READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH FROM THE APOSTOLIC AGE TO THE REFORMATION A.D. 64-1517 |
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State and various
forms of Pagan Religion, and of Philosophy.
The reign of Augustus Caesar is the most remarkable epoch in the history of
mankind. For the first time, a large part of the families, tribes, and nations,
into which the human race had gradually separated, were united under a vast,
uniform, and apparently permanent, social system. The older Asiatic empires
had, in general, owed their rise to the ability and success of some adventurous
Conqueror; and, when the masterhand was withdrawn,
fell asunder; or were swept away to make room for some new kingdom or dynasty,
which sprang up with equal rapidity, and in its turn experienced the same
fate. The Grecian monarchy established by Alexander, as though it shared in
the Asiatic principle of vast and sudden growth and as rapid decay, broke up at
his death into several conflicting kingdoms; yet survived in its influence, and
united, in some degree, Western Asia, Egypt, and Greece into one political
system, in which the Greek language and manners predominated. But the monarchy
of Rome was founded on principles as yet unknown; the kingdoms, which were won
by the most unjustifiable aggression, were, for the most part, governed with a
judicious union of firmness and conciliation, in which the conscious strength
of irresistible power was tempered with the wisest respect to national usages.
The Romans conquered like savages, but ruled like philosophic statesmen. From the Euphrates to the Atlantic, from the shores of Britain, and the borders
of the German forests, to the sands of the African Desert, the whole Western
world was consolidated into one great commonwealth, united by the bonds of law
and government, by facilities of communication and commerce, and by the general
dissemination of the Greek and Latin languages.
For civilisation followed in the train of Roman conquest: the
ferocity of her martial temperament seemed to have spent itself in the civil
wars: the lava flood of her ambition had cooled; and wherever it had spread, a
rich and luxuriant vegetation broke forth. At least down to the time of the Antonines, though occasionally disturbed by the contests
which arose on the change of dynasties, the rapid progress of improvement was
by no means retarded. Diverging from Rome as a centre,
magnificent and commodious roads connected the most remote countries; the free
navigation of the Mediterranean united the most flourishing cities of the
empire; the military colonies had disseminated the language and manners of the
South in the most distant regions; the wealth and population of the African and
Asiatic provinces had steadily increased; while, amid the forests of Gaul, the
morasses of Britain, the sierras of Spain, flourishing cities arose; and the
arts, the luxuries, the order, and regularity of cultivated life were
introduced into regions which, a short time before, had afforded a scanty and
precarious subsistence to tribes scarcely acquainted with agriculture. The frontiers
of civilisation seemed gradually to advance, and to
drive back the still-receding barbarism; while within the pale, national
distinctions were dying away; all tribes and races met amicably in the general
relation of Roman subjects or citizens, and mankind seemed settling down into
one great federal society.
About this point of
time Christianity appeared. As Rome had united the whole Western world into
one, as it might almost seem, lasting social system, so Christianity was the
first religion which aimed at an universal and permanent moral conquest. The
religions of the older world were content with their dominion over the
particular people which were their several votaries. Family, tribal, national,
deities were universally recognised; and as their
gods accompanied the migrations or the conquests of different nations, the
worship of those gods was extended over a wider surface, but rarely propagated
among the subject races. To drag in triumph the divinities of a vanquished
people was the last and most insulting mark of subjugation. Yet, though the
gods of the conquerors had thus manifested their superiority, and, in some
cases, the subject nation might be inclined to desert their inefficient
protectors who had been found wanting in the hour of trial; still the godhead
even of the defeated divinities was not denied. Though their power could not
withstand the mightier tutelar deity of the invaders; yet their right to a seat
in the crowded synod of heaven, and their rank among the intermediate rulers of
the world, were not called in question. The conqueror might, indeed, take
delight in showing his contempt, and, as it were, trampling under
foot the rebuked and impotent deities of his subject; and thus religious
persecution be inflicted by the oppressor, and religious fanaticism excited
among the oppressed. Yet, if the temple was desecrated, the altar thrown down,
the priesthood degraded or put to the sword, this was done in the fierceness of
hostility, or the insolence of pride; or from policy, lest the religion should
become the rallying point of civil independence; rarely, if ever, for the
purpose of extirpating a false, or supplanting it by a true, system of belief;
perhaps in no instance with the design of promulgating the tenets of a more
pure and perfect religion. A wiser policy commenced with Alexander.
The deities of the conquered nations were treated with uniform reverence, the sacrilegious
plunder of their temples punished with exemplary severity.
According to the Grecian system, their own gods were recognised in those of Egypt and Asia. The foreign deities were called by Grecian names, and worshipped with the accustomed offerings; and thus all religious differences between Macedonian, and Syrian, and Egyptian, and Persian, at once vanished away. On the same principle, and with equal sagacity, Rome, in this as in other respects, aspired to enslave the mind of those nations which had been prostrated by her arms. The gods of the subject nations were treated with every mark of respect: sometimes they were admitted within the walls of the conqueror, as though to render their allegiance, and rank themselves in peaceful subordination under the supreme divinity of the Roman Gradivus, or the Jupiter of the Capitol; till, at length, they all met in the amicable synod of the Pantheon, a representative assembly, as it were, of the presiding deities of all nations in Rome, the religious as well as the civil capital of the world. The state, as Cicero shows in his Book of Laws, retained the power of declaring what forms of religion were permitted by the law (licite); but this authority was rarely exercised with rigour, excepting against such foreign superstitions as were considered pernicious to the morals of the people,—in earlier times, the Dionysiac; in later, the Isiac and Serapic rites.
Christianity
proclaimed itself the religion, not of family, or tribe, or nation, but of
universal man. It admitted within its pale, on equal terms, all ranks and all
races. It addressed mankind as one brotherhood, sprung from one common
progenitor, and raised to immortality by one Redeemer. In this respect
Christianity might appear singularly adapted to become the religion of a great
empire. At an earlier period in the annals of the world, it would have encountered
obstacles apparently insurmountable, in passing from one province to another,
in moulding hostile and jealous nations into one religious
community. A fiercer fire was necessary to melt and fuse the discordant
elements into one kindred mass, before its gentler warmth could penetrate and
permeate the whole with its vivifying influence. Not only were the
circumstances of the times favourable to the
extensive propagation of Christianity, from the facility of intercourse between
the most remote nations, the cessation of hostile movements, and the uniform
system of internal police, but the state of mankind seemed imperiously to
demand the introduction of a new religion, to satisfy those universal
propensities of human nature which connect man with a higher order of things.
Man, as history and experience teach, is essentially a religious being. There
are certain faculties and modes of thinking and feeling apparently inseparable
from his mental organisation, which lead him
irresistibly to seek some communication with another and a higher world. But at
the present juncture, the ancient religions were effete: they belonged to a
totally different state of civilisation; though they
retained the strong hold of habit and interest on different classes of
society, yet the general mind was advanced beyond them; they could not supply
the religious necessities of the age. Thus the world, peaceably united under
one temporal monarchy, might be compared to a vast body without a soul. The
throne of the human mind appeared vacant; among the rival competitors for its
dominion, none advanced more than claims local, or limited to a certain class.
Nothing less was required than a religion coextensive at least with the empire
of Rome, and calculated for the advanced state of intellectual culture: and in
Christianity this new element of society was found; which, in fact, incorporating
itself with manners, usages, and laws, has been the bond which has held
together, notwithstanding the internal feuds and divisions, the great European
commonwealth; maintained a kind of federal relation between its parts; and
stamped its peculiar character on the whole of modern history.
Christianity
announced the appearance of its Divine Author as the era of a new moral
creation; and if we take our stand, as it were, on the isthmus which separates
the ancient from the modern world, and survey the state of mankind before and
after the introduction of this new power into human society, it is impossible
not to be struck with the total revolution in the whole aspect of the world. If
from this point of view we look upward, we see the dissociating principle at
work both in the civil and religious usages of mankind; the human race
breaking up into countless independent tribes and nations, which recede more
and more from each other as they gradually spread over the surface of the
earth; and in some parts, as we adopt the theory of the primitive barbarism,
or that of the degeneracy of man from an earlier state of culture, either
remaining stationary at the lowest point of ignorance and rudeness, or sinking
to it; either resuming the primeval dignity of the race, or rising gradually to
a higher state of civilisation. A certain diversity
of religion follows the diversity of race, of people, and of country. In no
respect is the common nature of human kind so strongly indicated as in the
universality of some kind of religion; in no respect is man so various, yet so
much the same. All the religions of antiquity, multiform and countless as they
appear, may be easily reduced to certain classes, and, independent of the traditions
which they may possess in common, throughout the whole, reigns something like a
family resemblance. Whether all may be rightly considered as depravations of
the same primitive form of worship; whether the human mind is necessarily
confined to a certain circle of religious notions; whether the striking
phenomena of the visible world, presented to the imagination of various people
in a similar state of civilisation, will excite the
same train of devotional thoughts and emotions,—the philosophical spirit, and
extensive range of inquiry, which in modern times have been carried into the
study of mythology, approximate in the most remarkable manner the religions of
the most remote countries. The same primary principles everywhere
appear, modified by the social state, the local circumstances, the civil
customs, the imaginative or practical character of the people.
Each state of
social culture has its characteristic theology, self-adapted to the
intellectual and moral condition of the people, and coloured in some degree by the habits of life. In the rudest and most savage races we
find a gross superstition, called by modern foreign writers Fetichism, in which
the shapeless stone, the meanest reptile, any object however worthless or
insignificant, is consecrated by a vague and mysterious reverence, as the
representative of an unseen Being. The beneficence of this deity is usually
limited to supplying the wants of the day, or to influencing the hourly
occurrences of a life, in which violent and exhausting labour alternates either with periods of sluggish and torpid indolence, as among some
of the North American tribes; or, as among the Africans, with wild bursts of
thoughtless merriment. This Fetichism apparently survived in more polished
nations, in the household gods, perhaps in the Teraphim, and in the sacred
stones (the Boetylia), which were thought either to
have fallen from heaven, or were sanctified by immemorial reverence.
In the Oriental
pastoral tribes, Tsabaism, the simpler
worship of the heavenly bodies, in general prevailed; which among the
agricultural races grew up into a more complicated system, connecting the
periodical revolutions of the sun and moon with the pursuits of husbandry. It
was Nature-worship, simple in its primary elements, but branching out into
mythological fables, rich and diversified in proportion to the poetic genius
of the people. This Natureworship in its simpler, probably its earlier form,
appears as a sort of dualism, in which the two great antagonist powers, the
creative and destructive, Light and Darkness, seem contending for the
sovereignty of the worlds and, emblematical of moral good and evil, are
occupied in pouring the full horn of fertility and blessing, or the vial of
wrath and misery, upon the human race. Subordinate to, or as a modification of,
these two conflicting powers, most of the Eastern races concurred in deifying the
active and passive powers of generation. The sun and the earth, Osiris and
Isis, formed a second dualism. And it is remarkable how widely, almost
universally extended throughout the earlier world, appears the institution of
a solemn period of mourning about the autumnal, and of rejoicing about the
vernal, equinox. The suspension, or apparent extinction of the great vivifying
power of nature, Osiris or Iacchus; the destitution
of Ceres, Isis, or the Earth, of her husband or her beautiful daughter, torn in
pieces or carried away into their realms by the malignant powers of darkness;
their reappearance in all their bright and fertilising energy; these, under different forms, were the great annual fast and festival
of the early heathen worship.
But the poets were
the priests of this Nature-worship; and from their creative imagination arose
the popular mythology, which gave its separate deity to every part of animate
or inanimate being; and, departing still farther from the primitive allegory,
and the symbolic forms under which the phenomena of the visible world were
embodied, wandered into pure fiction; till Nature-worship was almost supplanted
by religious fable: and hence, by a natural transition, those who discerned God
in every thing, multiplied every separate part of
creation into a distinct divinity. The mind fluctuated between a kind of vague
and unformed pantheism, the deification of the whole of nature, or its
animation by one pervading power or soul, and the deification of every object
which impressed the mind with awe or admiration. While every nation, every
tribe, every province, every town, every village, every family, had its
peculiar, local, or tutelar deity, there was a kind of common neutral ground on
which they all met, a notion that the gods in their collective capacity
exercised a general controlling providence over the affairs of men, interfered,
especially on great occasions, and, though this belief was still more vague
and more inextricably involved in fable, administered retribution in another
state of being. And thus even the common language of the most polytheistic
nations approached to monotheism.
Wherever, indeed,
there has been a great priestly caste, less occupied with the daily toils of
life, and advanced beyond the mass of the people, the primitive Nature-worship
has been perpetually brought back, as it were, to its original elements; and,
without disturbing the popular mythological religion, furnished a creed to the
higher and more thinking part of the community, less wild and extravagant. In
Persia the Magian order retained or acquired something like a pure theism, in
which the Supreme Deity was represented under the symbol of the primal
uncreated fire; and there Nature-worship, under the form of the two conflicting
principles, preserved much more of its original simplicity than in most other
countries. To the influence of a distinct sacerdotal order may be traced, in
India, the singular union of the sublimest allegory,
and a sort of lofty poetical religious philosophy, with the most monstrous and
incoherent superstitions; and the appearance of the profound political religion
of Egypt in strange juxtaposition with the most debasing Fetichism, the worship
of reptiles and vegetables.
From this
Nature-worship arose the beautiful anthropomorphism of the Greeks, of which the
Homeric poetry, from its extensive and lasting popularity, may in one sense be
considered the parent. The primitive traditions and the local superstitions of
the different races were moulded together in these
songs, which, disseminated throughout Greece, gave a kind of federal character
to the religion of which they were, in some sort, the sacred books. But the
genius of the people had already assumed its bias: few, yet still some,
vestiges remain in Homer of the earlier theogonic fables. Conscious, as it were, and prophetic of their future pre-eminence in
all that constitutes the physical and mental perfection of our race, this wonderful
people conformed their religion to themselves. The cumbrous and multiform idol,
in which wisdom, or power, or fertility, was represented by innumerable heads
or arms, or breasts, as in the Ephesian Diana, was refined into a being, only
distinguished from human nature by its preterhuman development of the noblest
physical qualities of man. The imagination here took another and a nobler
course; it threw an ideal grandeur and an unearthly loveliness over the human
form, and by degrees deities became men, and men deities, or, as the
distinction between the godlike and the divine became more indistinct, were united in the intermediate form of heroes and
demigods. The character of the people here, as elsewhere, operated on the
religion; the religion reacted on the popular character. The religion of
Greece was the religion of the Arts, the Games, the Theatre; it was that of a
race, living always in public, by whom the corporeal perfection of man had been
carried to the highest point In no other country would the legislator have
taken under his protection the physical conformation, in some cases the procreation,
in all the development of the bodily powers by gymnastic education; and it
required the most consummate skill in the sculptor to preserve the endangered
preeminence of the gods, in whose images were embodied the perfect models of
power and grace and beauty.
The religion of
Rome was political and military. Springing originally from a kindred stock to that
of earlier Greece, the rural Gods of the first cultivators of Italy, it received
many of its rites from that remarkable people, the Etruscans; and rapidly
adapted itself, or was forced by the legislator into an adaptation to the
character of the people. Mars or Gradivus was the
divine ancestor of the race. The religious calendar was the early history of
the people; a large part of the festivals was not so much the celebration of
the various deities, as the commemoration of the great events in their annals..
The priesthood was united with the highest civil and military offices; and the
great occupation of Roman worship seems to have been to secure the stability of
her constitution, and still more, to give a religious character to her wars,
and infuse a religious confidence of success into her legionaries. The great
office of the diviners, whether augurs or aruspices, was to choose the
fortunate day of battle; the Fetiales, religious
officers, denounced war: the standards and eagles possessed a kind of sanctity;
the eagle was in fact a shrine. The altar had its place in the centre of the camp, as the ark of God in that of the Israelites.
The Triumph may be considered as the great religious ceremony of the nation;
the god Terminus, who never receded, was, as it were, the deified ambition of
Rome. At length Rome herself was impersonated and assumed her rank in heaven,
as it were the representative of the all-conquering and all-ruling republic.
There was a
stronger moral element in the Roman religion than in that of Greece. In
Greece the gods had been represented in their collective capacity as the
avengers of great crimes; a kind of general retributive justice was assigned to
them; they guarded the sanctity of oaths. But in the better days of the
Republic, Rome had, as it were, deified her own virtues. Temples arose to
Concord, to Faith, to Constancy, to Modesty (Pudor), to Hope. The Penates, the
household deities, became the guardians of domestic happiness. Venus
Verticordia presided over the purity of domestic morals, and Jupiter Stator
over courage. But the true national character of the Roman theology is most
remarkably shown in the various temples and various attributes assigned to the
good Fortune of the city, who might appear the Deity of Patriotism. Even Peace
was at length received among the gods of Rome. And as long as the worship of
the heart continued to sanctify these impersonations of human virtues, their
adoration tended to maintain the lofty moral tone; but so soon as that was
withdrawn or languished into apathy, the deities became cold abstractions,
without even that reality which might appear to attach itself to the other gods
of the city: their temples stood, their rites were perhaps solemnised,
but they had ceased to command, and no longer received, the active veneration
of the people. What, in fact, is the general result of the Roman religious
calendar, half a year of which is described in the Fasti of Ovid. There are
festivals founded on old Italian and on picturesque Grecian legends; others
commemorative of the great events of the heroic days of the Republic; others
instituted in base flattery of the ruling dynasty; one ceremonial only, that of
the Manes, which relates to the doctrine of another life, and that preserved
as it were from pride, and as a memorial of older times. Nothing can show more
strongly the nationality of the Roman religion, and its almost complete transmutation from a moral into a political power.
Amidst all this
labyrinth we behold the sacred secret of the divine Unity, preserved inviolate,
though sometimes under the most adverse circumstances, and, as it were,
perpetually hovering on the verge of extinction, in one narrow district of the
world, the province of Palestine. Nor is it there the recondite treasure of a
high and learned caste, or the hardly worked-out conclusion of the thinking and
philosophical few, but the plain and distinct groundwork of the popular creed.
Still, even there, as though in its earlier period, the yet undeveloped mind of
man was unfit for the reception, or at least for the preservation of this doctrine,
in its perfect spiritual purity; as though the Deity condescended to the
capacities of the age, and it were impossible for the divine nature to maintain
its place in the mind of man without some visible representative; a kind of
symbolic worship still enshrines the one great God of the Mosaic religion.
There is a striking analogy between the Shechinah or luminous appearance which “dwelt
between the cherubim,” and the pure immaterial fire of the Theism, which
approaches nearest to the Hebrew, that of the early Persians. Yet even here
likewise is found the great indelible distinction between the religion of the
ancient and of the modern world; the characteristic, which besides the general
practice of propitiating the Deity, usually by animal sacrifices, universally
prevails in the pre-Christian ages. The physical predominates over the moral
character of the Deity. God is Power in the old religion; He is Love under the new. Nor does his pure and essential spirituality in the more complete
faith of the Gospel attach itself to, or exhibit itself under any form. “God,”
says the Divine Author of Christianity, “is Spirit, and they that worship
him, must worship him in spirit and in truth”. In the early Jewish worship, it
was the physical power of the Deity which was chiefly and perpetually presented
to the mind of the worshipper: he was their temporal king, the dispenser of
earthly blessings, famine and plenty, drought and rain, discomfiture or success
in war. The miracles recorded in the Old Testament, particularly in the earlier
books, are amplifications, as it were, or new directions of the powers of
nature; as if the object were to show that the deities of other nations were
but subordinate and obedient instruments in the hand of the great self-existent
Being, the Jehovah of Jewish worship.
Yet, when it is said
that the physical rather than the moral character of the Deity predominated, it must not be supposed that the latter was altogether excluded. It is
impossible entirely to dissociate the notion of moral government from that
belief, or that propensity to believe in the existence of a God implanted in
the human mind; and religion was too useful an ally not to be called in to
confirm the consciously imperfect authority of human law. But it may be laid
down as a principle that the nearer the nation approaches to barbarism, the
childhood of the human race, the more earthly are the conceptions of the Deity;
the moral aspect of the divine nature seems gradually to develope itself with the development of the human mind. It is at first, as in Egypt and
India, the prerogative of the higher class; the vulgar are left to their stocks
and their stones, their animals and their reptiles. In the republican states
of Greece, the intellectual aristocracy of the philosophers, guarded by no such
legally established distinction, rarely dared openly to assert their superiority,
but concealed their more extended views behind a prudential veil,
as a secret or esoteric doctrine, and by studious conformity to the national
rites and ceremonies.
Gradually, however,
as the period approaches in which the religion of civilisation is to be introduced into the great drama of human life, as we descend nearer
towards the point of separation between the ancient and modern world, the human
mind appears expanding. Polytheism is evidently relaxing its hold upon all
classes: the monarch maintains his throne, not from the deep-rooted, or
rational, or conscientious loyalty of his subjects, but from the want of a
competitor; because mankind were habituated to a government which the
statesman thought it might be dangerous, and the philosopher, enjoying perfect
toleration, and rather proud of his distinctive superiority than anxious to
propagate his opinions throughout the world, did not think it worthwhile, at
the hazard of popular odium, to disturb.
Judaism gave
manifest indications of a preparation for a more essentially spiritual, more
purely moral faith. The symbolic presence of the Deity (according to their own
tradition) ceased with the temple of Solomon; and the heathen world beheld with
astonishment a whole race whose deity was represented under no visible form or
likeness. The Prophets, in their spiritual as in their moral tone, rose high
above the Law. The conqueror Pompey, who enters the violated temple, is filled
with wonder at finding the sanctuary without image or emblem of the presiding
deity; the poet describes them as worshipping nothing but the clouds and the
divinity that fills the Heaven; the philosophic historian, whose profounder
mind seems struggling with hostile prejudices, defines, with his own inimitable
compression of language, the doctrine, to the sublimity of which he has closed
his eyes. “The worship of the Jews is purely mental; they acknowledge but one
God—and that God supreme and eternal, neither changeable nor perishable.” The
doctrine of another life (which derived no sanction from the Law, and was
naturally obscured by the more immediate and intelligible prospect of temporal
rewards and punishments) dawns in the prophetic writings; and from the
apocryphal books and from Josephus, as well as from the writings of the New
Testament, clearly appears to have become incorporated with the general
sentiment. Retribution in another life has already taken the place of the
immediate or speedy avenging or rewarding providence of the Deity in the land
of Canaan.
Judaism, however,
only required to expand with the expansion of the human mind; its sacred
records had preserved in its original simplicity the notion of the Divine
Power; the pregnant definitions of the one great self-existing Being, the
magnificent poetical amplifications of his might and providence were of all
ages: they were eternal poetry, because they were eternal truth. If the moral
aspect of the Divine nature was more obscurely intimated, and, in this respect,
had assumed the character of a local or national Deity, whose love was
confined to the chosen people, and displayed itself chiefly in the beneficence
of a temporal sovereign: yet nothing was needed but to give a higher and
more extensive sense to those types and shadows of universal wisdom; an
improvement which the tendency of the age manifestly required; and which the
Jews themselves, especially the Alexandrian school, had already attempted, by allegorising the whole annals of their people, and extracting
a profound moral meaning from all the circumstances of their extraordinary
history.
But the progress of
knowledge was fatal to the popular religion of Greece and Rome. The awestruck
imagination of the older race, which had listened with trembling belief to the
wildest fables, the deep feeling of the sublime and the beautiful, which,
uniting with national pride, had assembled adoring multitudes before the
Parthenon or the Jove of Phidias, now gave place to cold and sober reason.
Poetry had been religion—religion was becoming mere poetry. Humanizing the
Deity, and bringing it too near the earth, naturally produced, in a less
imaginative and more reflecting age, that familiarity which destroys respect.
When man became more acquainted with his own nature, the less was he satisfied
with deities cast in his own mould. In some respects
the advancement of civilisation had no doubt softened
and purified the old religions from their savage and licentious tendencies.
Human sacrifices had ceased, or had retired to the remotest parts of Germany,
or to the shores of the Baltic. Though some of the secret rites were said to be
defiled with unspeakable pollutions, yet this, if true, arose from the depravation
of manners, rather than from religion. The orgies of the Bona Dea were a profanation of the sacred rite, held up to
detestation by the indignant satirist, not as among some of the early Oriental
nations, the rite itself.
But with the tyranny, which could thus extort from reluctant human
nature the sacrifice of all humanity and all decency, the older religions had
lost their more salutary, and, if the expression may be ventured, their
constitutional authority. They had been driven away, or silently receded from
their post, in which indeed they had never been firmly seated, as conservators
of public morals. The circumstances of the times tended no less to loosen the
bonds of the ancient faith. Peace enervated the deities, as well as the
soldiers of Rome : their occupation was gone; the augurs read no longer the signs
of conquest in the entrails of the victims; and though down to the days of
Augustine, Roman pride clung to the worship of the older and
glorious days of the Republic, and denounced the ingratitude of forsaking
gods, under whose tutelary sway Rome had become the empress of the world, yet
the ceremonies had now no stirring interest; they were pageants in which the
unbelieving aristocracy played their parts with formal coldness, the contagion
of which could not but spread to the lower classes. The only novel or exciting
rite of the Roman religion was that which probably tended more than any other,
when the immediate excitement was over, to enfeeble the religious feeling, the
deification of the living, or the apotheosis of the dead emperor, whom a few
years or perhaps a few days abandoned to the open execration or contempt of the
whole people. At the same time that energy of mind, which had consumed itself
in foreign conquest or civil faction, in carrying the arms of Rome to the
Euphrates or the Rhine, or in the mortal conflict for patrician or plebeian
supremacy, now that the field of military or civil distinction was closed,
turned inward and preyed upon itself; or, compressed by the iron hand of
despotism, made itself a vent in philosophical or religious speculations. The
noble mind sought a retreat from the degradation of servitude in the groves of
the Academy, or attempted to find consolation for the loss of personal dignity,
by asserting with the Stoic the dignity of human nature.
But Philosophy aspired in vain to fill that void in the human mind,
which had been created by the expulsion or secession of religion. The objects
of Philosophy were twofold: either—1. To refine the popular religion into a
more rational creed; or, 2. To offer itself as a substitute. With this first
view it endeavoured to bring back the fables to
their original meaning to detect the latent truth under the allegoric shell:
but in many cases the key was lost, or the fable had wandered so far from its
primary sense as to refuse all rational interpretation; and where the truth had
been less encumbered with fiction, it came forth cold and inanimate. The
philosopher could strip off the splendid robes in which the moral or religious
doctrine had been disguised, but he could not instil into
it the breath of life. The imagination refused the unnatural alliance of cold
and calculating reason; and the religious feeling, when it saw the old deities
reduced into ingenious allegories, sank into apathy; or vaguely yearned for
some new excitement which it knew not from what quarter to expect.
The last hopes of the ancient religion lay in the Mysteries. Of them
alone the writers, about the time of the appearance of Christianity, speak with
uniform reverence, if not with awe. They alone could bestow happiness in life,
and hope in death. In these remarkable rites the primitive Nature-worship had
survived under a less refined and less humanized form; the original and more
simple symbolic forms (those of the first agricultural inhabitants of Greece) had
been retained by ancient reverence: as its allegory was less intricate and
obscure it accommodated itself better with the advancing spirit of the age. It
may indeed be questioned whether the Mysteries did not owe much of their
influence to their secrecy, and to the impressive forms under which they
shadowed forth their more recondite truths. These, if they did not satisfy, yet
kept the mind in a state of progressive and continued excitement. They were, if
it may be so said, a great religious drama, in which the initiated were at once
spectators and actors; where the fifth act was designedly delayed to the utmost
possible point, and of this still suspended catastrophe, the dramatis personae,
the only audience, were kept in studied ignorance. The Mysteries had, perhaps,
from an early period associated a moral purport with their sacred shows; and
with the progress of opinion, the moral would more and more predominate over
the primitive religious meaning. Yet the morality of the Mysteries was
apparently that of the ancient Nature-worship of the East. It taught the immortality
of the soul as a part of that vast system of nature, which, emanating from the
Supreme Being, passed through a long course of deterioration or refinement,
and at length returned and resolved itself into the primal source of all
existence. But the Mysteries, from their very nature, could only act upon the
public mind in a limited manner: directly they ceased to be mysteries they lost
their power. Nor can it be doubted, that while the local and public Mysteries,
particularly the greatest of all, the Eleusinian, were pure and
undefiled by licentiousness, and, if they retained any of the obscene symbols,
disguised or kept them in the back ground; the private and moveable mysteries,
which, under the conduct of vagabond priests, were continually flowing in from
the East, displayed those symbols in unblushing nakedness, and gave occasion
for the utmost licence and impurity.
Philosophy as a substitute for religion was still more manifestly
deficient. For, in the first place, it was unable, or condescended not, to reach the body of the people, whom the progress of civilisation was slowly bringing up towards the common level; and where it found or
sought proselytes, it spoke without authority, and distracted with the
multitude of its conflicting sects the patient but bewildered inquirer.
Philosophy maintained the aristocratic tone, which, while it declared that to a
few elect spirits alone it was possible to communicate the highest secrets of
knowledge, more particularly the mystery of the great Supreme Being, proclaimed
it vain and unwise to attempt to elevate the many to such exalted speculations. “The Father of the worlds,” says Plato in this tone,“it is difficult to discover, and, when discovered, it is impossible to make him
known to all.” So, observes a German historian of Christianity, think the
Brahmins of India. Plato might aspire to the creation of an imaginary republic,
which, if it could possibly be realised, might stand
alone an unapproachable model of the physical and moral perfection of man;
but the amelioration of the whole world, the simultaneous elevation of all
nations, orders, and classes to a higher degree of moral advancement would
have been a vision from which even his imagination would have shrunk in
despair. This remained to be conceived and accomplished by one who appeared to
the mass of mankind in his own age, as a peasant of Palestine.
It cannot be denied that to those whom it deigned to address
philosophy was sufficiently accommodating; and whatever the bias of the individual
mind, the school was open, and the teacher at hand, to lead the inquirer,
either to the luxurious gardens of Epicurus, or among the loftier spirits of
the Porch. In the two prevalent systems of philosophy, the Epicurean and the
Stoic, appears a striking assimilation to the national character of the two
predominant races which constituted the larger part of the Roman world. The
Epicurean, with its subtle metaphysics, its abstract notion of the Deity, its
imaginative character; materialism, its milder and more pleasurable morals, and
perhaps its propensity to degenerate into indolence and sensuality, was kindred
and congenial to that of Greece, and the Grecian part of the Roman society. The Stoic, with its more practical character, its mental strength and
self-confidence, its fatalism, its universally diffused and allgoverning
Deity, the soul of the universe (of which the political power of the all-ruling
republic might appear an image), bore the same analogy to that of Rome. While
the more profound thinkers who could not disguise from themselves the
insufficiency of the grounds on which the philosophical systems rested,
either settled into a calm and contented scepticism, or, with the Academics, formed an eclectic creed from what appeared the better
parts of the rest.
Such on all the great questions of religion, the divine nature,
providence, the origin and future being of the soul, was the
floating and uncertain state of the human mind. In the department of morals,
Philosophy nobly performed her part; but perhaps her success in this respect
more clearly displayed her inefficiency. The height to which moral science was
carried in the works of Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Antoninus, while it made the breach still wider between the
popular religion and the advanced state of the human mind, more vividly
displayed the want of a faith, which would associate itself with the purest and
loftiest morality; and remarry, as it were, those thoughts and feelings which
connect man with a future state of being, to the practical duties of life.
For while these speculations occupied the loftier and more thinking
minds, what remained for the vulgar of the higher and of the lower orders
Philosophy had shaken the old edifice to its base; and even if it could have
confined its more profound and secret doctrines within the circle of its own
elect, if its contempt for the old fables of the popular creed had been more
jealously guarded, it is impossible but that the irreligion of the upper order
must work downwards upon the lower. When religion has, if not avowedly, yet
manifestly, sunk into an engine of state policy, its most imposing and solemn
rites will lose all their commanding life and energy. Actors will perform ill
who do not feel their parts. “It is marvellous,”
says the Epicurean in Cicero, “that one soothsayer (Haruspex) can look another
in the face without laughing.” And when the Epicurean himself stood before the
altar, in the remarkable language of Plutarch, “he hypocritically enacted
prayer and adoration from fear of the many; he uttered words directly opposite
to his philosophy. While he sacrifices, the ministering priest seems to him no
more than a cook, and he departs uttering the line of Menander, ‘I have
sacrificed to Gods in whom I have no concern’.”
Unless indeed the literature as well as the philosophy of the age
immediately preceding Christianity had been confined to the intellectual aristocracy;
the reasoning spirit, which rejected with disdain the old imaginative fables,
could not but descend at least as low as the rudiments of liberal education.
When the gravest writers, like Polybius and Strabo, find it necessary to apologise to their more learned and thinking readers for the
introduction of those mythic legends which formed the creed of their ancestors,
and to plead the necessity of avoiding offence, because such tales are still
sacred among the vulgar, this deference shows rather the increasing
indifference, than the strength of popular opinion. “Historians,” says the
former writer, “must be pardoned, if for the sake of maintaining piety among
the many, they occasionally introduce miraculous or fabulous tales; but they
must not be permitted on these points to run into extravagance.” “Religion,”
he declares in another passage, “would perhaps be unnecessary in a commonwealth
of wise men. But since the multitude is ever fickle, full of lawless desires,
irrational passions and violence, it is right to restrain it by the fear of the
invisible world, and such tragic terrors. Whence our ancestors appear to have
introduced notions concerning the Gods, and opinions about the infernal regions,
not rashly or without consideration. Those rather act rashly and
inconsiderately who would expel them?.” “It is impossible,” observes the
inquiring geographer, “to govern a mob of women, or the whole mixed multitude
by philosophic reasoning, and to exhort them to piety, holiness, and faith; we
must also employ superstition with its fables and prodigies. For the thunder,
the aegis, the trident, the torches, the serpents, the thyrsi of the Gods are
fables, as is all the ancient theology; but the legislature introduced these
things as bugbears to those who are children in understanding.” In short even
when the Roman writers professed the utmost respect for the religious
institutions of their country, there was a kind of silent protest against their
sincerity. It was an evident, frequently an avowed, condescension to the
prejudices of the vulgar. Livy admires the wisdom of Numa,
who introduced the fear of the Gods, as a “most efficacious means of
controlling an ignorant and barbarous populace.” Even the serious Dionysius
judges of religion according to its usefulness, not according to its truth, as
the wise scheme of the legislator, rather than as the revelation of the Deity.
Pausanias, while he is making a kind of religious survey of Greece, expressing
a grave veneration for all the temples and rites of antiquity, frequently
relating the miraculous intervention of the several deities, is jealous and
careful lest he should be considered a believer in the fables which he relates.
The natural consequence of this double doctrine was not unforeseen. “What,”
says the Academic in Cicero, “when men maintain all belief in the immortal Gods
to have been invented by wise men for the good of the state, that religion
might lead to their duty those who would not be led by reason, do they not
sweep away the very foundations of all religion?”
The mental childhood of the human race was passing away, at least it had
become wearied of its old toys. The education itself, by which, according to
these generally judicious writers, the youthful mind was to be impregnated with
reverential feelings for the objects of national worship, must have been coldly
conducted by teachers conscious that they were practising a pious fraud upon their disciples, and perpetually embarrassed by the
necessity of maintaining the gravity befitting such solemn subjects, and of
suppressing the involuntary smile, which might betray the secret of their own
impiety. One class of fables seems to have been universally exploded even in
the earliest youth, those which related to another life. The picture of the
unrivalled satirist may be overcharged, but it corresponds strictly with the
public language of the orator, and the private sentence of the philosopher:
The silent realm of
disembodied ghosts,
The frogs that
croak along the Stygian coasts;
The thousand souls
in one crazed vessel steer’d,
Not boys believe,
save boys without a beard.
Even the religious Pausanias speaks of the immortality of the soul as a
foreign doctrine, introduced by the Chaldeans and the Magi, and embraced by
some of the Greeks, particularly by Plato. Pliny, whose Natural History opens
with a declaration that the universe is the sole Deity, devotes a separate
chapter to a contemptuous exposure of the idle notion of the immortality of
the soul, as a vision of human pride, and equally absurd, whether under the
form of existence in another sphere, or under that of transmigration.
We return then again to the question, what remained for minds thus
enlightened beyond the poetic Religions, faith of their ancestors, yet not ripe
for philosophy? how was the craving for religious excitement to be appeased,
which turned with dissatisfaction or disgust from its accustomed nutriment?
Here is the secret of the remarkable union between the highest reason and the
most abject superstition which characterises the age
of Imperial Rome. Every foreign religion found proselytes in the capital of the
world; not only the pure and rational theism of the Jews, which had made a
progress, the extent of which it is among the most difficult questions in
history to estimate: but the Oriental rites of Phrygia, and the Isiac and Serapic worship of
Egypt, which, in defiance of the edict of the magistrate and the scorn of the
philosopher, maintained their ground in the capital, and were so widely
propagated among the provinces, that their vestiges may be traced in the remote
districts of Gaul and Britain; and at a later period the reviving Mithriac Mysteries, which in the same manner made their way
into the western provinces of the empire. In the capital itself, every thing that was new, or secret, or imposing, found a
welcome reception among a people that listened with indifference to
philosophers who reasoned, and poets who embodied philosophy in the most attractive
diction. For in Rome, poetry had forsworn the alliance of the old imaginative
faith. The irreligious system of Euhemerus had found
a translator in Ennius; that of Epicurus was
commended by the unrivalled powers of Lucretius. Virgil himself, who, as he
collected from all quarters the beauties of ancient poetry, so he inlaid in his
splendid tessellation the noblest images of the poetic faith of Greece: yet,
though at one moment he transfuses mythology into his stately verse, with all
the fire of an ardent votary, at the next he appears as a pantheist, and
describes the Deity but as the animating soul of the universe. An occasional
fit of superstition crosses over the careless and Epicurean apathy of Horace.
Astrology and witchcraft led captive minds which boasted themselves emancipated from the idle terrors
of the avenging gods. In the Pharsalia of Lucan,
which manifestly soars far above the vulgar theology, where the lofty Stoicism
elevates the brave man who disdains, above the gods who flatter, the rising
fortunes of Caesar; yet in the description of the witch Erictho evoking the dead (the only purely imaginative passage in the whole rhetorical
poem), there is a kind of tremendous truth and earnestness, which show that if
the poet himself believed not “the magic wonders which he drew,” at least he
well knew the terrors that would strike the age in which he wrote.
The old established traders in human credulity had almost lost their
occupation, but their place was supplied by new empirics, who swarmed from all
quarters. The oracles were silent, while astrology seized the administration of
the secrets of futurity. Pompey, and Crassus, and Caesar, all consulted the Chaldaeans, whose flattering predictions that they should
die in old age, in their homes, in glory, so belied by their miserable fates,
still brought not the unblushing science into disrepute. The repeated edicts
which expelled the astrologers and “mathematicians” from Rome, were no less an
homage to their power over the public mind, than their recall, the tacit
permission to return, or the return in defiance of the insulted edict. Banished
by Agrippa, by Augustus, by Tiberius, by Claudius, they are described in the
inimitable language of Tacitus, as a race who, treacherous to those in power, fallacious
to those who hope for power, are ever proscribed, yet will ever remain. They
were at length taken under the avowed patronage of Vespasian and his successors..
All these circumstances were manifest indications of the decay and of the
approaching dissolution of the old religion. The elegiac poet had read, not
without sagacity, the signs of the times.
None sought the aid
of foreign gods, while bow’d
Before their native
shrines the trembling crowd.
And thus, in this struggle between the old household deities of the
established faith, and the half-domiciliated gods of the stranger, undermined
by philosophy, supplanted by still darker superstition, Polytheism seemed, as
it were, to await its death-blow; and to be ready to surrender its ancient honours to the conqueror, whom Divine Providence should
endow with sufficient authority over the human mind to seize upon the abdicated
supremacy.
Such is the state in which the ancient world leaves the mind of man. On
a sudden a new era commences; a rapid yet gradual revolution takes place in the opinions, sentiments, and principles of mankind; the void is
filled; the connexion between religion and morals
re-established with an intimacy of union yet unknown. The unity of the Deity
becomes, not the high and mysterious creed of a privileged sacerdotal or
intellectual oligarchy, but the common property of all whose minds are fitted
to receive it: all religious distinctions are annihilated; the jurisdictions of
all local deities abolished; and imperceptibly the empire of Rome becomes one
great Christian commonwealth, which even sends out, as it were, its peaceful
colonies into regions beyond the limits of the Imperial power. The
characteristic distinction of the general revolution is this: that the physical
agency of the Deity seems to recede from the view, while the spiritual
character is more distinctly unfolded; or rather, the notion of the Divine
Power is merged in the more prevailing sentiment of his moral Goodness. The
remarkable passage in the Jewish history, in which God is described as
revealing himself to Elijah, “neither in the strong wind, nor in the earthquake,
nor in the fire, but in the still small voice,” may be considered, we will not
say prophetic, but singularly significant of the sensations to be excited in
the human mind by the successive revelations of the Deity.
The doctrine of the immortality of the soul partook the same change with the notion of the Deity; it became at once popular, simple, and spiritual. It was disseminated throughout all orders of society: it admitted no aristocratic elysium of heroes and demi-gods, like that of the early Greeks; it separated itself from that earlier and widely prevalent form, which it assumed in the theogonies of the Natureworship, where the soul emanating from the source of Being, after one or many transmigrations, was reabsorbed into the Divine Essence. It announced the resurrection of all mankind to judgment, and the reunion of the spirit to a body, which, preserving the principle of identity, nevertheless should be of a purer and more imperishable nature. Such are the great primary principles, which became incorporated with the mind of man; and, operating on all human institutions, on the common sentiments of the whole race, form the great distinctive difference between the ancient and the modern, the European and the Asiatic world.
During the dark ages there was a strong reaction of
barbarism: in its outward form Christianity might appear to recede towards the
polytheism of older times; and, as has been shown, not in a philosophic, but in
a narrow polemic spirit of hostility to the Church of Rome, many of the rites
and usages of heathenism were admitted into the Christian system; yet the
indelible difference between the two periods remained. A higher sense and meaning
was infused into these forms; God was considered in his moral rather than his
physical attributes—as the Lord of the future as much or even more than of the
present world. The saints and angels, who have been compared to the
intermediate deities of the older superstitions, had, nevertheless, besides
their tutelar power against immediate accidents and temporal calamities, an
important influence over the state of the soul in the world to come; they
assumed the higher office of ministering the hopes of the future, in a still
greater degree than the blessings of the present life.
To the more complete development of this fact we shall descend in the
course of our History, which will endeavour to trace
all the modifications of Christianity, by which it accommodated itself to the
spirit of successive ages; and by this apparently almost skilful,
but in fact necessary condescension to the predominant state of moral culture,
of which itself formed a constituent element, maintained its uninterrupted
dominion. It is the author’s object, the difficulty of which he himself fully
appreciates, to portray the genius of the Christianity of each successive age,
in connexion with that of the age itself; entirely to
discard all polemic views; to mark the origin and progress of all the
subordinate diversities of belief; their origin in the circumstances of the
place or time in which they appeared; their progress from their adaptation to
the prevailing state of opinion or sentiment: rather than directly to confute
error or to establish truth; in short, to exhibit the reciprocal influence of civilisation on Christianity, of Christianity on civilisation. To the accomplishment of such a scheme he is
well aware, that besides the usual high qualifications of a faithful historian,
is requisite, in an especial manner, the union of true philosophy with perfect
charity, if indeed they are not one and the same. This calm, impartial, and dispassionate
tone he will constantly endeavour, he dares scarcely
hope, with such warnings on every side of involuntary prejudice and unconscious
prepossession, uniformly to maintain. In the honesty of his purpose he will
seek his excuse for all imperfection or deficiency in the execution of his
scheme. Nor is he aware that he enters on ground preoccupied by any writers of
established authority, at least in our own country, where the History of
Christianity has usually assumed the form of a History of the Church, more or
less controversial, and confined itself to annals of the internal feuds and
divisions in the Christian community, and the variations in doctrine and discipline,
rather than to its political and social influence. Our attention, on the other
hand, will be chiefly directed to its effects on the social and even political
condition of man, as it extended itself throughout the Roman world, and at
length entered into the administration of government and of law; the gradual
manner in which it absorbed and incorporated into the religious commonwealth
the successive masses of population, which, after having overthrown the
temporal polity of Rome, were subdued to the religion of the conquered people;
the separation of the human race into the distinct castes of the clergy and
laity; the former at first an aristocracy, afterwards a despotic monarchy: as
Europe sank back into barbarism, the imaginative state of the human mind, the
formation of a new poetic faith, a mythology and a complete system of
symbolical worship; the interworking of Christianism with barbarism, till they
slowly grew into a kind of semi-barbarous heroic period, that of Christian
chivalry; the gradual expansion of the system, with the expansion of the human
mind; and the slow, perhaps not yet complete, certainly not general,
development of a rational and intellectual religion. Throughout his work the
author will equally, or as his disposition inclines, even more diligently, labour to show the good as well as the evil of each phasis
of Christianity; since it is his opinion that, at every period, much more is to
be attributed to the circumstances of the age, to the collective operation of
certain principles which grew out of the events of the time, than to the
intentional or accidental influence of any individual or class of men.
Christianity, in short, may exist in a certain form in a nation of savages as
well as in a nation of philosophers, yet its specific character
will almost entirely depend upon the character of the people who are its
votaries. It must be considered, therefore, in constant connexion with that character; it will darken with the darkness, and brighten with the light,
of each succeeding century; in an ungenial time it will recede so far from its
genuine and essential nature as scarcely to retain any sign of its divine
original: it will advance with the advancement of human nature, and keep up the
moral to the utmost height of the intellectual culture of man.
While, however, Christianity necessarily submitted to all these
modifications, I strongly protest against the opinion, that the origin of the religion can be attributed, according to a theory adopted by many foreign
writers, to the gradual and spontaneous development of the human mind. Christ
is as much beyond his own age, as his own age is beyond the darkest barbarism.
The time, though fitted to receive, could not by any combination of prevalent
opinions, or by any conceivable course of moral improvement, have produced Christianity. The conception of the human character of Jesus, and the simple
principles of the new religion, as they were in direct opposition to the predominant
opinions and temper of his own countrymen, so they stand completely alone in
the history of our race; and, as imaginary no less than as real, altogether
transcend the powers of man’s moral conception. Supposing the Gospels purely
fictitious, or that, like the Cyropaedia of Xenophon,
they embody on a groundwork of fact the highest moral and religious notions to
which man had attained, and show the utmost ideal perfection of the divine and
human nature, they can be accounted for, according to my judgment, on none of
the ordinary principles of human nature. When we behold Christ standing in the
midst of the wreck of old religious institutions, and building, or rather at
one word commanding to arise, the simple and harmonious structure of the new
faith, which seems equally adapted for all ages—a temple to which nations in
the highest degree of civilisation may bring their
offerings of pure hearts, virtuous dispositions, universal charity,—our
natural emotion is the recognition of the Divine goodness, in the promulgation
of this beneficent code of religion; and adoration of that Being in whom that
Divine goodness is thus embodied and made comprehensible to the faculties of
man. In the language of the apostle, “God is in Christ, reconciling the world
unto himself.”
Life of Jesus
Christ — State of Judaea—The Belief in the Messiah
The history of
Christianity without the life of its Divine Author appears imperfect and
incomplete, particularly considering the close connexion of that life, not only with the mysterious doctrines, but with the practical,
and even political influence of the religion; for even its apparently most
unimportant incidents have, in many cases, affected most deeply the opinions
and feelings of the Christian world. The isolation of the history of Christ in
a kind of sacred seclusion has no doubt a beneficial effect on the piety of the
Christian, which delights in contemplating the Saviour
undisturbed and uncontaminated by less holy associations; but it has likewise
its disadvantages, in disconnecting his life from the general history of
mankind, of which it forms an integral and essential part. Had the life of
Christ been more generally considered as intimately and inseparably connected
with the progress and development of human affairs, with the events and
opinions of his time, works would not have been required to prove his
existence, scarcely perhaps the authenticity of his history. The real historical
evidence of Christianity is the absolute necessity of his life, to fill up the
void in the annals of mankind, to account for the effects of his religion in
the subsequent history of man.
Yet to write the life of Christ, though at first sight it may appear the
most easy, is perhaps the most difficult task which an historian can undertake.
Many Lives have been composed with a devotional, none at least to my knowledge,
in this country, with an historic design; none in which the author has endeavoured to throw himself completely back into the age
when Jesus of Nazareth began to travel as the teacher of a new religion through
the villages of Galilee; none which has attempted to keep up a perpetual
reference to the circumstances of the times, the habits and national character
of the people, and the state of public feeling; and thus, identifying itself
with the past, to show the origin and progress of the new faith, as it slowly
developed itself, and won its way through the adverse elements which it
encountered in Judaea and the adjacent provinces. To depart from the evangelic
simplicity in the relation of the facts would not merely offend the reverential
feelings of the reader, but tend likewise to destroy the remarkable harmony
between the facts and doctrines, which characterises the narrative of the Gospels, and on which their authenticity, as genuine
historical documents, might to an intelligent mind be safely rested. The three
first Gospels, unless written at a very early period, could scarcely have
escaped the controversial, or at least argumentative tone, which enters into
the later Christian writings, and with which the relation of St John is imbued.
The plan then which the author will pursue, will be to presume, to a certain
degree, on the reader’s acquaintance with the subject on which he enters: he
will not think it necessary to relate at length all the discourses or even all
the acts of Christ, but rather to interweave the historic illustration with the main events,
disposed, as far as possible, in the order of time, and to trace the effect
which each separate incident, and the whole course of the life of Jesus may be
supposed to have produced upon the popular mind. In short, it will partake, in
some degree, of the nature of an historical comment, on facts which it will
rather endeavour to elucidate than to draw out to
their full length.
The days of the elder Herod were drawing to a tragedy rarely
ventured to imagine. His last years had revealed the horrible, the humiliating
secret, that the son, at whose instigation he had put to death the two noble
and popular princes, his children by Mariamne the
Asmonean, had almost all his life been overreaching him in that dark policy, of
which he esteemed himself the master; and now, as a final return for his
unsuspecting confidence, had conspired to cut short the brief remainder of his
days. Almost the last, and the most popular exercise of Herod’s royal
authority, was to order the execution of the perfidious Antipater. Fearful
times! when the condemnation of a son by a father, and that father an odious
and sanguinary tyrant, could coincide with the universal sentiment of the
people! The attachment of the nation to the reigning family might have been
secured, if the sons of Mariamne, the heiress of the
Asmonean line, had survived to claim the succession. The foreign and Idumean
origin of the father might have been forgotten in the national and splendid
descent of the mother. There was, it would seem, a powerful Herodian party,
attached to the fortunes of the ruling house; but the body of the nation now
looked with ill-concealed aversion to the perpetuation of the Idumean tyranny
in the persons of the sons of Herod. Yet to those who contemplated only the
political signs of the times, nothing remained but the degrading alternative,
either to submit to the line of Herod, or to sink into a Roman province. Such
was to be the end of their long ages of national glory, such the hopeless termination
of the national independence. But, notwithstanding the progress of Grecian
opinions and manners, with which the politic Herod had endeavoured to counterbalance the turbulent and unruly spirit of the religious party, the
great mass of the people, obstinately wedded to the law and to the institutions
of their fathers, watched with undisguised jealousy the denationalising proceedings of their king. This stern and inextinguishable enthusiasm had recently broken out into active resistance, in the
conspiracy to tear down the golden eagle, which Herod had suspended over the
gate of the Temple. The signal for this daring act had been a rumour of the king’s death; and the terrific vengeance,
which, under a temporary show of moderation, Herod had wreaked on the
offenders, the degradation of the High-priest, and the execution of the popular
teachers, who were accused of having instigated the insurrection, could not but
widen the breach between the dying sovereign and the people. The greater part
of the nation looked to the death of Herod with a vague hope of liberation and
independence, which struck in with the more peculiar cause of excitement
predominant in the general mind.
For the principle of this universal ferment lay deeper than in the
impatience of a tyrannical government, which burdened the people with
intolerable exactions, or the apprehension of national degradation if Judaea
should be reduced to the dominion of a Roman proconsul. It was the confidence
in the immediate coming of the Messiah, which was working with vague and
mysterious agitation in the hearts of all orders. The very danger to which
Jewish independence was reduced, was associated with this exalted sentiment;
the nearer the ruin, the nearer the restoration of their Theocracy. For there
is no doubt, that among other predictions, according to the general belief,
which pointed to the present period, a very ancient interpretation of the
prophecy, which declared that the sceptre, the royal
dominion, should not depart from the race of Israel until the coming of the
Shiloh, one of the titles uniformly attributed to the Messiah, connected the
termination of the existing polity with the manifestation of the Deliverer.
This expectation of a wonderful revolution to be wrought by the sudden
appearance of some great mysterious person, had been so widely disseminated,
as to excite the astonishment, perhaps the jealousy of the Romans, whose
historians, Suetonius and Tacitus, as is well known, bear witness to the fact.
“Among many,” writes the latter, “there was a persuasion, that in the ancient
books of the priesthood it was written, that at this precise time, the East
should become mighty, and that the sovereigns of the world should issue from
Judaea”. “In the East, an ancient and consistent opinion prevailed,
that it was fated there should issue, at this time, from Judaea, those who
should obtain universal dominion.”
Yet no question is more difficult than to ascertain the origin, the extent,
the character of this belief, as it prevailed at the time of our Saviour’s coming;—how far it had spread among the
surrounding nations; or how far, on the other hand, the original Jewish creed,
formed from the authentic prophetical writings, had become impregnated with
Oriental or Alexandrian notions. It is most probable, that there was no
consistent, uniform, or authorised opinion on the
subject. All was vague and indefinite; and in this vagueness and indefiniteness
lay much of its power over the general mind. Whatever purer or loftier notions
concerning the great Deliverer and Restorer might be imparted to wise and holy
men, in whatever sense we understand that “Abraham rejoiced to see the day”
of the Messiah, the intimations on this subject in the earlier books of the Old
Testament, though distinctly to be traced along its whole course, are few,
brief, and occurring at long intervals. But from the time, and during the whole
period of the Prophets, this mysterious Being becomes gradually more prominent.
The future dominion of some great king, to descend from the line of David, to
triumph over all his enemies, and to establish an universal kingdom of peace
and happiness, of which the descriptions of the golden age in the Greek poets
are but a faint and unimaginative transcript: the promise of the Messiah, in
short, comes more distinctly forward. As early as the first chapters of Isaiah,
he appears to assume a title and sacred designation, which at least approaches
near to that of the Divinity; and in the later prophets, not merely does this
leading characteristic maintain its place, but under the splendid poetical
imagery, drawn from existing circumstances, there seems to lie hid a more
profound meaning, which points to some great and general moral revolution, to
be achieved by this mysterious Being.
But their sacred books, the Law and the Prophets, were not the clear and
unmingled source of the Jewish opinions on this all-absorbing subject. Over
this, as over the whole system of the Law, tradition had thrown a veil; and it
is this traditionary notion of the Messiah, which it is necessary here to develope: but from whence tradition had derived its
apparently extraneous and independent notions, becomes a much more deep and
embarrassing question. It is manifest from the Evangelic history, that although
there was no settled or established creed upon the subject, yet there was a
certain conventional language: particular texts of the sacred writings were
universally recognised, as bearing reference to the
Messiah; and there were some few characteristic credentials of his title and
office, which would have commanded universal assent.
There are two quarters from which the Jews, as they ceased to be an
insulated people, confined in the narrow tract of Palestine, and by their
captivity and migrations became more mingled with other races, might insensibly
contract new religious notions, the East and the West, Babylonia and Alexandria.
The latter would be the chief, though not perhaps the only channel through
which the influence of Grecian opinions would penetrate into Palestine; and
of the Alexandrian notions of the Messiah, we shall hereafter adduce two
competent representatives, the author of the Book of Wisdom and Philo. But the East
no doubt made a more early, profound, and lasting impression on the
popular mind of the Jews. Unfortunately in no part does history present us
with so melancholy a blank, as in that of the great Babylonian settlement of
the people of Israel. Yet its importance in the religious, and even in the
civil affairs of the nation cannot but have been very considerable. It was
only a small part of the nation which returned with the successive remigrations
under Ezra and Nehemiah to their native land; and, though probably many of the poorer
classes had remained behind at the period of the Captivity, and many more
returned singly or in small bodies, yet on the other hand it is probable, that
the tide of emigration, which at a later time was perpetually flowing from the
valleys of Palestine into Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and even more remote
regions, would often take the course of the Euphrates, and swell the numbers of
the Mesopotamian colony. In the great contest between Alexander and the Persian
monarchy, excepting from some rather suspicious stories in Josephus, we hear
less than we might expect of this race of Jews. But as we approach the era of
Christianity, and somewhat later, they emerge rather more into notice. While
the Jews were spreading in the West, and no doubt successfully disseminating
their Monotheism in many quarters, in Babylonia their proselytes were kings;
and the later Jewish Temple beheld an Eastern queen (by a singular coincidence,
of the same name with the celebrated mother of Constantine, the patroness of
Christian Jerusalem) lavishing her wealth on the structure on Mount Moriah, and
in the most munificent charity to the poorer inhabitants of the city. The name
of Helena, queen of the Adiabeni, was long dear to
the memory of the Jews; and her tomb was one of the most remarkable monuments
near the walls of the city. Philo not only asserts that Babylon and other
Eastern satrapies were full of his countrymen; but intimates that the apprehension
of their taking up arms in behalf of their outraged religion and marching upon
Palestine, weighed upon the mind of Petronius, when commanded, at all hazards,
to place the statue of Caligula in the Temple. It appears from some
hints of Josephus, that during the last war, the revolted party entertained
great hopes of succour from that quarter and there is
good ground for supposing that the final insurrection in the time of Hadrian
was connected with a rising in Mesopotamia. At the same period the influence of
this race of Jews on the religious character of the people is no less manifest.
Here was a chief scene of the preaching of the great apostle: and we cannot but
think, that its importance in early Christian history, which has usually been
traced almost exclusively in the West, has been much underrated. Hence came the
mystic Cabala of the Jews, the chief parent of those gnostic
opinions, out of which grew the heresies of the early Church: here the Jews,
under the Prince of the Captivity, held their most famous schools, where
learning was embodied in the Babylonian Talmud; and here the most influential
heresiarch, Manes, attempted to fuse into one system the elements of Magianism, Cabalism, and Christianity. Having thus rapidly
traced the fortunes of this great Jewish colony, we must reascend to the time
of its first establishment
From a very early
period the Jews seem to have possessed a Cabala, a traditionary comment or
interpretation of the sacred writings. Whether it existed before the Captivity
it is impossible to ascertain; it is certain that many of their books, even those
written by distinguished prophets, Nathan, and Gad, and Iddo,
were lost at that disastrous time. But whether they carried any accredited
tradition to Babylonia it seems evident from the Oriental cast which it
assumed, that they either brought it from thence on their return to their
native land, or received it subsequently during their intercourse with their
Eastern brethren. Down to the Captivity the Jews of Palestine had been in contact
only with the religions of the neighbouring nations,
which, however differently modified, appear to have been essentially the same,
a sort of Nature-worship, in which the host of Heaven, especially the sun and
moon, under different names, Baal and Moloch, Astarte and Mylitta, and probably
as symbols or representatives of the active and passive powers of nature, no
doubt with some distinction of their attributes, were the predominant objects.
These religions had long degenerated into cruel or licentious superstitions;
and the Jews, in falling off to the idolatry of their neighbours,
or introducing foreign rites into their own religious system, not merely
offended against the great primal distinction of their faith, the Unity of the
Godhead, but sunk from the pure, humane, and comparatively civilised institutes of their lawgiver, to the loose
Religion of sanguinary usages of barbarism. In the East, however, they
encountered a religion of a far nobler and more regular structure: a religion
which offered no temptation to idolatrous practices; for the Magian rejected,
with the devout abhorrence of the followers of Moses, the exhibition of the
Deity in the human form; though it possessed a rich store of mythological and
symbolical figures, singularly analogous to those which may be considered the
poetic machinery of the later Hebrew prophets. The religion of Persia seems to
have held an intermediate rank between the Pantheism of India, where the whole
universe emanated from the Deity, and was finally to be reabsorbed into the
Deity, and the purer Theism of the Jews, which asserted the one omnific
Jehovah, and seemed to place a wide and impassable interval between the nature
of the Creator and that of the created being. In the Persian system the
Creation owed its existence to the conflicting powers of evil and good. These
were subordinate to, or proceeding from, the Great Primal Cause (Zeruane Akerene), Time without
bounds, which in fact appears, as Gibbon observes, rather as a metaphysical
abstraction, than as an active and presiding deity. The Creation was at once
the work and the dominion of the two antagonist creators, who had balanced
against each other in perpetual conflict a race of spiritual and material
beings, light and darkness, good and evil. This Magianism,
subsequent to the Jewish Captivity; and during the residence of the captives in
Mesopotamia, either spread with the conquests of the Persians from the regions
farther to the east, Aderbijan and Bactria, or was
first promulgated by Zoroaster, who is differently represented as the author or
as the reformer of the faith. From the remarkable allusions or points of
coincidence between some of the Magian tenets and the Sacred Writings, Hyde and Prideaux laboured to prove
that Zoroaster had been a pupil of Daniel, and derived those notions, which
seem more nearly allied to the purer Jewish faith, from his intercourse with
the Hebrew prophet, who held a high station under the victorious Medo-Persian monarchy. But, in fact, there is such an
originality and completeness in the Zoroastrian system, and in its leading
principles, especially that of the antagonistic powers of good and evil, it
departs so widely from the ancient and simple Theism of the Jews, as clearly to
indicate an independent and peculiar source, at least in its more perfect
development; if it is not, as we are inclined to believe, of much more ancient
date, and native to a region much farther to the east than the Persian court,
where Zoroaster, according to one tradition, might have had intercourse, in
his youth, with the Prophet Daniel.
If, as appears to
be the general opinion of the Continental writers who have most profoundly
investigated the subject, we have authentic remains, or at least records,
which, if of later date, contain the true principles of Magianism in the Liturgies and Institutes of the Zendavesta; it
is by no means an improbable source in which we might discover the origin of
those traditional notions of the Jews, which were extraneous to their earlier
system, and which do not appear to rest on their sacred records. It is undoubtedly
remarkable that among the Magian tenets we find so many of those doctrines
about which the great schism in the Jewish popular creed, that of the
traditionists and anti-traditionists, contended for several centuries. It has
already been observed that in the later prophetic writings many allusions, and
much of what may be called the poetic language and machinery, are strikingly
similar to the main principles of the Magian faith. Nor can it be necessary to
suggest how completely such expressions as the “ children of light,” and the “children of darkness,” had become identified with the common language of the
Jews at the time of our Saviour: and when our Lord
proclaimed himself “the Light of the World,” no doubt He employed a term
familiar to the ears of the people, though, as usual, they might not clearly
comprehend in what sense it was applicable to the Messiah, or to the purely
moral character of the new religion.
It is generally
admitted that the Jewish notions about the angels, one great subject of dispute
in their synagogues, and what may be called their Daemonology, received a
strong foreign tinge during their residence in Babylonia. The earliest books of
the Old Testament fully recognize the ministration of angels; but in Babylonia
this simpler creed grew up into a regular hierarchy, in which the degrees of
rank and subordination were arranged with almost heraldic precision. The seven
great archangels of Jewish tradition correspond with the Amachaspands of the Zendavesta: and in strict mutual analogy,
both systems arrayed against each other a separate host of spiritual beings,
with distinct powers and functions. Each nation, each individual had in one
case his Ferver, in the other his guardian angel; and
was exposed to the malice of the hostile Dev or Daemon. In apparent allusion to
or coincidence with this system, the visions of Daniel represent Michael, the
tutelar angel or intelligence of the Jewish people, in opposition to the four
angels of the great monarchies; and even our Saviour seems to condescend to the popular language, when He represents the parental
care of the Almighty over children, under the significant and beautiful image,
“that in Heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is
in Heaven.”
The great impersonated
Principle of Evil appears to have assumed much of the character of the
antagonist power of darkness. The name itself of Satan, which in the older
poetical book of Job is assigned to a spirit of different attributes, one of
the celestial ministers who assemble before the throne of the Almighty, and is
used in the earlier books of the Old Testament in its simple sense of an
adversary, became appropriated to the prince of the malignant spirits—the head
and representative of the spiritual world, which ruled over physical as well as
moral evil.
Even the notion of the one Supreme Deity had undergone some modification
consonant to certain prevailing opinions of the time. Wherever any approximation
had been made to the sublime truth of the one great First Cause, either awful
religious reverence or philosophic abstraction had removed the primal Deity
entirely beyond the sphere of human sense, and supposed that the intercourse
of the Divinity with man, the moral government, and even the original creation,
had been carried on by the intermediate agency, either in Oriental language of
an Emanation, or in Platonic, of the Wisdom, Reason, or Intelligence of the one
Supreme. This being was more or less distinctly impersonated, according to the
more popular or more philosophic, the more material or more abstract notions of
the age or people. This was the doctrine from the Ganges, or even the shores of
the Yellow Sea, to the Ilissus; it was the
fundamental principle of the Indian religion and Indian philosophy; it was the
basis of Zoroastrianism, it was pure Platonismit was
the Platonic Judaism of the Alexandrian school. Many fine passages might be
quoted from Philo, on the impossibility that the first self-existing Being
should become cognisable to the sense of man; and
even in Palestine, no doubt, John the Baptist, and our Lord himself, spoke no
new doctrine, but rather the common sentiment of the more enlightened, when they
declared that no man had seen God at any time. In conformity with
this principle, the Jews, in the interpretation of the older Scriptures,
instead of direct and sensible communication from the one great Deity, had
interposed either one or more intermediate beings, as the channels of
communication. According to one accredited tradition alluded to by St. Stephen,
the Law was delivered “by the disposition of angels;”—according to another,
this office was delegated to a single angel, sometimes called the Angel of the
Law, at others the Metatron. But the more ordinary representative, as it were,
of God to the sense and mind of man, was the Memra,
or the Divine Word; and it is remarkable that the same appellation is found in
the Indian, the Persian, the Platonic, and the Alexandrian systems. By the
Targumists, the earliest Jewish commentators on the Scriptures, this term had
been already applied to the Messiah; nor is it necessary to
observe the manner in which it has been sanctified by its introduction into the
Christian scheme. From this remarkable uniformity of conception, and
coincidence of language, has sometimes been assumed a common tradition,
generally disseminated throughout the race of man. I should be content with
receiving it as the general acquiescence of the human mind in the necessity of
some mediation between the pure spiritual nature of the Deity and the
intellectual and moral being of man, of which the sublimest and simplest, and therefore the most natural development, was the revelation of
God in Christ—in the inadequate language of our version of the original “the
brightness of (God’s) glory, and the express image of his person.”
No question has
been more strenuously debated than the knowledge of a future state, entertained
by the earlier Jews. At all events it is quite clear that before the time of
Christ not merely the immortality of the soul, but what is very different, a
final resurrection had become completely interwoven with the popular belief.
Passages in the later prophets, Daniel and Ezekiel, particularly a very
remarkable one in the latter, may be adduced as the first distinct authorities
on which this belief might be grounded. It appears, however, in its more
perfect development, soon after the return from the Captivity. As early as the
revolt of the Maccabees, it was so deeply rooted in the public mind, that we
find a solemn ceremony performed for the dead. From henceforth it became the
leading article of the great schism between the traditionists and the
anti-traditionists, the Pharisees and the Sadducees; and in the Gospels we
cannot but discover at a glance its almost universal prevalence. Even the Roman
historian was struck by its influence on the indomitable character of the
people. In the Zoroastrian religion, a resurrection holds a place no less
prominent, than in the later Jewish belief. On the day of the final triumph of
the Great Principle of Light, the children of light are to be raised from the
dead, to partake in the physical splendour, and to
assume the moral perfection of the subjects of the triumphant Principle of
Good. In the same manner, the Jews associated together the coming of the
Messiah with the final resurrection. From many passages, quoted by Lightfoot, I
select the following: “The righteous, whom the Lord shall raise from the dead
in the days of the Messiah, when they are restored to life, shall not again
return to their dust, neither in the days of the Messiah, nor in the following
age, but their flesh shall remain upon them.”
Out of all these
different sources, from whence they derived a knowledge of a future state, the
passages of their prophets in their own sacred writings (among which that in
the book of Daniel, from its coincidence with the Zoroastrian tenet, might
easily be misapplied), and the Oriental element, the popular belief of the
Palestinian Jews had moulded up a splendid though confused
vision of the appearance of the Messiah, the simultaneous regeneration of all
things, the resurrection of the dead, and the reign of the Messiah upon earth.
All these events were to take place at once, or to follow close upon each
other. In many passages, the language of the Apostles clearly intimates that
they were as little prepared to expect a purely religious renovation, at the
coming of the Messiah, as the rest of their countrymen; and throughout the
Apostolic age, this notion still maintained its ground, and kept up the general
apprehension, that the final consummation was immediately at hand. It is no
doubt impossible to assign their particular preponderance to these several
elements, which combined to form the popular belief: yet, even if many of their
notions entirely originated in the Zoroastrian system, it would be curious to
observe how, by the very calamities of the Jews, Divine Providence adapted
them for the more important part which they were to fill in the history of
mankind; and to trace the progressive manner in which the Almighty prepared the
development of the more perfect and universal system of Christianity.
For, with whatever
Oriental colouring Jewish tradition might invest the
image of the great Deliverer, in Palestine it still remained rigidly
national and exclusive. If the Jew concurred with the worshipper of Ormuzd in expecting a final restoration of all things
through the agency of a Divine Intelligence, that Being, according to the
promise to their fathers, was to be intimately connected with their race; he
was to descend from the line of David; he was to occupy Sion, the holy city, as
the centre of his government; he was to make his
appearance in the temple on Mount Moriah; he was to reassemble all the
scattered descendants of the tribes, to discomfit and expel their barbarous and
foreign rulers. The great distinction between the two races of mankind fell in
completely with their hereditary prejudices: the children of Abraham were, as
their birthright, the children of light; and even the doctrine of the
resurrection was singularly harmonised with that
exclusive nationality. At least the first resurrection was to be
their separate portion; it was to summon them, if not all, at least the more
righteous, from Paradise, from the abode of departed spirits; and under their
triumphant king they were to enjoy a thousand years of glory and bliss upon the
recreated and renovated earth.
We pass from the
rich poetic impersonations, the fantastic but expressive symbolic forms of the
East, to the colder and clearer light of Grecian philosophy, with which the
Western Jews, especially in Alexandria, had endeavoured to associate their own religious truths. The poetic age of Greece had long
passed away before the two nations came into contact; and the same rationalising tendency of the times led the Greek to reduce
his religion, the Jew the history of his nation, to a lofty moral allegory.
Enough of poetry remained in the philosophic system, adopted in the great
Jewish Alexandrian school, that of Plato, to leave ample scope for the
imagination: and indeed there was a kind of softened Orientalism, probably
derived by Plato from his master Pythagoras, by Pythagoras from the East, which
readily assimilated with the mystic interpretations of the Egypto-Jewish
theology. The Alexandrian notions of the days of the Messiah are faintly
shadowed out in the book “of the Wisdom of Solomon,” in terms which occasionally
remind us of some which occur in the New Testament. The righteous Jews, on
account of their acknowledged moral and religious superiority, were to “judge
the nations,” and have “dominion over all people.” But the more perfect
development of these views is to be found in the works of Philo. This writer,
who, however inclined to soar into the cloudy realms of mysticism, often rests
in the middle region of the moral sublime, and abounds in passages which would
scarcely do discredit to his Athenian master, had arrayed a splendid vision of
the perfectibility of human nature, in which his own nation was to take the
most distinguished part. From them knowledge and virtue were to emanate through
the universal race of man. The whole world, convinced at length of the moral
superiority of the Mosaic institutes, interpreted, it is true, upon the allegorical
system, and so harmonised with the sublimest Platonism of the Greeks, was to submit in
voluntary homage, and render allegiance to the great religious teachers and
examples of mankind. The Jews themselves, thus suddenly regenerated to more
than the primitive purity and loftiness of their Law (in which the Divine
Reason, the Logos, was as it were embodied), were to gather together from all
quarters, and under the guidance of a more than human being, unseen to all eyes
but those of the favoured nation (such was the only
vestige of the Messiah), to reassemble in their native land. There the great
era of virtue, and peace, and abundance, productiveness of the soil, prolificness in the people, in short, of all the blessings
promised in the book of Deuteronomy, was to commence and endure for ever. This people was to be invincible, since true valour is inseparable from true virtue. By a singular
inference, not out of character with allegoric interpreters who, while they
refine the plainest facts and precepts to a more subtle and mystic meaning, are
apt to take that which is evidently figurative in a literal sense, the very
wild beasts, in awe and wonder at this pure and passionless race, who shall
have ceased to rage against each other with bestial ferocity, were to tame
their savage hostility to mankind. Thus the prophecy of Isaiah, to
which Philo seems to allude, though he does not adduce the words, was to be
accomplished to the letter; and that paradisaical state of amity between brute
and man, so beautifully described by Milton, perhaps from this source, was
finally to be renewed. And as the Jewish philosopher, contrary to most of his
own countrymen and to some of the Grecian sects, denied the future dissolution
of the world by fire, and asserted its eternity, he probably contemplated the
everlasting duration of this peaceful and holy state.
Such, for no doubt
the Alexandrian opinions had penetrated into Palestine, particularly among the
Hellenist Jews—such were the vast, incoherent, and dazzling images with which
the future teemed to the hopes of the Jewish people. They admitted either a
part or the whole of the common belief, as accorded with their tone of mind and
feeling. Each region, each rank, each sect; the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the
Palestinian, the Samaritan; the Pharisee, the Lawyer, the Zealot, arrayed the
Messiah in those attributes which suited his own temperament. Of that which
was more methodically taught in the synagogue or the adjacent school, the
populace caught up whatever made the deeper impression. The enthusiasm took an
active or contemplative, an ambitious or a religious, an earthly or a heavenly
tone, according to the education, habits, or station of the believer; and to
different men the Messiah was man or angel, or more than angel; he was king,
conqueror, or moral reformer; a more victorious Joshua, a more magnificent
Herod, a wider-ruling Caesar, a wiser Moses, a holier Abraham; an
Angel, the Angel of the Covenant, the Metatron, the Mediator between God and
man; Michael, the great tutelar archangel of the nation, who appears
by some to have been identified with the mysterious Being who led them forth
from Egypt; he was the Word of God; an Emanation from the Deity;
himself partaking of the divine nature. While this was the religious belief,
some there were, no doubt, of the Sadducaic party, or
the half-Graecised adherents of the Herodian family,
who treated the whole as a popular delusion; or, as Josephus with Vespasian,
would not scruple to employ it as a politic means for the advancement of their
own fortunes. While the robber chieftain looked out from his hill-tower to see
the blood-red banner of him whom he literally expected to come “from Edom with
dyed garments from Bozrah,” and “treading the
wine-press in his wrath,” the Essene in his solitary hermitage, or monastic
fraternity of husbandmen, looked to the reign of the Messiah, when the more
peaceful images of the same prophet would be accomplished, and the Prince of
Peace establish his quiet and uninterrupted reign.
In the body of the
people, the circumstances of the times powerfully tended both to develope more fully, and to stamp more deeply into their
hearts the expectation of a temporal deliverer, a conqueror, a king. As
misgovernment irritated, as exaction pressed, as national pride was wounded by
foreign domination, so enthusiasm took a fiercer and more martial turn : as the
desire of national independence became the predominant sentiment, the Messiah
was more immediately expected to accomplish that which lay nearest to their
hearts. The higher views of his character, and the more unworldly hopes of a
spiritual and moral revolution, receded farther and farther from the view; and
as the time approached in which the Messiah was to be born, the people in
general were in a less favourable state of mind to
listen to the doctrines of peace, humility, and love, or to recognise that Messiah in a being so entirely divested of temporal power or splendour. In the ruling party, on the other hand, as will
hereafter appear,
the dread of this inflammable state of the public mind, and the dangerous
position of affairs, would confirm that jealousy of innovation inseparable
from established governments. Every tendency to commotion would be repressed
with a strong hand, or at least the rulers would be constantly on the watch, by
their forward zeal in condemning all disturbers of the public peace, to
exculpate themselves with their foreign masters from any participation in the
tumult. Holding, no doubt, with devout, perhaps with conscientious earnestness,
the promised coming of the Messiah as an abstract truth, and as an article of
their religious creed, their own interests, their rank and authority, were so
connected with the existing order of things, political prudence would appear so
fully to justify more than ordinary caution, that while they would have
fiercely resented any imputation on their want of faith in the divine promises,
it would have been difficult, even by the most public and imposing “signs” to
have satisfied their cool incredulity.
With all these
elements of political and religious excitement stirring through the whole
fabric of society, it would be difficult to conceive a nation in a more
extraordinary state of suspense and agitation than the Jews about the period of
the birth of Christ. Their temporal and religious fortunes seemed drawing to an
immediate issue. Their king lay slowly perishing of a lingering and loathsome
disease; and his temper, which had so often broken out into paroxysms little
short of insanity, now seemed to be goaded by bodily and mental anguish to the
fury of a wild beast. Every day might be anticipated the spectacle of the
execution of his eldest son, now on his way from Rome, and known to have been
detected in his unnatural treasons. It seemed that even yet, the royal
authority and the stern fanaticism of the religious party, which had, for many
years, lowered upon each other with hostile front, might grapple in a deadly
struggle. The more prudent of the religious leaders could scarcely restrain the
indignant enthusiasm of their followers, which broke out at once on the
accession of Archelaus; while, on the other hand, the almost incredible testamentary
cruelty, by which Herod commanded the heads of the principal Jewish families to
be assembled in the Hippodrome, at the signal of his death, to be cut down in a
promiscuous massacre, may reasonably be ascribed to remorseless policy, as well
as to frantic vengeance. He might suppose that, by removing all opponents of
weight and influence, he could secure the peaceable succession of his
descendants, if the Emperor, according to his promise, should ratify the will
by which he had divided his dominions among his surviving sons.
In the midst of
this civil confusion, that great event took place, which was to produce so
total a revolution in the state of all mankind. However striking the few
incidents which are related of the birth of Christ, when contemplated distinct
and separate from the stirring transactions of the times, and through the
atmosphere, as it were, of devotional feelings, which at once seem to magnify
and harmonise them; yet, for this very reason, we are
perhaps scarcely capable of judging the effect which such events actually
produced, and the relative magnitude in which they appeared to the contemporary
generation. For if we endeavour to cast ourselves
back into the period to which these incidents belong, and place ourselves, as
it were, in the midst of the awful political crisis, which seemed about to
decide at once the independence or servitude of the nation, and might, more or
less, affect the private and personal welfare of each family and individual, it
will by no means move our wonder, that the commotion excited by the appearance
of the Magians in Jerusalem, and the announcement of the birth of the Christ
should not have made a more deep impression on the public mind, and should have
passed away, it should seem, so speedily from the popular remembrance. In fact,
even if generally credited, the intelligence that the Messiah had appeared in
the form of a new-born infant, would rather perhaps have disappointed, than
gratified, the high-wrought expectation, which looked for an instant, an
immediate deliverance, and would be too impatient to await the slow development
of his manhood. Whether the more considerate expected the Deliverer suddenly to
reveal himself in his maturity of strength and power, may be uncertain: but the
last thing that the more ardent and fiery looked for, particularly those who
supposed that the Messiah would partake of the divine or superhuman nature, was
his appearance as a child; the last throne to which they would be summoned to
render their homage, would be the cradle of a helpless infant.
Nor is it less
important, throughout the early history of Christianity, to seize the spirit of
the times. Events which appear to us so extraordinary, that we can scarcely
conceive that they should either fail in exciting a powerful sensation, or ever
be obliterated from the popular remembrance, in their own day might pass off
as of little more than ordinary occurrence. During the whole life of Christ,
and the early propagation of the religion, it must be borne in mind that they
took place in an age, and among a people, which superstition had made so
familiar with what were supposed to be preternatural events, that wonders
awakened no emotion, or were speedily superseded by some new demand on the
ever-ready belief. The Jews of that period not only believed that the Supreme
Being had the power of controlling the course of nature, but that the same
influence was possessed by multitudes of subordinate spirits, both good and
evil. Where the pious Christian in the present day would behold the direct
agency of the Almighty, the Jews would invariably have interposed an angel as
the author or ministerial agent in the wonderful transaction. Where the
Christian moralist would condemn the fierce passion, the ungovernable lust, or
the inhuman temper, the Jew discerned the workings of diabolical possession.
Scarcely a malady was endured, or crime committed, but it was traced to the
operation of one of these myriad daemons, who watched every opportunity of
exercising their malice in the sufferings and the sins of men.
Yet the first
incident in Christian history, the annunciation of the conception and birth of
John the Baptist, as its wonderful circumstances the took place in a priestly
family, and on so public a scene as the Temple, might be expected to excite the
public attention in no ordinary degree. The four Levitical families who
returned from the Captivity had been distributed into twenty-four courses, one
of which came into actual office in the Temple every week: they had assumed the
old names, as if descended in direct lineage from the original heads of
families; and thus the regular ministrations of the priesthood were reorganised on the ancient footing, coeval with the
foundation of the Temple. In the course of Abias, the
eighth in order was an aged priest, named Zachariah. The officiating course
were accustomed to cast lots for the separate functions. Some of these were
considered of higher dignity than others, which were either of a more menial
character, or at least were not held in equal estimation. Nearly the most
important was the watching and supplying with incense the great brazen altar,
which stood within the building of the Temple, in the first or Holy Place. Into
this, at the sound of a small bell, which gave notice to the worshippers at a
distance, the ministering priest entered alone. And in the sacred chamber, into
which the light of day never penetrated, but where the dim fires of the altar,
and the chandeliers, which were never extinguished, gave a solemn and
uncertain light, still more bedimmed by the clouds of smoke arising from the
newly fed altar of incense, no doubt, in the pious mind, the sense of the more
immediate presence of the Deity, only separated by the veil, which divided the
Holy Place from the Holy of Holies, would constantly have awakened the most
profound emotions. While the priest was employed within the gates, the
multitude of worshippers in the adjacent court awaited his return; for it would
seem, that the offering of incense was considered emblematic of the prayers of
the whole nation; and though it took place twice every day, at morning and
evening, the entrance and return of the priest from the mysterious precincts
were watched by the devout with something of awful anxiety.
This day, to the
general astonishment, Zachariah, to whom the function had fallen, lingered far
beyond the customary time. For it is said of the high-priest’s annual entrance
into the Holy of Holies, that he usually stayed within as short a time as
possible, lest the anxious people should fear, that on account of some omission
in the offering, or guilt in the minister, or perhaps in the nation, of which
he was the federal religious head, he might have been stricken with death. It
may be supposed, therefore, that even in the subordinate ceremonies there was
a certain ordinary time, after which the devouter people would begin to tremble, lest their representative, who in their behalf
was making the national offering, might have met with some sinister or fatal
sign of the divine disfavour. When at length
Zachariah appeared he could not speak; and it was evident that in some
mysterious manner he had been struck dumb, and to the anxious inquiries he
could only make known by signs that something awful and unusual had taken place
within the sanctuary. At what period he made his full relation of the wonderful
fact which had occurred does not appear; but it was a relation of absorbing
interest both to the aged man himself, who, although his wife was far advanced
in years, was to be blessed with offspring; and to the whole people, as
indicating the fulfilment of one of the preliminary signs which were
universally accredited as precursive of the Messiah.
In the vision of
Zachariah, he had beheld an angel standing on the right side of the altar, who
announced that his prayer was heard and that his barren house was to be
blessed; that his aged wife should near a son, and that son be consecrated from
his birth to the service of God, and observe the strictest austerity; that he
was to revive the decaying spirit of religion, unite the disorganised nation, and above all, should appear as the expected harbinger, who was to
precede and prepare the way for the approaching Redeemer. The angel proclaimed
himself to be the messenger of God (Gabriel), and both as a punishment for his
incredulity, and a sign of the certainty of the promise, Zachariah was struck
dumb, but with an assurance that the affliction should remain only till the
accomplishment of the divine prediction in the birth of his son. If, as
has been said, the vision of Zachariah was in any manner communicated to the
assembled people (though the silence of the evangelist makes strongly against
any such supposition), or even to his kindred the officiating priesthood, it
would no doubt have caused a great sensation, falling in, as it would, with the
prevailing tone of the public mind. For it was the general belief that some
messenger would, in the language of Isaiah, “prepare the way of the Lord;” and
the last words which had, as it were, sealed the book of prophecy, intimated,
as many supposed, the personal reappearance of Elijah, the greatest,
and, in popular opinion, a sort of representative of the whole prophetic
community. The ascetic life to which the infant prophet was to be dedicated,
according to the Nazaritish vow of abstinence from
all wine or strong drink, was likewise a characteristic of the prophetic order,
which, although many, more particularly among the Essenes, asserted their
inspired knowledge of futurity, was generally considered to have ceased in the
person of Malachi, the last whose oracles were enrolled in the sacred canon.
It does not appear
that dumbness was a legal disqualification for the sacerdotal function, for
Zachariah remained among his brethren, the priests, till their week of
ministration ended. He then returned to his usual residence in the southern
part of Judaea, most probably in the ancient and well-known city of Hebron,
which was originally a Levitical city; and although the sacerdotal order had not
resumed the exclusive possession of their cities at the return from the
Captivity, it might lead the priestly families to settle more generally in
those towns; and Hebron, though of no great size, was considered remarkably
populous in proportion to its extent. The divine promise began to be
accomplished; and during the five first months of her pregnancy, Elizabeth, the
wife of Zachariah, concealed herself, either avoiding the curious inquiries of
her neighbours in these jealous and perilous times,
or in devotional retirement, rendering thanks to the Almighty for the
unexpected blessing.
It was on a far less public scene that the birth of Christ, of whom the
child of Zachariah was to be the harbinger, was announced to the Virgin Mother.
The families which traced their descent from the house of David had fallen into
poverty and neglect. When, after the return from the Babylonian captivity, the
sovereignty had been assumed, first by the high-priests of Levitical descent,
subsequently by the Asmonean family, who were likewise of the priestly line,
and finally, by the house of Herod, of Idumean origin, but engrafted into the
Maccabean line by the marriage of Herod with Mariamne,
it was the most obvious policy to leave in the obscurity into which they had
sunk, that race which, if it should produce any pretendant of the least
distinction, he might advance an hereditary claim, as dear to the people as it
would be dangerous to the reigning dynasty. The whole descendants of the royal
race seem to have sunk so low, that even the popular belief, which looked to
the line of David, as that from which the Messiah was to spring, did not invest
them with sufficient importance, to awaken the jealousy or suspicion of the
rulers. Joseph, a man descended from this royal race, had migrated, for some
unknown reason, to a distance from the part of the land inhabited by the tribe
of Benjamin, to which, however, they were still considered to belong. He had
settled in Nazareth, an obscure town in Lower Galilee, which, independent of the
general disrepute in which the whole of the Galilean provinces were held by the
inhabitants of the more holy district of Judaea, seems to have been marked by a
kind of peculiar proverbial contempt. Joseph had been betrothed to a virgin of
his own race, named Mary; but according to Jewish usage, some time was to
elapse between the betrothment and the espousals. In this interval took place
the annunciation of the divine conception to the Virgin. In no part is the
singular simplicity of the Gospel narrative more striking than in the relation
of this incident; and I should be inclined, for this reason alone, to reject
the notion that these chapters were of a later date. So early does that
remarkable characteristic of the evangelic writings develope itself; the manner in which they relate, in the same calm and equable tone, the
most extraordinary and most trivial events; the apparent absence either of
wonder in the writer, or the desire of producing a strong effect on the mind of
the reader. To illustrate this, no passage can be more striking than the
account of her vision,—“And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail thou
that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee:
blessed art thou among women. And when she saw him, she was troubled at his
saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. And the
angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a Son,
and shalt call his name Jesus. He
shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God
shall give unto him the throne of his father David: and he shall reign over the
house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there
shall be no end. Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I
know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall
come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore
also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of
God. And, behold, thy cousin Elizabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her
old age; and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren. For with
God nothing shall be impossible. And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the
Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.”
The Incarnation of the Deity, or the union of some part of the Divine
Essence with a material or human body, is by no means an uncommon religious
notion, more particularly in the East. Yet, in the doctrine as subsequently
developed by Christianity, there seems the same important difference which characterises the whole system of the ancient and modern
religions. It is in the former a mythological impersonation of the Power, in Christ
it is the Goodness of the Deity, which, associating itself with a human form,
assumes the character of a representative of the human race; in whose person is
exhibited a pure model of moral perfection, and whose triumph over evil is by
the slow and gradual progress of enlightening the mind, and softening and
purifying the heart. The moral purpose of the descent of the Deity is by no
means excluded in the religions in which a similar notion has prevailed, as
neither is that of divine power, though confining itself to acts of pure
beneficence, from the Christian scheme. This seems more particularly the case,
if we may state any thing with certainty concerning those
half-mythological, half-real personages, the Budah,
Gautama, or Somana Codom of
the remoter East. In these systems likewise the overbearing excess of human
wickedness demands the interference, and the restoration of a better order of
things is the object, which vindicates the presence of the embodied Deity; yet
there is invariably a greater or less connexion with
the Oriental cosmogonical systems; it is the triumph of mind over matter, the
termination of the long strife between the two adverse principles. The
Christian scheme, however it may occasionally admit the current language of the
time, as where Christ is called the “Light of the World,” yet in its scope and
purport stands clear and independent of all these physical notions: it is
original, inasmuch as it is purely, essentially, and exclusively a moral
revelation; its sole design to work a moral change; to establish a new relation
between man and the Almighty Creator, and to bring to light the great secret of
the immortality of man.
Hence the only deviation from the course of nature was the birth of this
Being from a pure virgin. Much has been written on this subject; but it is more
consistent with our object to point out the influence of this doctrine upon the
human mind, as hence its harmony with the general design of Christianity
becomes more manifest.
We estimate very inadequately the influence or the value of any religion,
if we merely consider its precepts, or its opinions. The impression it makes,
the emotions it awakens, the sentiments which it inspires, are perhaps its most
vital and effective energies. From these, men continually act; and the
character of a particular age is more distinctly marked by the predominance of
these silent but universal motives, than by the professed creed, or prevalent
philosophy, or, in general, by the opinions of the times. Thus, none of the
primary facts in the history of a widely-extended religion can be without
effect on the character of its believers. The images perpetually presented to
the mind, work, as it were, into its most intimate being, become incorporated
with the feelings, and thus powerfully contribute to form the moral nature of
the whole race. Nothing could be more appropriate than that the martial Romans
should derive their origin from the nursling of the wolf, or from the god of
war; and whether those fables sprung from the national temperament, or
contributed to form it, however these fierce images were enshrined in the
national traditions, they were at once the emblem and example of that bold and
relentless spirit which gradually developed itself, until it had made the
Romans the masters of the world. The circumstances of the birth of Christ were
as strictly in unison with the design of the religion. This incident seemed to
incorporate with the general feeling the deep sense of holiness and gentleness,
which was to characterise the followers of Jesus
Christ. It was the consecration of sexual purity and maternal tenderness. No
doubt by falling in, to a certain degree, with the ascetic spirit of Oriental
enthusiasm, the former incidentally tended to confirm the sanctity of celibacy,
which for so many ages reigned paramount in the Church; and in the days in
which the Virgin Mother was associated with her divine Son in the general adoration,
the propensity to this worship was strengthened by its coincidence with the
better feelings of our nature, especially among the female sex. Still the
substitution of these images for such as formed the symbols of the older
religions, was a great advance towards that holier and more humane tone of
thought and feeling, with which it was the professed design of the new religion
to imbue the mind of man.
In the marvellous incidents which follow, the
visit of the Virgin Mother to her cousin Elizabeth, when the joy occasioned by
the miraculous conception seemed to communicate itself to the child of which
the latter was pregnant, and called forth her ardent expressions of homage: and
in the Magnificat, or song of thanksgiving, into which, like Hannah in the
older Scriptures, the Virgin broke forth, it is curious to observe how
completely and exclusively consistent every expression appears with the state
of belief at that period; all is purely Jewish, and accordant with the
prevalent expectation of the national Messiah: there is no word which seems to
imply any acquaintance with the unworldly and purely moral nature of the
redemption, which was subsequently developed. It may perhaps appear too closely
to press the terms of that which was the common, almost the proverbial,
language of the devotional feelings: yet the expressions which intimate the
degradation of the mighty from their seat, the disregard of the wealthy, the
elevation of the lowly and the meek, and respect to the low estate of the poor,
sound not unlike an allusion to the rejection of the proud and splendid royal
race, which had so long ruled the nation, and the assumption of the throne of
David by one born in a more humble state.
After the return of Mary to Nazareth, the birth of John the Baptist
excited the attention of the whole of Southern Judaea to the
fulfilment of the rest of the prediction. When the child is about to
be named, the dumb father interferes; he writes on a tablet the name by which
he desires him to be called, and instantaneously recovers his speech. It is not
unworthy of remark that, in this hymn of thanksgiving, the part which was to
be assigned to John in the promulgation of the new faith, and his
subordination to the unborn Messiah, are distinctly announced. Already, while
one is but a new-born infant, the other scarcely conceived in the womb of his
mother, they have assumed their separate stations: the child of Elizabeth is announced
as the prophet of the Highest, who shall go “before the face of the Lord, to
prepare his ways.” Yet even here the Jewish notion predominates: the first
object of the Messiah’s coming, is that the children of Israel “should be
saved from their enemies and from the hand of all that hate them; that they,
being delivered from the hand of their enemies, might serve him without fear.”
As the period approaches at which the child of
Mary to be born, an apparently
fortuitous circumstances summons both Joseph and the Virgin Mother from their
residence in the unpopular town of Nazareth, in the province of Galilee, to
Bethlehem, a small village to the south of Jerusalem. Joseph on the discovery
of the pregnancy of his betrothed, being a man of gentle character, had been
willing to spare her the rigorous punishment enacted by the law in such cases,
and determined on a private dissolution of the marriage. A vision, however,
warned him of the real state of the case, and he no longer hesitated, though
abstaining from all connexion to take her to his
home; and accordingly, being of the same descent, she accompanied him to
Bethlehem. This town, as the birthplace of David, had always been consecrated
in the memory of the Jews with peculiar reverence; and no prediction in the Old
Testament appears more distinct, than that which assigns for the nativity of
the great Prince, who was to perpetuate the line of David, the same town which
had given birth to his royal ancestor.
The decree of the Emperor Augustus, in obedience to which the whole
population of Palestine was to be enrolled and registered, has been,
and still remains, an endless subject of controversy. One point
seems clear, that the enrolment must have been of the nature of a
population-census; for any property, possessed by Joseph or Mary, must have
been at Nazareth; and the enrolment, which seems to have included both husband
and wife, was made at the place where the genealogical registers of the tribes
were kept. About this period Josephus gives an account of an oath of allegiance
and of fidelity, to Caesar and to the interests of the reigning sovereign,
which was to be taken by the whole Jewish nation. The affair of this oath is
strangely mingled up with predictions of a change of dynasty, and with the
expected appearance of a great king, under whose all-powerful reign the most
extraordinary events were to take place. Six thousand of the Pharisees, the
violent religious party, resolutely refused to take the oath. They were fined,
and their fine discharged by the low-born wife of Pheroras,
the brother of Herod, into whose line certain impostors or enthusiasts, pretending
to the gift of prophecy, had declared that the succession was to pass. An eunuch, Bagoas, to whom they had promised peculiar
and miraculous advantages during the reign of the great predicted king, was implicated
in this conspiracy, and suffered death, with many of the obstinate Pharisees
and of Herod’s kindred. It is highly probable that the administration of the
oath of allegiance in Josephus, and the census in St. Luke, belong to the same
transaction; for if the oath was to be taken by all the subjects of Herod, a
general enrolment would be necessary throughout his dominions; and it was
likely, according to Jewish usage, that this enrolment would be conducted
according to the established divisions of the tribes. If, however, the
expectation of the Messiah had penetrated even into the palace of Herod; if it
had been made use of in the intrigues and dissensions among the separate
branches of his family; if the strong religious faction had not scrupled to assume
the character of divinely-inspired prophets, and to proclaim an immediate
change of dynasty, the whole conduct of Herod, as described by the evangelists, harmonises in a most singular manner with the circumstances
of the times. Though the birth of Jesus might appear to Herod but as an
insignificant episode in the more dangerous tragic plot which was unfolding
itself in his own family, yet his jealous apprehension at the very name of a
new-born native king, would seize at once on the most trifling cause of
suspicion; and the judicial massacre of many of the most influential of the Pharisees,
and of his own kindred in Jerusalem, which took place on the discovery of this
plot, was a fitting prelude for the slaughter of all the children under a
certain age in Bethlehem.
But whether the enrolment, which summoned Joseph and Mary to the town
where the registers of their descent were kept, was connected with this oath of
fidelity to the emperor and the king; or whether it was only a
population-return, made by the command of the emperor, in all the provinces
where the Roman sovereignty or influence extended, it singularly contributed to
the completion of the prophecy to which we have alluded, which designated the
city of David as the birthplace of the Messiah. Those who claimed descent from
the families whose original possessions were in the neighbourhood of Bethlehem, crowded the whole of the small town; and in the stable of the inn
was born THE CHILD, whose moral doctrines, if adopted throughout the world,
would destroy more than half the misery by destroying all the vice and mutual
hostility of men; and who has been for centuries the object of adoration, as
the Divine Mediator between God and man, throughout the most civilised and enlightened nations of the earth. Of this
immediate epoch only one incident is recorded; but in all the early history of
Christianity nothing is more beautiful, nor in more perfect unison with the future character of the religion than the
first revelation of its benign principles by voices from heaven to the lowly
shepherds. The proclamation of “Glory to God, Peace on earth and good will
towards men,” is not made by day, but in the quiet stillness of the night; not
in the stately temple of the ancient worship, but among the peaceful pastures;
not to the religious senate of the Jewish people, or to the priesthood arrayed
in all the splendour of public ministration, but to
peasants employed on their lowly occupation.
In eight days, according to the law, the child was initiated into the
race of Abraham, by the rite of circumcision, and when the forty days of purification,
likewise appointed by the statute, are over, the Virgin Mother hastens to make
the customary presentation of the first-born male in the Temple. Her offering
is that of the poorer Jewish females, who, while the more wealthy made an
oblation of a lamb, were content with the least costly, a pair of turtle doves,
or two young pigeons. Only two persons are recorded as having any knowledge of
the future destiny of the child,—Anna, a woman endowed with a prophetical
character, and the aged Simeon. That Simeon was not the celebrated master of
the schools of Jewish learning, the son of Hillel, and the father of Gamaliel,
is fairly inferred from the silence of St. Luke, who, though chiefly writing
for the Greek converts, would scarcely have omitted to state distinctly the
testimony of so distinguished a man to the Messiahship of Jesus. There are
other insurmountable historical objections. Though occurrences among the more
devout worshippers in the Temple were perhaps less likely to reach the
ear of Herod than those in any other part of the city, yet it was impossible
that the solemn act of recognising the Messiah in
the infant son of Mary, on so public a scene, by a man whose language and
conduct were watched by the whole people, could escape observation. Such an
acknowledgment, by so high an authority, would immediately have been noised
abroad; no prudence could have suppressed the instantaneous excitement. Besides
this, if alive at this time, Simeon ben Hillel would have presided in the court
of inquiry, summoned by Herod, after the appearance of the Magi. The most
remarkable point in the benediction of Simeon is the prediction that the child,
who it would have been supposed would have caused unmingled pride and joy,
should also be the cause of the deepest sorrow to his mother; and of the most
fearful calamities, as well as of glory, to the nation.
The intercommunion of opinions between the Jewish and Zoroastrian
religions throws great light on the visit of the Magi, or Wise Men, to
Jerusalem. The impregnation of the Jewish notions about the Messiah with the
Magian doctrines of the final triumph of Ormusd,
makes it by no means improbable that, on the other side, the national doctrines
of the Jews may have worked their way into the popular belief of the East, or
at least into the opinions of those among the Magian hierarchy, who had come
more immediately into contact with the Babylonian Jews. From them they may
have adopted the expectation of the Great Principle of Light in a human form,
and descending, according to ancient prophecy, from the race of Israel; and
thus have been prepared to set forth, at the first appearance of the luminous
body, by which they were led to Judaea. The universal usage of the East, never
to approach the presence of a superior, particularly a sovereign, without some
precious gift, is naturally exemplified in their costly but portable offerings
of gold, myrrh, and frankincense.
The appearance of these strangers in Jerusalem at this critical period,
particularly if considered in connexion with the
conspiracy in the family of Herod and among the religious faction, as it
excited an extraordinary sensation through the whole city, would reawaken all
the watchfulness of the monarch. The assemblage of the religious authorities,
in order that they might judicially declare the place from which the Messiah
was expected, might be intended not merely to direct the ministers of the royal
vengeance to the quarter from whence danger was to be apprehended, but to force
the acknowledged interpreters of the sacred writings to an authoritative
declaration as to the circumstances of the Messiah’s birth; so, if any event
should occur, contrary to their version of the prophecies, either to commit
them on the side of the ruling powers, or altogether to invalidate the
expectation, that was dangerously brooding in the popular mind. The subtlety
of Herod’s character is as strikingly exhibited in his pretended resolution to
join the Magians in their worship of the new-born king, as his relentless
decision, when the Magians did not return to Jerusalem, in commanding the
general massacre of all the infants under the age of two years, in Bethlehem and
its district.
Egypt, where, by divine command, the parents of Jesus took refuge, was
but a few days’ journey, on a line perpetually frequented by regular caravans;
and in that country, those who fled from Palestine could scarcely fail to meet
with hospitable reception, among some of that second nation of Jews, who
inhabited Alexandria and its neighbourhood.
On their return from Egypt, after the death of Herod (which took place
in the ensuing year, though the parents
of Jesus did not leave Egypt till the accession of Archelaus), Joseph, justly
apprehensive that the son might inherit the jealousy and relentless disposition
of the father, of which he had already given fearful indications, retired to
his former residence in Galilee, under the less suspicious dominion of Herod
Antipas. There the general prejudice against Galilee might be their best
security; and the universal belief that it was in Judaea that the great king
was to assume his sovereignty, would render their situation less perilous;
for it was the throne of the monarch of Judah, the dominion of the ruler in
Jerusalem, rather than the government of the Galilean tetrarch, which would
have been considered in danger from the appearance of the Messiah.
Commencement of the
Public Life of Jesus.
Nearly thirty years had passed away since the birth in Bethlehem, during which
period there is but one incident recorded, which could direct the public
attention to the Son of Mary. All religious Jews made their periodical visits
to the capital at the three great festivals, especially at the Passover. The
more pious women, though exempt by the law from regular attendance, usually
accompanied their husband or kindred. It is probable that, at the age of
twelve, the children, who were then said to have assumed the rank of “Sons of
the Law,” and were considered responsible for their obedience to the civil and
religious institutes of the nation, were first permitted to appear with their
parents in the metropolis, to be present, and, as it were, to be initiated in
the religious ceremonies. Accordingly, at this age, Jesus went up with his
parents at the festival to Jerusalem; but on their return, after the customary
residence of seven days, they had advanced a full day’s journey without discovering
that the youth was not to be found in the whole caravan, or long train of
pilgrims, which probably comprised all the religious inhabitants of the
populous northern provinces. In the utmost anxiety they returned to Jerusalem,
and, after three days, found Him in one of the chambers, within the precincts
of the Temple, set apart for public instruction. In these schools the wisest
and most respected of the Rabbis, or teachers, were accustomed to hold their
sittings, which were open to all who were desirous of knowledge. Jesus was
seated, as the scholars usually were; and at his familiarity with the Law, and
the depth and subtilty of his questions, the learned men were in the utmost
astonishment: the phrase may, perhaps, bear the stronger sense—they were “in an
ecstasy of admiration.” This incident is strictly in accordance with Jewish
usage. The more promising youths were encouraged to the early development and
display of their acquaintance with the Sacred Writings, and the institutes of
the country. Josephus, the historian, relates, that in his early youth he was
an object of wonder for his precocious knowledge with the Wise Men, who took
delight in examining and developing his proficiency in the subtler questions of
the Law. Whether the impression of the transcendent promise of Jesus was as
deep and lasting as it was vivid we have no information; for without
reluctance, with no more than a brief and mysterious intimation that public
instruction was the business imposed upon him by his Father, he returned with
his parents to his remote and undistinguished home. The Law, in this, as in all
such cases, harmonising with the eternal instincts of
nature had placed the relation of child and parent on the simplest and
soundest principles. The authority of the parent was unlimited, while his
power of inflicting punishment on the person, or injuring the fortunes of the
child by disinheritance, was controlled; and while the child, on the one hand,
was bound to obedience by the strongest sanctions, on the other the duty of
maintaining and instructing his offspring was as rigidly enforced upon the
father. The youth then returned to the usual subjection to his parents; and,
for nearly eighteen years longer, we have no knowledge that Jesus was
distinguished among the inhabitants of Nazareth, except by his exemplary
piety, and by his engaging demeanour and conduct,
which acquired him the general good-will. The Law, as some suppose, prescribed
the period of thirty years for the assumption of the most important functions;
and it was not till he had arrived at this age that Jesus again emerged from
his obscurity; nor does it appear improbable that John had
previously commenced his public career at the same period in his life.
During these thirty
years most important revolutions had taken place in the public administration
of affairs in Judaea, and a deep and sullen change had been slowly working in
the popular mind. The stirring events which had rapidly succeeded each
other, were such as no doubt might entirely obliterate any transient
impressions made by the marvellous circumstances
which attended the birth of Jesus, if indeed they had obtained greater
publicity than we are inclined to suppose. As the period approached, in which
the new Teacher was to publish his mild and benignant faith, the nation,
wounded in their pride, galled by oppression, infuriated by the promulgation
of fierce and turbulent doctrines more congenial to their temper, became less
and less fit to receive any but a warlike and conquering Messiah. The reign of
Archelaus, or rather the interregnum, while he awaited the ratification of his
kingly powers from Rome, had commenced with a bloody tumult, in which the royal
soldiery had attempted to repress the insurrectionary spirit of the populace.
The Passover had been interrupted—an unprecedented and ill-omened event!—and
the nation, assembled from all quarters, had been constrained to disperse
without the completion of the sacred ceremony. After the tyrannical reign of
Archelaus as ethnarch, for more than nine years, he had been banished into
Gaul, and Judaea was reduced to a Roman province, under a governor
(procurator) of the equestrian order, who was subordinate to the President of
Syria. But the first Roman governors, having taken up their residence in Herod’s
magnificent city on the coast, Caesarea, the municipal government of Jerusalem
had apparently fallen into the hands of the native authorities. The Sanhedrin
of seventy-one, composed of the chief priests and men learned in the Law, from
a court of judicature, to which their functions were chiefly confined, while
the executive was administered by the kings, had become a kind of senate.
Pontius Pilate, the first of the Roman governors, who, if he did not afflict
the capital with the spectacle of a resident foreign ruler, seems to have
visited it more frequently, was the first who introduced into the city the “idolatrous” standards of Rome, and had attempted to suspend certain bucklers,
bearing an image of the emperor, in the palace of Herod. In his time, the Sanhedrin
seems to have been recognised as a sort of
representative council of the nation. But the proud and unruly people could not
disguise from itself the humiliating consciousness that it was reduced to a
state of foreign servitude. Throughout the country the publicans, the farmers
or collectors of the tribute to Rome, a burden not less vexatious in its amount
and mode of collection than offensive to their feelings, were openly exercising
their office. The chief priest was perpetually displaced at the order of the
Roman prefect, by what might be jealous or systematic policy, but which had all
the appearance of capricious and insulting violence. They looked abroad, but
without hope. The country had, without any advantage, suffered all the evils of
insurrectionary anarchy. At the period between the death of Herod and the accession
of his sons, adventurers of all classes had taken up arms, and some of the
lowest, shepherds and slaves, whether hoping to strike in with the popular
feeling, and if successful at first to throw the whole nation on their side,
had not scrupled to assume the title and ensigns of royalty. These commotions
had been suppressed; but the external appearance of peace was a fallacious evidence
of the real state of public feeling. The religious sects which had long divided
the nation, those of the Pharisees and Sadducees, no longer restrained by the
strong hand of power, renewed their conflicts: sometimes one party, sometimes
the other, obtained the high priesthood, and predominated in the Sanhedrin;
while from the former had sprung up a new faction, in whose tenets the stem
sense of national degradation which rankled in the hearts of so many, found
vent and expression.
The sect of Judas
the Gaulonite, or as he was called, the Galilean,
may be considered the lineal inheritors of that mingled spirit of national independence
and of religious enthusiasm, which had in early days won the glorious triumph
of freedom from the Syro-Grecian kings, and had maintained
a stern though secret resistance to the later Asmoneans, and to the Idumean
dynasty. Just before the death of Herod, it had induced the six thousand
Pharisees to refuse the oath of allegiance to the king and to his imperial protector,
and had probably been the secret incitement in the other acts of resistance to
the royal authority. Judas the Galilean openly proclaimed the unlawfulness, the
impiety of God’s people submitting to a foreign yoke, and thus acknowledging
the subordination of the Jewish theocracy to the empire of Rome. The payment of
tribute which began to be enforced on the deposition of Archelaus, according to
his tenets, was not merely a base renunciation of their liberties, but a sin
against their God. To the doctrines of this bold and eloquent man, which had
been propagated with dangerous rapidity and success, frequent allusions are
found in the Gospels. Though the Galileans slain by Pilate may not have been of
this sect, yet probably the Roman authorities would look with more than usual
jealousy on any appearance of tumult arising in the province which was the
reputed birthplace of Judas; and the constant attempts to implicate Jesus with
this party appear in their insidious questions about the lawfulness of paying
tribute to Caesar. The subsequent excesses of the Zealots, who were the
doctrinal descendants of Judas, and among whom his own sons assumed a dangerous
and fatal preeminence, may show that the jealousy of the rulers was not
groundless; and indicate, as will hereafter appear, under what unfavourable impressions with the existing authorities, on
account of his coming from Galilee, Jesus was about to enter on his public
career.
Towards the close
of this period of thirty years, though we have no evidence to fix a precise date,
while Jesus was growing up in the ordinary course of nature, in the obscurity
of the Galilean town of Nazareth, which lay to the north of Jerusalem, at much
the same distance to the south John had arrived at maturity, and suddenly
appeared as a public teacher, at first in the desert country in the neighbourhood of Hebron; but speedily removed, no doubt for
the facility of administering the characteristic rite, from which he was
called the Baptist, at all seasons, and with the utmost publicity and effect.
In the southern desert of Judaea the streams are few and scanty, probably in
the summer entirely dried up. The nearest large body of water was the Dead Sea.
Besides that the western banks of this great lake are mostly rugged and
precipitous, natural feeling, and still more the religious awe of the people,
would have shrunk from performing sacred ablutions in those fetid, unwholesome,
and accursed waters. But the banks of the great national stream, the scene of
so many miracles, offered many situations, in every respect admirably calculated
for this purpose. The Baptist’s usual station was near the place, Bethabara,
the ford of the Jordan, which tradition pointed out as that where the waters
divided before the ark, that the chosen people might enter into the promised
land. Here, though the adjacent region towards Jerusalem is wild and desert,
the immediate shores of the river offer spots of great picturesque beauty. The
Jordan has a kind of double channel. In its summer course the shelving banks,
to the top of which the waters reach at its period of flood, are covered with
acacias and other trees of great luxuriance; and amid the rich vegetation and
grateful shade afforded by these scenes, the Italian painters, with no less
truth than effect, have delighted to represent the Baptist surrounded by
listening multitudes, or performing the solemn rite of initiation. The teacher
himself partook of the ascetic character of the more solitary of the Essenes,
all of whom retired from the tumult and licence of
the city; some dwelt alone in remote hermitages, and not rarely pretended to a
prophetic character. His raiment was of the coarsest texture, of camel’s hair;
his girdle (an ornament often of the greatest richness in Oriental costume, of
the finest linen or cotton, and embroidered with silver or gold) was of
untanned leather; his food the locusts and wild honey, of which there is a
copious supply both in the open and the wooded regions, in which he had taken
up his abode.
No question has
been more strenuously debated than the origin of the rite of baptism. The
practice of the external washing of the body, as emblematic of the inward
purification of the soul, is almost universal. The sacred Ganges cleanses all
moral pollution from the Indian; among the Greeks and Romans even the murderer
might, it was supposed, wash the blood “clean from his hands”; and in many of their religious
rites, lustrations or ablutions, either in the running stream or in the sea,
purified the candidate for divine favour, and made
him fit to approach the shrines of the gods. The perpetual similitude and connexion between the uncleanness of the body and of the
soul, which ran through the Mosaic Law and had become interwoven with the
common language and sentiment, the formal enactment of washing in many cases,
which either required the cleansing of some unhealthy taint, or more than usual
purity, must have familiarised the mind with the
mysterious effects attributed to such a rite; and of all the Jewish sects, that
of the Essenes, to which no doubt popular opinion associated the Baptist, were
most frequent and scrupulous in their ceremonial ablutions. It is strongly
asserted on the one hand, and denied with equal confidence on the other, that
baptism was in general use among the Jews as a distinct and formal rite; and
that it was by this ceremony that the Gentile proselytes, who were not yet
thought worthy of circumcision, or perhaps refused to submit to it, were
imperfectly initiated into the family of Israel. Though there does not seem
very conclusive evidence in the earlier Rabbinical writings to the antiquity,
yet there are perpetual allusions to the existence of this rite, at least at a
later period; and the argument, that after irreconcileable hostility had been declared between the two religions, the Jews would be little
likely to borrow their distinctive ceremony from the Christians, applies with
more than ordinary force. Nor, if we may fairly judge from the very rapid and
concise narrative of the Evangelists, does the public administration of
baptism by John appear to have excited astonishment as a new and unprecedented
rite.
For, from every
quarter, all ranks and sects crowded to the teaching and to partake in the
mystic ablutions performed by the Baptist. The stream of the Jordan reflected
the wondering multitudes of every class and character, which thronged around
him with that deep interest and high-wrought curiosity, which could not fail to
be excited, especially at such a crisis, by one who assumed the tone and
authority of a divine commission, and seemed, even if he were not hereafter to
break forth in a higher character, to renew in his person the long silent and
interrupted race of the ancient prophets. Of all those prophets Elijah was held
in the most profound reverence by the descendants of Israel. He was the
representative of their great race of moral instructors and interpreters of the
Divine Will, whose writings (though of Elijah nothing remained) had been
admitted to almost equal authority with the Law itself, were read in the public
synagogues, and with the other sacred books formed the canon of their
Scripture. A mysterious intimation had closed this hallowed volume of the
prophetic writings, announcing, as from Malachi, on which the fire
of prophecy expired, a second coming of Elijah, which it would seem popular
belief had construed into the personal reappearance of him who had ascended
into heaven in a car of fire. And where, and at what time, and in what form was
he so likely to appear as in the desert, by the shore of the Jordan, at so fearful
a crisis in the national destinies, and in the wild garb and with the mortified demeanour so frequent among the ancient seers. The
language of the Baptist took the bold, severe, and uncompromising tone of those
delegates of the Most High. On both the great religious factions he denounced
the same maledictions, from both demanded the same complete and immediate
reformation. On the people he inculcated mutual charity; on the publicans, whom
he did not exclude from his followers, justice; on the soldiery : humanity
and abstinence from all unnecessary violence and pillage. These general
denunciations against the vices of the age, and the indiscriminate enforcement
of a higher moral and religious standard, though they might gall the
consciences of individuals, or wound the pride of the different sects; yet, as
clashing with no national prejudice, would excite no hostility, which could be
openly avowed; while the fearless and impartial language of condemnation was
certain to secure the wonder, the respect, the veneration, of the populace.
But that which no
doubt drew the whole population in such crowds to the desert shores of the
Jordan, was the mysterious yet distinct assertion, that the “kingdom of Heaven
was at hand”— that kingdom of which the belief was as universal as of the
personal coming of the Messiah; and as variously coloured by the disposition and temperament of every class and individual, as the
character of the sovereign who was thus to assume dominion. All anticipated the
establishment of an earthly sovereignty, but its approach thrilled the popular
bosom with mingled emotions. The very prophecy which announced the previous
appearance of Elijah, spoke of the “great and dreadful day of the Lord,” and,
as has been said, according to the current belief, fearful calamities were to
precede the glorious days of the Messiah: nor was it till after a dark period
of trial, that the children of Abraham, as the prerogative of their birth, the
sons of God, the inheritors of his kingdom, were to emerge from their obscurity;
their theocracy to be reestablished in its new and more enduring form; the
dead, at least those who were to share in the first resurrection, their own
ancestors, were to rise; the solemn judgement was to be held; the hostile
nations were to be thrust down to hell; and those only of the Gentiles, who
should become proselytes to Judaism, were to be admitted to this earthly
paradisiacal state.
The language of the
Baptist at once fell in with and opposed the popular feeling ; at one instant
it raised, at the next it crossed their hopes. He announced the necessity of a
complete moral change, while he repudiated the claims of those who rested their
sole title to the favours of God on their descent
from the chosen race, for “God even of the stones could raise up children to
Abraham.” But, on the other hand, he proclaimed the immediate, the instant
coming of the Messiah; and on the nature of the kingdom, though he might
deviate from the ordinary language, in expressly intimating that the final
separation would be made not on national but moral grounds—that the bad and
good, even of the race of Israel, were to be doomed according to their
wickedness or virtue—yet there was nothing which interfered with the prevailing
belief in the personal temporal reign of the Son of David.
The course of our
History will show how slowly Christianity attained the purely moral and
spiritual notion of the change to be wrought by the coming of Christ, and how
perpetually this inveterate Judaism has revived in the Christian Church, where,
in days of excitement, the old Jewish tenet of the personal reign of the
Messiah has filled the mind of the enthusiast. Nor were the Jews likely to be
more embarrassed than mankind in general by the demand of high moral qualifications;
for while one part would look on their own state with perfect complacency and
satisfaction, another would expect to obtain from Heaven, without much effort
or exertion on their own part, that which Heaven required. God who intended to
make them happy would first make them virtuous.
Such was the
general excitement at the appearance, the teaching, and the baptizing of John.
So great was the influence which he had obtained throughout the country, that,
as we shall speedily see, a formal deputation from the national authorities was
commissioned to inquire into his pretensions, and to ascertain whether he
limited himself to those of a prophet, or laid claim to the higher title of the
Christ. And the deep hold which he had taken upon the popular feeling is
strongly indicated by the fact, that the rulers did not dare, on the occasion
of a question proposed to them at a much later period, by Jesus, openly to deny
the prophetic mission of John, which was not merely generally acknowledged, but
even zealously asserted by the people.
How long the
preaching of John had lasted before the descent of the Son of Mary to the
shores of the Jordan, rests on somewhat uncertain evidence. We can decide with
as little confidence on some other more interesting questions. There is no precise
information, whether any or what degree of intercourse had been kept up between
the family of Zachariah and that of Joseph, who resided at a considerable
distance from each other, and were not likely to meet, unless at the periodical
feasts; nor how far John might be previously acquainted with the person of
Jesus. But it is undoubtedly a remarkable fact in the history of Christianity,
that from the very first appearance of Jesus on the shores of the Jordan,
unquestionably before He had displayed his powers, or openly asserted his title
to the higher place, John should invariably retain his humbler relative
position. Such was his uniform language from the commencement of his career;
such it continued to the end. Yet at this period the power and influence of
John over the public mind were at their height; Jesus, humanly speaking, was
but an unknown and undistinguished youth, whose qualifications to maintain the
higher character were as yet untried. John, however, cedes at once the first
place: in the strongest language he declares himself immeasurably inferior to
him, who stood among the crowd, unmarked and unregarded;
whatever his own claims, whatever the effects of his initiatory rite, Jesus was
at once to assume a higher function, to administer a more powerful and
influential baptism. This has always appeared to me one of the most striking
incidental arguments for the truth of the Evangelic narrative, and consequently
of the Christian faith. The recognition appears to have been instant and
immediate. Hitherto, the Baptist had insisted on the purification of all who
had assembled around him; and, with the commanding dignity of a
Heaven-commissioned teacher, had rebuked, without distinction, the sins of all classes
and all sections. In Jesus alone, by his refusal to baptize him, he acknowledges
the immaculate purity, while his deference assumes the tone of homage, almost
of adoration.
Jesus, however,
perhaps to do honour to a rite which was hereafter to
be that of initiation into the new religion, insists on submitting to the usual
ablution. As he went up out of the water, which wound below in its deep
channel, and was ascending the shelving shore, a light shone around with the
rapid and undulating motion of a dove, typifying the descent of the Holy Spirit
on the Son of Man; and a voice was heard from Heaven, which recognised him as the Son of God, well pleasing to the Almighty Father of the Universe.
This light could scarcely have been seen, or the voice heard, by more than the
Baptist and the Son of Mary himself, as no immediate sensation appeals to have
been excited among the multitudes, such as must have followed this public and
miraculous proclamation of his sacred character; and at a subsequent period, Jesus
seems to have appeared among the followers of John,unrecognised,
or at least unhonoured, until He was pointed out by
the Baptist, and announced as having been proclaimed from Heaven at his
baptism. The calmness and comparatively unimposing peacefulness of this scene,
which may be described as the inauguration of this “greater than Moses,” in his
office as founder of a new religion, is strikingly contrasted with the terrific
tempests and convulsions of nature at the delivery of the Law on Sinai, and harmonises with the general tone and character of the new
faith. The image of the Dove, the universal symbol of innocence and peace, even
if purely illustrative, is beautifully in keeping with the gentler character of
the whole transaction.
The Temptation of Jesus
is the next event in the history of his life; and here, at the opening, as it
were, oh his career, appears shadowed out the sort of complex character under
which Christianity represents its Divine Author, as a kind of federal representative
of mankind. On the interpretation of no incident in the Gospels, do those who
insist on the literal acceptation of the Evangelists’ language, and those who
consider that, even in the New Testament, much allowance is to be made for the
essentially allegoric character of Oriental narrative, depart so far asunder.
While the former receive the whole as a real scene, the latter suppose
that the truth lies deeper; and that some, not less real, though less
preternatural transaction, is related, either from some secret motive, or,
according to the genius of Eastern narrative, in this figurative style. As
pretending to discover historical facts of much importance in the life of
Christ, the latter exposition demands our examination. The Temptation,
according to one view, is a parabolic description of an actual event; according
to another, of a kind of inward mental trial, which continued during the
public career of Jesus. In the first theory, the Tempter was nothing less than
the high priest, or one of the Sanhedrin, delegated by their authority to
discover the real pretensions of Jesus. Having received intelligence of the
testimony borne to Jesus by John, this person was directed to follow him into
the wilderness, where he first demanded, as the price of his acknowledgment by
the public authorities, some display of miraculous power, such as should
enable him, like Moses, to support the life of man by a preternatural supply of
food in the wilderness. He then held out to him the splendid prospects of aggrandisement, if he should boldly place himself, as a
divinely commissioned leader, at the head of the nation; and even led him in
person to the pinnacle of the Temple, and commanded him to cast himself down,
as the condition, if he should be miraculously preserved, of his formal
recognition by the Sanhedrin. To this view, ingenious as it is, some obvious
objections occur; —the precise date apparently assigned to the transaction by
the Evangelists, and the improbability that, at so early a period, he would be
thought of so much importance by the ruling powers; the difficulty of supposing
that, even if there might be prudential motives to induce St. Matthew, writing
in Judaea, to disguise, under this allegoric veil, so remarkable an event in
the history of Christ, St Luke, influenced by no such motives, would adopt the
same course. Though, indeed, it may be replied, that if the transaction had
once assumed, it would be likely to retain its parabolic dress; still, it must
seem extraordinary that no clearer notice of so wonderful a circumstance should
transpire in any of the Christian records. Nor does it appear easily reconcileable with the cautious distance at which the
authorities appear to have watched the conduct of Jesus, thus, as it were, at
once to have committed themselves, and almost placed themselves within his
power.
The second theory
is embarrassed with fewer of these difficulties, though it is liable to the
same objection, as to the precise date apparently assigned to the incident.
According to this view, at one particular period of his life, or at several times,
the earthly and temporal thoughts, thus parabolically described as a personal
contest with the Principle of Evil, passed through the mind of Jesus, and
arrayed before him the image constantly present to the minds of his countrymen,
that of the author of a new temporal theocracy. For so completely were the
suggestions in unison with the popular expectation, that ambition, if it had
taken a human or a worldly turn, might have urged precisely such displays of
supernatural power as are represented in the temptations of Jesus. On no two
points, probably, would the Jews have so entirely coincided, as in expecting
the Messiah to assume his title and dignity, before the view of the whole
people, and in the most public and imposing manner; such, for instance, as,
springing from the highest point of the Temple, to have appeared floating in
the air, or preternaturally poised upon the unyielding element; any miraculous
act, in short, of a totally opposite character to those more private, more
humane, and, if we may so speak, more unassuming signs, to which he himself
appealed as the evidences of his mission. To be the lord of all the kingdoms,
at least of Palestine, if not of the whole world, was, according to the same
popular belief, the admitted right of the Messiah. If then, as the history
implies, the Saviour was tried by the intrusion of
worldly thoughts, whether according to the common literal interpretation,
actually urged by the Principle of Evil, in his proper person, or, according to
this more modified interpretation of the passage, suggested to his mind, such
was the natural turn which they might have taken.
But, however
interpreted, the moral purport of the scene remains the same—the intimation
that the strongest and most lively impressions were made upon the mind of
Jesus, to withdraw him from the purely religious end of his being upon earth,
to transform him from the author of a moral revolution to be slowly wrought by
the introduction of new principles of virtue, and new rules for individual and
social happiness, to the vulgar station of one of the great monarchs or conquerors
of mankind; to degrade him from a being who was to offer to man the gift of
eternal life, and elevate his nature to a previous fitness for that exalted
destiny, to one whose influence over his own generation might have been more
instantaneously manifest, but which could have been as little permanently
beneficial as that of any other of those remarkable names, which, especially
in the East, have blazed for a time and expired.
From the desert,
not improbably supposed to be that of Quarantania,
lying between Jericho and Jerusalem, where tradition, in Palestine
unfortunately of no great authority, still points out the scene of this great
spiritual conflict, and where a mountain, commanding an almost boundless
prospect of the valleys and hills of Judaea, is shown as that from whence Jesus
looked down unmoved on the kingdoms of the earth, the Son of Man returned to
the scene of John’s baptism.
In the meantime the
success of the new prophet, the Baptist, had excited the attention, if not the
jealousy, of the ruling authorities of the Jews. The solemn deputation appeared
to inquire into his pretensions. The Pharisees probably at this time predominated
in the great council, and the delegates, as of this sect, framed their
questions in accordance with the popular traditions, as well as with the
prophetic writings: they inquire whether he is the Christ, or Elijah, or the
prophet. John at once disclaims his title to the appellation of the Christ;
nor is he Elijah, personally returned, according to the vulgar expectation; nor
Jeremiah, to whom tradition assigned the name of “the prophet,” who was to rise
from the dead at the coming of the Messiah, in order, it was supposed, to
restore the tabernacle, the ark, and the altar of incense, which he was said to
have concealed in a cave on the destruction of the Temple by Nebuchadnezzar,
and which were to be brought again to light at the Messiah’s coming.
The next day John
renewed his declaration that he was the harbinger described in the Prophet
Isaiah, who, according to the custom in the progresses of Oriental monarchs,
was to go before, and cutting through mountains and bridging valleys, to make a
wide and level way for the advance of the Great King. So John was to remove
some of the moral impediments for the reception of Christ. At the same time, as
Jesus mingled undistinguished among the crowd, without directly designating
him, the Baptist declared the actual presence of the mightier teacher who was
about to appear. The next day, in the more private circle of his believers,
John did not scruple to point out the more distinctly the person of the Messiah.
The occasion of his remarkable speech (it has been suggested with much
probability) was the passing of large flocks of sheep and lambs, which, from
the rich pastoral districts beyond the river, crossed the Jordan at the ford,
and were driven on to the metropolis, to furnish either the usual daily sacrifices
or those for the approaching Passover. The Baptist, as they were passing,
glanced from them to Jesus, declared him to be that superior Being, of whom he
was but the humble harbinger, and described him as “the Lamb of God”, which
taketh away the sins of the world. Unblemished and innocent as the meek
animals that passed, like them he was to go up as a sacrifice to Jerusalem, and
in some mysterious manner to “take away” the sins of mankind. Another title,
by which he designated Jesus yet more distinctly as the Messiah, was that of
the “Son of God,” one of the appellations of the Deliverer most universally
admitted, though, no doubt, it might bear a different sense to different
hearers.
Among the more
immediate disciples of John this declaration of their master could not but
excite the strongest emotions; nor can anything be more characteristic of the
feelings of that class among the Jews than the anxious rapidity with which the
wonderful intelligence is propagated, and the distant and awestruck reverence
with which the disciples slowly present themselves to their new master. The
first of these were, Andrew, the brother of Simon (Peter), and probably the
author of the narrative, St. John. Simon, to whom his brother communicates the
extraordinary tidings, immediately follows, and on him Jesus bestows a new
name, expressive of the firmness of his character. All these belonged to the
same village, Bethsaida, on the shore of the lake of Gennesaret. On the
departure of Jesus, when He is returning to Galilee, He summons another, named
Philip. Philip, like Andrew, hastens away to impart the tidings to Nathanael,
not improbably conjectured to be the apostle Bartholomew (the son of Tolmai or Ptolemy), a man of blameless character, whose
only doubt is whether the Messiah could come from a town of such proverbial
disrepute as Nazareth. But the doubts of Nathanael are removed by the
preternatural knowledge displayed by Jesus of an incident which he could not
have witnessed; and this fifth disciple, in like manner, does homage to the
Messiah under his titles “the Son of God, the King of Israel.” Yet this proof
of more than human knowledge, Jesus declares to be as nothing in comparison
with the more striking signs of the Divine protection and favour,
which he asserts, under the popular and significant image of the perpetual
intervention of angels, that his chosen followers are hereafter to witness.
Jesus had now commenced his career: disciples had attached themselves to
this new master, and his claim to a divine mission must necessarily accompanied
by the signs and wonders which were to ratify the appearance of the Messiah.
Yet even his miraculous powers had nothing of the imposing, the appalling, or
public character, looked for, no doubt, by those who expected that the appeal
would be made to their senses and their passions, to their terror and their
hope, not to the more tranquil emotions of gratitude and love. But of this more
hereafter.
The first miracle
of Jesus was the changing the water into wine, at the marriage feast at Cana in
Galilee. This event, however, was not merely remarkable as being the first
occasion for the display of supernatural power, but as developing in some
degree the primary principles of the new religious revelation. The attendance
of Jesus at a marriage festival, his contributing to the festive hilarity, more
particularly his sanctioning the use of wine on such occasions, at once
separated and set him apart from that sect with which he was most likely to be
confounded. John, no doubt, passed with the vulgar for a stricter Essene, many
of whom, it has been before said, observed the severest morality, and, in one
great point, differed most widely from all their brethren. They disregarded the
ceremonies of the Law, even the solemn national festivals, and depreciated
sacrifices. Shut up, in short, in their own monastic establishments, they had
substituted observances of their own for those of the Mosaic institutes. In
all these points, John, who nowhere appears to have visited Jerusalem, at least
after his assumption of the prophetic office (for his presence there would
doubtless have excited much commotion), followed the Essenian practice.
Like them he was severe, secluded, monastic, or rather eremitical in
his habits and language. But among the most marked peculiarities of the Essenian fraternity was their aversion to marriage. Though
some of the less rigid of their communities submitted to this inevitable evil,
yet those who were of higher pretensions, and doubtless of higher estimation,
maintained inviolable celibacy, and had fully imbibed that Oriental principle
of asceticism, which proscribed all indulgence of the gross and material body
as interfering with the purity of the immaculate spirit. The perfect religious
being was he who had receded to the utmost from all human passion; who had
withdrawn his senses from all intercourse with the material world, or rather
had estranged his mind from all objects of sense, and had become absorbed in
the silent and ecstatic contemplation of the Deity. This mysticism was the
vital principle of the Essenian observances in
Judaea, and of those of the Therapeutae, or Contemplatists,
in Egypt, the lineal ancestors of the Christian monks and hermits. By giving
public countenance to a marriage ceremony, still more by sanctioning the use of
wine on such occasions (for wine was likewise proscribed by Essenian usage), Jesus thus, at the outset of his career,
as he afterwards placed himself in direct opposition to the other prevailing
sects, so he had already receded from the practice of these recluse mystics,
who formed the third, and though not in numbers, yet in character and
influence, by no means unimportant religious party.
After this event in Cana,
Jesus, with his mother, his brethren, and some of his disciples, took up their
abode, not in their native town of Nazareth, but in the village of Capernaum,
which was situated not far from the rising city of Tiberias, on the shore of
the beautiful lake, the Sea of Gennesaret. It was called the Village of
Comfort, or the Lovely Village, from a spring of delicious water, and became
afterwards the chief residence of Jesus, and the great scene of his wonderful
works.
The Passover approached the great festival which assembled not only from
all parts of Palestine, but even from remoter regions, the more devout Jews,
who at this period of the year constantly made their pilgrimage to the Holy
City: regular caravans came from Babylonia and Egypt; and, as we shall explain
hereafter, considerable numbers from Syria, Asia Minor, and the other provinces
of the Roman empire. There can be no doubt that at least vague rumours of the extraordinary transactions which had already
excited public attention towards Jesus of Nazareth, must have preceded his
arrival at Jerusalem. The declaration of the Baptist, although neither himself
nor many of his immediate disciples might attend the feast, could not but have
transpired. Though the single miracle wrought at Cana might not have been
distinctly reported at Jerusalem—though the few disciples who may have followed
him from Galilee, having there disseminated the intelligence of his conduct
and actions, might have been lost in the multitude and confusion of the crowded
city—though, on the other hand, the impressions thus made, would be still
further counterbalanced by the general prejudice against Galilee, more
especially against a Galilean from Nazareth—still the Son of Mary, even at his
first appearance in Jerusalem, seems to have been looked on with a kind of
reverential awe. His actions were watched; and though both the ruling powers,
and, as yet apparently, the leading Pharisees kept aloof, though he is neither
molested by the jealousy of the latter, nor excites the alarm of the former,
yet the mass of the people already observed his words and his demeanour with anxious interest. The conduct of Jesus
tended to keep up this mysterious uncertainty so likely to work on the
imagination of a people thus ripe for religious excitement. He is said to have
performed “many miracles,” but these, no doubt, were still of a private, secret,
and unimposing character; and on all other points he maintains the utmost
reserve, and avoids with the most jealous precaution any action or language
which might directly commit him with the rulers or the people.
One act alone was public, commanding, and authoritative. The outer court
of the Temple had become, particularly at the period of the greatest
solemnity, a scene of profane disorder and confusion. As the Jews assembled
from all quarters of the country, almost of the world, they were under the necessity
of purchasing the victims for their offerings on the spot; and the rich man who
could afford a sheep or an ox, or the poor man who was content with the humbler
oblation of a pair of doves, found the dealer at hand to supply his wants. The
traders in sheep, cattle, and pigeons, had therefore been permitted to
establish themselves within the precincts of the Temple in the court of the
Gentiles; and a line of shops (tabernae)
ran along the outer wall of the inner court. Every Jew made an annual payment
of a half-shekel to the Temple; and as the treasury, according to ancient
usage, only received the coin of Palestine, those who came from distant provinces were obliged to change
their foreign money, the relative value of which was probably liable to considerable
fluctuation. It is evident from the strong language of Jesus, that not only a
fair and honest, but even a questionable and extortionate traffic was conducted
within the holy precincts. Nor is it impossible, that even in the Temple courts
trade might be earned on less connected with the religious character of the
place. Throughout the East, the periodical assemblages of the different tribes
of the same descent at some central temple is intimately connected with
commercial views. The neighbourhood of the Holy Place
is the great fair or exchange of the tribe or nation. Even to the present day,
Mecca, at the time of the great concourse of worshippers at the tomb of the
Prophet, is a mart for the most active traffic among the merchant pilgrims, who
form the caravans from all quarters of the Mahometan world.
We may conceive how the deep and awful stillness, which ought to have
prevailed within the inner courts, dedicated to the adoration of the people—how
the quiet prayer of the solitary worshipper, and the breathless silence of the
multitude, while the priests were performing the more important ceremonies,
either offering the national sacrifice, or entering the Holy Place, must have
been interrupted by the close neighbourhood of this
disorderly market. How dissonant must have been the noises of the bleating
sheep, the lowing cattle, the clamours and disputes,
and all the tumult and confusion thus crowded into a space of no great extent.
No doubt the feelings of
the more devout must long before have been shocked by this desecration of the
holy precincts when Jesus commanded the expulsion of these traders out of the court of the Temple, from the
almost unresisting submission with which they abandoned their lucrative posts,
at the command of one invested with no public authority, and who could have
appeared to them no more than a simple Galilean peasant, it is clear that this
assertion of the sanctity of the Temple must have been a popular act with the
majority of the worshippers. Though Jesus is said personally to have exerted
himself, assisting with a light scourge probably in driving out the cattle, it
is not likely that if he had stood alone, either the calm and commanding
dignity of his manner, or even his appeal to the authority of the Sacred
Writings, which forbade the profanation of the Temple as a place of
merchandise, would have overpowered the sullen obstinacy of men engaged in a
gainful traffic, sanctioned by ancient usage. The same profound veneration for
the Temple, which took such implacable offence at the subsequent language of
Jesus, would look with unallayed admiration on the zeal for “the Father’s
House.” That House would not brook the intrusion of worldly pursuits or profane
noises within its hallowed gates.
Of itself, then, this act of Jesus might not amount to the assumption of
authority over the Temple of God: it was, perhaps, no more than a courageous
zealot for the Law might have done; but, combined with the former mysterious rumours about his character and his miraculous powers, it
invested him at once with the awful character of one in whose person might appear the long-desired, the long-expected Messiah. The multitude eagerly
throng around him, and demand some supernatural sign of his divine mission. The
establishment of the Law had been accompanied, according to the universal
belief, with the most terrific demonstrations of Almighty power—the rocking of
the earth, the blazing of the mountain. Would the restoration of the Theocracy
in more ample power, and more enduring majesty, be unattended with the same
appalling wonders? The splendid images in the highly figurative writings of the
Prophets, the traditions, among the mass of the people equally authoritative,
had prepared them to expect the coming of the Messiah to be announced by the
obedient elements. It would have been difficult, by the most signal convulsions
of nature, to have come up to their high-wrought expectations. Private acts of
benevolence to individuals, preternatural cures of diseases, or the restoration
of disordered faculties, fell far beneath the notions of men, blind, in most
cases, to the moral beauty of such actions. They required public, if we may so
speak, national miracles, and those of the most stupendous nature. To their
demand, Jesus calmly answered by an obscure and somewhat oracular allusion to
the remote event of his own resurrection, the one great “ sign ” of
Christianity, to which it is remarkable that the Saviour constantly refers, when required to ratify his mission by some public miracle.
The gesture, by which he probably confined his meaning to the temple of his
body, which, though destroyed, was to be raised up again in three days, was
seen, indeed, by his disciples, yet even by them but imperfectly understood; by
the people in general his language seemed plainly to imply the possible
destruction of the Temple. An appalling thought, and feebly counterbalanced by
the assertion of his power to rebuild it in three days!
This misapprehended speech struck on the most
sensitive chord in the high-strung religious temperament of the Jewish people.
Their national pride, their national existence, were identified with the
inviolability of the Temple. Their passionate and zealous fanaticism on this
point can scarcely be understood unless after the profound study of their
history. In older times, the sad and loathsome death of Antiochus Epiphanes,
in more recent, the fate of Crassus, perishing amid the thirsty sands of the
desert, and of Pompey, with his headless trunk exposed to the outrages of the
basest of mankind on the strand of Egypt, had been construed into manifest
visitations of the Almighty, in revenge for the plunder and profanation of his
Temple. Their later history is full of the same spirit; and even in the horrible
scenes of the fatal siege by Titus, this indelible passion survived all
feelings of nature or of humanity. The fall of the Temple was like the bursting
of the heart of the nation.
From the period at which Herod the Great had begun to restore the dilapidated
work of Zorobabel, forty-six years had elapsed, and still the magnificence of
the king, or the wealth and devotion of the principal among the people, had
found some new work on which to expend those incalculable riches, which, from
these sources, the tribute of the whole nation, and the donations of the
pious, continued to pour into the Temple treasury. And this was the building of
which Jesus, as he was understood, could calmly contemplate the fall, and
daringly promise the immediate restoration. To their indignant murmurs, Jesus,
it may seem, made no reply. The explanation would, perhaps, have necessarily
led to a more distinct prediction of his own death and resurrection than it was
yet expedient to make, especially on so public a scene. But how deeply this
mistaken speech sunk into the popular mind, may be estimated from its being
adduced as the most serious charge against Jesus at his trial; and the
bitterest scorn, with which he was followed to his crucifixion, exhausted
itself in a fierce and sarcastic allusion to this supposed assertion of power.
Still, although with the exasperated multitude the growing veneration
for Jesus might be checked by this misapprehended speech, a more profound
impression had been made among some of the more thinking part of the community.
Already one, if not more members, of the Sanhedrin, began to look upon him with
interest, perhaps with a secret inclination to espouse his doctrines. That
one, named Nicodemus, determined to satisfy himself by a personal interview,
as to the character and pretensions of the new Teacher. Nicodemus had hitherto
been connected with the Pharisaic party, and he dreaded the jealousy of that
powerful sect, who, though not yet in declared hostility against Jesus,
watched, no doubt, his motions with secret aversion; for they could not but
perceive that he made no advances towards them, and treated with open disregard
their minute and austere observance of the literal and traditionary law, their
principles of separation from the “unclean” part of the community, aid their distinctive dress and deportment. The
popular and accessible demeanour of Jesus showed at
once that he had nothing in common with the spirit of this predominant
religious faction. Nicodemus, therefore, chooses the dead of the night to
obtain his secret interview with Jesus; he salutes him with a title, that of
Rabbi, assumed by none but those who were at once qualified and authorised to teach in public; and he recognises at once his divine mission, as avouched by his wonderful works. But, with
astonishment almost overpowering, the Jewish ruler hears the explanation of the
first principles of the new religion. When the heathen proselyte was admitted
into Judaism, he was considered to be endowed with new life: he was separated
from all his former connexions; he was born again to
higher hopes, to more extended knowledge, to a more splendid destiny. But now,
even the Jew of the most unimpeachable descent from Abraham, the Jew of the
highest estimation so as to have been chosen into the court of Sanhedrin, and
one who had maintained the strictest obedience to the law, required, in order
to become a member of the new community, a change no less complete. He was to
pass through the ceremony emblematic of moral and spiritual purification. To
him, as to the most unclean of strangers, baptism was to be the mark of his
initiation into the new faith; and a secret internal transmutation was to take
place by divine agency in his heart, which was to communicate a new principle
of religious life. Without this, he could not attain to that which he had
hitherto supposed either the certain privilege of his Israelitish descent, or
at least of his conscientious adherence to the Law. Eternal life, Jesus
declared, was to depend solely on the reception of the Son of God, who, he not
obscurely intimated, had descended from heaven, was present in his person, and
was not universally received, only from the want of moral fitness to appreciate
his character. This light was too pure to be admitted into the thick darkness
which was brooding over the public mind, and rendered it impenetrable by the
soft and quiet rays of the new doctrine. Jesus, in short, almost without
disguise or reservation, announced himself to the wondering ruler as the
Messiah, while, at the same time, He enigmatically foretold his rejection by
the people. The age was not ripe for the exhibition of the Divine Goodness in
his person; it still yearned for a revelation of the terrible, destructive,
revengeful Power of the Almighty—a national deity which should embody,
as it were, the prevailing sentiments of the nation. Nor came He to fulfil that
impious expectation of Jewish pride—the condemnation of the world, of all
Gentile races to the worst calamities, while on Israel alone his blessings
were to be showered with exclusive bounty. He came as a common benefactor—as an
universal Saviour—to the whole human race. Nicodemus,
it may seem, left the presence of Jesus, if not a decided convert, yet
impressed with still deeper reverence. Though never an avowed disciple, yet,
with other members of the Sanhedrin, he was only restrained by his dread of the
predominant party: more than once we find him seizing opportunities of showing
his respect and attachment for the teacher whose cause he had not courage
openly to espouse; and, perhaps, his secret influence, with that of others
similarly disposed, may, for a time, have mitigated or obstructed the more
violent designs of the hostile Pharisees.
Thus ended the first visit of Jesus to Jerusalem since his assumption of
a public character. His influence had, in one class probably, made
considerable, though secret, progress; with others, a dark feeling of hostility
had been more deeply rooted; while this very difference of sentiment was likely
to increase the general suspense and interest, as to the future development of
his character. As yet, it appears, unless in that most private interview with
Nicodemus, he had not openly avowed his claim to the title of the Messiah: in
expression of St. John, “he did not
trust himself to them,” seems to imply the extreme caution and reserve which He
maintained towards all the converts which He made during his present visit to
Jerusalem.
On the dispersion of the strangers from the
metropolis, at the close of the Passover, Jesus, with his more immediate
followers, passed a short time in Judaea, where such multitudes crowded to the
baptism administered by his disciples, that the adherents of John began to find
the concourse to their master somewhat diminished. The Baptist had removed his
station to the other side of the Jordan, and fixed himself by a stream, which
afforded a plentiful supply of water, near the town of Salim, in Peraea. The partisans of John, not it might seem without
jealousy, began to dispute concerning the relative importance of the baptism of
their master, and that of him whom they were disposed to consider his rival.
But these unworthy feelings were strongly repressed by John. In terms still
more emphatic he reasserted his own secondary station: he was but the
paranymph, the humble attendant on the bridegroom, Christ the bridegroom
himself: his doctrine was that of earth, that of Christ was from heaven; in
short, he openly announces Jesus as the Son of the Almighty Father, and as the
author of everlasting life.
The career of John was drawing to a close. His new station in Peraea was within the dominions of Herod Antipas. On the
division of the Jewish kingdom at the death of Herod the Great, Galilee and Peraea had formed the tetrarchate of Antipas. This Herod
was engaged in a dangerous war with Aretas, king of
Arabia Petraea, whose daughter he had married. But having formed an incestuous connexion with the wife of his brother, Herod Philip, his
Arabian queen indignantly fled to her father, who took up arms to revenge her
wrongs against her guilty husband. How far Herod could depend in this contest
on the loyalty of his subjects, was extremely doubtful. It is possible he might
entertain hopes that the repudiation of a foreign alliance, ever hateful to
the Jews, and the union with a branch of the Asmonean line (for Herodias was
the grand-daughter of Herod the Great and of Mariamne),
might counterbalance in the popular estimation the injustice and criminality of
his marriage with his brother’s wife. The influence of John (according to
Josephus) was almost unlimited. The subjects, and even the soldiery of the
tetrarch had crowded with devout submission around the Prophet. On his decision
might depend the wavering loyalty of the whole province. But John denounced
with open indignation the royal incest, and declared the marriage with a
brother’s wife to be a flagrant violation of the Law. Herod, before long,
ordered him to be seized and imprisoned in the strong fortress of Machaerus, on the remote border of his Transjordanic territory.
Jesus, in the meantime, apprehensive of the awakening jealousy of the
Pharisees, whom his increasing success inflamed to more avowed animosity, left
the borders of Judaea, and proceeded on his return to Galilee. The nearer road
lay through the province of Samaria. The mutual hatred between the
Jews and Samaritans, ever since the secession of Sanballat, had kept the two
races not merely distinct, but opposed to each other with the most fanatical
hostility. This animosity, instead of being allayed by time, had but grown the
more inveterate, and had recently been embittered by acts, according to
Josephus, of wanton and unprovoked outrage on the part of the Samaritans.
During the administration of Coponius, certain of
this hateful race, early in the morning on one of the days of the Passover, had
stolen into the Temple at Jerusalem, and defiled the porticoes and courts by
strewing them with dead men’s bones—an abomination the most offensive to the
Jewish principles of cleanliness and sanctity. Still later, they had
frequently taken advantage of the position in which their district lay,
directly between Judaea and Galilee, to interrupt the concourse of the
religious Galileans to the capital. Jealous that such multitudes should pass
their sacred mountain, Gerizim, to worship in the Temple at Jerusalem, they
often waylaid the incautious pilgrim, and thus the nearest road to Jerusalem
had become extremely insecure. Our History will show how calmly Jesus ever
pursued his course through these conflicting elements of society, gently endeavoured to allay the implacable schism and set the
example of that mild and
tolerant spirit, so beautifully embodied in his precepts. He passed on in quiet
security through the dangerous district; and it is remarkable that here, safe
from the suspicious vigilance of the Pharisaic party, among these proscribed
aliens from the hopes of Israel, He more distinctly and publicly than He had
hitherto done, avowed his title as the Messiah, and developed that leading
characteristic of his religion, the abolition of all local and national
deities, and the promulgation of one comprehensive faith, in which the great
Eternal Spirit was to be worshipped by all mankind in spirit and in truth.
There was a well near the gates of Sichem, a name which by the Jews had
been long perverted into the opprobrious term Sichar.
This spot, according to immemorial tradition, the Patriarch Jacob had purchased,
and here were laid the bones of Joseph, his elder son, carried from Egypt, to
whose descendant, Ephraim, this district had been assigned. Sichem lay in a
valley between the two famous mountains Ebal and
Gerizim, on which the Law was read, and ratified by the acclamations of the
assembled tribes; and on the latter height stood the rival temple of the
Samaritans, which had so long afflicted the more zealous Jews by its daring
opposition to the one chosen sanctuary on Mount Moriah. The well bore the name
of the Patriarch; and while his disciples entered the town to purchase provisions,
a traffic from which probably few, except the disciples of Christ, would not
have abstained, except in extreme necessity, Jesus reposed by its
margin. It was the sultry hour of noon, about twelve o’clock, when a woman, as
is the general usage in the East, where the females commonly resort to the
wells or tanks to obtain water for all domestic uses, approached the well.
Jesus, whom she knew not to be her countryman, either from his dress, or
perhaps his dialect or pronunciation, in which the inhabitants of the Ephraimitish district of Samaria differed both from the
Jews and Galileans, to her astonishment, asked her for water to quench his
thirst. For in general the lip of a Jew, especially a Pharisaic Jew, would have
shrunk in disgust from the purest element in a vessel defiled by the hand of a
Samaritan. Drawing, as usual, his similitudes from the present circumstances,
Jesus excites the wonder of the woman by speaking of living waters at his
command, waters which were to nourish the soul for everlasting life: he
increases her awe by allusions which show more than mortal knowledge of her own
private history (she was living in concubinage, having been married to five
husbands), and at length clearly announce that, the local worship, both on
Gerizim and at Jerusalem, was to give place to a more sublime and comprehensive
faith. The astonished woman confesses her belief that, on the coming of the
Messiah, truths equally wonderful may be announced. Jesus, for the first time,
distinctly and unequivocally declares himself to be the Messiah. On
the return of the disciples from the town, their Jewish prejudices are
immediately betrayed at beholding their master thus familiarly conversing with
a woman of the hateful race : on the other hand, the intelligence of the woman
runs rapidly through the town, and the Samaritans crowd forth in eager interest
to behold and listen to the extraordinary teacher.
The nature and origin of the Samaritan belief in the Messiah is even a more obscure question than
that of the Jews. That belief was evidently more clear and defined than the
vague expectation which prevailed throughout the East; still it was probably,
like that of the Jews, by no means distinct or definite. It is generally
supposed that the Samaritans, admitting only the Law, must have rested their
hope solely on some ambiguous or latent prediction in the books of Moses, who
had foretold the coming of another and a mightier prophet than himself. But
though the Samaritans may not have admitted the authority of the prophets as
equal to that of the Law—though they had not installed them in the regular and canonised code of their sacred books, it does not follow
that they were unacquainted with them, or that they did not listen with devout
belief to the more general promises, which by no means limited the benefits of
the Messiah’s coming to the local sanctuary of Jerusalem, or to the line of the
Jewish kings. There appear some faint traces of a belief in the descent of the
Messiah from the line of Joseph, of which, as belonging to the tribe of
Ephraim, the Samaritans seem to have considered themselves the representatives.
Nor is it improbable, from the subsequent rapid progress of the doctrines of
Simon Magus, which were deeply impregnated with Orientalism, that the Samaritan
notion of the Messiah had already a strong Magian or Babylonian tendency. On
the other hand, if their expectations rested on less definite grounds, the
Samaritans were unenslaved by many of those fatal prejudices of the Jews, which
so completely secularised their notions of the
Messiah, and were free from that rigid and exclusive pride which so jealously
appropriated the divine promises. If the Samaritans could not pretend to an equal
share in the splendid anticipations of the ancient prophets, they were safer
from their misinterpretation. They had no visions of universal dominion; they
looked not to Samaria or Sichem to become the metropolis of some mighty empire.
They had some legend of the return of Moses to discover the sacred vessels
concealed near Mount Gerizim, but they did not expect to see the banner raised,
and the conqueror go forth to beat the nations to the earth and prostrate
mankind before their reestablished theocracy. They might even be more inclined
to recognise the Messiah in the person of a purely
religious reformer, on account of the overbearing confidence with which the
rival people announced their hour of triumph, when the Great King should erect
his throne on Sion, and punish all the enemies of the chosen race, among whom
the “foolish people,” as they were called, “who dwelt at Sichem,” would not be
the last to incur the terrible vengeance. A Messiah who would disappoint the
insulting hopes of the Jews would, for that very reason, be more acceptable to
the Samaritans.
The Samaritan commonwealth was governed under the Roman supremacy by a council or sanhedrin. But this body had not assumed the pretensions of a divinely inspired hierarchy; nor had they a jealous and domineering sect, like that of the Pharisees in possession of the public instruction and watching every new teacher who did not wear the garb, or speak the Shibboleth of their faction as guilty of an invasion of their peculiar province. But, from whatever cause, the reception of Jesus among the Samaritans was strongly contrasted with that among the Jews. They listened with reverence, and entreated him to take up his permanent abode within their province; and many among them distinctly acknowledged him as the Messiah and Saviour of the world.
Still a residence, longer than was necessary in the infected air, as the
Jews would suppose it of Samaria would have strengthened the growing
hostility of the ruling powers, and of the prevailing sect among the Jews.
After two days, therefore, Jesus proceeded on his journey, reentered Galilee,
and publicly assumed in that province his office as the teacher of a new
religion. The report of a second, a more public and more extraordinary miracle
than that before performed in the town of Cana, tended to establish the fame of
his actions in Jerusalem, which had been disseminated by those Galileans who
had returned more quickly from the Passover, and had excited a general interest
to behold the person of whom such wonderful rumours were spread abroad. The nature of the miracle, the healing a youth
who lay sick at Capernaum, about twenty-five miles distant from Cana, where he
then was; the station of the father, at whose entreaty he restored the son to
health (he was probably on the household establishment of Herod), could not
fail to raise the expectation to a higher pitch, and to prepare the inhabitants
of Galilee to listen with eager deference to the new doctrines.
One place alone received the Son of Mary with cold and inhospitable
unconcern, and rejected his claims with indignant violence—his native town of
Nazareth. The history of this transaction is singularly true to human nature. Where Jesus was unknown, the awestruck imagination of the people,
excited by the fame of his wonderful works, beheld him already arrayed in the
sanctity of a prophetical, if not of a divine mission. Nothing intruded on
their thoughts to disturb their reverence for the commanding gentleness of his demeanour, the authoritative persuasiveness of his
language, the holiness of his conduct, the celebrity of his miracles: He
appeared before them in the pure and unmingled dignity of his public character.
But the inhabitants of Nazareth had to struggle with old impressions, and to
exalt their former familiarity into a feeling of deference or veneration. In
Nazareth he had been seen from his childhood; and though gentle, blameless,
popular, nothing had occurred, up to the period of his manhood, to place him so
much above the ordinary level of mankind. His father’s humble station and employment
had, if we may so speak, still farther undignified the person of Jesus to the
mind of his fellow-townsmen. In Nazareth Jesus was still “the carpenter’s son.”
We think, likewise, that we discover in the language of the Nazarenes something of local jealousy against the
more favoured town of Capernaum. If Jesus intended to
assume a public and distinguished character, why had not his dwelling place the
fame of his splendid works? Why was Capernaum honoured
as the residence of the new prophet, rather than the city in which he had dwelt
from his youth?
It was in the synagogue of Nazareth where Jesus had hitherto been a
humble and devout listener, that he stood up in the character of a Teacher.
According to the usage, the chazan or minister of the synagogue, whose office
it was to deliver the volume of the Law or the Prophets appointed to be read to
the person to whom that function had fallen, or who might have received
permission from the rulers of the synagogue to address the congregation, gave
it into the hands of Jesus. Jesus opened on the passage in the beginning of the
16th chapter of Isaiah by universal consent applied to the coming of the
Messiah, and under its beautiful images describing with the most perfect truth
the character of the new religion. It spoke of good tidings to the poor of
consolation in every sorrow, of deliverance from every affliction:—“He hath
anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the
broken hearted; to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight
to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bound.” It went on, as it were,
to announce the instant fulfilment of the prediction, in the commencement of
the “acceptable year of the Lord;” but before it came to the next clause, which harmonised ill with the benign character of the new
faith, and spoke of “the day of vengeance,” He broke off and closed the book.
He proceeded, probably at some length, to declare the immediate approach of
these times of wisdom and peace.
The whole assembly was in a state of pleasing astonishment at the ease
of his delivery, and the sweet copiousness of his language; they could scarcely
believe that it was the youth whom they had so often seen, the son of a humble
father, in their streets, and who had enjoyed no advantages of learned
education. Some of them, probably either by their countenance, or tone, or
gesture, expressed their incredulity, or even their contempt for Joseph’s
son; for Jesus at once declared his intention of performing no miracle to satisfy
the doubts of his unbelieving countrymen:—“No prophet is received with honour in his own country.” This avowed preference of other
places before the dwelling of his youth; this refusal to grant to Nazareth any
share in the fame of his extraordinary works, embittered perhaps by the
suspicion that the general prejudice against their town might be strengthened,
at least not discountenanced, as it might have been, by the residence of so
distinguished a citizen within their walls—the reproof so obviously concealed
in the words and conduct of Jesus, mingled no doubt with other fanatical
motives, wrought the whole assembly to such a pitch of frenzy, that they
expelled Jesus from the synagogue. Nazareth lies in a valley, from which a
hill immediately rises; they hurried him up the slope, and were preparing to
cast him down from the abrupt cliff on the other side, when they found that the
intended victim of their wrath had disappeared.
Jesus retired to Capernaum, which from this
time became, as it were, his headquarters. This place was admirably situated
for his purpose, both from the facility of communication, as well by land as by
the lake, with many considerable and flourishing towns, and of escape into a
more secure region, in case of any threatened persecution. It lay towards the
northern extremity of the lake or sea of Gennesaret. On the land side it was a centre from which the circuit of both Upper and Lower
Galilee might begin. The countless barks of the fishermen employed upon the
lake, many of whom became his earliest adherents, could transport him with the
utmost ease to any of the cities on the western bank; while, if danger
approached from Herod or the ruling powers of Galilee, he had but to cross to
the opposite shore, the territory, at least at the commencement of his career,
of Philip, the most just and popular of the sons of Herod, and which on his
death reverted to the Roman government. Nor was it an unfavourable circumstance, that he had most likely secured the powerful protection of the officer
attached to the court of Herod, whose son he had healed, and who probably
resided at Capernaum.
The first act of the Saviour’s public career
was the permanent attachment to his person, and the investing in the delegated
authority of teachers of the new religion, four out of the twelve who
afterwards became the Apostles. Andrew and Peter were, as before stated,
originally of Bethsaida, at the north-eastern extremity of the lake, but the
residence of Peter appears to have been at Capernaum. James and John were
brothers, the sons of Zebedee. All these men had united themselves to Jesus
immediately after his baptism; the latter, if not all the four, had probably
attended upon him during the festival in Jerusalem, but had returned to their
usual avocations. Jesus saw them on the shore of the lake,—two of them were
actually employed in fishing, the others at a little distance were mending
their nets. At the well-known voice of their master, confirmed by the sign of
the miraculous draught of fishes, which impressed Peter with so much awe, that
he thought himself unworthy of standing in the presence of so wonderful a
Being, they left their ships and followed Him into the town; and though they
appear to have resumed their humble occupations, on which, no doubt, their
livelihood depended, it would seem that from this time they might be considered
as the regular attendants of Jesus.
The reception of Jesus in the synagogue of Capernaum was very different
from that which he encountered in Nazareth. He was heard on the regular day of
teaching, the Sabbath, not only undisturbed, but with increasing reverence and
awe. And, indeed, if the
inhabitants of Nazareth were offended, and the Galileans in general astonished
at the appearance of the humble Jesus in the character of a public teacher,
the tone and language which he assumed was not likely to allay their wonder.
The remarkable expression, “He speaks as one having authority, and not as the
scribes,” seems to imply more than the extraordinary power and persuasiveness
of his language.
The ordinary instructors of the people, whether under the name of
scribes, lawyers, or Rabbis, rested their whole claim to the public attention
on the established Sacred Writings. They were the conservators, and perhaps
personally ordained interpreters of the Law, with its equally sacred
traditionary comment; but they pretended to no authority, not originally
derived from these sources. They did not stand forward as legislators, but as accredited
expositors of the Law; not as men directly inspired from on high, but as men
who, by profound study and intercourse with the older wise men, were best
enabled to decide on the dark, or latent, or ambiguous sense of the inspired
writings; or who had received, in regular descent, the more ancient Cabala, the
accredited tradition. Although, therefore, they had completely enslaved the
public mind, which reverenced the sayings of the masters or Rabbis equally with
the original text of Moses and the Prophets; though it is quite clear that the
spiritual Rabbinical dominion, which at a later period established so arbitrary
a despotism over the understanding of the people, was already deeply rooted,
still the basis of their supremacy rested on the popular reverence for the
Sacred Writings. “It is written,” was the sanction of all the Rabbinical
decrees, however those decrees might misinterpret the real meaning of the Law,
or “add burdens to the neck of
the people,” by no means intended by the wise and humane lawgiver.
Jesus came forth as a public teacher in a new and opposite character.
His authority rested on no previous revelation, excepting as far as his divine
commission had been foreshown in the Law and the Prophets. He prefaced his
addresses with the unusual formulary, “I say unto you.” Perpetually displaying
the most intimate familiarity with the Sacred Writings, instantly silencing or
baffling his adversaries by adducing with the utmost readiness and address,
texts of the Law and the Prophets according to the accredited interpretation,
yet his ordinary language evidently assumed a higher tone. He was the direct,
immediate representative of the wisdom of the Almighty Father; he appeared as
equal, as superior to Moses; as the author of a new revelation, which,
although it was not to destroy the Law, was in a certain sense to supersede it
by the introduction of a new and original faith. Hence the implacable hostility
manifested against Jesus, not merely by the fierce, the fanatical, the violent,
or the licentious, by all who might take offence at the purity and gentleness
of his precepts, but by the better and more educated among the people, the
Scribes, the Lawyers, the Pharisees. Jesus at once assumed a superiority not
merely over these teachers of the Law, this acknowledged religious aristocracy
whose reputation, whose interests, and whose pride were deeply pledged to the
maintenance of the existing system, but he set himself above those inspired
teachers of whom the Rabbis were but the interpreters. Christ uttered
commandments which had neither been registered on the tablets of stone, nor
defined in the more minute enactments in the book of Leviticus. He superseded
at once by his simple word all that they had painfully learned, and regularly
taught as the eternal, irrepealable word of God, perfect, complete, enduring no
addition. Hence their perpetual endeavours to commit
Jesus with the multitude, as disparaging or infringing the ordinances of Moses; endeavours which were perpetually baffled on his
part, by his cautious compliance with the more important observances, and,
notwithstanding the general bearing of his teaching towards the development of
a higher and independent doctrine, his uniform respect for the
letter as well as the spirit of the Mosaic institutes. But as the strength of
the Rabbinical hierarchy lay in the passionate jealousy of the people about the
Law, they never abandoned the hope of convicting Jesus on this ground,
notwithstanding his extraordinary works, as a false pretender to the character
of the Messiah. At all events, they saw clearly that it was a struggle for the
life and death of their authority. Jesus acknowledged as the Christ, the whole
fabric of their power and influence fell at once. The traditions, the Law itself,
the skill of the Scribe, the subtilty of the Lawyer, the profound study of the
Rabbi, or the teacher in the synagogue and in the school, became obsolete; and
the pride of superior wisdom, the long-enjoyed deference, the blind obedience
with which the people had listened to their decrees, were gone by for ever. The whole hierarchy were to cede at once their
rank and estimation to an humble and uninstructed peasant from Galilee, a
region scorned by the better educated for its rudeness and ignorance, and from
Nazareth, the most despised town in the despised province. Against such deep
and rooted motives for animosity, which combined and knit together every
feeling of pride, passion, habit, and interest, the simple and engaging demeanour of the Teacher, the beauty of the precepts, their
general harmony with the spirit however they might expand the letter of the
Law, the charities they breathed, the holiness they inculcated, the aptitude
and imaginative felicity of the parables under which they were couched, the
hopes they excited, the fears they allayed, the blessings and consolations they
promised, all which makes the discourses of Jesus so confessedly superior to
all human morality, made little impression on this class, who in some respects,
as the most intellectual, might be considered as in the highest state of
advancement, and therefore most likely to understand the real spirit of the
new religion. The authority of Jesus could not coexist with that of the
Scribes and Pharisees; and this was the great principle of the fierce
opposition and jealous hostility with which he was in general encountered by
the best instructed teachers of the people.
In Capernaum, however, no resistance seems to have been made to his
success: the synagogue was open to him on every Sabbath; and wonderful cures,
that of a demoniac in the synagogue itself, that of Simon’s wife’s mother, and
of many others within the same town, established and strengthened his growing
influence. From Capernaum He set forth to make a regular progress through the
whole populous province of Galilee, which was crowded, if we are to receive the
account of Josephus, with flourishing towns and cities, beyond almost any other
region of the world. According to the statement of this author, the number of
towns, and the population of Galilee in a district of between fifty and sixty
miles in length, and between sixty and seventy in breadth, was no less than 204
cities and villages, the least of which contained 15,000 souls. Reckoning
nothing for smaller communities, and supposing each town and village to include
the adjacent district, so as to allow of no scattered inhabitants in the
country, the population of the province would amount to the incredible number
of 3,060,000. Of these, probably, much the larger proportion were of Jewish
descent, and spoke a harsher dialect of the Aramaic than that which prevailed
in Judaea, though in many of the chief cities there was a considerable number
of Syrian Greeks and of other foreign races. Each of these towns had
one or more synagogues, in which the people met for the ordinary purposes of
worship, while the more religious attended regularly at the festivals in
Jerusalem. The province of Galilee with Peraea formed
the tetrarchate of Herod Antipas, who, till his incestuous marriage, had
treated the Baptist with respect, if not with deference, and does not appear at
first to have interfered with the proceedings of Jesus. Though at one time decidedly
hostile, he appears neither to have been very active in his opposition, nor to
have entertained any deep or violent animosity against the person of Jesus even
at the time of His final trial. No doubt Jerusalem and its adjacent province
were the centre and stronghold of Jewish religious
and political enthusiasm; the pulse beat stronger about the heart than at the
extremities. Nor, whatever personal apprehensions Herod might have entertained
of an aspirant to the name of the Messiah, whom he might suspect of temporal
ambition, was he likely to be actuated by the same jealousy as the Jewish
Sanhedrin, of a teacher who confined himself to religious instruction. Herod’s
power rested on force, not on opinion; on the strength of his guards and the
protection of Rome, not on the respect which belonged to the half-religious,
half-political pre-eminence of the rulers in Jerusalem. That which made Jesus
the more odious to the native government in Judaea, his disappointment of their
hopes of a temporal Messiah, and his announcement of a revolution purely moral
and religious, would allay the fears and secure the indifference of Herod. To
him Christianity, however imperfectly understood, would appear less dangerous
than fanatical Judaism. The Pharisees were in considerable numbers, and
possessed much influence over the minds of the Galileans; but it was in Judaea
that this overwhelming faction completely predominated, and swayed the public
opinion with irresistible power. Hence the unobstructed success of Jesus in
this remoter region of the Holy Land, and the seeming wisdom of selecting that
part of the country where, for a time at least, he might hope to pursue
unmolested his career of blessing. During this first progress he appears to
have passed from town to town uninterrupted, if not cordially welcomed. Either
astonishment, or prudent caution, which dreaded to offend his numerous
followers; or the better feeling which had not yet given place to the fiercer
passions; or a vague hope that Jesus might yet assume all that they thought
wanting to the character of the Messiah, not only attracted around him the
population of the towns through which he passed, but as he approached the
borders, the inhabitants of Decapolis (the district beyond the Jordan), of
Judaea, and even of Jerusalem, and the remoter parts of Peraea,
thronged to profit both by his teaching, and by the wonderful cures which were
wrought on all who were afflicted by the prevalent diseases of the country.
How singular the contrast (familiarity with its circumstances, or deep and early reverence, prevents us from appreciating it justly) between the peaceful progress of the Son of Man, on the one hand healing maladies, relieving afflictions, restoring their senses to the dumb or blind; on the other gently instilling into the minds of the people those pure, and humane, and gentle principles of moral goodness, to which the wisdom of ages has been able to add nothing; and every other event to which it can be compared, in the history of human kind! Compare the men who have at different periods wrought great and beneficial revolutions in the civil or the moral state of their kind; or those mythic personages, either deified men or humanised deities, which appear as the parents, or at some marked epoch in the revolutions. History of different nations, embodying the highest notions of human nature or divine perfection to which the age or the people have attained—compare all these, in the most dispassionate spirit, with the impersonation of the divine goodness in Jesus Christ. It seems a conception, notwithstanding the progress in moral truth which had been made among the more intellectual of the Jews, and the nobler reasoners among the Greeks, so completely beyond the age, so opposite to the prevalent expectations of the times, as to add no little strength to the belief of the Christian in the divine origin of his faith. Was the sublime notion of the Universal Father, the God of Love, and the exhibition of as much of the divine nature as is intelligible to the limited faculties of man, his goodness and beneficent power, in the “Son of Man,” first developed in the natural progress of the human mind among the peasants of Galilee? Or, as the Christian asserts with more faith, and surely not less reason, did the great Spirit, which created and animates the countless worlds, condescend to show this image and reflection of his own inconceivable nature, for the benefit of one race of created beings, to restore them to, and prepare them for, a higher and eternal state of existence?
The synagogues, it
has been said, appear to have been open to Jesus during the whole of his
progress through Galilee; but it was not within the narrow walls of these buildings
that he confined his instructions. It was in the open air, in the field, or in
the vineyard, on the slope of the hill, or by the side of the lake, where the
deck of one of his followers vessels formed a kind of platform or tribune, that
he delighted to address the wondering multitudes. His language teems with
allusions to external nature, which, it has often been observed, seem to have
been drawn from objects immediately around him. It would be superfluous to
attempt to rival, and unjust to an author of remarkable good sense and felicity
of expression, to alter the language in which this peculiarity of Christ’s
teaching has already been described:—“In the spring our Saviour went into the fields and sat down on a mountain, and made that discourse which
is recorded in St Matthew, and which is full of observations arising from the
things which offered themselves to his sight. For when he exhorted his
disciples to trust in God, he bade them behold the fowls of the air, which were
then flying about them, and were fed by Divine Providence, though they did not sow nor reap, nor gather into barns. He
bade them take notice of the lilies of the field which were then blown, and
were so beautifully clothed by the same power, and yet ‘toiled not’ like the
husbandmen who were then at work. Being in a place where they had a wide
prospect of a cultivated land, he bade them observe how God caused the sun to
shine, and the rain to descend upon the fields and gardens, even of the wicked
and ungrateful. And he continued to convey his doctrine to them under rural
images, speaking of good trees and corrupt trees—of wolves in sheep's
clothing—of grapes not growing upon thorns, nor figs on thistles—of the
folly of casting precious things to dogs and swine—of good measure pressed
down, and shaken together, and running over. Speaking at the same time to the
people, many of whom were fishermen and lived much upon fish, he says, What
man of you will give his son a serpent, if he ask a fish? Therefore when he
said in the same discourse to his disciples, Ye are the light of the world;
a city that is set ana hill, and cannot be hid, it is probable that he
pointed to a city within their view, situated upon the brow of a hill. And when
he called them the salt of the earth, he alluded, perhaps, to the
husbandmen, who were manuring the ground: and when he compared every person
who observed his precepts, to a man who built a house upon a rock, which stood
firm; and everyone who slighted his word, to a man who built a house upon the
sand, which was thrown down by the winds and floods—when he used this
comparison, it is not improbable that he had before his eyes houses standing
upon high ground, and houses standing in the valley in a ruinous condition,
which had been destroyed by inundations.
It was on his
return to Capernaum, either at the close of the present or of a later progress
through Galilee, that among the multitudes who had gathered around him from all
quarters, he ascended an eminence, and delivered in a long continuous address
the memorable Sermon on the Mount. It is not my design to enter at length on
the trite, though in my opinion by no means exhausted, subject of Christian morality.
I content myself with indicating some of those characteristic points which
belong, as it were, to the historical development of the new religion, and
cannot be distinctly comprehended unless in relation to the circumstances of
the times :—I. The morality of Jesus was not in unison with the temper or the
feelings of his age. II, It was universal morality, adapted for the whole human
race, and for every period of civilisation. III. It was
morality grounded on broad and simple principles, which had hitherto never been
laid down as the basis of human action.
I.The great principle of
the Mosaic theocracy was the strict apportionment of temporal happiness or calamity,
at least to the nation, if not to the individual, according to his obedience or
his rebellion against the divine laws. The natural consequence of this doctrine
seemed to be, that prosperity was the invariable sign of the divine approval,
adversity of disfavour. And this, in the time of our
Lord, appears to have been carried to such an extreme, that every malady, every
infirmity, was an evidence of sin in the individual, or a punishment inherited
from his guilty forefathers. The only question which arose about the man born
blind was, whether his affliction was the consequence of his own or his
parents’ criminality: he bore in his calamity the hateful evidence that he was accursed of God. This principle was perpetually struggling
with the belief in a future state, and an equitable adjustment of the apparent
inequalities in the present life, to which the Jewish mind had gradually
expanded; and with the natural humanity, inculcated by the spirit of the Mosaic
Law,towards their own brethren. But if the miseries of this life were an evidence
of the divine anger, the blessings were likewise of his favour.
Hence the prosperous, the wealthy, those exempt from human suffering and
calamity, were accustomed to draw even a more false and dangerous line of
demarcation than in ordinary cases, between themselves and their humble and
afflicted brethren. The natural haughtiness which belonged to such superiority,
acquired, as it were, a divine sanction; nor was any vice in the Jewish
character more strongly reproved by Jesus, or more hostile to his reception as
the Messiah. For when the kingdom of Heaven should come—when the theocracy
should be restored in more than its former splendour—who
so secure in popular estimation of its inestimable blessings as those who were
already marked and designated by the divine favour.
Among the higher orders the expectation of a more than ordinary share in the
promised blessings might practically be checked from imprudently betraying
itself, by the natural timidity of those who have much to lose, and by their reluctance
to hazard any political convulsion. Yet nothing could be more inexplicable, or
more contrary to the universal sentiment, than
that Jesus should disregard the concurrence of, and make no particular advances
towards those who formed the spiritual as well as the temporal aristocracy of
the nation—those whose possession of the highest station seemed, in a great
degree, to prove their designation for such eminence by the Almighty. “Have any
of the rulers believed in him?” was the contemptuous, and, as they conceived,
conclusive argument against his claims, adduced by the Pharisees. Jesus not
only did not condescend to favour, he ran
directly counter to this prevailing notion. He announced that the
kingdom of Heaven was peculiarly prepared for the humble and the afflicted; his
disciples were chosen from the lowest order; and it was not obscurely intimated
that his ranks would be chiefly filled by those who were undistinguished by
worldly prosperity. Yet, on the other hand, there was nothing in his language
to conciliate the passions of the populace, no address to the envious and
discontented spirit of the needy to inflame them against their superiors.
Popular as he was, in the highest sense of the term, nothing could be farther
removed than the Prophet of Nazareth from the demagogue. The “kingdom
of Heaven” was opened only to those who possessed and cultivated the virtues
of their lowly station—meekness, humility, resignation, peacefulness,
patience; and it was only because these virtues were most prevalent in the
humbler classes, that the new faith was addressed to them. The more fierce and
violent of the populace rushed into the ranks of the zealot, and enrolled
themselves among the partisans of Judas the Galilean. They thronged around the
robber chieftain, and secretly propagated that fiery spirit of
insurrection which led, at length, to the fatal war. The meek and peaceful
doctrines of Jesus found their way only into meek and peaceful hearts; the
benevolent character of his miracles touched not those minds which had only
imbibed the sterner, not the humaner, spirit of the
Mosaic Law. Thus it was lowliness of character, rather than of station, which
qualified the proselyte for the new faith—the absence, in short, of all those
fierce passions which looked only to a conquering, wide-ruling Messiah: and it
was in elevating these virtues to the highest rank, which to the many of all
orders was treason against the hopes of Israel and the promises of God, that
Jesus departed most widely from the general sentiment of his age and nation.
He went still further; he annihilated the main principle of the theocracy—the
administration of temporal rewards and punishments in proportion to obedience
or rebellion—a notion which, though, as we have said, by no means justified by
common experience, and weakened by the growing belief in another life,
nevertheless still held its ground in the general opinion. Sorrow, as in one
sense the distinguishing mark and portion of the new religion, became sacred;
and the curse of God was, as it were, removed from the afflictions of mankind.
His own disciples, He himself, were to undergo a fearful probation of
suffering, which could only be secure of its reward in another life. The
language of Jesus confirmed the truth of the anti-Sadducaic belief of the greater part of the nation, and assumed the certainty of another
state of existence, concerning which, as yet, it spoke the current language;
but which it was hereafter to expand into a more simple and universal creed,
and mingle, if it may be so said, the sense of immortality with all the
feelings and opinions of mankind.
II. Nor was it to the different classes of the Jews alone that the universal precepts of Christian morality expanded beyond the narrow and exclusive notions of the age and people. Jesus did not throw down the barrier which secluded the Jews from the rest of mankind, but he shook it to its base. Christian morality was not that of a sect, a race, or a nation, but of universal man: though necessarily delivered at times in Jewish language, couched under Jewish figures, and illustrated by local allusions, in its spirit it was diametrically opposite to Jewish. However it might make some provisions suited only to the peculiar state of the first disciples, yet in its essence it may be said to be comprehensive as the human race, immutable as the nature of man. It had no political, no local, no temporary precepts; it was, therefore, neither liable to be abrogated by any change in the condition of man, nor to fall into disuse, as belonging to a past and obsolete state of civilisation. It may dwell within its proper kingdom, the heart of man, in every change of political relation—in the monarchy, the oligarchy, the republic. It may domesticate itself in any climate, amid the burning sands of Africa, or the frozen regions of the North; for it has no local centre, no temple, no Caaba, no essential ceremonies impracticable under any conceivable state of human existence. In fact it is, strictly speaking, no Law; it is no system of positive enactments; it is the establishment of certain principles, the enforcement of certain dispositions, the cultivation of a certain temper of mind, which the conscience is to apply to the ever-varying exigencies of time and place. This appears to me to be the distinctive peculiarity of Christian morals, a characteristic in itself most remarkable, and singularly so when we find this free and comprehensive system emanating from that of which the mainspring was its exclusiveness.
III. The basis of this universality
in Christian morals was the broad and
original principles upon which it rested. If we were to glean from the later
Jewish writings, from the beautiful aphorisms of other Oriental nations, which
we cannot fairly trace to Christian sources, and from the Platonic and Stoic
philosophy, their more striking precepts, we might find, perhaps, a counterpart
to almost all the moral sayings of Jesus. But the same truth is of different
importance as an unconnected aphorism, and as the groundwork of a complete
system. No doubt the benevolence of the Creator had awakened grateful feelings,
and kindled the most exquisite poetry of expression, in the hearts and from the
lips of many before the coming of Christ; no doubt general humanity had been
impressed upon mankind in the most vivid and earnest language. But the Gospel
first placed these two great principles as the main pillars of the new moral
structure : God the universal Father, mankind one brotherhood; God made known
through the mediation of his Son, the image, and humanised type and exemplar of his goodness; mankind of one kindred, and therefore of
equal rank in the sight of the Creator, and to be united in one spiritual
commonwealth Such were the great principles of Christian morals, shadowed
forth at first, rather than distinctly announced, in condescension to the prejudices
of the Jews, who, if they had been found worthy of appreciating the essential
spirit of the new religion—if they had received Jesus as the promised aviourmight have been collectively and nationally
the religious parents and teachers of mankind.
Such was the
singular position of Jesus with regard to his countrymen: the attempt to
conciliate them to the new religion was to be fairly made; but the religion,
however it might condescend to speak their language, could not forfeit or
compromise even for such an end its primary and essential principles. Jesus
therefore pursues his course, at one time paying the utmost deference to, at
another unavoidably offending, the deep-rooted prejudices of the people. The
inveterate and loathsome nature of the leprosy in Syria, the deep abhorrence
with which the wretched victim of this disease was cast forth from all social
fellowship, is well known to all who are even slightly acquainted with the Jewish
Law and usages. One of these miserable beings appealed, and not in vain, to the
mercy of Jesus. He was instantaneously cured; but Jesus, whether to
authenticate the cure, and to secure the readmission of the outcast into the
rights and privileges of society from which he was legally excluded, or more
probably lest he should be accused of interfering with the rights or
diminishing the dues of the priesthood, enjoined him to preserve the strictest
secrecy concerning the cause of his cure; to submit to the regular examination
of his case by the appointed authorities, and on no account to omit the
customary offering. The second incident was remarkable for its publicity, as
having taken place in a crowded house, in the midst of many of the Scribes, who
were, at this period at least, not friendly to Jesus. The door of the house
being inaccessible on account of the crowd, the sick man was borne in his couch
along the flat terrace roofs of the adjacent buildings (for in the East the
roofs are rarely pointed or shelving) and let down through an aperture, which
was easily made, and of sufficient dimensions to admit the bed into the upper
chamber, where Jesus was seated in the midst of his hearers. Jesus complied at
once with their request to cure the afflicted man, but made use of a new and
remarkable expression, “Thy sins are forgiven thee.” This phrase, while it
coincided with the general notion that such diseases were the penalties of sin,
nevertheless as assuming to the Lord an unprecedented power, that which seems
to belong to the Deity alone, struck his hearers, more especially the better
instructed, the Scribes, with astonishment. Their wonder, however, at the
instantaneous cure, for the present, overpowered their indignation, yet no
doubt the whole transaction tended to increase the jealousy with which Jesus
began to be beheld.
The third incident jarred on a still more sensitive chord in the popular feeling. On no
point were all orders among the Jews so unanimous as in their contempt and
detestation of the publicans. Strictly speaking the persons named in the
Evangelists were not publicans. These were men of property, not below the
equestrian order, who farmed the public revenues. Those in question were the
agents of these contractors, men, often freed slaves, or of low birth and
station, and throughout the Roman world proverbial for their extortions, and in
Judaea still more hateful, as among the manifest signs of subjugation to a
foreign dominion. The Jew who exercised the function of a publican was, as it
were, a traitor to the national independence. One of these, Matthew, otherwise
called Levi, was summoned from his post as collector, perhaps at the port of
Capernaum, to become one of the most intimate followers of Jesus; and the
general astonishment was still farther increased by Jesus entering familiarly
into the house, and even partaking of food with men thus proscribed by the
universal feeling; and though not legally unclean, yet no doubt held in even
greater abhorrence by the general sentiment of the people.
Thus ended the
first year of the public life of Jesus. The fame of his wonderful works; the
authority with which he delivered his doctrines; among the meeker and more
peaceful spirits the beauty of the doctrines themselves; above all, the mystery
which hung over his character and pretensions, had strongly excited the
interest of the whole nation. From all quarters, from Galilee, Peraea, Judaea, and even the remoter Idumea,
multitudes approached him with eager curiosity. On the other hand, his total
secession from, or rather his avowed condemnation of, the great prevailing
party, the Pharisees, while his doctrines seemed equally opposed to the less
numerous yet rival Sadducaic faction; his popular demeanour, which had little in common with the ascetic
mysticism of the Essenes; his independence of the ruling authorities; above
all, notwithstanding his general deference for the Law, his manifest assumption
of a power above the Law, had no doubt, if not actively arrayed against him,
yet awakened to a secret and brooding animosity, the interests and the
passions of the more powerful and influential throughout the country.
Second Year of the
Public Life of Jesus.
The second year of the public life of Christ opened, as the first, with
his attendance at the Passover. He appeared again amidst the assembled
population of the whole race of Israel, in the place where, by common consent,
the real Messiah was to assume his office, and to claim the allegiance of the favoured chosen people of God. It is clear that a considerable
change had taken place in the popular sentiment, on the whole, at least with
the ruling party, unfavourable to Jesus of Nazareth.
The inquisitive wonder, not unmingled with respect, which on the former
occasion seemed to have watched his words and actions, had turned to an unquiet
and jealous vigilance, and a manifest anxiety on the part of his opponents to
catch some opportunity of weakening his influence over the people. The
misapprehended speech concerning the demolition and restoration of the Temple
probably rankled in the recollection of many; and rumours no doubt, and those most likely inaccurate and misrepresented, must have
reached Jerusalem, of the mysterious language in which he had spoken of his
relation to Jehovah, the Supreme Being. The mere fact that Galilee had been
chosen, rather than Jerusalem or Judaea, for his assumption of whatever
distinguished character he was about to support, would work, with no doubtful
or disguised animosity, among the proud and jealous inhabitants of the metropolis.
Nor was his conduct, however still cautious, without further inevitable
collision with some of the most inveterate prejudices of his countrymen. The first
year the only public demonstration of his superiority had been the expulsion of
the buyers and sellers from the Temple, and his ambiguous and misinterpreted
speech about that sacred edifice. His conversation with Nicodemus had probably
not transpired, or at least not gained general publicity; for the same motives
which would lead the cautious Pharisee to conceal his visit under the veil of
night, would induce him to keep within his own bosom the important and
startling truths, which perhaps he himself did not yet clearly comprehend, but
which at all events were so opposite to the principles of his sect, and so
humiliating to the pride of the ruling and learned oligarchy.
During his second
visit, however, at the same solemn period of national assemblage, Jesus gave a
new cause of astonishment to his followers, of offence to his adversaries, by
an act which could not but excite the highest wonder and the strongest
animadversion. This was no less than an assumption of authority to dispense
with the observance of the Sabbath. Of all their institutes, which, after
having infringed or neglected for centuries of cold and faithless service, the
Jews, on the return from the Captivity, embraced with passionate and fanatical
attachment, none had become so completely identified with the popular feeling,
or had been guarded by such minute and multifarious provisions, as the Sabbath.
In the early days of the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus, the insurgents,
having been surprised on a Sabbath, submitted to be tamely butchered, rather
than violate the sanctity of the day, even by defensive warfare. And though the
manifest impossibility of recovering or maintaining their liberties against the
inroads of hostile nations had led to a relaxation of the Law as far as self-defence, yet during the siege of Jerusalem by Pompey,
the wondering Romans discovered, that although on the seventh day the garrison
would repel an assault, yet they would do nothing to prevent or molest the
enemy in carrying on his operations in the trenches. Tradition, “the hedge of
the Law,” as it was called, had fenced this institution with more than usual
care : it had noted with jealous rigour almost every
act of bodily exertion within the capacity of man, arranged them under
thirty-nine heads, which were each considered to comprehend a multitude of
subordinate cases, and against each and every one of these had solemnly affixed
the seal of Divine condemnation. A Sabbath day’s journey was a distance
limited to 2,000 cubits, or rather less than a mile; and the carrying any
burthen was especially denounced as among the most flagrant violations of the
Law. This Sabbatic observance was the stronghold of
Pharisaic rigour; and enslaved as the whole nation
was in voluntary bondage to these minute regulations, in no point were they less inclined to struggle with the yoke, or wore
it with greater willingness and pride.
There was a pool,
situated most likely to the north of the Temple, near the Sheep-gate, the same
probably through which the animals intended for sacrifice were usually brought
into the city. The place was called Bethesda (the House of Mercy), and the pool
was supposed to possess remarkable properties for healing diseases. At certain
periods there was a strong commotion in the waters, which probably bubbled up
from some chemical cause connected with their medicinal effects. Popular
belief, or rather perhaps popular language, attributed this agitation of the
surface to the descent of an angel ; for of course the regular descent of a
celestial being, visible to the whole city, cannot for an instant be supposed.
Around the pool were usually assembled a number of diseased persons, blind or
paralytic, who awaited the right moment for plunging into the water, under the
shelter of five porticoes, which had been built either by private charity, or
at the public cost, for the general convenience. Among these lay one who had
been notoriously afflicted for thirty-eight years by some disorder which
deprived him of the use of his limbs. It was in vain that he had watched an
opportunity of relief; for as the sick person who first plunged into the water,
when it became agitated, seems to have exhausted its virtues, this helpless
and friendless sufferer was constantly thrust aside, or supplanted by some more
active rival for the salutary effects of the spring. Jesus saw and had
compassion on the afflicted man, commanded him to rise, and, that he might show
the perfect restoration of his strength, to take up the pallet on which he had
lain, and to bear it away. The carrying any burthen, as has been said, was
specifically named as one of the most heinous offences against the Law; and the
strange sight of a man thus openly violating the statute in so public a place,
could not but excite the utmost attention. The man was summoned, it would seem,
before the appointed authorities, and questioned about his offence against
public decency and the established law. His defence was plain and simple; he acted according to the command of the wonderful person
who had restored his limbs with a word, but who that person was he had no
knowledge; for, immediately after the miraculous cure, Jesus, in conformity
with his usual practice of avoiding whatever might lead to popular tumult, had
quietly withdrawn from the wondering crowd. Subsequently, however, meeting
Jesus in the Temple, he recognised his benefactor,
and it became generally known that Jesus was the author both of the cure and of
the violation of the Sabbath Jesus in his turn was called to account for his
conduct.
The transaction
bears the appearance, if not of a formal arraignment before the high court of
the Sanhedrin, at least of a solemn and regular judicial inquiry. Yet, as no
verdict seems to have been given, notwithstanding the importance evidently
attached to the affair, it may be supposed either that the full authority of
the Sanhedrin was wanting, or that they dared not, on such insufficient
evidence, condemn with severity one about whom the popular mind was at least
divided. The defence of Jesus, though apparently not
given at full length by the Evangelist, was of a nature to startle and perplex
the tribunal: it was full of mysterious intimations, and couched in language
about which it is difficult to decide how far it was familiar to the ears of
the more learned. It appeared at once to strike at the literal interpretation
of the Mosaic commandment, and at the same time to draw a parallel between the
actions of Jesus and those of God. On the Sabbath the beneficent
works of the Almighty Father are continued as on any other day; there is no
period of rest to Him whose active power is continually employed in upholding, animating,
maintaining in its uniform and uninterrupted course the universe which He has
created. The free course of God’s blessing knows no pause, no suspension. It is
clear that the healing waters of Bethesda occasionally showed their salutary
virtues on the Sabbath, and might thus be an acknowledged instance of the
unremitting benevolence of the Almighty. In the same manner the benevolence of
Jesus disdained to be confined by any distinction of days; it was to flow forth
as constant and unimpeded as the Divine bounty. The indignant court heard with
astonishment this aggravation of the offence. Not only had Jesus assumed the
power of dispensing with the Law, but, with what appeared to them profane and
impious boldness, he had instituted a comparison between himself and the great
Ineffable Deity. With one consent they determine to press with greater
vehemence the capital charge. Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill
him, because he had not only broken the Sabbath, but said that God was his
father, making himself equal with God.
The second defence of Jesus was at once more full and explicit, and
more alarming to the awestruck assembly. It amounted to an open assumption of
the title and offices of the Messiah—the Messiah in the person of the
commanding and fearless, yet still, as they supposed, humble Galilean, who
stood before their tribunal. It commenced by expanding and confirming that
parallel, which had already sunk so deep into their resentful minds. The Son
was upon earth, as it were, a representative of the power and mercy of the
invisible Father—of that great Being who had never been comprehensible to the
senses of man. For what things soever he (the Father) doeth, those also
doeth the Son likewise. The Saviour proceeded to
declare his divine mission and his claim to divine honour,
his investment with power, not only over diseases, but over death itself. From
thence he passed to the acknowledged offices of the Messiah, the resurrection,
the final judgement, the apportionment of everlasting life. All these recognised functions of the Messiah were assigned by the
Father to the Son, and that Son appeared in his person. In confirmation of
these as yet unheard-of pretensions, Jesus declared that his right to honour and reverence rested not on his own assertion alone.
He appealed to the testimony which had been publicly borne to his character by
John the Baptist. The prophetic authority of John had been, if not universally,
at least generally recognised; it had so completely
sunk into the popular belief, that, as appears in a subsequent incident, the
multitude would have resented any suspicion thrown even by their acknowledged
superiors on one thus established in their respect and veneration, and perhaps
further endeared by the persecution which he was now suffering under the
unpopular tetrarch of Galilee. He appealed to a more decisive testimony, the
public miracles which he had wrought, concerning which the rulers seem
scarcely yet to have determined on their course, whether to doubt, to deny, or
to ascribe them to daemoniacal agency. Finally he
appealed to the last unanswerable authority, the Sacred Writings, which they
held in such devout reverence; and distinctly asserted that his coming had been
prefigured by their great lawgiver, from the spirit at least, if not from the
express letter of whose sacred laws they were departing, in rejecting his
claims to the title and honours of the Messiah. Had
ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me, for he wrote of me.
There is an air of
conscious superiority in the whole of this address, which occasionally rises to
the vehemence of reproof, to solemn expostulation, to authoritative
admonition, of which it is difficult to estimate the impression upon a court
accustomed to issue their judgements to a trembling and humiliated auditory.
But of their subsequent proceedings we have no information,—whether the
Sanhedrin hesitated or feared to proceed; whether they were divided in their
opinions, or could not reckon upon the support of the people; whether they
doubted their own competency to take so strong a measure without the concurrence
or sanction of the Roman governor—at all events, no attempt was made to secure
the person of Jesus. He appears, with his usual caution, to have retired
towards the safer province of Galilee, where the Jewish senate possessed no
authority, and where Herod, much less under the Pharisaic influence, would not
think it necessary to support the injured dignity of the Sanhedrin in
Jerusalem; nor, whatever his political apprehensions, would he entertain the
same sensitive terrors of a reformer who confined his views to the religious
improvement of mankind.
But from this time
commences the declared hostility of the Pharisaic party against Jesus. Every
opportunity is seized of detecting him in some further violation of the
religious statutes. We now perpetually find the Pharisees watching his footsteps,
and, especially on the Sabbath, laying hold of every pretext to inflame the
popular mind against his neglect or open defiance of their observances. Nor was
their jealous vigilance disappointed. Jesus calmly pursued on the Sabbath, as
on every other day, his course of benevolence. A second and a third time,
immediately after his public arraignment, that, which they considered the inexpiable
offence, was renewed, and justified in terms which were still more repugnant to
their inveterate prejudices.
The Passover was
scarcely ended, and with his disciples he was probably travelling homewards,
when the first of these incidents occurred. On the first Sabbath after the
second day of unleavened bread, the disciples passing through a field of com,
and being hungry, plucked some of the ears of com, and rubbing them in their
hands, ate the grain. This, according to Jewish usage, was no violation of the
laws of property, as, after the wave-offering had been made in the Temple, the
harvest was considered to be ripe: and the humane regulation of the Lawgiver
permitted the stranger, who was passing through a remote district, thus to
satisfy his immediate wants. But it was the Sabbath, and the act directly
offended against another of the multifarious provisions of Pharisaic tradition.
The vindication of his followers by their Master took still higher ground. He
not merely adduced the example of David, who in extreme want had not scrupled,
in open violation of the Law, to take the shewbread, which was prohibited to
all but the priestly order (he thus placed his humble disciples on a level with
the great king, whose memory was cherished with the most devout reverence and
pride), but he distinctly asserted his own power of dispensing with that which
was considered the eternal, the irreversible commandment,—he declared himself
Lord of the Sabbath.
Rumours of this dangerous
innovation accompanied the Saviour into Galilee.
Whether some of the more zealous Pharisees had followed him during his journey,
or had accidentally returned at the same time from the Passover, or whether, by
means of that intimate and rapid correspondence likely to be maintained among
the members of an ambitious and spreading sect, they had already communicated
their apprehensions of danger and their animosity against Jesus, they already
seem to have arrayed against him in all parts the vigilance and enmity of their
brethren. It was in the public synagogue in some town which he entered on his
return to Galilee, in the face of the whole assembly, that a man with a
withered hand recovered the strength of his limb at the command of Jesus on the
Sabbath day. And the multitude, instead of being inflamed by the zeal of the
Pharisees, appear at least to have been unmoved by their angry remonstrances.
They heard without disapprobation, if they did not openly testify their
admiration, both of the power and goodness of Jesus; and listened to the simple
argument with which he silenced his adversaries, by appealing to their own
practice in extricating their own property, or delivering their own cattle from
jeopardy, on the sacred day.
The discomfited
Pharisees endeavoured to enlist in their party the followers,
perhaps the magistracy of Herod, and to organise a
formidable opposition to the growing influence of Jesus. So successful was
their hostility, that Jesus seems to have thought it prudent to withdraw for a
short time from the collision. He passed towards the lake, over which he could
at any time cross into the district which was beyond the authority both of
Herod and of the Jewish Sanhedrin. A bark attended upon him, which would
transport him to any quarter he might desire, and on board of which he seems to
have avoided the multitudes, which constantly thronged around, or seated on
the deck addressed, with greater convenience, the crowding hearers who lined the
shores. Yet concealment, or perhaps less frequent publicity, seems now to have
been his object; for when some of those insane persons, the daemoniacs as they were called, openly address him by the
title of Son of God, Jesus enjoins their silence, as though he were
yet unwilling openly to assume this title, which was fully equivalent to that of
the Messiah; and which, no doubt, was already ascribed to him by the bolder
and less prudent of his followers. The same injunctions of secrecy were addressed
to others, who at this time were relieved or cured by the beneficent power; so
that one Evangelist considers that the cautious and unresisting demeanour of Jesus, thus avoiding all unnecessary offence
or irritation, exemplified that characteristic of the Messiah, so beautifully
described by Isaiah, “He shall neither strive nor cry, neither shall any man
hear his voice in the streets; a bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking
flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory.”
This persecution,
however, continues but a short time, and Jesus appears again openly in
Capernaum and its neighbourhood. After a night passed
in solitary retirement, he takes the decided step of organising his followers, selecting and solemnly inaugurating a certain number of his more
immediate disciples, who were to receive an authoritative commission to disseminate
trines. Hitherto he had stood, as it were, alone; though doubtless some of his
followers had attended upon him with greater zeal and assiduity than others,
yet he could scarcely be considered as the head of a regular and disciplined
community. The twelve Apostles, whether or not selected with that view, could
not but call to mind the number of the tribes of Israel. Of the earlier lives
of these humble men little can be gathered beyond the usual avocations of some
among them; and even tradition, for once, preserves a modest and almost total
silence. They were of the lower, though perhaps not quite the lowest, class of
Galilean peasants. What previous education they had received we can scarcely
conjecture; though almost all the Jews appear to have received some kind of
instruction in the history, the religion, and the traditions of the nation.
First among the twelve appears Simon, to whom Jesus, in allusion to the
firmness of character which he was hereafter to exhibit, gave a name, or
rather, perhaps, interpreted a name by which he was already known, Cephas, the Rock; and declared that his new religious community was to rest on a
foundation as solid as that name seemed to signify. Andrew his brother is
usually associated with Peter. James and John received the
remarkable name of Boanerges, the Sons of Thunder, of which it is not easy to
trace the exact force; for those who bore it do not appear remarkable among
their brethren, either for energy or vehemence. The peculiar gentleness of the
latter, both in character and in the style of his writings, would lead us to
doubt the correctness of the interpretation generally assigned to the
appellation. The two former were natives of one town, Bethsaida, the latter,
either of Bethsaida or Capernaum, and all obtained their livelihood as
fishermen on the Lake of Gennesaret, the waters of which were extraordinarily
prolific in fish of many kinds. Matthew or Levi, as it has been said, was a
publican. Philip was likewise of Bethsaida. Bartholomew, the son of Tolmai or Ptolemy, is generally considered to have been the
same with Nathanael, and was distinguished, before his knowledge of Jesus, by
the blamelessness of his character, and, from the respect in which he was held,
may be supposed to have been of higher reputation as of a better instructed
class. Thomas or Didymus (for the Syriac and Greek words have the same
signification, a twin) is remarkable in the subsequent history for his coolness
and reflecting temper of mind. Lebbeus, or Thaddeus,
or Judas the brother of James, are doubtless different names of the same
person. Judas in Syriac is Thaddai. Whether Lebbaios is derived from the town of Lebba,
on the sea coast of Galilee, or from a word denoting the heart, and therefore
almost synonymous with Thaddai, which is interpreted
the breast, is extremely doubtful. James was the son of Cleophas or Alpheus;
concerning him and his relationship to Jesus there has been much dispute. His
father Cleophas was married to another Mary, sister of Mary the mother of Jesus,
to whom he would therefore be cousin-german. But whether he is the same with
the James who in other places is named the brother of the Lord (the term of
brother by Jewish usage, according to one opinion, comprehending these closer
ties of kindred); and whether either of these two, or which, was the James who
presided over the Christian community in Jerusalem, and whose cruel death is
described by Josephus, must remain among those questions on which we can
scarcely expect further information, and cannot therefore decide with
certainty. Simon the Canaanite was so called, not, as has been supposed, from
the town of Cana, still less from his Canaanitish descent,
but from a Hebrew word meaning a zealot, to which fanatical and dangerous body
this apostle had probably belonged, before he joined the more peaceful
disciples of Jesus. The last was Judas
Iscariot, perhaps so named from a small village named Iscara,
or more probably Carioth, situated in the tribe of
Judah.
It was after the
regular inauguration of the twelve in their apostolic office, that, according
to St. Luke, the Sermon on the Mount was delivered, or some second outline of
Christian morals repeated in nearly similar terms. Immediately after, as Jesus
returned to Capernaum, a cure was wrought, both from its circumstances and its
probable influence on the situation of Jesus, highly worthy of remark. It was
in favour of a centurion, a military officer of
Galilean descent, probably in the service of Herod, and a proselyte to Judaism,
for he could scarcely have built a synagogue for Jewish worship, unless a
convert to the religion. This man was held in such high estimation that the
Jewish elders of the city, likewise it might seem not unfavourably disposed towards Jesus, interceded in his behalf. The man himself appears to
have held the new teacher in such profound reverence, that in his humility he
did not think his house worthy of so illustrious a guest, and expressed his
confidence that a word from him would be as effective, even uttered at a
distance, as the orders that he was accustomed to issue to his soldiery. Jesus
not only complied with his request by restoring his servant to health, but took
the opportunity of declaring that many Gentiles, from the most remote quarters,
would be admitted within the pale of the new religion, to the exclusion of many
who had no title but their descent from Abraham. Still there was nothing, so
far as in the earlier part of this declaration, directly contrary to the
established opinions; for at least the more liberal Jews were not unwilling to
entertain the splendid ambition of becoming the religious instructors of the
world, provided the world did homage to the excellence and divine institution
of the Law; and at all times the Gentiles, by becoming Jews, either as
proselytes of the gate, if not proselytes by circumcision, might share in most,
if not in all, the privileges of the chosen people. This incident was likewise
of importance as still further strengthening the interest of Jesus with the
ruling authorities and with another powerful officer in the town of Capernaum.
A more extraordinary transaction followed. As yet Jesus had claimed authority
over the most distressing and obstinate maladies; he now appeared invested
with power over death itself. As he entered the town of Nain, between twenty
and thirty miles from Capernaum, he met a funeral procession, accompanied with
circumstances of extreme distress. It was a youth, the only son of a widow,
who was borne out to burial; so great was the calamity that it had excited the
general interest of the inhabitants. Jesus raises the youth from his bier, and
restores him to the destitute mother.
The fame of this
unprecedented miracle was propagated with the utmost rapidity through the
country; and still vague, yet deepening rumours that
a prophet had appeared; that the great event which held the whole nation in
suspense was on the instant of fulfilment, spread throughout the whole
province. It even reached the remote fortress of Machaerus,
in which John was still closely guarded, though it seems the free access of his
followers was not prohibited. John commissioned two of his disciples to inquire
into the truth of these wonderful reports, and to demand of Jesus himself,
whether he was the expected Messiah. But what was the design of John in this
message to Jesus? The question is not without difficulty. Was it for the
satisfaction of his own doubts, or those of his followers? Was it
that, in apprehension of his approaching death, he would consign his disciples
to the care of a still greater instructor? Was it that he might attach them
before his death to Jesus, and familiarise them with
conduct, in some respects, so opposite to his own Essenian,
if not Pharisaic, habits? He might foresee the advantage that would be taken
by the more ascetic to alienate his followers from Jesus, as a teacher who fell
far below the austerity of their own; and who, accessible to all, held in no
respect those minute observances which the usage of the stricter Jews, and the
example of their master, had arrayed in indispensable sanctity. Or was it that
John himself, having languished for nearly a year in his remote prison, began
to be impatient for the commencement of that splendid epoch, of which the
whole nation, even the Apostles of Jesus, both before and after the
resurrection, had by no means abandoned their glorious, worldly, and Jewish
notions? Was John, like the rest of the people, not yet exalted above those
hopes which were inseparable from the national mind ? If he is the King, why
does he hesitate to assume his kingdom? If the Deliverer, why so tardy to
commence the deliverance? “If thou art indeed the Messiah (such may
appear to have been the purport of the Baptist’s message), proclaim thyself at
once; assume thy state; array thyself in majesty ; discomfit the enemies of
holiness and of God! My prison doors will at once burst open; my trembling
persecutors will cease from their oppressions. Herod himself will yield up his
usurped authority; and even the power of Rome will cease to afflict the
redeemed people of the Almighty!” What, on the other hand, is the answer of
Jesus? It harmonises in a remarkable manner with this
latter view. It declares at once, and to the disappointment of these temporal
hopes, the purely moral and religious nature of the dominion to be established
by the Messiah. He was found displaying manifest signs of more than human
power, and to these peaceful signs he appeals as the conclusive evidence of the commencement of the Messiah’s kingdom, the relief of
diseases, the assuagement of sorrows, the restoration of their lost or decayed
senses to the deaf or blind, the equal admission of the lowest orders to the
same religious privileges with those more especially favoured by God. The remarkable words are added, “Blessed is he that shall not be
offended in me he that shall not consider irreconcileable with the splendid promises of the Messiah’s kingdom, my lowly condition, my calm
and unassuming course of mercy and love to mankind, my total disregard of
worldly honours, my refusal to place myself at the
head of the people as a temporal ruler. Violent men, more especially during the
disturbed and excited period since the appearance of John the Baptist, would urge
on a kingdom of violence. How truly the character of the times is thus
described, is apparent from the single fact, that shortly afterwards the people
would have seized Jesus himself and forced him to assume the royal title, if he
had not withdrawn himself from his dangerous adherents. This last expression,
however, occurs in the subsequent discourse of Jesus, after his disciples had
departed, when in those striking images he spoke of the former concourse of the
people to the Baptist, and justified it by the assertion of his prophetic
character. It was no idle object which led them into the wilderness, to see, as
it were, “a reed shaken by the wind”; nor to behold any rich or luxurious
object—for such they would have gone to the courts of their sovereigns. Still
he declares the meanest of his own, disciples to have attained some moral superiority,
some knowledge, probably, of the real nature of the new religion, and of the
character and designs of the Messiah, which had never been possessed by John.
With his usual rapidity of transition, Jesus passes at once to his moral
instruction, and vividly shows, that whether severe or gentle, whether more
ascetic or more popular, the teachers of a holier faith had been equally
unacceptable. The general multitude of the Jews had rejected both the austerer Baptist, and himself though of so much more benign
and engaging demeanour. The whole discourse ends with
the significant words, “ My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Nothing, indeed,
could offer a more striking contrast to the secluded and eremitical life of John,
than the easy and accessible manner with which Jesus mingled among all classes,
even his bitterest opponents, the Pharisees. He accepts the invitation of one
of these, and enters into his house to partake of refreshment. Here a woman of dissolute
life found her way into the chamber where the feast was held; she sat at his
feet, anointing him, according to Eastern usage, with a costly unguent, which
was contained in a box of alabaster; she wept bitterly, and with her long
locks wiped away the falling tears. The Pharisees, who shrunk not only from the
contact, but even from the approach, of all whom they considered physically or
morally unclean, could only attribute the conduct of Jesus to his ignorance of
her real character. The reply of Jesus intimates that his religion was intended
to reform and purify the worst, and that some of his most sincere and ardent
believers might proceed from those very outcasts of society from whom Pharisaic rigour shrunk with abhorrence.
After this Jesus
appears to have made another circuit through the towns and villages of Galilee.
On his return to Capernaum, instigated, perhaps, by his adversaries, some of
his relatives appear to have believed, or pretended to believe, that he was
out of his senses; and, therefore, attempted to secure his person. This scheme
failing, the Pharisaic party, who had been deputed, it would seem, from
Jerusalem to watch his conduct, endeavour to avail
themselves of that great principle of Jewish superstition, the belief in the
power of evil spirits, to invalidate his growing authority. On the occasion of
the cure of one of those lunatics, usually called daemoniacs,
who was both dumb and blind, they accused him of unlawful dealings with the spirits
of evil. It was by a magic influence obtained by a secret contract with
Beelzebub, the chief of the powers of darkness, or by secretly invoking his
all-powerful name, that he reduced the subordinate daemons to obedience. The
answer of Jesus struck them with confusion. Evil spirits, according to their
own creed, took delight in the miseries and crimes of men; his acts were those
of the purest benevolence: how gross the inconsistency to suppose that
malignant spirits would thus lend themselves to the cause of human happiness
and virtue! Another more personal argument still farther confounded his
adversaries. The Pharisees were professed exorcists if, then, exorcism, or the
ejection of these evil spirits, necessarily implied unlawful dealings with the world
of darkness, they were as open to the charge as he whom they accused. They had,
therefore, the alternative of renouncing their own pretensions, or of admitting
that those of Jesus were to be judged on other principles. It was, then,
blasphemy against the Spirit of God to ascribe acts which bore the manifest
impress of the divine goodness in their essentially beneficent character, to
any other source but the Father of Mercies; it was an offence which argued such
total obtuseness of moral perception, such utter incapacity of feeling or
comprehending the beauty either of the conduct or the doctrines of Jesus, as to
leave no hope that they would ever be reclaimed from their rancorous hostility
to his religion, or be qualified for admission into the pale and to the
benefits of the new faith.
The discomfited Pharisees now demand a more public and undeniable sign
of his Messiahship, which alone could justify the lofty tone assumed by Jesus.
A second time Jesus obscurely alludes to the one great future sign of the new
faith —his resurrection; and, refusing further to gratify their curiosity, he
reverts, in language of more than usual energy, to the incapacity of the age
and nation to discern the real and intrinsic superiority of his religion.
The followers of Jesus had now been organised into a regular sect or party. Another incident distinctly showed that he no
longer stood alone; even the social duties, which up to this time he had, no
doubt, discharged with the utmost affection, were to give place to the sublimer objects of his mission. While he sat encircled by
the multitude of his disciples, tidings were brought that his mother and his
brethren desired to approach him. But Jesus refused to break off his
occupation; he declared himself connected by a closer tie even than that of
blood, with the great spiritual family of which he was to be the parent, and
with which he was to stand in the most intimate relation. He was the chief of a
fraternity not connected by common descent or consanguinity, but by a purely moral
and religious bond; not by any national or local union, but bound together by
the one strong but indivisible link of their common faith. On the increase,
the future prospects, the final destiny of this community, his discourses now
dwell, with frequent if obscure allusions. His language more constantly
assumes the form of parable. Nor was this merely in compliance with the genius
of an Eastern people, in order to convey his instruction in a form more attractive,
and therefore both more immediately and more permanently impressive; or by awakening
the imagination, to stamp his doctrines more deeply on the memory, and to
incorporate them with the feelings. These short and lively apologues were
admirably adapted to suggest the first rudiments of truths which it was not
expedient openly to announce. Though some of the parables have a purely moral
purport, the greater part delivered at this period bear a more or less covert
relation to the character and growth of the new religion; a subject which, avowed
without disguise, would have revolted the popular mind, and clashed too
directly with the inveterate nationality. Yet these splendid, though obscure,
anticipations singularly contrast with occasional allusions to his own
personal destitution : “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have
nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.” For with the growth and organisation
of his followers he seems fully aware that his dangers increase; he now
frequently changes his place, passes from one side of the lake to the other,
and even endeavours to throw a temporary concealment
over some of his most extraordinary miracles. During an expedition across the
lake, he is in danger from one of those sudden and violent tempests which often
disturb inland seas, particularly in mountainous districts. He rebukes the
storm, and it ceases. On the other side of the lake, in the district of Gadara,
occurs the remarkable scene of the daemoniacs among
the tombs, and the herd of swine; the only act in the whole life of Jesus in
the least repugnant to the uniform gentleness of his disposition, which would
shrink from the unnecessary destruction even of the meanest and most loathsome
animals On his return from this expedition to Capernaum took place the healing
of the woman with the issue of blood, and the raising of Jairus’s daughter.
Concerning the latter, as likewise concerning the relief of two blind men, he
gives the strongest injunctions of secrecy, which, nevertheless, the active
zeal of his partisans seems by no means to have regarded.
But a more decisive step was now taken than the organisation of the new religious community. The twelve Apostles were sent out to
disseminate the doctrines of Jesus throughout the whole of Galilee.. They were
invested with the power of healing diseases; with cautious deference to Jewish
feeling, they were forbidden to proceed beyond the borders of the Holy Land,
either among the Gentiles or the heretical Samaritans; they were to depend on
the hospitality of those whom they might address for their subsistence; and he distinctly
anticipates the enmity which they would perpetually encounter, and the
dissension which would be caused, even in the bosom of families, by the
appearance of men thus acting on a commission unprecedented and unrecognised by the religious authorities of the nation,
yet whose doctrines were of such intrinsic beauty, and so full of exciting
promise.
It was most likely this open proclamation, as it were, of the rise of a
new and organised community, and the greater
publicity which this simultaneous appearance of two of its delegates in the
different towns of Galilee could not but give to the growing influence of
Jesus, that first attracted the notice of the government. Up to this period
Jesus, as a remarkable man, must have been well known by general report; by
this measure he stood in a very different character, as the chief of a numerous
fraternity. There were other reasons, at this critical period, to excite the
apprehensions and jealousy of Herod. During the short interval between the
visit of John’s disciples to Jesus and the present time, the Tetrarch had at
length, at the instigation of his wife, perpetrated the murder of
John of the Baptist. Whether his reluctance to shed unnecessary blood, or his
prudence, had as yet shrunk from this crime, the condemnation of her marriage
could not but rankle in the heart of the wife. The desire of revenge would be
strengthened by a feeling of insecurity, and an apprehension of the
precariousness of an union, declared, on such revered authority, null and void.
As long as this stem and respected censor lived, her influence over her
husband, the bond of marriage itself, might, in an hour of passion or remorse,
be dissolved. The common crime would cement still closer, perhaps for ever, their common interests. The artifices of
Herodias, who did not scruple to make use of the .beauty and grace of her
daughter to compass her end, had extorted from the reluctant king, in the hour
of festive carelessness—the celebration of Herod’s birthday —the royal promise,
which, whether for good or for evil, was equally irrevocable. The head of John
the Baptist was the reward for the dancing of the daughter of Herodias. Whether
the mind of Herod, like that of his father, was disordered by his crime, and
the disgrace and discomfiture of his arms contributed to his moody terrors; or
whether some popular rumour of the reappearance of
John, and that Jesus was the murdered prophet restored to life, had obtained
currency; indications of hostility from the government seem to have put Jesus
upon his guard. For no sooner had he been rejoined by the Apostles, than
he withdrew into the desert country about Bethsaida, with the prudence
which he now thought fit to assume, avoiding any sudden collision with the
desperation or the capricious violence of the Tetrarch.
But he now filled too important a place in the public mind to remain
concealed so near his customary residence, and the scene of his extraordinary
actions. The multitude thronged forth to trace hi footsteps, so that five
thousand persons had preoccupied the place of his retreat; and so completely
were they possessed by profound religious enthusiasm, as entirely to have
forgotten the difficulty of obtaining provisions in that desolate region. The
manner in which their wants were preternaturally supplied, and the whole
assemblage fed by five loaves and two small fishes, wound up at once the rising
enthusiasm to the highest pitch. It could not but call to the mind of the
multitude the memorable event in their annals, the feeding the whole nation in
the desert by the multiplication of the manna. Jesus then would no longer
confine himself to those private and more unimposing acts of beneficence, of
which the actual advantage was limited to a single object, and the ocular
evidence of the fact to but few witnesses. Here was a sign performed in
the presence of many thousands, who had actually participated in the miraculous
food. This then, they supposed, could not but be the long-desired commencement
of his more public, more national, career. Behold a second Moses! behold a
Leader of the people, under whom they could never be afflicted with want I
behold at length the Prophet, under whose government the people were to enjoy,
among the other blessings of the Messiah’s reign, unexampled, uninterrupted
plenty.
Their acclamations clearly betrayed their intentions; they would brook
no longer delay; they would force him to assume the royal title; they would
proclaim him, whether consenting or not, the King of Israel. Jesus withdrew
from the midst of the dangerous tumult, and till the next day they sought him
in vain. On their return to Capernaum, they found that He had crossed the lake,
and entered the city the evening before. Their suspense, no doubt, had not been
allayed by his mysterious disappearance on the other side of the lake. The
circumstances under which He had passed over if communicated by the Apostles to
the wondering multitude (and unless positively prohibited by their Master,
they could not have kept silence on so wonderful an occurrence), would inflame
still farther the intense popular agitation. While the Apostles were passing
the lake in their boat, Jesus had appeared by their side, walking upon the
waters.
When therefore Jesus entered the
synagogue of Capernaum, no doubt the crisis was immediately expected: at length
He will avow himself; the declaration of his dignity must now be made;
and where with such propriety as in the place of the public worship, in the
midst of the devout and adoring people. The calm, the purely religious language
of Jesus was a death-blow to these high-strung hopes. The object of his
mission, he declared in explicit terms, was not to confer temporal benefits;
they were not to follow him with the hope that they would obtain without labour the fruits of the earth, or be secured against
thirst and hunger—these were mere casual and incidental blessings. The real
design of the new religion was the elevation of the moral and spiritual
condition of man, described under the strong but not unusual figure of nourishment
administered to the soul. During the whole of his address, or rather his
conversation with the different parties, the popular opinion was in a state of
fluctuation; or, as is probable, there were two distinct parties,—that of the
populace, at first more favourable to Jesus; and that
of the Jewish leaders, who were altogether hostile. The former appear
more humbly to have inquired what was demanded by the new Teacher in order to
please God: of them Jesus required faith in the Messiah. The latter first demanded
a new sign, but broke out into murmurs of disapprobation when “the carpenter’s
son” began in his mysterious language to speak of his descent, his commission,
from his Father, his reascension to his former
intimate communion with the Deity; still more when He seemed to confine the
hope of everlasting life to those only who were fitted to receive it; to those
whose souls would receive the inward nutriment of his doctrines. No word in
the whole address fell in with their excited, their passionate hopes: however
dark, however ambiguous his allusions, they could not warp or misinterpret
them into the confirmation of their splendid views. Not only did they appear to
discountenance the immediate, they gave no warrant to the remote, accomplishment
of their visions of the Messiah’s earthly power and glory. At all events the
disappointment was universal; his own adherents, baffled and sinking at once
from their exalted hopes, cast off their unambitious, their inexplicable
Leader; and so complete appears to have been the desertion, that Jesus demanded
of the Twelve, whether they too would abandon his cause, and leave him to his
fate. In the name of the Apostles Peter replied, that they had still full confidence
in his doctrines, as teaching the way to eternal life ; they still believed him
to be the promised Messiah, the Son of God. Jesus received this protestation of
fidelity with apparent approbation, but intimated that the time would come when
one even of the tried and chosen twelve would prove a traitor.
The third Passover
had now arrived since Jesus of Nazareth
had appeared as a public Teacher, but, as it would seem, “his appointed hour”
was not yet come; and, instead of descending with the general concourse of the
whole nation to the capital, he remains in Galilee, or rather retires to the
remotest extremity of the country; and though he approaches nearer to the
northern shore of the lake, never ventures down into the populous region in
which he more usually fixed his residence. The avowed hostility of the Jews,
and their determination to put him to death; the apparently growing jealousy
of Herod, and the desertion of his cause, on one hand, by a great number of his
Galilean followers, who had taken offence at his speech in the synagogue of Capernaum,
with the rash and intemperate zeal of others who were prepared to force him to
assume the royal title, would render his presence at Jerusalem, if not
absolutely necessary for his designs, both dangerous and inexpedient. But his
absence from this Passover is still more remarkable, if, as appears highly
probable, it was at this feast that the event occurred which is alluded to in St.
Luke as of general notoriety, and at a later period was the subject of a
conversation between Jesus and his disciples,—the slaughter of certain
Galileans in the Temple of Jerusalem by the Roman governor. The reasons for
assigning this fact to the period of the third Passover appear to have considerable
weight. Though at all times of the year the Temple was open, not merely for the
regular morning and evening offerings, but likewise for the private sacrifices
of more devout worshippers, such an event as this massacre was not likely to
have occurred, even if Pilate was present at Jerusalem at other times, unless
the metropolis had been crowded with strangers, at least in numbers sufficient
to excite some apprehension of dangerous tumult. For Pontius Pilate, though
prodigal of blood if the occasion seemed to demand the vigorous exercise of
power, does not appear to have been wantonly sanguinary. It is, therefore, most
probable, that the massacre took place during some public festival; and if so,
it must have been either at the Passover or Pentecost, as Jesus was present at
both the later feasts of the present year, those of Tabernacles and of the
Dedication: nor does the slightest intimation occur of any disturbance of that nature
at either. Who these Galileans were, whether they had been guilty of turbulent
and seditious conduct, or were the innocent victims of the governor’s jealousy,
there is no evidence. It has been suggested, not without plausibility, that
they were of the sect of Judas the Galilean; and, however they may not have
been formally enrolled as belonging to this sect, they may have been, in some
degree, infected with the same opinions; more especially, as properly
belonging to the jurisdiction of Herod, these Galileans would scarcely have
been treated with such unrelenting severity, unless implicated, or suspected to
be implicated, in some designs obnoxious to the Roman sway. If, however, our
conjecture be right, had he appeared at this festival, Jesus might have fallen
undistinguished in a general massacre of his countrymen, by the direct
interference of the Roman governor, and without the guilt of his rejection and
death being attributable to the rulers or the nation of the Jews. Speaking
according to mere human probability the Saviour of
mankind might have been swept away by a stem act of Roman despotism.
Yet, be that as it may, during this period of the life of Jesus, it is
most difficult to trace his course; his rapid changes have the semblance of
concealment. At one time He appears at the extreme border of Palestine, the
district immediately adjacent to that of Tyre and Sidon; he then seems to have descended again towards Bethsaida, and the
desert country to the north of the Sea of Tiberias; he is then again on
the immediate frontiers of Palestine, near the town of Caesarea Philippi,
close to the fountains of the Jordan.
The incidents which occur at almost all these places coincide with his
singular situation at this period of his life, and perpetually bear almost a
direct reference to the state of public feeling at this particular time. His
conduct towards the Greek or Syro-Phoenician woman
may illustrate this. Those who watched the motions of Jesus with the greatest
vigilance, either from attachment or animosity, must have beheld him with
astonishment, at this period when every road was crowded with travellers towards Jerusalem, deliberately proceeding in
an opposite direction; thus, at the time of the most solemn festival, moving,
as it were, directly contrary to the stream which flowed in one current towards
the capital. There appears at one time to have prevailed, among some, an
obscure apprehension which, though only expressed during one of his later
visits to Jerusalem might have begun to creep into their minds at an earlier period;
that, after all, the Saviour might turn his back on
his ungrateful and inhospitable country, or at least not fetter himself with
the exclusive nationality inseparable from their conceptions of the true
Messiah. And here, at this present instant, after having excited their hopes to
the utmost by the miracle which placed him, as it were, on a level with their
lawgiver, and having afterwards afflicted them with bitter disappointment by
his speech in the synagogue—here, at the season of the Passover, He was
proceeding towards, if not beyond, the borders of the Holy Land; placing himself,
as it were, in direct communication with the uncircumcised, and imparting those
blessings to strangers and aliens, which were the undoubted, inalienable
property of the privileged race.
At this juncture, when He was upon the borders of the territory of Tyre and Sidon, a woman of heathen extraction having heard
the fame of his miracles, determined to have recourse to him to heal her
daughter, who was suffering under diabolic possession. Whether adopting the
common title, which she had heard that Jesus had assumed, or from any obscure
notion of the Messiah, which could not but have penetrated into the districts
immediately bordering on Palestine, she saluted him by his title of Son of
David, and implored his mercy. In this instance alone Jesus, who on all other
occasions is described as prompt and forward to hear the cry of the afflicted,
turns, at first, a deaf and regardless ear to her supplication: the mercy is,
as it were, slowly and reluctantly wrung from him. The secret of this apparent,
but unusual indifference to suffering, no doubt lies in the circumstances of
the case. Nothing would have been so repugnant to Jewish prejudice, especially
at this juncture, as his admitting at once this recognition of his title, or
his receiving and rewarding the homage of any stranger from the blood of
Israel, particularly one descended from the accursed race of Canaan. The
conduct of the Apostles shows their harsh and Jewish spirit. They are indignant
at her pertinacious importunity; they almost insist on her peremptory
dismissal. That a stranger, a Canaanite, should share in the mercies of their
Master, does not seem to have entered into their thoughts: the brand of ancient
condemnation was upon her: the hereditary hatefulness of the seed of Canaan
marked her as a fit object for malediction, as the appropriate prey of the evil
spirits, as without hope of blessing from the God of Israel. Jesus himself at
first seems to countenance this exclusive tone. He declares that he is sent
only to the race of Israel; that dogs (the common and opprobrious term by which
all religious aliens were described) could have no hope of sharing in the
blessings jealously reserved for the children of Abraham. The humility of the
woman’s reply, “Truth, Lord, yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from
their masters’ table,” might almost disarm the antipathy of the most zealous
Jew. That the Gentiles might receive a kind of secondary and inferior benefit
from their Messiah, was by no means in opposition to the vulgar belief; it left
the Jews in full possession of their exclusive religious dignity, while it was
rather flattering to their pride than debasing to their prejudices, that, with
such limitation, the power of their Redeemer should be displayed among Gentile
foreigners. By his condescension, therefore, to their prejudices, Jesus was
enabled to display his own benevolence, without awakening, or confirming if
already awakened, the quick suspicion of his followers.
After this more remote excursion, Jesus appears again, for a short time,
nearer his accustomed residence; but still hovering, as it were, on the impartial borders, and lingering rather in the wild mountainous region to the
north and east of the lake, than descending to the more cultivated and populous
districts to the west. But here his fame follows him; and even in these desert
regions, multitudes, many of them bearing their sick and afflicted relatives,
perpetually assemble around Him. His conduct displays, as it were, a continual
struggle between his benevolence and his caution. He seems as if he could not
refrain from the indulgence of his goodness, while at the same time he is aware
that every new cure may reawaken the dangerous enthusiasm from which he had so
recently withdrawn himself. In the hill country of Decapolis, a deaf and dumb
man is restored to speech; he is strictly enjoined, though apparently without
effect, to preserve the utmost secrecy. A second time the starving multitude in
the desert appeal to his compassion. They are again miraculously fed; but Jesus,
as though remembering the immediate consequences of the former event, dismisses
them at once, and crossing in a boat to Dalmanutha or
Magdala, places, as it were, the lake between himself and their indiscreet
zeal, or irrepressible gratitude. At Magdala he again encounters some of the
Pharisaic party, who were, perhaps, returned from the Passover. They reiterate
their perpetual demand of some sign which may satisfy their impatient
incredulity, and a third time Jesus repels them with an allusion to the great
“sign” of his resurrection.
As the Pentecost draws near, he again retires to the utmost borders of
the land. He crosses back to Bethsaida, where a blind man is restored to sight,
with the same strict injunctions of concealment. He then passes to the neighbourhood of Caesarea-Philippi, at the extreme verge of
the land, a modern town, recently built on the site of the older, now named Paneas, situated almost close to the fountains of the
Jordan.
Alone with his immediate disciples in this secluded region, he begins to
unfold more distinctly, both his real character and his future fate, to their
wondering ears. It is difficult to conceive the state of fluctuation and
embarrassment in which the simple minds of the Apostles of Jesus must have been
continually kept by what must have appeared the inexplicable, if not
contradictory, conduct and language of their Master. At one moment he seemed
entirely to lift the veil from his own character; the next, it fell again and
left them in more than their former state of suspense. Now, all is clear,
distinct, comprehensible; then again, dim, doubtful, mysterious. Here their
hopes are elevated to the highest, and all their preconceived notions of the
greatness of the Messiah seem ripening into reality; there, the strange
foreboding of his humiliating fate, which He communicates with more than usual
distinctness, thrills them with apprehension. Their own destiny is opened to
their prospect, crossed with the same strangely mingling lights and shadows. At
one time they are promised miraculous endowments, and seem justified in all
their ambitious hopes of eminence and distinction in the approaching kingdom;
at the next, they are warned that they must expect to share in the humiliations
and afflictions of their Teacher.
Near Caesarea Philippi, Jesus questions his disciples as to the common
view of his character. By some, it seems, he was supposed to be John the Baptist
restored from the dead; by others, Eliahs, who was to reappear on earth previous
to the final revelation of the Messiah ; by others, Jeremiah, who, according to
a tradition to which we have before alluded, was to come to life : and when the
ardent zeal of Peter recognises him under the most
sacred title, which was universally considered as appropriated lo the Messiah,”
the Christ, the Son of the Living God”, his homage is no longer declined; and
the apostle himself is commended in language so strong, that the preeminence
of Peter over the rest of the twelve has been mainly supported by the words of
Jesus employed on this occasion. The transport of the apostles at this open and
distinct avowal of his character, although at present confined to the secret
circle of his more immediate adherents, no doubt before long to be publicly
proclaimed, and asserted with irresistible power, is almost instantaneously
checked; the bright, expanding prospects change in a moment to the gloomy
reverse, when Jesus proceeds to foretell to a greater number of his followers
his approaching lamentable fate, the hostility of all the rulers of the nation,
his death, and that which was probably the least intelligible part of the whole
prediction—his resurrection. The highly-excited Peter cannot endure the sudden
and unexpected reverse; he betrays his reluctance to believe that the Messiah,
whom he had now, he supposed, full authority to array in the highest temporal splendour which his imagination could suggest, could
possibly apprehend so degraded a doom. Jesus not only represses the ardour of the apostle, but enters at some length into the earthly
dangers to which His disciples would be exposed, and the unworldly nature of
Christian reward. They listened, but how far they comprehended these sublime
truths must be conjectured from their subsequent conduct. It was to minds thus
preoccupied, on one hand full of
unrepressed hopes of the instantaneous revelation of the Messiah in all his
temporal greatness, on the other, embarrassed with the apparently irreconcilable
predictions of the humiliation of their Master, that the extraordinary scene of
the Transfiguration was presented. Whatever explanation we adopt of this
emblematic vision, its purport and its effect upon the minds of the three
disciples who beheld it remain the same. Its significant sights and sounds
manifestly announced the equality, the superiority of Jesus to the founder, and
to him who may almost be called the restorer of the Theocracy, to Moses the
lawgiver, and Eliahs the representative of the prophets. These holy personages
had, as it were, seemed to pay homage to Jesus; they had vanished, and he alone
had remained. The appearance of Moses and Eliahs at the time of the Messiah was
strictly in accordance with the general tradition; and when, in his
astonishment, Peter proposes to make there three of those huts or cabins of
boughs which the Jews were accustomed to run up as temporary dwellings at the
time of the Feast of the Tabernacles, he seems to have supposed that the
spirits of the lawgiver and the prophet were to make their permanent residence
with the Messiah, and that this mountain was to be, as it were, another sacred
place, a second Sinai, from which the new kingdom was to commence its dominion
and issue its mandates.
The other circumstances of the transaction, the height on which they
stood, their own half-waking state, the sounds from heaven (whether articulate
voices or thunder, which appeared to give the Divine assent to their own
preconceived notions of the Messiah), the wonderful change in the appearance of
Jesus, the glittering cloud which seemed to absorb the two spirits, and leave
Jesus alone upon the mountain—all the incidents of this majestic and mysterious
scene, whether presented as dreams before their sleeping, or as visions before
their waking senses, tended to elevate still higher their already exalted notions
of their master. Again, however, they appear to have been doomed to hear a
confirmation of that which, if their reluctant minds had not refused to
entertain the humiliating thought, would have depressed them to utter
despondency. After healing the daemoniac, whom they
had in vain attempted to exorcise, the assurance of his approaching death is
again renewed, and in the clearest language, by their roaster.
From the distant and the solitary scenes where these transactions had
taken place, Jesus now returns to the populous district about Capernaum. On his
entrance into city, the customary payment of half a shekel for the maintenance
of the Temple, a capitation tax which was levied on every Jew, in every quarter
of the world, is demanded of Jesus. How, then, will he act, who but now
declared himself to his disciples as the Messiah, the Son of God? Will he claim
his privilege of exemption as the Messiah? Will the Son of God contribute to
the maintenance of the Temple of the Father? or will the long-expected public
declaration at length take place? Will the claim of immunity virtually confirm
his claim to the privileges of his descent? He again reverts to his former cautious
habit of never unnecessarily offending the prejudices of the people; he
complies with the demand, and the money is miraculously supplied.
But on the minds of the apostles
the recent scenes are still working with unallayed excitement. The dark, the
melancholy language of their Master appears to pass away and leave no
impression upon their minds; while every circumstance which animates or exalts
is treasured with the utmost care; and in a short time, on their road to Capernaum,
they are fiercely disputing among themselves their relative rank in the
instantaneously expected kingdom of the Messiah. The beauty of the significant
action by which Jesus repressed the rising emotions of their pride, is
heightened by considering it in relation to the immediate circumstances. Even
now, at this crisis of their exaltation, He takes a child, places it in the midst
of them, and declares that only those in such a state of innocence and docility
are qualified to become members of the new community. Over such humble and
blameless beings, over children, and over men of childlike dispositions, the
vigilant providence of God would watch with unsleeping care, and those who injured
them would be exposed to his strong displeasure. The narrow jealousy of the
apostles, which would have prohibited a stranger from making use of the name of
Jesus for the purpose of exorcism, was rebuked in the same spirit : all who
would embrace the cause of Christ were to be encouraged rather than
discountenanced. Some of the most striking sentences, and one parable which
illustrates, in the most vivid manner, the extent of Christian forgiveness and
mutual forbearance, close, as it were, this period of the Saviour’s life, by instilling into the minds of his followers, as the time of the final
collision with his adversaries approaches, the milder and more benignant tenets
of the evangelic religion.
The Passover had come, and Jesus had remained in the obscure borders of
the land; the Pentecost had passed away, and the expected public assumption of
the titles and functions of the Messiah had not yet been made. The autumnal
Feast of Tabernacles is at hand; his incredulous brethren again assemble around
him, and even the impatient disciples can no longer endure the suspense : they
urge him with almost imperious importunity to cast off at length his
prudential, his mysterious reserve; at least to vindicate the faith of his
followers, and to justify the zeal of his partisans, by displaying those works,
which he seemed so studiously to conceal among the obscure towns of Galilee, in
the crowded metropolis of the nation, at some great period of national assemblage.
In order to prevent any indiscreet proclamation of his approach, or any
procession of His followers through the country, and probably lest the rulers
should have time to organize their hostile measures, Jesus disguises under ambiguous
language his intention of going up to Jerusalem; he permits his brethren, who
suppose that he is still in Galilee, to set forward without him. Still,
however, his movements are the subject of anxious inquiry among the assembling
multitudes in the capital; and many secret and half-stilled murmurs among the
Galileans, some exalting his virtues, others representing him as a dangerous
disturber of the public peace, keep up the general curiosity about his
character and designs. On a sudden, in the midst of the festival, he appears in
the Temple, and takes His station as a public teacher. The rulers seem to have
been entirely off their guard; and the multitude are perplexed by the bold and,
as yet, uninterrupted publicity with which a man, whom the Sanhedrin were well
known to have denounced as guilty of a capital offence, entered the court of
the Temple, and calmly pursued his office of instructing the people. The fact
that he had taken on Himself that office was of itself unprecedented and
surprising to many. As we have observed before, He belonged to no school, He
had been bred at the feet of none of the recognised and celebrated teachers, yet he assumed superiority to all, and arraigned the
whole of the wise men of vainglory rather than of sincere piety. His own
doctrine was from a higher source, and possessed more undeniable authority. He
even boldly anticipated the charge, which he knew would be renewed against him,
his violation of the Sabbath by his works of mercy. He accused them of
conspiring against his life ; a charge which seems to have excited indignation
as well as astonishment. The suspense and agitation of the assemblage are
described with a few rapid but singularly expressive touches. It was part of
the vague popular belief that the Messiah would appear in some strange, sudden,
and surprising manner. The circumstances of his coming were thus left to the
imagination of each to fill up, according to his own notions of that which was
striking and magnificent. But the extraordinary incidents which attended the
birth of Jesus were forgotten, or had never been generally known; his origin
and extraction were supposed to be ascertained: he appeared but as the
legitimate descendant of an humble Galilean family; his acknowledged brethren
were ordinary and undistinguished men. “We know this man whence he is; but when
Christ come no man know whence he is”. His mysterious allusions to his higher
descent were heard with mingled feelings of indignation and awe. On the
multitude his wonderful works had made a favourable impression, which was not a little increased by the inactivity and hesitation
of the rulers. The Sanhedrin, in which the Pharisaic party still predominated,
were evidently unprepared, and had concerted no measures either to counteract
his progress in the public mind, or to secure his person. Their authority in
such a case was probably, in the absence of the Roman prefect, or without the
concurrence of the commander of the Roman guard in the Antonia, by no means
clearly ascertained. With every desire, therefore, for his apprehension, they
at first respected his person, and their non-interference was mistaken for
connivance, if not as a sanction for his proceedings. They determine at length
on stronger measures; their officers are sent out to arrest the offender, but seem
to have been overawed by the tranquil dignity and commanding language of Jesus,
and were, perhaps, in some degree controlled by the manifest favour of the people.
On the great day of the feast, the agitation of the assembly, as well as
the perplexity of the Sanhedrin, is at its height. Jesus still appears publicly;
he makes a striking allusion to the ceremonial of the day. Water was drawn from
the hallowed fountain of Siloah, and borne into the
Temple with the sound of the trumpet and with great rejoicing. “Who”, say the rabbins, “has not seen the rejoicing on the drawing of this
water, hath seen no rejoicing at all”. They sang in the procession, “with joy
shall they draw water from the wells of salvation”. In the midst of this
tumult, Jesus, according to his custom, calmly diverts the attention to the
great moral end of his own teaching, and, in allusion to the rite, declares
that from himself are to flow the real living waters of salvation. The ceremony
almost appears to have been arrested in its progress; and open discussions of
his claim to be considered as the Messiah divide the wondering multitude. The
Sanhedrin find that they cannot depend on their own officers, whom they accuse
of surrendering themselves to the popular deception, in favour of one condemned by the rulers of the nation. Even within their council,
Nicodemus, the secret proselyte of Jesus, ventures to interfere in his behalf ;
and though, with the utmost caution, he appeals to the law, and asserts the
injustice of condemning Jesus without a hearing (he seems to have desired that
Jesus might be admitted publicly to plead his own cause before the Sanhedrin),
he is accused by the more violent of leaning to the Galilean party—the party
which bore its own condemnation in the simple fact of adhering to a Galilean
prophet. The council dispersed without coming to any decision.
On the next day, for the former transactions had taken place in the
earlier part of the week, the last, the most crowded and solemn day of the
festival, a more insidious attempt is made, whether from a premeditated or
fortuitous circumstance, to undermine the growing popularity of Jesus; an
attempt to make him assume a judicial authority in the case of a woman taken in
the act of adultery. Such an act would probably have been resisted by the whole
Sanhedrin as an invasion of their province; and as it appeared that he must
either acquit or condemn the criminal, in either case he would give an
advantage to his adversaries. If he inclined to severity, they might be able,
notwithstanding the general benevolence of his character, to contrast their own
leniency in the administration of the law (this was the characteristic of the
Pharisaic party which distinguished them from the Sadducees, and of this the
Rabbinical writings furnish many curious illustrations) with the rigour of the new teacher, and thus to conciliate the
naturally compassionate feelings of the people, which would have been shocked
by the unusual spectacle of a woman suffering death, or even condemned to
capital punishment, for such an offence. If, on the other hand, he acquitted
her, he abrogated the express letter of the Mosaic statute; and the multitude
might be inflamed by this new evidence of that which the ruling party had
constantly endeavoured to instil into their minds, the hostility of Jesus to the law of their forefathers, and
his secret design of abolishing the whole long-reverenced and heaven-enacted
code. Nothing can equal, if the expression may be ventured, the address of
Jesus in extricating himself from this difficulty; his turning the current of
popular odium, or even contempt, upon his assailants; the manner in which, by
summoning them to execute the law, he extorts a tacit confession of their own
loose morals : “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at
her” (this being the office of the chief accuser); and finally shows mercy to
the accused, without in the least invalidating the decision of the law against
the crime, yet not without the most gentle and effective moral admonition.
After this discomfiture of his opponents, Jesus appears to have been permitted
to pursue his course of teaching undisturbed, until new circumstances occurred
to inflame the resentment of his enemies. He had taken his station in a part of
the Temple court called the Treasury. His language became more mysterious, yet,
at the same time, more authoritative; more full of those allusions to his
character as the Messiah, to his Divine descent, and at length to his
preexistence. The former of these were in some degree familiar to the popular
conception; the latter, though it entered into the higher notion of the
Messiah, which was prevalent among those who entertained the loftiest views of
his character, nevertheless, from the manner in which it was expressed, jarred
with the harshest discord upon the popular ear. They listened with patience to
Jesus while he proclaimed himself the light of the world : though they
questioned his right to assume the title of “Son of the Heavenly Father”
without farther witness than he had already produced, they yet permitted him to
proceed in his discourse : they did not interrupt him when he still farther
alluded, in dark and ambiguous terms, to his own fate : when he declared that
God was with him, and that his doctrines were pleasing to the Almighty Father,
a still more favourable impression was made, and many
openly espoused his belief; but when he touched on their rights and privileges
as descendants of Abraham, the subject on which, above all, they were most
jealous and sensitive, the collision became inevitable. He spoke of their
freedom, the moral freedom from the slavery of their own passions, to which
they were to be exalted by the revelation of the truth; but freedom was a word
which to them only bore another sense. They broke in at once with indignant
denial that the race of Abraham, however the Roman troops were guarding their
Temple, had ever forfeited their national independence. He spoke as if the
legitimacy of their descent from Abraham depended not on their hereditary
genealogy, but on the moral evidence of their similarity in virtue to their great
forefather. The good, the pious, the gentle Abraham was not the father of those
who were meditating the murder of an innocent man. If their fierce and sanguinary
dispositions disqualified them from being the children of Abraham, how much more
from being, as they boasted, the adopted children of God; the spirit of evil,
in whose darkest and most bloody temper they were ready to act, was rather the
parent of men with dispositions so diabolic. At this their wrath bursts forth
in more unrestrained vehemence; the worst and most bitter appellations by which
a Jew could express his hatred, were heaped on Jesus; he is called a Samaritan,
and declared to be under daemoniac possession. But
when Jesus proceeded to assert his title to the Messiahship, by proclaiming
that Abraham had received some intimation of the future great religious revolution
to be effected by him; when he was “not fifty years old” (that is, not arrived
at that period when the Jews, who assumed the public offices at thirty, were released
from them on account of their age), declared that he had existed before Abraham;
when he this placed himself, not merely on a equality with, but asserted his immeasurable
superiority to the great to the father of the race; when He uttered the awful
and significant words which identified him, as it were, with Jehovah, the great
self-existent Deity, “Before Abraham was, I am,” they immediately rushed
forward to crush without trial, without further hearing, him whom they
considered the self-convicted blasphemer. As there was always some work of
building or repair going on within the Temple, which was not considered to be
finished till many years after, these instruments for the fulfilment of the
legal punishment were immediately at hand; and Jesus only escaped from being
stoned on the spot by passing (we know not how), during the wild and frantic
tumult, through the midst of his assailants, and withdrawing from the court of
the Temple.
But even in this
exigency he pauses at no great distance to perform an act of mercy. There was a
man notoriously blind from his birth, who seems to have taken his accustomed
station in some way leading to the Temple. Some of the disciples of Jesus had
accompanied Him, and perhaps, as it were, covered his retreat from his furious
assailants; and by this time, probably, being safe from pursuit, they stopped
near the place where the blind man stood. The whole history of the cure of this
blind man is remarkable, as singularly illustrative of Jewish feeling and opinion,
and on account both of the critical juncture at which it took place, and the
strict judicial investigation which it seems to have undergone before the
hostile Sanhedrin. The common popular belief ascribed every malady or
affliction to some sin, of which it was the direct and providential
punishment—a notion, as we have before hinted, of all others, the most
likely to harden the bigoted heart to indifference, or even contempt and
abhorrence of the heaven-visited, and therefore heaven-branded, sufferer. This
notion, which however was so overpowered by the strong spirit of nationalism as
to obtain for the Jews in foreign countries the admiration of the heathen for
their mutual compassion towards each other, while they had no kindly feeling
for strangers, no doubt, from the language of Jesus on many occasions,
exercised a most pernicious influence on the general character in their native
land, where the lessons of Christian kindliness and humanity appear to have
been as deeply needed as they were unacceptable. But how was this notion of the
penal nature of all suffering to be reconciled with the fact of a man being
born subject to one of the most grievous afflictions of our nature—the want of
sight. They were thus thrown back upon those other singular notions which
prevailed among the Jews of that period—either his fathers or himself must
have sinned. Was it, then, a malady inherited from the guilt of his parents? or
was the soul, having sinned in a preexistent state, now expiating its former
offences in the present form of being? This notion, embraced by Plato in the
West, was more likely to have been derived by the Jews from the East, where it
may be regularly traced from India through the different Oriental religions.
Jesus at once corrected this inveterate error, and having anointed the eyes of
the blind man with clay, sent him to wash in the celebrated pool of Siloam, at
no great distance from the Street of the Temple. The return of the blind man, restored
to sight, excited so much astonishment, that the bystanders began to dispute whether
he was really the same who had been so long familiarly known. The man set their
doubts at rest by declaring himself to be the same. The Sanhedrin, now so
actively watching the actions of Jesus, and indeed inflamed to the utmost
resentment, had no course but, if possible, to invalidate the effect of such a
miracle on the public mind; they hoped either to detect some collusion between
the parties, or to throw suspicion on the whole transaction: at all events the
case was so public, that they could not avoid bringing it under the cognisance of their tribunal. The man was summoned, and, as
it happened to have been the Sabbath, the stronger Pharisaic party were in
hopes of getting rid of the question altogether by the immediate decision, that
a man guilty of a violation of the Law could not act under the sanction of God.
But a considerable party in the Sanhedrin were still either too prudent, too
just, or too much impressed by the evidence of the case, to concur in so
summary a sentence. This decision of the council appears to have led to a more
close investigation of the whole transaction. The first object appears to have
been, by questioning the man himself, to implicate him as an adherent of Jesus,
and so to throw discredit upon his testimony. The man, either from caution or
ignorance of the character assumed by Jesus, merely replied that he believed
him to be a prophet. Baffled on this point, the next step of the Pharisaic
party is to inquire into the reality of the malady and the cure. The parents of
the blind man are examined; their deposition simply affirms the fact of their
son having been born blind, and having received his sight; for it was now notorious that the Sanhedrin had threatened all
the partisans of Jesus with the terrible sentence of excommunication; and the
timid parents, trembling before this awful tribunal, refer the judges to their
son for all further information on this perilous question.
The further
proceedings of the Sanhedrin are still more remarkable: unable to refute the
fact of the miraculous cure, they endeavour, nevertheless,
to withhold from Jesus all claim upon the gratitude of him whom he had
relieved, and all participation in the power with which the instantaneous cure
was wrought. The man is exhorted to give praise for the blessing to God alone,
and to abandon the cause of Jesus of Nazareth, whom they authoritatively
denounce as a sinner. He rejoins, with straightforward simplicity, that he
merely deposes to the fact of his own blindness, and to his having received his
sight: on such high questions as the character of Jesus, he presumes not at
first to dispute with the great legal tribunal, with the chosen wisdom of the
nation. Wearied, however, at length with their pertinacious examination, the
man seems to discover the vantage ground on which he stands; the altercation
becomes more spirited on his part, more full of passionate violence on theirs.
He declares that he has already again and again repeated the circumstances of
the transaction, and that it is in vain for them to question him further,
unless they are determined, if the truth of the miracle should be established,
to acknowledge the divine mission of Jesus. This seems to have been the object
at which the more violent party in the Sanhedrin aimed; so far to throw him off
his guard, as to make him avow himself the partisan of Jesus, and by this means
to shake his whole testimony. On the instant they begin to revile him, to
appeal to the popular clamour, to declare him a
secret adherent of Jesus, while they were the steadfast disciples of Moses. God
was acknowledged to have spoken by Moses, and to compare Jesus with him was
inexpiable impiety—Jesus, of whose origin they professed themselves ignorant.
The man rejoins in still bolder terms, “Why, herein is a marvellous thing, that ye know not from whence he is, but yet he hath opened mine eyes.”
He continues in the same strain openly to assert his conviction that no man,
unless commissioned by God, could work such wonders. Their whole history,
abounding as it did with extraordinary events, displayed nothing more
wonderful than that which had so recently taken place in his person. This
daring and disrespectful language excites the utmost indignation in the whole
assembly. They revert to the popular opinion, that the blindness with which the
man was born, was a proof of his having been accursed of God. “Thou wast altogether born in sin, and dost
thou teach us?” God marked thy very birth, thy very cradle, with the indelible
sign of his displeasure; and therefore the testimony of one branded by the
wrath of Heaven can be of no value”. Forgetful that even on their own principle,
if, by being born blind, the man was manifestly an object
of the divine anger, his gaining his sight was an evidence equally
unanswerable of the divine favour. But while
they traced the hand of God in the curse, they refused to trace it in the blessing;
to close the eyes was a proof of divine power, but to open them none whatever.
The fearless conduct, however, of the man appears to have united the divided
council; the formal and terrible sentence of excommunication was pronounced,
probably for the first time, against any adherent of Jesus. The Evangelist
concludes the narrative, as if to show that the man was not as yet a declared
disciple of Christ, with a second interview between the blind man and Jesus, in
which Jesus openly accepted the title of the Messiah, the Son of God, and
received the homage of the now avowed adherent. Nor did Jesus discontinue his
teaching on account of this declared interposition of the Sanhedrin ; his
manifest superiority throughout this transaction rather appears to have caused
a new schism in the council, which secured him from any violent measures on
their part, until the termination of the festival.
Another collision
takes place with some of the Pharisaic party, with whom he now seems scarcely
to keep any measure: he openly denounces them as misleading the people, and
declares himself the “ one true Shepherd.” Whither Jesus retreated after this
conflict with the ruling powers, we have no distinct information—most probably
however into Galilee; nor is it possible with certainty to assign those events,
which filled up the period between the autumnal Feast of Tabernacles and that
of the Dedication of the Temple, which took place in the winter.
Now, however, Jesus appears more distinctly to have avowed his
determination not to remain in his more concealed and private character in
Galilee: but when the occasion should demand, when, at the approaching
Passover, the whole nation should be assembled in the metropolis, He would
confront them, and at length bring his acceptance or rejection to a crisis. He
now, at times at least, assumes greater state; messengers are sent before him
to proclaim his arrival in the different towns and villages; and as the Feast
of Dedication draws near, He approaches the borders of Samaria, and
sends forward some of his followers into a neighbouring village to announce his approach. Whether the Samaritans may have entertained
some hopes from the rumour of his former proceedings
in their country, that, persecuted by the Jews, and avowedly opposed to the
leading parties in Jerusalem, the Lord might espouse their party in the
national quarrel, and were therefore instigated by disappointment as well as
jealousy; or whether it was merely an accidental outburst of the old irreconcileable feud, the inhospitable village refused to
receive him. The disciples were now elate with the expectation of the
approaching crisis; on their minds all the dispiriting predictions of the fate
of their Master passed away without the least impression; they were indignant
that their triumphant procession should be arrested; and with these more immediate
and peculiar motives mingled, no doubt, the implacable spirit of national
hostility. They thought that the hour of vengeance was now come; that even
their gentle Master would resent on these deadliest foes of the race of Israel,
this deliberate insult on his dignity; that, as He had in some respects
resembled the ancient prophets, He would now not hesitate to assume that
fiercer and more terrific majesty, with which, according to their ancient
histories, these holy men had at times been avenged; they entreated their Master
to call down fire from heaven to consume the village. Jesus simply replied by a
sentence, which at once established the incalculable difference between his own
religion and that which it was to succeed. This sentence, most truly sublime
and most characteristic of the evangelic religion, ever since the establishment
of Christianity has been struggling to maintain its authority against the
still-reviving Judaism, which, inseparable it would seem from uncivilised and unchristian man, has constantly endeavoured to array the Deity, rather in his attributes of
destructive power than of preserving mercy : “The Son of Man is not come to
destroy men’s lives, but to save them.” So speaking He left the inhospitable
Samaritans unharmed, and calmly passed to another village.
It appears to me
probable that He here left the direct road to the metropolis through Samaria,
and turned aside to the district about Scythopolis and the valley of the Jordan, and most likely crossed into Peraea.
From hence, if not before, He sent out his messengers with greater regularity,
and, it might seem, to keep up some resemblance with the established institutions
of the nation, He chose the number of Seventy, a number already sanctified in
the notions of the people, as that of the great Sanhedrin of the nation, who
deduced their own origin and authority from the Council of Seventy, established
by Moses in the wilderness. The Seventy after a short absence returned and
made a favourable report of the influence which they
had obtained over the people. The language of Jesus, both in his charge to his
disciples and in his observations on the report of their success, appears to
indicate the still approaching crisis; it would seem that even the towns in
which He had wrought his mightiest works, Chorazin,
Bethsaida, and Capernaum, at least the general mass of the people, and the
influential rulers, now had declared against him. They are condemned in terms
of unusual severity for their blindness; yet among the meek and humble He had a
still increasing hold—and
the days were now at hand, which the disciples were permitted to behold, and
for which the wise and good for many ages had been looking forward with still
baffled hopes.
It was during the
absence of the Seventy, or immediately after their return, that Jesus, who perhaps
had visited in the interval many towns and villages both of Galilee and Peraea, which his central position near the Jordan
commanded, descended to the winter Festival of the Dedication. Once
it is clear that He drew near to Jerusalem, at least as near as the village of
Bethany; and though not insensible to the difficulties of this view, I cannot
but think that this village, about two miles’ distance from Jerusalem, and the
house of the relations of Lazarus, was the place where He was concealed during
both his two later unexpected and secret visits to the metropolis, and where He
in general passed the nights during the week of the last Passover. His appearance
at this festival seems to have been, like the former, sudden and unlooked-for.
The multitude probably at this time was not so great, both on account of the
season, and because the festival was kept in other places besides Jerusalem,
though of course with the greatest splendour and
concourse in the Temple itself. Jesus was seen walking in one of the porticoes
or arcades which surrounded the outer court of the Temple, that to the east,
which from its greater splendour, being formed of a
triple instead of a double row of columns, was called by the name of Solomon’s.
The leading Jews, whether unprepared for more violent measures, or with some
insidious design, now address him, seemingly neither in a hostile nor unfriendly
tone. It almost appears, that having before attempted force, they are now
inclined to try the milder course of persuasion; their language sounds like the
expostulation of impatience. Why, they inquire, does He thus continue to keep
up this strange excitement? Why thus persist in endangering the public peace?
Why does He not avow himself at once? Why does He not distinctly assert himself
to be the Christ, and by some signal, some public, some indisputable, evidence
of his being the Messiah, at once set at rest the doubts, and compose the
agitation of the troubled nation? The answer of Jesus is an appeal to the
wonderful works which he had already wrought; but this evidence the Jews, in
their present state and disposition of mind, were morally incapable of
appreciating. He had already avowed himself, but in language unintelligible to
their ears; a few had heard him, a few would receive the reward of their
obedience, and those few were, in the simple phrase, the sheep who heard his
voice. But as he proceeded, his language assumed a higher, a more mysterious,
tone. He spoke of his unity with the great Father of the worlds. “I and my
Father are one.” However understood, his words sounded to the Jewish
ears so like direct blasphemy, as again to justify on the spot the summary
punishment of the Law. Without further trial they prepared to stone him where
he stood. Jesus arrested their fury on the instant by a calm appeal to the
manifest moral goodness, as well as the physical power, of the Deity displayed
in his works. The Jews in plain terms accused him of blasphemously ascribing to
himself the title of God. He replied by reference to their sacred books, in
which they could not deny that the divine name was sometimes ascribed to beings
of an inferior rank; how much less, therefore, ought they to be indignant at
that sacred name being assumed by him, in whom the great attributes of
divinity, both the power and the goodness, had thus manifestly appeared! His wonderful
works showed the intercommunion of nature, in this respect, between himself and
the Almighty. This explanation, far beyond their moral perceptions, only
excited a new burst of fury, which Jesus eluded, and, retiring again from the
capital, returned to the district beyond the Jordan.
The three months
which elapsed between the Feast of Dedication and the Passover were no doubt
occupied in excursions, if not in regular progresses, through the different
districts of the Holy Land, on both sides of the river, which his central
position, near one of the most celebrated fords, was extremely well suited to
command. Wherever he went, multitudes assembled around him; and at one time the
government of Herod was seized with alarm, and Jesus received information that
his life was in danger, and that he might apprehend the same fate which had
befallen John the Baptist if he remained in Galilee or Peraea,
both which districts were within the dominions of Herod. It is remarkable that
this intelligence came from some of the Pharisaic party, whether suborned by
Herod, thus peacefully, and without incurring any further unpopularity, to rid
his dominions of one who might become either the designing or the innocent
cause of tumult and confusion (the reflection of Jesus on the crafty character
of Herod may confirm the notion that the Pharisees were acting under
his insidious direction), or whether the Pharisaic party were of themselves
desirous to force Jesus, before the Passover arrived, into the province of
Judaea, where the Roman government might either, of itself, be disposed to act
with decision, or might grant permission to the Sanhedrin to interpose its
authority with the utmost rigour. But it was no doubt
in this quarter that he received intelligence of a very different nature, that
led to one of his preternatural works, which of itself was the most
extraordinary, and evidently made the deepest impression upon the public mind.
The raising of Lazarus may be considered the proximate cause of the general
conspiracy for his death, by throwing the popular feeling more decidedly on his
side, and thereby deepening the fierce animosity of the rulers, who now saw
that they had no alternative but to crush him at once, or to admit his triumph.
We have supposed
that it was at the house of Lazarus, or of his relatives, in the village of Bethany,
that Jesus had passed the nights during his recent visits to Jerusalem. At some
distance from the metropolis he receives information of the dangerous illness
of that faithful adherent, whom he seems to have honoured with peculiar attachment. He at first assures his followers in ambiguous
language of the favourable termination of the
disorder; and after two days’ delay, notwithstanding the remonstrances of his
disciples, who feared that he was precipitately rushing, as it were, into the
toils of his enemies, and who resolve to accompany him, though in acknowledged
apprehension that his death was inevitable, Jesus first informs his disciples
of the actual death of Lazarus, yet, nevertheless, persists in his
determination of visiting Bethany. On his arrival at Bethany the dead man, who
according to Jewish usage had no doubt been immediately buried, had been four
days in the sepulchre. The house was full of Jews,
who had come to console, according to their custom, the afflicted relatives;
and the characters assigned in other parts of the history to the two sisters,
are strikingly exemplified in their conduct on this mournful occasion. The more
active Martha hastens to meet Jesus, laments his absence at the time of her
brother’s death, and, on his declaration of the resurrection of her brother,
reverts only to the general resurrection of mankind, a truth embodied in a
certain sense in the Jewish creed. So far Christ answers in language which
intimates his own close connexion with that
resurrection of mankind. The gentler Mary falls at the feet of Jesus, and with
many tears expresses the same confidence in his power, had he been present, of
averting her brother’s death. So deep, however, is their reverence, that
neither of them ventures the slightest word of expostulation at his delay; nor
does either appear to have entertained the least hope of further relief. The
tears of Jesus himself (for Jesus wept) appear to confirm the notion
that the case is utterly desperate; and some of the Jews, in a less kindly
spirit, begin to murmur at his apparent neglect of a friend, to whom,
nevertheless, he appears so tenderly attached. It might seem that it was in the
presence of some of these persons, by no means well disposed to his cause, that Jesus proceeded to the sepulchre,
summoned the dead body to arise, and was obeyed.
The intelligence of this inconceivable event spread with the utmost rapidity to Jerusalem. The Sanhedrin was instantly summoned, and a solemn debate commenced, finally to decide on their future proceedings towards Jesus. It had now become evident that his progress in the popular belief must be at once arrested, or the power of the Sanhedrin, the influence of the Pharisaic party, was lost for ever. With this may have mingled, in minds entirely ignorant of the real nature of the new religion, an honest and conscientious, though blind, dread of some tumult or insurrection taking place, which would give the Romans an excuse for wresting away the lingering semblance of national independence, to which they adhered with such passionate attachment. The high priesthood was now filled by Caiaphas, the son-in-law of Annas or Ananus; for the Roman governors, as has been said, since the expulsion of Archelaus, either in the capricious or venal wantonness of power, or from jealousy of his authority, had perpetually deposed and reappointed this chief civil and religious magistrate of the nation. Caiaphas threw the weight of his official influence into the scale of the more decided and violent party; and endeavoured, as it were, to give an appearance of patriotism to the meditated crime, by declaring the expediency of sacrificing one life, even though innocent, for the welfare of the whole nation? His language was afterwards treasured in the memory of the Christians, as inadvertently prophetic of the more extensive benefits derived to mankind by the death of their Master. The death of Jesus was deliberately decreed; but Jesus for the present avoided the gathering storm, withdrew from the neighbourhood of the metropolis, and retired to Ephraim, on the border of Judaea, near the wild and mountainous region which divided Judaea from Samaria.
The last
Passover.—The Crucifixion.
The Passover rapidly approached; the roads from all quarters were already
crowded with the assembling worshippers. It is difficult for those who are
ignorant of the extraordinary power which local religious reverence holds over
Southern and Asiatic nations, to imagine the state of Judaea and of Jerusalem
at the time of this great periodical festival. The rolling onward of countless
and gathering masses of population to some of the temples in India; the caravans
from all quarters of the Eastern world, which assemble at Mecca during the Holy
Season; the multitudes which formerly flowed to Loreto or Rome at the great
ceremonies, when the Roman Catholic religion held its unenfeebled sway over the
mind of Europe—do not surpass, perhaps scarcely equal, the sudden, simultaneous
confluence, not of the population of a single city, but of the whole Jewish
nation, towards the capital of Judaea at the time of the Passover. Dispersed as
they were throughout the world, it was not only the great mass of the inhabitants
of Palestine, but many foreign Jews who thronged from every quarter—from
Babylonia, from Arabia, from Egypt, from Asia Minor and Greece, from Italy,
probably even from Gaul and Spain. Some notion of the density and vastness of
the multitude may be formed from the calculation of Josephus, who, having ascertained
the number of paschal lambs sacrificed on one of these solemn occasions, which
amounted to 256,500, and assigning the ordinary number to a company
who could partake of the same victim, estimated the total number of the
pilgrims and residents in Jerusalem at 2,700,000. Through all this concourse of
the whole Jewish race, animated more or less profoundly, according to their
peculiar temperament, with the same national and religious feelings, rumours about the appearance, the induct, the pretensions,
the language of Jesus, could not but have spread abroad, and be communicated
with unchecked rapidity. The utmost anxiety prevails throughout the whole
crowded city and its neighborhood to ascertain whether this new prophet—this
more, perhaps, than prophet—will, as it were, confront at this solemn period
the assembled nation; or, as on the last occasion, remain concealed in the
remote parts of the country. The Sanhedrin are on their guard, and strict
injunctions are issued that they may receive the earliest intelligence of his
approach, in order that they may arrest him before He has attempted to make any
impression on the multitude.
Already Jesus had
either crossed the Jordan, or descended from the hill country to the north. He
had passed through Jericho, where he had been recognised by two blind men as the Son of David, the title of the Messiah probably the
most prevalent among the common people; and instead of disclaiming the homage,
he had rewarded the avowal by the restoration of their sight to the suppliants.
On his way from Jericho to Jerusalem, but much nearer to the metropolis,
He was hospitably received in the house of a wealthy publican named Zaccheus, who had been so impressed with the report of his
extraordinary character, that, being of small stature, he had climbed a tree by
the roadside to see him pass by; and had evinced the sincerity of his belief
in the just and generous principles of the new faith, both by giving up at once
half of his property to the poor, and offering the amplest restitution to those
whom he might have oppressed in the exercise of his function as a publican. The
noblest homage to the power of the new faith! It is probable that Jesus passed
the night, perhaps the whole of the Sabbath, in the house of Zaccheus, and set forth, on the first day of the week,
through the villages of Bethphage and Bethany to Jerusalem.
Let us, however, before we trace his progress, pause to ascertain, if
possible, the actual state of feeling at this precise period, among the
different ranks and orders of the Jews.
Jesus of Nazareth had now, for three years, assumed the character of a
public teacher; his wonderful works were generally acknowledged; all no doubt
considered him as an extraordinary being; but whether he was the Messiah still,
as it were, hung in the balance. His language, plain enough to those who could
comprehend the real superiority, the real divinity of his character, was
necessarily dark and ambiguous to those who were insensible to the moral and
spiritual beauty of his words and actions. Few, perhaps, beyond his more
immediate followers, looked upon him with implicit faith; many with doubt, even
with hope; perhaps still greater numbers, comprising the more turbulent of the
lower class, and almost all the higher and more influential, with incredulity,
if not with undisguised animosity. For, though thus for three years He had kept
the public mind in suspense as to his being the promised Redeemer, of those
circumstances to which the popular passions had looked forward as the only
certain signs of the Messiah’s coming; those, which among the mass of the
community were considered inseparable from the commencement of the kingdom of
heaven—the terrific, the awful, the national, not one had come to pass. The
deliverance of the nation from the Roman yoke seemed as remote as ever; the
governor had made but a short time, perhaps a year, before, a terrible assertion
of his supremacy, by defiling the Temple itself with the blood of the
rebellious or unoffending Galileans. The Sanhedrin, imperious during his
absence, quailed and submitted whenever the tribunal of Pilate was erected in
the metropolis. The publicans, those unwelcome remembrancers of the
subjugation of the country, were still abroad in every town and village,
levying the hateful tribute; and instead of joining in the popular clamour against these agents of a foreign rule, or even
reprobating their extortions, Jesus had treated them with his accustomed
equable gentleness; he had entered familiarly into their houses; one of his
constant followers, one of his chosen twelve, was of this proscribed and odious
profession.
Thus, then, the fierce and violent, the avowed or the secret partisans
of the Galilean Judas, and all who, without having enrolled themselves in his
sect, inclined to the same opinions, if not already inflamed against Jesus,
were at least ready to take fire, on the instant that his success might appear to
endanger their schemes and visions of independence: and their fanaticism once
inflamed, no considerations of humanity or justice would arrest its course or
assuage its violence. To every sect Jesus had been equally uncompromising. To
the Pharisees he had always proclaimed the most undisguised opposition; and if
his language rises from its gentle and persuasive, though authoritative tone,
it is ever in inveighing against the hypocrisy, the avarice, the secret vices
of this class, whose dominion over the public mind it was necessary to shake
with a strong hand; all communion, with whose peculiar opinions it was
incumbent on the Teacher, of purer virtue to disclaim in the most
unmeasured terms. But this hostility to the Pharisaic party was likely to operate unfavourably to the cause of Jesus, not only with the
party itself, but with the great mass of the lower orders. If there be in man a
natural love of independence both in thought and action, there is among the
vulgar, especially in a nation so superstitious as the Jews, a reverence, even
a passionate attachment to religious tyranny. The bondage in which the minute
observances of the traditionists, more like those of the Brahminical Indians
than the free and more generous institutes of their Lawgiver, had fettered the
whole life of the Jew, was nevertheless a source of satisfaction and pride; and
the offer of deliverance from this inveterate slavery would be received by most
with unthankfulness or suspicion. Nor can any teacher
of religion, however he may appeal to the better feelings and to the reason, without
endangering his influence over the common people, permit himself to be outdone
in that austerity which they ever consider the sole test of fervour and sincerity. Even those less enslaved to the traditionary observances, the
Lawyers (perhaps the religious ancestors of the Kraites), who adhered more
closely, and confined their precepts, to the sacred books, must have trembled
and recoiled at the manner in which Jesus assumed an authority above that of
Moses or the Prophets. With the Sadducees Jesus had come less frequently into
collision: it is probable that this sect prevailed chiefly among the
aristocracy of the larger cities and of the metropolis, while Jesus in general
mingled with the lower orders; and the Sadducees were less regular attendants
in the synagogues and schools, where he was wont to deliver his instructions.
They, in all likelihood, were less possessed than the rest of the nation with
the expectation of the Messiah; at all events they rejected as innovations not
merely the Babylonian notions about the angels and the resurrection, which prevailed
in the rest of the community, but altogether disclaimed these doctrines, and
professed themselves adherents of the original simple Mosaic Theocracy. Hence, though
on one or two occasions they appear to have joined in the general confederacy
to arrest his progress, the Sadducees for the most part would look on with
contemptuous indifference; and although the declaration of eternal life mingled
with the whole system of the teaching of Jesus, yet it was not till his
Resurrection had become the leading article of the new faith—till Christianity
was thus, as it were, committed in irreconcileable hostility with the main principle of their creed—that their opposition took a
more active turn, and from the accidental increase of their weight in the
Sanhedrin, came into perpetual and terrible collision with the Apostles. The
only point of union which the Sadducaic party would
possess with the Pharisees would be the most extreme jealousy of the abrogation
of the Law, the exclusive feeling of its superior sanctity, wisdom, and
irrepealable authority: on this point the spirit of nationality would draw
together these two conflicting parties, who would vie with each other in the
patriotic, the religious vigilance with which they would seize on any
expression of Jesus which might imply the abrogation of the divinely inspired
institutes of Moses, or even any material innovation on their strict letter.
But, besides the general suspicion that Jesus was assuming an authority above,
in some cases contrary to the Law, there were other trifling circumstances
which threw doubts on that genuine and uncontaminated Judaism, which the nation
in general would have imperiously demanded from their Messiah. There seems to
have been some apprehension, as we have before stated, of his abandoning his
ungrateful countrymen, and taking refuge among a foreign race; and his conduct
towards the Samaritans was directly contrary to the strongest Jewish
prejudices. On more than one occasion, even if his remarkable conduct and
language during his first journey through Samaria had not transpired, He had
avowedly discountenanced that implacable national hatred, which no one can ever
attempt to allay without diverting it, as it were, on his own head. He had adduced
the example of a Samaritan as the only one of the ten lepers who showed either
gratitude to his benefactor, or piety to God; and in the exquisite apologue of
the Good Samaritan, he had placed the Priest and the Levite in a most unfavourable light, as contrasted with the descendant of
that hated race.
Yet there could be no doubt that He had already avowed himself to be the
Messiah: his harbinger, the Baptist, had proclaimed the rapid, the
instantaneous approach of the kingdom of Christ. Of that kingdom Jesus himself
had spoken as commencing, as having already commenced; but where were the
outward, the visible, the undeniable signs of sovereignty. He had permitted
himself, both in private and in public, to be saluted as the Son of David, an
expression which was equivalent to a claim to the hereditary throne of David:
but still to the common eye he appeared the same lowly and unroyal being, as
when he first set forth as a teacher through the villages of Galilee. As to the
nature of this kingdom, even to his closest followers, his language was most
perplexing and contradictory. An unworldly kingdom, a moral dominion, a purely
religious community, held together only by the bond of common faith, was so
unlike the former intimate union of civil and religious polity—so diametrically
opposite to the first principles of their Theocracy—as to be utterly
unintelligible. The real nature and design of the new religion seemed
altogether beyond their
comprehension; and it is most remarkable to trace it, as it slowly dawned on
the minds of the Apostles themselves, and gradually, after the death of Jesus,
extended its horizon till it comprehended all mankind within its expanding
view. To be in the highest sense the religious ancestors of mankind; to be the
authors, or at least the agents, in the greatest moral revolution which has
taken place in the world; to obtain an influence over the human mind, as much
more extensive than that which had been violently obtained by the arms of
Rome, as it was more conducive to the happiness of the human race; to be the
teachers and disseminators of doctrines, opinions, sentiments, which, slowly
incorporating themselves, as it were, with the intimate essence of man’s moral
being, were to work a gradual but total change—a change which, as to the
temporal as well as the eternal destiny of our race, to those who look forward
to the simultaneous progress of human civilisation and the genuine religion of Jesus, is yet far from complete—all this was too
high, too remote, too mysterious, for the narrow vision of the Jewish people.
They, as a nation, were better prepared indeed, by already possessing the
rudiments of the new faith, for becoming the willing agents in this divine
work. On the other hand they were, in some respects, disqualified by that very
distinction, which, by keeping them in rigid seclusion from the rest of
mankind, had rendered them, as it were, the faithful depositaries of the great
principle of religion, the Unity of God. The peculiar privilege, with which
they had been entrusted for the benefit of mankind, had become, as it were,
their exclusive property: nor were they willing, indiscriminately, to
communicate to others this their own distinctive prerogative.
Those, for such doubtless there were, who pierced, though dimly, through
the veil—the more reasoning, the more advanced, the more philosophical—were
little likely to espouse the cause of Jesus with vigour and resolution. Persons of this character are usually too calm, dispassionate,
and speculative, to be the active and zealous instruments in a great religious
revolution. It is probable that most of this class were either far gone in
Oriental mysticism, or in some instances in the colder philosophy of the
Greeks. For these Jesus was as much too plain and popular, as he was too gentle
and peaceable for the turbulent. He was scarcely more congenial to the severe
and ascetic practices of the Essene, than to the fiercer followers of the Galilean
Judas. Though the Essene might admire the exquisite purity of his moral teaching
and the uncompromising firmness with which he repressed the vices of all ranks
and parties; however he might be prepared for the abrogation of the ceremonial
law, and the substitution of the religion of the heart for that of the
prevalent outward forms, on his side he was too closely bound by his own
monastic rules: his whole existence was recluse and contemplative. His religion
was altogether unfitted for aggression, so that, however apparently it might
coincide with Christianity in some material points, in fact its vital system
was repugnant to that of the new faith. Though, after strict investigation,
the Essene would admit the numerous candidates who aspired to unite themselves
with his coenobitic society, in which no one, according to Pliny’s expression,
was born but which was always full, he would never seek proselytes, or use any
active means for disseminating his principles; and it is worthy of remark,
that almost the only quarter of Palestine which Jesus does not appear to have
visited, is the district near the Dead Sea, where the agricultural settlements
of the Essenes were chiefly situated.
While the mass of the community were hostile to Jesus, from his
deficiency in the more imposing, the warlike, the destructive signs of the
Messiah’s power and glory; from his opposition to the genius and principles of
the prevailing sects; from his want of nationality, both as regarded the civil
independence and the exclusive religious superiority of the race of Abraham; and
from their own general incapacity for comprehending the moral sublimity of his
teaching; additional, and not less influential motives conspired to inflame
the animosity of the Rulers. Independent of the dread of innovation,
inseparable from established governments, they could not but discern the utter
incompatibility of their own rule with that of an unworldly Messiah. They must
abdicate at once, if not their civil office as magistrates, unquestionably
their sovereignty over the public mind; retract much which they had been
teaching on the authority of their fathers, the Wise men; and submit, with the
lowest and most ignorant, to be the humble scholars of the new Teacher.
With all this mingled, no doubt, a real apprehension of offending the
Roman power. The Rulers could not but discern on how precarious a foundation
rested not only the feeble shadow of national independence, but even the
national existence. A single mandate from the Emperor, not unlikely to be precipitately
advised and relentlessly carried into execution, on the least appearance of
tumult, by a governor of so decided a character as Pontius Pilate, might
annihilate at once all that remained of their civil, and even of their
religious, constitution. If we look forward we find that, during the whole of
the period which precedes the last Jewish war, the ruling authorities of the
nation pursued the same cautious policy. They were driven into the insurrection,
not by their own deliberate determination, but by the uncontrollable fanaticism
of the populace. To every overture of peace they lent a willing ear; and their
hopes of an honourable capitulation, by which the
city might be spared the horrors of a storm, and the Temple be secured from desecration,
did not expire till their party was thinned by the remorseless sword of the
Idumean and the Assassin, and the Temple had become the stronghold of one of
the contending factions. Religious fears might seem to countenance this
trembling apprehension of the Roman power, for there is strong ground, both in
Josephus and the Talmudic writings, for believing that the current
interpretation of the prophecies of Daniel designated the Romans as the predestined
destroyers of the Theocracy. And however the more enthusiastic
might look upon this only as one of the inevitable calamities which were to
precede the appearance and final triumph of the Messiah, the less fervid faith
of the older and more commanding party was far more profoundly impressed with
the dread of the impending ruin, than elated with the remoter hope of final
restoration. The advice of Caiaphas, therefore, to sacrifice even an innocent
man for the safety of the state, would appear to them both sound and reasonable
policy.
We must imagine this suspense, this agitation of the crowded city, or we
shall be unable fully to enter into the beauty of the calm and unostentatious
dignity with which Jesus pursues his course through the midst of this terrific
tumult. He preserves the same equable composure in the triumphant procession
into the Temple and in the Hall of Pilate. Everything indicates his tranquil
conviction of his inevitable death; He foretells it with all its afflicting circumstances
to his disciples, incredulous almost to the last to this alone of their
Master’s declarations. At every step He feels himself more inextricably within
the toils; yet He moves onwards with the self-command of a willing sacrifice,
constantly dwelling with a profound, though chastened, melancholy on his
approaching fate, and intimating that his death was necessary, in order to
secure indescribable benefits for his faithful followers and for mankind. Yet
there is no needless exasperation of his enemies; He observes the utmost
prudence, though He seems so fully aware that his prudence can be of no avail;
He never passes the night within the city; and it is only by the treachery of
one of his followers that the Sanhedrin at length make themselves masters of
his person.
The Son of Man had now arrived at Bethany, and we must endeavour to trace his future proceedings in a consecutive
course. But if it has been difficult to dispose the events of the life of
Jesus in the order of time, this difficulty increases as we approach its
termination. However embarrassing this fact to those who require something more
than historical credibility in the evangelical narratives, to those who are
content with a lower and more rational view of their authority, it throws not
the least suspicion on their truth. It might almost seem, at the present
period, that the Evangelists, confounded as it were, and stunned with the deep
sense of the importance of the crisis, however they might remember the facts,
had in some degree perplexed and confused their regular order.
At Bethany the Lord took up his abode in the house of Simon, who had
been a leper, and, it is no improbably conjectured, had been healed by the
wonderful power of Jesus. Simon was, in all likelihood, closely connected,
though the degree of relationship is not intimated, with the family of
Lazarus, for Lazarus was present at the feast, and it was conducted by Martha
his sister. The fervent devotion of their sister Mary had been already
indicated on two occasions; and this passionate zeal, now heightened by
gratitude for the recent restoration of her brother to life, evinced itself in
her breaking an alabaster box of very costly perfume, and anointing the Saviour’s head, according, as we have seen on a former
occasion, to a usage not uncommon in Oriental banquets. It is possible that
vague thoughts of the royal character, which she expected that Jesus was about
to assume, might mingle with those purer feelings which led her to pay this
prodigal homage to his person. The mercenary character of Judas now begins to
be developed. Judas had been appointed a kind of treasurer, and entrusted with
the care of the common purse, from which the scanty necessities of the humble
and temperate society had been defrayed, and the rest reserved for distribution
among the poor. Some others of the disciples had been seized with astonishment
at this unusual and seemingly unnecessary waste of so valuable a commodity: but
Judas broke out into open remonstrance, and, concealing his own avarice under the veil of charity for the poor, protested against the wanton prodigality.
Jesus contented himself with praising the pious and affectionate devotion of
the woman, and, reverting to his usual tone of calm melancholy, declared that
unknowingly she had performed a more pious office, the anointing his body for
his burial.
The intelligence of the arrival of Jesus at Bethany spread rapidly to
the city, from which it was not quite two miles distant. Multitudes thronged
forth to behold him: nor was Jesus the only object of interest, for the fame of
the resurrection of Lazarus was widely disseminated, and the strangers in
Jerusalem were scarcely less anxious to behold a man who had undergone a fate
so unprecedented.
Lazarus, thus an object of intense interest to the people, became one of no less jealousy to the ruling authorities, the enemies of Jesus.
His death was likewise decreed, and the magistracy only awaited a favourable opportunity for the execution of their edicts.
But the Sanhedrin is at first obliged to remain in overawed and trembling
inactivity. The popular sentiment is so decidedly in favour of Jesus of Nazareth, that they dare not venture to oppose his open, his
public, his triumphant procession into the city, or his entrance amid the
applauses of the wondering multitude into the Temple itself. On the morning of
the second day of the week Jesus is seen, in the face of day, approaching one
of the gates of the city which looked towards Mount Olivet. In avowed
conformity to a celebrated prophecy of Zechariah, he appears riding on the yet
unbroken colt of an ass; the procession of his followers, as he descends the
side of the Mount of Olives, escort him with royal honours,
and with acclamations expressive of the title of the Messiah, towards the city:
many of them had been witnesses of the resurrection of Lazarus, and no doubt
proclaimed, as they advanced, this extraordinary instance of power. They are
met by another band advancing from the city, who receive him with the same
homage, strew branches of palm and even their garments in his way; and the
Sanhedrin could not but hear within the courts of the Temple, the appalling
proclamation, “Hosannah! Blessed is the King of Israel, that cometh in the name
of the Lord.” Some of the Pharisees, who had mingled with the multitude,
remonstrate with Jesus, and command him to silence what to their ears sounded
like the profane, the impious adulation of his partisans. Uninterrupted, and
only answering that if these were silent, the stones on which He trod would
bear witness, Jesus still advances; the acclamations become yet louder; He
is hailed as the Son of David, the rightful heir of David’s kingdom; and the
desponding Pharisees, alarmed at the complete mastery over the public mind
which He appears to possess, withdraw for the present their fruitless opposition. On the declivity of the hill he
pauses to behold the city at his feet, and something of that emotion, which
afterwards is expressed with much greater fulness, betrays itself in a few
brief and emphatic sentences, expressive of the future miserable destiny of the
devoted Jerusalem.
The whole crowded
city is excited by this increasing tumult. Anxious inquiries about the cause,
and the intelligence that it is the entrance of Jesus of Nazareth into the
city, still heighten the universal suspense. And even in the Temple itself,
where perhaps the religion of the place, or the expectation of some public
declaration, or perhaps of some immediate sign of his power, had caused a
temporary silence among his older followers, the children prolong the
acclamations.. Then, too, as the sick, the infirm, the afflicted with different
maladies, are brought to him to be healed, and are restored at once to health
or to the use of their faculties, at every instance of the power and goodness
of Jesus the same uncontrolled acclamations from the younger part of the
multitude are renewed with increasing fervour.
Those of the Sanhedrin who are present, though they do not attempt at
this immediate juncture to stem the torrent, venture to remonstrate against the
disrespect to the sanctity of the Temple, and demand of Jesus to silence what
to their feelings sounded like profane violation of the sacred edifice. Jesus
replies, as usual, with an apt quotation from the sacred writings, which
declared that even the voices of children and infants might be raised, without
reproof, in praise and thanksgiving to God.
Among the multitudes of Jews who assembled at the Passover, there were
usually many proselytes who were called Greeks (a term in Jewish language of as
wide signification as that of Barbarians with the Greeks, and including all who
were not of Jewish descent). Some of this class, carried away by the general
enthusiasm towards Jesus, expressed an anxious desire to be admitted to his
presence. It is not improbable that these proselytes might be permitted to
advance no farther than the division in the outer Court of the Gentiles, where
certain palisades were erected, with inscriptions in various languages,
prohibiting the entrance of all foreigners; or even if they were allowed
to pass this barrier, they may have been excluded from the Court of Israel,
into which Jesus may have passed. By the intervention of two of the Apostles,
their desire is made known to Jesus; who, perhaps as he passes back through the
outward Court, permits them to approach. No doubt as these proselytes shared in
the general excitement towards the person of Jesus, so they shared in the
general expectation of the immediate, the instantaneous commencement of the splendour, the happiness of the Messiah’s kingdom. To their
surprise, either in answer to or anticipating their declaration to this effect,
instead of enlarging on the glory of that great event, the somewhat ambiguous language
of Jesus dwells, at first, on his approaching fate, on the severe trial which
awaits the devotion of his followers; yet on the necessity of this humiliation,
this dissolution to his final glory, and to the triumph of his beneficent
religion. It rises at length into a devotional address to the Father, to bring
immediately to accomplishment all his promises, for the glorification of the
Messiah. As he was yet speaking, a rolling sound was heard in the heavens,
which the unbelieving part of the multitude heard only as an accidental burst
of thunder: to others, however, it seemed an audible, a distinct, or, according
to those who adhere to the strict letter, the articulate voice of an angel, proclaiming the
divine sanction to the presage of his future glory. Jesus continues his
discourse in a tone of profounder mystery, yet evidently declaring the immediate
discomfiture of the “Prince of this world,” the adversary of the Jewish people
and of the human race, his own departure from the world, and the important
consequences which were to ensue from that departure. After his death, his
religion was to be more attractive than during his life. “ I, if I be lifted up
from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” Among the characteristics of the
Messiah which were deeply rooted in the general belief, was the eternity of his
reign; once revealed, he was revealed for ever; once
established in their glorious, their paradisiacal state, the people of God, the
subjects of the kingdom, were to be liable to no change, no vicissitude. The
allusions of Jesus to his departure, clashing with this notion of his perpetual
presence, heightened their embarrassment; and, leaving them in this state of
mysterious suspense, he withdrew unperceived from the multitude, and retired
again with his own chosen disciples to the village of Bethany.
The second morning Jesus returned to Jerusalem. A fig-tree stood by the
wayside, of that kind well known in Palestine, which during a mild winter
preserve their leaves, and with the early spring put forth and ripen their
fruit. Jesus approached the tree to pluck the fruit; but finding that it bore
none, condemned it to perpetual barrenness.
This transaction is remarkable, as almost the only instance in which
Jesus adopted that symbolic mode of teaching by action, rather than by language,
so peculiar to the East, and so frequently exemplified in the earlier books,
especially of the Prophets. For it is difficult to conceive any reason either
for the incident itself, or for its admission into the evangelic narrative at a
period so important, unless it was believed to convey some profounder meaning.
The close moral analogy, the accordance with the common phraseology between
the barren tree, disqualified by its hardened and sapless state from bearing
its natural produce, and the Jewish nation, equally incapable of bearing the
fruits of Christian goodness, formed a most expressive, and, as it were, living
apologue.
On this day, Jesus renews the remarkable scene which had taken place at
the first Passover. The customary traffic, the tumult and confusion, which his
authority had restrained for a short time, had been renewed in the courts of
the Temple; and Jesus again expelled the traders from the holy precincts, and,
to secure the silence and the sanctity of the whole enclosure, prohibited the
carrying any vessel through the Temple courts. Through the whole of this day
the Sanhedrin, as it were, rested on their arms; they found, with still
increasing apprehension, that every hour the multitude crowded with more and
more anxious interest around the Prophet of Nazareth; his authority over the
Temple courts seems to have been admitted without resistance; and probably the
assertion of the violated dignity of the Temple was a point on which the devotional
feelings would have been so strongly in favour of the
Redeemer, that it would have been highly dangerous and unwise for the
magistrates to risk even the appearance of opposition or of dissatisfaction.
The third morning arrived. As Jesus passed to the Temple, the fig-tree,
the symbol of the Jewish nation, stood utterly withered and dried up. But, as
it were, to prevent the obvious inference from the immediate fulfilment of his
malediction—almost the only destructive act during his whole public career, and
that on a tree by the wayside, the common property—Jesus mingles with his
promise of power to his Apostles to perform acts as extraordinary, the
strictest injunctions to the milder spirit inculcated by his precept and his
example. Their prayers were to be for the pardon, not for the providential
destruction, of their enemies.
The Sanhedrin had now
determined on the necessity of making an effort to discredit Jesus with the more
and more admiring multitude. A deputation arrives to demand by what authority
He had taken up his station, and was daily teaching in the Temple, had expelled
the traders, and, in short, had usurped a complete superiority over the
accredited and established instructors of the people? The self-command and
promptitude of Jesus caught them, as it were, in their own toils, and reduced
them to the utmost embarrassment. The claim of the Baptist to the prophetic
character had been generally admitted, and even passionately asserted; his
death had, no doubt, still further endeared him to all who detested the
Herodian rule, or who admired the uncompromising boldness with which he had
condemned iniquity even upon the throne. The popular feeling would have
resented an impeachment on his prophetic dignity. When, therefore, Jesus demanded
their judgement as to the Baptism of John, they had but the alternative of
acknowledging its divine sanction, and so tacitly condemning themselves for not
having submitted to his authority, and even for not admitting his testimony in favour of Jesus; or of exposing themselves, by denying it,
to popular insult and fury. The self-degrading confession of their ignorance
placed Jesus immediately on the vantage ground, and at once annulled their
right to question or to decide upon the authority of his mission—that right which
was considered to be vested in the Sanhedrin. They were condemned to listen to
language still more humiliating. In two striking parables, that of the Lord of
the Vineyard, and of the Marriage Feast, Jesus not obscurely intimated the rejection
of those labourers who had been first summoned to the
work of God; of those guests who had been first invited to the nuptial banquet;
and the substitution of meaner and most unexpected guests or subjects in their
place.
The fourth day arrived; and once more Jesus appeared in the Temple with
a still increasing concourse of followers. No unfavourable impression had yet been made on the popular mind by his adversaries; his career
is yet unchecked; his authority unshaken.
His enemies are now fully aware of their own desperate position. The
apprehension of the progress of Jesus unites the most discordant parties into
one formidable conspiracy; the Pharisaic, the Sadducaic,
and the Herodian factions agree to make common cause against the common enemy:
the two national sects, the Traditionists and the Anti-traditionists, no longer
hesitate to accept the aid of the foreign or Herodian faction. Some
suppose the Herodians to have been the officers and attendants on the court of
Herod, then present at Jerusalem; but the appellation more probably includes
all those who, estranged from the more inveterate Judaism of the nation, and having,
in some degree, adopted Grecian habits and opinions, considered the peace of
the country best secured by the government of the descendants of Herod, with
the sanction and under the protection of Rome. They were the foreign faction,
and as such, in general, in direct opposition to the Pharisaic, or national
party. But the success of Jesus, however at present it threatened more
immediately the ruling authorities in Jerusalem, could not but endanger the
Galilean government of Herod. The object, therefore, was to implicate Jesus
with the faction, or at least to tempt him into acknowledging opinions similar
to those of the Galilean demagogue—a scheme the more likely to work on the
jealousy of the Roman government, if it was at the last Passover that the
apprehension of tumult among the Galilean strangers had justified, or appeared
to justify, the massacre perpetrated by Pilate. The plot was laid with great
subtlety; for either way Jesus, it appeared, must commit himself. The great
test of the Galilean opinion was, the lawfulness of tribute to a foreign
power; which Judas had boldly declared to be not merely a base compromise of
the national independence, but an impious infringement on the first principles
of their theocracy. But the independence, if not the universal dominion, of the
Jews was inseparably bound up with the popular belief in the Messiah. Jesus,
then, would either, on the question of the lawfulness of tribute to Caesar,
confirm the bolder doctrines of the Galilean, and so convict himself before
the Romans as one of that dangerous faction; or he would admit its legality,
and so annul at once all his claims to the character of the Messiah. Not in the
least thrown off his guard by the artful courtesy, or rather the adulation of
their address, Jesus appeals to the current coin of the country, which, bearing
the impress of the Roman Emperor, was in itself a recognition of Roman
supremacy.
The Herodian or political party thus discomfited, the Sadducees advanced
to the encounter. Nothing can appear more captious or frivolous than their
question with regard to the future possession of a wife in another state of
being, who had been successively married to seven brothers, according to the
Levirate law. But, perhaps, considered in reference to the opinions of the
time, it will seem less extraordinary. The Sadducees, no doubt, had heard that
the resurrection and the life to come had formed an essential tenet in the
teaching of Jesus. They concluded that his notions on these subjects were those
generally prevalent among the people. But, if the later Rabbinical notions of
the happiness of the renewed state of existence were current, or even known in
their general outline, nothing could be more gross or unspiritual: if less
voluptuous, they were certainly not less strange and unreasonable than those
which perhaps were derived from the same source—the Paradise of Mohammed. The
Sadducees were accustomed to contend with these disputants, whose paradisiacal
state, to be established by the Messiah, after the resurrection, was but the
completion of those temporal promises in the book of Deuteronomy, a perpetuity
of plenty, fertility, and earthly enjoyment. The
answer of Jesus, while it declares the certainty of another state of existence,
carefully purifies it from all these corporeal and earthly images; and assimilates
man, in another state of existence, to a higher order of beings. And in his
concluding inference from the passage in Exodus, in which God is described as
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the allusion may perhaps be still kept
up. The temporal and corporeal resurrection, according to the common Pharisaic
belief, was to take place only after the coming of the Messiah; yet their
reverence for the fathers of the race, their holy ancestors, would scarcely
allow even the Sadducee to suppose their total extinction. The actual, the pure
beatitude of the Patriarchs, was probably an admitted point; if not formally
decided by their teachers, implicitly received, and fervently embraced by the
religious feelings of the whole people. But if, according to the Sadducaic principle, the soul did not exist independent of
the body, even Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had shared the common fate, the favour of God had ceased with their earthly dissolution ;
nor in the time of Moses could He be justly described as the God of those who
in death had sunk into utter annihilation.
Although now engaged in a common cause, the hostility of the Pharisaic party to the Sadducees could not but derive gratification from their public discomfiture. One Scribe of their sect is so struck by the superiority of Jesus, that, though still with something of an insidious design, he demands in what manner he should rank the commandments, which in popular belief were probably of equal dignity and importance? But when Jesus comprises the whole of religion under the simple precepts of the love of God and the love of man, the Scribe is so struck with the sublimity of the language, that he does not hesitate openly to espouse his doctrines.
Paralyse by this desertion, and warned
by the discomfiture of the two parties which had preceded them in dispute with
Jesus, the Pharisees appear to have stood wavering and uncertain how to speak
or act. Jesus seizes the opportunity of still further weakening their authority
with the assembled multitude; and, in his turn, addresses an embarrassing
question as to the descent of the Messiah. The Messiah, according to the
universal belief, would be the heir and representative of David: Jesus, by a
reference to the Second Psalm, which was generally considered prophetic
of the Redeemer, forces them to confess that, even according to their own
authority, the kingdom of the Messiah was to be of far higher dignity, far
wider extent, and administered by a more exalted sovereign than David, for
even David himself, by their own admission, had called him his Lord.
The Pharisees withdrew in mortified silence, and for that time abandoned
all hope of betraying him into any incautious or unpopular denial by their
captious questions. But they withdrew unmoved by the wisdom, unattracted by the
beauty, unsubdued by the authority of Jesus.
After some delay, during which took place the beautiful incident of his approving the charity of the poor widow, who cast her mite into the treasury of the Temple, he addressed the wondering multitude (“for the common people heard him gladly”) in a grave and solemn denunciation against the tyranny, the hypocrisy, the bigoted attachment to the most minute observances, and at the same time the total blindness to the spirit of religion, which actuated that great predominant party. He declared them possessed by the same proud and inhuman spirit, which had perpetually bedewed the city with the blood of the Prophets. Jerusalem had thus for ever rejected the mercy of God.
This appalling condemnation was, as it were, the final declaration of
war against the prevailing religion; it declared that the new doctrines could
not harmonise with minds so inveterately wedded to
their own narrow bigotry. But even yet the people were not altogether estranged
from Jesus, and in that class in which the Pharisaic interest had hitherto
despotically ruled, it appeared as it were trembling for its existence.
And now everything indicated the approaching, the immediate crisis. Although the populace were so decidedly, up to the present instant, in his favour—though many of the ruling party were only withholden by the dread of that awful sentence of excommunication, which inflicted civil, almost religious death, from avowing themselves his disciples — yet Jesus never entered the Temple again. The next time he appeared before the people was as a prisoner, as a condemned malefactor. As he left the Temple, a casual expression of admiration from some of his followers, at the magnificence and solidity of the building and the immense size of the stones of which it was formed, called forth a prediction of its impending ruin; which was expanded, to four of his Apostles, into a more detailed and circumstantial description of its appalling fate, as he sat, during the evening, upon the Mount of Olives.
It is impossible to conceive a spectacle of greater natural or moral sublimity than the Saviour seated on the slope of the Mount of Olives, and thus looking down, almost for the last time, on the Temple and city of Jerusalem, crowded as it then was with near three millions of worshippers. It was evening, and the whole irregular outline of the city rising from the deep glens, which encircled it on all sides, might be distinctly traced. The sun, the significant emblem of the great Fountain of moral light, to which Jesus and his faith had been perpetually compared, may be imagined sinking behind the western hills, while its last rays might linger on the broad and massy fortifications on Mount Sion, on the stately palace of Herod, on the square tower, the Antonia, at the corner of the Temple, and on the roof of the Temple, fretted all over with golden spikes, which glittered like fire; while below, the colonnades and lofty gates would cast their broad shadows over the courts, and afford that striking contrast between vast masses of gloom and gleams of the richest light, which only an evening scene, like the present, can display. Nor, indeed (even without the sacred and solemn associations connected with the Holy City), would it be easy to conceive any natural situation in the world of more impressive grandeur, or likely to be seen with greater advantage under the influence of such accessories, than that of Jerusalem, seated, as it was, upon hills of irregular height, intersected by bold ravines, and with still loftier mountains in the distance; itself formed, in its most conspicuous parts, of gorgeous ranges of Eastern architecture, in all its lightness, luxuriance, and variety. The effect may have been heightened by the rising of the slow volumes of smoke from the evening sacrifices, while even at the distance of the slope of Mount Olivet the silence may have been faintly broken by the hymns of the worshippers.
Yet the fall of that splendid edifice was inevitable; the total demolition of all those magnificent and time-hallowed structures might not be averted. It was necessary to the complete development of the designs of Almighty Providence for the welfare of mankind in the promulgation of Christianity. Independent of all other reasons, the destruction certainly of the Temple, and if not of the city, at least of the city as the centre and metropolis of a people, the only true and exclusive worshippers of the one Almighty Creator, seemed essential to the progress of the new faith. The universal and comprehensive religion to be promulgated by Christ and his Apostles, was grounded on the abrogation of all local claims to peculiar sanctity, of all distinctions of one nation above another as possessing any especial privilege in the knowledge or favour of the Deity. The time was come when “neither in Jerusalem nor on the mountain of Gerizim,” was the great Universal Spirit to be worshipped with circumscribed or local homage. As long, however, as the Temple on Mount Moriah remained, hallowed by the reverence of ages, sanctified, according to the general belief, for perpetuity, by the especial command of God as his peculiar dwelling-place; so long, among the Jews at least, and even among other nations, the true principle of Christian worship might be counteracted by the notion of the inalienable sanctity of this one place. Judaism would scarcely be entirely annulled, so long as the Temple rose in its original majesty and veneration.
Yet, notwithstanding this absolute necessity for its destruction,
notwithstanding that it thus stood, as it were, in the way of the progress of
human advancement and salvation, the Son of Man does not contemplate its ruin
without emotion. And in all the superhuman beauty of the character of Jesus,
nothing is more affecting and impressive than the profound melancholy with
which He foretells the future desolation of the city, which, before two days
were passed, was to reek with his own blood. Nor
should we do justice to this most remarkable incident in his life, if we should
consider it merely as a sudden emotion of compassion, as the natural sensation
of sadness at the decay or dissolution of that which has long worn the aspect
of human grandeur. It seems rather a wise and far-sighted consideration, not
merely of the approaching guilt and future penal doom of the city, but of the
remoter moral causes, which, by forming the national character, influenced the
national destiny; the long train of events, the wonderful combination of circumstances,
which had gradually wrought the Jewish people to that sterner frame of mind,
too soon to display itself with such barbarous, such fatal ferocity. Jesus
might seem not merely to know what was in man, but how it entered into man’s
heart and mind. His was divine charity, enlightened by infinite wisdom.
In fact, there was an intimate moral connexion between the murder of Jesus and the doom of the Jewish city. It was the same
national temperament, the same characteristic disposition of the people, which
now morally disqualified them “from knowing,” in the language of Christ, “the
things which belonged unto their peace,” which forty years afterwards committed
them in their deadly and ruinous struggle with the masters of the world.
Christianity alone could have subdued or mitigated that stubborn fanaticism which
drove them at length to their desperate collision with the arms of Rome. As
Christians, the Jewish people might have subsided into peaceful subjects of
the universal empire. They might have lived, as the Christians did, with the
high and inalienable consolations of faith and hope under the heaviest oppressions
; and calmly awaited the time when their holier and more beneficent ambition
might be gratified by the submission of the lords of the world to the religious
dominion founded by Christ and his Apostles. They would have slowly won that
victory by the patient heroism of martyrdom and the steady perseverance in the
dissemination of their faith, which it was madness to hope that they could ever
obtain by force of arms. As Jews, they were almost sure, sooner or later, to
provoke the implacable vengeance of their foreign sovereigns. The same vision
of worldly dominion, the same obstinate expectation of a temporal Deliverer,
which made them unable to comprehend the nature of the redemption to be wrought
by the presence, and the kingdom to be established by the power, of Christ, continued
to the end to mingle with their wild and frantic resistance.
In the rejection and murder of Jesus, the Rulers, as their interests and
authority were more immediately endangered, were more deeply implicated than
the people; but unless the mass of Jews, the people had been blinded by these
false notions of the Messiah, they would not have demanded, or at least, with
the general voice, assented to the sacrifice of Jesus. The progress of Jesus at
the present period in the public estimation, his transient popularity, arose
from the enforced admiration of his commanding demeanour,
the notoriety of his wonderful works, perhaps, for such language is always
acceptable to the common ear, from his bold animadversions on the existing
authorities; but it was no doubt supported in the mass of the populace by a
hope, that even yet He would conform to the popular views of the Messiah’s
character. Their present brief access of faith would not have stood long
against the continued disappointment of that hope: and it was no doubt by
working on the reaction of this powerful feeling, that the Sanhedrin were able
so suddenly, and, it almost appears, so entirely, to change the prevailing
sentiment. Whatever the proverbial versatility of the popular mind, there must
have been some chord strung to the most sensitive pitch, the slightest touch of
which would vibrate through the whole frame of society, and madden at least a
commanding majority to their blind concurrence in this revolting iniquity. Thus
in the Jewish nation, but more especially in the prime movers, the Rulers and
the heads of the Pharisaic party, the murder of Jesus was an act of unmitigated
cruelty, but, as we have said, it arose out of the generally fierce and bigoted
spirit, which morally incapacitated the whole people from discerning the
evidence of his mission from heaven, in his acts of divine goodness as well as
of divine power. It was an act of religious fanaticism ; they thought, in the
language of Jesus himself, that they were “doing God service” when they slew
the Master, as much as afterwards when they persecuted his followers.
When however the last, and, as far as the existence of the nation, the
most fatal display of this fanaticism took place, it was accidentally allied
with nobler motives, with generous impatience of oppression, and the patriotic
desire of national independence. However desperate and frantic the struggle
against such irresistible power, the unprecedented tyranny of the later Roman
procurators, Felix, Albinus, and Florus, might
almost have justified the prudence of manly and resolute insurrection. Yet in
its spirit and origin it was the same; and it is well known that even to the
last, during the most sanguinary and licentious tumults in the Temple as well
as the city, they never entirely lost sight of a deliverance from Heaven: God,
they yet thought, would interpose in behalf of his chosen people. In short,
the same moral state of the people (for the Rulers for obvious reasons were
less forward in the resistance to the Romans), the same temperament and
disposition now led them to reject Jesus and demand the release of Barabbas,
which, forty years later, provoked the unrelenting vengeance of Titus, and
deluged their streets with the blood of their own citizens. Even after the
death of Jesus, this spirit might have been allayed, but only by a complete
abandonment of all the motives which led to his crucifixion—by the general
reception of Christianity in all its meekness, humility, and purity—by the
tardy substitution of the hope of a moral, for that of temporal dominion. This
unhappily was not the case: but it belongs to Jewish history to relate how the
circumstances of the times, instead of assuaging or subduing, exasperated the
people into madness; instead of predisposing to Christianity, confirmed the
inveterate Judaism, and led at length to the accomplishment of their
anticipated doom.
Altogether, then, it is evident, that it was this brooding hope of
sovereignty, at least of political independence, moulded up with religious enthusiasm, and lurking, as it were, in the very heart’s core
of the people, which rendered it impossible that the pure, the gentle, the humane,
the unworldly and comprehensive doctrines of Jesus should be generally
received, or his character appreciated, by a nation in that temper of mind; and
the nation who could thus incur the guilt of his death, was prepared to precipitate
itself to such a fate as at length it suffered.
Hence political
sagacity might, perhaps, have anticipated the crisis, which could only be
averted, by that which was morally impossible, the simultaneous conversion of
the whole people to Christianity. Yet the distinctness, the minuteness, the
circumstantial accuracy, with which the prophetic outline of the siege and fall
of Jerusalem is drawn, bear, perhaps, greater evidence of more than human
foreknowledge, than any other in the sacred volume : and in fact this profound
and far-sighted wisdom, this anticipation of the remote political consequences
of the reception or rejection of his doctrines, supposing Jesus but an ordinary
human being, would be scarcely less extraordinary than prophecy itself.
Still though
determined, at all hazards, to suppress the growing party of Jesus, the
Sanhedrin were greatly embarrassed as to their course of proceeding. Jesus
invariably passed the night without the walls, and only appeared during the
daytime, though with the utmost publicity, in the Temple. His seizure in the
Temple, especially during the festival, would almost inevitably lead to tumult,
and (since it was yet doubtful on which side the populace would array
themselves) tumult as inevitably to the prompt interference of the Roman
authority. The Procurator, on the slightest indication of disturbance, without
inquiring into the guilt or innocence of either party, might coerce both with
equal severity; or, even without further examination, let loose the guard, always
mounted in the gallery which connected the fortress of Antonia with the
north-western corner of the Temple, to mow down both the conflicting parties in
indiscriminate havoc. He might thus mingle the blood of all present, as he had
done that of the Galileans, with the sacrificial offerings. To discover then
where Jesus might be arrested without commotion or resistance from his
followers, so reasonably to be apprehended, the treachery of one of his more
immediate disciples was absolutely necessary; yet this was an event,
considering the commanding influence possessed by Jesus over his followers,
rather to be desired than expected.
On a sudden,
however, appeared within their court one of the chosen Twelve, with a voluntary
offer of assisting them in the apprehension of his Master. Much
ingenuity has been displayed by some recent writers in attempting to palliate,
or rather to account for, this extraordinary conduct of Judas; but the language
in which Jesus spoke of the crime, appears to confirm the common opinion of its
enormity. It has been suggested, either that Judas might expect Jesus to put
forth his power, even after his apprehension, to elude or to escape from his
enemies; and thus his avarice might calculate on securing the reward without
being an accomplice in absolute murder, thus at once betraying his Master and
defrauding his employers. According to others still higher motives may have
mingled with his love of gain : he may have supposed, that by thus involving
Jesus in difficulties otherwise inextricable, he would leave him only the
alternative of declaring himself openly and authoritatively to be the Messiah,
and so force him to the tardy accomplishment of the ambitious visions of his
partisans. It is possible that the traitor may not have contemplated, or may
not have permitted himself clearly to contemplate, the ultimate consequences of
his crime: he may have indulged the vague hope, that if Jesus were really the
Messiah, he bore, if we may venture the expression, “a charmed life,” and was
safe in his inherent immortality (a notion in all likelihood inseparable from
that of the Deliverer) from the malice of his enemies. If He were not, the crime
of his betrayal would not be of very great importance. There were other motives
which would concur with the avarice of Judas: the rebuke which he had received
when he expostulated about the waste of the ointment, if it had not excited any
feeling of exasperation against his Master, at least showed that his character
was fully understood by the Saviour. He must have
felt himself out of his element among the more honest and sincere disciples; nor
can he have been actuated by any real or profound veneration for the exquisite
perfection of a character so opposite to his own. And thus insincere and
doubting, he may have shrunk from the approaching crisis, and as he would
seize any means of extricating himself from that cause which had now become so
full of danger, his covetousness would direct him to those means which would at
once secure his own personal safety, and obtain the price, the thirty pieces
of silver set by public proclamation on the head of Jesus.
Nor is the desperate access of remorse, which led to the public restitution of the reward, and to the suicide of the traitor, irreconcileable with the unmitigated heinousness of the treachery. Men coolly meditate a crime, of which the actual perpetration overwhelms them with horror. The general detestation, of which, no doubt, Judas could not but be conscious, not merely among his former companions, the followers of Jesus, but even among the multitude ; the supercilious coldness of the Sanhedrin, who, having employed him as their instrument, treat his recantation with the most contemptuous indifference, might overstrain the firmest, and work upon the basest mind: and even the unexampled sufferings and tranquil endurance of Jesus, however the betrayer may have calmly surveyed them when distant, and softened and subdued by his imagination, when present to his mind in their fearful reality, forced by the busy tongue of rumour upon his ears, perhaps not concealed from his sight, might drive him to desperation, little short of insanity.
It was on the last
evening but one before the death of Jesus that the fatal compact was made: the next
day, the last of his life, Jesus determines on returning to the city to
celebrate the Feast of the Passover: his disciples are sent to occupy a room
prepared for the purpose. His conduct and language before and during the whole
repast clearly indicate his preparation for inevitable death. His washing the
feel of the disciples, his prediction of his betrayal, his intimation to Judas
that he is fully aware of his design, his quiet dismissal of the traitor from
the assembly, his institution of the second characteristic ordinance of the new
religion, his allusions in that rite to the supper. breaking of his body, and
the pouring forth of his blood, his prediction of the denial of Peter, his
final address to his followers, and his prayer before lie left the chamber, are
all deeply impregnated with the solemn melancholy, yet calm and unalterable composure,
with which He looks forward to all the terrible details of his approaching, his
almost immediate, sufferings. To his followers He makes, as it were, the valedictory
promise, that his religion would not expire at his death, that his place would
be filled by a mysterious Comforter, who was to teach, to guide, to console—the
promise of the Holy Ghost, which was to be great Principle, and to the end the
Life of Christianity.
This calm assurance
of approaching death in Jesus is the more striking when contrasted with the
inveterately Jewish notions of the Messiah’s kingdom, which even yet possess
the minds of the Apostles. They are now fiercely contesting for their
superiority in that earthly dominion, which even yet they suppose on the eve of
its commencement. Nor does Jesus at this time altogether correct these
erroneous notions, but in some degree falls into the prevailing language, to
assure them of the distinguished reward which awaited his more faithful
disciples. After inculcating the utmost humility by an allusion to the lowly
fraternal service which He had just before performed in washing their feet, He
describes the happiness and glory which they are at length to attain, by the
strong, and no doubt familiar, imagery, of their being seated on twelve
thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
The festival was
closed according to the usage with the second part of the Hallel, the Psalms,
from the 113th to the 118th inclusive, of which the former were customarily
sung at the commencement, the latter at the end, of the paschal supper. Jesus
with his disciples again departed from the room in the city where the feast had
been held, probably down the Street of the Temple, till they came to the
valley: they crossed the brook of Kidron, and began to ascend the slope of the
Mount of Olives. Within the city no open space was left for gardens; but the
whole neighbourhood of Jerusalem was laid out in inclosures for the convenience and enjoyment of the
inhabitants. The historian of the war relates, not without feelings of
poignant sorrow, the havoc made among these peaceful retreats by the devastating
approaches of the Roman army. Jesus turned aside into one of these inclosures, which, it would seem from the
subsequent history, was a place of customary retreat, well known to his
immediate followers. The early hours of the night were passed by him in retired
and devotional meditation, while the weary disciples are overpowered by involuntary
slumber. Thrice Jesus returns to them, and each time He finds them sleeping.
But to him it was no hour of quiet or repose. In the solitary garden of
Gethsemane, Jesus, who in public, though confronting danger and suffering
neither with stoical indifference, nor with the effort of a strong mind working
itself up to the highest moral courage, but with a settled dignity, a calm and
natural superiority, now, as it were, endured the last struggle of human
nature. The whole scene of his approaching trial, his inevitable death, is
present to his mind, and lor an instant He prays to the Almighty Father to
release him from the task, which, although of such importance to the welfare of
mankind, is to be accomplished by such fearful means. The next instant,
however, the momentary weakness is subdued, and though the agony is so severe
that the sweat falls like large drops of blood to the ground, he resigns
himself at once to the will of God. Nothing can heighten the terrors of the
coming scene so much, as its effect, in anticipation, on the mind of Jesus
himself.
The devotions of
Jesus and the slumbers of his followers, as midnight approached, were rudely interrupted.
Jesus had rejoined his, now awakened, disciples for the last time; he had commanded
them to rise, and be prepared for the terrible event. Still, no doubt,
incredulous of the sad predictions of their Master—still supposing that his
unbounded power would secure him from any attempt of his enemies, they beheld
the garden filled with armed men, and gleaming with lamps and torches. Judas
advances and makes the signal which had been agreed on, saluting his Master
with the customary mark of respect, a kiss on the cheek, for which he receives
the calm but severe rebuke of Jesus for thus treacherously abusing this mark of
familiarity and attachment: “Judas, betrayest thou
the Son of Man with a kiss?” The tranquil dignity of Jesus overawed the
soldiers who first approached; they were most likely ignorant of the service
on which they were employed; and when Jesus announces himself as the object of
their search, they shrink back in astonishment, and fall to the earth. Jesus,
however, covenanting only for the safe dismissal of his followers, readily
surrenders himself to the guard. The fiery indignation of Peter, who had drawn
his sword, and endeavoured, at least by his example,
to incite the few adherents of Jesus to resistance, is repressed by the command
of his Master: his peaceful religion disclaims all alliance with the acts or
the weapons of the violent. The man whose ear had been struck off, was instantaneously
healed; and Jesus, with no more than a brief and calm remonstrance against this
ignominious treatment, against this arrestation, not in the face of day, in the
public Temple, but at night, by men with arms in their hands, as though He had
been a robber, allows himself to be led back, without resistance, into
the city. His panic-stricken followers disperse on all sides, and Jesus is
left, forsaken and alone, amid his mortal enemies.
The caprice, the jealousy, or the prudence, of the Roman government, as has been before observed, had in no point so frequently violated the feelings of the subject nation, as in the deposition of the High Priest, and the appointment of a successor to the office, in whom they might hope to place more implicit confidence. The stubbornness of the people, revolted by this wanton insult, persisted in honouring with the title those whom they could not maintain in the post of authority; all who had borne the office retained, in common language, the appellation of High Priest, if indeed the appellation was not still more loosely applied. Probably the most influential man in Jerusalem at this time was Annas, or , four of whose sons in turn either had been, or were subsequently, elevated to that high dignity now filled by his son-in-law, Caiaphas. The house of Annas was the first place to which Jesus was led, either that the guard might receive further instructions, or perhaps as the place of the greatest security, while the Sanhedrin was hastily summoned to meet at that untimely hour, towards, midnight or soon after, in the house of Caiaphas. Before the houses of the more wealthy in the East, or rather within the outer porch, there is usually a large square open court, in which public business is transacted, particularly by thos e who fill official stations. Into such a court, before the palace of Caiaphas, Jesus was led by the soldiers, and Peter, following unnoticed amid the throng, lingered before the porch until John, who happened to be familiarly known to some of the High Priest’s servants, obtained permission, for his entrance.
The first process
seems to have been a private examination, perhaps while the rest of the Sanhedrin
were assembling, before the High Priest. He demanded of Jesus the nature of his
doctrines, and the character of his disciples. Jesus appealed to the publicity
of his teaching, and referred him to his hearers for an account of the tenets
which He had advanced. He had no secret doctrines, either of tumult or
sedition; He had ever spoken “ in public, in the synagogue, or in the Temple.”
And now the fearful scene of personal insult and violence began. An officer of the High Priest, enraged at the calm composure with which Jesus answered the interrogatory, struck him on the mouth (beating on the mouth, sometimes with the hand, more often with a thong of leather or a slipper, is still a common act of violence in the East). He bore the insult with the same equable placidity:—“If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil; but if well, why smitest thou me?”
The more formal
arraignment began: and, however hurried and tumultuous the meeting, the Sanhedrin,
either desirous that their proceedings should be conducted with regularity, or,
more likely, strictly fettered by the established rules of their court, perhaps
by no means unanimous in their sentiments, were, after all, in the utmost
embarrassment how to obtain a legal capital conviction. Witnesses were summoned,
but the immutable principles of the Law, and the invariable practice of the
tribunal, required, in every case of life and death, the agreement of two
witnesses on some specific charge. Many were at hand, suborned by the enemies
of Jesus, and hesitating at no falsehood; but their testimony was so confused,
or bore so little on any capital charge, that the court was still further
perplexed. At length two witnesses deposed to the misapprehended speech of
Jesus, at his first visit to Jerusalem, relating to the destruction of the
Temple. But even these depositions were so contradictory, that it was scarcely
possible to venture on a conviction upon such loose and incoherent statements. Jesus,
in the meantime, preserved a tranquil and total silence. He neither interrupted
nor questioned the witnesses; He did not condescend to place himself upon his defence. Nothing, therefore, remained but to question the
prisoner, and, if possible, to betray him into criminating himself. The High
Priest, rising to give greater energy to his address, and adjuring him in the
most solemn manner, in the name of God, to answer the truth, demands whether He
is indeed the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Jesus at once
answers in the affirmative, and adds a distinct allusion to the prediction of
Daniel, then universally admitted to refer to the reign of the Messiah. His
words may be thus paraphrased :—“Ye shall know me for that mighty King
described by the prophet; ye shall know me when my great, eternal, and
imperishable kingdom shall be established on the ruins of your Theocracy.”
The secret joy of
the High Priest, though perhaps his devout horror was not altogether insincere,
was disguised by the tone and gesture of religious indignation which he
assumed. He rent his clothes; an act considered indecorous, almost indecent, in
the High Priest, unless justified by an outrage against the established
religion so flagrant and offensive as this declaration of Jesus. He pronounced
that speech (strangely indeed did its lofty tone contrast with the appearance
of the prisoner) to be direct and treasonable blasphemy. The whole court,
either sharing in the indignation, or hurried away by the vehement gesture and
commanding influence of the High Priest, hastily passed the fatal sentence, and
declared Jesus guilty of the capital crime.
The insolent
soldiery (as the Saviour was withdrawn from the
court) had now licence, and perhaps more than the licence, of their superiors to indulge the brutality of
their own dispositions. They began to spit on his face—in the East the most degrading
insult; they blindfolded him, and struck him with the palms of their hands,
and, in their miserable merriment, commanded him to display his prophetic
knowledge by detecting the hand that was raised against him.
The dismay, the
despair, which had seized upon his adherents, is most strongly exemplified by
the denial of Peter. The zealous disciple, after he had obtained admittance
into the hall, stood warming himself, in the cool of the dawning morning,
probably by a kind of brazier. He was first accosted by a female servant, who
charged him with being an accomplice of the prisoner: Peter denied the charge
with vehemence, and retired to the portico or porch in front of the palace. A
second time, another female renewed the accusation: with still more angry
protestations Peter disclaimed all connexion with
his Master; and once, but unregarded, the cock crew.
An hour afterwards, probably about this time, after the formal condemnation,
the charge was renewed by a relation of the man whose ear he had cut off. His
harsh Galilean pronunciation had betrayed him as coming from that province; but
Peter now resolutely confirmed his denial with an oath. It was the usual time
of the second cockcrowing, and again it was distinctly heard. Jesus, who was
probably at that time in the outer hall or porch in the midst of the insulting
soldiery, turned his face towards Peter, who, overwhelmed with shame arid
distress; hastily retreated from the sight of his deserted Master, and wept the
bitter tears of self-reproach and humiliation.
But, although the
Sanhedrin had thus passed their sentence, there remained a serious obstacle
before it could be carried into execution. On the contested point, whether the
Jews, under the Roman government, possessed the power of life and death, it is
not easy to state the question with brevity and distinctness. Notwithstanding
the apparently clear and distinct recognition of the Sanhedrin, that they had
not authority to put any man to death; notwithstanding the remarkable
concurrence of Rabbinical tradition with this declaration, which asserts that
the nation had been deprived of the power of life and death forty years before
the destruction of the city, many of the most learned writers, some indeed of
the ablest of the Fathers, from arguments arising out of the practice of Roman
provincial jurisprudence, and from later facts in the Evangelic history and
that of the Jews, have supposed, that even if, as is doubtful, they were
deprived of this power in civil, they retained it in religious, cases. Some
have added, that even in the latter, the ratification of the sentence by the
Roman governor, or the permission to carry it into execution, was necessary.
According to this view, the object of the Sanhedrin was to bring the case
before Pilate as a civil charge; since the assumption of a royal title and
authority implied a design to cast off the Roman yoke. Or, if they retained the
right of capital punishment in religious cases, it was contrary to usage, in
the proceedings of the Sanhedrin, as sacred as law itself, to order an
execution on the day of preparation for the Passover. As then they dared not
violate that usage, and as delay was in every way dangerous, either from the
fickleness of the people, who, having been momentarily wrought up to a pitch of
deadly animosity against Jesus, might again, by some act of power or goodness
on his part, be carried away back to his side, or, in case of tumult, from the
unsolicited intervention of the Romans, their plainest course was to obtain, if
possible, the immediate support and assistance of the government.
In my own opinion,
formed upon the study of the relation cotemporary Jewish history, the power of
the Sanhedrin, at this period of political change and confusion, on this, as
well as on other points, was altogether undefined. Under the Asmonean princes,
the sovereign, uniting the civil and religious supremacy, the High-Priesthood
with the royal power, exercised, with the Sanhedrin as his council, the highest
political and civil jurisdiction. Herod, whose authority depended on the
protection of Rome, and was maintained by his wealth, and in part by foreign
mercenaries, although he might leave to the Sanhedrin, as the supreme
tribunal, the judicial power, and in ordinary religious cases might admit their
unlimited jurisdiction, yet no doubt watched and controlled their proceedings
with the jealousy of an Asiatic despot, and practically, if not formally, subjected
all their decrees to his revision: at least he would not have permitted any
encroachment on his own supreme authority. In fact, according to the general
tradition of the Jews, he at one time put the whole Sanhedrin to death : and
since, as his life advanced, his tyranny became more watchful and suspicious,
he was more likely to diminish than increase the powers of the national
tribunal. In the short interval of little more than thirty years which had
elapsed since the death of Herod, nearly ten had been occupied by the reign of
Archelaus. On his deposal, the Sanhedrin had probably extended or resumed its
original functions, but still the supreme civil authority rested in the Roman
Procurator. All the commotions excited by the turbulent adventurers who
infested the country, or by Judas the Galilean and his adherents, would fall
under the cognisance of the civil governor, and were
repressed by his direct interference. Nor can capital religious offences have
been of frequent occurrence, since it is evident that the rigour of the Mosaic Law had been greatly relaxed, partly by the feebleness of the
judicial power, partly by the tendency of the age, which ran in a counter
direction to those acts of idolatry against which the Mosaic statutes were
chiefly framed, and left few crimes obnoxious to the extreme penalty. Nor until
the existence of their polity and religion was threatened, first by the progress
of Christ, and afterwards of his religion, would they have cared to be armed
with an authority, which it was rarely, if ever, necessary or expedient to put
forth in its full force..
This, then, may
have been, strictly speaking, a new case, the first which had occurred since
the reduction of Judaea to a Roman province. The Sanhedrin, from whom all
jurisdiction in political cases was withdrawn, and who had no recent precedent
for the infliction of capital punishment on any religious charge, might think
it more prudent (particularly during this hurried and tumultuous proceeding,
which commenced at midnight, and must be despatched with the least possible delay) at once to disclaim an authority which, however
the Roman governor seemed to attribute it to them, he might at last prevent
their carrying into execution. All the other motives then operating on their
minds would concur in favour of this course of
proceeding:—their mistrust of the people, who might attempt a rescue from their
feeble and unrespected officers, and could only, if
they should fall off to the other side, be controlled by the dread of the Roman
military, and the reluctance to profane so sacred a day by a public execution,
of which the odium would thus be cast on their foreign rulers. It was clearly
their policy, at any cost, to secure the intervention of Pilate, as well to
insure the destruction of their victim, as to shift the responsibility from
their own head upon that of the Romans. They might, not unreasonably, suppose
that Pilate, whose relentless disposition had been shown in a recent instance,
would not hesitate, at once, and on their authority, on the first intimation of
a dangerous and growing party, to act without further examination or inquiry;
and without scruple, add one victim more to the robbers or turbulent insurgents
who, it appears, were kept in prison, in order to be executed as a terrible
example at that period of national concourse.
It would seem that
while Jesus was sent in chains to the Praetorium of Pilate, whether in the Antonia,
the fortress adjacent to the Temple, or in part of Herod’s palace, which was
connected with the mountain of the Temple by a bridge over the Tyropaeon, the council adjourned to their usual place of
assemblage, the chamber called Gazith, within the Temple.
A deputation only accompanied the prisoner to explain and support the charge,
and here probably it was, in the Gazith, that, in his
agony of remorse, Judas brought back the
reward that he had received; and when the assembly, to his confession of his
crime in betraying the innocent blood, replied with cold and contumelious unconcern,
he cast down the money on the pavement, and rushed away to close his
miserable life. Nor must the characteristic incident be omitted. The Sanhedrin,
who had not hesitated to reward the basest treachery, probably out of
the Temple funds, scruple to receive back, and to replace in the sacred
Treasury, the price of blood. The sum, therefore, is set apart for the
purchase of a field for the burial of strangers, long known by the name of
Aceldama, the Field of Blood. Such is ever the absurdity, as well as
the heinousness, of crimes committed in the name of religion.
The first emotion
of Pilate at this strange accusation from the great tribunal of the nation,
however rumours of the name and influence of Jesus
had, no doubt, reached his ears, must have been the utmost astonishment. To the
Roman mind the Jewish character was ever an inexplicable problem. But if so
when they were seen scattered about and mingled with the countless diversities
of races of discordant habits, usages, and religions, which thronged to the metropolis
of the world, or were dispersed through the principal cities of the empire; in
their own country, where there was, as it were, a concentration of all their
extraordinary national propensities, they must have appeared, and did appear,
in still stronger opposition to the rest of mankind. To the loose manner in
which religious belief hung on the greater part of the subjects of the Roman
empire, their recluse and uncompromising attachment to the faith of their
ancestors offered the most singular contrast. Everywhere else the temples were
open, the rites free to the stranger by race or country, who rarely scrupled to
do homage to the tutelar deity of the place. The Jewish Temple alone received
indeed, but with a kind of jealous condescension, the offerings even of the
Emperor. Throughout the rest of the world, religious enthusiasm might not be
uncommon; here and there, and in individual cases, particularly in the East,
the priests of some of the mystic religions at times excited a considerable
body of followers, and drove them blindfold to the wildest acts of
superstitious frenzy; but the sudden access of religious fervour was, in general, as transient as violent; the flame burned with rapid and
irresistible fury, and went out of itself. The Jews stood alone (according to
the language and opinion of the Roman world) as a nation of religious fanatics;
and this fanaticism was a deep, a settled, a conscientious feeling, and
formed, an essential and inseparable part, the groundwork of their rigid and
unsocial character.
Yet even to one familiarised by a residence of several years with the
Jewish nation, on the present occasion the conduct of the Sanhedrin must have
appeared utterly unaccountable. This senate, or municipal body, had left to the
Roman governor to discover the danger, and suppress the turbulence, of the
robbers and insurgents against whom Pilate had taken such decisive measures.
Now, however, they appear suddenly seized with an access of loyalty for the
Roman authority and a trembling apprehension of the least invasion of the Roman
title to supremacy. And against whom were they actuated by this unwonted
caution, and burning with this unprecedented zeal? Against a man who, as far as
Pilate could discover, was a harmless, peaceful, and benevolent enthusiast, who had persuaded many of the lower orders to believe in certain unintelligible
doctrines, which seemed to have no relation to the government of the country,
and were, as yet, no way connected with insurrectionary movements. In fact,
Pilate could not but clearly see that they were jealous of the influence
obtained by Jesus over the populace; but whether Jesus or the Sanhedrin
governed the religious feelings and practices of the people, was a matter of
perfect indifference to the Roman supremacy.
The vehemence with
which they pressed the charge, and the charge itself, were equally
inexplicable. When Pilate referred back, as it were, the judgement to themselves,
and offered to leave Jesus to be punished by the existing law; while they
shrank from that responsibility, and disclaimed, at least over such a case and
at such a season, the power of life and death, they did not in the least relax
the vehement earnestness of their prosecution. Jesus was accused of assuming
the title of King of the Jews, and an intention of throwing off the Roman yoke.
But, however little Pilate may have heard or understood his doctrines, the
conduct and demeanour of Christ were so utterly at
variance with such a charge; the only intelligible article in the accusation,
his imputed prohibition of the payment of tribute, so unsupported by proof, as
to bear no weight. This redoubted king had been seized by the emissaries of the
Sanhedrin, perhaps Roman soldiers placed under their orders; had been conveyed
without resistance through the city; his few adherents, mostly unarmed
peasants, had fled at the instant of his capture ; not the slightest tumultuary
movement had taken place during his examination before the High Priest, and the
popular feeling seemed rather at present incensed against him than inclined to
take his part.
To the mind of
Pilate, indeed, accustomed to the disconnexion of
religion and morality, the more striking contradiction in the conduct of the
Jewish rulers may not have appeared altogether so extraordinary. At the moment when
they were violating the great eternal and immutable principles of all
religion, and infringing on one of the positive commandments of their Law, by
persecuting to death an innocent man, they were withholden by religious scruple
from entering the dwelling of Pilate; they were endangering the success of
their cause, lest this intercourse with the unclean stranger should exclude
them from the worship of their God—a worship for which they contracted no
disqualifying defilement by this deed of blood. The deputation stood out the hall of Pilate; and not even their animosity against Jesus could induce
them to depart from that superstitious usage, so as to lend the weight of
their personal appearance to the solemn accusation, or, at all events, to
deprive the hated object of their persecution of any advantage which He might
receive from undergoing his examination without being confronted with his
accusers. Pilate seems to have paid so much respect to their usages, that ho
went out to receive their charge, and to inquire the nature of the crime
for which Jesus was denounced.
The simple question
put to Jesus, on his first interrogatory before Pilate, was, whether He
claimed the title of King of the Jews? The answer of Jesus may be considered as
an appeal to the justice and right feeling of the Governor. “ Sayest thou
this thing of thyself, Examination others
tell it thee of me?” “As Roman Prefect, have you any cause for suspecting
me of ambitious or insurrectionary designs? Do you entertain the least apprehension
of my seditious demeanour? Or are you not rather
adopting the suggestions of my enemies, and lending yourself to their
unwarranted animosity?” Pilate disclaims all communion with the passions or the
prejudices of the Jewish rulers. Am I a Jew? But Jesus had been brought
before him, denounced as a dangerous disturber of the public peace, and the
Roman Governor was officially bound to take cognisance of such a charge. In the rest of the defence of
Christ, the only part intelligible to Pilate would be the unanswerable appeal
to the peaceful conduct of his followers. When Jesus asserted that He was a
king, yet evidently implied a moral or religious sense in his use of the term,
Pilate might attribute a vague meaning to his language, from the Stoic axiom, “
I am a king when I rule myself”; and
thus give a sense to that which otherwise would have sounded in his ears like
unintelligible mysticism. His perplexity, however, must have been greatly
increased when Jesus, in this perilous hour, when his life trembled as it were
on the balance, declared that the object of his birth and of his life was the
establishment of “ the truth.” “ To this end was I born, and for this cause
came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Every
one that is of the truth heareth my voice.” That the peace of a nation
or the life of an individual should be endangered on account of the truth or
falsehood of any system of speculative opinions, was so diametrically opposite
to the general opinion and feeling of the Roman world, that Pilate, either in
contemptuous mockery, or with the merciful design of showing the utter
harmlessness and insignificance of such points, inquired what He meant by truth,—what truth had to do with the present question, with a question of life and
death, with a capital charge brought by the national council before the supreme
tribunal. Apparently despairing, on one side, of bringing him, whom he seems
to have considered a blameless enthusiast, to his senses; on the other,
unwilling to attach so much importance to what appeared to him in so different
a light, he wished at once to put an end to the whole affair. He abruptly left
Jesus, and went out again to the Jewish deputation at save Jesus, the gate (now
perhaps increased by a greater number of the Sanhedrin), and declared his
conviction of the innocence of Jesus.
At this unexpected
turn, the Sanhedrin burst into a furious clamour,
reiterated their vague, perhaps contradictory, and to the ears of Pilate unintelligible
or insignificant charges, and seemed determined to press the conviction with
implacable animosity. Pilate turned to Jesus, who had been led out, to demand his
answer to these charges. Jesus stood collected, but silent, and the
astonishment of Pilate was still further heightened. The only accusation which
seemed to bear any meaning, imputed to Jesus the raising tumultuous meetings of
the people throughout the country, from Judaea to Galilee? This incidental
mention of Galilee, made perhaps with an invidious design of awakening in the
mind of the Governor the remembrance of the turbulent character of that
people, suggested to Pilate a course by which he might rid himself of
the embarrassment and responsibility of this strange transaction. It has been
conjectured, not without probability, that the massacre of Herod’s subjects was
the cause of the enmity that existed between the tetrarch and the Roman Governor.
Pilate had now an opportunity at once to avoid an occurrence of the same
nature, in which he had no desire to be implicated, and to make overtures of
reconciliation to the native sovereign. He was indifferent about the fate of
Jesus, provided he could shake off all actual concern in his death; or he might
suppose that Herod, uninfected with the inexplicable enmity of the Chief Priests,
might be inclined to protect his innocent subject.
The fame of Jesus
had already excited the curiosity of Herod, but his curiosity was rather that which
sought amusement or excitement from the powers of an extraordinary wonder-worker,
than that which looked for information or improvement from a wise moral, or a
divinely-commissioned religious teacher. The circumstances of the interview,
which probably took place in the presence of the tetrarch and his courtiers,
and into which none of the disciples of Jesus could find their way, are not
related. The investigation was long; but Jesus maintained his usual unruffled
silence, and at the close of the examination. He was sent back to Pilate. By
the murder of John, Herod had incurred deep and lasting unpopularity; he might
be unwilling to increase his character for cruelty by the same conduct towards Jesus,
against whom, as he had not the same private reasons for requiring his support,
he had not the same bitterness of personal animosity; nor was his sovereignty,
as has before been observed, endangered in the same manner as that of the Chief
Priests, by the progress of Jesus. Herod therefore might treat with derision
what appeared to him a harmless assumption of royalty, and determine to effect,
by contempt and contumely, that degradation of Jesus in the estimation of the
people which his more cruel measures in the case of John had failed to
accomplish. With his connivance, therefore, if not under his instructions, his
soldiers (perhaps some of them, as those of his father had been—foreigners, Gaulish or Thracian barbarians) were permitted or
encouraged in every kind of cruel and wanton insult. They clothed the Saviour, in mockery of his royal title, in a purple robe,
and so escorted him back to Pilate, who, if he occupied part of the Herodion, not the Antonia, was close at hand, only in a different
quarter of the same extensive palace.
The refusal of
Herod to take cognisance of the charge renewed the
embarrassment of Pilate, but a way yet seemed open to extricate himself from
his difficulty. There was a custom that, in honour of
the great festival, the Passover, a prisoner should be set at liberty at the
request of the people. The multitude had already become clamorous for their
annual privilege. Among the half-robbers, half-insurgents, who had so long infested
the province of Judaea and the whole of Palestine, there was a celebrated
bandit, named Barabbas, who, probably in some insurrectionary tumult, had been guilty of
murder. Of the extent of his crime we are ignorant; but Pilate, by selecting
the worst case, that which the people could not but consider the most atrocious
and offensive to the Roman Government, might desire to force them, as it were,
to demand the release of Jesus. Barabbas had been undeniably guilty of those
overt acts of insubordination, which they endeavoured to infer as necessary consequences of the teaching of Jesus.
Pilate came forth, therefore, to the outside of his Praetorium, and,
having declared that neither himself nor Herod could discover any real guilt in
the prisoner who had been brought before them, he appealed to them to choose
between the condemned insurgent and murderer, and the blameless Prophet of
Nazareth. The High Priests had now wrought the people to madness, and had most
likely crowded the courts round Pilate’s quarters with their most zealous and
devoted partisans. The voice of the Governor was drowned with an instantaneous
burst of acclamation, demanding the release of Barabbas. Pilate made yet another
ineffectual attempt to save the life of the innocent man. He thought by some
punishment, short of death, if not to awaken the compassion, to satisfy the animosity,
of the people. The person of Jesus was given up to the lictors, and scourging
with rods, the common Roman punishment for minor offences, was inflicted with
merciless severity. The soldiers platted a crown of thorns, or, as is thought,
of some prickly plant, as it is scarcely conceivable that life could have
endured if the temples had been deeply pierced by a circle of thorns. In this pitiable state Jesus was
again led forth, bleeding from the scourge, his brow throbbing with the pointed
crown; and dressed in the purple robe of mockery, to make the last vain appeal
to the compassion, the humanity, of the people. The wild and furious cries of
“Crucify him! Crucify him!” broke out on all sides. In vain Pilate commanded
them to be the executioners of their own sentence, and reasserted his
conviction of the innocence of Jesus. In vain he accompanied his assertion by
the significant action of washing his hands in the public view, as if to show
that he would contract no guilt or defilement from the blood of a blameless
man. He was answered by the awful imprecation, “His blood be upon
us, and upon our children”. The deputies of the Sanhedrin pressed more
earnestly the capital charge of blasphemy—“He had made himself the Son of
God.” This inexplicable accusation still more shook the resolution of Pilate,
who, perhaps at this instant, was further agitated by a message from his wife.
Claudia Procula (the law which prohibited the wives
of the provincial rulers from accompanying their husbands to the seat of their
governments now having fallen into disuse) had been wife,
permitted to reside with her husband Pilate in Palestine. The stern justice of
the Romans had guarded by this law against the baneful effects of female influence.
In this instance, had Pilate listened to thehumaner counsels of his wife, from what a load of guilt would he have delivered his own
conscience and his province! Aware of the proceedings, which had occupied
Pilate during the whole night—perhaps in some way better acquainted with the
character of Jesus, she had gone to rest; but her sleep, her morning slumbers,
when visions were supposed to be more than ordinarily true, were disturbed by
dreams of the innocence Jesus, and the injustice
and inhumanity to which her husband might lend his authority.
The prisoner was
withdrawn into the guard-room, and Pilate endeavoured to obtain some explanation of the meaning of this new charge from Jesus
himself. He made no answer; and Pilate appealed to his fears, reminding him
that his life and death depended on the power of the Prefect. Jesus replied,
that his life was only in the power of Divine Providence, by whose permission
alone Pilate enjoyed a temporary authority. But touched, it may seem, by the
exertions of Pilate to save him, with all his accustomed gentleness. He
declares Pilate guiltless of his blood, in comparison with his betrayers and
persecutors among his own countrymen. This speech still further moved Pilate in favour of Jesus. But the justice and the compassion
of the Roman gave way at once before the fear of weakening his own interest, or
endangering his own personal safety, with his imperial master. He made one
effort more to work on the implacable people; he was answered with the same furious
exclamations, and with menaces of more alarming import. They accused him of
indifference to the stability of the imperial power:—“Thou art not Caesar’s
friend:” they threatened to report his conduct, in thus allowing
the title of royalty to be assumed with impunity, to the reigning Caesar. That
Caesar was the dark and jealous Tiberius. Up to this period the Jewish nation,
when they had complained of the tyranny of their native sovereigns, had ever
obtained a favourable hearing at Rome. Even against
Herod the Great, their charges had been received; they had been admitted to a
public audience; and though their claim to national independence at the death
of that sovereign had not been allowed, Archelaus had received his government
with limited powers, and on the complaint of the people had been removed from
his throne. In short, the influence of that attachment to the Caesarean family
which had obtained for the nation distinguished privileges from both Julius and
Augustus, had not yet been effaced by that character of turbulence and
insubordination which led to their final ruin.
In what manner such
a charge of not being “Caesar’s friend” might be misrepresented or aggravated,
it was impossible to conjecture; but the very strangeness of the accusation was
likely to work on the gloomy and suspicious mind of Tiberius; and the frail
tenure by which Pilate held his favour at Rome is
shown by his ignominious recall and banishment some years after, on the
complaint of the Jewish people; though not, it is true, for an act of
indiscreet mercy, but one of unnecessary cruelty. The latent and suspended decision
of his character reappeared in all its customary recklessness. The life of one
man, however blameless, was not for an instant to be considered, when his own
advancement, his personal safety, were in peril: his sterner nature resumed the
ascendant; he mounted the tribunal, which was erected on a tesselated pavement near the Praetorium, and passed the solemn, the irrevocable
sentence. It might almost seem that, in bitter mockery, Pilate for the last
time demanded, Shall I crucify Jesus, your king?” “We have no king,
but Caesar,” was the answer of the Chief Priests. Pilate yielded up the
contest; the murderer was commanded to be set at liberty, the Just man
surrendered to crucifixion.
The remorseless soldiery were at hand, and instigated,
no doubt, by the influence, by the bribes, of the Sanhedrin, carried the
sentence into soldiery. effect with the most savage and wanton insults. They
dressed him up in all the mock semblance of royalty (He had already the purple
robe and the crown); a reed was now placed in his hand for a sceptre; they paid him their insulting homage; struck him
with the palms of their hands; spat upon him; and then stripping him of his
splendid attire, dressed him again in his own simple raiment, and led him out
to death.
The place of
execution was without the gates. This was the case in most towns; and in
Jerusalem, which, according to tradition, always maintained a kind of
resemblance to the camp in the wilderness, as criminal punishments were
forbidden to defile the sacred precincts, a field beyond the walls was set
apart and desecrated for this unhallowed purpose.
Hitherto I have
been tempted into some detail, both by the desire of ascertaining the state of
the public mind, and the motives of the different actors in this unparalleled
transaction, and by the necessity of harmonising the
various circumstances related in the four separate narratives. As we approach
the appalling close, I tremble lest the colder process of explanation should
deaden the solemn and harrowing impression of the scene, or weaken the contrast
between the wild and tumultuous uproar of the triumphant enemies and executioners
of the Son of Man, with the deep and unutterable misery of the few faithful
adherents who still followed his footsteps: and, far above all, his own
serene, his more than human, composure, the dignity of suffering, which casts
so far into the shade every example of human heroism. Yet in the most trifling
incidents there is so much life and reality, so remarkable an adherence to the
usages of the time and to the state of public feeling, that I cannot but point
out the most striking of these particulars. For, in fact, there is no single
circumstance, however minute, which does not add to the truth of the whole
description, so as to stamp it (I have honestly endeavoured to consider it with the calmest impartiality) with an impression of
credibility, of certainty, equal to, if not surpassing, every event in the history
of man. The inability of Jesus (exhausted by a sleepless night, by the length
of the trial, by insults and bodily pain, by the scourging and the blows) to
bear his own cross (the constant practice of condemned criminals); the seizure
of a Cyrenian, from a province more numerously colonised by Jews than any other, except Egypt and
Babylonia, as he was entering the city, and, perhaps, was known to be an
adherent of Jesus, to bear the cross ; the customary deadening potion of wine
and myrrh, which was given to malefactors previous to their execution, but
which Jesus, aware of its stupifying or intoxicating
effect, and determined to preserve his firmness and self-command, but slightly
touched with his lips; the title, the King of the Jews, in three
languages so strictly in accordance with the public usage of the time; the
division and casting lots for his garments by the soldiers who executed him
(those who suffered the ignominious punishment of the cross being exposed
entirely naked, or with nothing more than was necessary for decency); all these
particulars, as well as the instrument of execution, the cross, are in strict
unison with the well-known practice of Roman criminal jurisprudence. The
execution of the two malefactors, one on each side of Jesus, is equally
consonant with their ordinary administration of justice, particularly in this
ill-fated province. Probably before, unquestionably at a later period, Jerusalem
was doomed to behold the long line of crosses on which her sons were left by
the relentless Roman authorities to struggle with slow and agonising death.
In other circumstances the Jewish national character is equally
conspicuous. This appears even in the conduct of the malefactors. The
fanatical Judaism of one, not improbably a follower, or infected with the
doctrines of the Gaulonite, even in his last agony,
has strength enough to insult the pretender to the name of a Messiah who yet
has not the power to release himself and his fellow-sufferers from death. The other,
of milder disposition, yet in death, inclines to believe in Jesus, and when he
returns to assume his kingdom, would hope to share in its blessings. To him
Jesus, speaking in the current, and therefore intelligible, language, promises
an immediate reward; he is to pass at once from life to happiness—from the
cross to Paradise. Besides this, how striking the triumph of his enemies, as
the Lord seemed to surrender himself without resistance to the growing pangs of
death; the assembling, not only of the rude and ferocious populace, but of many
of the most distinguished rank, the members of the Sanhedrin, to behold and to
insult the last moments of their once redoubted, but now despised, adversary!
And still every indication of approaching death seemed more and more to
justify their rejection!—still no sign of the mighty, the all-powerful Messiah!
Their taunting allusions to his royal title, to his misapprehended speech,
which rankled in their hearts, about the demolition and rebuilding of the
Temple; to his power of healing others, and restoring life, a power in his own
case so manifestly suspended or lost; the offer to acknowledge him as the
Messiah, if he would come down from the cross in, the face of day; the still
more malignant reproach, that He, who had boasted of the peculiar favour of God, was now so visibly deserted and abandoned,—the
Son of Man, as He called himself, is left to perish despised and disregarded by
God; all this as strikingly accords with, and illustrates the state of, Jewish
feeling, as do the former circumstances the Roman usages.
And amid the whole wild and tumultuous scene there are some quiet gleams
of pure Christianity, which contrast with and relieve the general darkness and
horror: not merely the superhuman patience, with which insult, and pain, and
ignominy, are borne; not merely the serene self-command, which shows that the
senses are not benumbed or deadened by the intensity of suffering; but the
slight incidental touches of gentleness and humanity. I cannot but indicate the
answer to the afflicted women, who stood by the way weeping, as Jesus passed on
to Calvary, and whom He commanded not “to weep for him,” but for the deeper
sorrows to which themselves or their children were devoted; the notice of the
group of his own kindred and followers who stood by the cross; his bequest of
the support of his Virgin Mother to the beloved disciple; above all, that most
affecting exemplification of his own tenets, the prayer for the pardon of his
enemies, the palliation of their crime from their ignorance of its real
enormity,—“ Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Yet so
little are the Evangelists studious of effect, that this incident of unrivalled
moral sublimity, even in the whole life of Christ, is but briefly, we might almost
say carelessly, noticed by St. Luke alone.
From the sixth hour (noonday), writes the Evangelist St. Matthew, there
was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour. The whole earth (the term
in the other Evangelists) is no doubt used according to Jewish phraseology, in
which Palestine, the sacred land, was emphatically the earth. This
supernatural gloom appears to resemble that terrific darkness which precedes an
earthquake.
For these three hours Jesus had borne the excruciating anguish—his
human nature begins to fail, and he complains of the burning thirst, the most
painful but usual aggravation of such a death. A compassionate bystander filled
a sponge with vinegar, fixed it on a long reed, and was about to lift it to his
lips, when the dying Jesus uttered his last words, those of the Twenty-second
Psalm, in which, in the bitterness of his heart, David had complained of the
manifest desertion of his God, who had yielded him up to his enemies—the phrase
had perhaps been in common use in extreme distress—Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?—My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
The compassionate hand of the man, raising the vinegar, was arrested by others,
who, a few perhaps in trembling curiosity, but more in bitter mockery,
supposing that He called not on God (Eli) but on Elias, commanded him to wait
and see, whether, even now, that great and certain sign of the Messiah, the
appearance of Elijah, would at length take place.
Their barbarous triumph was uninterrupted; and He, who yet (his
followers were not without some lingering hope, and the more superstitious of
his enemies not without some trembling apprehension) might awaken to all his
terrible and prevailing majesty, had now manifestly expired. The Messiah, the
imperishable, the eternal Messiah, had quietly yielded up the ghost.
Even the dreadful earthquake which followed, seemed to pass away without
appalling the enemies of Jesus. The rending of the veil of the Temple from the
top to the bottom, so strikingly significant of the approaching abolition of
the local worship, would either be concealed by the priesthood, or attributed
as a natural effect to the convulsion of the earth. The same convulsion would
displace the stones which covered the ancient tombs, and lay open many of the
innumerable rock-hewn sepulchres which perforated the
hills on every side of the city, and expose the dead to public view. To the awestruck
and depressed minds of the followers of Jesus, no doubt, were confined those
visionary appearances of the spirits of their deceased brethren, which are
obscurely intimated in the rapid narratives of the Evangelists.
But these terrific appearances, which were altogether lost on the
infatuated Jews, were not without effect on the less prejudiced Roman soldiery;
they seemed to bear the testimony of Heaven to the innocence, to the divine
commission, of the crucified Jesus. The centurion who guarded the spot,
according to St. Luke, declared aloud his conviction that Jesus was “a just man”;
according to St. Matthew, that He was “ the Son of God.”
Secure now, by the visible marks of dissolution, by the piercing of his
side, from which blood and water flowed out, that Jesus was actually dead; and
still, even in their most irreligious acts of cruelty and wickedness,
punctiliously religious (since it was a sin to leave the body of that
blameless being on the cross during one day whom it had been no sin, but rather
an act of the highest virtue, to murder the day before), the Sanhedrin gave
their consent to a wealthy adherent of Jesus, Joseph, of the town of Arimathea,
to bury the body. The sanction of Pilate was easily obtained : it was taken
down from the cross, and consigned to the sepulchre prepared by Joseph for his own family, but in which no body had yet been laid.
The sepulchre was at no great distance from the place
of execution; the customary rites were performed; the body was wrapped in fine
linen and anointed with a mixture of costly spice and myrrh, with which the
remains of those who were held in respect by their kindred were usually
preserved. As the Sabbath was drawing on, the work was performed with the
utmost despatch, and Jesus was laid to rest in the
grave of his faithful adherent.
In that rock-hewn tomb might appear to be buried for ever both the fears of his enemies and the hopes of his followers. Though some rumours of his predictions concerning his resurrection had crept abroad, sufficient to awaken the caution of the Sanhedrin, and to cause them to seal the outward covering of the sepulchre, and, with the approbation of Pilate, to station a Roman guard upon the spot; yet, as far as the popular notion of the Messiah, nothing could be more entirely and absolutely destructive of their hopes than the patient submission of Jesus to insult, to degradation, to death. However, with some of milder nature, his exquisite sufferings might excite compassion; however the savage and implacable cruelty with which the Rulers urged his fate might appear revolting to the multitude, after their first access of religious indignation had passed away, and the recollection returned to the gentle demeanour and beneficent acts of Jesus; yet the hope of redemption, whatever meaning they might attach to the term, whether deliverance from their enemies or the restoration of their theocratic government, had set in utter darkness. However vague or contradictory this notion among the different sects or classes, with the mass of the people, nothing less than an immediate instantaneous reappearance in some appalling or imposing form could have reinstated Jesus in his high place in the popular expectation. Without this, his career was finally closed, and He would pass away at once, as one of the brief wonders of the time, his temporary claims to respect or attachment refuted altogether by the shame, by the ignominy, of his death. His ostensible leading adherents were men of the humblest origin, and, as yet, of no distinguished ability; men from whom little danger could be apprehended, and who might safely be treated with contemptuous neglect. No attempt appears to have been made to secure a single person, or to prevent their peaceful retreat to their native Galilee. The whole religion centered in the person of Jesus, and in his death was apparently suppressed, crushed, extinguished for ever. After a few days, the Sanhedrin would dread nothing less than a new disturbance from the same quarter; and Pilate, as the whole affair had passed off without tumult, would soon suppress the remonstrances of his conscience at the sacrifice of an innocent life, since the public peace had been maintained, and no doubt his own popularity with the leading Jews considerably heigh