READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
2 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.
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