Part 4 (2/2)

THE WESTERN CHURCH.

Our story is not yet told. As regards the New Testament books, though the genius that produced them was Eastern, the judgment that brought them together in a single collection was Western. No list of the New Testament books pretending to carry weight was made until the year 360.

For two centuries and a half there was no Christian bible. The canon, as it now stands, was fixed by Pope Innocent I., A. D. 405, by a special decree. Why precisely these books were selected from the ma.s.s of literature then in existence and use, is--except in two or three cases where the prevailing sentiment of the actual Church threw out a book like Enoch or kept in a book like the Apocalypse--still open to conjecture. In such a dilemma Schwegler's conjecture, that the irenical or reconciling books were retained, and the partisan writings dropped, is as plausible as any, perhaps more so. The Church of Rome had two patron saints--Peter and Paul; it claimed to be founded by both Apostles, and, on this principle, adopted its canon of scripture. The New Testament, by its arrangement, was, it is claimed, an expression in literature of the Catholic claim.

As regards the Christ idea, though formed in the East, the West gave it currency, made it the central feature of a vast religious system, crowned it and placed it on a throne. Had the creative thought of Judaism been confined to the East, our concern with it need have gone no further. But the thought was not confined to the East, even in the widest comprehension of that term. The Jews were everywhere. The repeated disasters which befel their country gave fresh impulse to their creed. Their ideas spread as their state diminished; and their ideas were so vital that they captured and engaged the floating speculations of the Gentile world whenever they were encountered. In Alexandria, where Jews had been for two hundred and fifty or three hundred years, and whither they flocked by thousands after each fresh national disaster, the faith, instead of being extinguished by the flood of speculation in that busy centre of the world's thought, revived, drew in copious supplies of blood from the Greek spirit, and entered on a new career. If it be true, as is declared in Smith's Dictionary of Geography, that when the city of Alexandria was founded (B. C. 332) it was laid out in three sections, one of which was a.s.signed to the Jews, their political and social influence must have corresponded to their numbers. Prof. Huidekoper revives and reargues the belief, that travelled men of letters from Greece, preeminent among them, Plato, who visited Egypt, borrowed from the Jews the ideas which enn.o.bled and beautified the Greek philosophy. The doctrines of the Stoics, Greek and Roman, bear, in Mr. Huidekoper's opinion, evident marks of Jewish origin. This is going, we think, beyond warrant of the facts. We may claim much less and still place very high the intellectual sway of this remarkable people. It may be confidently a.s.serted, that in portions of Asia Minor, Syria, and Northern Egypt, their faith had largely displaced the ancient superst.i.tions.

The splendid literature of the Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom, the rich fund of speculation in the Talmud, the intellectual wealth of Philo, the Pauline and Johannean Gnosis, brilliantly attest their intellectual vigor. The Rev. Brooke Foss Walcott, in Smith's ”Dictionary of the Bible,” declares, that from the date of the destruction of Jerusalem, in the year 70, the power of Judaism ”as a present living force, was stayed.” But such a statement can be accepted only in a much qualified sense. The destruction of Jerusalem put an end to the State more completely than the overthrow of any modern city could do; for the holy city was the home of the national life in a peculiar sense; it was the seat of the national wors.h.i.+p in which the national life centred.

With the temple fell the inst.i.tutions that rested on the temple. When the walls were thrown down and the grand buildings levelled, it was like erasing the marks of history, tearing up the roots of tradition and setting the seal of destiny on the nation's future. The territory was small; the power of the great city was felt in every part of it, and the quenching of its light left the land in darkness. But the catastrophe which terminated the existence of the State, gave a new life to the religious idea and opened a new arena for its conquests. It greatly increased the number of Jews in the city of Rome, the imperial city of the West, the conquering metropolis; raised the congregations already existing there to a position of considerable importance; served to unite, by the sympathy of a common sorrow, parties that had been divided; had the effect in some measure to weaken antipathies, harmonize opinions and inflame zeal; in a word, transferred to Italy the faith that, in outward form, had been crushed in Palestine. Thenceforth Judaism, which had been a blended wors.h.i.+p and polity, ceased to be a polity, and became more intensely than ever, because more exclusively, a wors.h.i.+p.

The history of the settlement of Jews in Rome, is naturally obscure.

Being mainly of the mercantile and trading cla.s.s their presence there might have been expected early. They were restless, enterprising, industrious, eager and skilful in barter; and Rome attracted all such, being the business centre of the western world. Political affairs at home were never long favorable to peaceful pursuits, and were frequently in such confusion that the transactions of ordinary existence were precarious. The numbers that were carried away to Babylon comprised it is probable the more eminent cla.s.s. As many, if not more, found their way to other cities, and of these Rome received its share. The earliest mention brings them before us as already of consequence from their wealth and intelligence. Sixty years before the christian era, Cicero commended Lucius Valerius Flaccus, praetor of the district of Asia Minor, because he did not encourage an exorbitant expenditure of money on the construction of the temple, by Jews, the exportation of whose wealth from Rome was felt as an evil. He states that under the directions of Flaccus, one hundred pounds weight of gold ($25,000) had been seized at Apamea, in Asia Minor; twenty pounds at Laodicea. The Jews were rich.

Their demonstrations of grief at the death of Julius Caesar, the conqueror of their conqueror, Pompey, and the enlightened friend of the people, argued by the number and loudness of the voices, the presence of a mult.i.tude. One may read in any book of Jewish history that Josephus reckoned at eight thousand the Jews who were present, when at the death of king Herod, his son Archelaus appeared before Augustus; that the poor among them were numerous enough to procure from Augustus a decree authorizing them to receive their share of the bounty of corn on another day, when the day of general distribution fell on their Sabbath; that one emperor expelled them as a dangerous element in the city; that another for the same reason laid special penalties and burdens on them; that the aristocratic party was steadily hostile to them. Tacitus, their enemy, speaks of the deportation of four thousand young Israelites to Sardinia. Josephus makes the astounding, the fabulous statement that in the year 66, the Jews in Rome required two hundred and fifty-six thousand lambs for their paschal commemoration.[2] Such a provision would imply a population of two million and a half at least. That the Jews were of some importance is attested by the comments made on them by Roman writers; by Martial, who alludes to their customs in his epigrams; by Ovid, who criticises their observance of the Sabbath as having the character of a debasing superst.i.tion and introduces a s.h.i.+rk who, having exhausted all pretexts, makes a pretext of respecting the Sabbath in order not to incur the ill will of the Jews; by Persius, who remarks satirically on the Sabbath observances and the rite of circ.u.mcision; by Plutarch, who minutely describes the Mosaic system of laws. Satire betrays fear as well as dislike. The great writer disdains to caricature people who are inconspicuous. Juvenal was a great writer, and his envenomed raillery against the Jews has become familiar by quotation. It would seem, from his invectives, that Jewish ideas and practices had crept into public approval, and were exerting an influence on the education of Roman youth. He complains bitterly of parents who bring up their children to think more of the laws of Moses than of the laws of their country.--”Some there are, a.s.signed by fortune to Sabbath fearing fathers, who adore nothing but the clouds and the genius of the sky; who see no distinction between the swine's flesh as food and the flesh of man. Habitually despising the laws of Rome, they study, keep and revere the code of Judaea, a tradition given by Moses in a dark volume. The blame is with the father, with whom every seventh day is devoted to idleness, and withdrawn from the uses of life.” Juvenal lived in the latter part of the first and the early part of the second century, about a generation after the destruction of Jerusalem. Admitting the genuineness of the pa.s.sage, and the ground of the criticism, neither of which is disputed, the influence of the Jews was by no means contemptible.

[Footnote 2: Bellum Judaic.u.m, VII. 17.]

Milman conjectures that while the number of Jews in Rome was much increased, their respectability as well as their popularity were much diminished by the immense influx of the most dest.i.tute as well as of the most unruly of the race, who were swept into captivity by thousands after the fall of Jerusalem. This may be true. There is reason to believe that the importation of so great a number of strangers was attended by poverty, distress, and squalor, horrible to think of. It could not have been otherwise. That they should infest and infect whole districts of the city; that they should pitch their vagabond tents on vacant plots of ground, and should change fair districts, gardens and groves into disreputable and foul precincts; that they should resort to mean trades for support, peddling, trafficking in old clothes, rags, matches, broken gla.s.s, or should sink into mendicancy, is simply in the nature of things, But it is fair to suppose that the exiles from Jerusalem would bring with them the memory of their sufferings during the unexampled horrors of that tremendous war; would bring with them also a fiercer sense of loyalty to the faith for which such agonies had been borne, such sacrifices had been made. That they held their religion dear, is certain. Their Sabbaths were observed, their laws revered, their synagogues frequented, their peculiarities of race cherished and perpetuated by tradition from father to son. There is reason to think that they antic.i.p.ated the Christians in their practice of burying their dead in the catacombs, which bore a strong resemblance to the rocky caverns where in the fatherland, their ancestors were laid. The catacombs in the neighborhood of the Transtevere, the district where the Jews mostly lived, are plainly a.s.sociated with them. The seven-branched candlestick appears on the wall, and the inscriptions bear witness to the pious constancy of the race.[3] They made proselytes among the pagans weary of their decrepit and moribund faiths, and thus extended the religious ideas which they so tenaciously held. Among themselves there was close a.s.sociation, partly from tradition and partly from race.

Some semblance of their ancient inst.i.tutions was kept up; their general council; their tribunal of laws. Circ.u.mstances alone prevented them from maintaining their ancestral religion in its grandeur. Seneca, about the middle of the first century, represents Jewish usages as having pervaded all nations; he is speaking of the Sabbath. Paul found thriving synagogues, wherever he went, and wrote to some that he could not visit, before the destruction of Jerusalem made the final dispersion.

[Footnote 3: See Milman's Jews, II. p. 461.]

The Messianic hope was strong in these people; all the stronger on account of their political degradation. Born in sorrow, the antic.i.p.ation grew keen in bitter hours. That Jehovah would abandon them, could not be believed. The thought would be atheism. The hope kept the eastern Jews in a perpetual state of insurrection. The cry, ”lo here, lo there!”

was incessant. The last great insurrection, that of Bar-Cochab, revealed an astonis.h.i.+ng frenzy of zeal. It was purely a Messianic uprising.

Judaism had excited the fears of the Emperor Hadrian,[4] and induced him to inflict unusual severities on the people. He had forbidden circ.u.mcision, the rite of initiation into their church; he had prohibited the observance of the Sabbath and the public reading of the law, thus drying up the sources of the national faith. He had even threatened to abolish the historical rallying point of the religion by planting a Roman colony on the site of Jerusalem and building a shrine to Jupiter on the place where the temple had stood. Measures so violent and radical could hardly have been prompted by anything less alarming than the upspringing of that indomitable conviction which worked at the heart of the people. The effect of the violence was to stimulate that conviction to fury. The night of their despair was once more illumined by the star of the east. The banner of the Messiah was raised. Portents as of old were seen in the sky; the clouds were watched for the glory that should appear. Bar-Cochab, the ”son of the star,” seemed to fill out the popular idea of the deliverer. Miracles were ascribed to him; flames issued from his mouth. The vulgar imagination made haste to transform the audacious fanatic into a child of David. Mult.i.tudes flocked to his standard. ”The whole Jewish race throughout the world,”

says Milman, ”was in commotion; those who dared not betray their interest in the common cause openly, did so in secret, and perhaps some of the wealthy Jews in the remote provinces privately contributed from their resources.” ”Native Jews and strangers swelled his ranks. It is probable that many of the fugitives from the insurgents in Egypt and Cyrene had found their way to Palestine and lay hid in caves and fastnesses. No doubt some from the Mesopotamian provinces came to the aid of their brethren.” ”Those who had denied or disguised their circ.u.mcision, hastened to renew that distinguis.h.i.+ng mark of their Israelitish descent, to ent.i.tle themselves to a share in the great redemption.” The insurrection gained head. The heights about Jerusalem were seized and occupied; fortifications were erected; caves were dug, and subterranean pa.s.sages cut between the garrisoned positions; arms were collected; nothing but the ”host of angels” was needed to insure victory. The angels did not appear; the Roman legions did. The carnage, during the three or four years of the war--for so long and possibly longer, the war lasted--was frightful. The Messiah, not proving himself a conqueror, was held to have proved himself an impostor, the ”son of a lie.” The holy city was once more destroyed, this time completely. A new city, peopled by foreigners, arose on its site. The effect of the outbreak, which was felt far and wide, in time and s.p.a.ce, was disastrous to Jewish influence in the empire. From this time Judaism lost its good name, and at the same time its hold on the cultivated mind of Europe.

Fanaticism so wild and destructive was ent.i.tled to no respect.

[Footnote 4: See Huidekoper's ”Judaism in Rome,” p. 325-329.]

The Christians, of course, took no part in the great rising, and had no interest in it. It was their faith that the Messiah had already come; and however confident their expectation of his reappearance to judge the nations and redeem his elect, time had so far sobered the hopes of even the rudest among them, that they no longer looked for a man of war, no longer were attracted by banners in the hands of ruffians or trumpet blasts blown by human lips. The feeling was gaining ground, if it was not quite confirmed, that instead of waiting for the Christ to come to them, they were to go to him in his heaven. Hence, Jews, though they might be in the essentials of their religious faith, they were wholly alienated from those of their race who looked for a cosmical or political demonstration. That this want of sympathy and failure to partic.i.p.ate, widened the breach between them and the Jews who still expected a temporal deliverer, there can be little question; that in times of great excitement, the Christian Jews were exposed to scoffing and persecution is equally undeniable. Bar-Cochab treated them with extreme cruelty. It is even probable that in Rome and the provinces of the empire a settled hatred of the Christians animated Jews of the average stamp, and found expression in the usual forms of popular malignity. It is easy to believe that Jews in Rome, possessing influence in high quarters, thrust Christians between themselves and persecution.

This, indeed, is extremely probable.[5] But that, in ordinary times, an active animosity prevailed on the part of the Jews of the old school against Jews of the new school, is not clearly proved. The latter were orthodox, conservative Jews, loyal to the national faith in every respect save one, namely, their persuasion that the Christ was no longer to be looked for, having already appeared. To those Jews, who had abandoned the belief that he would appear, or who had allowed that belief to sink into the background of their minds, the belief of the Christians would occasion no bitterness. It is still a common impression that the persecution recorded in the book of ”The Acts of the Apostles,”

to which Stephanos, the Greek convert, fell a victim, was directed by Jews against Christians. But it has been made to appear more than probable,--admitting the historical truth of the narrative--that the a.s.sault was made by the Judaizing upon the anti-Judaizing Christians; the Jews who were not Christians at all, taking no part in it. The reasoning upon which this conclusion is based, will be found in Zeller's book on the ”Acts,” an exhaustive treatise which must be studied by anybody who would understand that curious composition. The main positions may be apprehended by the intelligent reader on carefully perusing the story as written, and noting the conspicuous fact, that the quarrel is between radicals and conservatives; between the advocates of a broad policy, comprehending Greeks and Romans on the same terms with Jews, and the champions of a restricted policy, confining the benefits of the Messiah's advent to the true Israelites.

[Footnote 5: See ”Judaism in Rome,” p. 245.]

The destruction of Jerusalem was one of the causes that may have operated to close this gulf. By breaking up the head-quarters of the Christian conservatism, and dispersing the lingerers there among the inhabitants of Gentile cities, it weakened their ties, widened their experience, softened their prejudices, and prepared them to accept the larger interpretation of their faith. The writings of the New Testament, all of them produced after the destruction of Jerusalem, some of them fifty or sixty years after, none of them less than ten or fifteen years, bear traces of this enlargement. The Jewish christians living in Greek and Roman Cities could hardly avoid the temptations to adopt that view of their faith which commended it to the communities whereof they were a part, and this was the view presented by Paul and his school, the intellectual, or, as some prefer to call it, the ”spiritual” view.

According to this view, also, the new religion was grafted on the old, Judaism was the foundation; the root from which sprung the branches, however widely spreading. Paul, as has been remarked, addressed himself invariably to Jews, in the first instance, and turned to the Gentiles only when the Jews rejected him. The essential beliefs of the religious Jew he retained, never exchanging them for the beliefs of Paganism, or qualifying them with the speculations of heathen philosophy. He labored in the interest of the faith of Israel, broadly interpreted, nor, in respect of his fundamental conceptions, did he ever wander far from the religion of his fathers. The spiritual distance between the school he founded, and the school that in his life time he opposed, was not so wide that it might not in course of time, be diminished, until at length it disappeared entirely. Parties holding the same cardinal belief, will not forever be separated by incidental barriers, especially when, as was the case with the destruction of Jerusalem, providence moves the chief barriers away.

Other inducements to a good understanding between the two parties of Christian Jews were at work. Heresies of all sorts were springing up within the churches, which could be suppressed only by the moral power of a common persuasion in the minds of the chief bodies. Questions were raised which neither branch of the christian community could satisfactorily answer; controversies arose, demanding something like an ecclesiastical authority to adjust. Unless the new religion was to split into petty sections and be pulverized to nothingness, the restoration of old breaches was an absolute necessity. The danger was of too sudden and artificial a compromise between the main divisions, resulting in a compact organization that might arrest the movements of the spirit of liberty. The church did eventually obtain supremacy in dogma and rite, through the imperative demand for unity that was urgently pressed early in the second century.

Judaism contained in its bosom two elements, one stationary, the other progressive; one close, the other expansive; one centralizing in Judaea and waiting till it should attract the outer world to it, the other forth reaching beyond Palestine, and seeking to commend the faith of Israel to those who knew it not. These two elements coexisted from early times, and caused perpetual ferment by their struggles to overmaster each other. The priest stood for the one principle, the narrower, the fixed, the inst.i.tuted; the prophet stood for the other, the intellectual, the expansive, the progressive. The priest stayed at home to administer the ordinances; the prophet journeyed about, to spread the salvation. The priest was a fixture, the prophet was a missionary.

The two divisions of the earliest Christian community represented these counter tendencies. The school of Peter, James, and John, the hierarchal, conservative school, maintained the att.i.tude of expectation.

They waited and prayed, exacted rigid compliance with ordinances; clung to their a.s.sociations with places and seasons; were tenacious of holy usages; required punctuality and accuracy of posturing, were strict in conformity with legal prescriptions, made a point of circ.u.mcision, or other rites of initiation into the true church. The school of Paul and Apollos took up the principle of universality, dispensed with whatever hampered their movements and impeded their action, and, taking essential ideas only, making themselves ”all things to all men, if peradventure, they might win some,” preached the message freely, to as many as would hear. The two principles, however discordant in operation, demanded each other. They could not long exist apart; the unity and the universality were mutually complementary. Unity alone, would bring isolation, solitariness, and ultimate death from diminution. Universality alone would lead to dissipation, attenuation, and disappearance. It was therefore not long before the extremes drew together and met.

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