/xi.'
THE LIFE OF LIVES
THE LIFE OF L
FURTHER STUDI
THE LIFE OF CHRIST
F. W.FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.
DEAN OF CANTERBURY AND DEPUTY
CLERK OF THE CLOSET TO THE QUEEN
"O xterna Veritas, et vera Caritas, et cara iEternitas, tu es Deus meus." — St. Aug.
"Yea through life, death, through sorrow, and through sinning,
Christ shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed;
Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,
Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.' — F. W. H. Myers.
"The longer I live the more I feel that Christianity does not consist in any particu-
lar system of Church Government, or in any credal statement, but that Christianity
is Christ." — Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone.
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
I 900
A
Copyright /goo by
DoDD, Mead & Company.
CONJUGI
DILECTISSIM^ ET FIDELISSIM^,
LABORUM, FELICITATIS, DOLORUM.
PER XL ANNOS PARTICIPJ,
HUNC LIBRUM
D. D. D.
FREDERICUS GULIELMUS FARRAR
IIJ Non. APr. MDCCCC.
PREFACE.
TwENTY-SIX years ago I was led by " God's unseen
Providence, which men nickname ' Chance,' " to write and
publish a " Life of Christ." It was based on long study,
primarily of the Four Gospels and the Old and New Testa-
ments, and, next, of all the sources of knowledge open to
me, from the most ancient to the most modern. Manifold
as were the imperfections of my work — of which no one is
more conscious than I am myself — the book was found
useful, and has not only been read in all parts of the Eng-
lish-speaking world, but has also been translated into many
languages — even into Japanese. It has been most widely
disseminated in two translations throughout the whole of
the Russian Empire, and has brought me many expres-
sions of gratitude alike from English-speaking readers and
from foreigners of every rank. I desire to record my
humble thankfulness to God for permitting me to render
this service — however small — to what I believe from my
heart to be the cause of Righteousness and Truth.
Since my " Life of Christ " was published, much criti-
cism, alike favourable and adverse, has been written upon it.
But with perfect readiness to modify any statement which
can be disproved, and to alter any error which can be
demonstrated, I have seen no reason to correct a single
conclusion of the smallest vital importance. It is there-
fore needless for me, and it would be superfluous, to
attempt to re-narrate the external incidents in the mortal'
days of the Saviour of Mankind. In some pages, however,
the subject has obliged me to revert to considerations on
which I have already dwelt.
viil PREFACE.
The object of the present book is different. It deals
with questions of high importance, which the Gospels
suggest, and aims at deepening the faith and brightening
the hope in Christ of all who read it honestly. *'Sts sus, sis
Dwus, sum Caltha, et non tibi spiro."
And so I send it forth with the humble petition, offered
" with bent head and beseeching hand," that He who
deigned to bless my former efforts will bless this effort
also, to the furtherance of His Kingdom, and the good of
His Church.
He came to "holy and humble men of heart"; and
those who believe in Him, and would fain go to Him
— and to Him only — for knowledge and for wisdom, will
say with St. Paul : " To me it is a very small thing to be
judged by man's brief day." * They desire no approval,
save that of Him whose "//^" and " Venite" shall settle
all questions and controversies for ever.
* I Cor. iv. 3. 'E/zot 6e e'lq kldxtOTdv ioTiv Iva ii^' vfiuv avuKpiQa i) vnb avBpit-
irivtjq ^fiipag.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE DIVINE BIRTH. PAGE
Belief of the Best, Wisest, and Greatest of Men in Divine Provi-
dence — Miracles the Outcome of a Natural Law — The Birth
of Christ and the Destinies of Mankind — Testimony to Him
of History, of Poetry, of Philosophy, of Art, of Science, of
Philanthropy — The Witness of the Human Heart,
CHAPTER n.
THE UNIQUE SUPREMACY OF JESUS.
His Sinlessness— His Superiority to Sakya Muni, to Confucius, to
Mohammed, to the Best and Greatest of the Greeks and
Romans i8
CHAPTER HI.
THE UNIQUE SUPREMACY OF JESUS {continued).
His Unapproachable Superiority to the Saints and Prophets of
the Old Dispensation and to the Best of the Rabbis— His
Infinite Supremacy compared with the Saints of Christendom, 34
CHAPTER IV.
THE TESTIMONY OF SCEPTICS AND FREE INQUIRERS.
Utterances of Spinoza, Lessing, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant,
Schelling, Strauss, Goethe, Channing, Renan, J. S. Mill,
Keim, Theodore Parker, Dr. Congreve, Dr. Martineau,
Matthew Arnold, and the author of Supernatural Religion, 41
CHAPTER V.
THE GOSPELS.
The Substantial Truth of the Gospels vindicated by Modern
Criticism— The Synoptists — The Fourth Gospel— Contrast
between the Genuine and the Apocryphal Gospels, . . 46
X CONTENTS.
CHAPTER VI.
THE CLAIMS OF JESUS AND THE SPELL HE EXERCISED. PAGE
His Sinlessness not a Miraculous but an Achieved Sinlessness —
The Witnesses to it — His Seven " I Ams" — Other Declara-
tions Concerning Himself — The Validity of His Words and
Promises abundantly justified, 54
CHAPTER Vn.
THE HUMAN EDUCATION OF JESUS.
The Silence of Mary as to His Childhood — St. Luke's the one
reference in the Gospels to His Infancy — How Jewish Boys
at that Day were Trained — The Probability that Christ spoke
both Aramaic and Greek — Teaching Children the Mosaic and
Levitic Law — Attendance at School and Synagogue — Sim-
plicity of the Worship of the Synagogue, .... 70
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FIRST ANECDOTE.
Jesus Goes with His Parents to Jerusalem — The Journey — The
First Sight of Jerusalem and of the Temple — What He must
have Seen and Heard — The Temple— Eating the Paschal
Meal — Lost, and Found in the Temple — His Docility towards
the Rabbis — His Submissiveness towards His Parents, . bo
CHAPTER IX.
LESSONS OF THE UNRECORDED YEARS.
The Reticence of the Evangelists as to His Youth and Early
Manhood a Proof of their Truthfulness — Years of Prepara-
tion, of Poverty, of Obscurity, of Manual Toil — The Scenery
around Nazareth — Christ's Loving Observation of all that
went on around Him, 92
CHAPTER X.
THE HOME AT NAZARETH.
Poverty and Insignificance of Nazareth — A Peasant's Home
Described — Mr. Holman Hunt's Picture of a Carpenter's
Shop 107
CONTENTS. xi
CHAPTER XI.
THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH. PAGE
Joseph — Mary, the Wife of Cleopas — Probably a Sister of the
Virgin — The " Brethren" of Jesus — St. James — St. Jude — The
Descendants of St. Jude — The Virgin Mary— Mariolatry
Alien from the Teaching of the Gospel — Mary at the Cross —
The Human Aspect of Christ, no
CHAPTER XII.
THE CONDITION OF THE WORLD.
The Gentiles — The Jews in Palestine — The Jews of the Dis-
persion — The Samaritans— The Galileans, .... 126
CHAPTER XIII.
THE STATE OF RELIGION IN PALESTINE.
The Zealots — The Essenes — The Sadducees^the Herodians —
The Pharisees — Pharisaism the Direct Antithesis of the
Teaching of the Prophets, 144
CHAPTER XIV.
THE MESSIANIC HOPE.
An Age of Expectancy — The Older and the Newer Messianic
Idea — Expectation not Confined to the Jews — How Christ
reversed the Messianic Conceptions of the Age, . . . 165
CHAPTER XV.
JOHN THE BAPTIST.
" God Called forth a Maji " — The Essence of John's Teaching —
His Aspect — Religious Awakenment the Object of his
Preaching — His Protest against Shows and Shams — His
Calls to Repentance — His Belief that the Deliverer was at
Hand — His Life not a Failure, 171
CHAPTER XVI.
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS.
Theories as to the Meaning of our Lord's Baptism — John
Decreases— His Failure to Enter into the Kingdom, . . 180
xii CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE TEMPTATION. PAGE
Jesus Goes into Solitude to Meditate upon His Mission — The
Temptation Real, and yet an Illustration of HisSinlessness —
The First Temptation an Appeal to the Desire of the Flesh —
The Second to the Pride of Life — The Third a Suggestion to
Make Concession to Earthly Prejudices, . . . .186
CHAPTER XVIII.
SCENES OF CHRIST'S MINISTRY.
" The Galilean Spring "—The Plain of Genuesareth— The Sites
of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum — Jesus leaves the
Synagogue and Teaches in the Open Air — The Four Places
where it is Known that His Feet have Stood, . . . 200
CHAPTER XIX.
Christ's methods of evangelisation.
The Simple Humanity of His Procedure — His Teaching sug-
gested by Immediate Circumstances — His Insistence upon
Spirituality, Simplicity, and Sincerity, 210
CHAPTER XX.
the form of Christ's teaching.
His Teaching as Varied and as Simple in Form as in Method —
His Use of Aphorism and of Paradox — His Assonances and
Plays on Words— His Spontaneous Poetry — His Use of
Parallelism, 215
CHAPTER XXI.
the form of Christ's teaching (continued).
The Parables — Not a Single Parable in the Apocryphal Gos-
pels — Why our Lord Adopted this Form of Teaching — The
Story of the Prodigal Son — The Parables Classified — How
they were influenced by Circumstances, .... 224
CHAPTER XXII.
THE substance OF CHRIST's TEACHING.
Christ's Relation to the Priests and the Legalists — His Severity
towards the Pharisees — The Laws of His New Kingdom, . 235
CONTENTS. xiii
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE UNIQUENESS OF CHRIST's TEACHING. page
Its Insistence upon the Love of God and the Duty of Man —
Christ's Attitude towards the Ancient Scriptures — His Proc-
lamation of the Fatherhood of God — Man's Duty to God
Involved in the Relation of God to Men — The Beatitudes a
Reversal of the Judgments of Men, 241
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE TITLES OF JESUS AND THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN,
"The Son of David," " The Son of God," " The Word," " The
Son of Man " — What the Last Title Implies — Christ's Atti-
tude towards the Samaritans, the Gentiles, the Common
People, the Publicans, Women and Children, . . . 251
CHAPTER XXV.
Christ's condemnation of Pharisaic religionism.
His Antagonism to the Pharisees — How they Magnified the Oral
Law — His Attitude towards Ceremonial Purifications ;
towards the Distinction between Clean and Unclean
Meats ; towards Fasting ; towards the Rabbinic Exegesis, . 269
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHRIST AND THE SABBATH.
Pharisaic Rules as to the Day of Rest — Christ's Principle: " It is
Lawful to do Good on the Sabbath," and How He Exempli-
fies it — Wherein Pure Religion Consists, .... 282
CHAPTER" XXVII.
THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST.
"Powers," "Wonders," "Signs," "Works"— The Miracles
not Intended Primarily as Evidences of His Divinity — A
Classification: Miracles on Nature, on Man, on the Spirit-
world — Why they had not a more Decisive Effect, . . . 293
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE GLADNESS AND SORROW OF THE CHRIST.
The Elements of Simple Gladness to be Seen Throughout His
Ministry— Only Recognises Fasting as the Natural Expres-
sion of Natural Grief — His Afflictions Caused by the Wicked-
ness of Men — His Pity, His Surprise, His Grief and Anger,
His Indignation, His Self-restraint — The Expression^ of His
Emotion, .,,.,,...,. 301
xiv CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE APOSTLES. PAGE
A Division into Tetrads— The Little We Know of the Majority of
the Apostles — Whence they Derived their Amazing Influence, 314
CHAPTER XXX.
ST. PETER, ST. JOHN, AND JUDAS.
St. Peter's Strength and Weakness — St. John's Faults and Dis-
tinguishing Glory — The Traitor — His Remorse the Measure
of what his Better Feelings must have been, . . . 323
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE APOSTOLIC COMMISSION,
The Power of the Keys— The Power to Loose and Bind— The
Power to Forgive Sins Conferred upon the Disciples Gen-
erally — How it is to be Interpreted, 332
CHAPTER XXXII.
ORDER OF EVENTS IN OUR LORD'S LIFE.
Date of our Lord's Birth — Length of His Ministry— Its Division
into Four Periods, 337
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE CLOSING DAYS.
Arrival at Bethany— Palm Sunday — A Day of Parables— The
Day of Temptations — A Day of Seclusion— Preparing for the
Paschal Feast, 355
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE LAST SUPPER.
Washing the Disciples' Feet— Partaking of the Last Supper —
Christ's Final Revelations — Singing a Hymn — The Great
High-Priestly Prayer, 360
CHAPTER XXXV.
GETHSEMANE.
The Agony— The Arrest— The Final Triumph Won, . . . 364
CONTENTS. XV
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE TRIALS BEFORE THE JEWS, PAGE
The Illegality of the Trials— Character of Annas— The Trial
before Annas — The Trial before Caiaphas — The Trial before
the Sanhedrin, 367
CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE TRIAL BEFORE PILATE.
The Three Charges Brought against Jesus — The Remission to
Herod Antipas — Again before Pilate — Pilate's Attempt to
Save Him — The Scourging — " We have no king but Caesar!"
Pilate's Weakness, 376
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE SUFFERINGS OF JESUS.
An Enumeration of His Sorrows and Distresses — The Final Cry
from the Cross, 384
CHAPTER XXXIX.
THE RIGHT VIEW OF CHRIST's SUFFERINGS.
The Deification of Pain — Christ's Agony not Self-sought — His
Death not to be Separated from His Life — His Sufferings a
Revelation of Victorious Majesty — The Error of Dwelling
too Exclusively upon His Anguish, ..... 390
CHAPTER XL.
THE ATONEMENT.
False Conceptions of the Doctrine — Christ's Death a Transcend-
ent Fact not to be Strictly Categorised — The Atonement
Apprehensible only in its Effects 396
CHAPTER XLI.
THE RESURRECTION.
The Resurrection as Important in the Teaching of the Apostles
and Evangelists as the Crucifixion — The Central Event in
the History of the World — The only Pledge of Man's Immor-
tality — The Evidence for it Distinct, Decisive, and Varied —
Its Cumulative Effect 401
xvi CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XLII.
THE ASCENSION. PAGE
The True Meaning of Christ's " Ascension " — Only a bare Refer-
ence to the Manner of the Ascension, and that by but a Single
Evangelist — Transcendent Importance of the Fact of the
Ascension, 412
CHAPTER XLHI.
THE FINAL ISSUES.
The Crime of Calvary the Beginning of the End of the Old
Dispensation — Christianity a Transfiguration of Life — What
it has Done for the World, 415
THE LIFE OF LIVES.
CHAPTER I.
THE DIVINE BIRTH.
" Who . . . emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, being made
in the likeness of man." — Phil. ii. 7.
" The unfathomable depths of the divine counsels were moved ; the
fountains of the great deep were broken up ; the healing of the nations
was issuing forth ; but nothing was seen on the surface of human
society but this slight rippling of the water." — ISAAC WILLIAMS, The
Nativity.
To the vast majority of true Christians the unalterable
belief that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, the Saviour of
the World, comes from the witness of the Spirit in their
hearts. It is not mainly derived from any one process of
argument, or even from the convergence of many different
lines of demonstration. Confluent streams of probability
may have helped to swell the current of their conviction,
but the main reason why their faith remains unshaken by
any doubt is because they know Christ and are known of
Him. The light which lighteth every man that is born
into the world came from Him, and was concentrated upon
Him in the fulness of its illuminating splendour. There
are many whose whole life is lived by faith in the Son of
God. They would say with St. Paul : " With me to live is
Christ." We may indeed lose this blessed certainty —
" For when we in our viciousness grow hard,
O misery on't, the wise gods seal our eyes,
In our own filth drop our clear judgments, make us
Adore our errors, laugh at us while we strut
To our confusion,"
2 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
But " Belief lives in us through Conduct," * and while an
immoral Deism produces men like Aretino and Marat, the
faith in Christ has produced thousands of such saints as
Francis of Assisi and Vincent de Paul. To all whose daily
experience is that Christ is with them, and within them,
belief has become part of their inmost being. With a
power which transcends all earthly knowledge, the Spirit
beareth witness with their spirits that they are " sons of
God," because they have been admitted into the Brother-
hood of Him who was the Son of God. To them He is not
only " Verax " and " Verus," but " ipsa Veritas."
To those who abound in this beautitude of certainty —
and they are, thank God, " a great multitude whom no man
can number" — argument has become needless. We may
modify the words of the Poet and say that —
" In such high hours
Of inspiration from the hving God,
Thought is not, in devotion it expires."
But there are millions who have never attained to this
experience. To us it seems as though man lived in the
very midst of miracles — miracles stupendous, innumerable,
incessant. To us " the starry heavens above," and still
more " the moral law within," are a perpetual miracle ; nor
would the supernaturalness of those miracles be to us
diminished, even though every phenomenon of the material,
moral, and spiritual Universe could be directly explained
by what are called " natural " laws. To us the outer
Universe is but an atom in God's infinitude, or, as the
Rabbis expressed it, " God (who in Talmudic literature is
often called Maqom or ' Space ') is not the Universe (Ha-
Maqom), but all the Universe is in God." f To us the
natural is itself a supernatural phenomenon. Nature is but
a name to express the laws which God has impressed upon
His Universe.
* Schleiermacher.
f See Hershon, Genesis ace. to the Talmud, p. 170.
THE DIVINE BIRTH. 3
Those who hold these views — those who think not only
that God is but that He " worketh hitherto " ; those who
believe in God's perpetual Providence, and do not reduce
Him to the Blind Fate of the Stoics, or the Supernal
Indifference of the Epicureans ; those who accept the
words of Scripture that " He careth for us," and " is about
our path, and about our bed, and spieth out all our
ways" — constitute the immense majority of mankind, to
whatever religion they may belong. We do not observe
that such are, in any respect, less wise, less learned, or less
intellectually clear-sighted, nor have they rendered fewer
services to mankind, than the minority who take upon
them to set aside such views as childish and obsolete
superstitions. In this majority are numbered all the most
supremely great of those who, compared with their
brethren, have been " among the molehills as mountains,
and among the thistles as forest trees." In all the histories
of the nations you can scarcely find one man of epoch-
making eminence who has not believed in the God who is
not far from every one of us, since in Him we live, and
move, and have our being. Are we not, then, entitled to
say with confidence, as all the best, greatest, and wisest of
men have believed, that God has not resigned His care for
the creatures of His hand to the exclusive working of what
are called " natural laws"? Securiis judicat orbis terrarum.
Again, may we not urge a second argument upon those
who, because of the supposed invariableness of natural
laws, cannot conceive that God ever works, or has worked,
in the affairs of man except in exact accordance with the
observed order? May we not ask them to consider that
miracles themselves are nothing but an outcome of that
Natural Law which, after all, is but a partial synonym for
the will of God? If it be perfectly within the power of
man to make a machine which should, in unvarying
sequence, push out, one by one, every number, from a unit
to (say) ten millions, and then — simply by the pre-arranged
4 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
construction of the machine itself — should skip a number,
and go from ten million to ten million and tivo, how absurd
is it to suppose that even the apparent violation, or super-
session, of laws may not be due to the very laws them-
selves — just, for instance, as a balloon, very heavy and
laden with human beings, mounts upwards by the very law
of gravitation which seems to draw all objects downwards?
To start, as sceptics have often done, with the dogma
that " Miracles do not " — or even that " miracles cannot —
happen" is surely short-sighted and unphilosophical; to
say nothing of the fact that such an axiom sets aside
masses of evidence — accumulated in age after age and still
accumulating — that miracles (/. e., events which apparently
supersede or transcend the every-day order) have happened,
and do happen continually. " Nature " is but a name for
God's normal and continuous government; and "chance"
is but a nickname for His unseen Providence. " What is
disturbed by a miracle," said Professor Mozley, " is the
mechanical expectation of a recurrence." * " Law I know ;
but what is this necessity but an empty shadow of my own
mind's throwing ? " f
Why, then, should the supernatural birth of the Saviour
of the World appear to sceptics to be a difBculty so stupen-
dous, and so insuperable, that it is only fit to be contemptu-
ously set aside?:}; Is it wise to feel such confidence in
arguments which, after all, convince very few, and which
have not shaken the belief of men whose transcendent
intellectual powers could be questioned by none? Are
myriads of the most brilliant men of action and men of
genius whom the world has ever seen, such utter fools that
a sceptic, because of his own peculiar idiosyncrasy, may
* Mozley, Bampton Lects., p. 56. f Huxley, Lay Sermons, p. 158,
X It should be observed that, as Weber points out, the story of a Virgin-birth
was not likely to have been invented by Jewish Christians, for it formed no
part of the current Messianic expectation {Die Lehren des Talmuds, 339-
342) ; and, even among the Jews, Is. vii. 14, was not understood in this sense.
THE DIVINE BIRTH. 5
sweep away, as though it were a mere contemptible nullity,
the initial fact in the faith of Christians? If the Virgin-
birth of the Saviour of Mankind had stood alone — if noth-
ing had led up to it ; if nothing had sprung from it ; if the
witnesses to it were untrustworthy liars, who were morally
capable of having palmed off upon the world a conscious
fiction — then doubt would have been natural. But when
the event stands, as it does, — quite apart from religion, — as
the central point of the destinies of mankind ; when we see
that all the history of the past led up to it, and that all the
illimitable future was, and must still be, dominated by it ;
when we see how it fulfilled the prophecies and yearnings
of Humanity among the heathen as well as among the
Jewish race, and how it has been the germ of all that was
best and greatest in the progress of the ages which have
followed — the fact ceases to stand alone. Had " the man
Christ Jesus" been but one of the millions — if He had been
merely distinguished above His fellows by ordinary human
greatness — doubt might have been excusable. But when
we see in that Babe lying in the cradle One of whom all the
Prophets had spoken, and One to whom ever since that
Nativity — amid the intensification of all Light, and all
Knowledge, and amid the undreamed-of splendour of
immeasurable Progress — alike the humblest and the
greatest of human intellects have looked ; — when we see
that (to use the words of the German historian whom a
study of history converted to Christianity from unbelief)
" Christ lifted the gate of the centuries off its hinges with
His bleeding hand " — the case becomes far different. The
greatness of Jesus, even if we regard Him simply as a man
among men, not only transcends, but transcends incon-
ceivably and immeasurably, the combination of all the
forms and varieties of human greatness. The ages which
have followed have all looked to
" Him first, Him last, Him midst, and without end."
6 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
As they have contemplated Him, in the Unity of the
Father and the Holy Spirit, they have exclaimed, "Whom
have we in heaven but Thee ? " and as they have felt the
penetrative, all-absorbing influence of His human person-
ality, they have exclaimed, " There is none upon earth that
I desire beside Thee." *
I. History has borne its witness to Him. The Jews,
who in their decadence no longer listened to Moses and the
Prophets, but to Sadducean Priests and posing Pharisees,
fell into utter and immediate ruin in accordance with His
prophecy. The grandeur of the Roman Empire was hum-
bled to the dust, and vanished before Him. The Northern
nations, abandoning their ignorance and savagery, knelt
humbly before " The White Christ," and, conquerors
though they were, accepted the religion of the Christians
whom they had conquered. " In all my study of the an-
cient times," wrote the German historian Johann von
Miiller, " I have always felt the want of something, and it
was not till I knew our Lord that all was clear to me ; with
Him there is nothing that I am not able to solve." |
The great rulers have claimed their authority from Him
alone, and have confessed His absolute pre-eminence. The
first Christian Emperor wove upon the labarum of his
armies His cross of shame; and it is set in jewels on the
diadems of many kings. The oldest crown of Europe — the
famous iron crown of Lombard y — was venerated most be-
cause it was believed to be made of an iron nail from the
cross on Golgotha. " Bow thy head, Sicambrian," said St.
Remigius to Clovis after the victory of Tolbiac ; "burn
what thou hast adored, adore what thou hast burned ! "
Godfrey of Bouillon, when crowned King of Jerusalem,
would not wear a crown of gold where his Saviour had worn
a crown of thorns. Rudolph of Hapsburg, founder of the
great Empire of Germany, when no sceptre could be found
amid the tumult of his coronation, grasped a crucifix and
swore that that should be his sceptre. Napoleon, the last
* Ps. Ixxiii. 25.
THE DIVINE BIRTH. 7
great conqueror of modern days, said in his exile, " I know
men, and Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a
resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and
the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not
exist. There is between Christ and all other religions
whatsoever the distance of infinity : from the first day to
the last He is the same — always the same, majestic, simple,
infinitely firm and infinitely gentle. Between Him and
whoever else in the world there is no possible term of
comparison." *
2. Poetry is the choicest flower of all human thought ;
and just as the greatest poets of the ancient world who
knew God — like Isaiah, and Amos, and the Psalmists — had
sung of the coming Christ, so, since He was born, all the
supremest poets without exception — Dante, Shakespeare,
Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson — have
come to Him with their singing robes about them, and laid
their garlands most humbly at His feet. Truly
" Piety hath found
Friends in the friends of Science, and true prayer
Has flowed from lips wet with Castalian dews."
Nay, even in the ancient heathen world, supreme poets have
stretched blind hands of faith and prayer to the Unknown
Deliverer, ^schylus, sublimest of the Athenian tragedians,
in his greatest drama, makes Hermes say to Prometheus :
" Expect not at all any termination of this thy anguish till
some one of the gods appear as a successor to thy toils, and
be willing to go down into the unlighted Hades, and around
the gloomy depths of Tartarus."f And Virgil, sweetest of all
the Roman singers, wrote in his Fourth Eclogue a prophecy
of the Golden Age which was at hand, and the Child whose
manhood would inaugurate a reign of peace in a world of
* In a conversation with Genl. Bertrand, Comte de Montholon, HScii de la
Captiv. de V Emperetir NapoUon,
f iEsch. Prom. v. 1026-1029.
8 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
beauty ; and this he wrote in such strains as almost elevated
him to the rank of an inspired Seer.
3. Philosophy has occupied the minds of some of the
loftiest of the human race, and it has been the lifelong
pursuit of many a
" Grey spirit, yearning in desire
To follow knowledge, like a guiding star,
Beyond the utmost bounds of human thought."
But these grave and earnest students of the problem of the
world have often either sunk into despondency, like Zeno
and Marcus Aurelius, for lack of the hope which Christ has
inspired into the hearts of men ; or, like Plato, they have
looked yearningly forward to some Unseen Deliverer whom
as yet they knew not, though they were convinced of the
awful necessity for His Advent. Kant used indignantly to
repel every word spoken against the historic Saviour, and
regarded himself as a mere bungler, interpreting Him as
best he could.* " Philosophy," said Pico della Mirandola,
" j^^>^.f truth. . . KeUgion possesses it." f
4. Art reveals to us the Unseen. It teaches us to see,
and what to see, and to see more than we see with our
bodily eyes ; and since Christ was born, all the greatest Art
in the world, without exception, has been consecrated to
His glory. To Him have been reared those " Epic poems
in stone," those glorious Churches and Cathedrals, shadowy
with immortal memories, which make us exclaim,
" They dreamt not of a perishable home
Who thus could build ";
and under whose hallowed shade we feel that
" Bubbles burst, and folly's dancing foam
Melts if it cross the threshold."
To His glory the greatest of sculptors set free the impris-
oned angels which, to his imagination, seemed to be strug-
* Vorowski, Life of Kant, p. 86. f Pic. Mirand., 0pp. 359.
THE DIVINE BIRTH. 9
gling in the blocks of unhewn marble; to His glory Giotto
and Leonardo, Raphael and Luini, Vittore Pisano and
Lorenzo di Credi, Giovanni Bellini and Carpaccio, Albrecht
Diirer and Holbein — and with them the greatest of all the
painters, down to our own Millais, and Burne-Jones, and
Holman Hunt — have devoted the strongest and purest of
their powers. For love of Him, and with no thought
of gain, Fra Angelico and Sandro Botticelli painted their
soft and silent pictures, even as, long centuries earlier, the
poor and persecuted Christians of the Catacombs had made
the walls of those dark corpse-crowded galleries bright
with their emblems of Orpheus, the Dove, the Fish, the
Vine, and the Fair Shepherd with the lamb or kid upon His
shoulder. From the earliest dawn of the Gospel down to
the present day, no pictures have been comparable in
greatness to those in which the supremest artists have con-
secrated to the memory of Christ the glory of the fair
colours, and the inspiration of hallowed thoughts.
5. And to take one other all-embracing sphere of human
intellect, the sphere of SCIENCE, in that region, too, the
most eminent human souls — men like Copernicus, Bacon,
Leibnitz, Descartes, Haller, Pascal, Ray, Franklin, Her-
schell, Agassiz, Faraday, and many others — not losing sight
of the Creator in the multitudinous marvels of His crea-
tures, have looked to Christ as their Lord and their God.
" A little Philosophie," as Bacon said, " inclineth a man's
mind to Atheism, but depth in Philosophie bringeth men's
minds about to religion."* Among the Coryphaei of
Science two names stand supreme — Kepler and Newton.
Kepler wrote of Christ with the profoundest reverence, and
Newton — " the whitest of human souls " as well as one of
the most richly endowed — raised his adoring eyes to heaven
in uttermost simplicity, and sincerely believed in the Lord
Jesus Christ with all his heart. The first mortal eyes
which ever observed the transit of Venus were those of
* Bacon, £ssay 16. Of Atheisme,
lo THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Jeremiah Horrocks, then a humble curate at Hoole. He
hurried to his telescope in the intervals between three
Sunday services, and, though his observation was of such
consummate astronomical importance, he recorded in his
diary — and the sentence is carved upon the tablet placed to
his memory two centuries later in Westminster Abbey —
that he broke off his work to go to the humble service in
the little village church — '^ ad major a avocatus quae ob haec
parerga negligi noji decuit^
On one occasion a friend. Sir Henry Acland, found
Michael Faraday in tears ; with his head bent over an open
Bible. " I fear you are feeling worse," he said. " No,"
answered Faraday, " it is not that ; but why, oh, why will
not men believe the blessed truths here revealed to them ?"
A humble and reverent study of the laws which God has
impressed upon the Universe has made
" The pale-featured sage's trembling hand
Strong as a host of armed deities,
Such as the blind Ionian fabled erst : "
and yet of those sages, from Copernicus to Faraday, and
down to the most eminent of our living students of Science,
the foremost have not only had faith in God, but also have
believed rightly in the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus
Christ.
6. So, then, for Earth's loftiest intellects — as one of the
foremost and most learned poets of our own generation
has sung —
" The acknowledgment of God in Christ,
Accepted by the reason, solves for thee
All pro)3lems in the world, and out of it."
And the same is true of those who have evinced a yet
diviner greatness by scaling the loftiest moral heights and
showing the utmost glories of self-sacrifice. If the men of
loftiest genms in the world have acknowledged Christ, this
was if possible even more the case with those who have
THE DIVINE BIRTH. ii
conferred on the Human race the highest and most deep-
reaching services of pity and goodness. What was it but
the Divine trembling pity which he had learned from
Christ, and the commission which he had received from
Him, that sent forth St, Paul to preach the Gospel amid
his daily death of hatreds, miseries, and cruel persecutions,
till, like the blaze of beacon fires kindled from hill to hill,
its glory flashed from Jerusalem to Antioch, to Ephesus,
and to Troas, and thence leapt over the sea to Athens, to
Corinth, to Imperial Rome, and even to our Britain, the
Ultima TJiule of the World ? What made the Roman
lady Fabiola spend her fortune in founding hospitals at
Rome, and in distant lands? Why did St. Jerome bury
himself in the Cave of the Nativity at Bethlehem to trans-
late the Bible from the Hebrew into Latin ? What made
the boy St. Benedict fly from the allurements of Rome to
the Rocks of Subiaco and found the order to which learn-
ing owes so deep a debt? Why did St. Bonaventura,
when asked the source of his great learning, point in
silence to his Crucifix? Why did St. Thomas Aquinas,
when asked by Christ in vision. Bene scripsisti de me, TJioma.
Quain mercedem recipies? reply immediately '■'■ Non aliam
nisi Te, Domine ? '' Why did sweet St. Francis of Assisi
strip himself of everything, and, by living as a pauper and
a beggar, infuse new life and holiness into an apostatising
and luxurious world ? What led St. Francis Xavier to lay
aside his rank and his pleasures, and become a wandering
missionary, gaining by his sacrifice a happiness so intense
that he even prayed God not to pour upon him such a
flood-tide of rapturous beatitude ? What sent the Baptist
cobbler, William Carey, with his first collection of ;^I3
2s. 6d., to evangelise the mighty Continent of Hindostan ?
Every one of these, and thousands more of all those whose
lives have been a blessing to the world, would have
answered "CHRIST."
What but the love of Christ constraining him led John
12 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Howard to toil among plague-stricken prisoners, until his
death at Cherson, on the Black Sea, " clothed a nation in
spontaneous mourning," and " he went down to his grave
amid the benedictions of the poor " ? What made
Elizabeth Fry go unaccompanied among the wild, de-
graded, brutalised women of Newgate, and take them by
the hand, and raise them from the depths of their fallen
humanity? Why did men like Thomas Clarkson, Granville
Sharpe, Zachary Macaulay, and William Wilberforce, with
an energy which nothing could daunt, with a persistence
nothing could interrupt, use their time, their talents, their
fortunes, and every energy of their minds and bodies — and
that in spite of ridicule, hatred, peril, and reproach — " to
save England from the guilt of using the arm of freedom
to forge the fetters of the slave " ? * What sent Father
Damien to wretched and squalor-stricken Molokai, to live,
and catch the leprosy, and die a leper among the lepers in
the dismal isle ? What made Lord Shaftesbury vow him-
self, while yet he was a Harrow boy, to works of mercy
which added the brightest jewel to the glory of Queen
Victoria's reign ? What enabled him — amid the venomous
attacks of the Press and the world, and the chill aloofness
of the clergy — to toil on until he had inaugurated the
Ragged School movement, and passed the Ten Hours and
the Factory Bills ? Why should the poor Portsmouth
cobbler, John Pounds, have troubled himself, day after
day, to gather the ragged waifs into his stall, and teach
them with letters torn down from the advertisements upon
the walls, and so — poor and ignorant as he was^ — to give an
impulse to our great national system of education? What
influenced Robert Raikes, the Gloucester printer, to begin
the work which established Sunday Schools throughout
the length and breadth of the world ? "I thought, Can I
do nothing for all these wandering little ones ? A voice said
to me ' Try.' I did try, and lo ! What hath God wrought I "
* From the epitaph on Granville Sharpe in Westminster Abbey.
THE DIVINE BIRTH. 13
Or take the best and most widely known of the effective
workers of to-day amid the slums of unutterable squalor
and degradation. Ask them what is the hidden force
which sustains them in the long and thankless self-sacrifice
of their lives, amid the scorn of worldlings and formalists,
who look down upon them from the lordly altitudes of
their own utter inferiority. What made General Sir Henry
Havelock face so many sneers for holding Bible classes
among his soldiers, and winning them to Total Abstinence ?
What made General Gordon so kind to the poor, ragged,
homeless boys of Greenwich ?
One and all, they would give the same answer, " The
Love of Christ constraineth us." They would be ready to
say with St. Ignatius, " Come fire, and the cross, and
crowds of wild beasts ; come tearings, breakings, and
crunching of my bones; come the mutilation of my mem-
bers, and shatterings of my whole body, and all the dread-
ful torments of the Devil, so I may but attain to Jesus
Christ."* He felt that " he who is near to the sword, he
who is among the wild beasts, is near to God." f
We are trying, they would say, to walk in the footsteps,
we are trying to continue the work, of Him who was the
Good Physician, of Him who went about doing good.
We would fain be imitators of our Lord and Saviour Jesus
Christ — of Him who taught that Love is the fulfilling of
the Law ; of Him who summed up the Law of God in
Love to Him and to our neighbour. Has any unbeliever
rendered to mankind the millionth part of such immortal
services ? I am not aware of a single supreme effort for
the amelioration of the manifold miseries of mankind which
has not been due to the inspiration of Christian enthusiasm.
" There is nothing fruitful but sacrifice " — and the noblest
and most continuous self-sacrifice which the world has seen
has sprung simply from the belief in, and the imitation of,
Jesus Christ.
* Ignat. E^. ad Rom, v. \ id. ad Smyrn. iv.
14 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Christianity, then, is the highest, the most divine, the
most eternal blessing in the world. It has been so in all
these nineteen centuries; it is so in all the best conditions
of our existence, and not to believers only, but even to
those who deny, even to those who blaspheme Christ. But
Christianity, had it only been a dead creed, or a purified
ideal, or an organised society, would have been powerless.
As a system of doctrine, or a code of loftier morals, it
would have achieved but little. The permanent life, the
regenerative force, the irresistible inspiration of Christianity
is Christ.
It will be seen, then, that the reason why we believe in
the records of that miraculous birth, of those angel
melodies, of those bending Magi, is not only because they
stand recorded by those who were far too feeble to have
invented them, and of whom every one would have said,
" I would rather die than lie " — but because, being so
recorded, they have received the attestation of God Him-
self, seeing that the whole subsequent history of the world
seems to us to have set its seal to the belief that they are
true.
To us the records of Christ in the Gospels seem the
reverse of non-natural or needless. If any man can really
believe that Humanity is the result of the working of
mechanical laws, deaf, and dead, and dumb, " blind as
Fate, inexorable as tyranny, merciless as death — which
have no ear to hear, no heart to pity, and no arm to
save " ; if any man can really persuade himself, not that
" God formed man out of the dust of the earth, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life," but that man
is] only the accident of accidents — the casual outcome of
unconscious material forces — then with such a man it is
simply impossible to argue at all. His mental peculiarities
must be wholly different in kind from those of the human
race in general. And deep below the surface of an avowed
infidelity there often lurks an instinctive conviction that,
THE DIVINE BIRTH. 15
after all, we are the creatures of God's hand. Even the
reckless and depraved conspirator, who made an arrogant
boast of his shallow scepticism, cried out on the scaffold,
" O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul ! "
But if we believe even so elementary a truth as that
God made man, then if God created the first Adam— if
God created him who, whether literally or in an allegory,
fell by eating that forbidden fruit
" Whose moral taste
Brought sin into the world, and all our woe " —
we cannot see the least difficulty in the belief that God also
clothed with human existence, by the exercise of His
supernatural power, His own Son, the second Adam, who
came to redeem and save the fallen race. If indeed, God
were some ruthless Moloch, to be appeased by
" Blood
Of children's sacrifice, and parents' tears ";
if He were like the Ahriman of the Persians, or the Typhon
of the Egyptians, or the Sheeva of the Hindoos, or the
Atua of the New Zealanders — we might suppose that He
would care nothing whether men perished in utter misery
and corruption or not. But to all who believe that God is
Love, and that, in spite of the insoluble problem of the
existence of evil, " love is creation's primal law," to them
a Divine interposition for the redemption and deliverance
of mankind seems even more in accordance with Eternal
Power than man's original creation. The instinct of mercy
in our own nature forbids us to accept the Epicurean dream
of gods who lie beside their nectar and
" Smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, stormy deeps and fiery
sands.
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying
hands,"
i6 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
If Creation be but an ordinary exercise of the Divine
power, why should T^^-crcation be less so ? If God made
man, and " breathed into his nostrils the breath of life
and man became a living soul," why was it impossible or
unlikely that Christ should be "born of a pure Virgin"?
What seems impossible to man is always possible to God.
And when God saw His children — and "we are all His off-
spring," as even the heathen recognised* — wandering and
lost in the wilderness of shame and death — since God is
God, and God is Love, it would have seemed to us infinitely
less believable that He would leave the creatures of His
hand to perish in their wickedness, than that His mercy
should provide for them a way of salvation. There is no
other name under heaven whereby we can be saved, except
the name of Christ ; and this seems to us a sufificient reason
for, a sufiEicient explanation of, the truth that for us men
and for our salvation, Christ took our nature upon Him,
and was made in the likeness of sinful flesh.
And the more we study and learn what Christ was, and
how He lived, and what He has done, the deeper will be
this our conviction that He whom we worship. He whom
we acknowledge as the Lord of Glory, came not into the
world by the ordinary processes of human birth, but that
when the fulness of the time was come, " God sent forth
His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, that we
might receive the adoption of sons." f
But after all, the strongest part of the evidence to us is
that we have " the witness in ourselves." % We know that
God is He "who also stamped us as with a seal for Him-
self, and gave us the earnest " — the arrhabo, at once pledge
and part payment — " of the Spirit in our hearts.'" It is
^^ witli the heart that man believeth unto righteousness." §
If we would see Christ, we must, as Origen said, leave the
*Acts xvii. 28. rot) yap koX yivog ka/xiv (St. Paul, quoting from Aratus and
Cleanthes. C/. Virgil Q(org., iv. 221-25).
\ Gal. iv. 4, 1 1 John v. 10, § Rom. x, lo,
THE DIVINE BIRTH. 17
crowd of faithless disciples with the demoniac whom they
cannot cure, and must ascend the mountain top.* Of
every true Christian it may be said that " His seed is in
him ! " f and if '* the natura/ ma.n receiveth not the things of
the Spirit of God because " they are foolishness unto him,";}:
yet spiritual things are spiritually discerned. They who
are spiritually-minded recognise the truth not only by the
reason, but by the heart. § " Christian faith is a grand
cathedral, with divinely-pictured windows. Standing ivt^/i-
out you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any;
standing ivithin, each ray of light reveals a harmony of
unspeakable splendour." ||
This is a demonstration stronger than any criticism can
take away, though to all such criticism, even on its own
chosen ground, we can offer what to us — as to the vast
majority of God's most gifted as well as of His humblest
sons — seems to be a decisive refutation.
* Orig. c. Cels. vi. 77. f r John iii. 9. :j: i Cor. ii. 14.
§ Pascal, Pens^es, iii. 208. H Nath. Hawthorne, Transformation, p. 262.
CHAPTER II.
THE UNIQUE SUPREMACY OF JESUS.
" To whom will ye liken Me, and make Me equal, and compare Me, that
we may be like ?" — Is. xlvi. 5.
AvTog EvrivOp^irr/aEv, Iva ^fielg QeoiroirjOufiEv. — AthaNASIUS, De Incarn., p.
51-
" Dictmur et filii Dei ; sed Ille aliter Filius Dei." — Augustine, in
Ps. ii.
" Try all the ways of righteousness you can think of, and you will find
no way brings you to it except the way of Jesus." — Matthew Arnold.
We believe, then, in the Miraculous Birth of our Saviour
Christ; and our belief is confirmed when we examine the
records of all history through and through, and find that the
Babe, at whose birth the heavens burst open to disclose
their radiant minstrelsies, stood ALONE, UNIQUE, SUPREME
among all the million millions of every age of all the sons
of men. It would be more amazing that such an one —
" holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners," and,
even in His human humiliation, but " a little lower than
the angels " ; — that One who has thus visibly been made
"the heir of all things"; — that One who was foremost in
the love and adoration of countless brethren, and to them
a motive force of incomparable and inexhaustible vitality, —
should have been born not otherwise than the mass of
ordinary men. An infinite catastrophe required an infinite
interference. God had created men sinless; it required a
new man, even the Lord from Heaven, to uplift him from
that gulf of sin into which he had been plunged by choos-
ing the evil, and refusing the good, until his whole nature
18
UNIQUE SUPREMACY OF JESUS. 19
had become perverted, the whole head sick, and the whole
heart faint.
And here is a point which may be tested. The records of
the ages are open to us. History unfolds to our eyes her
ample page, ** rich with the spoils of time." We know
enough of tens of thousands of human beings to enable us
to judge of them ; and we know enough at least of all the
greatest of mankind to enable us to compare them with
Him whom we worship as the Son of God.
The unique supremacy of Jesus is especially illustrated
by His sinlessness. By confession of all Scripture, and of
all humanity, from the beginning until now, there never
has been any other man who, being in human flesh, was
not a sinner. There is no man that sinneth not, no, not
one.* Our Lord Himself said to His disciples, " When ye
have done all that is commanded you, say. We are unprof-
itable servants." f A thousand years earlier the Psalmist
had said, Enter not into judgment with Thy servant, O
Lord, for in Thy sight shall no man living be justified." |
Seven and a half centuries before the Incarnation, Isaiah
had said, " We are all as an unclean thing, and [all our
righteousnesses are as filthy rags." § But those who knew,
and day by day had lived with the Lord Jesus, and had
watched His least-actions, and shared His inmost thoughts,
bear witness with one voice that " He did no sin." || And
He, in whose mouth there was no guile, and who was " meek
and lowly of heart," yet spoke of Himself, as did all His
Apostles, as of one who could not sin,^ and as always doing
the things that pleased God. **
Other human beings have become the founders of forms
* I Kings viii, 46 ; Rom. iii. 10. \ Luke xvii. 10.
X Ps. cxliii. 2. § Is. Ixiv. 6. R. V. " A polluted garment."
\ I John iii. 5 ; i Pet. ii. 22.
1[ Heb. vii. 26. Comp. iv. 15 ; 2 Cor. v. 2i ; i Pet. i. 19, ii. 22, iii. 18 ; Rev.
iii. 7.
** John viii. 29.
20 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
of religion adopted by whole peoples and generations, and
have been surrounded by legends with a blaze of miracles.
Yet enough has been recorded of their lives and teaching
to enable us to contrast them with the Saviour of the
World, and to show that they lie as far beneath Him as the
earth is beneath the highest heaven.
Let us take three such — the founders of the three reli-
gions to which, with Christianity, the great majority of the
human race belong.
I. Buddhism is said to number among its votaries many
millions of mankind, or nearly one-third of the human race.
"The Buddha" is not the name, but the title of the
founder; his name was Gotama, and he was often spoken
of as Sakya Muni, or " Sakya the Sage." He was born
about B. c. 624. Nearly every fact and detail of his life is
lost in the dim mist of extravagant traditions. He lived
in prehistoric times, and the sacred book — the Tripitaka, or
" Three Baskets " — which professes to record his doctrine,
was not given to the world till centuries after his death.
Of Sakya Muni therefore we can only judge by the religion
which he taught — by the ideal which he set before himself
and his followers, and the results which that religion has
produced in the world.
Though in a certain sense Sakya Muni may be called
"The Light of Asia," and though Buddhism numbers more
adherents than any other religion in the world, yet, tried
by any standard whatever, Buddha cannot for a moment
be placed in the most distant comparison with Christ.
His ideal was in some essential particulars radically false,
and even pernicious. There is an uncleanly abjectness in
some of his precepts, a narrow selfishness in his morality.
His religion is a dreary atheism which tends to merge into
idolatry * ; his heaven an extinction of individual exist-
ence ; his piety a perverted bodily service. He taught
* " II n*y a pas trace de I'idee de Dieu dans le Boudhisme entier." Barth.
St. Hilaire, Le Buddha, p. iv.
UNIQUE SUPREMACY OF JESUS. 21
that there was " no God, no creation, no Creator — nothing
but Mind minding itself."* " Insufficient for Time, and re-
jecting Eternity, the triumph of his religion is to live with-
out fear, and to die without hope." f Its ideal is the life of
its Bhikshahs, who, besides professing faith in Buddha, en-
gaged to lead a life of self-denial, celibacy, and mendicancy,
and to e7istrange themselves from all domestic and social
obligations. X
Buddhism, among many other glaring deficiencies and
errors, involves a practical denial of the doctrine of man's
immortality. It is a religion of despair, for it only
offers a possibility of weary and endless metamorphoses, to
be crowned at last by that obliteration of personal exist-
ence — that final loss of individuality — to which he gave
the name of Nirvana. Barth^lemy St. Hilaire, who made
a special study of the subject, says, " his religion is a spirit-
ualism without soul, a virtue without duty, a morality
without liberty, a world without nature and without
God."
And what have been the religious results of Buddhism ?
There are men of excellent character and holy life among
Buddhists as in all other religious communities, for God
doth not leave Himself without witness among those whom
He has made, and " in every nation he that feareth God
and doeth righteousness is accepted of Him." § But
Buddhism as a religion leaves the multitude with little but
a false ideal and an unilluminated despair. "Vice had no
intrinsic hideousness, and virtue was another name for cal-
culating prudence ; love was little more than animal sym-
* Max Miiller, Chips, p. 269.
f Sir J, Em. Tennant, Christianity in Ceylon, p. 227.
X Prof. Wilson says: " Belief in a supreme God is unquestionably a modem
graft upon the unqualified atheism of Sakya Muni" {Journal of Asiat. Soc,
xvi. 255). Wilson, Essay, i. 360. "Sin is, in the view of the Buddhist, a
necessary thing: it is a cosmical and not a personal evil." Hardwick, Christ
and Other Masters, i. 226.
§ Acts X. 35.
22 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
pathy ; duty was devoid of moral motive. The Buddhist's
principle of action was ' I nmst ' ; he could not say * I
ought.' " *
And the «^//Tai — mere com-
monplace nobodies, who had never had a learned educa-
tion.* They spoke a coarse provincial dialect ; they
possessed none of the exegetic lore of the Scribes ; they
knew nothing of the Middoth or the Erubhin, nothing of
Halacha or the HaggadaJi ; they belonged to the common
amharatsim — the multitude who '' knew not the law and
were accursed." f Such men could not even be pious, and
a Pharisee felt polluted (so Hillel declared) if he so much
as touched them with the hem of his garment. In the
Gospels themselves the Evangelists constantly record inci-
dents which show that they were " dull and slow of heart
* Acts iv. 13.
f John vii. 49, miKarapaTOi. The name dmai, from ^7|«of, was also givea
to these " Men of the People." See Hamburger, s, v. Amhaaretz.
48 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
to believe " ; that they ignorantly misunderstood Christ's
allusions ; that without the aid of His tender condescension,
they could not grasp the significance of His parables ; that
they were entirely unprepared for His line of action in
many cases ; that they would fain have hindered His
divine purposes; that His plainest prophecies failed to
impress their understandings ; that they were liable to
petty jealousies and ambitions among themselves ; and
that, even after His resurrection. He had to upbraid them
for their unbelief and hardness of heart.* Inferiority is far
too weak a word to express the depth at which they stood
below their Master. How could these Galilean peasants
and fishermen, " fresh from their nets, and with their clothes
wringing wet " — how could tax gatherers and zealots, and
men of individuality so unmarked that their fellows had
little or nothing special to record about them, except their
imperfections — how could they have invented a story, and
imagined z. character, which transcended them as infinitely
as the heaven is higher than the earth, and which, when it
was shining before them in heaven's own light, they could
but very dimly understand ? Who will believe that St.
Paul, the learned Pharisee, who began with the most furi-
ous rage against Christianity, was so credulous that — in
defiance of all his predilections, and all his past training —
he suddenly accepted as true a mass of myths, freshly in-
vented by unknown Galileans ? Is there any one whose
capacity for appreciating evidence is so paralysed as to
believe "that the Holiest of Men was a deceiver. His disci-
ples either deluded or liars, and that deceivers would have
preached a holy religion of which self-denial is the chief
duty ? " t Whatever else the early Apostles, Disciples, and
EvangeHsts may have been, they were undeniably holy
men ; — would they have invented falsities, and then, in
preaching them, have poured out their lives like water, and
sacrificed everything which life holds most dear?
* Mark xvi. 14. f Niebuhr, Lebensnachr., i. 470
THE GOSPELS. 49
The presence and the work of Jesus in Palestine in the
days of the Herods are matters of ordinary history, as
certain as any recorded in Tacitus or Dion Cassius. It
would be the wildest of hypotheses that the poor Evangel-
ists could have evolved out of their own consciousness a
story so entrancing that, nineteen centuries later, it should
be read with awe and ecstasy alike by emperors in their
palaces and peasants in their hovels. Maories and Fijians,
Kaffirs and Negroes, Esquimaux and Tahitians, can delight
in the Gospels with no less intensity than men of the finest
genius and the most consummate learning.
The Synoptists exhibit no special skill, or power, or
insight. Their main function is simply to narrate.
They do not enter into theological disquisitions. The
technical scholasticism of theologians leaves no trace
on their pages. There is no learning in their allusions, no
brilliance or profundity in their style. Their records are
fragmentary and unchronological. St. Matthew, accus-
tomed to the use of the stylus from his trade as a despised
toll-collector, was probably the first to commit to writing
a collection of Christ's " sayings " {Logia) ; and he and
the others, though guided by divine inspiration, yet in
other respects followed the bent of their own individuality,
and wrote as St. Augustine said, " ut qiiisqiie meviinerat, vel
ut cuiqiie cordieraty It must also be borne in mind that they
do not profess to offer complete or exhaustive records. Our
Lord uttered His prophetic woe on Chorazin and Bethsaida
as cities which had witnessed His mighty works ; yet we do
not know of a single miracle performed at Chorazin, and
only one is recorded to have been performed at Bethsaida.*
St. Matthew belonged to the social class which was,
of all others, regarded with the greatest contempt, and
beyond this we know scarcely a single fact about him.
He wrote mainly for the converts from Judaism.f It used
* Mark viii. 22.
f Hence in St. Matthew there are eleven quotations made by the Evangelist
50 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
to be thought that his original work was in Hebrew,* but
modern scholars now regard his Gospel as a composite one,
formed partly from a Greek Gospel resembling that of St,
Mark, and partly from a collection of our Lord's sayings in
Greek, used also by St. Luke; the two documents having
been welded together by a third redactor.
St. Luke, as " a physician," had probably belonged at
one time to the body of slaves in some wealthy house in
Asia Minor.
St. Mark recorded in his Greek Gospel, for Roman
readers,f some of the vivid reminiscences of St. Peter, the
Galilean fisherman. Not one of the three was in any other
respect specially remarkable, and though all three wrote in
Greek, their records are tinged with the Aramaic phrases
of the earliest oral teaching. It is a gross absurdity to
himself from the Old Testament, not counting those made by our Lord. In
St. Mark, who wrote for Roman readers, there is only one (or, perhaps, two).
In St. Luke, who wrote mainly for Greeks, three. In St. John, who wrote for
the whole Christian world, there are nine. Each synoptist has his own special-
ties. The subject of Prophecy is prominent in St. Matthew ; of Prayer in St.
Luke, who also dwells much on the ministry of angels, and uses the Pauline
word evayje'Xi^EaBai more than twenty times, and aurr/pia four times. He uses
the title 6 Kupcog for Christ much more frequently than the other Evangelists.
* Euseb. //. E. iii. 39 ; Iren. Haer. iii. i ; Jer. Pref. in Matt. St. Matthew
alone uses the Hebrew term " the Kingdom of the heavens " thirty-two times ; '
the other N. T. writers always call it " the Kingdom of God."
f It is no part of my immediate object to enter into the proI)lem of the origin
of the Synoptic Gospels — a problem complicated by their close resemblances
yet marked divergences. Even the verbal differences show that they did not
slavishly follow each other. Thus St. Mark expresses " through the eye of a
needle" by <5m t (ivaakiaq pa(j)l6og (Mark x. 25) ; St. Matthew by 6th TpvKr/fiarog
pacpUhg ; St. Luke, in the best reading, by 6ia Tp^uarog Pelovijg. To my own
mind the tlieory of a common original fund of oral teaching best meets the
peculiarities of the case. Many special touches in St. Luke seem to come
from eye witnesses. The agreements are mostly in the story of the beginning
2l\-\. 52.
We may, then, be assured of the genuineness of the Gospel
narratives, and they prove that Jesus was a Perfect Man.
All subsequent experience, and the survey of nineteen
centuries of history, suffice (as we have seen) to show that,
as a Perfect Man, He stands alone in the annals of the
world — unapproachable, unparalleled.
From heathen sources — from Tacitus,* Suetonius,f and
Pliny:]: — though they all refer to Jesus, nothing is to be
learnt. In Jewish sources — Josephus and the Talmudists
— we find deliberate silence or frantic calumny. " The
True Word " of the Platonist Celsus (a. d. 176) was suffi-
ciently refuted by Origen. Some of these writers merely
mention His name as the founder of a religion, and the
Talmudists have a few wild and monstrous fictions about
Him, but none of them charge Him with sin or crime.
The silence of Josephus — for the famous allusion to Jesus
in his Antiquities (xviii. 3, 3) is either an interpolation, or
has been tampered with by Christian writers — was obvi-
ously intentional. That it was not the silence of ignorance,
but of embarrassment, is certain, for he knew all about
John the Baptist, § and regarded him with high respect;
and in speaking of the martyrdom of James, the Lord's
brother, if that passage be genuine, he actually attributes
* Tac. Ann. xv. 44. f Suet. Nero 16 ; Claud. 16.
t Plin. Ep. X. 97, 98. %Anti. xviii. 5, 2.
54
THE CLAIMS OF JESUS. 55
the final destruction of Jerusalem to the Nemesis due to
that crime. The allusions in the writings of later Judaism
— which will not name Jesus, but speak of Him as " the
fellow," " the fool," or " he who ought not to be named "
— are beneath contempt. The " infamous, multiform,
mediaeval lampoon " against Jesus, known as the " Toldoth
Jes/m" gives expression to the screams and curses of a
hatred only excusable because it was partly, alas! due to
the savage ruthlessness of Christian persecution.
But in what way do the fourfold records of the Evangel-
ists demonstrate this unique sinlessness and perfectness of
the Saviour of Mankind ? They do so, because in all they
narrate they show us One who lived His life amid the
ordinary surroundings of men, yet wholly without a trace
of evil, or of incompleteness in His moral supremacy.
Jesus lived in the full blaze of publicity, (i.) Many fol-
lowers had been under His constant teaching. (ii.)
Myriads had heard His words and seen His works in Gali-
lee, (iii.) He had thousands of enemies, who hated Him
with a singular intensity of that unscrupulous hatred which
always exhibits itself in its vilest and most ruthless forms
among religious disputants.
His followers, who had seen Him in the most private
and confidential intercourse of common life, narrated from
intimate knowledge the incidents of His ministry. In all
that they narrate we see the glory of Godhead veiled in
human form, and we cannot find the least trace of that evil
impulse (the Yetzer ha-raJi) which, the Jewish Rabbis said,
divided with the good impulse (the Yetzer ha-tob) the whole
domain of human existence."*
We see that the sinlessness of Jesus was not a miraculous,
* See Hershon, Rabbinic CoiJimentary on Genesis, p. 21. Treasures of the
Talmud, p. 161. In Gen. ii. 7, the word for " He formed " has two lods,
which the Rabbis explained of the trvo impulses. On Gen. viii. 21, they re-
marked that the Yetzer ha-rah is implanted in men, whereas the Yetzer ha-tob
is only a guest. See, too, Sanhedrin, f. 64, i.
56 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
but an achieved sinlessness. He was perfectly man, as well
as truly God. He was tempted in all points like as we are,
yet without sin. He was " tempted of the Devil," not only
in the wilderness, but to the end ; and the temptations
would have been no temptations if it had been antecedently
impossible for Him to have succumbed to them. After the
great Temptation in the wilderness the Devil left Him, but
it was only " for a season." He had to face those two-fold
and opposite influences to swerve from the path of perfect-
ness, which arise on the one hand from the allurements of
ease, and on the other from the agonies of suffering. His
temptations appealed to His human nature, His human
imagination. His human sensitiveness to anguish ; they en-
deavoured to sway at once the desires of the mind and
the weakness of the flesh. Jesus was not humanly endowed
with an impossibility of sinning — a iioii posse peccare ; but
with the power to achieve the complete and final victory
over every impulse to sin — a posse nan peccare. This victory,
even more than His miracles, was sufficient to convince His
followers of His Divine Nature, so that from the earliest
days of Christianity, as we learn from Pliny the younger,
they sang hymns to Him as God.*
Be it observed that the superhuman grandeur which
seemed to invest Him as with a garment was something
wholly apart from all earthly pomp of circumstance, or
splendour of endowments. In position He was nothing
more than a Galilean peasant, the lowliest of the lowly,
"the carpenter" of despised and proverbial Nazareth.
The Prophet whom the multitudes saw before them was a
nameless youth, seated on a mountain, or speaking to them
from a boat. When the world, even the hostile and
sceptical world, involuntarily bows before Him, it is not
because of any of the gifts or qualities which ordinarily
dazzle mankind. Jesus was no Poet, entrancing the souls
of men with passionate melodies. He was no mighty
Leader like Moses, emancipating nations from servitude,
* Pliny, Ep. x. 97.
THE CLAIMS OF JESUS. 57
or, with i'Uuminated countenance, promulgating to them a
code of systematic morality. He was no rapt Orator, now
stirring them to tumultuous emotion, now holding them
hushed as an infant at the mother's breast. He was no
Warrior, smiting down his foes in triumphant victory, and
breaking from the necks of the oppressed the yoke of
foreign bondage. Yet turning away from the choir of im-
mortal Poets ; from all " famous men and the fathers who
begat us " ; from mighty Orators who have played on
the emotions of men as on an instrument, and swept them
into stormy passion, or moved them to sobs of pity, as the
wind sweeps into wild music or into soft murmurings the
strings of an .^olian harp ; from all magnificent Con-
querors ; from the Pharaohs in their chariots whirled into
battle amid the serried ranks of their archers ; from Assyr-
ian monarchs leading their captivity captive, and hunting
the lion amid their lords ; from Babylonian Emperors with
the crumbs gathered beneath their tables by vassal kings ;
from deified Caesars in their dizzy exaltation; from Aurung-
zebe or Haroun, flaming in their jewelled robes and sur-
rounded by kotowing courtiers — the world, abandoning all
its own predilections, has felt constrained to drop its
weapons, to tear the garlands from its hair, to kneel lowly
on its knees before the Son of Man in His meek humilia-
tion — in the faded purple of His mockery, in His crown of
torturing thorns !
And His sinlessness is confirmed from every source.
(i.) His OWN Family witness to it. His mother and
His brethren had lived with Him from infancy in the same
poor hut at Nazareth ; they had eaten and drunk and slept
with Him ; had been with Him by night, by day, in the
most solemn intercourse, at the most unguarded moments,
during the bright gaiety of boyhood and the passionate fire
of youth, with an intimacy which would have rendered con-
cealment impossible, if, even in His thoughts. He had been
unfaithful to God His Father. His ways were not as their
58 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
ways, nor His thoughts as their thoughts. He set aside
their advice ; He checked their occasional intrusiveness.*
He did not adopt their ideals of patriotism ; He bitterly
disappointed the earthly form of their Messianic hopes —
yet they were so convinced of His sinlessness, that, after
His resurrection, these Dcsposynia^s they were called — these
members of our Lord's human family — became, like James
the Bishop of Jerusalem and Judo the author of the Epis-
tle, pre-eminent and pronounced believers in His divine
supremacy.
(ii.) St. John the Baptist was united to Him by
earthly kinship, and had probably seen something of Him
in His earlier years. This prophet of the wilderness was
one of the sternest of mankind — an uncompromising foe to
all insincerity ; a man who did not for a moment hesitate to
rebuke cruel autocrats, and, with rude impetuosity, to strip
the mask from the hypocritic face of painted Pharisees ; a
man who, so far from feeling flattered when he won con-
verts among the pompous religionists of his day, bluntly
denounced them as " the offsprings of vipers." At the
presence of Jesus, though as yet He was but the unknown
carpenter of Nazaretli, the voice which terrified multitudes
and made kings tremble is hushed into accents of humility,
and the strong personality which over-awed a proud and
passionate nation becomes like that of a timid boy. He
who baptised all others, shrank from baptising the Son of
Man. Before the ministry of Jesus had begun, or a single
miracle had been wrought, John pointed Him out to His
disciples as " the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins
of the world," and as One whose shoe's latchet he is not
worthy to stoop down and unloose.
(iii.) The Apostles lived and moved about with Him
under all varieties of outward condition, alike in the sun-
light of His early ministry, and amid the deadly hatred
and bitter persecution which drove Him forth as a Avan-
*See Matt. xiii. 46 ; Mk. iii. 31 ; Luke viii. 19 ; John vii. 5, 10.
THE CLAIMS OF JESUS. 59
derer and a fugitive who had not where to lay His head ;
and though their worldly Messianic hopes were so utterly
blighted, though they had to bear for His sake the loss of
all which men most desire — yet, with one voice, they speak
of Him as the Holy One of God ; as One who did no sin,
neither was guile found in His mouth ; as One who alone
had the words of eternal life ; as the Christ, the Son of the
Living God ; as holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from
sinners, and made higher than the heavens ; as the sinless
High Priest, who is faithful and just to forgive us our sins,
and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.*
(iv.) The Pharisees, THE Sadducees, the Herodians,
all hated Christ with that deadliness of malignity which
has been invariably exhibited against all the best and
holiest men ; alike by Priests, Jesuits, and Inquisitors,
against all who oppose their own falsities, and by worldings
who resent all unswerving sincerity and stainless authority.
These enemies laid traps for Jesus; tried to entangle Him
in His talk; combined in shameless and clever machinations
to entrap and to destroy Him ; did their utmost to embroil
Him with the rulers, and to disillusion the Galilean multi-
tude of their devotion for Him. They supported their own
false judgments by frantic lies. Yet the only charges
which they could bring against Him were that He " broke
the tradition of the elders" — which He did designedly,
because the so-called " tradition " had become a paltry
rubbish-heap of quantitative goodness — and that " He had
a demon, and cast out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of
demons," which was a mere scream of insane hatred, and
involved the absurdity of supposing that the prince of the
demons was going about as an angel of holiness.
(v.) One of His Apostles, Judas Iscariot, giving himself
up to the temptation of greed, and probably maddened
with sullen wrath at the frustration and disappointment of
* Acts iii. 14, viii. 35, xxii. 14 ; i Pet. ii. 21, iii. iS ; i John ii. I, 29, iii. 5,
7 ; 2 Cor. V. 21 ; I Tim. iii. 16.
6o THE LIFE OF LIVES.
all his worldly hopes, became a traitor. Perhaps he laid to
his soul the flattering unction that there could be no great
sin in doing that which High Priests, and Scribes, and
Pharisees urged him to do, and paid him for doing. Yet
even after that humiliating condemnation, which he might
have been tempted to regard as the final disproof of His
Master's Messianic claims, he was so haunted by the pangs
of intolerable remorse that he flung down unspent upon the
Temple floor the thirty pieces of silver for which he had
sold his soul, and rushed forth to his hideous suicide with
the confession that he had been guilty in that he " had
betrayed INNOCENT BLOOD."
(vi.) The Saniiedrists, violating the traditional com-
passionateness of Jewish tribunals, and goaded on by
priestly hypocrites, sought false witness against Him, and
could find none. There was not a single fault or crime
which they could establish against Him, and their eager
false witnesses utterly broke down. They condemned Him
on His true claim — extorted from Him by the illegal
adjuration of the High Priest, and proved by the subse-
quent history of the whole Jewish and Gentile world — His
claim to be the Christ.
(vii.) The Roman Lady, Claudia Procula, the wife of
Pilate, was so haunted by the thought of Jesus that, terri-
fied by dreams, she bade her husband take no part in con-
demning " that Just Person."
(viii.) Before PiLATE the Jewish priests, with base and
shifty malice, brought against Him four charges : (i) that
He was a deceiver ; (2) that He stirred up the people ; (3)
that He forbade to pay tribute to Caesar ; (4) that He called
Himself a King. All four charges, in the sense in which
they were urged, were absolute lies ; and Pilate — bad, cruel,
blood-stained, wilful as he was — saw them to be lies, born
of the deadliest hatred. Awed by the Prisoner's meek
grandeur, unoffended even byHis majestic silence, trembling
before the mysterious spell which He exercised while He
THE CLAIMS OF JESUS. 6i
stood before him with the agony of pain and the marks of
shame and spitting upon His brow, the haughty Roman
Procurator was constrained to utter again and again the
emphatic testimony, " I find in him no fault at all."
(ix.) The Crucified Malefactor who witnessed the
ultimate humiliation of Jesus ; who shared in the unspeak-
able infamy of His last agonies; who had, at first, joined
in the taunts of the other malefactor against Him ; who
had challenged Him — if He were not the mesith whom the
priests and religious world of the day declared Him to be
— to come down from the cross, and save Himself and His
companions in misery ; — that crucified robber, who saw
Him only in the hour and power of darkness, with the
Roman soldiers mocking, and the crowds yelling against
Him, and the Hierarchs and Elders passing by and wagging
their heads at Him — even that poor robber, overawed to
conviction by the triumph of His patient majesty, testified
" This man hath done nothing amiss," and called Him
" Lord," and prayed that He would admit him into His
kingdom.
(x.) The Roman Centurion, who had seen Him so
grievously insulted by the leaders and religious teachers
and mobs of His own countrymen ; who had watched the
whole scene until the tortures ceased in death ; who had
been in command of the rude quaternions of soldiers — felt
the witness wrung from him, " Truly this was a righteous
man."
(xi.) The very mobs which had so frantically yelled
against Him seem to have been hushed into awe and silence
by the sight of a majesty which no ignominy could humili-
ate, and after His crucifixion returned to Jerusalem smiting
their breasts with remorseful misgiving.
Thus, alike the friends and the enemies of Jesus became
voluntary or unwilling witnesses to His stainless innocence.
His friends not only testified to His perfectness through
all the remainder of their days, but demonstrated it by the
62 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
simplicity of their truthful records, and the power of their
renovated lives. His opponents, with all the will in the
world to blacken His name and depreciate His character,
were either constrained to confess His immaculate purity
of conduct, or in the charges which they brought against
Him were self-convicted of malice, ignorance, and falsehood.
Yet all these testimonies, and even the stupendous
results of His life and death, would not necessarily prove
His sinless humanity, or His divine prerogatives, had they
not been corroborated by His own repeated and unvarying
testimony,*
He asked His most raging opponents, " Which of you
convinceth Me of sin ? And if 1 say the truth, why do ye
not believe Me ? " f
The keynote of Christ's inner life was heavenliness.
" How sour sweet music is
When time is broke, and no proportion kept ;
So is it with the music of men's Uves,"
If the keynote of a man's life be selfishness, earthliness,
greed, self-indulgence, his whole life will be full of " harsh
chromatic jars," If we imitate Christ, we shall be enabled
to join in the perfect diapason, and keep in tune with heaven.
For us, as for our Saviour, "the path to heaven will then
lie through heaven, and all the way to heaven be heaven."
And this heavenliness of Christ was achieved and exhibited
in the common round, the trivial task. He never was what
Romanists call "a religious." His life bore no resem-
blance to those of hermits, monks, or ascetics. His reli-
gion was to finish His Father's work amid the common
every-day life of men. In that common every-day life. He
shifted the centre of gravity of man's existence from earth
to heaven. He made it not geocentric, but heleoccntric.
For all who walk in His steps, life is not only ennobled ; it
* John iv. 34 ; v. 30 ; viii. 29 ; x. 30 ; xiv. 9, 31 ; xv. 6. 27 ; xvi. 33 ; xvii,
4, 19 ; Matt. xi. 28.
f John viii 46. Stier, ReJoi Jesii, Part IV., p. 428.
THE CLAIMS OF JESUS. 63
is glorified, it is transfigured. " Thou shalt show me the
path of Hfe ; in Thy presence is fuhiess of joy, and at Thy
right hand there are pleasures for evermore."
Bearing in mind what He was, only consider the weight
of such utterances as these which follow, and consider how
— if they had not been so amply justified, both by the short
years of His life, and by the nineteen centuries which that
life has influenced, and by the ages which it will still influ-
ence till Time shall be no more — the fact of uttering them,
had they not been the perfect truth, would have lowered
Jesus below the level of all other religious teachers ; would
have branded Him with the weakness of self-deception and
the stain of falsehood.
Consider His seven " I am's."
I. " Jesus said unto them, I am the Bread of Life.'' *
This He said when the multitude, impressed with
His words and works, yet asked of Him a sign to authen-
ticate His claim that the Father had sent Him to bestow
eternal life by the food which He could give. They chal-
lenged Him to fulfil the tradition that the Messiah should,
like Moses, give them manna from Heaven, f They had
not realised, as even Philo had done, \ that " the heavenly
food which feeds the soiiV is the true bread from heaven.
And when they asked for the bread of God which cometh
down from heaven. He told them that He Himself was the
Bread of Life ; in other words, that they who accepted
Him, by faith lived in Him, would never hunger nor thirst,
but would have everlasting life. The Apostles showed that
they had rightly apprehended His revelation when Simon
Peter said, in the name of them all, " Lord, to whom shall we
go ? Thou hast words of eternal life ; and we have believed
and have come to know that Thou art the Holy On« of God."§
* John vi. 35. f See Lightfoot, Hor . Hebr. ad loc.
I Philo, lie Profugis, § 25, quoted by Bp. Westcott ad loc.
§ Christ also spoke of Himself as the source of the Living Water (John iv. 14.
vii. 37. 38).
64 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
2. " 1 am the Light of the World" *
This utterance was another revelation of His divinity,
for God is Light. Christ was " the Sun of Righteousness "
of whom Malachi had prophesied that He should rise with
healing in His wings. Just as the Pillar of Fire had illumi-
nated the darkness of night in the wilderness, so would
Christ illuminate the darkness of the world, and His true
disciples should reflect His light.
3. " / am the Door of the Fold." f
In Eastern lands separate flocks are often led at night
for safety into one large fold. The porter remains to
watch over the various flocks, and in the morning the
shepherds come and call out their own sheep. The fold is
the universal Church — "the blessed company of all faithful
people," and none can enter into that safe and holy fold
except through Christ.
4. '' I am the Fair Shepherd!' \
Christ is the genuine Shepherd of the sheep, and not only
the "good," but the "fair" Shepherd — altogether lovely
as well as tender — who knows His sheep, defends them from
all danger, and lays down His life for them. He has many
"folds" in His one Flock, but all the sheep shall be
gathered at last into the one eternal fold, and become one
fold under their one Shepherd. This beautiful image more
than any other haunted the minds of the early Christians,
as we see from the constant representations of the " Fair
Shepherd " on the walls of the Catacombs.
5. " / am the Resurrection a)id the Life."^
Christ is the Eternal Life shared equally by all who live
" in Him." Whether they be now living on earth, or living
in the new form of life beyond the phase of earthly death,
death cannot touch them that have life in Him.
*Johnviii. 12. The words were immediately suggested by the lighting of
the great Golden Candelabra in the Court of the Women at the Feast of
Tabernacles.
f John X. 7, 9. :{: John x. 11, 14. § Joli" xi. 25.
THE CLAIMS OF JESUS. 65
6. " I am the true Vine." *
As all the branches of a vine derive their life from union
with the stem and root, so all believers in Christ share His
life. As long as they bear the fruit of such union, they
need indeed to be pruned — as men are by suffering — but
only that they may become more fruitful. It is only the
absolutely and hopelessly barren and withered branches
that are taken away and burned.
7. " I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life" f
Christ is the sole Way whereby we can pass from death
to life, and from our evil and perverted self to the Father.
He is the Eternal Verity in which all semblances are lost.
He is the Life because He is one with the Living Father,
apart from whom life is but a living death.
By all these metaphors — of the Manna, and the living
Bread, and the Light, and the Door, and the Shepherd,
and the Vine, and the Way — did Jesus indicate " the
irrevocable saving significance " which He knew that His
life and death possessed for mankind.
No human lips have ever uttered claims so immense and
fundamental as these. The fact that Jesus made them
would brand Him with condemnation had not age after
age demonstrated their simple and eternal truth.
Again, consider such invitations as these :
** Come unto Me all ye that labour and are heavy-laden,
and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and
learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall
find rest unto your souls." :j:
Or sayings so awful as :
" He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father. How
sayest thou, Show us the Father? " §
Or,
"All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father;
and no one knoweth who the Son is save the Father; and
* John XV. I. f John xiv. 6.
I Matt. xi. 28, 2g, § John xiv, 9,
66 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
who the Father is save the Son, and he to whomsoever the
Son willeth to reveal Him."*
These utterances are not accidental outcomes of the
thought of Jesus. Expressed in every variety of form
they are a fundamental part of all His teaching. He
accepted worship ; He called Himself the Son of God.f
In the lowest abyss of the shame, agony, and failure out-
poured upon His short earthly life — and be it ever remem-
bered that the man Christ Jesus was a young man even
when He died — He could yet tell the maddened, sneering
Sanhedrin, with death for blasphemy staring Him in the
face as the certain and immediate consequence, that He
was the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and that here-
after they should see the Son of Man seated at the right
hand of God, and coming in the clouds of heaven.
On the cross itself, nailed there in the uttermost humilia-
tion of helpless torture and nakedness, with scarcely one
friend to care for Him among the millions whom He came
to save. He yet, of His own authority, flung wide open the
gates of Paradise to the robber who, in punishment for his
crimes, was dying by His side.
And all these claims — so vast, of such eternal import —
were unhesitatingly repeated and proclaimed, even at the
peril of life, by those who had seen and known, and whose
hands had handled the Word of Life.;}:
Now, if such claims, promises, and testimonies were the
result of monstrous arrogance, or the delusions of pitiful
hallucination, they would degrade Jesus into the position
of a self-worshipping fanatic, or an insanely arrogant
deceiver. Every line which is written of Him, every day
of the long centuries which have passed since the day of
* Luke X. 22. Comp. Luke xix. lo ; John iii. 35, 36, vi. 37, vii. 37, etc.
f John ix, 35-38 ; Matt. viii. 2, ix. 18, xiv. 33, etc.; Mark xv. 19 ; Luke
xxiv. 52.
X Rom. vi. 23 ; Gal, iii. 13, 22 ; i Tim. i. 15 ; Col. i. 14 ; i Pet. ii. 24 ;
John iii. 35, 36, x. 9, xvii. 3 ; Acts xvi. 31, xiii. 38, 39, etc.
THE CLAIMS OF JESUS. 67
His baptism, stamp either alternative as too outrageous
even for blasphemy to utter. As He said to the hostile
Jews, His works bore witness for Him. They were the
seal of attestation affixed to His utterances by His heavenly
Father, whom they knew not. Though He bore witness to
Himself, yet was His witness true, for He sought not His
own glory.* It was His Father who glorified Him, and
consecrated Him, and bore witness to Him, and He did the
works of His Father.f The whole ideal and outline of His
character, as shewn in all that He said and did, stamps His
own witness concerning Himself with an unanswerable
force. Liars and deceivers rank among the wickedest of
mankind ; self-exalting madmen, who claim to be divine,
are among the most abject of human creatures. It might
seem as if the earth would yawn beneath the feet of any
one who — by rejecting this repeated and most awfully
solemn testimony, and in defiance of all truth and reverence
— dared to relegate the Son of Man to either class. For
has not every claim He uttered been superabundantly
justified by the witness of God in the renovation of the
world wrought through faith in His name ?
The validity of the words and promises of Christ has
been abundantly justified in matters open to the most
ordinary tests. He never commissioned His Apostles to
write, yet, in the midst of what might have seemed to be
utter and shameful defeat, He calmly said to His little ob-
scure handful of Galilean disciples that heaven and earth
would pass away, but His words would not pass away ; and
so it has been.ij: And when He well knew how near was
His death of shame, at a feast in the petty Judaean village
of Bethany, He promised to Mary's act of fidelity an im-
mortal memory over the whole habitable earth ; and to
this day, in every region of the habitable earth, that deed
is still proclaimed.§
* John viii. 50-54- f John xii. 28, xiv. 13, xvii. 4, etc.
:}: Matt. xxiv. 35. § Matt. xxvi. 13.
68 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
There are, as Kant wrote, tivo things which move and
uplift and overawe the soul, more than all else of which, by
our senses and intellect, we can become cognisant — " the
starry heavens above, and the moral law within." But to
these two things, it has been rightly said, we must add a
third, yet more sublime, namely, the realisation, the fulfil-
ment, the perfect exhibition of that " moral law within " in
the life of One who was exalted far above all heavens, yet
lived in a tent like ours, and of the same material — the man
Christ Jesus. "Sin is a failure, and perversity an apostasy.
He alone conquered sin. In Him alone there was no
sin."
Yes ! God the Father, the Almighty, the Maker of
Heaven and Earth, has, in all the consequences achieved by
Christ in all the world, stamped His seal of Divine attesta-
tion to the mission of His Son Jesus. God has " in mani-
fold figures indicated the unique, irrevocable, saving signifi-
cance which He knew His preaching to have for men."*
The comment upon that saving significance is written
broad and large over all the subsequent destinies of man-
kind. Jesus taught but for one or two short years, moving
about among the humble peasants of despised Galilee ; yet
He " became the creator of a new and higher Kosmos, the
duration of which is to be reckoned by millenniums and the
extent of which is to be conterminous with the whole sur-
face of the earth. "f "The proof of the grace poured out
in His life,":}: says Origen, " is this — that, after a brief space
of time, the whole world has been filled with His teaching
and the faith of His filial love." In vain were Philo and
Josephus silent respecting Him ; in vain did Tacitus dismiss
Christianity as an ^' cxitiabilis supcrstitio^ to be classed
with all things " atrocia aut piidenda "/§ in vain did Pliny
characterise it as " superstitio prava et imtnodica ; " \\ in vain
* Wendt, The Teaching of Jesus, ii. 289. f Keim.
|Orig. De Princ. iv. 5. §Tac. Ann. xv. 14.
\ Plin. Epp. 10, 97, 98.
THE CLAIMS OF JESUS. 69
did Celsus accumulate his lying slanders ; * in vain did
Suetonius describe Christians as people of a new and ma-
lefic superstition ; f in vain did Talmudic and mediaeval
Judaism heap upon Jesus and those who believed on Him
their inextinguishable hatred and monstrous calumnies ;:]:
in vain did the Middle Ages produce the book De Tribus
Impostoribiis ; in vain did Paulus, and Strauss, and Renan,
and many more in modern days strive to undermine our
faith with their naturalistic explanations, and mythic
theories, and historic or philosophic reconstructions — in
spite of all these, CJiristus vijicit, CJiristiis regnat, Christiis
imperat ; and we still pray with perfect faith, " Christus ab
onini inalo plebem siiam defendat ! "
*See Orig. c. Cels. i, 28, a.\\6. passim. Comp. Justin. Dial. 10, 17, 28.
f See Eisemenger Entd. Judenth. Schottgen. Hor. Hebr. ii. 693. Wagen-
seil, Tela ignea Satanae.
:j:Suet. Nero. 16.
CHAPTER VII.
THE HUMAN EDUCATION OF JESUS.
" Hearken unto me, ye holy children, and bud forth as a rose growing
by the brook of the field ; and give ye a sweet savour as frankincense,
and flourish as a lily, and send forth a smell, and sing a song of praise."
— Ecclus. xxxix. 13, 14.
TO 6i naidiov ?jh^ave, " The Little Child grew." — Luke ii. 40.
There is in the Evangelists a deep and holy reserve.
What they did not know they would not relate. St. Mat-
thew had only become a disciple when Christ called him
from the place of toll beside the Lake of Galilee in Caper-
naum. St. Mark was probably still a youth at the time of
the Crucifixion. He had not been a personal witness of
the scenes of the ministry, and though he derived his
information from St. Peter, yet St. Peter first met Jesus at
the Baptism of John. St. Luke may not have been con-
verted till after the death of Christ ; and he frankly tells us
that, though he classed himself among those who "from
the beginning were the eye-witnesses and ministers of the
word," he based his Gospel on what he had ascertained
from " having traced the course of all things accurately
from the first." St. John did not mean his Gospel for a
complete record ; he disavows the intention of recording
" many other things which Jesus did." His obvious pur-
pose was to complete the narratives of his predecessors, to
supplement what they had left unrecorded of the Judaean
ministry, and to present the life and teaching of the Lord
Jesus under that more immediately spiritual aspect, which,
until years of eventful issue had passed by, could not have
been adequately understood.
70
HUMAN EDUCATION OF JESUS. 71
The only persons who could fully have narrated the early
years of Jesus were His mother, Mary, and Joseph, and
those who are called " His brethren." But Mary chose to
remain silent.* Conscious of overwhelming revelations,
she " kept all these things and pondered them in her heart."
Joseph, her husband, seems to have died while Jesus was
yet a boy. The " brethren " — whatever may have been the
exact relation in which they stood to Jesus — were not at
first among the number of his avowed disciples, and only
became so after His resurrection. Further, we may observe
that the importance attached to childhood and youth in
many modern records was a thing unknown to antiquity,
and that stories of early years are very rarely, or never,
mentioned in ancient biographies.
SL Matthciv narrates the circumstances of the Virgin-
birth of Christ. He tells us of the visit of the Magi ; the
massacre of the innocents at Bethlehem ; the flight into
Egypt ; and the reason why Joseph — abandoning all
thoughts of settling in Judaea under the suspicious and
sanguinary rule of Archelaus — retired to Nazareth, in Gali-
lee. Then, passing over some thirty years of the Saviour's
life, he proceeds at once to describe the preaching of John
the Baptist.
St. Mark, in his brief and vivid Gospel, written for
Roman readers, f plunges at once " in medias res" and only
professes to give an account of the ministry, which was
inaugurated by the vision and descent of the Holy Spirit
upon Jesus when John was baptising. All the light which
he throws on the childhood, youth, and early manhood of
Jesus, is seen (as well as pointed out later) in the flash of a
single casual but revealing word.
*I have not, in this book, entered into questions of date. Our era Anno
Domini (a. u. c. 754) was fixed by the Abbot Dionysius Exiguus in A. D. 525,
An older tradition fixed the Birth of Christ A. u. c. 750, four years earlier. The
question is unsettled, and will probably remain so.
f See such notices as those in Mark x. 12, xii. 42, xv. i.
72 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
St. John, writing at the close of the first century, when
the Synoptic Gospels, and others less sacred, were already
in the hands of Christians, takes the same starting-point as
the three Synoptists. He does not lift the curtain for us,
though he probably knew more about the early years of
Jesus than the other Evangelists, for he was, by birth, a
nephew of the Virgin, and had been as a son to her, and
— by the tender care of Jesus for His mother — had taken
her in her hour of anguish to his own home.*
In the silence of the New Testament on the earlier years
of Jesus, we see the over-ruling restraint of a Divine Provi-
dence, It was not intended that the Gospels should
gratify a biographical curiosity ; they had a far diviner pur-
pose. Had all been detailed, St. John says, " I suppose
that even the world itself would not contain the books
that should be written." As it is, the Gospels have been
the parents of a literature ever increasing in extent, and
already immeasurably vast. There are cases in which
silence becomes the most powerful eloquence, and some-
thing of the significance of that silence we may see when
we come to speak of Christ's unrecorded years.
St. Luke, a Greek-speaking convert of Asiatic origin, was
undoubtedly familiar with Ephesus, which he had visited
among the companions of St. Paul ; and if the tradition be
true that the Virgin died at Ephesus, f he may have known
* It does not fall within my scope, in this book, to enter for the ten thou-
sandth time into the question of the genuineness and authenticity of the Fourth
Gospel. We know at any rate that as early as the day of Tatian {circ. A. D. 170)
it had taken its place as one of the Four Gospels received by the whole Church;
and that (in Orat. ad Graecos 13) Tatian (a pupil of Justin Martyr) quotes John
i. 5 as sacred Scripture. For the rest I must content myself with referring to
the many decisive proofs which have of late years been accumulated by the
learned; and especially to the decisive arguments of Bishop Westcott in the
Speaker's Commentary.
\ Epiph. Haer. 78. Her tomb was shown at Ephesus (see Cone. Eph. Labbe
iii. 574a.) Another tradition is that slie died at Jerusalem, and that her
latter years were mainly spent in the Cu;naculum, the upper chamber of the
Last Supper.
HUMAN EDUCATION OF JESUS. 73
her there, and have learnt from her lips the few details
about the infancy of Christ, which, in their ineffable sweet-
ness, seem stamped with the tender grace of a mother's
reminiscences.
But among the minor differences between the Gospels,
they do not differ in the least in the picture and impression
of Jesus which they leave upon our minds. The method
of St. John, and the details which he furnishes, diverge in
many particulars from the method and details of the
Synoptists, but we see on every page alike one and
the same Divine Lord.
It is from St. Luke that we learn in a single sentence all
that we know of the Divine Infancy. It is that " the Child
grew and waxed strong, becoming full of wisdom, and the
grace of God was upon Him."*
It is but a single sentence, but it is inestimably precious.
It illustrates the truth of the perfect humanity of Jesus.
It shows us that Christ was not only " truly God " (as was
finally declared by the decision of the Council of Nice), but
that also He was (as the Council of Constantinople decided)
''perfectly {rsXiooi) man." It is a bulwark against the
ApoUinarianism which denies the full humanity of Christ,
a heresy more common in these days, and quite as danger-
ous as the Arianism which denies His divinity. It shows
us the reality of that kenosis, that " emptying Himself" of
His glory, and of the divine attributes of Omnipotence and
Omniscience, of which St. Paul speaks, f It shows us that
Jesus grew up simply as a human child, after the common
way of all men (as Justin Martyr says), :{: though the grace
of God was upon Him ; and that His advance in wisdom
was as normal as His growth in strength and stature. It
pictures to us a natural but holy childhood, " like the
* Luke ii 40. The word Tr^povfievov implies, of course, conimuous advance,
like the word npoEKonTe in Luke ii. 52.
f Phil. ii. 7. EKEVuaev iavrdv.
X Just. Mart. Dia/. c. Tryph. 88.
74 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
flower of roses in the spring of the year, and as lilies by the
water courses."
But St. Luke — and there can be little doubt that he
heard the story from the lips of the Virgin, whether at
Jerusalem or at Ephesus — alone preserves for us a single
anecdote of the boyhood of Jesus, which is full of beauty
and preciousness.
Twelve silent years glided by — perhaps the twelfth had
been completed— and Jesus was considered old enough to
accompany His parents to the Paschal Feast."^ Of the
eight stages into which the Jews divided childhood and
boyhood, He had now reached the last. He was a bacJmr,
" a full-grown boy." In Rabbinic phraseology, He was no
longer animated by the nephcsli, or " natural life," but by
the ruach or " spirit " ; that is, as we should express it, He
had attained to years of discretion — for the boys develop
much more rapidly in the East than in our Northern cli-
mate. At this age, by the rule of tradition, a boy would
begin to learn a trade for his own maintenance, and to
wear " phylacteries " {tephillm) after presentation by his
father in the synagogue on the Shabbath Tcphilin. It is,
however, highly uncertain whether our Lord ever wore, on
arm and forehead, these little leather receptacles for texts,
or whether they were common among " the men of the
people " — the amharatsim of Galilee. We have no refer-
ence to them in the Gospels, except in Christ's condemna-
tion of the Pharisees for the vain ostentation with which
they made them unusually broad.
As Jesus was now, or shortly afterwards became, " a son
of the Covenant " {Bar mitzvaJi), or " a son of the Law "
{Be?ihattorah), He had already received a considerable part
of His early education. What were the most marked
features in the training of a Jewish boy of that day?
The Jews were honourably distinguished by the care
they took in the education of their children. They re-
*Comp. Jos. Autl. ii. 9, § 6.
HUMAN EDUCATION OF JESUS. 75
garded their schools .as " vineyards." There is a story in
the Talmud how once there had been a long and painful
drought, and all the Chief Priests and Rabbis assembled
before the people to pray for rain. They prayed, and
prayed, but no rain fell. Then rose up one common-look-
ing man, and prayed, and instantly the heavens grew black
with clouds, and the rain fell abundantly. " Who art thou,"
they asked in astonishment, "that thy prayer alone should
have prevailed ? " And he answered, " / am a teacher of
little childrejiT*
It is probable that our Lord grew up in the habitual use
of two languages — Aramaic and Greek. Aramaic, a dia-
lect of Hebrew, was at that time the current language of
Galilee. A great part of Palestine was bilingual, so that
there can be no doubt that Jesus also learnt to speak Greek,
for He could converse with the Centurion, and the Syro-
Phoenician woman, and Pilate, and others, without any inter-
preter. He was of course familiar with the Old Testament
in the original Hebrew.f Since our Lord's brethren, James
and Jude, show in their Epistles that they were well ac-
quainted with the Apocrypha, we may be sure that our
Lord was also. This would be decisively proved by the
resemblance of Matt, xxiii. 37 to 2 Esdras i. 30-33, if it
were not nearly certain that much of 2 Esdras is inter-
polated by a Christian writer.
The teaching of children was, however, mainly confined
to the Mosaic and Levitic Law. " I lay aside all the trade
of the world," said R. Nehorai, " and teach my son only
the Law ; for its reward is enjoyed in this world, and its
* See the articles on ^^ Kinder" '■'' Unterricht" in Winer, Realworter-
buch ; Diestel, s.v. Unterricht, in Schenkel's Bibel-Lexicon ; Hamburger,
s. vv. Schuler, Lehrer, Schnle, Mitzwa. YJ\\X.o,Cyclopae(i.,s.v. Education; Dean
Plumptre in Smith's Diet, of the Bible, and Schtirer, Div. ii. r, 323-326 ;
Herzfeld, Gesch. d. Volkes Israel, iii. 266-268, etc.
f As seems to be proved by the quotations from the original. Mark xii.
29, 30 ; Luke xxi. 37 ; Matt, xxvii. 46. The knowledge of Hebrew seems to
be implied by Matt. v. 22.
76 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
capital remains for the world to come." * But the teach-
ing of the Law was mainly an exercise of the memory.
The commands of the Law were iterated and reiterated, so
that the Rabbinic word for " to teach " (shanah) means
" to repeat," and the word for " teaching " is Mishnah
(" repetition "). The highest praise for a pupil was to be
" like a well, lined with lime, which loses not one drop." f
The main effort, then, was merely to train the memory.
We do full justice to the importance which the Jews
attached to education, yet we cannot but admit that their
views of education were too narrow. We cannot concede
to Josephus that "the Jews by their system of teaching,
which combined the teaching of the Law with the practice
of morals, surpassed the foremost of the Greeks, since they
united the unquestioning obedience of the Spartans with
the theoretic instruction of the Athenians." % Jewish boys
were taught the Law, as Philo says, by their parents and
teachers, from their very swaddling clothes ; but, unhap-
pily, the current conception of the Law had been overlaid
with deplorable perversions, and was radically erroneous
in important particulars.
There can be little doubt that Jesus attended the school
which was attached to the synagogue of Nazareth, and that,
as He "was continually growing in wisdom," He had from
the first been carefully trained by His mother and Joseph.
That training also was all-but-exclusively Scriptural. The
Kindergarten of Jewish children — and the Jews sometimes
called their schools " gardens " — was the Beth Hassepher,
or " House of the Book " ; and it was only when a child
had been well grounded in "the Book " that he passed to
the Beth HammidrasJi, or secondary school. §
* Peak, i. I.
\ Avoth. ii. 8 ; Qixoxtx, Jakrh. des Heils, i.; Hamburger, s.v. Lehrhaus.
IJos. c. Ap. ii. l6, 17. Compare ^«//. iv. 8, 12 ; Philo, Leg. ad Caiunt. 36.
§ Schools for children are said to have been founded throughout Palestine a
century earlier by Simeon ben Shetach (Jer. Kethoiiboth, viii. 14) ; and to have
HUMAN EDUCATION OF JESUS. ^^
By that time a boy had been taught to read, and some-
times (though more rarely) to write ; to keep the Sabbath ;
and to fast on the Day of Atonement. A little later he
would be taught to repeat the SJiema and the SJiemoneh
Ezrcli. The Shema — or " Hear, O Israel ! " — consisted of
the sections Deut. vi. 4-9, xi. 13-21 ; Num. xv. 37-41,
with various benedictions {BeracJiotJi) which were attached
to them. The SJioiioneh EzreJi consisted of " Eighteen
Blessings," mostly expressed in the words of Scripture, and
beginning with the words " Blessed art Thou, O Lord." *
To this training was added all that a child learnt almost
mechanically from his constant Sabbath-attendances at the
synagogue, which was meant for instruction as well as for
worship. How familiar must Christ have been with that
village BetJi Tcphilla (House of Prayer) or Beth Hakkeneseth
(House of Assembly), as He sat among the other boys of
Nazareth in the back seats, behind the chief worshippers !
How deeply must He have taken in the divine meaning
alike of the ParashotJi, or 154 sections of the Law, by
which the Pentateuch was read through in three years; and
also of the Haphtaroth, or sections of the Prophets, the
reading of which had been introduced in the days of the
fierce persecution by Antiochus Epiphanes, when the read-
ing of the Law was punished with death. Not only were
the passages read by the appointed person — who might
even be a boy — in the original Hebrew, but they were
translated, paragraph after paragraph, into the Aramaic by
the MctJiiirgemaii, or interpreter. How deep must have
been the expectant interest with which the child Jesus saw
the Rosh Hakkeneseth, or " Ruler of the Synagogue," re-
ceive from the hand of his clerk {Chazzati) the roll of the
Law, or of the Prophets, and appoint the reader, who took
been extended by the order of the High Priest, Jesus Bar Gamala (Bab.
Bavabathrai. 21, i).
*For full information, see Hamburger, Real-Encycl. II. s.v., Schemone-
Esre.
78 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
his stand behind the elevated Benia, and read the lesson,
and then sat down to deliver the explanation or sermon
{DerashaJi). With what a thrill of heart must He have
heard the trumpets {Shopharoth) blown at the beginning of
the new year and on the solemn feast days.
Thus the human training of the Christ Child involved a
thorough acquaintance with the letter of the Holy Scrip-
tures, which rose infinitely above the wooden literalism, the
fantastic expansions, the evasive manipulations of the cur-
rent exegesis. The right apprehension of Holy Writ came
to Him from no human teacher, but from His own pure
spirit, and His union with that Father of Lights with whom
is no variableness nor shadow cast by turning. Yet, early
as He may have seen through the hollowness of the inter-
pretations with which Scripture had been overlaid by the
current tendencies of His day, we are quite sure that He
was utterly unlike the terrible, ungovernable child of the
Apocryphal fictions. Towards all His earthly teachers we
are sure that He exhibited that sweet lowliness of heart
which, as He grew in wisdom and stature, caused Him to
advance also in favour with God and man.
The Son of Sirach asks : " How can he get wisdom that
holdeth the plough, that driveth oxen — and whose talk is
of bullocks ... so every carpefiter and workmaster that
laboureth night and day? All these trust to their hands ;
they shall not be sought for in public counsel. . . They
shall not understand the covenant of judgment, and
where parables are they shall not be found." * Neverthe-
less, however simple and elementary may have been the
training which Jesus received from the Mikrcdardike, or
" teachers of children," in the local synagogue-school, so
deep was His insight into the Scriptures — so far deeper
than that derived from the traditions of the Scribes — that
when Rabbis and Jerusalemite Pharisees encountered Him
in lordly oppQsition, He could at once refute their insolent
* Ecclus. xxxviii. 24-34.
HUMAN EDUCATION OF JESUS. 79
tone of superiority by His searching questions, " Have jfe
never read?"* We observe, too, that whereas the system
of Jewish education was ahnost exclusively occupied with the
study of the Law, our Lord reverts far more frequently to
the great Prophets of Israel, and sets mercy far above sac-
rifice.
It may be worth while to emphasise in passing the
extreme simplicity of the worship in which during all His life
the Saviour of mankind, Sabbath after Sabbath, was wont
to take His part. The visits to the Temple were few and
exceptional, and all His life long He mainly worshipped in
the synagogues, which were as bare and as devoid of all
ritual, symbolism, or outward gorgeousness as the barest
Dissenting chapel. The synagogues were rooms, of which
the end usually pointed to Jerusalem (the Kibleh, or con-
secrated direction of Jewish worship, Dan. vi. 10). On one
side sat the men ; on the other the veiled women. Almost
the only piece of furniture in them was the Ark {Tebhah) of
painted wood, which contained the Law {ThoraJi) and the
rolls {Tephilloth) of the Prophets. On one side was a Bema
(the Jews borrowed the name from the Greeks) for the
reader and preacher, and the " chief seats " of the " Ruler
of the Synagogue " and the Elders {Zekenim). The only
servants of the synagogue, in its severe simplicity, were the
clerk {Chazzan), the verger [Sheliach), and the deacons
{Partiasim, or shepherds). It is clear therefore that rites
and ceremonies — in favour of which neither Christ nor His
Apostles uttered a single word — were needless for the most
intense and exalted worship which the world has ever seen.
The only rubric which the New Testament contains is,
" Let all things be done decently and in order."
*Luke iv. 17 ; Matt. v. 18, xii. 3, xiii. 52, xix. 4, xxi. 16, 42, xxii. 31. The
Rabbis hardly regarded a country education as worth their notice (Mark vi. 2 ;
John vi. 42, vii. 15).
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FIRST ANECDOTE.
Ir/aovg 6 nalg. — Luke ii. 43.
2 Mace, ii. 22. " The Temple, renowned all the world over."
" Take notice that His doing nothing wonderful was itself a kind of
wonder. As there was power in His actions, so is there power in His
silence, in His inactivity, in His retirement." — St. Bonaventura.
The other Evangelists give us a passing glimpse of the
outer circumstances of the infancy of Jesus, and then pass
on to His full manhood.
St. Luke alone, as we have seen, gives us the notice
respecting Him — brief, but inestimably precious — when
He was " a weaned child." He also furnishes us with " one
solitary floweret out of the enclosed garden of the thirty
years, plucked precisely there where the swollen bud, at a
distinctive crisis, bursts into flower." *
Not before the twelfth year, and, as a rule, not till after
its completion,f was a boy required to enter into the full
obedience of an Israelite, and to attend the Passover. We
can imagine how the heart of Jesus must have beat with
earnest joy, as, with His parents and the many pilgrims
from Nazareth who would attend the Feast, He made His
way down the narrow valley from the summit of His native
hill. He was doubtless clad in the bright-coloured robes of
an Eastern boy — in red caftan, and gay tunic, girded with
an embroidered sash, and covered, perhaps, with a loose
* Slier, V. 18.
\ Pirqe Avoth. v. 21. "At thirteen years of age a boy becomes bound to
observe the (613) precepts of the Law."
80
THE FIRST ANECDOTE. 8i
outer jacket of white or blue. What a rush of new associa-
tions would sweep through His soul as He traversed those
eighty miles between Nazareth and Jerusalem, and saw the
scenes which were indelibly associated in His mind with
memories of Sisera and Barak, of Elijah and Elisha, of
Joshua and Saul, at Kishon, and Shunem, and Gilboa !
He probably passed between Ebal and Gerizin, and by
Jacob's Well, and so by Shiloh and Bethel to the Holy
City. How often must the thought have been in His
mind, " Our feet shall stand in Thy courts, O Jerusalem ! "
And when the city glittered before Him on its rocky water-
shed between the Jordan and the sea, with its three hills of
Zion, Moriah, and Acra, surrounded by walls and stately
towers — when He saw the Temple, with its white marble,
and gilded pinnacles, flaming in the eastern sunlight like a
mountain of snow and gold, and rising before Him, terrace
above terrace — the words of the Psalmist would almost
inevitably be in His mind, " Jerusalem is built as a city which
is at unity with itself. For thither the tribes go up, even
the tribes of the Lord, for a testimony unto Israel, to give
thanks unto the name of the Lord." *
Or, " Walk about Zion, and go round about her, and tell
the towers thereof. Mark well her bulwarks, consider her
palaces, that ye may tell them that come after." f The
Psalms known as the "Songs of Degrees,":}: were often
sung by the pilgrims as they approached Jerusalem, as they
had been — according to tradition — by the exiles who
returned with Ezra. We can imagine the enthusiasm with
which they would join in such words as :
" Peace be within thy walls, and plenteousness within
thy palaces !
" For my brethren and companions' sakes, I will wish
thee prosperity.
*Ps. cxxii. 4. fPs. xlviii. 13.
I Pss. cxx.-cxxxiv. They should properly be called "Songs of Ascents,"
or " of the Goings Up."
82 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
*' Yea, because of the House of the Lord our God I will
seek to do thee good.' *
Amid the rose-gardens and pleasances which surrounded
Jerusalem,! and under the umbrageous multitudes of
palms and olives, and figs and cedars, and chestnut trees,
would have been scattered the temporary booths of some
of the two million pilgrims who flocked to the city for the
great yearly feast from every region of the civilised globe.
When the pilgrims from Nazareth had passed along the
Valleys of Jehoshaphat and Hinnom, the roads and the
streets through which they made their way to the Temple
must have been densely thronged with ever-increasing
crowds.
Jesus would pass beneath those colossal substructions
towering up some 600 feet above His head, and built of
vast blocks of stones, still visible, of which some are 20 feet
in length and 4 feet in height. :j; Perhaps he crossed the
royal bridge over the Valley of the Tyropoeon. And at
last — at last — He would enter " the Mountain of the
House " § by one of the five gates. If He entered by the
gate called Shushan, or " the Lily Gate," He would see
" Solomon's Porch " stretching to right and left, and would
stand on the many-coloured pavement of the court of that
gorgeous Herodian Temple which was one of the wonders
of the world. The scene was doubtless one of extraordi-
nary animation, yet it must have presented many repulsive
features which it required an intense enthusiasm to over-
look. For the colonnades were thronged with the vendors
of sheep and oxen for sacrifice, including thousands of
Paschal lambs. Here were seated the sellers of the doves,
for the offerings of the poor, with their crowded wicker
*Ps. cxxii. 7~9'
f An ancient rose-garden is mentioned {Baha Kama, 82, i), and there were
the gardens of Solomon (2 Kings xxv. 4 ; Neh. iii. 15 ; Eccl. ii. 5, etc.).
J On the Temple, see Josephus B.J. v. 2, and plate in Carr's St. Matthew.
§ n^3n Tn Comp. i Mace. xiii. 52.
THE FIRST ANECDOTE. 83
baskets. Here sat and chaffered the two classes of money-
changers — those who gave smaller change for gold and
silver,* and those who took foreign money, with its heathen
emblems and inscriptions, in exchange for the Jewish
money, which could alone be used for Temple purposes.f
These men drove hard bargains in noisy and often nefari-
ous traffic. At the south end of this huge Court of the
Gentiles was the triple royal colonnade — known as " Solo-
mon's Porch " — which was reserved for more quiet gather-
ings. This Forecourt of the Gentiles was marked off from
the more sacred enclosures by the double barriers of the
Soreg and the Cliel (i'Ti). Through one of the openings of
the vS^rr^ Jesus would climb the fourteen steps to the CJiel,
on which were marble tablets with inscriptions in Greek
and Latin forbidding any Gentiles to proceed a step farther
on pain of death.:}: Mounting the steps of a terrace which
towered sixty feet above the Court of the Gentiles, Jesus
would pass, perhaps, through " the Beautiful Gate " and
gaze at the Court of the Women, and the Court of the
Israelites. In the latter stood the LisJicath Hag-gazztth, or
" Hall of Square Stones," to the southeast of the inner
forecourt, in which perhaps at that time the Sanhedrin
held its meetings. Here, too, was the Treasury, outside of
which were the thirteen chests with trumpet-shaped open-
* KoTC^v^icTai, John ii. 15. See Matt. xxi. 12 ; Mark xi. 15; Luke
xix. 45.
\ KepfiaTiaral, John ii. 14 ; Josephus B. J. vi. 2, 4 ; Philo, 0pp. ii. 577.
Comp. Acts xxi. 28.
\ One of these marble tablets, which must have been seen by Christ Himself,
was discovered by Mons. Clermont Ganneau built into the wall of a Moham-
medan house at Jerusalem. It is now in one of the mosques in Constantinople.
For the actual inscription see Rev. Archiologique, xxiii. pi. x. ; Schiirer, i. 266.
M. Clermont Ganneau gave an account of its discovery in the Athenceum of
June 10, 1871. The inscription is word for word as given by Josephus, except
that he, with his usual complaisance to the Romans, omits the threatened
penalty of death to any intruder beyond the 6pv(paKTbg which ran round the
temple (lepov) and enclosure (jvepijio^) (Besant, Twenty-Oyte Years of Work, p.
167).
84 THE LIFE OE LIVES.
ings {Shopharoth) * into which alike the rich and the poor
cast their Temple-offerings.
Twelve or fifteen steps higher still was the Court of the
Priests, on the northwest end of which, on a platform
ascended by twelve more steps, rose in white marble " the
joy of the whole earth, the Temple of the Great King."f
Its doors were open, but the interior was concealed from
vulgar gaze by curtains of Babylonian purple. Over its
gilded portico was wreathed the huge Vine with its bunches
of golden grapes. On its topmost roof were the gilded
spikes (" scare-ravens ") to keep birds from settling on it.
Within its mysterious recesses was that awful " Holy of
Holies" which was trodden by no human foot save that of
the High Priest when he sprinkled the blood of the sacri-
fice, on the great Day of Atonement, towards the place
where once had stood the Ark of the Covenant, over-
shadowed by the outspread wings of the golden Cherubim.;}:
And this was the one most hallowed spot of all the world,
towards which, for centuries, every Jew had turned his eyes
when he knelt down to pray to the God of his Fathers.§
All was as yet entirely new to the Holy Boy, and we can
but imagine with what interest He — the unknown heir of
David's line — would have listened to the nine trumpet-
blasts which announced the morning and evening sacrifice,
* Yotna, f. 55, 2.
\ We cannot always be certain of the exactness of the details.
X The Ark had disappeared since the Captivity. Nothing was now to be
seen in the Holiest Place but the " Stone of the Foundation" ( Voma, f. 53, 2),
which was supposed to be the centre of the world {cf. Ezek. v. 5, and see Her-
shon, Tiilin. Miscellany, p. 300). Pompey, when he forced his way into the
Holiest, expecting to find some image of an animal which the Gentiles ignor-
antly fancied that the Jews worshipped, was amazed to find " vacua omnia,"
According to Yovia, f. 21, 2, tlie five things wanting to the second Temple
were: i. The Ark. 2. The Holy Fire. 3. The Shechinah. 4. The Spirit
of Prophecy. 5. The Urim and Thummim. These five missing things were
supposed to be indicated by the omission of H ( = 5 ) in the word 13JN1, " and
I will be glorified," in Hag. i. S.
§ Dan. vi. 10.
THE FIRST ANECDOTE. 85
and to the sacred songs and solemn litanies of the singers,
the sons of Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun, with their silver
trumpets, and harps, and cymbals. He must have watched
the army of priests in their turbans and white robes and
girdles of purple, and blue, and scarlet, hurrying about the
Court of the Priests with their bare feet, and busy from
morn till dewy eve in roasting and seething the oxen,
and lambs, and kids, and ever washing the gold and silver
vessels of the Sanctuary. He would see for the first time
the huge altar of burnt-offering standing before the eastern
front of the Temple. It was the hugest in the world, forty-
eight feet square at the base, and diminishing by stages to
its summit. It was built of unhewn stones, untouched by
any human tool. It was also approached by an ascent of
unhewn stones, and on its broad summit flamed, day and
night, the perpetual fire. Beyond it was the great brazen
laver in which the priests washed their hands and feet.* In
this Court the victims were slaughtered, and there were
pillars to which their carcasses were hung, and marble
tables on which they were skinned and the entrails washed.
To the ordinary eye this Court must often have looked like
one huge slaughter-house, in which amid the wreaths of
curling smoke were heard the sound of perpetual prayers
and formularies, the bleating of sheep, and the lowing of
oxen. But it would seem transfigured to eyes that gazed
on it with holy enthusiasm. Jesus could only have seen it
from the Court of the Israelites ; for, under ordinary
circumstances, none but the priestly ministers were allowed
to enter into its actual precincts. "Whoever has not seen
Herod's Temple," says the Talmud, "has never seen a
beautiful structure in his life. How did Herod build it?
Ravah replied, ' With white and green marble, so that it
appeared in the distance like waves of the sea.' " f
* Baba Bathra^ f. 3, 2. " The Mount of the Temple was 500 yards square."
Middoth, ch. 2.
\ Baba Bathra, f. 4, i. See, for full details, Schiirer, i. 280.
86 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
But in the Court below, the full stream of the varied life
of Judaism must have passed before His eyes. Here He
would have seen the High Priest Hanan (or Annas), son of
Seth, before whom He was destined to stand as a prisoner. *
He would have seen too, the "Captain of the Temple"
(the Ish har hab-Bith, or " Man of the Mountain of the
House "), with his little army of subordinate Levites, in their
peaked caps, and with the pockets which held their Law
books. Mingled among the crowd would be solemn white-
robed Essenes ; Pharisees with their broad phylacteries;
Herodian courtiers in their gorgeous clothing ; Nazarites
with their long hair ; beggars — blind and lame — seated
before the two great bronze valves of the Gate Beautiful ;
and here and there, perhaps, in the Court of the Gentiles,
some Roman soldier in his armour, looking round him
with scornful curiosity, and answering with looks of disdain
the scowls of hatred sometimes thrown upon him. At
sunset Jesus would perhaps stop to witness the closing of
the great bronze gate on the east of the Court of the
Gentiles, so heavy that it took twenty men to move it,t
though, sixty years later, before the destruction of the
Temple, it was said to have opened of its own accord, while
Voices, as of departing Deities, where heard to wail in tones
of awful warning, "Let us depart hence ! " %
And then, at evening, in some little wattled booth out-
side the city, among the Galilean pilgrims, or in the humble
house of some Galilean friends in Jerusalem, the male mem-
bers of the Holy Family — although not with their loins
girded, their staves in their hands, their shoes on their feet,
as the ancient custom was — would have eaten the Paschal
meal rejoicing, with hymns and benedictions, and would
* He was High Priest A. D. 6-15. At later visits Jesus may have seen, in
the rapidly changing Hierarchy, Ishmael ben Phabi (a. d. 15, 16) ; Eleazar,
son of Annas (a. d. 16, 17) ; Simon ben Kamhith (A. D. 17, 18) ; and Joseph
Caiaphas (a. i>. 18-36).
\ Josephus B. J. vi. 5, 3. \ Tac. Hist. v. 13.
THE FIRST ANECDOTE. 87
drink the cups of blessing and thanksgiving which the
father of the family passed round.
So the Feast ended, with its tumult of new associations.
And then, after this chief event in the whole year, the
booths were broken up, the simple belongings of the pil-
grims were packed on the backs of asses and camels, and in
various groups, the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims,
amid psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, began to wend
their way back to their own quiet homes.
How easy it would be, in such a scene of bustle, to lose
sight of one young boy."^' At first, Joseph and Mary did
not notice His absence, feeling no doubt assured that, as
He must have known the hour at which the caravan would
start. He must be safe and happy amid some group of the
rejoicing relatives and friends who had accompanied them
from Nazareth. The fact that they did not observe His
absence illustrates the naturalness and unconstraint of the
conditions in which the Boy Jesus had been trained. To
this day the incident of separation from friends in these
great caravans is a common one, and excites little anxiety.
It was not till the evening of the first day's journey —
perhaps when they had arrived at Beeroth, some six miles
north of Jerusalem — that they missed Him, and by that
time wondered why He had not rejoined them. Then,
with intense anxiety, they began to search for Him, and
their anxiety deepened to agony when he was nowhere to
be found in the little companies of Nazarenes or other Gal-
ileans. With hearts full of forebodings, they turned back
to Jerusalem, looking for Him all along the route. Still
they could hear nothing of Him. He was nowhere to be
seen in the entire caravans, nor among the later stragglers.
It was not till the third day that they discovered Him in
the Temple, f probably in one of the halls or rooms which
surrounded the Court of the Israelities, and were used for
purposes of teaching. They were amazed to see the gracious
* Luke ii. 43. \ Luke ii. 46, " After three days.''
S8 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Boy " sitting in the midst of the Rabbis, both hearing them
and asking them questions." The instruction of the young
was a constant function of the leading Scribes, and they
always showed ready kindness to any youthful enquirer.
It is not impossible that among these Rabbis may have been
men so famous as Hilleland Shammai, and Bava ben Butah,
in their extreme old age ; and among the younger may have
been Rabban Simeon, son of Shammai ; and Gamaliel,
son of Hillel ; and Nicodemus, and Jochanan ben Zakkai.
Overawed perhaps at first, Joseph and Mary would hardly
venture to thrust themselves into that group of learned
ofificials and Rabbis, surrounded as they were with almost
awful reverence ; but they took in enough of the scene
to notice that " all that heard Him were astonished at His
understanding and answers."
In the Apocryphal Gospels, and in many books, the
significance of the scene has been entirely misunderstood.
In pictures, also, Jesus has been represented sitting, or
standing, in an attitude of authority, as though He were
teaching and catechising these Scribes, the most famed for
learning in their day. Such a notion is contrary to all that
we know of Christ's gracious humility. Anything like for-
wardness or presumption would have awakened nothing but
displeasure in Rabbis accustomed to deferential homage ;*
but, on the contrary, the Boy of Nazareth had won their
admiration by His modesty and intelligence. He was
"sitting " at the feet of the Rabbis, " hearing them," i. e.,
trying to learn all which they could teach ; and ingenuously,
but with consummate insight, "answering" the questions
which they addressed to Him. What most astonished
* See Pirqe Avoth, v. 12, 15. Baha Meizia, f. 84, 2. Similar stories are
told of Eliezer ben Azariah, R. Ashi, and Josephiis (Vit. 2). Comp. Baba
Metzia, f. 48, 6, where we are told liow Rabbi Elaza, and Rabbi Judah (the
Holy) sat on the ground as boys before two great Rabbis, " asking questions
and starting objections. The other Rabbis exclaimed, ' We drink of their
water ' {i. e., we imbibe their wisdom), ' and they sit upon the ground ! ' Seats
were then brought in for the two children."
THE FIRST ANECDOTE. 89
them was His knowledge of the Scriptures, and'the wisdom,
beyond His boyish age, which His answers manifested.
His parents too — for Mary's awful secret was hidden deep
within her heart, aw^^oseph was regarded as His father —
were amazed to see Him so happy, so calmly at ease, in
that august assembly. At last His mother ventured to
address to Him the agitated question, " Child {reuvov'),
why didst thou thus to us ? Behold, thy father and I were
seeking thee in sorrow ? " * To Him — so wrapt up in all
that He had seen and heard, and living in inward com-
munion with His Father in Heaven — their distress seemed
strange. When they first missed Him, where. He asked,
would it have been most natural for them at once to seek
Him ? " Why is it that ye were seeking me ? Did ye not
know that I must be in my Father's house? " f
The rendering of the A. V., " about my Father s business"
may now be regarded as having been finally disproved. It
would be, in every way, much more dif^cult to explain ; for
Jesus had been in the Temple, tiot in any fulfilment of His
mission, but as a boy, to worship and to learn. His kinsfolk
must have observed His rapture as He had spent day after
day of the Feast in the Temple Courts. They must have
been long familiar with His ardent love for instruction,
and with the untroubled simplicity with which He always
looked up to God as His Father. " Where then," He
seems to ask them, " would it be natural for you at once
to seek for me, except in my Father s House ? " It was an
accident that, when they started homeward, they had not
noticed His absence ; — but, having missed Him, surely
they might have known the one place where they would be
most sure to find Him !
* Luke ii. 4S.
\ The contrast of the sublime and truthful simplicity of the Evangelists with
the unauthorised additions of the Apocryphal Gospels may be seen by reading
the very different accounts of this incident in the Gospel of St. Thomas. The
attempt to glorify Christ by inventing details instantly profanes the Ideal,
which nothing but truth could paint.
90 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
What could they say ? They could not take in the full
meaning of His words. The answer came to them like a
marvellous gleam of light. They felt that worlds of mys-
tery lay hidden in the depths of the Boy's soul — of mystery
which they could not fathom. His mother especially pon-
dered over His words, and kept them in her heart. What
would be the end of these things ? Whereunto would they
ultimately grow ?
And yet to His parents the Divine Boy was all tender-
ness and meek submission. From His earliest years " He
was meek and lowly of heart." '^ He returned with them
at once, and without question. They soon found them-
selves once more in Nazareth, among the poor yet happy
surroundings of their Holy Home. There was nothing
froward or defiant in the bearing of Mary's Son. His years
passed in uneventful calm, as He " kept advancing in wis-
dom and stature, and in favour with God and man." f
Many of the great Prophets of the Old Testament had
lived as He did, through a youth of unknown preparation
— as did David among the sheepfolds, and Elijah in the
tents of the Bed'awin, and Amos as a gatherer of sycamore
leaves at Tekoah, and Jeremiah in quiet Anathoth, and the
Baptist in the wilderness. They had waited, as He waited,
the call which summoned them to perform in the face of
the world the high mission of their lives.
And so, as Irenaius says, " He passed through every age,
having been made an infant to sanctify infants ; a little one
among the little ones, sanctifying the little ones ; among
the youths a youth." :{: That His childhood and early
boyhood were full of happy peace we have every reason to
* Matt. xi. 29.
f Comp. Prov. iii. 4. " So shalt thou find favour and good success in the
sight of God and man." Pirqe Avoth iii. 10. " In whomsoever the mind of
man delights, in him also the vSpirit of God delights." It is not said that the
Baptist grew up in favour with tnen. On the lifelong holy submission of Jesus
to the will of His Heavenly Father, see John iv. 34, v. 30, vi. 38, viii. 18, etc.
\ Iren. c. Haer, ii. 22.
THE FIRST ANECDOTE. 91
infer from the infinite tenderness which He always displayed
towards children, and His sympathetic references to their
joyous games and trustful gentleness.* His divine nature
deepened^ it did not qtiench, the keenness of His human
sympathies for His family, for His nation, for all mankind.
His greatness was not the separate greatness of Poet, or
Artist, or Orator, or Hero, but the unprecedented greatness
of Harmony and Peace, Humility and Majesty. His hatred
of sin in its every form, combined with tender compassion
for even the worst of sinners, made Him the fairest of the
children of men, the most supreme representative of man
in that union with God which is the sole greatness that
it is open to our nature to achieve by the grace which
comes from Him alone.f
* Matt. xi. 16, xix. 13-15.
\ On the whole subject, see Ullmann, The Sinlessness of Jesus, pp. 50-59.
CHAPTER IX.
LESSONS OF THE UNRECORDED YEARS.
" He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of
the dry ground." — Isaiah liii. 2.
" Having food and raiment, in these we shall have enough." — I Tim.
vi. 8.
" Ecclesia habet quatuor Evangelia, haeresis plurima." — Iren^us
iii. II, 9.
"He went down with them ... to Nazareth, and was
subject unto them." Such is St. Luke's brief epitome. It
is the only record left to us of nearly twenty years of the
life of Christ, from the time when He had attained the age
of twelve till when " He was about thirty years of age."*
We are told the one anecdote of boyhood, of which we
have been trying to grasp the significance, and, beyond
that, only the general facts of His growth in wisdom and
stature and favour with God and man, and His sweet filial
obedience during His abode in that beautiful Valley of
Nazareth. This is literally all that the four Gospels record
of all except — at the outside — some three and a half years
of the life of the Son of Man and the Son of God.
This is all that they record; but in St. Mark, a single
casual word — not meant for any part of the biography, but
occurring in the most incidental manner in the discontented
murmurs of the people of Nazareth — comes like a revealing
flash to illuminate the darkness. That word is " the
Carpenter.''^
* Luke iii. 23, R. V. " Jesus, when He began to teach, was about thirty
years of age."
f Mark vi. 3. Justin Martyr says, "He used, when among men, to work
as a carpenter, making ploughs and yokes." Dial. c. Tryph. 88.
92
UNRECORDED YEARS. 93
Jesus had been teaching in the synagogue so familiar to
Him in His early years, and His disciples were with Him.
As He taught, the Nazarenes were ainazed at His wisdom,
and His mighty works, but tiie humility of His origin was
a stumbling-block to them. Was not this man a peasant
like themselves ? In what respect could He claim any
superiority over them? Did they not know Mary His
mother, and His four brothers, and His sisters ? Had He
not laboured among them for His daily bread ? Was He
not in the eyes of the Scribes a mere ignoramus? How
could they accept a teaching so authoritative, claims so
lofty ? A prophet could expect but little honour in his own
country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.
" Is not this the Carpenter?" * Christ might have come
as a Prince like Buddha, or a Philosopher like Confucius, or
a Priest like Zoroaster, or a Warrior like Mohammed ; but
He chose to come as " the Carpenter of Nazareth." The
name of scorn lingered on through the centuries. " What
is the Carpenter doing now?" sneeringly asked Libanius,
the pagan sophist, of a Christian. ''He is making a coffin"
answered the Christian; and shortly after, Julian, the
apostate Emperor, whom Libanius regarded with such
proud devotion, was cut short in his brilliant career of
statesmanship and victory, and died with the words
" TJioii hast conquered, O Galilean ! " upon his lips.f
The innate vulgarity which showed itself in the scoff of
* Mark vi. 3. Hence Origen is mistaken when he says (c. Cels. vi. 36) that
" Jesus has never been described as the carpenter." The Jews, wiser by far in
this respect than tlie Pagans, honoured manual labour, and many of their
greatest men — among them Hillel and Akiba — were never ashamed to have
once earned their bread by the sweat of their brow. But how deep was the
humility of Christ's choice may be estimated if we read Ecclus. xxxviii. 24.
f There is a curious passage in Siiccah. " ' And the Lord showed me four
carpenters ' (Zech. i. 20). Who are these four carpenters ? Rav Ghana bar
Bizna says that they were A/cssia/i the Son of David; Messiah the son of Joseph;
Elijah, and the Priest of Righteousness." {Succah, f. 52, 2 ; Hershon, Talm.
Misc. p. 77.)
94 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
the Nazarenes has been common in all ages, although,
again and again, those who have sprung from the humblest
ranks among the people — like Mohammed, and St. Francis
of Assisi, and Gregory VII., and Luther, and Shakespeare,
and Bunyan — have shown themselves to be moving forces
in the world. But the low sneer becomes to us an illumin-
ating truth, revealing to us the methods and purposes of
God.
The very silence of the Evangelists about those long
years is full of eloquence. Contrast it with the profane
babblings and old wives' fables of unauthorised invention,
and it becomes rich in most blessed significance!
Let us consider what it means.
It shows the truthfulness of the Evangelists. It might
well have seemed most strange to them, as at first sight it
does to us, that He in whom they recognised the Son of
God, the Saviour of the world, should have spent in lowly
obscurity and unrecorded silence all but so small a fraction
of His years on earth. They must have yearned, as we
yearn, to lift the curtain of apparent oblivion which had
been suffered to rest upon the Life of Lives. But they
would not be of the " fools " who
" Rush in where angels fear to tread " ;
nor would they surround the brow of Christ with a halo of
lying miracles. They would record nothing where nothing
was given them to record.
Throughout these four narratives they show a great
simplicity, which is the most certain stamp of truthfulness.
They burst into no raptures, they abandon themselves to no
ecstasies, they indulge in no notes of admiration. " lis se
souviennent, voila tout ! " *
Yet this reticence is in itself rich in the deepest and most
necessary lessons.
^^ Fruit is seed.'' What the soil and the grain have been,
that will the harvest be When we see the perfect rose we
* Didon, I, liv.
UNRECORDED YEARS. 95
know at once that there can have been no blight, no imper-
fection in the bud. So far, then, as the revelation of
Christ's Person is concerned, we recognise, without special
record, that those unrecorded years must have been years
of holy and sinless humility.
But, further, the one word preserved (with such apparent
casualness) by St. Mark, brings clearly home to us that
those long years of Jesus in Nazareth were years of prepar-
ation, of poverty, of obscurity, of labor,
(i.) They were years of preparation : However deep
must have been the consciousness in the soul of the youth-
ful Christ that He was, in a special sense, the Son of His
Heavenly Father, and that He was born to do His work,
yet, in meekness and lowliness of heart. He would abide
God's good time. He would await the pointing of His finger,
the whisper of His voice. '* He shall not strive, nor cry,
neither shall His voice be heard in the streets. A bruised
reed will He not break, and the smoking flax will He not
quench, until He send forth judgment unto victory." ^ The
life ivith God and in God sufficed Him. Men might look
for manifestations of God in the earthquake or the thunder,
or the mighty strong wind which shakes the mountains and
rends their rocks : to Jesus, hidden in the cleft of that
mountain valley, they came, as to Elijah, in the " still,
small voice."
(ii.) And it teaches us a most blessed lesson, that God
Himself, hid in the veil of mortal flesh, should voluntarily
have undergone those long silent years from childhood to
manhood in the lot of poverty, of obscurity, of labour.
Of poverty. The Gospel of Christ is a Gospel to the
poor, who are the many. Poverty is the normal lot of the
vast majority of mankind. There was nothing squalid,
nothing torturing, nothing degraded in this poverty. It
was the modest competence, earned by manly toil, which
suffices to provide all that men truly need, though not all
* Matt. xii. 19, 20; Is. xlii. 2, 3.
96 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
that they passionately desire. It was the poverty which is
content with food and raiment. Men, by myraids, strive
passionately for wealth. In all ages Mammon has been the
god of their commonest worship, —
"Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From heaven ; for e'en in heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of heaven's pavement, trodden gold.
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific."
Men strive and agonise for gold ; they toil and moil, and
cheat, and steal, and oppress, and poison, and ruin their
brethren to get money ; they sell their souls, they turn
their whole lives into a degradation and a lie, because of
the false glamour of riches. The old song says rightly : —
" The gods from above the mad labour behold,
And pity mankind who would perish for gold."
Yet after all it is but very few who, with all their passionate
endeavours, attain to riches. The Dives who is clad in
purple and fine linen, and fares sumptuously every day, is
but one out of every hundred thousand ; and very often his
earthly wealth tends only to ossify and dehumanise his
heart. The lesson of Christ's poverty has helped myraids
of the humble to say, with brave Martin Luther, " My
God, I thank Thee that Thou hast made me poor and a
beggar upon earth." And, as the wise king had prayed :
"Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food
convenient for me," so Christ, by the example of these
long, silent years of poverty, gave deeper emphasis to His
own teaching: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon
earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves
dig through and steal ; but lay up for yourselves treasures
in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and
where thieves do not dig through nor steal." * In the
*Matt. vi. 19, 20.
UNRECORDED YEARS. 97
workshop at Nazareth, faithful in that which was little,
Christ revealed to mankind where to seek, and how to
enjoy the true riches. By long examjjle He added force to
His own precept : " Be not anxious for the morrow, for the
morrow will be anxious for the things of itself." " Be not
anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall
drink; nor yet for your body what ye shall put on. Is not
the life more than food, and the body than raiment." *
(iii.) And it was a life of obscurity. Men love fame;
they will risk life itself, they will face the cannon which
pour forth destruction into the midst of them, to win
renown, and " fly victorious in the mouths of men." This
passion to win fame is not so grovellingly ignoble as that
love of money which is a root of all kinds of evilPf
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble minds),
To scorn delights, and live laborious days ;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears
And slits the thin-spun life."
It is infinitely diflficult to disillusion men from this
passion, although in age after age the greatest have been
among the saddest of mankind. " Omnia fiii, et nihil
expedite' sighed the Roman Emperor, who had risen from
lowliness to the topmost summit of earthly grandeur.
" All my life long I have been prosperous in peace and
victorious in war, feared by my enemies, loved and hon-
oured by my friends," wrote Abdalrahman the Magnifi-
cent, in his private diary. " Amid all this wealth and glory
I have counted the days of my life which I could call
happy. They amount to fourteen !" :{; Our great drama-
tist makes his holy king say : —
♦Matt. vi. 34, 25, fTim. vi. IQ.
\ Quoted by Gibbon, ch, Iii. (ed, Milman, v, 197).
98 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
" My crown is in my heart, not on my head,
Not set with diamonds, or Indian stones,
Nor to be seen : my crown is called Content —
A crown it is which seldom kings enjoy ! "
And again : —
" I swear 'tis better to be lowly born
And range with humble dwellers in content.
Than to be perked up in a glistering grief,
And wear a golden sorrow."
" I never spent such tedious hours in all my life,"
exclaimed Napoleon I., as he flung- into the corners of the
room the superb coronation robes which he had worn when
the Pope of Rome, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, had
placed the crown of St. Louis on the brows of him who
had, a few years before, been the poor and struggling
sub-lieutenant of artillery. " Right well I know " — such
are the words which one of the chief poets of our generation
puts into the mouth of the mighty Merlin —
" Right well know I that fame is half dis-fame,
The cackle of the unborn about the grave.
Sweet were the days when I was all unknown,
But when my name was lifted up, the storm
Brake on the mountain, and I cared not for it."
And so the " Emptiness of emptiness, emptiness of
emptiness, all is emptiness ! " of the richest, wisest, and
most splendid of earthly kings * has been reverberated
from century to century; and with that verdict of disil-
lusionment comes the old wise lesson, " Seekest thou great
things for thyself? Seek them not, saith the Lord." f
Jesus gave to the lesson of this world-wide experience His
seal of confirmation by His unknown years at Nazareth ;
and thus, by example as by His words. He says to us :
* Ecc. i. 2.
•)■ Jer. xlv. 5. Comp. Luke xii. 29 ; John v. 30, 44, viii. 50.
UNRECORDED YEARS. 99
" Come unto Me . . . for I am meek and lowly in heart,
and ye shall find rest unto your souls." *
(iv.) And His was a life of manual ioil. In this respect
also how inestimable a boon did He confer upon the toil-
ing millions of mankind :
"Not to the rich He came, nor to the ruHng,
Men full of meat, whom most His heart abhors;
Not to the fools, grown insolent in fooling.
Most when the poor are dying out of doors."
There has been a haughty tendency in all ages to despise
manual labour, and look down on those who live by it.
All trade and mechanic work was to the ancient world
despicable {^dyauaov)^ a thing to be left to slaves, or
those but a little above them. So it was in the days of the
Roman Empire ; so it was even among our Teutonic
forefathers. A " base mechanic " was quite an ordinary
description, in the days of Queen Elizabeth, for the mass
of the people, f and to this day the insolent 'ineptitude of
commonplace vulgarity thinks it an immense disparagement
to call a man " a mere tradesman." The Jews alone among
the nations rose to a wiser standpoint, though even among
them we find such haughty sentence as: " How can he get
wisdom that holdeth the plough . . . whose talk is of
bullocks?":}:
Even " the sweet and noble Hillel," though he rose from
a position of the lowliest poverty, was so tainted by the
pride of leisurely sciolism as to say, " No am-Jia-aretz can
be pious." The lot of artisans was, however, indefinitely
raised among the Jews by the fact that the greatest Rabbis
were taught that it was well to be able to maintain them-
selves by a trade. What sublimer lesson could Jesus have
taught to mankind than by spending thirty unknown years
as the humble Carpenter of Nazareth? How fundamen-
tally did He thus rectify the judgments of rnan's feeble and
*Matt. xi. 29. fComp. Shakespeare, Ant. and Cleop. v. 2.
X Ecclus. xxxviii, 25.
ICX5 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
erring day! How did He thus illustrate the truth that
"all honest labour is an honour to the labourer"! How
did He further demojistrate by this example that man has
no essential dignity except that which comes from his
inherent nature as created in the image of God ! Shakes-
peare complains :
" Not a man for being simply man
Hath any honour ; but honour for those honours
Which are without him, as place, riches, favour.
Prizes of accident as oft as merit."
Buddhism has its Arhats; Brahminism its Yogis;
Mohammedanism its Dervishes ; Manichean asceticism has
its monks and hermits. But Christ wished to show that
He who, by His Divine Being, was immeasurably and
inconceivably greater than the greatest in all the world,
lost no particle of His grandeur by living the common
every-day life, and by learning to labour truly, and earning
His bread by the sweat of His brow.
" He who is without friends, without money, without
home, without country, is still at the least a man ; and he
who has all these is no more." * To all alike — to the
poorest, the lowliest, the most oppressed, the most perse-
cuted — God in Christ gives an equal chance of happiness.
Complete earthly insignificance is the lot of the mass of
mankind. Millions might say, ** We are the merest
cyphers." All but the very few, when death comes might
murmur:
" I shall be gone to the crowd untold
Of men by the cause they served unknown,
Who lie in the myriad graves of old.
Never a story, and never a stone."
Some men are inclined to ask why God placed them in
depths where their voices can never be heard. The answer
is that life means something infinitely more precious than
* Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy.
UNRECORDED YEARS. loi
power and fame. The object of life — as the silent, unre-
corded years of Christ's life teach us — is neither to be
known, nor to be praised, but simply to do our duty, and
to the best of our power to serve our brother-men. The
inch-high dignities of man on the insignificant stage of his
little greatness are annihilated in the infinitude of God, to
whom all human life, apart from Him, is but as "a. trouble
of ants 'mid a million million of suns ! " But
" All service is true service, wiiile it lasts,"
and
" All service ranks the same with God,
Whose puppets are we, one and all ;
There is no great and small."
If we realise this truth in the light of Christ's early life, we
add an undreamed-of "grandeur to the beatings of the
heart." If we live blameless and harmless children of
God without rebuke, we may make our lives as splendid in
the sight of our Heavenly Father as though we stood on
the summits of humanity, clad with angels' wings. The
Archangel Gabriel thought it as high an honour to help
back to its nest the little struggling ant as to save the great
King from comm-itting a sin.
" He did God's work, to him all one,
If on the earth, or in the sun."
All readers then, will, I trust, agree with me that the
silence of the Evangelists about those thirty years in the
earthly life of the Lord of Glory is the grandest eloquence ;
and that merely by living this unknown life of labour as a
peasant in a Galilean village, Christ set the very example,
and taught the very lesson, which the untold millions of
mankind most deeply need — it was the lesson that life
comes indeed differently to the good and to the bad, to the
wise and to the foolish, but that it has gifts of equal blessed-
ness for the low and for the high, for the poor and for the
I02 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
rich. To all true men, with no respect of persons, are flung
equally wide
" The Gates of Heaven, on golden hinges moving."
But it is perfectly lawful and reverent for us, though we
cannot narrate a single incident of Christ's youth and early
manhood, yet to try to realise all that can be ascertained
of the outer circumstances in the midst of which that life
was spent.
" He went down ... to Nazareth and was subject unto
them."
What was the scenery around the humble home in which
Jesus grew up? I need not repeat the description which
I have given elsewhere of that little white village on the
hill — " urbs florida et virgultis consita " *— lying amid its
green and umbrageous fields "like a handful of pearls in a
goblet of emerald." Suffice it to say that, while the
scenery is by no means grand or overwhelming, it is full of
peaceful loveliness. In this, as in all else, there was noth-
ing exceptional in the conditions which surrounded the
youth and early manhood of the Saviour.
" Needs no show of mountain hoary,
Winding sliore, or deepening glen,
Where the landscape in its glory
Teaches truth to wondering men ;
Give true hearts but earth and sky.
And some flowers to bloom and die ;
Homely scenes and simple views,
Lowly thoughts may best infuse."
As the boy Jesus stood on the hill-top of His native
town, gazing over scenes rich in the historic memories of
the Chosen People, and rejoicing as the wind of the moun-
tains and the sea played in His long hair. He would have
seen the pelicans, with their great white wings, flying in
long lines to the Lake of Galilee ; and the roller-bird, with
* Jerome /« Is. xi. i-
UNRECORDED YEARS. 103
its plumage of vivid blue, flash like a living sapphire among
the pale grey olive-trees ; and the kingfisher, perched on a
reed beside the waters, fishing eagerly from hour to hour;
and the harmless doves, soiled sometimes as they lighted
on the dustheaps of the streets, but " covered with silver
wings, and their feathers like gold " when they soared once
more into the azure, and reflected the sunlight from every
varying plume. He had watched with loving eye the
eagle soaring with supreme dominion in the cloudless sky;
the vultures which gather round the fallen carcass ; the
ravens which lay up no store for food, and yet the Heavenly
Father feedeth them ; the innumerable little brown
sparrows which twittered in the over-grown foliage of the
water-courses — so valueless that you could buy two of them
for a farthing, and, if you spent two farthings, could get
five, so that one would be thrown in for nothing,* and yet
not one of them falling to the ground without our Father's
love. He had noticed " the hen, with passionate maternal
love, clucking to gather its young beneath the shelter of
its widespread wings; the lambs blithely following their
shepherd, yet going astray, and roaming into the wild " ;
the sower flinging out the grains of wheat which sometimes
fell on rocky, or trodden, or thorny ground, or sank into
the good soil, to die indeed, but to spring up again in the
hundredfold of golden harvests. He would watch the
green blade passing into the ear, and then into the full corn
in the ear; and the fig-tree in springtide putting forth its
tender leaves ; and the vine-branch hung with its rich
purple clusters ; and the grain of mustard-seed, smallest of
all seeds, but growing up into the largest and bushiest of
garden herbs, so that the birds of the air took shelter in its
branches ; and the rushes whispering and wavering in the
evening wind ; and the lilies of the field brightening the
meadows and the mountain sides with blue and purple and
scarlet, like the broidery on the girdle of the High Priest ;
* Matt. X. 29 ; Luke xii. 6.
I04 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
and the many-coloured tulip, the golden armarylUs, the
scarlet anemone arrayed more splendidly than Solomon in
all his glory. He would notice, too, all the wild creatures
with an eager and tender gaze — the sly wisdom of the
serpent, the fox creeping to its hole, the wild wolves and
prowling jackals, as well as the sheep which hear the voice
of their shepherd and follow him when he calls them by
their names. He would watch the lightning hurling its
flame to earth, or flashing from the East even to the West,
and gaze on the sky red with the promise of golden days,
or lurid with the menace of the storm. He would listen to
the welcome plash of the fertilising rain, and to the rush of
the swollen streams, and to the south wind with its burning
heat, and to the breeze of which we hear the sound but
cannot tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. Nature
was to Him no blank impervious barrier between the soul
and God, but a glorious crystal mirror in which the Creator
was reflected ; and every one of these sights and sounds of
common nature, treasured up in His pure and sinless soul,
became parables of spiritual truth and illustrations of
eternal wisdom.
" To Thee all nature's oracles unfold
Their wondrous meaning, deep-concealed of old,
Now by Thy touch of sympathy laid bare :
To Thee the richness of their truth they yield,
Each sparrow, and each lily of the field.
Preaching the gospel of a Father's care.
The shepherd seeking his lost lambs again.
The housewife's bread, the gently falling rain,
The morning sun that climbs the heavenly height ;
The green grass, and the spirits of careless youth.
Are all but garments of the living truth
That through them shines, and fills our lives with light." *
Nor was it otherwise with the commonest sights and
sounds and incidents of daily life. To Him all became
* Quoted by Mr. Wicksteed in his translation of H, Van Oort's Bible for the
Young, V. 198.
UNRECORDED YEARS. 105
fruitful as vehicles of the holiest teaching, which was the
more impressive because all alike could understand it, from
the highest to the lowest. The form which His teaching
took furnishes an indirect proof of His daily familiarity
with the common life of the people during the long years
which He spent as one of the labouring classes. He had
watched the processions of the bridegrooms, and the games
of the little ones, and the gay clothing of the courtiers
from Tiberias. " He was at home," says Hausrath,* " in
those poor, windowless Syrian hovels, in which the house-
wife must light a candle in the daytime in order to seek for
her lost piece of silver.f He is acquainted with the secrets
of the bakehouse, :j: and the gardener, § and the builder, H
and with things which the higher classes never see — such as
the ' good measure, pressed down, and shaken together,
and running over,' of the cornchandler ;^ the rotten, leak-
ing wine-skin of the wine-dealer ; ^'^ the clumsy patchwork
of the peasant-woman ; ff and the brutal manners of the
upper servants towards the lower. ^ A hundred other
features of a similar kind are enwoven by Him into His
parables. Reminiscences given of His more special handi-
craft have been found, it is believed, in some of His sayings.
The parable of the Splinter and the Beam is said to recall
the carpenter's shop ; §§ the uneven foundation of the
houses, the building-yard ; |||1 the cubit that is added. His
workshop ; *l*l the distinction in the appearance of the
green and dry wood, the drying shed ; *** but from the fre-
quency of expressions peculiar to Him, it would be
possible to find similar evidence for every other handicraft.
Nevertheless the circumstance that His discourses are not
* New Testament Times n. 137. fLukexv, 8.
X Matt. xiii. 33 ; Luke xiii, 21. § Matt. xv. 13.
II Luke vi. 48, 49. ^ Luke vi. 38.
** Matt. ix. 17. ff Matt. ix. 16.
XX Luke xii. 45. §^5 Matt. vii. 3.
III Matt. vii. 24-27. HTf Matt. vi. 27.
***Luke xxiii. 31.
io6 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
drawn from rare spectacles and unusual processes, but
always move in the sphere of the ordinary man's activity,
has contributed to establish their special popularity."
We may say then of Jesus, that, for the infinite consola-
tion of the poor, during by far the greater part of His life,
He showed by an example more powerful than any teach-
ing, that " Man is as great as he is in God's sight, and no
greater."
THK HOME AT NAZARETH
" Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ;
His only teachers were the woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky.
The peace that is in the eternal hills."
— Wordsworth.
The hill-town of Nazareth on the southwest of the old
tribal district of Zabulon was remote, insignificant, and
poor. It was traversed by one of the roads from Ptolemais
to Damascus, and was near large and populous townships,
like Sepphoris and Tiberias, but it never rose into promi-
nence. It is not once mentioned in the Old Testament, nor
in the Talmud, nor in the Midrashim. The recent attempts
to make out that it was the centre of a busy commerce are
entirely unsuccessful. It is not alluded to by any Gentile
writer, nor even by Josephus, though he writes so much
about Galilee. The Jews despised it so entirely as to have
among them the proverb,* " Can any good thing come out
* The prophecy quoted by Matthew (ii. 23), "He shall be called a Naza-
rene," is of uncertain explanation. It is probably an allusion to Netzer
Branch (Is. xi. i ; Comp. Tsemach, Jer. xxiii. 5. ; Zech. iii. 8), or Notsri, as
Nazareth may perhaps mean " Protectress." The Christians were contemptu-
ously called " Nazarenes." Isaiah (ix. i, 2) describes the region in which
Nazareth stood as inhabited by "those that walk in darkness," and " that
dwell in the land of the shadow of death " (John i. 46, vii. 52, xix. 19. Light-
foot, Hor. Hebr. 232). Galilee, occupied by so many Phoenicians, Syrians, Ara-
bians, and other Gentiles (Jos. Antt. xiii. 15, 4 ; B.J. iii. 3, 2 ; Strabo xvi. 2,
34. Comp. Is. ix. i) was spoken of with great scorn (Acts ii. 7 ; Matt. xxvi.
69, 73), though the inhabitants, in their glad and healthy enthusiasm, were far
superior to other Jews. See Tacitus Hist. v. 6 ; Josephus B. J. q\ iii. 3, 2.
Barak, Deborah, Elon, Elisha, Hoshea, Jonah, Nahum, Tobit, and many
other men of fame sprang from Galilee,
107
io8 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
of Nazareth?" And afterwards the brethren of Jesus
spoke of work in Galilee as work " in secret." *
The position of an artisan in such a place must have
been humble indeed. The picture of a carpenter's shop at
Nazareth, drawn by Mr. Holman Hunt, will probably give a
very true conception of what such a shop looked like in the
days of Christ ;f for in the unchanging East the aspect of
things remains the same for century after century. It was
probably a house and workshop in one, and lighted mostly
from the door, except by night, when the single lamp
suspended in the centre was lit, " showing curiously com-
mingled the furniture of the family and the tools of the
mechanic." I have noticed in the homes of Nazareth the
gay-coloured quilts, neatly rolled up in the daytime, and
placed in a corner of the room, which at night are the beds
of the family. There is usually no table, but a little circu-
lar or octagonal stand, sometimes gaily painted or inlaid,
on which is placed the common dish of libban, or stewed
fruit, and the bread which form the staple meals. The
bronze basin and ewer are brought out after the meal by
the youngest member of the family, that he may pour
water over the hands of all who have been helping them-
selves out of the common dish.
Such was the home, for thirty years, of the Son of God,
the Saviour of the world. He lived amid the most ordi-
nary conditions. He would not seek for Himself an excep-
tional lot, but one which most closely resembled the com-
mon life of men, of whom all but a very few live humble,
unknown lives, and earn their bread by the labour of their
hands. There was nothing squalid or repellent in such a
life, but it served as the most forcible of proofs that the
* John vii. 3-5.
\ I saw Mr. Hunt when he was living at Jerusalem, and he drew this interior
of a real carpenter's shop at Nazareth to illustrate my Life of Christ. Since
those days the primitive simplicity of Nazareth is said to have partly dis-
appeared.
THE HOME AT NAZARETH. 109
true greatness of man consists in the immortal nature
which God has bestowed upon him, and not in the adjuncts
by which he is surrounded. Christ, by the years of His
earthly obscurity, meant to teach us that God judges not
as man judges, but that the sole appreciable greatness of
any man, be he emperor or peasant, lies in the fact that
God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life — that God
made him a little lower than the angels, to crown him with
glory and honour.
CHAPTER XL
THE P'AMILY AT NAZARETH,.
" Home is Heaven for beginners ; tlie place of peace ; the shelter not
only from all injury but from all terror, doubt, and division."
In the humble abode of the carpenter, Jesus learnt the
strength and tenderness of human affection which breathes
through all His utterances. Joseph and Mary were so poor
that the Virgin could only offer at her purification the pair
of turtle doves which none but the humblest mothers were
permitted by the Law to present in the place of lambs.
The fact that she was a descendant of David — which His
enemies never denied, and which is even admitted by the
Talmud* — made no difference in the lowliness of the posi-
tion of the Holy Family. The great Hillel is also said to
have been of David's race, yet until manhood he was in so
humble a lot as barely to be able to earn his daily bread by
toiling as an artisan. There is many an obscure working-
man in England at this moment who has the blood of the
Plantagenets in his veins. A few centuries entirely obliter-
ate any dignity which may be derivable from a royal
origin. In Egypt and Arabia we constantly see common
beggars who wear the green turban which shows them to be
of the family of Mohammed.f
♦See Derenbourg, Hist, de la Palestine, p. 349, who quotes Sanhedrin f. 43,
I (in editions not expurgated). The late Dr. Schiller Szinessy, however, called
Derenbourg an am-ha-aretz for understanding the words thus, and said they
only meant that Jesus was " influential with the (Roman) Government " !
f St. Peter, very soon after the Crucifixion, and St. Paul — Rabbi and San-
hedrist as he had been — speak of Jesus being " of the seed of David according
to the flesh," as though it was a fact which could not be challenged (Acts ii.
29-31 ; Rom. i. 3 ; 2 Tim. ii. 8. Comp, Heb. vii. 14 ; llegesippus ap.
Euseb. ii, 8, iii. ii, 12, 19, 20).
IIQ
THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH. in
Joseph, according to tradition, was considerably older
than the Virgin Mary, and as he is not once mentioned in
the Gospels after the Passover visit to Jerusalem, and as no
other trace of him, or allusion to him, has been preserved,
except in the Apocryphal Gospel which goes by his name,
it is probable th?.t he died soon after Jesus was thirteen
years old. The rest of the family consisted of four brothers,
and several sisters. They seem to have continued to live
together, with Mary and with Jesus. The names of these
" brethren " were James, and Joses, and Judas, and Simon.
What was their exact relationship to Jesus ? The Hel-
vidian theory takes the language of the New Testament in
its natural sense, and regards them as full brothers ; the Epi-
phanian describes them as elder sons of Joseph by a pre-
vious or a Levirate marriage; the Hieronymian — which is
the weakest and most foundationless — speaks of them as
the cousins of Jesus. From the unvarying language of the
Gospels about them, we might naturally infer that they
were sons of Mary and her husband Joseph, born after
the birth of Christ.* The belief in the Aeiparthenia, or
perpetual virginity of the mother of Jesus, was an after-
thought, unknown to the primitive Christians. It does not
seem to have been turned into an actual dogma before the
third century ,f and even then there were some — called the
AntidicomarianitcB — who followed Helvidius in rejecting
this new doctrine. It must be borne in mind that one of
*See Luke ii. 7, xxiv. 10; John ii. 12, vii. 2-8, xix. 25 ; Mark iii. 21, 31,
XV. 40 ; Matt, xxvii. 56, etc.
f Hegesippus (circ. A. D. 160) speaks of them as brethren in the natural
sense ; and Tertullian (A. D. 220) definitely states that they were {c. Marc. iv.
19; De Cam. Christi 7; De Virg. Vel. 61). Origen, indeed, took the view
that they were sons of Joseph by a former wife, but could only quote in favour
of this view two heretical and apocryphal Gospels. For fuller information, see
Bishop Lightfoot's Essay on the Brethren of the Lord in his Commentary on
the Galatians ; and Dr. J. B. Mayor in his Commentary on St. James ; and in
Hastings' Diet, of the Bible, i. 320. I may also refer to ch. xix. of my Earlff
Days of Christianity.
112 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
the views most universally current among the Jews was the
inherent duty and sanctity of marriage. To the earliest
Christians it would have seemed no derogation whatever
from the holy dignity of the Virgin, but rather the reverse,
if she had added the sacredness of ordinary motherhood to
the blessing of one who had been so highly favoured by the
Lord.
If, however, these four " brethren of Jesus " were not the
sons of His mother, they can only have been (i.) either His
cousins, or (ii.) the sons of Joseph by a previous or a
Levirate marriage.
The notion that they were the cousins of our Lord — sug-
gested by St. Jerome only as a desperate expedient of argu-
ment in which he himself hardly believed * — turns on the
supposition that Mary, the wife of Cleopas (Alphaeus), was
a sister of the Virgin, and that these were her four sons.
That this Mary was a sister of the Virgin is on other
grounds probable. The fact that two sisters should have
borne the same name is by no means unprecedented, and it
could not have been a very uncommon circumstance in days
when distinctive names, especially of women, were extremely
few in number. But it is fatal to this hypothesis (a) that
no one ever seems to have heard of it before Jerome
invented it ; and {d) that, (f they were Christ's cousins,
there is no conceivable reason why the word "cousin"
(aviipio?), or " kinsman " {(jvyyevTj?)^ should not have been
used of them,f nor why, without a single variation, they
should have been called " brethren "; and (c) that two, per-
haps four, of the sons of Mary and Alphaeus were Apostles
of Christ, so that it could not have been said, " neither did
* He first made the suggestion, without pretending to quote the least
authority for it, about A. D. 3S3 ; but in later works {E/>. ad Hedibiain), and in
his Commentary on the Galatians, he holds very loosely to this view, and his
arguments, such as they are, are beneath notice.
•f- The word aveipco^ occurs in Col. iv. 10 ; and of Symeon, son of Clopas, by
liegesippus, ap Euseb. //, £, iv. 22, For avyyevr/g, see Luke i. 36, ii. 44 ;
John xviii. 26, etc,
THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH. 113
His brethren believe on Him." On the other hand, if they
were sons of Joseph by a Levirate marriage, they would not
have been officially regarded as his sons, but rather as sons
of his deceased brother. And if they were sons of Joseph
by a previous marriage,* they, and not Jesus, were the
elder heirs of David's line.
In calling them Christ's "brethren" we adopt the lan-
guage of the Evangelists, and there is no evidence to justify
us in explaining it away out of deference to later fancies,
which seem to be purely subjective, and derive no support
of any kind from Scripture. If the " Perpetual Virginity "
had been regarded as a doctrine of any importance the
Evangelists would have guarded themselves against lan-
guage so liable to misinterpretation as Matt. i. 24, Luke
ii. 7.
Of these brethren, the two of most marked individuality —
the only two of whom any record survives — are James "the
Lord's brother," and Jude the " brother of James," to each
of whom we owe one of the Epistles of the New Testament.
St. James was a man of most powerful and independent
personality — pure and holy, yet with a certain natural
sternness of character. If the traditions preserved by
Hegesippus be true, he had been a Nazarite from his birth,
and the long locks of the Nazarite flowed over his shoul-
ders. It is manifest from his Epistle that he was a devoted
Jew. He addresses" the sojourners of the Dispersion "; he
speaks of the Christian assembly as " a synagogue "; his
mind was evidently steeped in Jewish literature, both
Scriptural and Apocryphal. There is a tone of severity in
his moral appeals and objurgations which recalls John the
* This was the view of Epiphanius (A. D. 370). Pearson and others have
quoted Ezek. xliv. 2 in this connection, but nothing is more deplorable that
this "ever-widening spiral ergo from the narrow aperture of single texts."
If we are to quote the Old Testament in this matter, Ps. Ixix. 8 would be much
more apposite. This Psalm, treated as Messianic by St. John (ii. 17), and St.
Luke (ii. 35), and St. Matthew (xxvii. 34), says: " I have become a stranger to
my brethren ; and an alien unto my mother's children." See Mayor /. c.
114 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Baptist. His Epistle is the least directly Christological in
the New Testament, yet Luther made an utter mistake
when he ventured to speak of it as a " downright strawy
Epistle." One passage in it especially has the profoundest
Gospel significance. It is the one in which he says, " Put-
ting away all filthincss and overflowing of wickedness,
receive with meekness the Implanted Word which is able
to save your souls." *
Still the Epistle shows us one who, while he believed
in the Lord Jesus Christ, had not broken loose from the
traditions of Judaism. In this respect he carried out the
early custom of St. Peter and St. John, who, being Jews,
after the Resurrection and after Pentecost still attended
the Temple services. Indeed, it is clear, if we accept the
story of Hegesippus, that St. James stood very high in the
estimation of the Jews, who even called him Obliam, or
" TJie Buhvark of the People " {OpJiel am). Yet so absolute
was his fidelity to Christ, that, in His name and for His sake,
he braved a martyr's death (a. D. 62. ) f
Of St. Jude, who modestly calls himself " the brother
of James," we know much less. Tradition has preserved
no particulars respecting him, except that he was the grand-
father of those descendants of David who were known as
" the Desposyni." We have, however, St. Jude's Epistle by
which to form some estimate of his character. We find in
it the same qualities of moral sternness as in that of his
brother; and besides the evident traces of a strict Judaic
* James i. 2i.
f See, on the death of St. James, Jos. Antt. xx. 9, I ; Orig. c. Cels. i. 47 ;
Euseb. H. E. ii. i, vii. 19. The well-known tradition of his martyrdom is
given at length by Hegesippus (a. d. 160), quoted by Euseb. H. E. ii. 23. The
story may come from an Ebionite book called 'Avajiai^nol 'laKu/Sov, of which
there are traces in the Clementine Recognitions. The simpler story is given by
Josephus (/^«//. XX. 9). Comp. Orig. c. Cels. i.47; Euseb. //. E. vii. 19. There
is an interesting allusion to St. James in the spurious letter of Ignatius to St.
John. " The venerable James, who is surnamed Just, whom they relate to be
very like Christ in appearance, in life, and in method of conduct, as if he were
a twin brother of the same womb."
THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH. 115
training, it contains uncommon allusions to Levitic institu-
tions,* and the apocryphal legends of the Jewish Haggadah.\
Some of these are softened down in the rifacimento of the
Epistle which we find in the second chapter of the Second
Epistle of St. Peter.
It is clear, then, that the family of Joseph was trained
in the strictest traditions of Mosaism, and it is one of the
numberless proofs of the Divine individuality of the Son of
Man that He was not swayed by such near and powerful
representatives of the Old Dispensation. There is not a
whisper or a trace of any disagreement or disunion within
the narrow limits of that humble home at Nazareth. But
the testimony of the Evangelists shows that when our
Lord began His mission, when he claimed the right to
speak with authority, and not as the Scribes ; when He set
aside the Oral Law, which his brethren had been taught to
reverence as " the tradition of the Elders " ; when He openly
broke with the all-venerated religious teachers of His day —
His brethren were startled by the immensity of His claims.
They even seem to have attributed them to a dangerous
enthusiasm, for — dreading, perhaps, lest they should lead to
some terrible catastrophe — they induced His mother to join
them in the endeavour to put some gentle restraint on what
they, with eyes as yet unenlightened, regarded as perilous
impulses.;};
And again, on a later occasion, His brethren tried to
exercise an unwarrantable influence over His methods and
actions, since their eyes were not yet opened to His Divine
authority.g They held to the current conceptions of the
coming Messiah, and urged Him to go openly to the Feast
of Tabernacles, and show His works, and claim his due posi-
* Jude8-23. t Jude6, g, 14.
X MaU, xii. 46 : Mark iii. 31, k^karr] \ Luke viii. 19. They were no doubt
deeply troubled by the fact that the venerated Scribes said that He " had a
demon," and cast out demons by Beelzebul. Comp. Mark vi. 4 ; John vii. 20.
Beelzebul seems to be the best attested reading.
§ John vii. 3, 5, lo, 14.
ii6 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
tion. He was compelled, therefore, to set aside their
intrusiveness. He would not go to the Feast with them.
He would not follow the wisdom or the ways of this world.
He was compelled to repudiate their officiousness, and
He did not take them into His confidence. He went up
to Jerusalem, not officially, but privately, after they had
departed, and did not appear in the Temple till the midst
of the Feast.
We see, however, clearly that if these " brethren of the
Lord " were men of somewhat unbending convictions, they
were nevertheless men of lofty moral character. They seem
to have been convinced and converted by the Resurrection
of Christ ; for though, during His ministry, they had not
fully or adequately believed on Him, immediately after-
wards we find them among his leading disciples. His
brother James, though not one of the Twelve, was elected
Bishop of Jerusalem after the martyrdom of James the son
of Zebedee. St. Paul, among six appearances of the Risen
Christ, mentions two only which are unrecorded in the
Gospels. One of these is, " after that He appeared to
James.'' * This has often been supposed to be the appear-
ance, not to the son of Zebedee, but to the eldest brother
of Jesus, which is mentioned in the Gospel according to the
Hebrews, f We are told that, after the Crucifixion, \ James
said that he would neither eat nor drink till he had seen
Christ risen from the dead ; and that Christ, appearing to
him, said, " Eat and drink, my brother, for the Son of Man
is risen from the dead."
The descendants of Jude, known as "members of the
Lord's family," are mentioned in the famous story of the
* I Cor. XV. 7. The separate appearance to Peter is not described in the
Gospels.
f Quoted by Jerome De Ver, ill. 2.
X Or, i nanother version, " from the hour in which he had drunk the cup of
the Lord." See Mayor, Ep. of St. James, xxxvii. n. See " Gospel ace. to the
Hebrews," ap. Jer. De Vir. ill. 2.
THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH. 117
Emperor Domitian, who (A. D. 81), hearing from Josephus
and from certain Nazarean heretics that some of the family
of Christ in Palestine claimed royal descent, suspected that
they might become possible leaders of sedition, and sent for
them to come to Rome. But on seeing at a glance that
they were only poor peasants whose hands were rough and
hard with toil, and hearing from them that they only tilled
seven acres of land, he contemptuously dismissed them to
their humble Galilean farms."*
In Christian History there is no more mysterious figure
than that of THE Mother of our Lord. In that car-
penter's shop at Nazareth what was her influence over the
early years of her Divine Son ?
After the events of the Nativity, the Virgin, strange to
say, almost disappears, not only from the New Testament,
but even from all the records of the Early Church. From
the incident in the Temple when Jesus had completed His
early boyhood, and from the fact that it was Mary, not
Joseph, who addressed Him, we infer that her share in the
training of His early years was more marked than was usual
in the case of Jewish mothers. We see again in the record
of the first miracle at Cana that she occupied a leading
position. There is no possible explanation of her remark
to Christ, " TJiey have no wine" except that it was an
indirect suggestion that by some word or deed of power
He should prevent the joy of the wedding-feast from being
destroyed by an apparent failure of the sacred duties of
hospitality. His answer, " Woman, what have I to do with
thee ? mine hour is not yet come," sounds to our ears far
more harsh than it was. It set aside the right of Mary to
direct His actions, yet was an implicit granting of her
request. The address, " Woman," f in accordance with
* Hegesippus ap. Eusebius, H. E. iii. 19-21. Julius Africanus (early in the
third century) says that he knew some of the Desposyni personally. He was
born at Eniniaus. Euseb. H. E. i. 7.
f John ii. 4,TikfioiKai aoi yvvai. In Aramaic this would be the common
ii8 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
ancient idiom, was perfectly tender and respectful, and
might be used even to Queens. * The " what have I to do
with thee?" spoken in tones of perfect gentleness, meant
merely, " This is a point which / must arrange, not thou."
The words might have been used by the most gentle and
affectionate son of full age, to his mother. The direction
immediately given by Mary to the servants shows that, so
far from feeling any sense of a repulse, she anticipated the
granting of her petition, which followed, without delay.
The Virgin is prominently mentioned in the Gospels in but
one other incident. It was on the occasion when she came
with the Lord's brethren to prevent, if possible, what they
regarded as the continuance of a deeply imperilled career.
Not only did Jesus decline to see them, but He uttered a
remark which seemed most decisively to show that the time
had now come when His work as the Son of God tran-
scended all the earthly conditions of the Son of Man.
Looking round on His assembled hearers at Capernaum,
He exclaimed, "Who is My mother, and who are My
brethren ?" And stretching forth His hand towards His
disciples, He said, " Behold My mother and My brethren !
For whosoever shall do the will of Mj'' Father who is in
heaven, he is My brother, and sister, and mother." f
Another incident tends still more strongly to emphasise
our conviction that any form of what has been called
" Mariolatry " is entirely alien from the teaching of the
pure Gospel of Christ. Our Lord had been teaching in one
of the synagogues, when a woman in the assembly, carried
away by the intensity of her feelings, cried out in the hear-
ing of all, " Blessed is the womb that bare Thee, and the
breasts which Thou hast sucked." :]: But though that
phrase, Mali If veldh, which is perfectly courteous. See 2 Sam. xvi. lo, xix.
22 ; I Kings xvii. i8 ; 2 Kings iii. 13, etc.
* See John iv. 21, xix. 26, xx. 13, 15. Thus Augustus addressed Cleopatra
in the words Oaprrn yi'vai (Dio. Cass. ii. p. 305).
\ MaU. xii. 46-50 ; Mark iii. 31-35. % Luke xi. 27.
THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH. 119
might have seemed to be the most natural of sentiments,
yet our Lord corrects its too material and human point of
view. He systematically discouraged the exaltation of
mere outward contact with His person, and taught that the
presence of His Spirit was something nearer and more to be
desired than any relationship with Him after the flesh (John
xiv. 16, 2 Cor. V. 16). " How many women have blessed the
Holy Virgin," says St. Chrysostom, " and desired to be such
a mother as she was ! What hinders them ? Christ has made
for us a wide way to this happiness, and not only women but
men may tread it — the way of obedience. This it is which
makes such a mother, and not the throes of parturition."
The last time during His life on earth that the Virgin is
mentioned is in the intensely pathetic incident when Jesus,
as He hung upon His Cross of Shame, saw His mother
standingby, and the disciple whom He loved. Thoughtful,
even at that supreme moment, for her desolate future. He
said, indicating by a movement of His head the Beloved
Disciple, " Woman, behold thy son ! " and to John, " Behold
thy mother ! " She had now drunk to the very dregs the
cup of anguish. John led her away, and from that hour
took her to his own home. In the surmises of which the
Lives of Christ are full, this incident has been much dis-
cussed. I think the answer to any difificulty lies in some
obvious considerations. St. John was "the disciple whom
Jesus loved," and was His kinsman. Having been admitted
into Christ's closest and most tender friendship, he would
be more likely to enter into the unspeakable depth of Mary's
feelings than the " brethren " who, up to that time, had
never fully accepted His Divine claims. Then again there
are indications that St. John was in a somewhat less strug-
gling worldly position than the sons of Joseph the car-
penter. Unlike " the brethren of the Lord," he was un-
married. He was familiar with Jerusalem, and probably
had a home there, in which, according to one tradition, the
Virgin lived from that time until her death.
120 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
From this moment the Virgin Mary, though her name
is just mentioned among those who formed the assemblies
of the early believers, practically disappears from Christian
History.* Even apocryphal tradition scarcely so much as
mentions her. It is not known how long she lived. It is
not certain whether she died at Jerusalem or at Ephcsus.
She is not referred to as a source of information, still less
as a fount of authority, though she could have told more
than any living being about the birth of the Saviour, and the
thirty long years of His humble obscurity. She "kept all
these and pondered them in her heart." But though
she must ever be cherished in Christian reverence as the
chosen handmaid of the Lord, and " blessed among women,"
it is impossible not to see in these indisputable facts the
strongest possible condemnation of that utterly unauthor-
ised worship of the Virgin, which centuries afterwards,
began to corrupt the turbid stream of Christianity. As
though by a Divine prevision of the dangerous aberrations
which were to come, in which Christians by millions were
taught to adore the creature even more than the Creator,
who is blessed for evermore, the name Mary is scarcely
noticed in the whole New Testament after the beginning of
Christ's ministry, and indeed after the one incident of His
boyhood. In tJirce of the instances in which it is introduced,
our Lord says, "Woman, what have I to do with thee?";
" He that doeth the will of God the same is my mother,
and my sister, and my brother " ; and, " Yea rather, blessed
are they that do the word of God and keep it." It might,
therefore, seem as if special care had been taken to dis-
courage and obviate the corrupted forms of Christianity
* Epiphanius (//(7^r. Ixxviii. ii)kncw nothing on the subject. Nicephonis
(//. E. ii. 3) is no authority, for he lived in the middle of the fourteenth cen-
tury. He says that she died at Jerusalem, aged 59, eleven years after the Cru-
cifixion. There was a tradition, mentioned in a letter of tlie Council of Ephe-
sus (a. n. 431), that she went with St. John to Ephesus and was buried there.
(See Weslcott on John xix. 2, 4.) A supposed " Tomb of the Virgin " is
shown at Jerusalem, near the traditional Gethsemane.
THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH. 121
which have thrust the Virgin Mary into the place of her
Eternal Son, and made lier more an object of rapturous
worship than God, to whom alone all worship is due.
Here we may perhaps revert for a moment to the ques-
tion on which I have already spoken elsewhere, as to the
human aspect of the Lord of Life. The early Christians
— looking almost daily for the visible return of Christ in
glory, and habitually regarding Him, no longer as "the
Man Christ Jesus," who for a few short years moved about
upon this earth, but rather as the Divine, the Eternal, the
ever-present God — have preserved for us no outline of a
picture, not even so much as a passing tradition, of His ap-
pearance as a man among men.* The early Christians —
feeling that He was with them, and within them, and that
He was " God of God, Lord of Lords, very God of very
God " — cared nothing for relics, or holy places, or semblances
of His mortal face. Hence, as far back as the second century,
nothing whatever was knoiv7i which could even decide the
question whether He was tall and stately and humanly
beautiful, or whether He was the very reverse. Ancient
writers could only fall back on the language of Prophecy.
Among the Greek Fathers and the earlier Latin writers the
tendency was to borrow the conception of His earthly
aspect from the prophecies of Isaiah (lii. 14, liii. 23), and
to speak of Him as " without form or comeliness," inglori-
ous, nay, even mean in appearance, " short, ignoble, ill-
favoured in body." \ But later on it began to be felt that
such notions were utterly untenable. We may safely infer
from the Gospels themselves that there must have been
some grandeur about the appearance of Jesus — " Sidereiim
* For full further information on these questions see my Life of Christ in
Art. See, too, Ullmann, p. igi ; Schiirer, II. ii, i6i.
t See the well-known passages : Just. Mart. Dial. 14, 36, 85, 88 ; Clem,
Alex. Paed. iii. 1,3; and others quoted on next page.
122 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
qniddam,'' as St. Jerome says — which on many occasions
won His friends and overawed His enemies.* No one who
had lived a life of sinless innocence and the supremest
moral nobleness could be otherwise than " fairer than the
children of men " (Ps. xlv. 3). This was the view of Jerome
and Augustine, and it became established in the Church of
the West, though Byzantine art continued to depict Ilim
in traditional ugliness.
The two late descriptions of Jesus — that by the pseudo
Publius Lentulus, preserved by John of Damascus in the
eighth, and that by Nicephorus in the fourteenth century —
are very beautiful, but purely ideal. All that we may be
sure of is that if " beauty " be " the sacrament of goodness,"
the Sinless Purity of the Son of Man could not but have
created for itself a noble Presence, and a Countenance full
of all human sweetness and all Divine dignity. It is certain
that pretended likeness of Christ originated among heretics
like the Carpocratians (Iren. i. 25), and we must still say
generally with St. Augustine, " Qua fiierit Ille facie,
penitiis ignoranmsy f It must be remembered that St.
Augustine gave this decisive judgment when hundreds of
pretended likenesses were in existence, all of which, he
says, differed most widely from each other.
And now the greater part of Christ's human life had
passed. The long thirty years were over. As yet He had
wrought no miracle, had given no sign, had uttered no
revelation of the Divine claims which were part of the
teaching destined to revolutionise the world. He had lived
* See, for instances, Matt. vii. 28, xiii. 54, xix. 25 ; Mark ix. 15 ; Luke ii.
47, etc.
f Jer. Ep. Ixv. in Matt. ix. 9 ; Aug. De Trin. viii. 4, 5. See Gieseler, i. 66 ;
W. H. Lecky, Hist, of Rationalism, i. 257 ; Kugler, //?>/. of Art, i. 15, 16. The
chief authorities are Clem. Alex. Paedai^. iii. i, Strom, ii. p. 308 ; Tert. De
Came Christi, 9. c. Jud. 14; Orig. c. Cels. vi. 327 ; Euseb. H. E. vii. 15.
THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH. 123
unknown and unnoticed, in the small Galilean town, as an
ordinary and humble mechanic, not challenging any place
among its provincial aristocracy, not interfering even with
the extremely modest prerogatives of the officials in its
synagogue. He had fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah :
" He shall not strive, nor cry aloud;
Neither shall any one hear His voice in the streets.
A bruised reed shall He not break,
And smoking flax shall He not quench.
Till He send forth judgment unto victory."
We may here sum up the deep lessons involved in these
long years of obscure and silent labour. They involve in
the most striking of all possible forms a testimony to the
value and sacredness of the ordinary life of man. They
were destined to furnish the most vivid possible proof that
the life is more than the food, and the body than the
raiment ; that God created man for incorruption, and made
him an image of His own everlastingness ; that to receive
Him into the soul is perfect righteousness, and to know
His dominion is the root of immortality. The lot of all but
the very few in every million of human beings is the lot of
struggle and obscurity. The Psalmist sang, ages ago, that
" As for man, his days are as grass,
As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it and it is gone,
And the place thereof shall know it no more."
Christ came to live, in all external respects, the commonest
life of man, that the multitude might not regard their
lives as mere stubble of the field, and themselves as things
of no account with God, because they constitute but
" Of men, the common rout
That, wandering loose about.
Grow up and perish, as the summer fly ;
Heads without name, no more remembered."
124 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
For the life which they live, in its namelessness and little
apparent value to mankind, was the very life lived by the
Son of God Himself, the Lord of Glory, for all but the
brief years of His ministry. It sufficed Him, and He
thereby taught us how infinite is the inherent preciousness
of life itself, apart from those concomitants of pride, suc-
cess, and riches, which to many men seem alone to make it
worth living. Tried by the world's standard, our existence
may seem deplorably insignificant ; but what is taught us
by the thirty years passed in the shop of the Nazarene car-
penter by " the Lord of Time and all the worlds," is that
each man has a right to say with humble faith :
" All I could never be,
All men ignored in me,
This was I worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped." *
And in all the early years of His life, with their experi-
ences and meditations, Jesus looked far more on what is
good in human nature than on what is evil. He became
filled more and more with a boundless compassion for man,
springing from absolute love for God. " Here," says Keim,
" we are made aware in Him of an ascending effort to get
beyond the boundaries of the natural, beyond the limita-
tions of human nature ; — a renunciation of the whole world,
a feeling of the nothingness of riches, and of the utter
helplessness of all human existence which lives but from
the alms, and crumbs, of the Eternal : but yet, instead of
the leap of self-annihilation, the plunging of man's nothing-
ness into God's Eternity — a profound repose of the creature
in itself ; an inward contemplation of inward riches along
with outward neediness ; a joyful recognition of the bright
light and everlasting worth of a human soul ; a self-confir-
mation in the right to endless existence ; and belief in the
personal elevation and dignity of mankind at large, in such
strength of conviction as had never been before, and as
* Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra,
THE FAMILY AT NAZARETH. 125
became henceforth tlie motive-power of all the future life of
humanity. " * Even the most abject and wretched were, in
Christ's apprehension, still sons and daughters of Abraham,
still children of the Heavenly Father, of the true and ever-
lasting God.
It was Christ's intense realisation of God's infinitude of
love which raised Him into the all-embracing love of Man.
It was His sense of the infinite grandeur of the Divine Per-
fection which made Him insist on the nature of true
worship as consisting in a communion of the soul with God.
The self-deceiving littlenesses of a theatrical externalism
hinder rather than promote the depth of that communion
of man with God which uplifts our souls at last into that
mystery wherein God in man is one with man in God.
*Keim, ii. 170. See Matt. vii. 9-11.
CHAPTER XII.
THE CONDITION OF THE WORLD.
" In whatsoever I may find you, in tills will I also judge you." — Un-
written Saying of Ciirist. Clem. Hovi. ii. 5. JusT. Mart. Dial. 47.
" Divina Providentia agitur mundus et homo." — Orosius.
" No incident in the Gospel story, no word in the teaching of Jesus
Christ, is intelligible apart from its setting in Jewish History, and with-
out a clear understanding of that world of thought distinctive of the
Jewish People." — SCHURER, Hist, of the Jewish People, Div. i, Vol. i,
p. I.
But the time had now come, when, in fulfilment of the
mission which was to regenerate mankind and to inaugu-
rate the last ason of the Divine Dispensation, Christ had to
reveal Himself to the world. Nazareth, secluded as it was,
was in a central position for observing the movements and
tendencies of the age. The Galileans- — an eager and emo-
tional race — were in constant contact with Jerusalem and
Samaria, and their hearts thrilled to the religious questions
of the day. They were within a short distance from
Decapolis, and the heathen or seini-heathen cities of Sep-
phoris. Hippos, Bethsaida Julias, and Tiberias. Not far
from them, in the plain of Esdraelon, was an encampment
of Roman soldiers, which still retains the name of " Legion "
(Lejjun). They were under the dominance of the meanest
of the Herods, and were well aware that their political
existence was ultimately dependent on the will of those
whom Herod the Great had called " the almighty Romans"
and their deified Emperors. From the hill-top of Nazareth
was visible the blue Mediterranean traversed by " the ships of
Chittim " — the narrow and open pathway to the Greek and
Asiatic world and the Isles of the Gentiles. And though
126
CONDITION OF THE WORLD. 127
there is no proof that Nazareth itself was in any sense a
centre of commercial activity, it was within easy access of
the roads from Damascus to the sea, the great Southern
road which led ultimately to Egypt, and the Eastern road
which led from Acre to Bethlehem.* In the festal visits
to Jerusalem Jesus must have mingled among crowds in
which there were " Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites,
and dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Judaea and Cappadocia, in
Pontus and Asia, in Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and
the parts of Libya about Cyrene, Alexandrians and Cilicians,
and sojourners from Rome, both Jews and Proselytes,
Cretans and Arabians." A Passover crowd in the Temple
Courts was an epitome of the civilised world.
Jesus must, therefore, have often meditated on the general
conditions of the life of His day, both among the Jews and
among the Gentiles. And the epoch was a deplorable one.
The darkness was deepest before the approach of dawn.
I. THE GENTILES.
As regards the Gentile world, no epoch could have been
worse, no period more deeply plunged into the Dead Sea
of corruption, or more despairingly conscious of its own
moral degradation. The mimes of Paganism reeked with
moral corruption, and the sanguinary amphitheatres were
schools of callous cruelty.f Infanticide was so universal
that a senator challenged the members of a full Senate to
say whether nearly every one of them had not exposed
infant children to die. Their very religion was corrupt at
the fountain-head. The pictures in the Temples, and the
representations of stories of their religious mythology, were
potent sources of corruption, such as even light poets
* See G. A. Smith, Hist. Geogr. of the Holy Land, 413-463.
f Juv. Sat. vi. 67 ; Mart. De Spectac. 7 ; Sen. Ep. 7 ; Tert. Apol. 15 ; ad
Nat. i. II. See Zosimus, Hist. i. 6. Offences against moral purity were
regarded even by philosophers as " matters of indifference" (ddmyopa).
128 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
observed and bewailed ; * and the dark mysterious recesses
of consecrated shrines were scenes of gross demoralisation.f
The old Roman virtues had been quenched, partly in
consequence of the closer contact of Rome with Greek
immorality, partly because the dead weight of military
despotism, as represented by the Emperors, had crushed
out the old freedom and nobleness. A highborn Roman
historian, Cremutius Cordus, was driven to suicide in the
days of Tiberius for speaking of Cassius as " the last of the
RomansyX The age was under no illusion as to its own
degeneracy, and it was pervaded by the gloomiest dread. §
The lowest of the mob were conscious of the unsurpassable
abominations which ran riot in the recesses of the palace,
and were envied and reproduced, not only in the houses of
the great senators, but even in those of the middle class.
How could any nobleness or purity survive the sway of
adored and deified monsters such as Tiberius, Caligula,
Nero, Vitellius, Otho, and Domitian ? Was ever a more
deplorable picture drawn of a state of morals rotten to its
inmost depths, than that delineated by such historians as
Tacitus and Suetonius? The picture which our Lord drew
in one of His last discourses, of wars and tumults, of
nations in perplexity for the roaring of the sea and the
billows, and of men fainting for fear and expectation of the
things which are coming on the world, || is the exact parallel
of the description of the same epoch by Tacitus as one
" rich in disasters, savage with battles, rent with factions,
cruel even in peace ; the swallowing up or overthrow of
cities, the pollution of sacred functions, the prevalence of
adulteries, the corruption of slaves against their masters, of
* Propert. Eleg. ii. 5, 19-26.
•)• Tert. Apol. 15 ; Minucius Felix, Octav, 25 ; Ovid Ars. Amat. i. 77, iii.
393 ; Firmicus De err. prof. rel. iv. p. 64 ; Rufinus, H. E. xii. 24, cited by
Dollinger, Judenth. u. Heidenth. p. 644.
\ Tac. Ann. iv. 34.
§See Tac. Ann. vi. 28-51, //. i. 3.
II Matt. xxiv. 3-14 ; Luke xxi. 10-28.
CONDITION OF THE WORLD. 129
freedmen against their patrons, and, when there was no
open enemy, the ruin of friends by friends."'^ Could aii}--
thing be more debased [[than the tone of vileness unbkish-
ingly presented by Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius ?
Already, in the better days of Augustus, Horace had sung:
" Damnosa quid non imminuit dies ?
Aetas paientum pejor avis dabit
Nos nequiores, mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem." t
Bad as his age was, the poet thought it might conceivably
be worse, and prophesied for future generations a still
more irredeemable decadence. But Juvenal, in the days
of Nero, with no conscious reference to what Horace had
said, wrote that wickedness had now reached its absolute
culmination, and that though future generations might be
as bad as his was, they could not be more vile.
"iV//erit ullerius quod nostris moribus addat
Posteritas ; eadem cupient, facientque minores
Omne in praecipiti vitium stetit."|:
Their hideous taurobolies and kriobolies — of which the first
trace is found on an inscription. A, D. 133 — were but vain
outward forms of expiation, which neither diminished the
violence of their passions, nor cooled the anguish of their
accusing consciences. Judaism did not reach them. They
fancied that the Jews were descended from lepers who had
been driven out of Egypt ; that they worshipped, some
said an ass, and others the clouds of heaven ; that they
were a nation of cheats and liars ; that they kept Sabbaths
on pretence of superstition, but solely as an excuse for
idleness ;§ and that they hated all men, as all men hated
them.
*Tac. Hist. I, 2. t Hor. Od. iii, vi. 45. tJuv. Sat. i. 148.
§0n these ignorant misapprehensions, even of cultivated heathen writers,
see Tac. H, v. 2, etc.; Juv. Sat. xiv. 96 ; Strabo, xvi. p. 670; Aug. Civ, Dei
vi. I ; Tert. Apol. 23 ; Dollinger, Jtidcnth. «. Hcidaith, p. 628.
I30 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
And the anguish of retribution was equal to the wicked-
ness of universal abandonment to vile affections. Inso-
lence, arrogance, greed, and the superabundance of fla-
gitiousness, filled Rome with whisperers, liars, slanderers,
professional informers — of whom some, to the common
terror, exercised their infernal trade openly, others
secretly.* The Emperor Tiberius had sunk to the lowest
depths of degradation in his sty at Caprea^, as an " inventor
of evil things," so that new words had to be coined to
describe his vileness;f and he was, as even Pliny says of
him, " notoriously the most wretched of mankind." He
himself wrote to his Senate, " What to write, or how to
write to you, Conscript Fathers, or what not to write, at
the present moment, may all the gods and goddesses
destroy me worse than I feel myself to be daily perishing,
if I know." :}: The comment of the stern historian on those
words is that his crimes and enormities turned to his own
punishment ; that neither his splendour nor his solitude
saved him from suffering the torments and penalties which
he confessed ; and that he illustrated the wise remark that,
if the minds of tyrants could be laid open to view, they
would be as visibly lacerated by the scourges of cruelty,
lust, and wicked counsels as bodies are by the lash.
This awful condition of things created an unspeakable
weariness of life ;§ and so deep was the conviction that
the life of men is but a matter of indifference, or even
a constant comedy in the eyes of the gods,! that suicide
was no longer regarded as a crime, but had come to be
looked upon as a sign of moral nobleness. Nor are these
the rhetorical exaggerations of poets, historians, and
satirists. Seneca was a grave philosopher, and one who
tried to be sincere, and he wrote, " He who denies that we
may forcibly end our life, does not see that he is closing the
♦Tac. Ann. vi. 7. f Tac, Ann. vi. I ; Rom. i. 30.
ifTac. Ann, vi. 6. § Tac. Ann. iv. I, xvi. 16 ; Cic. de Off. i. 4-18.
\ Tac. Ann. iii. 18.
CONDITION OF THE WORLD. 131
path of liberty. The eternal law hath done nothing better
than that it has given us one entrance to life, but many
exits."
Self-murder was belauded as an act of real magnanimity
by many, both of Greeks and Romans.* Even an Epicte-
tus and a Marcus Aurelius did not rise above this point of
view.f Not a few who were counted by the Greeks and
Romans among their noblest sons had died by their own
hands, and among them such philosophers as Zeno and
Kleanthes. " Having gone through every species of
wickedness," says Theophylact, " Human Nature needed
to be healed."
Thus the Gentiles are convicted out of the mouths of
their own writers, and it is proved that when St. Paul, in
the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, drew, in
such deep dark lines, the sketch of Pagan wickedness, and
showed how the heathen had " become vain in their reason-
ings and their senseless heart was darkened," and how they
were given up to passions of dishonour and reprobate
uncleanness, he was not actuated by feelings of national or
religious hatred, but was speaking, with holy dignity, the
words of soberness and truth. The worst fact about them
Avas that they were " past feeling " ; they had felt once, but
now were " hardened in wickedness.":}:
II. THE JEWS.
Nor must it be supposed that this leprosy of Pagan
wickedness was visible only in great Roman centres and
heathen lands. There were many Gentiles, and large
contingents of soldiers, in Palestine,§ and the wickedness
*See Ep. Iviii. 34, Ixxvii.; Plin. Epp. 3, 7.
f Epict. Diss. i. 25, ii. 2 ; Marc. Aurel. v. 9, viii. 47, x. 8.
X Eph. iv. 19, airTjlyTjKOTeq. See, for further proofs, Dollinger, The Jew and
the Gentile ; Renan, L' Antichrist ; and my Seekers after God, pp. 36-53.
§ Since the year A, D, 63, when Pompey had entered Jerusalem with his
&rmy, Palestine had been under the dominance of Rome. Even in the days
132 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
of ' them that knew not God " was not restrained by con-
tact with Judaism. The stories told of things done by
Roman soldiers, even in Jerusalem; their close alliance, in
the days of Felix, with the murderous Sicarii ; the cruel
slaughters of the defenceless in which they took a share ;
the act of gross indecency openly displayed for purposes of
insult by a Roman legionary in sight of all the worshippers
in the Temple at a great festival ; the abominable deeds of
brutalism enacted by the soldiers and people after the death
of Agrippa, in the cities of Caesarea and Sebaste* — are
incidents which sufificiently prove that the contagion of
heathendom was diffused even into the Holy Land.
Herod the Great and his sons were open patrons of
idolatry everywhere but in Jerusalem. They were not Jews
at all. Herod, who came to the throne in A. D. 39, and held
it for thirty-seven years, was the son of an Edomite father
and an Arabian mother. He could afford to defy the
shuddering hatred of the Jews so long as by flattering sub-
servience and supple complaisance he could retain the
favour of his Roman lords. These aliens built temples, in
the Holy Land itself, to heathen deities and to deified
Emperors. Herod the Great had even introduced into the
Holy City the looseness of the theatre and the sanguinary
ferocity of the gladiatorial games. Herod Philip, the
tetrarch of Ituraea, ruled as a heathen among heathens.
He stamped his coinage with the temple of Augustus, and
the laureated efifigies of Augustus and Tiberius, and he
called the town of Bethsaida "Julias" in honour of the
infamous daughter of Augustus. Besides this it was uni-
versally known, nor was there even a pretence at conceal-
ing the fact, that the darkest vices of fallen humanity were
practised in the Herodian palaces ; and that Herod's sons,
while still mere youths, had carried back with them from
of the Maccabees there were irdleiq ''EXkr/viSEq in the boundaries of Judsea
(2 Mace. vi. 8).
*Jos. Antt. xix. 9, I,
CONDITION OF THE WORLD. 133
Rome, where they were educated, sins which the Mosaic
law punished with death. So deeply indeed had this con-
tamination sunk that, for the sake of political dominance,
Alexandra, the mother of the beautiful Mariamne and of
the young High Priest Aristobulos, had, with the worst pur-
poses, sent the likenesses of her son and daughter to the
lewd Mark Antony, in order that she might secure an influ-
ence over him by means of his most shameless depravities.
And this was the family which, under the protection first
of the Triumvirate, and then of Augustus and Tiberius,
held in their hands the autocracy of the Land of Israel !
Philip, the tetrarch of Ituraea, was the only one of the
Herodian family who was unstained by crimes of lust and
bloodshed ; and he, as we have seen, was an open patron of
a decadent idolatry. It was in vain for the Rabbis to pro-
test against the CJiokuiath JavanitJi, or " Greek science,"
and to say that, since men ought to study the Law day and
night, Hellenic books could only be studied at some time
which was neither day nor night.* Hellenism, in its liter-
ary aspect, deeply affected the views even of Philo ; in its
practical influences it was felt not only throughout the
Dispersion, but in large areas of Palestine itself. In the
palace of Herod the Great were to be found cultivated
Hellenists like Nicolas of Damascus, a man of most versa-
tile ability, and time-serving fortune hunters of the " 6^r^-
ciilus esitriens " type, and even a youth like Carus, who
represented the lowest decadence of heathen immorality
and shame. f There were still righteous and holy men
among the Jews; yet very shortly after the days of Christ,
St. Paul, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, draws a very dark pic-
ture of the moral condition of his countrymen, and accuses
them of imposture, impurity, and theft. He says of the
Jews: "They please not God, and are contrary to all
men " ; and adds that though they professed " to dis-
* Menachoth, p. 992. Derenbourg, p. 361.
f Jos. Antt. xvii. 2, 4.
134 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
criminate the transcendent," they caused the Name of God
to be blasphemed among the Gentiles.* The Pharisees
thought so lightly of the mass of their own people as to
call them " accursed. "f The Roman writers attach to the
name of Jew such epithets as '^ gens scelcratissi)na, tcterrima,
projectissima ad libidineiHy\ Their own historian Josephus
declares that tiie nation had become so wicked and depraved
that the Holy City would have been swallowed up by an
earthquake, or overthrown by Sodomitic lightning, had not
the Romans executed judgment upon it.§ Divorce had
become disgracefully common. Adultery was so rife that
pretexts had to be devised for getting rid of the fearful
ordeal of "the water of jealousy." Judaism had become a
*^ seJitina iniquitatis^' and Jerusalem was a ^' lanicna pro-
pJietarumy
III. THE DISPERSION.
If Heathendom brought its taint into the Promised Land
of the People of the Covenant, it might have been hoped
that the vast majority of the Jewish nation, now known as
the Galootha, or Dispersion, || which was scattered through-
out the civilised world, would have disseminated some
higher moral ideals and some knowledge of the true God.
It is to be feared that this was not the case. In Rome
itself, since Pompey (B. C. 63) had brought back with him
his multitude of captives, there had been a large and for-
midable colony of Jews in the Imperial city, where their
ancient burial-places {coliinibarid) may still be seen.^ They
* Rom. ii. 17-29, ix. 3 ; I Tliess. ii. 2i. \ John vii. 49.
X Seneca, ap. Aug. Civ. Dei vi. 11 ; Tac. Hist, v. 5, 8 ; Ann. ii. 85 ; Suet.
Tiber. 36.
§ Keim i. 314 ; Jos. B.J. v. 13, 6, x. 5, vii. 8, i.
\ Only a handful of Jews — likened by their own writers to the chaff in com-
parison with the wheat — returned with Ezra to Palestine, Kiddushiii, 69, 2.
See Hershon, Genesis ace. to the Talt?iud, p. 246.
^ The Sibylline verses say that "every land and every sea was filled with
Jews" {Omc. Sibyll. iii. 271), and Strabo, that they had come into every city
CONDITION OF THE WORLD. 135
were so numerous as at times to create real alarm, and they
made themselves specially terrible to returning Provincial
Governors who had treated their compatriots with severity.
In Cicero's days they assembled in the Forum in such
threatening crowds that in B. C. 59 he had to deliver his
speech in favour of Flaccus — who was obnoxious to them- —
in a tone of voice too low for them to hear.* Julius Caesar
had always been their friend, and their mourning ceremo-
nies after his murder were expressive of such unrestrained
grief as to amaze the people of the city.f Tiberius had
multitudes of them impressed into the army, and sent to the
pestilential regions of Sardinia, in accordance with a uni-
versal feeling that if they all perished by malaria it would
be a very cheap loss. Claudius passed an edict which ex-
pelled them all from Rome because they were continually
rioting " under the impulse of Christus.";}: They did indeed
make some proselytes, but almost exclusively among women.
Josephus claims Poppaea, the wife of Nero, as a Jewish prose-
]yte.§ But two circumstances prevented Jews from exer-
cising a beneficent influence over their heathen neighbours.
One was the impression they made of being the devotees
of a superstition which gave them no moral superiority.
Cicero calls their religion " a barbarous superstition," and
the elder Pliny brands them as "noted for a contempt of
the gods." Coarser stories spoke of them as a nation who
worshipped the head of an ass.|| The vile cheating prac-
{ap. Jos. Anit. xiv. 7, 2 ; Schiirer div. ii. vol. ii, p. 321). They were most
numerous in Egypt and Cyrene. St. Paul found Jewish synagogues not only
throughout Asia Minor, but in Thessalonica, Beroea, Athens, Corinth (Acts
xvii. xviii.), Crete, and Rome.
* Cic. Pro Flacco, 28.
\ Sueton. CcEs. 84. In B. c. 4 eight thousand Jews of Rome met the deputa-
tion which came from Jerusalem to denounce the Herods.
\ Suet. Claud. 25 ; Acts xviii. 2.
§ Jos. Antt. XX. 8; Vit. 3. On the whole subject, see Schtirer ii. vol. ii. § 31.
I Tac. Hist. V. 2-4, 13 ; Ann. ii. 85 ; Suet. Tib. 36 ; Pliny, H. N. iii. 4 ;
Juv. Sat. xiv. 97 ; Pers. v. 184 ; Plut. Sympos. iv, 5, 6 ; Justin xxxvi. i, 2 ;
136 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
tised on a Roman lady in Rome in the reign of Nero
greatly deepened the hatred felt for them.* They were
regarded as beggars, swindlers, and sacrilegious robbers ; and
were believed to alienate to their private use the sums of
money which were contributed as the " Temple didrachm."
The other impediment to their influence rose from their
attitude of habitual disdain and hatred for those around
them.f " Adversiis ouines alios," says Seneca, " hostile
odium.'' St. Paul, with inspired insight, lays his finger on
both sources of failure. "They are contrary to all men,";}:
he says in his letter to the Thessalonians ; and in the Epis-
tle to the Romans he turns on the self-satisfied Jews with
a series of crushing questions. § " Thou therefore that
teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? Thou that
teachest that a man should not steal, dost thou steal ? Thou
that abhorrest idols, dost thou rob temples? Thou that
makest thy boast in the Law, through breaking the Law
dishonourest thou God?" We see, then, that the Jews as
a nation had shown themselves false to the high ideal
which had been set before them. Their religion was
nothing more than a decrepit survival. They had failed to
accomplish the mission which intended them to be the
moral and religious teachers of the ancient world. Josephus
says {B.J. v.-vi. lo) that no age had ever bred a genera-
tion more fruitful in wickedness since the beginning of
the world.
Philostr. Apoll. Tycan. v. il. Comp. Jos. Ap. i. 14, ii. 4-6 ; Rutilianus, i.
887. " Humanis animal dissociale cibis. Reddimus obscence convicia debita
genti." Tert. Apol. 16, etc.
* Suet. Nero. 32. Hence St. Paul's questions, " Thou that abhorrest idols,
dost thou rob tetnples ? " The notorious case had been that in wliich some Jews
swindled the Roman lady Fulvia (Jos. Antt. xviii. 3, 5).
f They applied to the Gentiles, Ezek. xxiii. 20, "whose flesh is as the flesh of
asses." Many fierce and contemistuous passages against Gentiles might be
quoted from the Talmud. See Rosh Hashanah, f. 17, i (Hershon, Ta/m.
Miscell. p. 155).
X I Thess. ii. 15. § Rom. ii. 17-29.
CONDITION OF THE WORLD. 137
IV. THE SAMARITANS.
Within the limits of the Holy Land itself there were
three closely connected yet often widely antagonistic
nationalities — the Jews, the Samaritans, and the Galileans.
The Samaritans were a people of mongrel origin. They
had sprung from the mixture of the Israelitish population
with immigrants sent into the ancient territory of the kings
of Israel by Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, after his capture
of Samaria.* At first these immigrants had continued the
forms of idolatry to which they had been accustomed ; but
on the devastation of the land by lions they asked the king
of Assyria to have a priest sent to them who should teach
them " the religion of the God of the land." This was
done, and they learned to worship Jehovah, though their
various communities mingled His worship with that of all
sorts of idols, f Nerjal and Ashimah, Nibhaz and Tartuk,
Adrammelech and Ananmelech. The Jews looked askance
upon them, and called them by the contemptuous name of
"lion-proselytes" and " Cuthaeans,":|: and "that foolish
people that dwell in Sichem." § Gradually, however, the
descendants of these settlers and the original people of the
land shook off the old idolatries, accepted Mosaism, claimed
the special heritage of Jacob, and built a Temple on Mount
Gerizim, which they (perhaps rightly) regarded as the scene
of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac,|| and of the meeting of Abra-
* 2 Kings xviii. 9, 12-24. The new settlers came from Babylon, Cuthah,
Ava, Hamath, Sepharvaim.
f Some most gratuitously see an allusion to this fivefold worship in John iv.
18 : " Thou hast had five husbands."
X Cuthim — so they are called throughout the Mishna ; and see Jos. Antt. ix.
14, 3, xi. 4, etc. Cuth, near Babylon, was one of the cities from which Sargon
(b. c. 722) deported the settlers. See Neubauer, Geogr. du Talm. 329. They
were also accused of worshipping the amulets buried by Jacob under the
Enchanted Oak (Gen. xxx. 47). See my Life of Christ, p. 149.
§Ecclus. I, 25, 26.
Kin Deut. xi. 29, they interpolated the words "'that is, Shechem" after
138 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
ham with Melchisedech,* and as the scene of Jacob's vision.
They referred to Deut. xxvii., and to the fact that at
Shechem Abraham had built his first altar to the Lord
(Gen. xii. 7). Since Gerizim had been chosen as " the
Mount of Blessing," f they regarded it — and not Jerusa-
lem — as being " the place which the Lord thy God shall
choose.":}: Their religion was the earliest form of Judaism,
though they accepted only the Pentateuch as their sacred
book. They were monotheists ; the)^ adopted circum-
cision ; they kept the Sabbath and the chief festivals.
The antagonism between them and the Jews was spe-
cially accentuated by the building of their Temple on Geri-
zim in the days of Alexander the Great. § It was destroyed
by John Hyrcanus in B. C. iio,|| but the mountain was still
their sacred shrine. The breach might have been healed if
the Jews in the days Zerubbabel had accepted their offer of
co-operation in rebuilding the Temple of Jerusalem.^ The
refusal of this offer led to centuries of embitterment. The
Jews did not in general rank them above Edomites and
Philistines,"^* though in a few respects they gave them a
grudging recognition. It was not till the days of the Tal-
mud that they were slanderously charged with worshipping
a dove.ff The treatment they received at the hands of their
" Gerizim," and were accused of tampering with the Books of the Law (Solfh,
f- 33> 2). In Chullin, p. 13 i. we read, " The bread of a Min (heretic) is as
the bread of a Cuthite ; his wine as the wine of idol-worship ; his books as tlie
books of wizards." Sheviiik, ch, 8. " He who eats the bread of a Cuthite,
eats as it were the flesh of swine." Many other passages of tlie Talmud might
be quoted.
*Gen. xiv. 17. f Deut. xi. 29, xxvii. 4, 12.
X John iv. 20.
§ It had been originally built by a son-in-law of Sanballat the Heronite.
Neh. xiii. 28.
llJos. Antt. xii. 9, i ; B.J. i. 2, 6. lEzra iv.
** " The nation that I hate is no nation," Ecclus. i, 25, 26. The Samaritans
always showed themselves open to foreign influences, and had become greatly
Hellenised.
\\ Demoth Jotiah, Chullin, i. 6, i. The dove was worshipped at Ascalon,
CONDITION OF THE WORLD. 139
neighbours caused a bitter hostility, which still raged in
our Lord's day. In former times they had purposely caused
confusion by kindling fire signals to mislead Jews as to the
time of the Easter moon. They frequently annoyed any
Jewish Passover pilgrims who ventured to pass through
their territory.* The people of En-Gannim (Gin3ea),f on
the Samaritan frontier, actually refused hospitality to our
Lord and the Apostles on their way to His last Passover,
"because His face was as though He would go to Jerusa-
lem.":}: Even when Jesus, in His thirst and weariness,
asked the Samaritan woman for some water from Jacob's
well, she was astonished at so small a request, because
" Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. "§ It was prob-
ably for this reason that, on sending out the Apostles on a
mission, Jesus said, "Into any city of the Samaritans enter
ye not."
The hatred between the two peoples was raised to white
heat, partly by the promise of an impostor (in A. D. 35) to
lead the Samaritans to Gerizim, and there reveal to them
the buried treasures of the old Temple ; || and partly by a
detestable act of some Samaritans at the Passover. During
the Feast the Temple was kept open at night, and Samari-
tans had entered the sacred precincts and prevented the
possibility of keeping the Passover by scattering dead men's
bones about the courts.^ The Samaritans have now
dwindled down to a small community of some sixty souls,
and doves may have been an object of worship among the Assyrians. Most of
the relevant passages of the Talmud, some of which breathe an intense hatred,
are quoted by Mr. Hershon, Treasures of the Talmud, pp. i88 ff. See,
too, Schiirer, Div. ii., vol. i. pp. 5-8 ; Hamburger, Real Encycl. ii. 1662, etc.
Jos. Antt. xviii. 2, 2, xx. 6, \ \ B. J. ii. 12, 3.
* Lives were sometimes sacrificed. Jos. Antt. xx. 6, i ; B.J. ii. 12, 13.
f Jos. B.J. ii. 12.
:i:Luke ix. 51, 53.
§ John iv. 9. The clause is omitted in some of the best MSS.
\ Moses was supposed to have buried the old sacred vessels of the Tabernacle
in the clefts of Gerizim (Jos. Antt. xviii. 4).
T[ Jos. Antt. xviii. 2, 2. Coponius, the Procurator, left the crime unpunished.
I40 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
and it is probable that they may soon disappear altogether.
They alone have been able yearly to kill the Paschal lamb,
because they regard the summit of Gerizim as the chosen
place for that sacrifice, whereas the Jews, since the destruc-
tion of Jerusalem, have only been able to observe a
" memorial " {/xv}/j.wv£vtiji6v) and not a " sacrificial "
{Svffijxov) Passover.
But the same hatred and alienation still exists. A
modern traveller relates how he saw a Jew and a Samaritan
tugging at each other's beards, and thought that " there
were very rough dealings between the Jews and Samari-
tans." They are still reviled' as "worshippers of the
pigeon "; and the Jewish traveller. Dr. Frankl, tells us that,
on informing a lady in Sainaria that he had been spending
a morning with the Samaritans, she drew back from him
with the exclamation, " Take a p2irifying bath ! "
Our Lord utterly discountenanced this spirit of furious
bigotry and mutual injuries. Although among the Jews
it was the bitterest term of reproach to call a man " a
Samaritan " — as when they said to Jesus, " Thou art a
Samaritan, and hast a demon"* — He chose the compas-
sion of the hated and heretical Samaritan as an example to
Priests and Piiarisees, and gladly accepted the hospitality
of these detested aliens. This was the more remarkable
because the Galileans, no less than the Jews, were on terms
of bitterest animosity with them, and Tacitus tells us of
" pillaging upon both sides, marauding bands despatched
against each other, ambuscades devised, and at times regu-
lar engagements." t But Jesus habitually breathed that
empyreal air of love towards all men, in which it was impos-
sible that personal or national animosities should continue
to exist.
* John viii. 48.
\Ann. xii. 54. See Hausrath, N. T. Times, E. T. i. 27.
CONDITION OF THE WORLD. 141
V. THE GALILEANS,
We must next consider what was the condition of the
Galileans among whom our Lord spent the greater part of
His Hfe, and to whom the main part of His teaching was
addressed.
Gahlee (derived from Galil, " circle," or " ring ") was a
district of some 1600 square miles, measuring about 36
miles from east to west, and about 50 miles from north to
south. With its hills and valleys, rivers, lakes and plains,
it had every variety of scenery. It was well watered by
many streams, which took their origin from the accumu-
lated snows of Lebanon, and even in ancient days it had
been famous for its fertility, comprising as it did the tribes
of Asher, Zabulon and Naphthali.* It was a densely popu-
lated country, which contained, according to Josephus, 204
towns, 15 fortified places, and 3,000,000 inhabitants. It was
chiefly remarkable for the mixture of populations which had
gained it the name of " Galilee of the Gentiles."
Few Jews had settled in the district after the return
from Babylon, and in B. C. 164 Simon the Maccabean had
removed them to Judaea.f Many of the population had,
however, returned between B. C. 165-135, in the reign of
John Hyrcanus. Galilee was crowded with Phoenicians,
Syrians, Arabs, and Greeks. Scythopolis, on the road from
Jezreel to the Valley of the Jordan, was practically a Gen-
tile city. The great roads which ran through Galilee were
constantly traversed by throngs of foreign traders. Sep-
phoris, so near Nazareth, looked like a Roman city, and at
Tiberias Herod Antipas had not scrupled to adorn the
frieze of his palace with the figures of animals. The Gali-
leans were much more cosmopolitan in their tolerance, and
far less scrupulously bigoted, than the Jews. But the
* Deut. xxxiii. 23, 24 ; Gen. xlix. 20 : Hos. xiv. 5 ; Ps. Ixxxix. 12., See G.
A. Smith, Geogr. of the Holy Land, 413 ff.
f I Mace. V. 23 ; 2 Mace. vi. 8 ; Sehiirer, piy. i. i, 19.
142 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Syrians had infected them with superstition so that they
were specially susceptible to "demoniacal possession."
They were gay and quick-witted, and though they did not
resist Hellenic and other influences they remained faithful
Jews and ardent patriots, whose old traditional bravery and
passionate idealism often hurried them into tumults.*
Even at Jerusalem their excitability had led to a massa-
cre, in which Pilate had mingled their blood with their
sacrifices.
Judas the Galilean, who came from Gamala, had headed
the Zealots (A. D. 6), who were the extremest section of the
Pharisees. He took for his watchword, " No Lord but
Jehovah ; no tax but the Temple didrachma ; no friend but
the Zealot." Judas, indeed, as Gamaliel tells us (Acts v.
37), perished ; but not till after a furious struggle, which
warned the Romans not to attempt the taxation of the
country.
His mantle fell on his sons, James, Simon, Menahem,
and Eleazar, who still maintained internecine hostility
against Rome. The family of Judas ended with the fearful
deed of his grandson Eleazar at Magada, when he and all
his garrison died by their own hands, set the fortress in
flames, and left nothing for the Roman Conqueror but
blackened ruins and half-burnt corpses. Hence, as Josephus
says, a Galilean revolt of two months " disturbed Rome for
seventy years, turned Palestine into a desert, destoyed
the Temple, and scattered Israel over the face of the
earth." f
The Jews ridiculed the rough patois of the Galileans, \
which made them mispronounce the most common letters.§
The Pharisees, with a strange ignorance of history, said
*Judg. V. 18.
f Hausrath ii. 81 ; Jos. B. J. vii. 8, i, viii. 6, For John of Gamala, see Jos
Vil. and^. y. xxi. i.
X Mark xiv. 70 ; Matt. xxvi. 73.
§ Thus they substituted n f"r 15', and call a man Uh, not ish.
CONDITION OF THE WORLD. 143
that "out of Galilee ariseth no prophet."* Even Nathan-
ael had asked Pliilip, " Can any good thing come out of
Nazareth ? " and at Pentecost the amazement of the assem-
bled multitude at the Gift of Tongues was increased by the
question, " Behold, are not all these who speak Galileans ? "
*" Nazarene " was a term of opprobrium even in the first
century, and it continues to be the contemptuous designa-
tion for Christians in Palestine to this day. f Nevertheless,
though they were not without serious faults, and were highly
excitable and liable to sudden changes of temperament,
and though Josephus describes them as ever fond of inno-
vation, we may say in accordance with both ancient and
modern testimony, that " they were still a healthy people
whose conscience would not get corrupted by Rabbinical
sophistries, and among whom full-grown men were elevated
far above their Jewish kinsfolk sickening with fanaticism.":}:
The Talmud itself bears witness that whereas the Jews
cared more for money, the Galileans cared more for
honour. §
* See ante, p. io8 (footnote). Not a few prophets like Hoshea, and great
leaders like Barak, sprang from tribes included in the district of Galilee, and
the glowing poetry of the Song of Songs derives its colouring from the land
they occupied. See Hausrath i. 14.
\ When I was in Palestine, if ever we came to a village where the inhabitants
were specially rude and inhospitable, my dragoman used always to say, " Oh,
yes, those people are Nazarenes."
X Hausrath quotes Jos. B. J. iii. 2, 3 ; Tac. Hist. v. 6 ; Ann. xii. 5. See
too Jos. Antt. X. 5, XX. 6, i ; B.J. xv. 5 ; Vit. xvii.
§See Neubauer, Geogr. der Talmud, p. 181,
CHAPTER XIII.
THE STATE OF RELIGION IN PALESTINE.
" Corruptio optimi, pessima."
The conditions of the world in general woke, then,
echoes even in Nazareth, and must have had their influence
on the human mind of Jesus during the silent years. Still
more would He feel and meditate over the state of things
in His own province, and in those which bordered upon it.
As regards questions of eternal moment, the thoughts of
the people of Palestine, of the countless Jews of the Dis-
persion, and indirectly of all who were under the sway of
Imperial Rome, were affected by the religious views of the
Priests and religious teachers in Judaea, and most of all in
Jerusalem itself. And there the aspects of religious life
and religious opinion, which we must now more closely
scrutinise, might well awaken the deepest misgivings.
(i.) Of the Zealots we need say but little further.
They represented the extreme wing of Pharisaic fanaticism,
and seem first to have acquired their distinctive name in
the rising of Judas the Galilean in A. D. 6. In Jerusalem
and Judsea the Zealots were rarely able to achieve any-
thing. The destruction of the Golden Eagle which Herod
had put over the Temple Gate, by the wild scholars of the
Rabbis Judas and Matthias, was punished by wholesale exe-
cutions. The party became more prominent in later days.
Many of them degenerated into mere assassins {sicarii)
and conspirators, like the forty who bound themselves
under a curse {Cherem) that they would neither eat nor
drink till they had murdered Paul.
144
RELIGION IN PALESTINE. 145
(ii.) Nor is it necessary to dwell long on the ESSENES, for
the accounts which we have of them vary so much that
they must either be inaccurate or refer to different sections
of the general body. The very derivation of the name is
quite uncertain. Philo seems to connect it with " holy
ones." Others derive it from Jesse. Bishop Lightfoot
connects it with chasha, " to be silent " ; Ewald, from
chazan, "to be strong"; Gfrorer, from asi, "healers";
Gratz, from sacha, "to bathe." If Philo's account of them
in his book, Quod omnis prohiis liber, be correct, they
lived mainly in villages, avoided trade, disapproved of war,
formed social communities of which all the members ate at
a common table, and lived a life of celibacy and labour. *
The notion that they worshipped the sun seems to have
been a calumny or a blunder. Josephus also speaks of
them. He compares them with the Pythagoreans,! ^i^d
adds such particulars as that they avoided the use of oil,
refused to take oaths, and were very scrupulous in all mat-
ters of ceremonial cleanness. He mentions Judas the
Essene and Menahem as exercising gifts of prophecy, and
Simon the Essene as an interpreter of dreams. Pliny the
* The fullest information is given by Bishop Lightfoot in his Essay on the
Essenes {Epistle to the Colossians, pp. 1 14-179). The original accounts are
found in Philo, Quod omnis probus liber; and a quotation from Philo in Euseb.
Praep. Evang.; V\\\vj,Hist. Nat. v. 17; Jos. Antt. xiii. 8, 9; ii. 2, xviii. i. 5,
etc.; B.J. ii. 8, 2, ff. ; Hippol. Laer. ix. 18-28. They were akin in doctrines
to ,the Therapeutse, of Alexandria, whom Philo describes in his De Vita Con-
templativa. Some of the statements about them are confused and contra-
dictory.
See, too, the quotation of Eusebius {Praep. Evan.) from Philo's De Nobil-
tate. It must be regarded as quite uncertain whether, in his book (if it be bis)
De Vita Contemplativa, he meant to describe the Essenes under the name of
Therapeut(E.
f Jos. Antt. ii. 8, 2, xiii. 5, g, xv. 10, xviii. i. Both Philo and Josephus
state the numbers of the Essenes at about 4000. Zeller, Keim, and Herzfeld
think that they were under Pythagorean influences (as well as Alexandrian) ;
but there seems more truth in the view of Frankl, Jost, Gratz, Derenbourg,
Ewald, Hausrath, and others, that Essenism is only a peculiar and extreme
development of Pharisaism.
146 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Elder describes one of their communities which was settled
in the neighbourhood of Engadi and Masada.*
They are not even mentioned in the New Testament, or
in the Mishnah, and they do not seem to have exercised
any effective influence on the religion of the nation. They
were exclusive and self-righteous ascetics, who abandoned
the world, which only regarded them with cold and distant
curiosity. Their Manichaean tenet that " enjoyment is
vile," is utterly unlike the teaching of Christ, who never
encouraged self-macerating abstemiousness for its own sake,
but " came eating and drinking." " Essenism was in reality
only a confession of helplessness against the actual state of
things, a renunciation of all attempts to reconstruct a
united Israel."
The fancy that John the Baptist was an Essene is sufifl-
ciently refuted by the fact that he wore a dress of camel's
hair, whereas they dressed in white linen ; and that he fed
on locusts, whereas they seem to have abjured animal
food.f We are not told that our Lord or His Apostles
once came into contact with them, and nothing is more
absolutely baseless than the notion that He was Himself an
Essene. They were Separatists ; His life was spent among
the multitudes. They were ascetics ; He came eating and
drinking, and living in outward particulars the common life
of men. They were Sabbatarians of the strictest school,
whereas He set aside the rules of Pharisaic Sabbatism.
They forbade the use and even the manufacture of weapons ;
He said, " He that hath no sword, let him sell his cloak
and buy one." ^ They were vegetarians ; He was not.
*Plin. //. N. V. 17. There are also dubious and unimportant references to
them in Epiphanius and in the Tahnud. " The Colossian heresy," against
■which St. Paul wrote, may have been tinged with Essenian as well as Gnostic
elements.
f This is denied by Schurer (Div. II. vol. ii. 20i), but his arguments do not
seem to me entirely conclusive. Perhaps some only of the Essenes were
vegetarians.
\ Luke xxii. 36.
RELIGION IN PALESTINE. 147
They would never touch food not prepared by the members
of their sect ; He reclined alike at the banquets of the Publi-
can and of the Pharisee, and swept away hosts of petty Hal-
achotJi about ceremonial uncleanness. They shunned and
despised women ; He was followed by a band of ministering
women. They washed themselves if a stranger touched
them ; He suffered the penitent harlot to wet His feet with
her tears, and to wipe them with the hairs of her head. So
far as they aimed at holiness, and believed in a universal
Priesthood, they resembled the Christians, but their reli-
gious opinions and practices diverged most widely from the
teachings of Christ, and would have been absolutely power-
less for the regeneration of the world.*
(iii.) The Sadducees played a far greater part in the
politics and destiny of Palestine that the Essenes, and exer-
cised a wider influence over the fortunes of the people. In
Jerusalem the Sadducees and Pharisees absorbed or over-
shadowed all other sects.
The entire religion of Israel underwent a change during
the Babylonian Captivity, quite apart from any Persian
influences which the Jews imbibed.
Before the Captivity the people had shown an incessant
tendency to relapse into idolatry. After the Captivity
they abhorred idols with the whole intensity of their con-
victions.
But the peril of idolatry was replaced by the peril of a
dead ritual, and by the ruinous results of substituting an
outward and mechanical worship for the service of pure
hearts and holy lives.
From the days of Ezra, all the ordinances which may be
*See, among other authorities, Gfrorer, Philo ii. 299 ; Uhlhorn, s.v.
" Essenes "(Herzog's Real Eticyc.) ; Hilgenfeld,y2/i/. Apocal. 243-286 ; Herz-
feld, Gesch. des Volkes Isr. iii. 36S ff. ; Keim, i. 365-393; Ewald, Gesch. des
Volkes Isr. iv. 453 ; Wescott, " Essenes" (Smith's Diet, of the Bible) ; Gins-
burg, "Essenes" (Kitto's Cyclop.); 'Y\\o\wio\'\, Books which Influenced Our
Lord, 75-123 ; Lightfoot, Colossians (349-419) ; and the authorities referred to
by Hausrath, Schurer, and Hamburger, s.v. " Essaer."
148 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
summed up under the head of " Levitism " — all the Levitic
ordinances of the later Mosaic Law — assumed a new and
immense prominence.* During the long centuries from
the entrance of Israel into Canaan to the Return from the
Exile, there is scarcely the slightest trace that they existed,
and certainly they do not attract the least attention. The
Day of Atonement, which came to be regarded as the most
memorable day of the year, is not mentioned even in nar-
ratives where everything would have led us to suppose that
it would have occupied a most prominent place. The name
of Azazel, the evil spirit to whom the scape-goat was
devoted, only occurs in Lev. xvi., and is alluded to nowhere
else in the whole Bible. But after the days of Ezra, " ordi-
nances which were not good, and statutes whereby they
could not live " f — given to the Jews originally only
" because of the hardness of their hearts " ; this system of
ordinances — against the slavish use of which the great
Prophets of Israel had spoken in tones of thunder — became
the main religion, and ultimately the almost mechanical
fetish of the rehgionists of the nation. The patriotism, and
the fervour for the institutions of Moses, aroused by the
cruel persecutions and apostatising Hellenism of some
of the Priests, created the party of the Chasidim, or " the
Pious." The party which rejected legal stringency gradually
acquired the name of Sadducees. The origin of the name
is uncertain. The Fathers — as Epiphanius and St. Jerome
— connected it with Tsaddtktm, " the righteous," but the
form of the name perhaps indicates a connection with l^sad-
duk, or Zadok.X The sons of Zadok formed one of the
priestly families, and the name may have been immediately
*It is remarkable that the word " Levites" occurs only twice in the N. T. :
John i. 19 ; Luke x. 32.
f Ezek. XX. 25.
\ Epiphan. Panar. H. 14 ; Jer. in Matt. xxii. 23. The double d favours
this derivation. The word may have been altered from Tsaddikiin to Tsad-
donVxm. only because of assonance with Pironshiin, " Pharisees." On the
Sadducees, see Taylor, Pirqe Avdth, pp. 126, 127.
RELIGION IN PALESTINE. 149
derived from Zadok, the High Priest in the days of David
(Ezek. xl.46; I Chr. xii. 28 ; Ex. ii. 2) ; or from Zadok, the
pupil of Antigonus of Socho,* and successor of Simeon the
Just. Antigonus is said to have left behind him the rule
that " we ought not to do righteousness for the sake of
reward." As the notion that salvation must be earned by
legal scrupulosities was rooted in the system of the Phari-
sees, the opposition to this view became the mark of Sad-
ducees. The CJiasidun developed into the Perushim {Sep-
aratists), or Pharisees; and the Sadducees, as representing
the Priests, rejected more and more the authority of the
Pharisaic Rabbis. They would only accept the Written
Law, and ignored " the traditions of the Elders " with
which it was overlaid.
But besides the endless disputes which arose between the
two parties about the interpretation of Levitic rules, there
were other lines of demarcation. The Sadducees were the
more aristocratic party, and also the more worldly and cos-
mopolitan. Almost all the leading Priests were Sadducees,f
and this sacerdotal party, contenting itself with sacrificial
functions, was always inclined to temporise. Even in the
days of Ezra and Nehemiah the Priests had shown a ten-
dency to be at ease amid their privileges and emoluments,
to adopt motives of worldly policy, and to relax the most
binding ordinances. :{: Thus Eliashib the Priest, in direct
defiance of the Mosaic Law (Deut. xxiii. 3, 4), had roused
the righteous indignation of Nehemiah by clearing out a
chamber in the Temple which had been used for storing
tithes and frankincense, and assigning it to the use of
Tobiah the Ammonite. In later days the Priests Manasseh
and Onias had proved themselves traitors to the nation and
its religion in their dealings with the Seleucidse, and Joshua
had openly assumed the heathen name of Jason.
The Asmonaean Priest-Prince Alexander Jannaeus, dis-
* Aboth de Rabbi Nathan, 5.
fActsv. 17. |Neh. xiii. 7.
I50 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
gusted with the arrogance, insolence, and dishonesty of the
Pharisaic leader, Simeon ben Shetach, had joined the Sad-
ducees. He showed his contempt for Pharisaic tradition at
the Feast of Tabernacles, by pouring out the libation on
the ground, and not on the altar.* The people were
always witli the Pharisees, and in their fury at this neglect
of customary ritual, tiiey pelted Jannaeus with the citrons
and branches {lidabivi) which they carried in their hands.
This resulted in a tumult and a massacre, but the Priest-
Prince became so conscious of the power of the Pharisees
that on his deathbed he ordered his widow to reconcile
herself with them.f
In the days of Herod the Great, Sudduceeism assumed its
fullest dimensions, for then the priests could reckon on the
aid of Roman and Idumaean despotism. Herod had sum-
moned to the High Priesthood the obscure Ananeel, of
Babylon. After this the High Priesthood, as we shall see
hereafter, became the coveted appanage of a few worldly
families — the House of Annas, the Boethusim,:}: the Kam-
hits, and others. These Priests, while they professed the
utmost strictness about sacrificial minutiae, had the worst
reputation among the people for greed, tyranny, and
arrogance, and denied such essential elements of religion
as the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body,
the future Messianic kingdom, § the world of angels and
spirits, and even (it is said) the over-ruling Providence of
God in the affairs of men.|| The Sadducees remained to
the last the aristocratic and exclusive party, luxurious
time-servers, insouciant sceptics, noted at once for cruelty
and Epicureanism. Disliked by the nation, and strong
* Succak, f. 48, 2.
f Jos. Antt. xiii. 15, 5 ; Soteh, f. 22, 2 ; Derenbourg, Palestine, p. 99.
X The Boethusim owed their elevation to Herod, who married Mariamne
(the Second), a daughter of the Alexandrian Priest Joazar, son of Boethos.
^ Jos. Antt. xviii. i, 4 ; Enoch xcviii. 6, c. 16, civ. 7.
I See Jos. Antt. x. 11, 7, xviii. i, 3, xiii. 5, 9 ; B. J. ii. 8, 14 ; Acts xxiii.
8 ; Keim, i. 353-365. The Talmud calls them " Epicureans."
RELIGION IN PALESTINE. 151
only by their alliance with the ruling powers, they had to
allow the Pharisees to dominate in the Sanhedrin.* "The
eloquence of the Synagogue," says Hausrath, " had won
the victory over the splendour of the Temple, but only to
dig a pit for the State, in which the Temple and School
were together buried." Whatever the Sadducees may
have been in their origin, they had, before the days of our
Lord, degenerated into "typical opportunists," bent above
all things on holding fast their own rights, privileges, and
immunities. f
(iv.) The Herodians need not occupy much of our
attention. They are only mentioned on two occasions in
the Gospels (Mark. iii. 6, xii. 13; Matt. xxii. 16). Josephus
defines them generally as "the partisans of Herod"
{oi rd rov 'HpcbSov (ppovovrre?), and it is evident that
they were a political rather than a religious party. It is
true that Tertullian says that they tried to represent Herod
the Great as a sort o{ political Messiah,;}: and they certainly
claimed the adherence of so prominent an Essene as
Menahem (Manaen), whose son was a foster-brother of
Herod. § But though they recognised in Jesus an enemy
to their worldly views, and were ready to plot with
Pharisees and Sadducees, and attempted to entangle Him
by their insidious questions as to the lawfulness of paying
tribute-money to Caesar, they played no prominent part
among the religious sects of Palestine.
(v.) We shall recur to the subject of the distinctive views
of the Pharisees when we have to show our Lord's deal-
ings with them and their system.
The PerusJiim rose into prominence in those times of
* I Mace. ii. 42, vii. 13, 17 ; 2 Mace. xiv. 6. See Wellhausen, Pharisaer
unci Sadducder, 76 ff.
f "Qui Christum Herodetn esse dixerunt." Tert. Adv. Omit. Haer. i.
Jer. Adv. Lucifer (opp. Bened. iv. 304), " Herodiani Herodem regem
suscepere pro Christo."
:|:See Jos. Anlt. xv. 10, 5 ; Lightfoot, Hor. Hebr. ii, 726.
§ Acts xiii. i.
J52 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
priestly Hellenising which were known as the "days of the
mingling'' ; and the word Perishooth, or "separatism," rep-
resents the afxi$ia of legalised and intentional unsocia-
bility (2 Mace. xiv. 3, 38). In the days of Christ they had
risen into marked prominence, and are said to have num-
bered 6000 adherents of their sect.* Their main charac-
teristic was devotion to the Oral Law, with its masses of
inferential tradition, and a slavish reverence for the
Lawyers, Scribes, and Rabbis, to whose misplaced and
microscopic ingenuity the development of this system was
due. The Talmud is, of course, a late and most untrust-
worthy authority. It is utterly unhistoric, and full of
confusions, anachronisms, and sheer inventions; yet to a
certain extent it represents the continuity of older tradi-
tions. The Talmudists leave a false impression when they
represent the Zougoth, or " Couples "f — that is, the two
leading teachers of the Schools in successive generations —
as having been the Presidents (the Nasi and the Ab-beth-
Din) of the Sanhedrin — for the Nasi was always the High
Priest. The leading Rabbis merely held positions in the
non-political Sanhedrin of the Schools. Those of them who
were specially and, so to s'^Qak, professionally, devoted to
the study of the Law, were called " Lawyers," i. e.y
" Teachers of the Law," or " Scribes,":}: of whom the Son
of Sirach says, "Where subtle parables are, he will be
there also. He will seek out the hidden meaning of
similitudes, and be conversant in the dark sayings of
parables." §
There were many particulars in which Pharisaism was
*Jos. Antt. xvii. ii. 4.
•j-The chief "Couples" were: Jose Ben Joezer and Jose Ben Jochanan,
Joshua Ben Peracliiah and Nitai of Arbela, Jehuda Ben Tabbai and Simeon
Ben Shetach, Shemaiah and Abtalion, Hillel and Shammai.
^'NofUKol, vo/io(h6aaiia?.oi, Luke vii. 30, xi. 45, etc. The "Scribes of the
Pharisees " is the true reading in Mark ii. 16. The Sopherim (yfjaufiareis),
" Scribes," are hardly distinguishable from " the Lawyers."
§ Ecclus. xxxix. 1-5.
RELIGION IN PALESTINE. 153
nearer to Christianity than Sadduceeism. The Pharisees
believed in the coming of the Messianic Kingdom, though
they mistook its nature. They believed in the immortality
of the soul, and the overruling Providence of God. But the
more they sank into petty ceremonialism — the more extrava-
gantly they valued mere external acts — the more radically
did they degrade the conception of the true nature of God.
Their religionism led to a hypocrisy all the deeper because
it was half unconscious. What shall we think of the
Talmudic representation of God, the Lord of Heaven and
Earth, as a kind of magnified Rabbi, who repeats the
Sh'ma to Himself daily; wears phylacteries on the wrist
and forehead; occupies Himself three hours every day in
studying His own law ; has disputes with the Angels about
legal minutiae; and finally summons a Rabbi to settle the
difference? Religion must always suffer in the worst
degree when the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who
filleth Infinitude and Eternity, is dwarfed into a small-
minded precisionist, to be pleased and pacified by pros-
trations, genuflexions, ablutions, and infinitestimal minu-
tiae, as though these paltry externals could be substitutes
for that inward holiness which alone He requires.
It is not too much to say that Pharisaism sank more and
more into a system which, while it travestied the burden-
some externalities of developed Levitism, ignored all that
was noblest and most spiritual in the whole teaching of
the Old Testament Scriptures. It nullified and superseded
the plainest injunctions of Moses by casuistic Halachoth
and tricky Erubhin ; and took into no real account the
magnificent and unbroken series of utterances which, in
book after book of Scripture, laid it down with unmistak-
able plainness that such things are to true religion but
as the small dust of the balance. With deplorable self-
deceit the Pharisees aborbed themselves in numbering
the threads of tassels, and tithing the stalks of pot-
herbs, while for such cheap things they neglected the
154 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
weightier matters of the Law — Justice, Mercy, and Truth.
That was why they drew down upon themselves " the seven-
fold flash of Christ's terrible invective." Utterly absorbed
in making their " hedge round the Law," they emptied the
Law itself — especially its most pure and spiritual elements —
of all the deepest significance.* Paralysed by self-induced
hypocrisy they showed far less real sincerity than the
blindest of Pagan devotees, and while they posed as religious
teachers, they poisoned religion at its fountain-head, made
it petty and unreal, and precipitated the catastrophe which
overwhelmed themselves and the nation which they had
misled.
The Prophets of the Old Testament furnished a direct
antithesis to the current Pharisaism of the Gospel era ;
their declarations of the inmost will of God are valid for all
time, and constitute the final distinctions between conceited
will- worship and that religion which is pure and undefiled
before God and the Father.
What said the mighty MoSES?
" And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require
of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all His
ways, and to love Him ? " f
What said the holy SAMUEL ?
" Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt-offerings and
sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord ? Behold, to
obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of
rams." :}:
What said KING SOLOMON ?
"To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the
Lord than sacrifice."!
What said the inspired gatherer of sycamore leaves — the
Prophet Amos ?
" I hate, I despise your feast-days, and I will not dwell in
* On the Pharisees, see Jos. Atiff. xvii. 2, 4 ; B. J. ii. 8, 14.
f Deut. X. 12, 13. X I Sam. xv. 22. § Prov. xxi. 3.
RELIGION IN PALESTINE. 155
your solemn assemblies. . . . But let judgment run down
as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." *
What said the sad-hearted HOSHEA, in words which were
the favourite quotation of our Lord ?
" I desired mercy and not sacrifice ; and the knowledge
of God more than burnt-offerings," f
What said the burning ISAIAH, again and again, in words
which were like thunder ?
" To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto
Me, saith the Lord. . . Bring no more vain oblations ;
incense is an abomination unto Me. Wash you, make you
clean, put away the evil of your doings from before Mine
eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn to do well.";}:
What said the royal David in his broken-hearted peni-
tence ?
" Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it ; Thou
delightest not in burnt-offerings. The sacrifices of God are
a broken spirit ; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou
wilt not despise." §
What said the sweet PSALMISTS of Israel ?
" Lord, who shall abide in Thy tabernacle ? Who shall
dwell in Thy holy hill ? He that walketh uprightly and
worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his
heart." ||
" Who shall ascend unto the hill of the Lord ? And who
shall stand in His holy place ? He that hath clean hands
and a pure heart ; who hath not lifted up his soul to vanity
nor sworn to deceive his neighbour. He shall receive the
blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of
his salvation." ^
What said JEREMIAH, in language startling in its em-
phasis ?
*Amosv. 21-24. f Hos. vi. 6; Matt. xii. 7.
:|: Is. i. II, 16, 17. Comp. Iviii, 6, 7, Ixvi. 3, xxix, 13^ andpassim.
§ Ps. li. 16, 17. Comp. xxxiv. 18.
|Ps. XV. I, 2. ITPs. xxiv. 3-5. Comp. Ps. Ixxxiv. 11, 12.
156 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
" I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in
the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, con-
cerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices ; but this thing com-
manded I them, saying. Obey My voice, and I will be your
God."*
What said EZEKIEL ?
" They sit before thee as My people, and they hear thy
words, but they will not do them. For with their mouth
they shew much love, but their heart goeth after their
covetousness." f
What said the eloquent MiCAH ?
" Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow my-
self before the Most High God? Shall I come before Him
with burnt-offerings, with calves of a year old ? Will the
Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thou-
sands of rivers of oil ? Shall I give my first-born for my
transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ?
He hath showed thee, O man, what is good ; and what doth
the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? " :}:
What said Habakkuk ?
"The just shall live by faith," or " in his faithfulness." §
What said Zechariah in answer to inquiries about
fasting ?
" Execute true judgment, and show mercy and compas-
sion every man to his brother." " These are the things
that ye shall do. Speak ye every man the truth to his
neighbour. And let none of you imagine evil in your
hearts." ||
The teaching of the whole New Testament as to the
nature of true religion, and as to what God desires, is in
closest accordance with these utterances of the Prophets.
This must be patent to every one who has not blinded and
*Jer. vii. 22, 23. f Ezek. xxxiii. 31. % Micah. vi. 6-8.
§ Hab. ii. 4. (John iii. 36 ; Gal. ii. 16, iii. 11 ; Heb. x. 38.)
JZech. vii. 9, viii. 16, 17.
RELIGION IN PALESTINE. 157
benumbed his own soul by the super-exaltation of tradi-
tional nothings. Suffice it to point to the explicit words of
Christ Himself. When the young man asked Him, "What
must I do to be saved?" he received the answer, " If thou
wouldst enter into the kingdom of heaven, keep the com-
mandments." When the Scribe, tempting Him, asked,
" Which is the great commandment of the Law ? " He said
that on the two commandments, " Love God with all thy
heart," and " Love thy neighbour as thyself," hang all the
Law, and the Prophets." *
To quote but two of His special utterances, he said :
" Not every one that saitJi unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall
enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the
will of My Father which is in heaven." f
And He said :
"Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you,
even so do unto . them : for tliis is the Law and the
Prophets.":}:
Contrast these with some of the Pharisaic utterances in
the Talmud, which constantly confound an easy, useless,
and self-deceiving legalism with the holiness which God
requires.
The Mosaic rule about wearing fringes (Num. xv. 38)
{Tsitsith, upaffTtsda, Matt. ix. 20), at the "wings," i. c,
corners of garments, and to put on them a thread § of blue,
is probably of Egyptian origin ; and there was nothing
either burdensome or unreasonable about it, since the white
wool and blue threads might stand as symbols of innocence
and heaven. But to this the Scribes had added a moun-
tainous mass of oral pedantries. The fringe was to be
made of four threads of white wool, of which one was to
be wound round the others first 7 times with a double
knot, then 8 times with a double knot, then 1 1 times
with a double knot, then 13 times with a double knot;
* Matt. xxii. 38 ; Mark xii. 33. f Matt. vii. 21, xii. 50.
X MaU. vii. 12, § Not as in A. V., " ribands."
158 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
because 7 + 8 + ii = 26, the numerical value of the
letters of Jehovah (nin-), and 13 is the numerical value of
Achad, " one," so that the number of windings represents
the words " Jehovah is one."
The great Rashi said, " The precept concerning fringes is
as zveiglity as all the other precepts put togetJier ; for it is
written (Num. xv. 39), ' And remember all the command-
ments of the Lord.' " Now numerically (by what the Rabbis
called Gematrid) the word fringes {Tsitsith) = 600; and
this with 8 threads and 5 knots makes 613. And Rabbi
Samlai had said that Moses gave 613 commandments,
namely, 365 negative {Gezaroth), as many as the days of the
year, and 2^% positive ( Tekanoth), as many as the members of
the human body = 613;* and this he proved by saying
that Thorah, "Law," by Gematria = 611 ; which with " I
am," and "Thou shalt have no other" = 613. f
Again, Rashi said that " he who observes the precepts
about fringes shall have 2800 slaves to wait on him " : for,
in Zech. viii. 23, we are told tliat ten men of all nations
shall take hold of the skirt of a Jew, and as there are
seventy nations, and four corners of a garment, 70 X 10 X
4 = 28004
In the same Talmudic treatise we are also told that Rabbi
Joseph ben Rabba declared that " the law about fringes "
was the one which should be most strongly inculcated, and
that his father Rabba having once accidentally trodden on
his fringe and torn it while he was standing on a ladder,
stayed where he was, and would not move till it was
mended. §
Our Lord, when He warned the people and His disciples
*See the Kabbalistic work Kitznr Sh'lu, p. 2, and Hershon, Talm. Misc.,
pp. 322 ff.
\ Sheznioth, f. 29, I ; Maccoth, f. 23, 2. In Deut. xxii. 12 they are called
gedillim, Ixx. , OTpt-Kra, R. V. Marg., "twisted threads." The rule is elabor-
ated in Num. xv. 37, 38.
\ Shabbath, f. 32, 2.
% Shabbath, f. 118, 2. Sec Rashi on Num. xv. 39,
RELIGION IN PALESTINE. 159
against the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, said not only that
" they enlarge the border of their garments " (which is an
allusion to the " fringes "), but also that " they make broad
their phylacteries," TepJiillin. *
It is at least doubtful whether Moses ever intended these
Tephillin to be worn. He said indeed, ** It [the institution
of the Passover] shall be for a sign unto thee upon thine
hand, and for a memorial between thine eyes" ; f and " It
shall be for a token upon thine hand, and for frontlets
between thine eyes." % There is the strongest probability
that the words were only metaphorical, just as in Prov. iii.
3, " Bind them on thy neck ; write them on the tablet of
thine heart." For there is no trace of any early use of these
prayer-boxes, and the passages inscribed on the vellum are
by no means the most memorable that might have been
selected.§ On these grounds the sensible Karaites rejected
the use of them, and St. Jerome rightly explains the pas-
sages to mean that the Jews should meditate constantly on
these commands. The Scribes and Pharisees, how^ever,
attached the most exaggerated importance to the use of
them, and made them as showily broad as they could.
The arm-phylacteries (7V/>/////z// sJiel yod) were bound on
the left arm, so as to be near the heart ; and the head-
phylacteries {Tephillin slid rosJi) were bound between the
eyes. The leather strips by which they were tied were
regarded as symbols of " the self-fettering of the Divine
commands." On the phylactery of the forehead the four
passages were to be written on four strips, and each placed
in a separate compartment of the calfskin receptacle, and
each was to be tied round with well-washed hair from the
*The separate compartments of the beth or " house " of the Tephillin were
called Totaphoth.
\ Ex. xiii. 9.
\ Ex. xiii. 16, Similiarly, the use of Mezuzoth, hollow cylinders with texts
in them, was founded on Deut. vi. 8, xi. iS.
§ They were Ex. xiii. 1-16 ; Deut. vi. 4-9, xi. 13-21.
i6o THE LIFE OF LIVES.
tail of a calf, with the letter Shin, K'. with tJirce prongs on
the right side (for SJiaddai, Almighty), and with four
prongs on the left side. In the "arm-phylactery" the
four passages were to be written on a single slip of* parch-
ment in four columns of seven lines each, and the
thong was to be passed round the arm three times
for t^, and then to have seven more twists. Rabbi Simon
Hassida deduced from Ex. xxxiii. 23 that God had revealed
to Moses the way to make the knot of the phylacteries,*
and also that the Eternal Himself wears " phylacteries."
So vast was the importance attached to these fetishes that
the Rabbis said, " He who has Tcphilltn on his arm, and
Tsitsith on his garment, and Meausoth on his door, has
every possible guarantee that he will not sin." Yet they
said that, since some of the words of the Law were " light "
and some " heavy," it was venial to deny that phylacteries
had ever been enjoined ; but since all the words of the
Scribes were " heavy," i. e., of consummate importance, it
was a capital offence to say that the division of the prayer-
box should have five compartments and not fourif Salva-
tion by works, and by such paltry nothings as these, vvas
the direct contradiction of the righteousness which Jesus
taught. Thus we may say of the Pharisees that their fear
towards God was taught by the precepts of men.:}:
"Mankind," said Bishop Butler, "are for placing the
stress of their religion anywhere rather than upon virtue."
Nevertheless in virtue — or to use the higher and better
words, "in righteousness and true holiness" — all that is
essential in true religion is comprised. The vast error both
of Sadducees and Pharisees was that they laid more stress on
rules which had degenerated into external rites and petty
puerilities than on temperance, chastity, and soberness. And
* Beb. Barachoth, f. 7.
f Mcnach. 33, 6 ; Jer. Berackoth, 3, 6. See GixQrtr, Jakr. d. Heils i. 146;
Schwab, p. 17 ; Kalisch, Exodus, p. 224,
\ Matt. XV. 9 ; Col. ii. 22,
RELIGION IN PALESTINE. i6i
that was why Christ addressed them as " Ye hypocrites ! "
and quoted against them the words of the Evangehcal
Prophet: "This people draweth nigh unto Me with their
mouth and honoureth Me with their lips ; but their heart is
far from Me. But in vain they do worship Me, teaching
for doctrines the commandments of men."*
In these pages we have been able to furnish but the
slightest glimpse of the religious condition of the Jews in the
time of our Lord, as represented by their leading parties.
But in the Talmud itself we find the elements of their
emphatic condemnation. The people, while they continued
to pay conventional honour to the Priests, deeply suspected
them of betraying the national interests for their own
aggrandisement,! and gave their main confidence to the
Pharisees. On the great Day of Atonement, on one occa-
sion, the High Priest left the Temple followed by a crowd
of worshippers, just after he had pronounced the promises
of God's pardon ; but on seeing the Pharisaic " couple " of
the day, Shemaiah and Abtalion, the crowd immediately
deserted the High Priest to give an escort to the Rabbis,
" Greeting to the men of the people ! " said the sarcastic
and indignant Pontiff. "Greeting," answered the Rabbis,
" to the men of the people who do the works of Aaron, not
to the sons of Aaron who do not resemble Aaron." :j:
Thus, of the Sadducean families of Priests in the days of
the Herods we read :
" Woe to the family of Boethos ! woe to their spears ! "
" Woe to the family of Hanan (Annas) ! woe to their
serpent-hissings ! "
" Woe to the family of Kanthera ! woe to their pens ! "
* Matt. XV. 8, 9. f Jos. Antt. xiv. 3. 2.
X Yoma, f. 71, 2 ; Griitz, iii. Ii6 ; Derenbourg, p. 118, See Hamburger,
Real-Encycl, ii. 1043.
i62 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
" Woe to the family of Ishmael ben Phabi ! woe to their
fists ! "
" They themselves are High Priests. Their sons are the
treasurers ; their sons-in-law captains of the Temple ; and
their servants smite the people with their rods."*
In another passage we read that " the threshold of the
Sanctuary uttered four cries, ' Depart hence, ye descend-
ants of Eli ; you defile the Temple of Jehovah ! '
" ' Depart hence, Issachar of Kephar Barkai, who only
carest for thyself, and profanest the victims consecrated to
heaven — [for he wore silk gloves when he sacrificed !]
" ' Open yourselves wide, ye portals ! let Ishmael ben
Phabi enter, the disciple of Pinekai.
"'Open yourselves wide, ye gates! let Johanan ben
Nebedai enter, the disciple of gluttons, that he may gorge
himself on the victims ! ' "f
And of the Pharisees, we read :
There are eight sects of Pharisees, viz., these :
1. The shoulder Pharisees, i. e., he who, as it were, shoul-
ders his good works, to be seen of men.
2. The time-gaining Pharisee, he who says, " Wait a
little while ; let me first perform this or that good work."
3. The compounding Pharisee, he who says, " May my
few sins be deducted from my many virtues, and so atoned
for."
4. The mortar Pharisee {medorkia), who so bends his back
with his eyes on the ground, as to look like an inverted
mortar.
This seems to be the same as the tumbling Pharisee, who
is so humble that he will not lift his feet from the ground ;
* Fesac/iim, {. S7. 'i ', K'erithotJi,{.i^. Josephus furnishes a startling com-
ment on the last woe in Antt. xx. 8, g. See also Tosefta, Meiiachoth ad Jin.;
GerLgtr,Urschrift, p. 118; Derenbourg, Palestine, p. 233; Renan, L' Antichrist,
p. 51; Raphall, Hist, of the Jews, ii. 370.
f Derenbourg, Palestine, p. 233. He regards Pinekai as meaning Self-
indulgence," an ironic variation of Phinehas.
RELIGION IN Px^LESTINE. 163
and the hump-backed Pharisee who walked as though his
shoulders bore the whole weight of the Law.
5. The tell-me-anotJier-diity-to-do-and-I -will-do-it Pharisee.
6. The SJiechemite Pharisee, who is a Pharisee only for
reward. (Com. Gen. xxxiv. 19.)
7. The timid Pharisee, who is a Pharisee only from dread
of Punishment.
To which Rabbi Nathan adds :
8. The born Pharisee.
And some substituted for one of these classes the bleed-
ing Pharisee {kinai), who shuts his eyes and knocks his
face against walls, lest he should happen to see a woman.
In their unbounded self-exaltation, and undisguised con-
tempt for all except their own set, they thrust themselves
into the place of God, and identified their small decisions
with the very voice of the Almighty. They fostered the
" enormous delusion " that sensuous and finical scrupulos-
ities constituted an acceptable service, and could suspend
the vengeance of God, which they imagined as ever ready
to burst upon those who neglected and despised their
" commandments of men." Punctilious trifles were sub-
stituted for holy lives, and immorality was concealed under
a cloak " doubly-lined with the fox-fur of hypocrisy."
Dr. Emmanuel Deutsch says that the Talmud inveighs
even more bitterly and caustically than the New Testa-
ment against what it calls " the plague of Pharisaism " —
"the dyed ones who do evil deeds and claim godly recom-
pense";* "they who preach beautifully, but do not act
beautifully." Parodying their exaggerated logical arrange-
ments, their scrupulous divisions and sub-divisions, the
Talmud, among its classes of unworthy pretenders, says
that the real and only Pharisee is he who doeth the will of
* Jer. Berachoth, f. ix. 7, f. 13 ; Bab. Soteh, f. 22, i ; Avoth d' Rabbi
Nathan, ch. 37. See Hershon, Talm. Miscel. p. 122 ; Derenbourg, Palestine,
p. 71. In Soteh, f. 21, 2, we read : " Foolish saints, crafty villains, sancti-
pionious women, and self -afflicting Pharisees are the destroyers of the world."
i64 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
his Father in heaven because he loves Him. But the charge
of hypocrisy against the Pharisees was not new in the days
of Christ. Even Alexander Jannaeus had warned his wife
against " painted Pharisees, who do the deeds of Zimri and
look for the reward of Phinehas."
Yet there must be in the human mind an instinctive
tendency to substitute outward observance for heart-
religion, and to make exaggerated legalism usurp the place
of true holiness; for Pharisaism, from its incipient stage in
the days of the Scribes of the Great Synagogue till the time
when it was codified in the Mishnah, covered a space of six
centuries ; and, in the grotesque developments of Talmud-
ism, it lasted on, in greater or less degree, down to modern
times. The explanation of the tendency is that externalism
is easy, and generates a self-satisfaction which enables men
to pose as " religious," while they despise others. Nothing
is more easy than to live with boundless self-complacency
in an elaborate round of functions dictated by some empty
Directorium of useless and obsolete tradition : but, as even
a heathen could say, it is difificult — difficult and not so easy
as it seems — to be good and not bad.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE MESSIANIC HOPE.
" Proclaim glad tidings in Jerusalem, for God hath had mercy upon
Israel in her visitation. Set thyself, O Jerusalem, upon a high place,
and behold thy sons and thy daughters from the morning unto the
evening, brought together for ever by the Lord." — Ps. Salom xi.
" All the prophets prophesied of nothing else than of the days of the
Messiah." — Bab. Berachoth, f. 34, 2.
Such was the condition of the world and of reh'gion as
Jesus heard of it, and saw it, and meditated upon it, while
in holy and obscure poverty He toiled in the shop of the
village carpenter. But He was also profoundly conscious
of the deep unrest, of the passionate longing for deliver-
ance, which moved the inmost hearts of thousands, and
caused so many of the best and holiest to live in constant
and yearning hope for '* the redemption of Jerusalem " and
" the consolation of Israel." *
There are epochs in the world's history when men feel a
depressing sense of uncertainty and misery which tends
to deepen into despair. At such times they yearn with the
whole strength of their being for some fresh communication
of the mind and will of God. The lamp of revelation has
a tendency to burn dim as the ages advance ; not only be-
cause it remains untrimmed, but also because the require-
ments of the ages differ, and that which sufificed the needs
of one millennium loses much of its force in another. For
this reason God has renewed again and again His communi-
* Luke ii. 25, 38, i. 46-55. Comp. Pss. Sol. v. 13 ff. ; 2 Esdras xi. 42 ; Orac.
Sib. iii. 49, etc. The Book of Baruch and 2 Esdras were probably not written
till after the Fall of Jerusalem (a. d. 72), and are doubtless influenced directly
and indirectly by Christian hopes.
165
i66 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
cations with mankind. From the first dim promise of
deHverance to the fallen progenitors of the human race —
from the days of Enoch, and Noah, and Abraham, and
Jacob, and Moses, again and again has
" God, stooping, showed sufficient of His light
For those i' the dark to walk by."
Then came the succession of Prophets, from Samuel to
Amos, and Isaiah to Malachi. After five centuries of
Scribism, not unenlightened by the appearance of a few
noble personalities like Judas the Maccabee and Simon the
Just, and by a few great writers like the Son of Sirach, we
come down to the Messianic era. The olden prophets had
spoken of a coming Deliverer — a Davidic King, who should
give victory, peace, and prosperity to His people ; or of a
Servant of Jehovah, who should bear the sins of many.
The Book of Daniel — the favourite book of the days of
Christ* — and various Apocryphal books, of more recent
date, pointed to the establishment of an everlasting king-
dom, and looked for a return of Elijah, or one of the
Prophets.f to prepare the way of its Founder. :j: It was a
current belief that Jeremiah might re-appear to restore to
the nation the five missing glories of the Temple, some of
which he was supposed to have hidden. § But in parts of
the Book of Enoch (b. C. 70), and the Sibylline Prophecies,
and in the Psalms of Solomon (b. c. 70-40), the belief in
the Advent of a Davidic King had been revived, || though
*Jos. Atitt. X. 10, II, B.J. vi. 5, 4. Josephus says that the popularity of
the Book rose from the definite calculations wliich they founded upon it. They
saw in the Roman Empire the " fourtli Beast" of Daniel, which was to be
followed by the Kingdom which should not be destroyed (Dan. vii. 13, 14).
f Mai. iv. 5 ; Ecclus. xxxvi. 15, 16, xlix. 7 ; Mark vi. 15, viii. 28 ; Johni. 21,
vi. 14, etc.
\ I Mace. iv. 46, xiv. 41. Comp. Deut. xviii. 15 ; Wendt, Teaching of
Jesus, i. 63.
§ Matt. xvi. 14 ; John i. 21, vi. 14, vii. 40. In 2 Mace. xv. 13 ff. he appears
in vision to strengthen his countrymen.
II Enoch X. 16-38, xlvi. i, Iv. 4, Ixii. 6, etc.; Sibyll. iii. 652-794 ; Pss. Sol.
THE MESSIANIC HOPE. 167
it is not found in the Assumption of Moses or the Book of
Jubilees. The Psalms of Solomon were specially full of a
passionate conviction that the day was at hand when the
coming Messiah should cleanse Jerusalem with His sanctifi-
cation, even as it was at the first, so that nations would
come from the ends of the earth to behold its glory. " No
evil will prevail among them in those days, for all shall be
holy, and their King is Christ the Lord.''* The great
Alexandrian thinker, Philo, though he moved for the most
part in a region of chill philosophical abstractions, yet
sometimes dwells on the coming glory of Messianic days, f
Josephus, though intensely cautious lest he should offend
his Roman patrons, shows that he, too, shared to some
extent in the hopes of his people.:}: Since the days of
Queen Alexandra, many like Simeon and Joseph of Arima.
thaea had been "waiting for the Consolation of Israel" and
for the Kingdom of God; so that at the coming of the
Baptist § the people were in expectation, "and many
reasoned in their hearts of John whether haply he were the
Christ."! The generality of the expectation explains the
daring violence of the Pharisaic youths who, at the instiga-
tion of Matthias and Judas, destroyed the golden eagle
which Herod had placed over the entrance-gate of his new
Temple. It also accounts for the multitude of followers
who gathered round Simon, Athronges, and Judas of
xvii., xviii. ; Wendt. /. c. It is clear from the Gospels that the conception was
prominent in the minds of the people. Mark viii, 29, ix. 13, x. 47, xi. 10, xii.
35, xiv. 61-64 ; John vi. 69, xii. 34.
*Pss. Sol. xvii. 33, 36. The writer also exclaims : "Behold, O Lord, and
raise up for them their King, David's Son, in the time when Thou hast
appointed, that he may reign over Israel thy servants." The Psalter of
Solomon may be read in Hilgenfeld's Messias Judceorum. It refers in many
passages to a pure and mighty Messiah, who in Ps. xvii. is described as
Xpcarbg Kiiftiog as in Lam. iv. 20 (Ixx).
f Philo, in his De execratiotie, and De pram, et poen.
XB.J. v. I, 3 ; Antt. iv. 6, 5, x. 10, 4. See Hausrath i. 199.
§ Luke ii. 25-28 ; Mark xv. 43.
II Luke iii. 15.
i68 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Galilee, and even such a miserable impostor as Theudas.
The multitude clung with convulsive hope or despairing
frenzy to almost anyone who seemed to promise any form
or possibility of emancipation — to Hyrcanus ; to the beau-
tiful young High Priest Aristobulus ; to the impostor
Alexander ; to Agrippa I.; — some Jews even regarded
Herod the Great as a Divinely appointed Deliverer;* while
Josephus looked, or professed to look, to Vespasian and the
power of Rome as a source of hope for the future. It was
not until after the final overthrow of Bar Cochba, " the Son
of a Star " (a. d. 135), that such movements became impos-
sible for ever. With the enthusiastic Pharisee, Rabbi
Akiba, ended the Rabbinic Schools, which expected for
Israel a temporal deliverance.
The older Messianic Hope had mainly concerned itself
with the future glories of Israel ; the later form of Messi-
anic Expectation began to regard the Messiah as the
Deliverer of the whole world, and the Comforter of indi-
vidual miseries. It also enriched and enlarged the horizon
of mortal life by the doctrine of a future Resurrection — in
which the Pharisees believed, though it was rejected by the
Priests and Sadducees. The Olani Habbah, or " future
aeon," was to be in every respect more splendid and happy
than the Olam Hazzeh, or " present aeon." But the happy
age was to be preceded by days of immense tribulation, of
which the only alleviation lay in the knowledge that they
were " the birth-throes " {oadirs? : Matt. xxiv. 8 ; Mark xiii.
8; B. /. vi. 5, 4), the Chebly Hammeshiach, or travail-pangs
of the Messiah (Hos. xiii. 13).
Such expectations had even been disseminated in the
heathen world. They have left their traces on the pages of
Horace and of Virgil. " In the whole East," says Sue-
tonius, " had prevailed an ancient and fixed opinion, that,
at this time, it was a decree of destiny that some who came
from Judaia would become masters of the whole world.
*See Keim i. 300 ff. (Tert. Praescr. 45),
THE MESSIANIC HOPE. 169
Events subsequently proved that such a prophecy had some
reference to a Roman Emperor ; but the Jews, forcing its
interpretation to themselves, rose in rebellion." Josephus
was probably the first who gave this interpretation to the
prophecy. Tacitus, like Suetonius, attributes the revolt
of the Jews to their perverted application to themselves of
a prediction which referred to the Roman Conquerors.*
The rumoured appearance of the Phoenix in Egypt, after
the lapse of many centuries, excited the wildest surmise in
an age which felt that the mass of mankind had sunk into a
condition too horrible for continuance, and which had been
affrighted by endless misfortunes and omens.f Men had
also been deeply moved by the story of the cry, " Great
Pan is dead! "" % which had been heard by the sailors in the
reign of Tiberius, and had evoked a burst of multitudinous
wailing. Before things had assumed their worst aspect,
Virgil, in his vaticination of the future glories of the son of
Asinius Pollio, had sung:§
" Aspice convexo nutantem pondere mundum
Terraeque tractusque maris, coelumque profundum,
Adspice venturo laetantur ut omnia saeclo ! "
The restless belief as to some overwhelmingly important
world-crisis, which would have its origin in Eastern lands,
affected even the most godless of Roman Emperors. It
was the passionate desire of Caius Caligula to set up the
gilded colossus of himself in the Temple of Jerusalem. As
we have seen, Poppaea, the wife of Nero, was, according to
Josephus, a Jewish proselyte; || and Nero himself had been
taught, perhaps by Jews, to look to the East, and even to
Jerusalem, as the seat of a future dominion.^f
It was not strange that, amid the deep and ever-deepen-
ing darkness, men should be expectant of a coming Dawn.
*Tac. Hist. V. 13. f Tac. Ann. vi. 28-51.
X Plut. De Defect. Orac. 17. § Eel. iv. Comp. Orac. Sibyll. 784 ff.
Il Jos. Vit. 3 ; Antt, xx. 8, 11. Comp. Tac. Ann. xvi. 6.
'[ Suet. Nero, 40. See Keim, i. 326.
I70 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
It is, however, important to observe that the True Messiah
was so little the natural evolution of current Messianic
expectations that, coming neither as a King nor as a Vic-
tor, nor as a temporal Emancipator of His people, nor as a
mere man at all, but as a Divine and crucified Nazarene,
He reversed and violated all the most cherished expecta-
tions of His land and age. He was not " a more victorious
Joshua, a more magnificent Herod, a wider-reaching Caesar,
a wiser Moses, a holier Abraham." He was no burning
Isaiah, no vengeful Elijah, no learned Hillel, or passionate
Akiba — no ringleader of rising multitudes, like Judas the
Gaulonite, or Bar Cochba.
" He came, but not in regal splendour drest —
The haughty diadem, the Tyrian vest ;
Not armed in flame all glorious from afar,
Of hosts the Captain, and the Lord of war ";
but He came as " the Carpenter," as the meek and lowly, as
the wearer of the crown of thorns ; and He established His
claim as Universal Victor by means of a few obscure and
timid followers, after He had perished amid the banded
obloquies of His nation and of His age.
CHAPTER XV.
JOHN THE BAPTIST.
" This is Elijah which was for to come." — Matt. xi. 14.
" John, than which man a sadder and a greater
Not till this day had been of woman born ;
John, like some iron peak by the Creator
Fired with the red glow of the rushing morn."
— F. Myers.
When the hour has struck — when " the shadow has
crept to the appointed hne on the dial-plate of destiny " —
God calls forth the man.
The chief need of the world is the death-defying courage
of true men. The only power which can reclaim the world
in ages of sloth, decadence, and self-deceiving religionisin is
the power of insight and burning sincerity which He
inspires into the hearts of saints and Prophets. No prayer
is more constantly needed than that God would grant to
His Church a succession of men, — not of incarnate conven-
tionalities, who think that the truth will perish with them,
or that it has been frozen for ever in channels of stagnant
function. Through such channels the living water flows no
longer. The cry which springs spontaneously from our
hearts is —
" God give us men ! A time like this demands
Great hearts, strong minds, true faith, and willing hands ;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill,
Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy,
Men who possess convictions and a will.
Men who have honour, men who dare not lie."
This has been felt even in heathen lands. We know how
Diogenes went through the streets of Athens with a lan-
171
172 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
tern, seeking for a man ; and when some of the crowd came
to him he beat them away with the contemptuous exclama-
tion, " I want men ; ye are GuvftaXa.'" Much more has it
been felt in Churches which have stagnated into pretence
and unreality under the ruinous influences of priestly
usurpation. " Run ye to and fro through the streets of
Jerusalem," said Jeremiah, "and see now, and know, and
seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a man, if
there be any that doeth justly and seeketh faithfulness, and
I will pardon her."* But he could find no such man.
There were many who said, " The Lord liveth," but they
swore falsely, and made their faces harder than a rock even
against chastisement. And if these were mainly the poor
and foolish, the great men and leaders were even worse.
They had altogether broken the yoke and burst the bands.
The nation as a nation continued to trust in dead formulae
which, so used, had dwindled into lying words. " Ignorant
of God's righteousness and seeking to establish their own,
they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of
God."f Convinced that they were themselves righteous,
and despising others, they had degraded God into the
leader of a sect, and in their opinionated infallibility furi-
ously condemned and did their utmost to suppress, by mean
slanders and by open or subterranean violence, those who
had some glimpses of the true light. Like the snail,
which, as the Hindoo proverb says, "sees nothing but its
own shell, and thinks it the grandest place in the universe,"
so they saw nothing beyond the pettinesses which they
glorified as though they were the essence of holy service.
Out of the heart of this spiritual stagnancy which had
lost sight of righteousness in ritualism, and fancied that a
mass of meaningless minutiae were essential things; out
of the very heart of this dead and half-putrescent system,
which was abundantly breeding its " offspring of vipers " X —
* Jer. V. 1-9. f Rom. x. 3.
i^This phrase yevv^/fxa-a ixi^vuv (Matt. iii. 7; Luke iii. 7 ; " serpentes ex
JOHN THE BAPTIST. 173
God called a MAN. He was by birth a priest, the son
of a priest of the order of Abijah, and was therefore
in a position to observe at first hand the moral decay of a
sacerdotalism which within was full of extortion and excess.
The mission of John expressed a revolt against Levitism,
and a republication — as from a new Sinai — of the eternal
moral law. It was a declaration that religion means " a
good mind and a good life," and that when it ceases to
mean this, it means worse than nothing. It was a preach-
ing of the old, simple, obliterated truth that " the righteous
Lord loveth righteousness^ John came, as our Lord said,
" 171 the zvay of righteousness.'"'^ His mission was a return
to the mighty moral teaching of those old prophets who
were the glory of Hebraism. John the Baptist did not so
much as allude to one of the myriad rules of Pharisaism.
Priest and Nazarite though he was, he did not once refer to
the ceremonial law to which the current orthodoxy made
the Prophets a mere appendage. But he re-echoed, in tones
of thunder, the burning messages of the Prophets them-
selves, and especially of Isaiah. The essence of his teach-
ing was to be found in the messages of "the Evangelical
Prophet," of Amos, Micah, Jeremiah, and Hoshea.
His aspect emphasised his message. His preached not
in Temple or synagogue, but among the wild rocks of ** the
appalling desolation " {/eshiinon), in the Valley of the Dead
Sea, " the haunt of thirst, where the dragons and demons
howl." He wore no priestly vestments, but a shaggy skin.f
His girdle was a strip of untanned leather — not a girdle of
fine linen embroidered with threads of gold and silver, like
those worn by such as lived in kings' houses. His food
was such as nature supplied. It consisted of the wild
honey which exudes from the leaves of tropical plants, or is
serpentibus ") is not found in the Old Testament, but waa twice used by our
Lord (Matt. xii. 34, xxiii. 33).
* Matt. xxi. 32.
f 2 Kings i, 8; Zech. xiii. 4; Is, iii. 24; Heb. xi. 37.
174 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
left by the bees in the clefts of the rocks;* and of the
locusts, which the south wind swept from Arabia, and
scattered among the valleys of the Dead Sea, but which
few could eat without disgust. f John poured open scorn
on all luxur)'. He came like a new Elijah, in all the uncom-
promising sternness of his prototype. :|: He did not preach
smooth things and prophesy deceits, but told of One whose
fan was in His hand, who should thoroughly purge His
floor, and burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. This
constituted the terribly original feature of his message.
"Of all the Messianic passages which we find written in
Sibyls, Apocalypses, and Jubilees, not one has struck this
tone, which fell like rolling thunder on the ears of the
people."
His preaching was avowedly preparative — it was that of
a Forerunner. He told the deputation of Priests and
Levites which came to him from Jerusalem that he was
not the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the expected Prophet, but
that he was " the Voice of one crying in the wilderness,
Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the Prophet
Isaiah." John baptised with water only, as a preparation
for Him who already stood among them, though they
knew Him not, who should baptise them with the Holy
Ghost and with fire, but who would not be finally mani-
fested except after a time of judgment — "the great and
terrible day of the Lord."
John's preaching aimed at religious awakenment. The
priests were indolently absorbed in "sacrificing and cele-
brating," and were sunk in greed, routine, and ambitious
worldliness. The masses of the people and of their
teachers were trusting in lying words, saying, "We be
Abraham's sons " ; and in outward privileges — " The
* Jos. B. J. iv. 8.
f All kinds of locusts are allowed to be eaten in Lev. xi. 22. They were
dried and salted. Jer. in Jovin. ii. Comp. Plin H. N. ii. 29, vi. 30.
X Mai. iii, 1-3 ; Ecclus. xlviii. ip, 11 ; Mark ix. 12,
JOHN THE BAPTIST. 175
Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple
of the Lord are these." They were occupied with badges
of party, and tithes of mint, anise, and cumin, and with
artificial moralities which altogether benumbed the sense
of truth and reality. The fogs needed to be scattered by
thunder and hurricane. From the sickly and perfumed air
of contentment with the infinitesimal, and hypocrisy as to
the essential — from the conventional optimism " which
sweetened the present, and gilded the future with the lazy
fancy of a well-fed piety " — he roused them as with shocks
of earthquake. It was not his to say smooth things and
prophesy deceits ; not his to bow low before the idol of
fashionable " views," nor "to glide softly into the hearts
of party votaries." His object was to tear off the
mask from the pretenders who disguised themselves as
angels of li^t, and to smite them in the face. The
preaching of John was "as the sweeping storms of March
before the soft rustling of the vernal breezes of the
Gospel."
He stood up, an Incarnate Conscience rising in revolt
against " the shows and shams of a self-soothing piety."
This child — nurtured amid the free winds and lonely
grandeur of the wilderness — represented Reality confront-
ing Sham. What he demanded was genuine penitence and
amendment of life. He had nothing to say about " bowing
the head like a bulrush," offering sacrificial atonements, or
being particular about fasts and feasts — but he thundered
forth, " Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of
your doings ; flee from the wrath to come ; bring forth
fruits worthy of your repentance." In all this (as we have
seen) he was but returning to the central messages of the
Old Testament Scriptures before the religion of Israel had
been overlaid with the filmy network of Scribism and
formality. *
* The inmost essence of the Law is expressed in such passages as Lev. xxvi.
40 ; Deut. iv. 29, xxx. 2 ; Isaiah i. 16, xlii. 24 ; Joel ii. 12 ; and />assim.
176 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Hence his preaching was necessarily a preaching of
repentance in the sternest of tones. Never was there a
more fierce denouncer of disguised hypocrisy. " Offspring
of vipers," he said to the Pharisees and Sadducccs, " wlio
warned you to flee from the wrath to come ? Bring forth,
therefore, fruit worthy of repentance. And think not to
say within yourselves, ' We have Abraham to our father,*
for I say unto you that God is able of these stones
{Abanim) to raise up children {Banini) to Abraham." He
did not speak to Jews as a Jew, but as a man to men, "that
all men through him might believe." Addressing his
hearers quite irrespectively of their nationality or pre-
rogatives, he discouraged the materialised hopes of his
people no less than their boasted prerogatives. The things
about which they prided themselves, and postured before
others, were not of the smallest importance. Their fast-
ings, their casuistical theologies, and multiplied ablutions —
their phylacteries, whether broad or narrow — were beneath
his notice. Their whole system of religion was but the
blighted tree on which the axe, already at its backmost
poise, should swoop with a final crash ; or as the barren
chaff which should soon be burnt with unquenchable fire.
The preaching of John dealt, as all true preaching should,
with plain, simple, unconventional holiness. It is not the
work of such men to compass heaven and earth to make
one proselyte, and then to make him " tenfold more the
child of hell than themselves." His work was to preach
the " pure, unsophisticated, dephlegmated, defaecated "
moral law; to tell the publicans to exact no more than that
which was legal ; to bid the soldiers be content with their
wages, to accuse none falsely, and to do no violence ; to
convince the people that they must substitute righteous-
ness for idle self-confidence, give alms to their fellow-men
with the most ample and generous self-sacrifice, and by
love serve one another.*
No wonder that such preaching in the wild desert of
* Matt, V. 40.
JOHN THE BAPTIST. 177
Jeshimon — preaching so utterly new, so fearless, so heart-
searching — uttered by a man who had broken with the
traditional religionism of his day, and desired something
deeper and more real than its narcotics, something higher
and more heroical than its functions, something more heal-
ing and essential than its petty effeminacies — caused multi-
tudes to stream out to " the horror " of the desert, to see
this " shocking figure " in camel's skin and leathern girdle,
who only cared to sustain life on locusts and wild honey.
The religious despots might self-complacently pronounce
that " he had a demon," but the multitude heard the mes-
sage of God in the voice of a true man. Here was a man
" whose manifestation was like a burning torch ; whose
whole life was a very earthquake ; whose whole being was a
sermon." Here was one who, alone among the teachers of
his day, scornfully tore to shreds the rags of hypocrisy, and
while he showed men that they were something better than
"hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites," strove to bring
them face to face with the Unseen, and make them realise
the grandeur of God, and feel the supremacy of righteous-
ness and true holiness.*
But there was also an element of Hope in his discourses.
Sharing in the intense Messianic expectations of the day,
he promised the speedy advent of the stern yet righteous
Deliverer, who should purify the air infected with heathen
influences and Sadducean unbelief,f and pour life into a
religion which had become like the thin iridescence over
the stagnancy of a putrescent pool.
The career of a Prophet or a true saint — especially if he
denounces current unrealities, and shows no respect for
dominant religious autocrats — is hardly complete unless it
* The simple veracity and authenticity of the Gospels constantly find corrob-
oration from external sources. The account of the Baptist receives an inde-
pendent support in all essential features from the reticent narrative of Josephus.
f The troubles raised by the Samaritan Messianic impostor (Jos. Atttt. xviii.
4, I, 2) may have partly arisen from the tension of mind caused by John's
teaching.
178 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
be surrounded with the malice, hatred, and all uncharit-
ableness of the world and of the nominal Church. The
normal lot of the loftiest teachers is some form or other of
martyrdom at the hands of all who love falsity. Popu-
larity, and party adulation, and the soft murmur of applause
are not for such, but for those natures who, in self-complac-
ent usurpation of prerogatives which are not theirs, answer
the world according to its idols ! The stake, the dungeon,
the torture-chamber, the roar of violent abuse, the viper's
hiss of creeping malice, the subterranean calumnies of reli-
gious partisans, the bale-fires of the Inquisitors, have been
the ordinary destiny of the noblest of the sons of God.
Their crown and sceptre have been like those of their
Saviour — a crown of torturing thorns, the sceptre of a
mocking reed. Such is the teaching alike of the Old* and
of the New Testament. f By Priests and Kings, " with
fierce lies maddening the blind multitude," the saints are
stoned, are sawn asunder, are slain with the sword, desti-
tute, afflicted, tormented, because the world is not worthy
of them. And worst of all, much of their work often seems
— though only seems — to have been in vain.
So it was with St. John the Baptist. First came cold
neglect and indifTerence, and the sneer of the religious
leaders that he was a demoniac ; % then the sword flashed,
and the life of the noblest of the Prophets was shorn away.
The " viper's brood," the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the
adulterous king, the wicked matron, the dancing girl, pre-
vailed ; and all that was left of him, than whom no greater
had been born of woman, was a head on a charger in a har-
lot's hand, and a bleeding trunk in the dungeon of a grim
fortress among the desert hills.
Nevertheless his work lived on. Not only did many,
*i Kings xix. lo ; 2 Chr. xvi. lo, xxiv. 21 ; Jer. xxvi. 8, 23.
f See Luke vi. 22, 23, 26 ; Matt. v. 11 : Mk. x. 29. 30 ; John xvii. 14 ;
Acts V. 41, vii. 52 ; Rom. v. 3 ; i Thess. ii. 14, 15 ; Heb. xi. 36-38, xiii. 13 ;
I Pet. iii. 14, iv. 12, 16.
% Matt xiv. 8-12.
JOHN THE BAPTIST. 179
even at Ephesus, own his leadership nearly thirty years
later (Acts xviii. 25, xix. 3), but — what was of infinitely
greater importance — he had effectually prepared the way
for Him " whose shoe's latchet he was not worthy to
unloose."
"The last and greatest herald of heaven's King,
Girt with rough skins, hies to the deserts wild :
His food was locusts, and what there doth spring,
With honey that from virgin-hives distilled ;
Then burst he forth, ' All ye whose hopes rely
On God, with me among the deserts mourn :
Repent ! repent ! and from old errors turn 1 '
Who listened to his voice, obeyed his cry ?
Only the echoes which he made relent
Rung from their flinty caves — ' Repent ! repent 1! ' "
CHAPTER XVI.
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS.
ovx wf cvdea, . . . dA/l' vnep tov yhovq
Tov Tuv avBpuTvuv. — Just. Mart. Dial. 88.
The Ministry of St. John the Baptist falls into two well-
marked epochs, separated from each other by the Baptism
of Christ.*
To Jesus, in His obscure and humble home, the thrill
which passed through every section of society at the voice
of the Baptist, and the appearance of a true Man among
the ignoble shadows and self-satisfied hypocrisies, came as
a sign from His Heavenly Father that the time had arrived
for His manifestation to the world. For now, by John's
work as an avowed Forerunner, the long-slumbering hope
was aroused, and, " with mighty billows the Messianic
movement surged through the entire people." Was he the
promised Forerunner, Elijah, whom in so many respects he
resembled? Was he the expected Jeremiah come to
restore to them the Ark and the Mercy Seat, and the Urim
which he was supposed to have hidden in a cave on Mount
Nebo?f Many even wondered whether he might not him-
self be the promised Messiah. " All men mused in their
hearts of John whether he were the Christ or not.":}:
In going to listen to the preaching of John, our Lord
doubtless followed that inward guidance which was the
supreme law of His life. He offered Himself for baptism.
The full meaning of this act is beyond our apprehension.
* It has not been my object to enter into questions of chronology, endlessly
debated, and still undecided. Several modern authorities have concluded that
Christ's Baptism took place before the Passover in A. D. 27.
f 2 Mace. ii. 1-7. X Luke iii. 15.
i9o
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. i8i
The baptism of John was no mere Essene or Levitical
ablution. It was accompanied by the confession of sins.
It was not " a laver of regeneration" (Tit. iii. 5), but "a
baptism of repentance." It was a sign that a man desired
to cleanse himself from moral defilement, to abandon all
righteousness of his own, and ** to draw nigh unto God in
full assurance of faith, having his heart sprinkled from an
evil conscience, and his body washed with pure water." *
How, then, could it be accepted by the Divine and sinless
Son of Man ? To others — but not to Him — could have
been applied the words of Ezekiel, " Then will I sprinkle
clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean." f All that we
know is what the Gospels tell us. We see that the stern
Prophet, who was no respecter of persons, but had dared to
address Scribes and Pharisees in words of scornful denunci-
ation, was overawed before the innate majesty of the Son
of God. This new Elijah, in his shaggy robe of camel's
hair with its coarse leathern girdle — this ascetic dweller in
the deserts — this herald whose voice rang with sternest
rebukes to startle drowsy souls, and stir them to repentance
— is at once hushed into timidity at the Presence of the
Lord of Love. So far from welcoming the acknowledg-
ment of his ministry by one whom he instinctively recog-
nised as his Lord, he made an earnest and continuous effort
to prevent Him from accepting his baptism.;}: He even
said, " / have need to be baptised of T/iee, and comest
T/ioH to Me ? " But the only explanation given to us is in
the words of our Lord Himself. He overcame John's
hesitating scruples by saying, " Suffer it to be so now ; for
thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness." § " He
* Heb. X. 22. f Ezek. xxxvi. 25. (Is. i. 16 ; Zech. xiii. i.)
X Matt. iii. 14, iisKiAvev. The Baptism of Christ seems to have been a soli-
tary one. It took place apparently " after all the people were baptised " (Luke
iii. 21), and may have been in a measure private.
§ This may possibly mean, as Dean Alford says, " to fulfil all the claims or
requirements {diKai^naTa) of the Law according to the definition of St. Chrys-
OStom," SiKatoGvv?/ yap eotcv ij tuv ivToldv kKnlfipuaiq,
i82 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
placed the confirmation of perfect righteousness," says St.
Bernard, " in perfect humihty." * Many have supposed
that He only submitted to the baptism as a corporate act,
desiring to identify Himself with the nation whose guilt
He came to bear and remove; others that He accepted it
vicariously and solely for the sake of mankind ;f others
that He regarded the act for Himself personally as a con-
secration to the Messianic kingdom.;}: Others, again, have
thought that as, to the mass of the people, the immer-
sion in the Jordan and the rising out of the water indicated
a death unto sin and a new life unto righteousness, so to
Christ it marked by way of symbol the close of His former
life of seclusion, and the entrance into that Divine mission
to which he was henceforth dedicated. § Whatever be the
exact ejfplanation, it was as He went up out of the water,
and stood praying, that both to Him and to the Baptist the
sign was given which had been promised, and which led
John to recognise Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God.
He beheld the Spirit, probably in some gleam of heavenly
brightness, descending out of the parted heavens as a
dove II with soft and hovering motion, and abiding upon
Him,!^ while a Voice from Heaven said, "This is my
* St. Bernard, Serm. d,"} in Cant.; St. Bonaventura, Vit. C/iristi xiii,
f This is the oldest explanation, and is found as early as Justin Martyr
Dial c. Tryph. 88. Conip. John i. 29. Our Baptismal office says, " He sanc-
tified water to the mystical washirig away of sin." Comp. Ps. Aug. Serrt.
145, 4 ; Ignat. ad Eph. 18 . Maxim Serm. 7, de Epiphan.
X Eph. i. 22. Comp. Ex. xxix. 4 ; Lev. viii. 1-30, xiv. 8.
§See Is. lii. 15 ; Ezek. xxxvi. 25 ; Zech. xiii. i.
\ The text does not say that the Spirit actually took the form of a dove.
The aufiaTiKo eiSei. of Luke iii. 22, does not necessarily imply more than a vis-
ible appearance. It seems more in accordance with other analogies to suppose
that like the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost (Acts ii. 7) the appearance
was " like as of fire" (comp. Matt. iii. 11). The dove was indeed a fitting
emblem of innocence and gentleness ; but Irenseus, arguing that the Logos was
united to Jesus at baptism, proves this by Gematria, since irepiaTeim = 801 =
K n (Rev. i. 8, II, xxi. 6, xxii. 13 ; Iren. C. Haer. i. 14, 6).
^ kfix^fxevov fTT* avTov, Matt. iii. 16 ; Is. xi. 2 ; Luke iii. 22 ; KaTajiaivov eig
avT6v (b. d. etc.), lit. " descending into Him," Mark i. 10. " Of all the fowls
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 183
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." Henceforth
Jesus felt Himself finally consecrated by the will of His
Father to be the Founder of the kingdom of heaven on
earth. As a man He now became fully "conscious of a
power of the Spirit within Him corresponding to the new
form of His work." *
After this it was destined that Jesus should increase and
John decrease. For though John was "the lamp kindled
and burninsf," his work showed the inevitable limitations
of all human work. He preached the preliminaries neces-
sary for the advent of the Kingdom ; it was beyond his
power to found the Kingdom itself. Indeed, it is probable
that though he differed so widely from the religious
teachers of his day in his moral ideals, he may have shared
in their special Messianic hopes. He may have looked, not
for a suffering, but for a triumphant Christ — for one who
should be a magnificent Potentate and Deliverer of His
nation — though the establishment of His Kingdom was to
be preceded by earthquake and eclipse, such as the Hebrew
Prophets had foretold.f Softened in tone as his ministry
had evidently been by the appearence of Jesus, it is very
likely that he failed to understand a Messiah at whose
presence the nations did not tremble, nor the mountains
visibly flow down ; who was not outwardly " a consuming
fire," and did not do terrible things in His wrath.:}; The
humble humanity, and untempestuous quietude of a Deliv-
erer who did not strive nor cry, neither was His voice
heard in the streets, became a decided stumbling-block in
the path of his Messianic faith. § Jesus did not attempt to
found any such earthly kingdom as John had imagined.
The whole ideal of the Saviour's work was different from
that are created, Thou hast named thee one Dove," 2 Esdr. v. 26. Ps. Iv. 6 ;
Is. lix. II : Matt. X. 16. Justin Martyr says (c. Tryph. 88) that a fire or light
was kindled in the Jordan.
* Bishop Westcott on John i. 34. \ Is. xiii. 9 ; Zeph. i. 14.
X Is. Ixiv. 1-3. § Matt. xi. 6.
i84 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
that of John. He did not frequent the wilderness, or
appear as an ascetic in hairy garb, or hurl thunderbolts.
He moved about in lowly simplicity as a man with men —
and that among the most stained and despised outcasts,
whom Pharisees and Sadducees would not touch with the
hem of their garments.
After the Baptist's work had culminated in the pointing
out of the Messiah, he seems to have lost much of his
power and insight. His disciples, if not he himself, began
to mistake means for ends. They did not become direct
disciples of Jesus. There austere self-denials did not meet
with our Lord's approval. Outward asceticism — like that
of the Pharisees — was brought by them into injurious prom-
inence. This was to put a patch of undressed cloth upon
an old garment. What was intended to fill up the rent only
made it worse. It was to put unfermented wine into old
wine-skins. The new wine fermented, in contact with the
yeasty particles left adhering to the leather — " the skins
burst and the wine was spilled." ^' There is something
infinitely pathetic in the fact that, in the gloomy recesses of
his frightful dungeon, haunted by demons and surrounded
by inaccessible crags, doubt as to Him whom he had
pointed out as the promised Christ seems for a moment to
have overshadowed the Baptist's soul. " A reed shaken by
the wind " he was not, and could not be ; but he might be
compared to " a cedar, half uprooted by the storm." He
foretold, he announced, the Kingdom of Christ, but can
hardly be said to have entered into it, so that — on the
principle "■minimum maximi est majus maxima minimi'' —
he who is but little (o jxinporipo?) in the kingdom of
heaven was greater than he.f Nevertheless, Jesus pro-
nounced on him the splendid eulogy that " Of them that
have been born of women there is none greater than John
the Baptist " ; and we may feel sure that any doubt which
may have crossed his mind was dispelled by the merciful
* Matt. ix. 14, xi. 14, xxi. 32 ; Luke, v. 33. f Matt. xi. II.
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 185
forbearance of Him whom he had pointed out as the Lamb
of God that taketh away the sins of the world. It disap-
peared for ever in the [jlorious Hght of that world where
all is judged of truly. There he would learn the meaning
of Christ's saying, " The kingdom of God is within you," *
and that they only can enter it, who enter it in the spirit of
little children, with meekness and perfect self-surrender.f
* ''EvTog vfiuv. Vulg. tnira vos est (i. e., in anhnis vestris). This meaning
seems to be the correct one. Comp. Rom. xiv. 17 ; Deut. xxx. 14. The
" Kingdom of God " is not only an external, but an ethical condition.
f Luke xvii. 20, 21 ; Matt, xviii. 3.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE TEMPTATION.
" Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder, the young lion and
the dragon shalt thou trample under foot." — Ps. xci. 13.
HeTTovQev avTog TretpaaBEig. — Heb. ii. 18, iv. 15.
Am Tovg aaOevovvrag 7/cQevovv, koI did rovg neivuvTaQ kireivuv, Kol did rovg
diipuvTag kditpuv—" Unwritten Saying" of Christ. — Orig. ijn Matt. xvii.
21).
"Omnis diabolica ilia Tentatio /tfr/.y non inius fuit." — Greg. M.
Hovi. i. 16.
" Thou Spirit that ledd'st this glorious Eremite
Into the desert, His victorious field
Against the spiritual foe, and brought'st Him thence
By proof the undoubted Son of God."
— Milton, Par. Reg. r.
Little as we may think it right to enter into the bound-
less field of speculation, yet the history of the Temptation
of our Lord is of such importance to a right understanding
of all that is revealed respecting Him in the Gospels as to
demand our patient endeavour to understand it aright.
It is narrated most circumstantially in the first and third
Gospels. In St. Mark it is compressed into one character-
istic but vivid verse, and he alone tells us, both, that " He
was with the wild beasts," and that "angels were continu-
ously ministering {ditpiovovv) unto Him." As St. John
was not professing to write a complete narrative, but
intended only to supplement in certain essential particulars
the records of the three Synoptic Gospels, it did not fall
within the scope of his work to narrate it once more. Yet,
so far was this from being — as it has been falsely repre-
sented — a designed suppression intended to exalt the
186
THE TEMPTATION. 187
Divinity of Christ, that St, John, no less than the other
Evangelists, shows us that the soul of Jesus could be
troubled and perplexed;'^ and that He regarded His work
as a triumph over the Prince of this worId,f who, through
Him, should be " cast out " when He should draw all men
unto Him. St. John also describes temptation as due to
the direct influence of Satan ;:|: he quotes the words of
Jesus — which describe the result of the Tempation — that
" the Prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in
Me " ;§ and says that Christ should " convict the world
in respect of judgment, because the Prince of this world
hath been judged."
The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews greatly helps
us to apprehend the significance of the Temptation when
he writes :
" We have not a High Priest who cannot be touched
with the feeling of our infirmities, but one that hath been
in all points tempted like as zve are, yet without sin." ||
And again :
" Wherefore it behoved Him in all things to be made
like unto His brethren, that He might be a merciful and
faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make
propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that He
Himself hath suffered being tempted, He is able to succour
them that are tempted."^
" We may represent the truth to ourselves best," says
Bishop Westcott, " by saying that Christ assumed human-
ity under the conditions of life belonging to man fallen,
though not with sinful promptings /r(?w witJiin."
First then let us consider the occasion, the locality,
and the circumstances of the Temptation.
Christ — who " lived in a tent like ours, and of the same
material," seeing that, as all the Gospels and Epistles teach
us. He was " perfectly man " — must have been swayed in
* John xii. 27. f John xii. 31. % John xiii. 27.
§ John xiv. 30, \ Heb. iii. 15. T[ Heb. ii. 17, 18.
i88 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
His human soul no less than in the mortal body by the
conditions which affect humanity. To Him therefore
the Baptism in the waters of Jordan, the opening heavens
which indicated a new relation with God, the Divine Voice
which called Him a Beloved Son, the descent of the Holy
Spirit upon and into Him,* there to abide in plenitude,
were the signs that the hour was at hand to begin His
Messianic work of Redemption. It was, as it were, the
final call to come forth from the Galilean village, and fulfil
His eternal purpose as the Teacher and Deliverer of man-
kind. In proportion as we realise the stupendous char-
acter of the work shall we be able to understand the
profound human emotion with which the Son of Man
contemplated the as yet unknown events and destines of
His earthly mission. In all such high hours of visitation
from the Living God there is, and must be, an intensity of
feeling which pervades the whole being, and creates an im-
perious demand for solitude and meditation. Man must be
alone, and " of the people there must be none with him,"
when he treads the winepress of his decisive hours. We can
therefore understand the expression of St. Matthew and
St. Luke that " then He was led up into the wilderness " ;
and that " full of the Holy Spirit, He was led in the Spirit
into the wilderness " ; and even the more forcible phrase of
St. Mark : " straightway the Spirit driveth Him fortJi into
the wilderness. "f In the Old Testament, Moses and
Elijah had spent forty days of spiritual crisis in lonely
places, and Paul, after his conversion, retired to Arabia.
"Into the wilderness": — we cannot say with certainty
what wilderness it was, for the tradition which gives its
name to the desert of the Forty Days {Qnarantania) is
quite uncertain ; but the awful associations with which
Jewish imagination filled these solitudes would correspond
with the tension of the spirit of Jesus. " He was," says St.
* Mark i. lo, uq avrbv, v. I. \ Comp. Ezek. viii. 3 ; Acts viii. 39.
THE TEMPTATION. 189
Mark, " with the wild beasts."* The Prophet Isaiah had
spoken of the Tsiyyim, and Ochim, and lyyini, " the
droughty ones " and " shaggy monsters and groaners,"
" the daughters of screaming,"f the owls, and the arrow-
snakes, and Lilith, " the night fairy," \ — half demoniac
creatures which made their homes amid its wild vegetation.
Those rugged and desolate places were also the dwelling
place of Azazel, the demon to whom" the scapegoat was dis-
missed. § " When the evil spirit is gone out of a man, he
walketh through dry places" — through the stony, waterless
deserts — "seeking rest, and he findeth it not."|| The evil
demon of " the dry places " was associated with the thought
of temptation, and there our Lord was tempted, as in
famine and solitude He wrestled mentally with the vast
problems of His predestined work. He felt an irrepres-
sible impulse to be alone in spirit with His Heavenly
Father, however much He might be surrounded by the
snares of the Evil One. He did not indeed feel the stings
of privation — scant as must have been the nourishment
which the wilderness afforded — till the close of the forty
days ; for it was only at their close — so St. Matthew tells us
— that "afterwards He hungered." But the Temptation,
though it was subsequently concentrated into three mighty
special assaults, was, in its essence, continuous. " He was
in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by the devil,''
says St. Mark, and St. Luke uses the same expression. It
was a period of mental strain and moral struggle, and it
involved the decisive victory over the assaults of Satan.
Henceforth it became possible for all to experience the
truth of the promise given by St. James, the Lord's
brother, " Resist the devil, and he will flee from you."
Two truths we must firmly apprehend.
(i.) One is that the Temptation was real, not a mere sem-
blance. Our Lord, under stress of genuine temptation, had
* See Job V. 22, 23. f Is. xiii. 21.
I Is. xxxiv. 13-15. § Lev. xvi. 8, 10, 20. || Matt. xii. 43.
I90 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
to win the victory, in man and for man, by evincing self-
denial, self-control, disregard for selfish advantage ; absolute
renunciation of power, honour, and self-gratification ; and
complete self-surrender to His Heavenly Father's will. If
the struggle had not been an actual struggle, there would
have been no significance in the victory. The Gospels
represent Jesus as subject to temptations from without, not
only at this crisis, but during all His life. He said to
Peter, "Get thee behind Me, Satan: thou art a stiimhling-
block unto Me " ; * and He said to His Apostles, " Ye are
they which have continued with Me in my temptations." f
The only difference between the temptations of Christ and
our own is that His came from without, but ours come also
from within. In Him " the tempting opportunity " could
not appeal to " the susceptible disposition." With us sin
acquires its deadliest force because we have yielded to it.
We can only conquer it when, by the triumph of God's
grace within us, we are able to say with the dying hero of
Azincour, " Get thee hence, Satan ; thou hast no part in
me ; my part is in the Lord Jesus Christ."
(ii.) The other truth which must be firmly grasped is that
the force and reality of the outward temptation did not
impair — nay, it illustrated — Christ's sinlessness. It is, as
Luther said, one thing to feel temptation {scntire tenta-
tioneni), and quite another thing to yield to it [asscntire
tentatio)ii)\ or, as our own great poet so well expresses it :
" 'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall."
The temptations came to Christ externally, through the
craft and subtlety of the devil, and, in defeating them. He
illustrated His own parable about the conquest of the Evil
One : " When the strong man, fully armed, guardeth his
own court, his goods are in peace ; but when a stronger
than he shall come upon him, he taketh from him his whole
* Matt. xvi. 23. ■)■ Luke xxii. 25.
THE TEMPTATION. 191
armour wherein he trusted, and divideth the spoil." By
His victory He gave power over the demons to all who
trust in Him, so that in all the power of the enemy nothing
should be able to hurt them. And for this very end has
He been manifested, "that He might destroy th(^ works of
the devil." * He did not, like the parents of our fallen
race, dabble with temptation, or go halfway to meet it, but,
by the instant rejection of it with the whole force of His
inner nature. He secured His transcendent and perfect
victory.
The question how the details of the Temptation became
known to the Apostles and Evangelists is not specially
important, but the answer to it seems clear. They could
only have learnt it from the Lord Himself. Nor, again, is
it in any way essential for the lessons which the narrative
is designed to teach us, whether we suppose that, in reveal-
ing it, He clothed the essential facts under the veil of sym-
bols or not. If He did so, it was only that we might have
a more vivid apprehension of truths which it would have
been impossible for us to understand had they been
expressed in spiritual or metaphysical terms. Nor need we
enter into the discussion as to whether Satan appeared to
Christ in a visible shape or not. There is nothing in the
form of expression which forces this conclusion upon us,
any more than in our Lord's words, " I was gazing on Satan
fallen as lightning from heaven." f Even the question as to
the personality of the Tempter is one which does not con-
cern us here. It is sufficient to say that Satan, the Accuser,
the Tempter, the Destroyer, is set before us throughout the
New Testament as a really existent and concrete being, and,
in any case, there exists for every one of us, as we know by
fatal experience, a reality of evil without us, "a force not
ourselves " which impels to all sin and unrighteousness, and
which it is our perpetual duty, as well as our only safety,
to resist to the uttermost.
* I John iii. 8. f Luke x. 17, Tveadwa,
192 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
It is much more important for us to observe that the three
temptations of our Lord fall generally under the compre-
hensive summary under which St. John sums up all forms
of temptation, namely, those that arise from " the lust of
the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life." * We
are perhaps hardly in a position to decide whether the order
of the Temptations as given by St. Matthew or that as given
by St. Luke is the more exact. In spiritual crises we can-
not take note of the ordinary sequences of time ; they
" Crowd eternity into an hour,
And stretch an hour into eternity."
It is clear from the expressions used by St. Mark and St.
Lukef that, though the temptations of Satan came to a head
in one great final conflict, they were, in some shape or other,
continuous ; and our Lord's victory is our example, that we
are not to love the world, neither the things that are in the
world, for if any man love the world the love of the Father
is not in him. " Nothing rises higher than its source. The
desire of things earthly, as though they were ends in them-
selves, comes from the world, and is bounded by the world.
It is, therefore, incompatible with the love of the Father."
(i.) The first appeal of Satan was an appeal to the desire
of the flesh in its simplest and most innocent form. It was
a temptation through suffering. It was not a temptation to
q)i\r]6ovia, the love of pleasure for its own sake, but rather
to the exercise of an inherent power for the extinction of
pain. Nothing could seem more plausible than the sugges-
tion that Jesus should appease the pangs of hunger by the
exercise of a prerogative which had been conferred on Him.
The wilderness abounds in stones, which sometimes look
like melons or cucumbers,:}: and sometimes bear the exact
* I John ii. l6.
f Mark i. I2 ; Luke iv. 2, treipa^SfiEvog. Comp. xxii. 28, " ye are they who
have continued with Me in my temptations." Heb. iv. 15, He " was in all
points tempted like as we are, yet without sin."
X These stones are known as septaria.
THE TEMPTATION. 193
appearance of loaves of bread. It would make hunger more
keen to see the semblance of food. And had not God fed
His whole people with manna in the wilderness in answer to
their cry ? And had He not sustained Moses during the
forty days of awful communion on Sinai ? And had not an
angel ministered to the needs of the unhappy and fugitive
Elijah ? And had not a voice from the heavens, which
seemed to be bursting open to their depths,* accompanied
by the hovering gleam of the descending Spirit, proclaimed
Him to be the beloved Son in whom God was well pleased ?
What could be more natural, what more harmless, than that
He should, under these circumstances, work the miracle
which was suggested to Him ? If He did so would it not
be a decisive test whether such a power were absolutely
His or not?
He now knew Himself to be called to His work as the
promised Messiah. Was it not one popular conception of
the Messiah's work that, like Moses, He should again feed
His people with bread from heaven ?f Was not this a
most favourable opportunity to exercise this power for the
supply of His own urgent needs, that, having thus tested
its reality, He might ever afterwards put it forth for the
blessing of the world which He had come to save?
Thus, beyond the mere agony of hunger, there might
well be this longing for support, this desire for assurance,
this impulse to test what, in the human sphere — though
He had laid aside His glory and taken upon Him the form
of a servant — might be permitted to Him, in a manner
which was in itself perfectly innocent. But whence did the
suggestion come ? It came from something without Him,
appealing to a bodily instinct. Quite clearly it was of the
earth, and came from the Prince of the Power of the Air,
suggesting to Him an inward doubt, or an open self-
assertion. And what was hunger? Could not hunger be
borne, if God had sent it? If God desired to satiate
^ Mark i. lo. f John vi. 30-35,
194 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
hunger by a miracle it was a duty to await His good time,
and not to use supernatural gifts for personal alleviation.
In any case there is the higher as well as the lower life.
The Tempter had indirectly suggested the thought of the
manna; but in the wilderness God had suffered His people
to hunger, expressly that He might try their faith and con-
stancy before He supplied their needs by the manna which
neither they nor their fathers had known. Jesus, therefore,
repelled the temptation by the words which follow in the
Book of Deuteronomy — that God had acted thus " that He
might make thee know that man doth not live by bread
only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth
of the Lord doth man live." * Thus to the Israelites the
manna became " spiritual food."f And had not Jeremiah
also said, " TJiy words were found, and I did eat them, and
Thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine
heart; for I am called by Thy name, O Lord God of
Hosts.":}: Our Lord would neither sate His hunger, nor
challenge His Almighty Father by putting His own mirac-
ulous powers to the test.
Thus, by " the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of
God," the first temptation was victoriously encountered, and
plainly shown to be a temptation through all its subtle
speciousness.
(ii.) But the Tempter was not yet foiled. His next
temptation should be separate from anything which could
seem even remotely to have in it any admixture of selfish-
ness or of personal desires. It should be a purely imagina-
tive temptation, appealing solely to the deep thoughts
about His Messianic work, which had been occupying the
* Deut. viii. 3. The idea that the observance of God's commandments
tends to life runs through Deuteronomy (iv. I, 2, 40, v. 29-33, etc.). See
Wright, Some Problems of the New Testament, p. 10. All three of our Lord's
answers to Satan were taken from Deut. vi. and viii. Two of them were texts
enclosed in the apertures of the phylacteries {Tephillin).
f I Cor. X. 4.
JJer. XV. 16. Comp. Ps. cxix. 103.
THE TEMPTATION. 195
mind of Jesus during His forty days in the wilderness, and
only suggesting that He should put to the test the miracu-
lous endowments which seemed indispensable to the fulfil-
ment of the mighty issues before Him. Appealing this
time to the pride of life, the Tempter suggests, "Thou
hast been proclaimed to be the Son of God, and if Thou
art the Son of God, no harm can happen to Thee. See !
Thou art on the pinnacle of the Temple;* cast Thyself
down. Thy safety will be a glorious, a decisive proof of
Thy Divine origin. Even of God's ordinary human saints
it is written —
" ' There shall no harm happen unto thee.
For He shall give His angels charge concerning thee
To keep thee in all thy ways ;
And on their hands they shall bear thee up,
Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone.' " t
Thus did the Devil cite Scripture for his purpose, and
clothe his temptation in the most seeming-innocent guise.
But he omitted from his quotations the words " to keep
thee ifi all thy zvays,'" because those words implied that
God's promise did not extend to " the precipice in the
Temple, the regions of mid-air, or any devious paths of
mere presumption, but only to the ways of obvious duty.";}:
If, as many have supposed — though in the brief narrative
of this spiritual struggle in the two Evangelists no hint of
the kind is distantly suggested — if the temptation was
really one to descend miraculously among the people
assembled in the court below ; to flash upon them as it
were at once in one sudden supernatural Epiphany of
divine power — it might seem to acquire additional force.
* Perhaps on the roof of the Sfoa Basilikh, or Royal Porch, on the southern
side of the Temple, which looked down 400 cubits into the luady oi the Kidron
(Jos. Antt. XV. II, 5) ; or the Stoa Aiiatoiike (Solomon's Porch), from which the
Lord's brother, St. James, was afterwards flung. Hegesippus ap. Euseb. H. E.
ii. 23.
f Ps. xci, I, II. :|: See Mill, Five Sermons on the Temptation, p. 116.
196 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
What a splendid manifestation would this be? How
irresistibly would He thus inaugurate the work which His
Father had given Him to do !
But again Jesus saw into the hidden heart of the tempta-
tion. It was an allurement to self-will, to self-assertion, to
the independent challenge and use of heavenly powers.
He repels the allurement by refuting the misapplication of
Satan's Scriptural quotation. The promise which the Evil
One had quoted was a promise that God would keep His
children amid the inevitable, iinsouglit dangers of life.
Scripture is not to be identified — as it constantly is — with
any perversion, to alien ends, of its mere words : Scripture
is solely what Scripture means. The Devil can quote
Scripture for his purpose, but it is always a perversion of
Scripture. The Psalmist had never meant to encourage
the audacious demand for God's supernatural interferences
to enable us to escape from self-created perils. Jesus
would not be guilty of forcing or of challenging God's
purposes. His reliance on His Heavenly Father should be
one of absolute dependence. He knew that He would
never be left alone while He did always the things which
were pleasing in God's sight.* So He met Satan's false
references to Scripture by another quotation which was of
eternal validity. " It stands written again," He said,
" Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." f This second
answer, like the first, involved the repudiation of all self-
will ; the determination to follow only the Divine order,
not any promptings, whether subjective or objective, which
did not come from the Father of Lights. " Trust in God
must be accompanied by humble submission to His will,
and is incompatible with the attempt to bring the power
of God into the service of one's own caprice." \
* John viii. 29.
\ Matt. iv. 7 (Deut. vi. 16), yi-yparrTai, " it hath been written," " it standeth
written ; ovk eKneipdaeig " thou shalt not tempt ij the full the Lord thy God,"
i. e., thou shalt not challenge the full expression of His power.
X Wendt.
THE TEMPTATION. 197
(iii.) The form in which the third Temptation is narrated
illustrates most decisively that our Lord, in revealing the
story of His temptations in the wilderness, threw them into
such a form as would bring them most vividly before the
minds of His Apostles. The form of the story — that
Satan set Jesus on an exceeding high mountain, and
showed him, in a moment of time, all the kingdoms of the
world and the glory of them — is doubtless an anthro-
pomorphic picture which summarises the result of a mental
conflict. The offer to give all these to Jesus on the condi-
tion ^^ that He would fall doivn and do reverence before
hint,'' is obviously one which, in this form, would have been
too coarsely and audaciously crude to have been a possible
temptation to the Son of God.* But not so the underly-
ing significance of the picture. Our Lord had been pro-
claimed to be the Messiah, and He was aware of the nature
of the Messianic hopes shared by the whole of His nation.
But how could He carry out such hopes? how could He
come up to the ideal of One whom John had painted as a
Ruler, thoroughly purging His floor with mighty winnow-
ing-fan, and gathering the wheat into His garner, but
burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire? Surely the
fulfilment of such magnificent anticipations would be
impossible so long as He did not rise above the humble
worldly position of a peasant and a Nazarene ? Conscious
of His Divine nature, and His as yet unexercised powers —
anxious, as a man among men, to inaugurate the King-
dom — He must have felt how easy it would be to kindle
His countrymen into a flame of zeal in comparison with
which the enthusiasm aroused by Judas of Galilee would
have been as nothing ; — into zeal which would have gathered
them as one man under one banner, and not only have
broken in sunder the galling yoke of Roman dominion, but
* The rendering, " fall down and worship me," is rather too strong ; it is,
rather, " do me homage as to a king, the KoafioKparup," Eph. vi. 12.
198 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
have carried Him forward to a world-wide dominion of
glory and righteousness.
The " desire of the eyes " could have had no share in
this temptation, for to Him the riches of the world and the
glory of them must have seemed no better than dross in
comparison with the things unseen and eternal. It is only
in a secondary and spiritual sense that what St. Joiin calls
"the braggart vaunt of life," its vain pomp and splendour,
could have had the smallest allurement for One who lived
in His Father's presence. But the temptation may have
come as a suggestion of the readiest and most triumphant
means by which He could subdue the world, and make its
kingdoms the kingdoms of God, at no other cost than that
of concession to earthly prejudices. The temptation was
most ingeniously veiled, as though it involved nothing more
than a politic accommodation to outward conditions — the
condescension of employing human means for high ends.
But this temptation also — this half-hidden offer of the
KOGf.iOKparopj'^ "the ruler of this world "^ — to promote
establishment of a Messianic empire — was decisively
rejected. " The god of this world " could not blind the
eyes of a Wisdom which came from heaven, nor could his
fiery darts remain unquenched on the shield of perfect
faith. Decisive and energetic was the rejection of this last
assault : " Get thee hence, Satan ! for it standeth written,
Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt
thou serve."
After so absolute a defeat, the Devil might well leave
Him " until a season," i. e., till he could see some new oppor-
tunity for assault ;t and angels came and were ministering
unto Him. He left the wilderness with mind determined,
* John xiii. 31, xiv. 30, xvi. II. The Jews spoke of Satan as Sar ha-Olam.
But his power was not, as he said, " delivered unto him," except by the
apostasy of men, for "the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof"
(Ps. xxiv. i).
\ Luke iv. 13, aniarji an' uvtov axpl naifjov.
THE TEMPTATION. 199
with will resolutely fixed, to walk only in God's way — in the
path which, step by step, the Heavenly Father should make
clear to Him, whithersoever it might lead. The principle
which would henceforth sustain His whole life should be to
shrink from no self-sacrifice, however awful ; to drink the
cup, however bitter, which God should send to Him ; and
to annihilate every prompting which should have its source
only in the earthly self.
Finally victorious over all the assaults and blandish-
ments of " the prince of the power of the air," Jesus felt the
clear conviction that the path of His Messianic deliverance
of Israel and of the world did not lie over the radiant moun-
tain-heights of human glory, but through the deep Valley of
Humiliation ; and that the one inflexible purpose of every
act of His mortal life must be, in absolute self-abnegation,
" to do the will of Him that sent Him, and to finish His
work." The whole narrative of the Temptation is a com-
ment on our Lord's saying, " The prince of this world
Cometh, and hath notlmig in me." '^
* John xiv. 30.
CHAPTER XVIII.
SCENES OF CHRIST'S MINISTRY.
" In the former time He brought into contempt the land of Zebulun
and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time He hath made it glo-
rious, by the way of the sea. . . Galilee of the nations. — Is. ix. i.
" Quare Vocatur Gennazar .-* ob hortos principum {ganne sarim)." —
LiGHTFOOT, Cent. Chorogr. Ixxix.
I PASS over the pathetically beautiful events which took
place when, on the return of Jesus from the Desert of the
Temptation, He once more visited the scenes where John,
having left the Wilderness of Judaea, was now baptising.
John was at Bethany,* beyond Jordan, near the well-known
Peraean ford of Bethabara, within a day's journey of Naza-
reth. The second stage of His ministry had begun. The
Baptist now knew full well that his mission was practically
finished, and he was inspired to point out the Lamb of God
to some of his own disciples,f openly avowing that //i? must
increase, and he himself must decrease. I shall speak far-
ther on of the earliest disciples to obey the call of Christ —
Andrew, John, Simon, Philip, and Nathanael. With them
He visited Cana and wrought His earliest miracle. At the
first Passover of His ministry He cleansed the Temple, and
had His nocturnal interview with Nicodemus, the teacher of
*'' Bethany," the reading of A, B, C, etc. , was conjecturally altered by
Origen into Bethabara, because he only knew of the Bethany on the Mount of
Olives. Bethabara means " the House of the Passage," and is within easy
reach of Cana. Caspari identifies it with Tiellanije, north of the Sea of Gali-
lee. Condor thinks it may be Makhadet Abarah, northeast of Beisah.
f Is. liii.; Acts viii. 32. There may also be a reference to the Paschal Lamb,
as the Passover was near. The thought may have been brought home to him
by the sight of the flocks of lambs being driven to Jerusalem as offerings at
the coming Feast.
200
SCENES OF CHRIST'S MINISTRY. 201
Israel, After this He continued for a time to work in Judaea,
and permitted His disciples to baptise, though He himself
baptised not. It was at this time that, in answer to the
jealous complaints of John's disciples, the great Forerunner
bore emphatic witness to Him as to One who cometh from
heaven, who spoke the words of God, and to whom the
Spirit had been given without measure — nay more, as the
Son, into whose hands the Father had given all things.*
Soon after this, Herod consummated his crimes by throwing
John into the prison at Machaerus. Jesus then retired from
Judaea into Galilee, and it may have been on this journey —
for the exact chronology of events must ever remain uncer-
tain — that He spoke with the Samaritan woman by Jacob's
Well. To this first year of His ministry also belonged the
healing of the son of the court officer (^fiaaikinoi) of
Capernaum, and His rejection by the Nazarenes when He
preached in their synagogue.
That pre-eminently bright and fruitful period of His
ministry which has been called "the Galilaean Spring" began
with His retirement from Nazareth to Capernaum. No small
portion of the Gospels is occupied by the narratives of the
work and teaching in the Plain of Gennesareth, beside the
Sea of Galilee. Remote and narrow in extent is this cor-
ner of Galilee, from which issued forth to all the world the
words of eternal life. Yet the scenery eminently suited the
Divine teaching, which was addressed to the humble, but
was intended to bring new life to all mankind. The words
of Jesus had few or none of the thunderous elements which
marked the preaching of the Baptist. They were spoken,
not in the waste and howling wilderness, nor, like those of
Moses, among the more awful aspects of nature, but amid
the soft delightful fields which He on the west of the Lake
of Galilee. There is a quiet enchantment about the whole
locality. I once rode into the plain from the top of Kur'n
Hattin — the Mount of Beatitudes — down the Wady Ham-
mam, or "Vale of Doves," rich with its Eastern vegetation.
*John iii. 22-36.
202 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
The road descends to the lake through the wretched village
of El Mejdel (Magdala),* where (a certain sign of squalor) the
little children run about naked in the street. So desolate
are the shores of the Sea of Galilee in these days, that, as I
rode for hours through the tall flowering oleanders, laden
with their pink blossoms, there was scarcely a sign of human
life. The white-winged pelicans floated on the water, and
the kingfishers perched on the reeds beside the lake, and the
masses of green entangled foliage along the water-courses
were alive with myriads of twittering birds; but, with the
exception of a little group of fishermen who were fishing
with a drag-net from the shore, and four splendidly mounted
Bedouin Arabs, I saw no one during many hours ; nor did
the whole surface of the lake for thirteen miles from north
to south show one single sail of the smallest fishing-boat.
The green plain itself — Gennesareth, " that unparalleled
garden of God "f — is but three miles long, and a mile and
a half broad. Yet it gave its name to the sea, of which the
Talmud has this remarkable eulogy: "Seven seas, spake
the Lord God, have I created in the land of Canaan, but
only one have I chosen for myself, the Sea of Gennezar." :}:
It was " surrounded by pleasant towns," § and its famous
hot springs attracted numerous visitors.
In the days of Jesus Christ the little plain was densely
populated, and was far more lovely than now it is in its
prolific luxuriance, which perhaps gained it the name of
the Garden of Princes. || Then as now the lake abounded
in rare and delicious varieties of fish ; then as now the grass
was enamelled with a profusion of the lilies of the field ;
* In ancient days indigo grew there, and it was known as " the town of
dyers."
f Jos. B. J. iii. 3, 2, X. 8.
XMidrash Tillin iv. 1 (quoted by Sepp. ii. 170).
§Plin. H. N.y. 15.
II The derivation of " Gennesareth " is uncertain. Some regard the name as
a corruption of the old Hebrew name Chinnereth, " a harp " (Deut. iii. 17;
Josh. xi. 2).
SCENES OF CHRIST'S MINISTRY. 203
then as now the barren basaltic hills of the Eastern shore
flung the shadows of their abrupt precipices upon the waters,
and the gusts which rushed down their narrow valleys often
swept the little inland sea into sudden storm. But the con-
temporary description given of it by the Jewish historian
will show how widely its present desolation differs from the
aspect which it presented to the eyes of the Saviour of the
World. " The waters," he says,* " are sweet, and very agree-
able for drinking; they are finer than the thick waters of
other fens. The lake is also pure, and on every side ends
directly at the shores and at the sand ; it is also of a tem-
perate nature when you draw it up, and of a more gentle
nature than river or fountain water, and yet always cooler
than one could expect. Now when this water is kept in the
open air it is as cold as snow. There are several kinds of
fish in it, different both to the taste and the sight from
those elsewhere. . . . Tiie country also that lies over
against this lake hath the same name of Gennesareth. Its
nature is wonderful as well as its beauty ; its soil is so fruit-
ful that all sorts of trees can grow upon it . . . for the
temper of the air is so well mixed that it agrees very well
with the several sorts . . . walnuts in vast plenty . . .
palm trees . . . fig-trees . . . olives. One may call this
place the ambition of nature, where it forces those plants
which are naturally enemies to one another to grow to-
gether ; it is a happy contention of the Seasons, as if every
one of them lay claim to this country." f
" Oh, why," asked a Rabbi, " are the fruits of Jerusalem
not so good as those of Galilee ?" " Because else," is the
answer, " we should live at Jerusalem for the sake of the
fruits, and not for Divine service." It was in these regions
*Jos. B. J. iii. 10, 7, 8. See Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, pp. 425-47;
Thomson, The Land and the Book, p. 402 ; Tristram, Land of Israel, p. 431;
Rob Roy on the Jordan ; Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, ch. xix. ; Renan,
Vie dejisus, 144 ; Neubauer, Geogr. du Talmud, p. 48.
f Whiston's transl. (abbreviated).
204 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
that the Prophet Hoshea " poured forth his warm and deep-
felt words in which the excitable temper of the Galileans
especially found expression " ; and the Song of Songs had
been composed " by a poet, into whose heart the cheerful
vicinage had poured its sunniest beams, and whose eyes
were open to note how the flowers gleam and the fig-tree puts
forth its green figs, and the vine sprouts, and the bloom of
the pomegranates unfolds itself." And " amid this luxuri-
ance of nature there lived still a healthy people, whose con-
science was not yet corrupted by Rabbinical sophistries,
and where full-grown men were elevated far above their
Jewish kinsfolk, sickening with fanaticism."
The commercial road which ran by the lake to Damascus
made Gennesareth familiar to foreign merchants, and vari-
ous Gentile elements were to be found among the popula-
tion. Tiberias, the new and half-heathen capital of Herod,
into which we are not told that our Lord so much as once
entered, exhibited to the offended eyes of the Jews its
Palace ornamented with Grecian sculptures. Jesus never
seems to have visited Sepphoris or Tarichece or other popu-
lous cities; but three village-towns {xoof.w7ioXei<;^ of Gen-
nesareth were specially familiar with the words and works
of the Son of Man — Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum.
These are mentioned by Christ Himself as the main
scenes of His ministry in the towns of Galilee.
" Woe unto thee, Chorazin ! Woe unto thee, Bethsaida !
for if the mighty works had been done in Tyre and Sidon
which have been done in you, they would have repented
long ago in sackcloth and ashes. . . .
" And thou, Capernaum, shalt thou be exalted into
heaven ? Thou shalt be brought down unto Hades ! for if
the mighty works had been done in Sodom which were
done in thee, it would have remained unto this day."
So fragmentary is our knowlege of the continuous work
of Christ, that, though Chorazin is mentioned first among
the towns which Jesus had thus signally endowed with the
SCENES OF CHRIST'S MINISTRY. 205
privilege of witnessing Plis miracles of mercy,* it is not once
again alluded to in the Gospels, nor do we know of a single
miracle which was wrought in it. Though we learn from
the Talmud that it was once famous for the fineness of its
wheat,f it was deserted even in the fourth century after
Christ, and it is only within the last few years that its site
has been identified with Kherazeh,;}: a heap of indistin-
guishable ruins not quite three miles from Tell Hum. Its
unusually stately synagogue had five aisles, and a quadruple
row of columns adorned with Corinthian capitals, and
decorative details elaborately carved in hard, black basalt.
Over the upheaped and weed-grown debris of its forgotten
prosperity might well be written the inscription :
" Woe unto thee, Chorazin ! "
The site of Bethsaida is to this day uncertain, though it
was the native place of Andrew, Peter, and Philip, and was
the frequeni scene of the Lord's manifestations. It was
near Capernaum and Chorazin, and its name ('* House of
Fish") seems to indicate that it was on the shore of the
lake. The scanty remains at Ain et Tabijah, " the fountain
of the fig-tree," seem to meet the necessary requirements.
The site of Capernaum is also still a matter of dispute,
though more than any other town it became Christ's " own
city," § and was the scene of His constant " signs." It is
not mentioned either in the Old Testament or the Apocry-
pha, but in Christ's day it was " exalted to heaven " by His
presence and gracious words. Tell Hum seems to me to
correspond most nearly with the indications of its locality
furnished by the Gospels. Capernaum is a corruption of
Kaphar Nahum, " the village of Nahum," and Tell Hum
* Matt. xi. 21 ; Luke x. 13.
\Bab. Menachoth, f. 85, i.
X It was discovered in 1842 by the Rev. G. Williams ; and by the Rev. W.
Thomson, 1857. It was in ruins in the days of Eus^bius (a. d. 330). See
Neubauer, Geogr. du Talm. 220.
§Matt. ix. I ; Mark ii. i.
2o6 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
may mean " the ruinous mound of (Na)hum." It is near
Chorazin. Among its ruins still stands the fragment of a
synagogue, over the gate of which is carved the pot of manna,
which may have turned the thoughts of the people to
Moses' gift of " bread from heaven." * This is, perhaps, the
very synagogue which the town owed to the munificence of
the friendly Roman centurion. f In this city Matthew was
called from " the place of toll," and here Jesus had at least
a temporary home,| perhaps in a house which may have
been partly occupied by Simon and Andrew. No town, so
far as we are aware, witnessed anything like the same num-
ber of miracles. Here great multitudes gathered to Him ;
here He healed the nobleman's son, and the centurion's ser-
vant, and Simon's mother-in-law, and the paralytic, and the
unclean demoniac, and the woman with the issue of blood,
and raised the daughter of Jairus, and showed many other
unrecorded signs. § Here He taught humility to the dis-
puting disciples by the example of a little child. || Here, too,
in the synagogue He delivered that memorable discourse
about " the Bread of Life," and about " eating His flesh and
drinking His blood," ^ which caused such deep-seated
offence, but which He Himself explained to be a metaphor
when He said, " It is the Spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh
profiteth nothing ; the zvords that I have spoken unto yon are
spirit and are life^'^''^ If that explanation, given by Christ
Himself, had been rightly considered and apprehended, we
might have been saved from masses of superstition. " The
letter," as St. Paul says, " killeth ; it is only the Spirit that
giveth life."ff "Nothing can carry us beyond the limits
of its own realms. The new life must come from that which
belongs properly to the sphere in which it moves." There
is no room for a wooden literalism. " Gratia Dei,'' says St.
*John vi. 22-71. f Luke vii. i, 8 ; Matt. viii. 8. ^ Mark ii. i.
§John iv. 46 ; Mark i. 21, 29 ; Matt, viii., ix.; Luke iv. 23, etc.
II Matt. xix. 13 ; Mark x. 13, 14 ; Luke xviii. 15-17,
Hjohn vi. 22-71, ** John vi.. 6^.. ff 2 Cor. iii. 6..
SCENES OF CHRIST'S MINISTRY. 207
Augustine, " non consuviitiir niorsibtis." There is no more
excuse for giving d^ literal meaning \.o ^^ M.y flesh is meat
indeed," than for understanding literally the words, " He
that believeth on Me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of liv-
ing water."*
It was first in the synagogues, and then in the market-
places f of these cities, and in the highways and the hedges,
that the Saviour of the World manifested forth His glory.
Here " Oriental misery in its most terrible shape became the
dearest object of His care." Here the lepers cried to Him
amid the degradation of their hideous deformity, and the
helpless crippled beggars — the blind, and the halt, and the
maimed. Jesus had nothing but love and healing pity for
wretches who lived on the scraps flung out of the rich man's
door, and for the wild, naked, howling demoniacs, and the
miserable, degraded harlots, and those whom Priests and
Pharisees spurned and loathed as the very outcasts of
society. Nor did He in the least resemble the self-deceivers
who
" Sigh for wretchedness, but shun the wretched,
Nursing in some delicious solitude
Their dainty loves and slothful sympathies."
He never withheld the fulness of His miraculous mercy from
the sick and sorrowful, the weary and heavy laden. Yet He
came not to these alone, but to all around them ; and as He
regarded them with His kingly eye of love. He used the
simplest incidents of their everyday lives to give point to
His parables and vividness to His instruction of the poor.
In the common illustrations which He employed, " day
labourers are hired in the market, and paid in the evening;
with plough reversed the labourer takes his homeward way ;
even at a distance from the village the singing and dancing
* John vii. 38.
f Not " in the streets," for the narrow, densely-crowded streets of Oriental
towns would afford no place for sermons or for acts of healing. Hence the
R. v., in Mark vi. 56, rightly corrects the " streets " of the A. V. St. Luke
uses " streets " in & general sense in xiii. 26.
2o8 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
of the holiday-makers can be heard ; in the market-place
the children wrangle in their sports ; until late at night the
noise of revelry and knocking at closed doors continues.
The drunken steward storms at, and beats, and otherwise
misuses the men-servants and maid-servants. In short, from
morning till night life is much occupied, and boisterous and
gay, and the busy people find no time for meditating on the
kingdom of God. The one has bought a piece of ground
and must needs go and see it ; the other must prove the
oxen that have been knocked down to him ; the third has
other business — a feast, or a funeral, or a marriage." " They
ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they
builded, they married and were given in marriage." So does
Jesus describe the restless, busy life of His native land.
At first Jesus seems largely to have used the synagogues
as the scenes of His teaching.* They were, during all His
life, the normal resorts of His Sabbath worship, and He
required no other adjuncts than the bare simplicity of the
desk and platform for preaching, and the cupboard in which
the Thorah was kept. But when even in the synagogues
He began to be opposed, and worried by the petty legal-
ities of the officials who were instigated to annoy Him by
their local Scribes, and by Pharisaic spies sent from Jeru-
salem to watch and harass His movements, then more and
more He deserted the synagogues, and taught under the
open air of heaven those outcasts of the world and of nom-
inal Churches from whom He meant to gather the children
of the Kingdom.
It is a strange thought that there are but three or four
actual spots where we may be certain that the feet of the
Saviour of mankind have stood. One is in the rocky road
full of sepulchral caves which mounts from the Plain of
Esdraelon to Nein (the Nain of the Gospel) up the sides of
Little Hermon (Jebel ed-Duhy), where He raised to life the
widow's son. Another is the rocky platform where the
* Matt. iv. 23, ix. 35, x. 17, xii. 9, xiii. 54 ; Luke iv. 15, 20, 44, etc.; John
xviii. 20.
SCENES OF CHRIST'S MINISTRY. 209
road from Bethany sweeps to the northward round the
shoulder of the Mount of Olives, and Jerusalem first bursts
on the view. The third is the summit of Kur'n Hattin,
from which Safed, " the city set on a hill," stands full in
view, where Jesus uttered " the Sermon on the Mount."
To these we may perhaps add the Har-ha-Beit, or " Hill
of the House," on the broad platform of which once stood
the Temple which was " the joy of the whole earth " ; and
perhaps Gethsemane, of which the traditional site has much
to be said in its favour. But we do not know with distant
approach to certainty the sites even of the Crucifixion, or
of the Holy Sepulchre. That the sites where events took
place which have swayed the whole temporal and eternal
destinies of the human race could have been forgotten
might well seem passing strange ; but the earliest genera-
tions of believers, in the days of primitive Christianity,
attached no importance to localities or relics. The Lord
Christ was to them far less the human Jesus, who, for one
brief lifetime had moved among men, than He was the
Risen, the Eternal, the Glorified Christ, their Lord and
their God. They habitually contemplated Him, not as on
the Cross, but as on the Throne ; not as the humiliated
sufferer, but as the King exalted far above all heavens.
They never regarded Him as taken away from them, but
on the contrary as nearer to them than He had been while
on earth even to the Disciple whom He loved, and who
bowed his head upon His breast. So far from being absent
from them, He was, as He had expressly taught, ever tuitk
them and within them. To minds pervaded by such
thoughts, the scenes of His earthly pilgrimage were com-
paratively as nothing. Their thoughts were with Him in
the " far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory "
wherein, though He now lived amid " the sevenfold chorus
of Hallelujahs and harping symphonies," He was yet no
less in the midst of them, wheresoever two or three were
gathered together in His name.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHRIST'S METHODS OF EVANGELISATION.
TlTuxoi EvayyeTii^ovTai. — MaTT, xi. 5.
Bpaxei? ^£ Kal, cvvTOfiol nap' avrov X6yoi yeySvaaiv. ov yap ao(j)iaTlc vnfjpx^
aXka Avvafjiig Qeov 6 Myog avrov f/v. — JuSTIN MARTYR, A^o/. i. 14.
The manner in which the Son of God preached the
Gospel of His Kingdom was characterised by the perfect
simplicity which marked His whole career. He came to
give an example to all mankind of what might be the ordi-
nary state of men, not exalted by any factitious rank, nor
glorified by any external magnificence, nor rendered prom-
inent by any adventitious circumstances, but elevated trans-
cendently above the low malarious swamps of common
humanity by the sinlessness of that spiriUial life which
He came not only to exemplify but to impart. The High
Priest on the Day of Atonement went into the holy place
in hierarchic pomp, in his golden garments, encircled with
his girdle of blue and purple and scarlet, and the jewelled
Urim on his breast ; the Essene affected white robes, and a
predetermined look of sanctified asceticism ; the Pharisee,
while he was devouring widows' houses, and for a pretence
making long prayers, chose the chief seats in feasts and
synagogues, loved to walk in long robes, and to pose
in saintly attitudes, delighted in ceremonious greetings,
sounded a trumpet before him when he did his alms, made
broad his phylacteries, enlarged the tassels of his garment,
and did all his works to be seen of men. The Lord of Life
went about in humble sincerity, wearing neither the mantle
of the Prophet, nor the hairy garb and leathern girdle of
the eremite, but making His appeal to the hearts of men
by the sacred elements of the humanity which was the
210
CHRIST'S METHODS. 211
common gift of God alike to the rich and to the poor, to
the great and to the lowly.
" In Himself was all His state.
More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits
On princes, when their rich retinue long
Of horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold.
Dazzles the crowd, and sets them all agape."
His was that most simple and deep-reaching form of evan-
gelisation which, in the persons of His holiest followers — a
Paul, a Peter, a Francis of Assisi, a Francis Xavier, a Wes-
ley, a Whitefield — has ever been ten-thousandfold more
effective than the most elaborately gorgeous ceremonials
of Popes and Priests. And though He wore the peasant
garb, and associated constantly with the peasant multitude,
and had not about Him a single attribute of earthly state,
there was something so heart-searching in His very look
that it troubled the world-entangled soul of the young
ruler;* and broke the heart of Peter ;f and impressed the
arrogant cynicism of the Roman Procurator ; :j: and again
and again left an indelible impression on the minds of His
disciples, § and even of the multitude.
When He was at Jerusalem He taught sometimes in the
Temple — but only in the open courts and porticoes, because
they were the common places of resort where alone in the
Holy City His voice could be heard by the multitudes who
thronged thither to the feasts. But the rites and cere-
monies of that desecrated Temple, infinitely elaborated as
they were, received from Him no word of approval. The
wild joy of the ceremony of drawing water in the Feast of
Tabernacles only caused Him to exclaim, " If any man
thirst, let him come unto Me and drink " ; | and when the
people were exulting in the glory of the huge golden can-
delabra and numberless lamps which shed their glow over
the Treasury and the Temple Courts, He said, " I am the
* Mark x. 21, 22. f Luke xxii. 6i. t John xix. 5.
§ Matt. xix. 26 ; Mark x. 27. II John vii. 37.
212 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Light of the world : he that followeth Me shall not walk in
the darkness, but shall have the light of life."*
These obvious, but unrecorded, indications that Christ's
teaching was suggested by immediate circumstances lead us
to suppose that this was constantly the case. The Parable
of the Pounds was suggested by the history of King Arche-
laus, which was brought into our Lord's mind by the sight
of the palace which he had built at Jericho. The allusion
to the wind which bloweth where it listeth, in the discourse
with Nicodemus, would naturally arise from the soughing
of the night wind outside the booth. The allegory of the
Ideal Vine may have been suggested by the vineyards near
the Kidron, or by the Golden Vine over the Temple door.
There are some minds which seem to think that worship
must be imperfect if it is not surrounded with splendour
and symbolism. Thus a Roman Catholic author wrote :
"Oh! then what delight! what joy unspeakable! The
stoups are filled to the brim ; the lamp of the Sanctuary
burns bright, and the albs hang in the oaken ambries, and
the cope-chests are filled with osphreyed baudekins, and
pyx, and pax, and chrismatory are there, and thurible
and cross !"f Strange sources, indeed, to any manly and
spiritual mind for such ecstatic rapture! How many
millions of true saints have enjoyed the utmost bliss of
holy worship without any need of being excited or dis-
tracted by " pyx," or " pax," or " chrismatory," or " oaken
ambries," or even " osphreyed baudekins ! " Such things as
the thurible and the crucifix were unknown to, and avoided
by, primitive Christians in the centuries when Christianity
was most effective and most pure. Artificial religious
externalism receives no approval from the lips of Christ.
Nothing which remotely resembles it is distantly alluded
to, either by Him or His Apostles, as constituting a desir-
able adjunct of holy worship. Even Levitism, destined to
meet the requirements of a people whose hearts were gross,
*John viii. 12. \ Recollections of A. Welby Pugiti, p. 162.
CHRIST'S METHODS. 213
and their ears dull of hearing, offers no analogy to the
spirituality, simplicity, and sincerity of worship which are
the sole requirements for our approach to Him who is a
Spirit, and who requires them that worship Him to worship
Him in spirit and in truth. Alike by His precepts and by
His practice, He who came from the bosom of the Father
illustrates the truth that sincere devotion can make even
the mud floor of the humblest cottage "as sacred as the
rocks of Sinai."
Hence Jesus taught sometimes in the house which at
Capernaum served Him as a home; * sometimes in Peter's
house, or the house of Martha and Mary at Bethany, f
Sometimes — as in the house of Simon the Pharisee, and of
other Pharisaic rulers— He made an ordinary meal the
occasion of some of His deepest lessons, and borrowed His
images from bread, and salt, and wine, and the washing of
hands. :{: He taught and healed in the market-places, and
at city gates ; § and in the broader streets and roads. ||
Much of His most solemn instruction was given, especially
to His Apostles, as He journeyed with them on the
frequented highways,^ or in lonely places to which He
had retired,** or " in the fields as they went from village to
to village." ff Some of His richest Parables were addressed
to the multitudes who crowded the beach while the little
boat, which was always at His disposal, rocked gently on
the bright ripples of the lake He loved. '!^ Sometimes He
spoke to throngs composed of poor pilgrims from every
*Mark ii. I, iii. 20, where elg oIkov {or hv oko) means that the house was His
house.
f Matt. viii. 14 ; Luke x. 38.
:j: John vi. ; Matt. v. 13, ix. 17 ; Luke v. 37 ; Matt. xv. 2 ; Mark vii. 2.
§ Mark vi. 56.
II Matt. vi. 2 ; Luke x. 10, xiii. 26.
T[ Matt. xvi. 13.
** Matt. xiv. 13 ; Luke ix. 10, xi. i ; Mark vi. 34, 35.
ff Matt. ix. 35, xiv. 15 ; Mark vi. 56 ; Luke xii. 22, etc.
\\ Matt. xiii. i. 2 ; Mark ii. 13 ; Luke v. 1-3,
214 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
nation, as they sat round Him on the hilltop; and some-
times on the broad and lonely plains whither great multi-
tudes flocked to Him on foot from all the cities.* He
loved to speak in the open air under God's blue heaven,
and among the lilies of the field. Teaching, with His feet
among the mountain flowers, He could point to the golden
amaryllis, or the scarlet anemones, or the gorgeous tulips,
and tell His hearers to trust in God's free bounty, since not
even "Solomon in all his glory" was arrayed like one of
these, which were but the perishing "grass of the field."
Teaching with the soft wind of heaven upon His brow, He
could point the lessons to be learnt from the ravens and the
sparrows and the bright or lowering sky. But, for the
greater part of His life, the simple worship of the syna-
gogues sufficed Him. "As His custom was He went into
the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up for to
read " ; and " He taught in their synagogues, being
glorified of all." f
But it did not seem to make the least difference to the
depth and power of His teaching whether He was speaking
to the ears of a single auditor, like Nicodemus, the timid
Chakani who came to Him by night, or the Samaritan
woman by the noonday well, or the blind man whom He
had healed ; or whether He was in the midst of " myriads,":}:
who "pressed, and crushed Him,"§ and " trode on one
another" in their eagerness to hear the gracious words
which proceeded from His lips.
* Matt. V. I, XV. 29, xvii. I. f Luke iv. 15, 16, etc.
X Luke xii. - § Luke viii. 45.
CHAPTER XX.
THE FORM OF CHRIST'S TEACHING.
UoTiVfiepug km no'kvTpdKuq. — Heb. i. I.
The form of Christ's teaching was as varied and as simple
as were its methods. It was the spontaneous outcome of
the requirements of the moment. Whatever was most
exactly needed for the defence of a truth, or the blighting
of a hypocrisy, or the startling of self-satisfaction into peni-
tence, or the consolation of despondency, was instantane-
ously clothed in its best form, whether of reproach, or
question, or deep irony, or tender apostrophe, or exquisitely
poetic image. It was a UoXvttoihiXo? Goqjia, "a. richly
variegated wisdom," which, like the King's daughter, was
" circu7naniicta varietatibiis — clothed in raiment of various
colours."''^ His lessons were not, it would seem, often
expressed in long and didactic addresses, to which the Ser-
mon on the Mount offers the nearest approach. There was
in them nothing of recondite metaphysics. "What Jesus
had to offer," it has been said, "was not a new code with its
penal enactments, not a new system of doctrine with its
curse upon all who should dare to depart from it, but a sure
promise of deliverance from misery, of consolation under
all suffering, and perfect satisfaction for all the wants of the
soul." And this was set forth, not in gorgeous metaphor,
or sonorous rhetoric, but in language of the most perfect
simplicity, unencumbered by the pedantry of scholasticism,
or the minutiae of logic. There ran throughout His dis-
courses " the two weighty qualities of impressive pregnancy
and popular intelligibility." And to make what He said
* Eph. iii. 10 ; Ps. xlv. 13.
315
2i6 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
more clear in its brevity, His words were illuminated with
constant illustrations, not drawn from remote truths of
science, but suggested by the commonest sights, sounds,
and scenes of nature, and the most familiar incidents of
humble life — the rejoicing shepherd carrying back on his
shoulders the recovered lamb ; the toiling vine-dressers ;
the harvesters in the fields of ripe corn ; the children busy
in gathering the tares for burning ; the woman seeking for
the lost coin out of her forehead-circlet ; the man going to
borrow from his neighbour a loaf for his hungry and
unexpected guest. He taught by picturesque and concrete
examples,* or when He laid down general rules applied
them to actual cases. Instead of speaking in the abstract
of the beauty of Humility, He took a little child and set
him in the midst, and bade the disciples receive the King-
dom of Heaven as that little child. f Instead of warning
them that they were liable to constant temptation, He says,
" Behold, Satan has desired to have you, that he may sift
you as wheat." f Instead of saying, "You must not be
content to keep your convictions for your private guidance,"
He says, " Is the lamp brought to be put under the bushel
or under the bed, and not to be put on the stand?":}: By
multitudes of such pictures He caused a spontaneous
recognition of the truth which to every enlightened con-
science would itself be as an authoritative command.
" A theoretical philosophy strictly so called," says Schii-
rer, " was a thing entirely foreign to genuine Judaism.
Whatever it did happen to produce in the way of philoso-
phy {Chokmah, * wisdom ') either had practical religious
problems as its theme (as in Job and Ecclesiastes), or was
of a directly practical nature — being directions based upon
a thoughtful study of human things in order so to regulate
our life as to ensure our being truly happy. The form in
* Matt. vi. 19, 25, vii. 6, x. 35, xi. 8, xviii. 6, xix. 12 ; Luke vi. 34, and
passim,
\ Luke xxii, 31. % Matt. v. 15.
FORM OF CHRIST'S TEACHING. 217
which these contemplations and instructions were presented
was that of the ' proverb ' or aphorism {Mashai), which con-
tained a single thought expressed in concise and compre-
hensive terms, in a form more or less poetical, and in which
there was nothing of the nature of discussion or argument."*
Jewish literature possessed a collection of such aphorisms
in the Proverbs of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Jesus the
Son of Sirach; and later we find them in the Talmudic
book, Pirqe Avotk, or "Sayings of the Fathers." Our Lord
frequently adopted this gnomic mode of instruction in
concise sayings, of which these are but a few specimens ;
although, as a glance suffices to prove, He infuses into them
a depth of spiritual meaning which finds no parallel in any
other form of proverbial instruction.
" A city set on a hill cannot be hid." t
" Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees." f
" God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." §
" Leave the dead to bury their own dead." ||
" If the light in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness." IT
" Salt is good ; but if the salt have lost its saltness, wherewith will ye
season it.?"**
" Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles ?" tt
" If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into a pit."];|:
" It is not meet to take the children's bread, and cast it to the
dogs." §§
" He that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth," ||{|
" They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are
sick." 1[1[
"Be ye wise as serpents, but harmless as doves."***
If these be compared with the sayings of Heraclitus (for
instance) among the Greeks, or of Hillel, who furnishes the
best specimens which we can find in the Talmud, their
immense superiority will at once be recognised. There is
* Hist, of the Jezvish People, div. ii, vol. iii. 24, E. T.
t Matt. V. 14. X Matt. xvi. 6. § Matt. xxii. 32.
II Luke ix. 60. \ Matt. vi. 23. ** Mark ix. 50.
tt Matt. vii. 19. XX Matt. xv. 14. §§ Mark vii. 27,
II John xii. 35. T[T[ Mark ii. 17. *** Matt. x. 16,
2i8 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
nothing strained or obscure about them ; they are intensely
concrete and picturesque. Their marvellous concentration
excludes every superfluous word, yet admits no lurking fal-
lacy. They have the illuminating force of the lightning ;
they compress words of wisdom into a single line. A child
may understand them, but the wisest philosopher cannot
exhaust their infinite significance.
Our Lord taught, it has been truly said, in ideas, not in
limitations; and the essence of faith is "a permanent confi-
dence in the idea — a confidence never to be broken down
by apparent failures, or by examples by which ordinary
people prove that qualification is necessary. It was pre-
cisely because Jesus taught the idea, and nothing below it,
that the effect produced by Him could not have been pro-
duced by anybody nearer to ordinary humanity."
Again, in order to arrest the attention and stimulate the
jaded and conventional moral sense of His hearers, our
Lord often adopted the form of paradox to state " excep-
tionless principles^' such as could only be perverted by a
stupid literalism. Exceptions which are inevitable, and are
a matter of course, may easily be omitted.* In fact, some
of Christ's vivid questions and concentrated appeals are
thrown into the form which was known to the Greeks as
oxymoron — which is defined as a saying which is the more
forcible from its apparent extravagance, f
Take, for instance, such a rule as :
" When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor
thy l)rethren, nor thy kinsfolk, nor rich neighbours ; lest haply they also
bid thee again, and a recompense be made thee. But when thou makest
a feast, bid the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind. . ."J
No one of the most ordinary intelligence would fail to see
* See Matt. vii. i, xx. i6, xxv. 29 ; Mark ii. 17 ; John v. 31 (comp. viii.
14), ix. 39, etc.
f See Matt. v. 39, ix. 13 ; Luke xiv. 26 ; John vi. 27, etc.; Glass, Philology
Sacr. p. 468.
X Luke xiv. 12-14.
FORM OF CHRIST'S TEACHING. 219
that the rule is not intended for /zV^r^'/ application, but that
it was meant to point out that there is no merit in hospital-
ity which is only directed by the " slightly expanded egot-
ism " of family selfishness, or only intended to bring about
a return in kind ; but that the highest and most genuine
hospitality is disinterested, loving, and compassionate. It
must also be borne in mind that our Lord naturally spoke
in the idioms of His country, and that in Hebrew";/^/"
often means " not only — but also," or " not so much — as." *
In other words, ^^ not" is often used to deny, not abso-
lutely, but conditionally and comparatively, f
Again, when He said, "Whosoever smiteth thee on thy
right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man
would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let him
have thy cloak also," He merely meant to present the essen-
tial ideas of forbearance and forgiveness " with the great-
est clearness and in the briefest compass." He showed by
His own example — as indeed His hearers would have easily
understood — that He did not mean such paradoxes to be
taken in the letter; for when He was Himself smitten on
the cheek by the servant of the High Priest He did not
turn the other cheek, but addressed to the insolent offender
a dignified rebuke in the words, " If I have spoken evil, bear
witness of the evil ; but if well, why smitest thou Me? "
So, too, when He said, " If any man cometh unto Me,
and Jiatetli not his own father and mother, and wife, and
children, and brethren and sisters, yea and his own life also,
he cannot be My disciple,":}: He was speaking to those who
were perfectly familiar with Jewish idioms, which put truth
in its extremest form, and — as a figure of speech — empha-
sised a precept by the exclusion of all exceptions. §
* See Prov. viii. lo ; John vi. 27 ; i Cor. i. 17, xv. 10 ; i Tim. ii. 9, etc.
f See Jer. viii. 22 ; Joel ii. 13 ; Matt. ix. 13 ; Gal. v. 21 ; Heb. vii. Ii.
if Wendt (ii. 67) compares the saying of Luther " Nehmen sie den Leib,
Gut, Ehr, Kind, und Weib. Lass fahren dahin ! "
§ Luke xiv. 26. We see from Matt. x. 37, that " hate " merely means in
comtarison with the deeper, diviner love.
220 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
This fact is illustrated by the way in whicii St. Matthew
records the saying ; — which is " He that loveth father or
mother more tJian Me is not worthy of Me : and he that
loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me."*
Thus, in our Lord's favourite quotation from the Prophet
Hoshea, " I desire mercy and 7iot sacrifice," neither the
ancient Prophet nor our Lord meant to abrogate the whole
Levitic law of sacrifice, but only to express the transcen-
dence of the duty of mercy.
In teaching which was pre-eminently intended to arrest
the attention and to linger in the memory, the form of ex-
pression is of the utmost importance. f Our Lord's dis-
courses were often delivered in the current Aramaic, and if
we possessed them in their original form it is more than
possible that we should find that they abounded in those
assonances and forcible plays on words which often have a
hidden power of their own. Thus, the words (Matt. xi. 17),
" We piped unto you and ye did not dance,
We wailed, and ye did not beat the breast,"
in addition to their rhythmic and antithetic parallelism
would have been still more forcible if the words used for
"danced" and "mourned" were rakedtoon and arkedtoon.
The phrase " the gates of Hades" (Matt. xvii. 18) may
have acquired impressiveness from the alliteration, Shaare
SJieol. \ Again, what a new light falls on the familiar words,
" Come unto Me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and
I will give you rest. For I am meek and lowly in heart,
and ye shall find rest unto your souls," when we know the
assonances between " I will give you rest " {anikhkhoii),
" meek " {jiikh) and " rest " {Nikhd).
* Matt. X. 37.
\ Thomas Boys (on I Pet. iii.) says : " The intention of these apparent in-
consistencies is that we may mark them, dwell upon them, get instruction out
of them. Things are put to us in a strange way, because if they were put in a
more ordinary way we should not notice them."
:j:On this subject, see Ileinsius, Aristarchus; and Glass, FJiil. Sacra, p. 958,
FORM OF CHRIST'S TEACHING. 221
In Matt. iii. 9, St. John the Baptist plays on the asso-
nance between Abanim (" stones ") and Banivi (" sons "). In
Matt. X. 30, we read, " The very hairs of your head are all
nuviberedr This is a paronomasia between Mene ("hairs ")
and mamyan (" numbered"). In Luke vii. 41, 42, the words
chav (" owe ") and achab (" one another ") resemble each
other. In John i. 5, the Syriac would be, " The light shin-
eth in darkness {Gebal), and the darkness comprehended
{gibbal) it not."*
It has not perhaps been sufficiently noticed that our
Lord sometimes adopted for His teaching the form of
spontaneous poetry — engraving the words on the memory
of His hearers by adopting the rhythmic parallelism of
Hebrew verse, characterised by that climax and refrain in
which Eastern poetry delights. The parallelism which is
the distinctive characteristic of Hebrew poetry falls under
three main heads — antithetic, synthetic, and synonymous.
We find all three forms utilised in Christ's teaching. We
have antithetic paralellism in such sayings as
" Every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled.
And he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." t
We have synthetic, or progressive parallelism in
" He that receiveth you receiveth Me,
And he that recevieth Me, receiveth Him that sent Me."t
Synonymous, or illustrative parallelism is found in such say-
ings as
" They that are whole have no need of a physician,
But they that are sick."
" I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." §
The following is a specimen of synthetic parallelism in
which the second line not only emphasises but advances
* Adduced by Dr. Bullinger, Figures of Scripture, p. 322.
f Luke xiv. 11. | Matt. x. 40. § Mark ii. 17.
222 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
the sense of the first ; and to which in the last two lines is
added a specimen of antithetic parallelism :
" Think not that I came to send peace on earth :
I came not to send peace, but a sword.
For I came to set a man at variance against his father.
And the daughter against her mother,
And the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
And a man's foe shall be they of his own household."
" He that findeth his life shall lose it ;
And he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it."*
Again
" Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men,
But the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven.
And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be
forgiven him ;
But whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be
forgiven him.
Neither in this aeon, nor in the coming one."
Here two antithetic parallelisms are followed by a strong
synthetic conclusion, f Again, in Matt. xxv. 34-46 there
is a lovely and powerful rhythmic passage in which " each
division consists of a triplet or stanza of three lines, fol-
lowed by a stanza of six lines, which, in the form of a
climax, state the reason of the sentence ; then the response
of those that receive the sentence, then the reply of the
Judge; lastl}^ the concluding couplet describes the passage
to their doom of the just and of the unjust." :{:
This poetic structure is often traceable in the Sermon on
the Mount, as in the lines of synthetic and introverted
parallelism in which the first corresponds to the fourth,
and the second to the third.
" Give not that which is holy unto the dogs,
Neither cast ye your pearls before swine,
*Matt. X. 34-39, xvi. 25 ; Mark viii. 35 ; Luke ix. 24. See, too. Matt. vi.
19, 20.
f Matt. xii. 31, 32. X Carr Si. Matthezv, p. 280.
FORM OF CHRIST'S TEACHING. 223
Lest haply they trample them under their feet
And turn again and rend you." *
And in the next two verses there are " triplets with an
ascending climax." f
" Ask, and it shall be given you ;
Seek, and ye shall find ;
Knock, and it shall be opened unto you
For every one that asketh receiveth,
And he that seeketh findeth,
And to him that knocketh it shall be opened."
And, not to multiply examples, there is a peculiarly lovely
and finished specimen of synthetic and antithetic parallel-
ism in the address of our Lord to Simon the Pharisee. ^
" Simon, dost thou mark this woman ?
I entered into thine house,
Thou gavest me no water for my feet ;
But she hath wetted my feet with her tears
And wiped them with her hair.
Thou gavest me no kiss ;
But she, since the time I came in,
Hath not ceased to kiss my feet.
My head with oil thou didst not' anoint ;
But she hath anointed my feet with spikenard.
Her sins, which are many, are forgiven.
For she loved much ;
But to whom little is forgiven.
The same loveth little."
* Matt. vii. 6. For another instance of introverted parallelism see Matt. vi.
24.
f /(/. 7, 8. Similiar triplets of synthetic parallelism are found in John x.
27, 28.
X Luke vii. 44-47.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE FORM OF CHRIST'S TEACHING {continued).
THE PARABLES.
" A parable of knowledge is in the treasures of wisdom." — Ecclus. i. 25.
"Apples of gold in baskets of silver." — Prov. xxv. 11,
" Though truths in manhood darkly join,
Deep-seated in our mystic frame,
We yield all blessing to the Name
Of Him who made them current coin."
—Tennyson.
The teachings of our Lord, especially after the earliest
phase of His Ministry, was more habitually and essentially
pictorial and illustrative than that of any other teacher of
mankind. The word •" parable " — derived from napa^oKX-
£iv, " to place side by side," and so " to compare " — is
used in the Gospels with a wider latitude than we ordi-
narily give to it. The parable differs from (i.) a fable
because it only moves within the limits of possibility ;
from (ii.) an allegory in not being throughout identical
with the truth illustrated ; from (iii.) a simile, in its more
complete and dramatic development. There is no direct
parable in the Gospel of St. John, but there are many
" symbolic comparisons," of which the majority are drawn
from Nature — such as that of the wind blowing where it
listeth (iii. 8) ; the growth of the grain of wheat (xii. 24);
sowing and reaping (iv. 35-38) ; and there are two alle-
gories, those of the Fair Shepherd, and the Vine and its
branches. St. John does not use the word napafioXr}
once, but he uses the word napoijxia (" proverb ") four
224
FORM OF CHRIST'S TEACHING. 225
times (x. 6, xvi. 25, 29). Elsewhere this word only occurs
in 2 Peter ii. 22.*
The name, " parable," is given, not only to continuous
narratives, but to condensed maxims such as :
" If the blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall into the ditch ? " f
"Physician, heal thyself." I
" The whole have no need of the physician, but the sick." §
" No man rendeth a piece from a new garment and putteth it on an
old garment, or putteth new wine into old wine-skins." ||
" Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles .''" IF
In point of fact, the words " parable " and " proverb "
are used to some extent interchangeably, and both words
are, in the Septuagint, chosen to translate the Hebrew
Mashal. ** In this sense of the word even the Sermon on
the Mount abounds in parables, for it contains fully four-
teen comparisons, any one of which might have been
expanded into a little narrative.
In ordinary English, however, the word " parable " is
used to describe the illustrations which, whether derivad
from nature or from human life, are used as pictorial figures
of spiritual and moral truths. These have been divided
into symbolic (which are the more numerous) and typical.\^
Symbolic parables are those which, like the Parables of the
Sower, the Mustard Seed, or the Fisher's Net, are descrip-
* The Book of Proverbs is called Tlapoifiiai in the LXX., but in i Kings iv. 32
we read, k2.d?i7iae rpiaxi^tai irapafio^aq.
f Luke V. 36. Our Lord very rarely used irony, as in Mark vii. 9.
X Luke vi. 39.
§ Mark ii. 17.
I Luke iv. 23. This proverb is found in the Talmud, in e. g. Tanchuma f . 4, 2.
^Matt. vii. 16, 2-4, xxiii. 24, xxiv. 28. For many others see Mark ii. 2I;
iii. 27,iiv, 21, vii. 27, x. 25 ; Luke xvi. 13, xvii. 31, xxiii. 31 ; Matt. xvii. 25;
John iv. 37, etc. Many of these are found in the Talmud ; Sanhedrin, f. 100,
i; Baba Bathra, f. 15, 2, etc.
** Ps. xHx. 4 ; Ixxviii. 2 ; i Sam. x. 19, xxiv. 14. Comp. Num. xxiii. 7 ;
Prov. i. 6 ; Ezek. xii. 22, etc.
f f Goebel, The Parables of Jesus, p. 4.
226 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
tive pictures set forth in a narrative form ; typical parables
are those like the Parables of the Good Samaritan, or Dives
and Lazarus, which convey instruction and warning by the
incidents or histories of human life. The Old Testament
supplies us with one example of each kind.* Nathan's
Parable of the Ewe Lamb is typical ; f Isaiah's Parable of
the Vineyard is symbolic:]: In the Psalms of Solomon, the
Book of Enoch, and in later Rabbinic literature, parables
are found, both symbolic and typical ; but whereas not one
of them has seized the imagination of mankind, the para-
bles of Jesus remain to this day a source of delight and of
deepest instruction to all sorts and conditions of men, and
in age after age have exercised over the world a memorable
influence.
It is interesting to observe that our Lord expressly used
parables to instruct the simple and ignorant multitude,
whereas by earlier teachers they had been regarded as the
prerogative of the Chaberim, or " pupils of the wise."
Tillers and herdsmen, says the Son of Sirach, are not found
where parables are spoken. §
It is further remarked that, amid all the crude and auda-
cious inventions of the Apocryphal Gospels, they do not
venture to invent a single parable. The Divine Wisdom nec-
essary to offer even a remote parallel to such instruction lay
wholly beyond the sphere of the capacity of crude fabulists.
The parables of Jesus took their tone in a great measure
from the circumstances by which He was surrounded, and
the class of people whom He was addressing.! For instance,
the first series, delivered at Capernaum — seven or eight in
*The address of Jotham (Judge ix. 7-15) is a fable. The scornful reply of
Jehoash to Amaziah (2 Kings xiv. 9, 10) is a sort of symbolic parable. Comp.
Heb. ix. g.
f 2 Sam. xii. 1-6.
:f There are many passages in Ezekiel (xv., xvi., xvii. i-io, 22-24, xxiii.)
and Isaiah (v. 1-6) which contain parabolic elements.
§ Ecclus. xxxviii. 33.
\ Goebel, pp. 21-23.
FORM OF CHRIST'S TEACHING. 227
number — deals with the founding of God's Kingdom; the
second series, mainly given by St. Luke (x.-xix.) describes
the progressive development of the Kingdom, and the atti-
tude of its members toward God and toward the world ; the
final series, which belong to the last period of Christ's minis-
try, relates to the future completion of the Kingdom at the
end of its temporal development.
One series of these parables was practically consecutive.
" The Sower exhibits the rise of the kingdom ; the Weeds
sown by the devil, its obstacles ; the Mustard Seed and the
Leaven, its growth ; the Treasure and the Pearl, its appro-
priation by mankind ; the Net, the separation at the judg-
ment, which closes the history of its development."
There was a reason for the adoption of the parabolic
form of teaching, which our Lord explained. His parables
resembled the pillar of fire, which to the hostile Egyptians
was a pillar of cloud. At first He had spoken to the multi-
tudes in similitudes indeed, but such as explained them-
selves ; and when He first resorted to parables the disciples
were astonished.* In answer to their question He explained
the double object of this change of method. It was at once
helpful and penal. To the earnest and faithful they gave
light ; to the wilful and perverse they were as a veil. To
the earnest, the sincere, the humble-minded, in proportion
to their faithfulness, the parables were, as Seneca said of
fables, " adniinicula imbecillitatis "/ but, to those who cared
nothing for the truth, or directly set themselves against it,
the indifference which caused them to disdain the truth made
of the parables a shroud to hide it from them.f Thus, as
Bacon said, " A parable has a double use — it tends to veil,
and it tends to illustrate a truth. In the latter case it seems
designed to teach; in the former to conceal.";}:
* Matt. xiii. lo.
f See the excellent article on Parables by the late Dean Plumptre in Smith's
Diet, of the Bible.
\ Bacon, De Sap. Veteriun. The strong expression of Mark iv. I2, " in
228 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
How far any of the typical parables were borrowed from
actual facts which had come under the cognisance of Jesus
we are unable to say, though many of them read like
descriptions of real events. None of them show any im-
probability ; much less do they even transgress the limits
of the possible. It is, however, a most interesting fact that
we are able to trace the origin of />. i. 1 19.
" Stupenda inanitas et vafrities." — Lightfoot, Bed. in Hor. Hebr.
Already in a previous chapter we have seen something
of the wretched series of minutiae into which the Pharisees
had degraded the Levitic System, though that system con-
sisted, as St. Paul says, of " weak and beggarly rudiments,"
and was nothing more than " a yoke of bondage," necessi-
tated by ignorance and hardness of heart.* The funda-
mental differences between the religion of the letter and of
the spirit, between the righteousness of the law and " the
righteousness which is through faith in Christ," f will be
found summarily described in the answer of Christ to the
Scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem, who came to act as
spies upon His ministry. :j:
The Pharisees were the only body of the Jewish people
with whom Christ entered into a position of direct antago-
nism, forced upon Him by their subterranean baseness, as
well as by the paltriness of their conceptions and the arro-
gance which resulted from their fundamental misapprehen-
sion of what is and is not truly sacred in the eyes of God..
* Gal, iv, 9, V. I. \ See Phil. iii. 9.
% Matt, \v. 1-20 ; M?i.rk vii. 1-2 1^
269
270 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Their system was an elaborate " cxternalization of holi-
ness " ; His teaching was that " God is a Spirit, and they
that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth."
It was the main object of the Lord of Life to bring to
erring men that true life which they can only acquire by
union with God. Formalities of every kind, will-worship,
even severities of the body, are easy ; but, as St. Paul so
emphatically says, they are of no value against the indul-
gence of the flesh.* It is easy to bow the head like a bul-
rush, but not easy to offer from the depths of a penitent
heart the prayer of the Publican, " God be merciful to me,
the sinner." The Pharisees called their Rabbis " Uprooters
of Mountains," " Lights of Israel," " Glories of the Law,"
"The Great," "The Holy," but the mass of the people
were in their eyes mere boors, "empty wells," "people of
the earth," " who knew not the Law and were accursed." f
Yet " the boldest religionists and mock-prophets," says
Henry More,;}: "are very full of heat and spirits; and have
their imagination too often infected with the fumes of
those lower parts, the full sense and pleasure whereof
they prefer before all the subtle delights of reason and
generous contemplation."
Always kind, always courteous, always forbearing even
towards meddling spies — ready to meet their quibbles,
ready to answer their questions, ready to accept their super-
cilious hospitality, ready with the most gracious courtesy
to meet their hard and calumnious criticisms — Jesus was
compelled at last " to break into plain thunderings and
lightnings " against them, in order to strip bare their hypoc-
risies, and to blight the influence they exerted over hosts of
*Col. ii. 23.
f In Lukexviii. 10-12, we read the brag of the posing Pharisee, and it is
exactly analogous to a prayer of R. Nechounia ben Hakana in Berachoth (see
Schwab, p. 336). But
" Humble we must be if to heaven we go ;
High is the roof there, but the gate is low."
\ Conject. Cahbalist., p. 231.
PHARISAIC RELIGIONISM. 271
deluded followers and proselytes, whom, to use His own
terrible expression, they " made tenfold more the children
of Gehenna than themselves."* He could not reveal to the
world the unchangeable truths which constitute the Alpha
and Omega of genuine holiness, without showing how mean
a parody was substituted for it by these "shallow and sel-
fish men, bigots in creed and in conduct, capable of no sin
disapproved by tradition, incapable of any virtue unenjoined
by it ; too respectable to be publicans and sinners, but at
once too ungenerous to forgive any sin against their own
order, and too blind to see the sins within it ; who remain
for all time our most perfect types of fierce and inflexible
devotion to a worship instituted and administered by man,
but of relentless and unbending antagonism to religion, as
the service of God in spirit and in truth." f
The Pharisees were the Tartuffes of ancient days. The
Gospel system could not be established without the over-
throw of that which had become the corporate expression
ol the cardinal sin of Judaism, the corruption of man's wor-
ship of God to a mere outward service by acts formal and
artificial, through instruments and articles sensuous, exter-
nal, purchasable. :{: Shammai, the rival of Hillel, was a
luxurious and selfish man ; yet so particular was he about
senseless scrupulosities that he almost starved his little son
on the Day of Atonement, and made a booth over the child-
bed of his daughter-in-law that his first-born grandson might
keep the Feast of Tabernacles ! § If they had understood
the most elementary teaching of the Psalms, || the Proph-
ets, T[ and even of their own Law,** they would not have
* Matt, xxiii. 15. -j- Fairbairn.
X Jost., GescA. d. Juden. iv. 76 ; Gfrorer, Jahrh. d. Heils, i. 140 ; Lightfoot,
Hor. Hebr. on Matt. iii. 17.
§ Succah. ii. g.
II Ps. vii. 10, xxiv. 4, 1. 8, li. 12, 18, cxxxix. 23.
iris. i. 10, Iviii. I, Ixvi. i; Jer. vi. 20, vii. 21, xvii. 10, xxxi. 32 ; Mic. vi. 6;
Amos V. 21 ; i Sam. xvi. 7.
** Deut. vi. 5.
272 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
elaborated their eye-service of men-pleasers which usurped
the place of that singleness of heart without which forms
and ceremonies are but as a booming gong or a clanging
cymbal. They ordained rites which corresponded to noth-
ing, and made their scrupulosities a cloak of maliciousness.
Christ extended the Decalogue itself to the thoughts of the
heart, and summed up all the Commandments in the Law
of Love. And in point of fact this was not in disaccord
with their own best teaching in their saner moments, for We
read in Soteh (p. 14, i), "The beginning of the Law is
benevolence, and in benevolence it ends. At the begin-
ning God clothed the naked (Gen. iii. 21), at the end He
buried the dead (Deut. xxxiv. 5,6)."
What was the so-called Oral Law which the Pharisees so
extravagantly valued ? The first sentence of the Pirqe
AvotJi tells us how Moses received the Thorah from God on
Mount Sinai, and that through Joshua, the Elders, and the
Prophets it was transmitted to the men of the Great Syna-
gogue, who, in accordance with the literal translation of
Lev. xviii. 30 (" make a MisJwieretJi to my MisJwiereth ")
handed it down as a duty to " make a fence to the Thorah "
{seyyag la-Thorah). The Rabbis held that Moses received
two Laws on Sinai, both the Written [Tho7'ah Sliebektab)
and the Oral Law {Thorah shebeal Pch) — " the law on the
lip."* Hence they described the Mishnah as "the
Halachah " (or " Rule ") given to Moses on Sinai ; and
Rabbi Simon Ben Lakdeh assigned a Mosaic origin even to
the Gemara,f including Halachoth, Haggadoth, and Mid-
rashim.:}: Nay, they exalted their tradition above the writ-
* The phrase is borrowed from Ex. xxxiv. 27, where al Peh is rendered
" after the tenor,"
\ Gittin, f. 6, 2 ; Hershon, Talm. Miscell., p. xv. On the great synagogue,
see Taylor's Pirqe Avoth, pp. 125, 126.
\ This they deduced in their own way from Mich. ii. 6, 7. In Baba Metzia
(86a) God summons Rabbi Bar-Nachman to settle a controversy which has
arisen between Him and the angels. Comp. f. 59, 6 ; Shemoth Kabbah, ch.
clvii. ; Berachoth, i. 7.
PHARISAIC RELIGIONISM. 273
ten Law, and said, " The words of the Scribes are more
noble than the words of the Law," In the Baba Metzia
we are told that to read the Mishnah and Gemara is far
more meritorious than to read the words of Scripture.
"The sayings of the elders," they said, "are weightier than
those of the Prophets." * Not to read the Shema, accord-
ing to Rabbi Abba Bar-Eshera, in the name of Rabbi
Judah Bar-Pari, deserves but a slight punishment, for it
only breaks an affirmative precept ; but not to read it
according to the rule of Hillel deserves capital punish-
ment, for " whoso breaketh a hedge (the Seyyag la-Thorah)
a serpent shall bite him"! (Eccl. x. 8). If a man's father
and his Rabbi are carrying burdens, he is to lighten the
Rabbi first. If both are in captivity he must first ransom
his Rabbi.f Pride went hand in hand with littleness.
They loved the chief seats in synagogues and the upper-
most place at feasts, and greetings in the market places,
and to be called of men. Rabbi, Rabbi. Modern criticism
has proved it to be at least possible that much of the
Levitic system did not assume its present form until after
the Exile. The futile elaborations of this Levitism —
imperfect and secondary as it was — had their origin in the
endeavour to separate Israel from all contact with the
nations by a network of traditions. The Scribes had
developed it into a sort of abracadabra without limit and
without end. " The whole history of religion proves that
a ceremony- and tradition-ridden time is infallibly a
morally corrupt time — artificial ceremonies, whether origin-
ating with Jewish Rabbis or Christian * priests,' are of no
spiritual value. Recommended by their zealous advocates,
often sincerely, as tending to promote the culture of
morality and piety, they often prove fatal to both. Well
are they called in the Epistle to the Hebrews ' dead works.*
If they have any life at all, it is life feeding upon death, the
* See Schiirer II. i. 3.
f Avoth iv. 12 ; Kerithoth, vi. 9. See Schurer II. i. 3.
274 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
life of fungi growing on dead trees ; if they have any
beauty, it is the beauty of decay, of autumnal leaves, sere
and yellow . . . when the woods are about to pass into
their winter state of nakedness." ^
Let us see how Jesus dealt with this state of things in
separate instances.
(i.) The Oral Law attached immense importance to the
ceremo7iial purifications, which occupy no less than twelve
treatises of the sixth Seder of the Mishnah, including
Yadaim or " Hand washings," and Migvaoth, " the water
used for baths and ablutions, and for the stalks of fruit
which convey uncleanness." f
Our Lord said to the Pharisees, " Now do ye Pharisees
cleanse the outside of the cup and of the platter, but your
inward part is full of extortion and wickedness." \\ or, as it
is in St. Matthew, " but within they are full from extortion
and excess." § The Pharisaic rules about the washing of
"cups and platters" were ludicrously minute. In the
treatise Kelim we read that the air in hollow earthen ves-
sels, like the hollow of the foot, contracts and propagates
uncleanness, so that they must be broken, and if a piece be
left large enough to anoint the little toe with, it is still " a
vessel," and therefore capable of defilement. They are to
be accounted as " broken " if there be a hole in them as
large as a medium-sized pomegranate ! Hillel caused end-
less trouble throughout the Dispersion by deciding, in
accordance with the rule of Joseph Ben Jezzer and Joseph
Ben Johanan, that even glass vessels were capable of con-
veying defilement. This legalised and intentional unsoci-
* See Bruce, Training of the Twelve, p. 82.
f See Winer, s. v. Reinigkeii ; Herzog, s. v. Reinigungen ; Schiirer II. ii.
§28.
\ Luke xi. 39.
§ Matt, xxiii. 25. St. Mark (vii. 4) speaks also of the washing of pots, and
brazen vessels, and tables, or couches. As to the latter we read in Kelim that
if one or two of the legs of a three-legged table are broken it is clean, but if
the third foot is gone, it becomes a board, and is susceptible of defilement.
PHARISAIC RELIGIONISM. 275
ability (Perishooth, afxi^ia) did infinite harm to the Jews
and prevented them from fulfilling the Divine mission
which they might otherwise have accomplished for the
ennoblement of the world,* Such puerilities could only
excite contempt in any healthy mind.
Again, as we know, the Jerusalemite spies, Scribes and
Pharisees, had seen some of the disciples " eat bread with
defiled {lit. common), tJiat is, tinwasJien hands," whereas
they themselves, following the tradition of the Elders,
washed their hands nvyf-U] (diligently ?), which is by some
interpreted to mean " up to the elbow," or " with the fist,"
and by others " up to the wrist." f The rule given in the
Talmudic book Soteli (f. 4, 6) is that " He who eats bread
without having first washed his hands, commits as it were
fornication." According to ShabbatJi (f. 14, 2) a Bath Kol,
or voice from heaven, had pronounced Solomon blessed
when he instituted the laws respecting hand-washings ; and
when a man washes his hands he is to first wash the right
hand, then the left, whereas in anointirig the hands he is
first to anoint the left hand, then the right.;}: " If a man
poured on one hand one gush his hand is clean ; but if one
gush on both hands R. Meir pronounces them unclean,
until one poured out a quarter log of water upon them." §
Moreover the scribes said it were better to cut off the
hands than to touch the nose, mouth, and ears with them
without having first washed them, as this causes blind-
ness, deafness, foul breath, and polypus. According to R.
* See many more of these paltry minutiae in Schiirer, /. c.
\ Heb. y.TrZ ' Mark vii. 3. See Lightfoot on Matt. xvi. 2 ; Hamburger,
Real. Ency. Handeivaschen. The word i^vyjuj probably refers to the rule that
the hand was to be held up, with closed fist, so that the water poured on it
streamed down to the elbow. There were additional rules as to the sort of
water to be used, from what vessel it was to be poured, who was to pour it,
etc. Vulg., crebro. Epiphanius {Hcer. 15) e'jrifj.e^.u^, " carefully." Erasmus
suggested a reading nvKvy. The reading of K is TrvKvd. The word occurs in
the LXX. ; Ex. xxi. 18 ; Is. Iviii. 4.
jj. Shabbath, f. 61, I. § Yadayim, ch. 2, I.
276 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Nathan an evil spirit named Bath Chorin haunts the
hands at night, and only departs if they are washed three
times ! '* Akiba preferred to die of thirst rather than not
wash his hands. The treatise Yadayivi, in four chapters, is
mainly devoted to this subject. According to another
treatise — the Kitzur Sh'lah — a man who does not wash his
hands before eating will have as little rest as a murderer,
and will be transmigrated into a cataract ; and in this
treatise we are taught that the proper way to wash the
hands is to stretch out the fingers, turning the palms
upwards, and say "Lift ye up your holy hands." f Fur-
ther, every one should have a vessel of water by his bed,
and if he walks four ells without washing his hands after
getting up "he has forfeited his life as a Divine punish-
ment.":}: Most truly may it be said of the Rabbinic writ-
ings, as Lightfoot says of them, "■ Niigis tibique scatent."
It should be observed that the question was not in the
least a question of health or cleanliness, but only of imagi-
nary and incidental defilements ; and our Lord swept aside
this whole mass of contemptible traditions in the one
sentence, "to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man."
Between Christ's teaching of spiritual simplicity and the
boundless i^eXoTtepiGGo^pijaueia (as Epiphanius admirably
calls it) of the Pharisees, there could be no middle term.§
(ii.) Again, the Scribes and Pharisees had developed
from the Levitic law reams of inferential littlenesses about
the distinction between clean and unclean meats. Accord-
ing to the Mishnah, God, in giving the law to Moses, had
assigned forty-nine reasons in every case for pronouncing
one thing unclean and another clean. || Seven hundred
kinds of fish and twenty-four kinds of birds were pro-
nounced unclean. Our Lord made very short work of all
* Yadayim, p. 109, i. f Ps. cxxxiv. 2.
X Kitzur Sh'lak, f. 43, 2. See Ilershon, Talmttdic Miscellany, p. 333.
§ Har. xvi. 34
\ Sopherim, xvi. 6.
PHARISAIC RELIGIONISM. 277
these laws of Kasliar 2,Vidi Tame (which still prevail in Jewish
communities)* when he said, "That which proceedeth out
of the man — out of the heart of men — that defileth the
man . . . whatsoever from without goeth into the man
cannot defile him."f This he said, making all meats clean.
He bade the disciples simply to eat such things as were set
before them,;}: just as St. Paul told his Gentile converts
to eat whatsoever was sold in the shambles, " asking no
questions."!
(iii.) To fasting the Pharisees ascribed an exaggerated
and most mistaken importance. The ninth treatise of
the second Seder of the Mishnah is devoted to fasts. In
the Levitic Law only one fast day was appointed in the
whole year (Lev. xvi. 29) — the Kippiir, or Day of Atone-
ment.! Py the time of Zechariah four yearly fasts had
come into vogue (Zech. viii. 19), but the Prophet declared
that they " should be to the House of Judah joy, and glad-
ness, and cheerful feasts," and when he was consulted
about them he in no way encouraged their observance
(vii. 1-14), but, in their place, enforced the duties of mercy
and compassion. Over and over again the great Prophets
of Israel had taught the uselessness of a fasting which had
not the least connection with goodness and charity.l" In
*Jos.c. Ap. ii. 17; Chullin, f. 63, 2. One specimen of the littleness of
their exegesis is shown in the prohibition to eat flesh and milk together because
of the law, " Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk ! "
f Mark vii. iS-23.
X Luke X. 8.
§ I Cor. X. 25.
II See, too. Numb. xxix. 7. The fact that this single fast and its ceremonies
is never referred to elsewhere in the Old Testament— not even in such passages
as Ezek. xl.-xlviii. and Neh. viii.-x., taken in connection with critical argu-
ments, constituted a decisive proof that the Day of Atonement was a Post-
exilic ordinance. See Dr. Driver, s. v. Day of Atonement (Dr. Hastings'
Diet, of the Bible).
Tfls. Iviii. 3-6; Mic. vi. 6-8; Amos v. 21-24, etc. Even in the Megillath
Taanith, which emanated from the early Rabbinic School, there is only a list
of days on which fasting is forbidden. Fasting was chiefly developed in the
278 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
the age of Christ the Pharisees had established two weekly
fasts, one on Thursday, when Moses was supposed to have
ascended Sinai, and one on Monday, when he descended,*
and they plumed themselves in a manner which the Lord
heartily disapproved upon these empty observances.
They probably became mere sham functions, fasting of
the effeminate amateur kind, in which case they were
beneath contempt ; or if they were real fasts, they were
a needless and injurious burden. The Scribes made them
still more injurious by parading their sanctimoniousness
and regarding it as a means for extorting Divine favours.
But when, on one of these fast-days, they, with the dis-
ciples of the Baptist, who in the imperfection of his views
had adopted the practice, came to complain, in all the carp-
ing fretfulness which fasting produces,! that neither our
Lord nor His Apostles took the least notice of this " tradi-
tion of the Elders," our Lord pointed out to them the only
conditions under which fasting becomes natural — the con-
ditions of overwhelming sorrow. He Himself " came eat-
ing and drinking " — that is, not depriving our human life
of the necessary support and innocent enjoyments which
God supplies and permits. This He did so openly as to
give to those who thought it right " to lie for God," the
excuse for the abhorrent calumny, " Behold a gluttonous
man and a wine-bibber." His disciples, " sons of the Bride-
chamber," ;{: could not fast while the Bridegroom was with
Post-exilic age. It is absurdly magnified in the Book of Judith iv. 13, viii. 6,
17-20. Comp. Tobit i, 10 ff. xii. 8.
* Bada Kama, f. 82, I,
f Mark ii. 18, ijcsav vjiaTEvovTeg. " The principle underlying this graphic rep-
resentation is that fasting should no/ be a matter of fixed mechanical rule, but
should have reference to the state of mind. . . Fasting under any other cir-
cumstances is forced, unnatural, unreal. Bruce's Training of the Twelve, 72.
In the New Testament the words " and fasting " are an ascetic and Manichean
interpolation of Scribes in Matt. xvii. 21; Mark ix. 29; Acts x. 30; i Cor.
vii. 5.
X Beni habachiinnah, the nearest friends of the wedded pair.
PHARISAIC RELIGIONISM. 279
them, but should fast, not of necessity, but in heaviness of
heart, when they had seen Him die on the Cross, and in the
coming days of overwhelming persecution. To interpret
" the days when the Bridegroom shall be taken away from
them," of the whole Christian Dispensation, and on that
misinterpretation to found the false inference that Chris-
tians ought continually to fast, is one of the most egre-
gious of the many egregious blunders of ignorant will-
worship. It ignores the innermost revelation of the
Saviour that His physical absence was actually " expedi-
ent " for His disciples, involving, as it did, the richer bless-
ing of a closer spiritual nearness. Hence the character-
istics of the early Christians were not gloomy anguish and
morose asceticism, but, on the contrary, exultation and
simplicity of heart.*
(iv.) Again our Lord entirely discountenapced the whole
method of Rabbinic exegesis with its " ever-widening
spiral ergo,'' drawn from the aperture of single texts. He
never referred except with disdain to Halachoth, which
were but masses of cobwebs spun out of their own fancy.
He ignored the Midrash, which was far less an explanation
of the Law and the Prophets than an inverted pyramid of
distortions built on its isolated phrases. In Ps. Ixii. 11 we
read
"God hath spoken once ;
Twice have I heard this ; "
and this was interpreted by Rabbi Akiba to mean " God
spake one thing ; what I heard is twofold," which wrests
the whole passage from its true meaning. This is in
accordance with the common Rabbinic comment, "Read
not thus, but thus." But our Lord's comments are always
on what the Bible means, not on those ingenious perver-
sions of it for party purposes which constituted no small
♦Acts ii. 46, "Breaking bread at home, they did take their food iv
hyoKkLaqei, ' ' in exultation " (the strongest of all words for abounding joy)
" and simplicity of heart."
28o THE LIFE OF LIVES.
part of current exegesis. He held with the saner Rabbis
that " Scripture speaks in the tongue of the sons of men."*
Jesus charged the Scribes with deliberately setting at
nought by their traditions the very Law round which, as
the most sacred object of their lives, they professed it to
be their duty to "make a hedge." They explained it " in
as many ways as a hammer dashes a rock into fragments."f
He never referred to the "decision of the Scribes,":}: nor
to the Kabbalistic mode of interpretation known as
Ge7ietJi,% nor to one of their unprofitably minute precepts.
But He did upbraid them with their hypocrisy.|| Thus by
means of their Emhhin (or "mixtures")^ they nullified
some of the Mosaic laws which they professed most pro-
foundly to respect,** so much so that in Menachoth Moses
himself is represented as standing amazed at the fatuous
inferences established by R. Akiba from the horns and
tips of letters.ft Well might Christ say to them, " Ye
search the Scriptures, because ye think that in them ye
have eternal life, and those very Scriptures testify of Me;
yet ye will not come to Me that ye may have life.":}^:
For instance, the law of the Sabbatic year was regarded
as fundamental. But as time went on, it was found to be
very inconvenient for commerce, so Hillel got rid of it by
a subterfuge called Prosbol, a preconcerted farce for the
*Berach. 31, 2. f Sanhedrin, 34.
§ Namely (i), Gematria (Geometria), inferences from the numerical value of
the letters of words. (2) Notarikon, the deducing of sentences from the letters
of words. (3) Themoiirah, the interchange of letters by Athbash, Albam,
etc. Those who wish for further explanations may find them fully furnished
in my papers on Rabbinic exegesis in The Expositor^ vols, v., vi, (First Series).
II Mark vii. 5-13.
^ In the first instance the word seems to be used for " the binding together
of several localities," in order to get rid of the supposed law that they might
not walk more than 2000 ells on the Sabbath.
**Weil, Le Jttdaistne, iii. 268.
ff Vajikra Rabba, i. 162, I. Quoted by Schottgen on Matt. xv. 18.
XX John v. 39, 40.
PHARISAIC RELIGIONISM.
2bl
evasion of the law, by which the creditor said to the
debtor, " TJiis being the Sabbatic year I release yoii from
your debt" and the debtor replied (as had been pre-
arranged), ^' Many thanks, but I prefer to pay it ! '' Thus
did they honour God with their lips, but denied Him in
their double heart. Long prayers, and devouring of
widows' houses ; flaming proselytism and subsequent
moral neglect ; rigorous stickling for the letter, bound-
less levity as to the spirit ; high-sounding words as to the
sanctity of oaths, and cunning reservations of casuistry ;
fidelity in trifles, gross neglect of essential principles ; the
mask of godliness without the reality ; petty orthodoxy
and artificial morals — such was Pharisaism. It was a false
system, based on egotism and self-seeking ; a semblable
goodness swayed by " a tame conscience," which had no
power over the heart.'^ And that was why the Pharisees
were " the only class which Jesus cared publicly to expose."
* See Canon Mozley, Univ. Sermons, pp. 28-51.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHRIST AND THE SABBATH.
It was as regards the non-observance of the traditions of
the Elders about tJie Sabbath that the Pharisees raised the
fiercest clamour against Christ. They had established a
number of arbitrary rules, whereas the principle and the
practice of Christ was that of the olden Law, that " the
Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath."
The Sabbath of the " Book of the Covenant" had been
greatly altered in the later priestly laws.* No one on that
day was to walk more than 2000 yards, because, in
Ex. xvi. 29, a Jew is forbidden "to go out of his place"
{Makoin), but, in Ex. xxi. 13, the homicide may fly to the
Levitic suburb, which was 2000 yards from the camp ;
hence, by one of Hillel's Middoih {known as "analogy"),
every one might walk 2000 yards on the Sabbath.f But
supposing a Pharisee wanted to dine with another on the
Sabbath, was he to forego his pleasure on this account ?
Oh, no ! By putting up sham lintels and doorposts, the
whole street, even if it were miles long, becomes a part of
their own house ! \ And no man might carry anything
more than four ells on a Sabbath; but at the end of the
four ells he might hand it to another and he to another,
and so get it conveyed a hundred miles if necessary.
Again, no man might buy anything on the Sabbath, but
he might go to a shopkeeper and say, " Give me this or
that,'' and call and pay for it next day. No Jew might
* See Montefiore, Ilihbert Lectures, p. 338.
\ Rosh Hashanah, f. 21 ; 2 Erubhin, f. 42, I.
X This particular evasion was called the Eriibh. Techumim. See Maimoni-
des, Hilchoth Erubhin, vi. 6 ; Montefiore, Hibbert Lectures, p. 562.
282
CHRIST AND THE SABBATH. 283
carry any burden on the Sabbath, however small, not even
a pocket-handkerchief ; but he might tie a pocket-hand-
kerchief round his knee, and regard it as a garter ! This
ocTtepavtoXoyia, as Origen calls it, has lasted for ages, for
even in the third century the Jews had decided that on
the Sabbath a man might wear one kind of shoe, but not
another.* Our Lord denounces such mean modes of trying
to deceive God, in the matter of the Corban, in the rule
about hating enemies, and on the subject of divorce. He
taught on the principle that Scripture does not cover any
number of inferences which can be extorted out of isolated
expressions, but that we are to abide by all that is perma-
nent in the plain meaning of Holy Writ. Scripture is what
Scripture jneans. To quote a phrase, and attribute to its
/2V(?r(?/ significance a meaning which it never had, and never
could have had, is a mere trick of ignorant hypocrisy.
We read in the Book of Jubilees (50), "Every one who
desecrates the Sabbath, or declares that he intends to
make a journey on it, or speaks either of buying or selling,
or he who draws water and has not provided it upon the
sixth day, and he who lifts a burden in order to take it out
of his dwelling-place, or out of his house, shall die. And
every man who makes a journey, or attends to his cattle,\
and he who kindles a fire, or rides upon any beast, or sails
tipon a ship on the sea upon the Sabbath day, shall die."
The rules about the Sabbath were divided into Avoth,
" fathers," X ^rid Toldoth, " generations " — i. e., primary and
derivative rules.
The Avoth were thirty-nine in number,§ and they for-
bade all such works as sowing, ploughing, reaping, binding
*Orig. 0pp. i. 179. The Sabbatic fanaticism of the Jews attracted the notice
of Pagans. Ovid, Ars Amat. i. 415 ; Juv. Sat. xiv. 98-100.
f Some Rabbis who "bound" with Shammai, rather than "loosed" with
Hillel, had decided that if a sheep fell into a water-tank on the Sabbath it was
not to be drawn out. See Hausrath i. 95.
X apxTiyiKuTara alria. Philo, De Vit. 686.
§ Shabbath, i. 78, I.
284 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
sheaves, threshing, etc. To these rules the Pharisees of
Christ's day seem to have added another, that no one was
to be healed on a Sabbath day, so little did they recognise
in their blindness that charity is above rubrics, and mercy
better than sacrifice. Now, our Lord, in order to combat
this folly, performed no less than seven miraculous healings
on the Sabbath Day. To refute their fanatical formalism
He appealed not only to His inherent authority as "Lord
of the Sabbath" (Mark ii. 28; John v. 17-47), but also to
Scripture precedents (Luke vi. 3-5), as well as to common
sense and to eternal principles (vi. 9). Sometimes, too, He
used, with crushing force, the argiimentuin ad hommcjn,
showing the selfish insincerity with which they applied and
modified their own regulations.
The rules of the Rabbis were so minute in what Origen
calls their "frigid traditions" that you might put wine on
the eyelid on the " Sabbath," but not into the eye, because
that is healing ; * and you might put vinegar into your
mouth for a toothache, but might not rinse the mouth with
it ! Yet our Lord never violated even their best princi-
ples : — for they said, " The Sabbath may be broken when
life is in danger — ^a child, for instance, may be saved from
drowning."f They distinguished, however, between saving
life and doing any other work of mercy ; for instance, if a
woman has a toothache she may keep a piece of salt in her
mouth, but only on condition that she has put it in the day
before ! :{: "In no case was this miserable micrology carried
to greater lengths."
Our Lord wished to restore the two divine principles that
God loves mercy rather than sacrifice ; and that God de-
sires our service solely because He desires that we should
be happy. He desired for the sake of Mankind to redeem
the Sabbath from a miserable fetish into the blessed boon
for which God had intended it. Therefore, on the Sabbath
* Shabbaih, f. 108, 2.
[ \ Yoma, f. 84, 2. :J: Shabbath, f. 64, 2.
CHRIST AND THE SABBATH. 285
days He liealed the Demoniac ;* and Simon's wife's
mother ;f and the man with the withered hand ;:{: and
the woman bound by a spirit of infirmity; § and the man
with the dropsy ;|| and the paralytic at Bethesda ;^[ and
the man born blind.** The Jews vehemently denounced
Him for these deeds of compassion, even though they
involved no labour. Our Lord showed the inherent hy-
pocrisy of their denunciations by pointing out that, in far
smaller matters tJiey violated their own professions, since
none of them hesitated to loose his ox or ass from the
manger and lead him away to watering ; or to draw out on
the Sabbath an animal that had fallen into a pit. When
Shemaiah and Abtalion had found Hillel almost frozen on
the outer window-sill of their lecture-room on a Sabbath,
they had not hesitated to spend a considerable amount of
labour to rub, and warm, and rouse him ; ff and so far
from being blamed for this, their remark that " he was
worthy that the Sabbath should be profaned on his behalf "
had met with universal approval. So too, when their op-
ponents were not concerned in the matter, the Talmudic
writings can praise Rabbis for even bearing burdens on the
Sabbath ! In the Midrash Koheleth,^^ Abba Techama is
praised for carrying a sick man into a town, and going
back — though it was the Sabbath — to fetch his bundle.
The rule laid down by our Lord with perfect distinctness
was, " It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. "§§ Could
there be a stronger contrast to the Rabbinic inanity, which
alloived bathing on the Sabbath, but not in the Dead Sea or
the Mediterranean, because the waters of those seas were
supposed to be medicinal, and healing is unlawful on the
Sabbath Day ! |||1
The objection to the Sabbath healings was sometimes
*Mark i. 23-26. f Mark i. 30, 31. % Matt. xii. 10.
§Luke xiii. 11, || Luke xiv. 2. Iljohn v, 8, 9.
** John ix. \\Y07na, f. 35, 6. %% Yoma, f. gi, 2.
§§ Matt. xii. 12. Ill Shabbath, f. 109, I.
286 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
complicated by the fact that Jesus had broken one of the
trivial Pharisaic Toldoth ox derivative r\x\es. Thus He had
bidden the healed man to take up his bed and walk,*
and the Jews "sought to slay Him because He had done
these things on the Sabbath day." But the so-called
" bed " was a mere mat or pallet, the carrying of which was
necessary for the man, and involved no labour. The act
bore no relation to the real meaning of Jer. xvii. 21, 22,
"Take heed to yourselves, and bear no burden on the
Sabbath day, neither carry forth a burden out of your
houses," which was spoken to prevent the profanation of
the Sabbath by daily toil and commerce. Although, there-
fore, the Rabbis had decided that " to carry anything from
a public place to a private house on the Sabbath " rendered
a man liable to death by stoning,f our Lord intentionally
ignored the literalism which strained out a gnat yet
swallowed a camel.
Again, when Jesus healed the man born blind, the miracle
went for nothing in the obstinate perversion of the Phari-
sees; but, because He had effected the miracle by anoint-
ing the man's eyes with clay moistened with saliva, they
declared that " He was not of God, because He keepeth
not the Sabbath ; " % and said, " We know that this man is
a sinner."§ Clay and saliva | were both regarded as thera-
peutic agents, and our Lord had used both as helps to the
faith of those whom He cured. ^ The Jews themselves
*John V. 10, 16; Mark ii. 11, vi. 55, Kpd^^aroq, grabatiis; Heb., mittah j
Luke V. 24, k?i/.vl6iov ; Attic, cKi/iKovg ; ¥r. grabat. It \\a.s a. mere palliasse,
or even sometimes an abeijah (outer robe) folded up, as we see from Ex. xxii.
27, where it is forbidden to take a man's upper robe in payment for a debt
because it is "that whereon he sleepeth " and "his only covering." Comp.
Virg. Mor. 5. " Membra levat sensim vili A^xax^^z. grabato"
\ Shabbath, vi.l.
X John ix. 16. § John ix. 24.
II Tac. Hist. iv. 81 ; Suet. Vesp. 7 ; Plin. H. N. xxviii. 7. Comp. Mark
viii. 23, vii. 33 ; Shabbath xiv. 4 (where the healing application of saliva to
the eyes on the Sabbath is distinctly forbidden).
^ Matt. xii. 5.
CHRIST AND THE SABBATH. 287
held that there was " no Sabbatism in the Temple," and
therefore that the Priests " profaned the Sabbath in the
Temple and were blameless."* To Christ the Temple of
God was the Temple of infinite, all-embracing compassion.
Again, on a certain Sabbath the disciples, in their
poverty and hunger, as they were making their way
through the cornfields, began to pluck the ears of corn, and
to rub them in the palms of their hands. Now, by two of
the thirty-nine Avoth or primary rules, all reaping and
threshing on the Sabbath were forbidden ; and one of the
numberless Toldoth or " derivative rules " regarded pluck-
ing the ears of corn (even to satisfy hunger !) as a kind
of reaping, and rubbing them as a ki7id of threshing. Im-
mediately, therefore, the Phariasic spies came down on
them with their contemptuous censure, " Why do ye do
that which is not lawful on the Sabbath Day? " and going
at once to Jesus, who seems to have been walking apart
from the Apostles, they said, " See " (pointing to the
Apostles,) " why do they do on the Sabbath Day what is
not lawful?" The vitality of these artificial trivialities
among the Jews is remarkable. Abarbanel relates that
when in 1492 the Jews were driven from Spain, and not
allowed to enter the city of Fez, lest they should cause
a famine, " they had to live on grass, but ' religiously '
avoided the violation of their Sabbath by plucking the
grass with their hands ! " Yet in order to keep the small
regulation, they gave themselves tiie infinitely greater
Sabbath-labour of grovelling on their knees, and cropping the
grass with their teeth ! But our Lord at once defended
His poor Apostles from censure by reminding these literal-
ists how on the Sabbath no less a saint than their own
David had illustrated the principle that physical necessities
abrogated ceremonial obligations, and had fearlessly vio-
lated the letter of the law by eating the sacred sliew-bread
with his companions, though it was " most holy," and was
* See Matt. xii. 5 ; Numb, xxviii. g.
288 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
expressly reserved for the Priests alone. * Mercy is always
a thing infinitely more sacred than " miserable micrology."
After the narration of this incident in Luke vi. 1-7, we
find in the Cambridge Uncial Manuscript D. the famous
Codex BezcB, the passage : " On the same day, observing
one working on the Sabbath, He said, ' O man, if indeed
thou knowest what thou art doing, thou art blessed, but if
thou knowest not, thou art accursed, and a transgressor of
the Law. ' " f
The authority of a single manuscript is, of course, insufifi-
cient to establish the genuineness of this passage as a part
of St. Luke's Gospel ; but there is much to be said for the
authenticity of the fact recorded. A man would not indeed
have dared to work openly on the Sabbath, for then he
would have incurred the certainty of being stoned ; but if
he had been compelled in some way — say in his own house
— to toil for some purpose of necessity, piety, or charity,
then his toil was perfectly justified by our Lord's own
teaching. Even the wiser Rabbis agreed that it was better
to work seven days in the week than to beg one's bread.
No less a personage than Rabbi Jochanan said — " in the
name of the people of Jerusalem " — "-Make thy Sabbath as
a week-day rather than depend ttpon other people." X In any
case, if there be any basis for the story, in some agraphon
dogma of Christ current in early Christian days, His meaning
could only have been, " If thy work is of faith — if thou art
thoroughly persuaded in thine inmost heart and conscience
that thy Sabbath work is justifiable — then thou art acting
with true insight ; but if thy work is not of faith, it is sin."§
* Lev. xxiv. 9, xxii. lO. See i Sam. xxi. 6. The scene took place in the
Tabernacle at Nob, and Abiathar may have been assisting his father Ahimelech.
Mark ii. 26. The words " in the High priesthood of Abiathar " are omitted
in D, and some old Latin MSS. ; and if the reading tov apxiEpi:^^ in A. C, etc.,
be right, the wrords might mean " in the times of Abiathar."
f On this reading, see Westcott, Introd. to the Gospels, Appendix C.
\ Pesachim, f. 113, i ; Hershon, Treasurer of the Talmud, i. 194.
§ See Rom. xiv. 22, 23 ; i Cor. viii. i.
CHRIST AND THE SABBATH. 289
Not all the Pharisees were scribes or lawyers.* In Mark
ii. 16 we read of " The Scribes of the Pharisees." They
were the " doctors " or " theologians " of the Pharisaic
party, and were held in the highest honour. When one of
them complained that, in His strong denunciations of the
Pharisees, Jesus insulted them also,f He emphasised His
disapproval by pointing out their supercilious tyranny
(Luke xi. 46), their insincerity and persecuting rancour
(47-51), and their arrogant exclusiveness (52).:}: But His
eight-fold " woe " on the Pharisees was even more severe.
He upbraided them for their frivolous scrupulosity (Luke
xi. 39, 40), mingled with hypocrisy (41); for their gross lack
of reality in religion (42) ; for their pride, ambition, and self-
seeking (43) ; and for their hidden depths of corruption,
which made them like tombs glistering with whitewash, or
graves over which men walked without being aware of the
putrescence underneath (44). In the seven great " woes "
pronounced in the Temple on the last day of His public
ministry. He spoke yet more fully of their blind folly,
which carefully strained out the gnat, yet swallowed the
camel ; which tithed the stalks of pot-herds, yet neglected
justice, mercy, and faith ; which professed external scru-
pulosity, while within they were full from extortion and
excess; which bound heavy burdens on men's shoulders,
and would not move them with one of their fingers ; which
shut the gate of the kingdom of heaven against men, and
neither entered nor suffered them to enter ; which com-
passed sea and land to make one proselyte, and then made
him tenfold more a son of Gehenna than themselves ;
which devoured widows' houses, while for a pretence they
* There does not seem to be much distinction between " Scribes " and
" Lawyers" or " Teachers of the Law." See Luke xi. 52, 53 ; Matt, xxiii. 13.
The name "Scribes" for those who wrote out and studied the Books of the
Law begins with Ezra.
f Luke xi. 45.
f " Ye have caused many to stumble at the Law." Mai. ii. 8.
290 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
made long prayers. * Severe as are these denunciations,
they are amply supported by many scathing passages in the
Talmud. To this day in Jerusalem, "You are a PorisW
{i. e., a Pharisee) is, says Dr. Frankl, a Jewish writer, " the
bitterest term of reproach." " They proudly separate them-
selves," he says, " from the rest of their co-religionists.
Fajiatical, bigoted, intolerajit, quarrelsome, and in truth
irreligious, with them the outward observance of the cere-
monial law is everything ; the moral law little binding,
morality itself of no importance." f And the results of
Pharisaism were wholly bad. Formalism killed religion, as
the strangling ivy kills the oak round which it twines. " At
last over the whole inert stagnation of the soul there grew
a scurf of feeble corruption. Petty vices, meannesses, little-
nesses were rife, and there appeared at last nothing to
mark the religious man except a little ill-temper, a faint
spite against those who held different opinions, and a fee-
ble, self-important pleasure in detecting heresy."
If the Pharisees had only listened to the words of Eter-
nal Wisdom, how different might have been the course of
history! But, although Jesus had at first tried to win
them by gentle courtesy, they set their faces as a flint
against Him, and tried in every way to thwart His efforts
and stir up the multitudes to kill Him. They displayed
the deadliest insolence — treating with continuous and
scornful jeers even His warnings against their besetting
avarice.:}: The words of most just judgment which had at
last to be uttered by the lips of love, involved the final
breach between Him and the self-constituted religious
teachers of His day. At the close of one of these utter-
ances, the Pharisees, in a scene of violence almost unique
in His ministry, began to press vehemently upon Him, and
* Matt. vi. 7, xxiii. 1-36 ; Mark xii. 40 ; Luke xx. 47.
\ Frankl, The Jews in the East, ii. 27.
\ i^EfivKT^pi^ov, Luke xvi. 14, xxiii. 35. Comp. 2 Sam. xix. 21 ; Psalm ii.
2-4.
CHRIST AND THE SABBATH. 291
tried to catch grounds of accusation against Him about very
many things by treacherous questions, lying in wait for
Him to hunt something out of His mouth,* until the very
multitude, in alarm and excitement, gathered for His per-
sonal protection round the door of the house in which the
scene had taken place.
But He came " to cast fire upon the earth " — the fire
which is salutary as well as retributive ; which warms and
purifies as well as consumes. One of the most remarkable
of the " unwritten sayings " is " He who is near Me, is near
the fire." f
Can there be the least doubt, we ask, after this survey
of the invariable teaching of Christ, wherein pure religion
does, and wherein it does not, consist ? May it not be
summed up even in the words of the Old Testament — " He
hath shown thee, O man, what is good ; and what doth the
Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with thy God?" St. Paul is emphatic
in teaching that in Christ Jesus neither circumcision
availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but faith working by
love. The revelation of Christ's will is unmistakably plain,
His commandments are summed up in the one word " love."
He said that to do unto others as we would they should do
unto us is the Law and the Prophets ; that to say, " Lord,
Lord," is nothing, but to do the will of His Father in
heaven ; that if we would enter into life we must keep His
commandments; that he who heareth the Word of God and
keepeth it, the same is His brother and His sister and His
mother. If we care at all for what Christ taught we shall
think less than nothing of the devotee's will-worship, or the
ascetic's self-torture, or artificial absolutions, or vestments,
or shibboleths, or Church exclusiveness, or hierarchic usur-
pations. What we shall desire will be simple faithfulness
in "the daily round, the common task," the humble prayer
* Luke xi. 53, 54, airoaTOfiari^eiv. . . Qr/pevaai . . . Seivug evexeiv.
■j- Preserved in Ignatius, Origen, and Didymus.
292
TME LIFE OF LIVES.
offered in secret, the sweet silent charities of common
life — the imitation of Christ, learnt, not from corrupt
manuals, or ecclesiastical traditions, but from His own lips,
and His own life, and His own Spirit shed abroad in the
hearts of all of every communion who humbly desire to be
His true servants, and who prefer His teaching and His
example to the intrusive inventions and tyrannies of men
deceiving and self-deceived.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST.
" Miraculum voco quicquid arduum aut insolitum supra spem vel
facultatem mirantis apparet." — Augustine, De Util. Cred. i6.
" Quisquis prodigia ut credat requirit, magnum est ipse prodigium,
qui, mundo credente, non credit." — Aug, De Civ. Dei, c. 22.
" Prima miracula confestim fecit, ne videretur cum labore facere ;
postea quum auctoritatem^ satis constituerat, moram interum adhibuit
salutarem." — Bengel.
I SHALL not here pause to enter once more into the ques-
tion of the credibility of the Gospel miracles. Enough for
us to say that the attempt to account for all Christ's
miracles by hallucination or exaggeration breaks down in
every direction before the utter simplicity of the Gospel
narratives, which differ toto ccelo from the portents of the
Apocryphal Gospels, and from those invented to glorify
mediaeval saints. Had the Apostles been capable of deceit-
ful intentions, their narratives would not have been marked
by such extreme sobriety and moderation. The miracles
which Christ wrought were not denied by the Pharisees,
and are admitted even in the Talmud. The Evangelists
regarded John the Baptist as the great Forerunner, as the
promised Elijah. Yet they acknowledge with the frankest
truthfulness that " John did no miracle," and they represent
the Son of Man as habitually repressing and restraining His
miraculous gifts (Matt. xxvi. 53); as only exercising them
for definite ends ; and as forbidding many of those who
received them to blazon them abroad. He only appealed
to His works as giving further emphasis to the grandeur
of His words. To all believing Christians the one sur-
passing, overwhelming miracle is that of the Incarnation.
293
294 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Christ being what He was, miracles wrought out of com-
passion would radiate from Him as naturally as sunbeams
from the sun.
In the endeavour to grasp the essential characteristics of
our Lord's miracles, and the relation in which they stand
to His whole work, we may learn important lessons from the
names by which they are ordinarily described. It will be
seen at once that they all involved deeds of mercy, or con-
veyed lessons of truth, and do not bear the slightest rela-
tion to the senseless prodigies of Eastern invention, or
Apocryphal romance.
1. In the Synoptic Gospels they are often called
" Powers " {dvvdjuEii) ; * seven times in St. Matthew, and
twice in St. Mark and St. Luke ; and the word " Power "
(A. V. " Virtue "f) is applied to the source from which
they emanated. By this designation they are represented
as the outcome of a divine gift.
2. The word " wonders'' or ^^ portents'" {rspara), is only
used of them three times, and always in connection with
" signs." \ This word describes them by the effect of
amazement which they produced upon the minds of those
who witnessed them. The rousing of astonishment Avas
the lowest and poorest result of our Lord's exercise of His
divine gifts, and one which He always discouraged. His
object was to lead men beyond the miracle to the facts it
was designed to prove. §
3. The word " Sign " and " Signs " (ffT^/Aeia) is used fre-
quently in the Gospels, and is the designation ordinarily
employed by St. John. This word indicates the main pur-
*Sometimes rendered in the A. V. "mighty works," "wonderful works,"
or '■ miracles." It is not used by St. John.
f 2 Mark v. 30 ; Luke vi. 19.
X Matt. xxiv. 24 ; Mark xiii. 22 ; John iv. 48.
§ Matt. viii. 27, ix. 8, 33, xv. 31, etc.; John vi. 26. The name Qavfiaaiov
only occurs in Matt. xxi. 15, and irapaSo^ov (something abnormal) only in Luke
V. 26 (comp. Mark. ii. 12). Christ recognised this element of the value of
miracles. John v. 36, xi. 15, xx. 31 ; Mark ii. 10, 11 ; Matt. xi. 20, 21,
THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST. 295
pose for which they were wrought. They were the creden-
tials of Christ's divine power, and of His unity with the
Father.
4. The fourth name, " Works," is almost peculiar to St.
John, where it occurs many times,* It is the deepest and
most characteristic of the four terms. It represents the
miracles as the natural outcome of Christ's relation to the
Father, who was the real doer of the works. " They are
the periphery of the circle of which He is the centre. The
great miracle is the Incarnation ; all else, so to speak, fol-
lows naturally and of course. It is no wonder that He
whose name is * Wonderful ' (Is. ix. 6) does works of won-
der ; the only wonder would be if He did them not."f
They were the normal fruit of the heavenly tree ; the efflu-
ence spontaneously irradiated from the Sun of Righteous-
ness. In the miracle of His personality all that might
otherwise startle us in the story of His miracles is com-
pletely absorbed. The influence of a higher nature finds
expression in " works " which are not contrary to, but are
beyond, and above, the ordinary working of earth's natural
laws.
It is important to observe that miracles do not seem
to have been primarily intended as evidences of Christ's
divinity, but rather as adding emphasis to His teaching,
and calling attention to His unity with the Father. Our
* John vi. 28, vii. 21, x. 25, 33, 38, xiv. 11, etc. But it also occurs in Matt,
xi. 2.
fl~ench, 0>i Miracles, p. 8. Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, p. 193.
Ammjnius, quoted by Theophylact, misses the force of the word aTjfielov
entirely in the definition repag wapa ^vaiv, oTj/nela irapa cwrfieiav yiveTai.
Schleiermacher {Leben Jesu, p. 206) rightly says, " In arf/ielov the most promi-
nent thing is the significance of what we should deduce from the result ; in
diivafiig, ' power,' the chief thing is the nature of the actor — that he has in him-
self such a power ; and in repag, ' wonder,' the comparison of this result with
other results." In Acts ii. 22, St. Peter, using the three words, says that
" Jesus of Nazareth was approved of God unto you by powers, and wonders,
and signs, which God did by Him in the midst of you, even as ye yourselves
know." See Steinmeyer, On Miracles, p. 42 ; Col. i. 19.
296 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
Lord was well aware that miracles will not convince the
obstinate and the hardened.* His miracles were forms of
Revelation, f Had they been meant to prostrate opposi-
tion, or to ejiforce belief, their characteristics would have
been different ; nor, in that case, would our Lord have per-
sistently refused to exhibit the startling and overwhelming
" sign from heaven " — the miracle of constantly-descending
manna to supply bodily needs, or the portent in the sun
or moon or stars — which the Pharisees and the multitude
demanded. In all true and transforming faith there is a
moral and spiritual element, and Jesus taught that it was a
higher thing to believe in His words, and to recognise that
the words which He spake were Spirit and were Life, than to
believe for the works' sake.;}: The miracles were not acts
of His divinity working apart from His humanity. He was
truly God, perfectly man, indivisibly God-Man, distinctly
God and Man ; and He appeals to His works only to prove
that the Father dwelt in Him, with whom He was indis-
solubly united. § He was co-ordinately the Doer of the
works. II Hence the miracles "belong properly to the
believer and not to the doubter. They are a treasure
rather than a bulwark. They are in their inmost sense
instruction and not evidence." ^
All of our Lord's miracles fall under the three heads of
miracles on Nature, on man, and on the spirit-world.
I. The miracles exercised in the world of Nature are, for
reasons already indicated, the rarest. With the exception
*Luke xvi. 31, Comp. John. xii. 37, xi. 45, 46.
f St. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between mir acuta qtim sunt ad fidei cott-
firmationem, and miracula de quibiis ipsa est fides. See Steinmeyer, On the
Miracles, p. 7 ; Wendt ii. 192-197.
X Theophylact wisely wrote, " Preaching is confirmed by miracles, and mira-
cles by preaching."
§ John xiv. 10.
\ John V. 17, 19.
T Westcott, The Gospel Miracles, p. 7. Gerhard says, '* Miracula sunt doc-
trinae tesserae et sigilla ; quemadmodum igitur sigillum Uteris avulsum nihil pr«-
bat, ita quoque miracula sine doctrina nihil valent."
THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST. 297
of the two miracles of the multiplication of the loaves and
fishes — of which, perhaps, the real character was scarcely
understood by most of the 5000 and of the 4000 for whose
benefit they were wrought — the Nature-miracles were only
directly witnessed by Christ's nearest disciples. These
were the changing of water into wine, the stilling of the
storm, the walking on the sea, and the withering of the
barren fig-tree. The miracles of the two draughts of fishes
are probably to be regarded rather as instances of supernat-
ural knowledge than as supersessions of the normal course
of natural laws.*
2. The miracles on man were, without exception, works
of mercy to relieve the sick and the suffering. They are
healings of the blind ; f of the deaf and dumb ; of the impo-
tent ; of the sick ; of lepers ; of the palsied ; of the dropsi-
cal ; of the fever-stricken ; of the man with the withered
hand ; of the woman with the issue. They were granted
either to the faith of personal suppliants, or to the inter-
cession of their parents or friends.
3. The miracles on the spirit-world are chiefly those ex-
tended to men or women possessed of the demons,:}: who
*Luke V. l-ii ; John xxi. 1-23. The story of the stater in the fish's
mouth stands in all respects alone. It is not said that any miracle was wrought.
It taught no spiritual truth, and did not arise from pity, nor depend on faith.
The meaning of the words has probably been misunderstood. On this subject
I must refer to what I have said in The Life of Christ.
\ Found in the Gospels only in Mark viii. 23 ; Malt. ix. 29, xi. 4, 5, xv. 30,
XX. 34, xxi. 14 ; Luke vii. 22 ; John ix. 6.
X^.aiii6via, always "demons" (Heb. Shedim). It is a pity that even the
Revised Version preserved the erroneous version " devils." Josephus, in
accordance with the general view of that day, defines " demons" as "the
spirits of wicked men, entering into, and slaying, the living." See Antt. vi. 8,
2, ii. 3 ; B. J. viii. 6, 3. For a full discussion of the nature of demoniac pos-
session, see Jahn, Archceologia Biblica, E. T., pp. 200-216. Weber, Syst. d.
altsynag. Paldst. Theol. The Talmud describes "demons" as resembling
men. Pesikta, i. 504. In the Book of Enoch (xv.) they are regarded as fallen
angels (comp. i Cor. x. 20). If the account of an exorciser in Josephus {Antt.
viii. 2, 5) be compared with the Gospel narratives it will be seen at once how
free from superstition, and stamped with the mark of truth, are the latter.
298 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
afflicted them either with wild and convulsive madness, or
with grievous physical calamities. There were also three
instances in which Jesus raised the dead — the daughter of
Jairus; the young son of the widow of Nain ; and Lazarus
whom he loved. The whole series of miracles, of which
thirty-three are recorded by the Evangelists,* was crowned
by our Lord's own Resurrection and Ascension, when by
death He had conquered him that hath the power of
death — that is the Devil.
It is not unnatural to ask how it came about that such
miracles of power and mercy, and many which were
wrought collectively, and on a large scale, did not — even
apart from our Lord's teaching — exercise a more decisive
effect in hushing all criticism, and overcoming all opposi-
tion. The answer seems to be twofold. On the one hand,
miracles, or what passed as such, were not unknown in the
Eastern world. f Various Rabbis are said to have wrought
miracles, and our Lord Himself tells us that exorcism was
commonly practised among the Jews themselves. " If I by
Beelzebul cast out demons, by whom do your sons cast
them out ? Therefore shall they be your judges." :{:
Indeed, according to Josephus, the power to eject demons
has been specially bestowed upon his people, and he tells
one remarkable story respecting it. What was known as
demoniacal possession often showed itself in forms of vio-
lent nervous excitement, by which the sin-polluted mind
swayed the functions and temperaments of the degraded
and weakened body. Such emotional conditions are capa-
ble of being affected by the influence of stronger wills and
* St. Matthew narrates twenty miracles ; St. Mark, eighteen ; St. Luke,
nineteen ; St. John, seven.
t Jos. B. J. vii. 6, 3 ; Antt. viii. 2, 5 ; Dial. c. Tryph. i.
X Matt. xii. 27 ; Mark iii. 22, etc. The true reading seems to be Beelzebul.
Beelzebub was the name of the god of Ekron, like Zeus Apomuios, " the
averter of flies," 2 Kings i. 2. Beelzebul may mean " the lord of the (celestial)
habitation," or, as a Jewish name of scorn, " lord of dung." — See Jahn,
Archaologia Biblica.
THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST. 299
holier personalities.'^ It was easy, within certain limits,
even for an impostor to excite a belief in his possession of
supernatural powers, as was the case with Theudas, who led
hundreds of deluded followers to feel confident that he
could divide the Jordan before them, and lead them over
dryshod ; f and during the procuratorship of Felix no less
than 30,000 had assembled on the Mount of Olives in the
belief that another impostor would throw down the walls
of Jerusalem before their advancing footsteps. The Phari-
sees, without the smallest tendency to believe in Christ,
yet admitted, and were forced to admit, that He did work
miracles, and that His miracles were works of love and
mercy.:}:
But, secondly, the Pharisees nullified the effect of them
on the minds of the multitude by attributing them to the
co-operation of evil spirits. They constantly averred that
Christ " had a demon," who conferred on Him the power
of doing wonders. They challenged Him to perform some
*' sign from heaven,'' such as no demon could perform ; but
He refused to meet a challenge which would not, even if it
had been performed, have really swept away their doubts ;
and He pointed them to His teaching, and the sign of the
Prophet Jonah. The preaching of Jonah had converted
the Ninevites ; the Queen of the South had come all
the way to Jerusalem to hear the wisdom of Solomon ;
if they refused to listen to one greater than Jonah or
Solomon they would harden their hearts even to the
end.
His Miracles of Mercy, the course of which seems to
have begun with the healing of the demoniac at Caper-
* " Demons " were supposed to be the spirits of the wicked dead. Jos. B.J.
vii. 6, 3. The Jews attributed all sorts of moral failures and physical calami-
ties to demons (as is still the case in the East, where they are called devs). See
Ps. xci. 6, Ixx. ; Targ. Cant. iv. 6.
f Jos. Antt. xix. 5, i. Comp. B.J. c, 13, 4.
:j: John xi. 47, xii. ig. Miracles which could not be denied were attributed
io ktshoof, "magic." Sanhedrin,y\\. 13, 19. See Derenbourg, pp. 106, 361.
300 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
naum,* were in the great majority of instances miracles of
simple compassion. Jesus suffered with those whom He
saw suffer, and St. Mark records how, at the sight of
human infirmity, a sigh was wrung from His inmost heart. f
^^ I have compassion on the multitude^' was a feeling which
always filled the Saviour's soul.:}; His miracles all look
back to the Incarnation, and forward to the Ascension, now
bringing God to man, and now raising man to God, as signs
of the full accomplishment of his earthly work. § They
differ fundamentally from the legends and miracles of
other religions. Each miracle was also the revelation of a
mystery, and all tend to raise us from a blind idolatry of
physical laws to the consciousness of a nobler presence, and
of a higher power. Thus they are a prophecy of a more
glorious world, and a revelation of a near God unseen —
an Epiphany of sovereignty and of mercy. They involve
a revelation of hope, of restoration, of forgiveness. The
same powers which conquered sickness and death are not
less mighty to overcome their spiritual antitypes, "the
blindness of sensuality and the leprosy of caste, the fever of
restlessness, the palsy of indolence, the death of sin."
I have already pointed out that it is no small indication
of the simple truthfulness of the Gospels that although
John stood among the greatest of the Prophets they do not
attribute to him a single miracle. " John did no miracle,"
yet he exercised over the people a stupendous influence.
The Evangelists only attribute to Christ these works, and
signs, and powers, because they narrated things as they
were, with no desire to suppress any more than to invent.
*Mark i. 21-34. f Mark vii. 34.
J Mark i. 41, viii. 2. Comp. Matt. ix. 36, xiv. 14, xx. 34 ; Luke vii. 13.
§ I here refer to the wise teaching on this subject in Bp. Westcott's Charac-
teristics of the Gospel Miracles.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE GLADNESS AND SORROW OF THE CHRIST.
TO SaKpvov avTov x^pa 7/neTpd. — Athanasius, De Incarn.
" Crede mihi, res severa est varum gaudium." — Augustine.
It has been an error, and one not wholly devoid of disas-
trous consequences, to regard the life of our Lord on earth
as a life of continuous and almost overwhelming sorrow.
This has arisen from too exclusive a contemplation of His
last year of flight and rejection, and of the anguish of His
death and passion ; and it has led to the overlooking of the
indications which point to the many gladder hours of the
Son of Man. He did, indeed, "bear our griefs and carry
our sorrows"; * but man's life is not an unbroken misery,
and Jesus had the deepest sympathy with all natural and
innocent sources of gladness. Nay more, He often called
attention to the truth that, in despite of earthly trials and
persecution, the Christian's joy shines on like a lamp,
unquenched by the darkness of the tomb. In the midst of
the worst misfortunes which the devil or the world could
inflict, He bade His followers to be not only patient in
tribulation, but also to rejoice in hope ; f — to " rejoice and
be exceeding glad," for great was their reward in heaven ;
nay, even to recognise their deep blessedness and " to leap
for joy." :}: He never intended to reduce the natural
blessedness of life to an artificial monotony of woe-begone
abjectness. It was one of the objects of His life to give to
men " the oil of exultation for mourning, the spirit of joy
* Is. liii. 4 : Heb. ix. 28 ; Matt. viii. 17. " Himself took our infirmities
and bare our diseases."
f Matt. V. 12. X Luke, vL 23.
301
302 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
for the spirit of heaviness";* by His gift they should exult
" with joy unspeakable and full of glory." f
When the seventy returned with joy at the proof that
even demons were subject unto them in Christ's name, He
bade them to rejoice still more that their names were written
in heaven. :{: The word ayaWiaGi?, " exultation," means
" abounding and overflowing joy," and not only did Jesus
bid His disciples "to exult," but in witnessing the success
of their simple-hearted ministrations He Himself " exulted
in spirit." §
Must we not feel confident that, during the thirty almost
unrecorded years of life, in the lovely country, in the pure
and happy home, in the humble and honourable toil, Jesus
must have tasted of the most limpid well-springs of human
happiness? This happiness must have been immeasurably
increased because His heart, unstained by any shadow of
guilt, reflected the very blue of heaven. Let any one con-
sider how much our human life is darkened by the deceit-
fulness of sin ; by the stings of shame ; by the voice of a
self-reproach which cannot be silenced ; by the memory of
wasted hours and desecrated gifts ; by erring judgments ;
by the constant sense of moral failure and unworthiness —
and he will then be able to estimate what must have been
the boyish and youthful happiness of one whose thoughts
were ever —
" Pleasant as roses in the thickets blown,
And pure as dew bathing their crimson leaves."
But do not we further see the constant elements of simple
gladness throughout our Lord's ministry ? He discounte-
* Heb. i. 9, i2.aiov ayakliaaeug. Comp, LXX.; Ps. xlv. 7, 8.
f John xvi. 22 ; i Peter i. 6, 8, iv. 13 ; Rev. xix. 7 ; Acts ii. 26 ; Jude 24.
X Luke X. 20.
§ Luke X. 21, T/yaTiXiaaaTO rw nvev/iari (the opposite extreme of emotion to
EveSpifi^aaTo tg" nvevnan in John xi. 33). In the spurious letter of P. Lentulus
to the Senate, it is said that " He wept oft, but no one had ever seen Him
smile." This is an instance of the erroneous conception and groundless tradi-
tion which. I hav? pointed out.
HIS GLADNESS AND SORROW. 303
nanced the showy abstinences of the Pharisees ; He prac-
tised no form of Essene rigorism; He had nothing of the
habitual fuhnination and stern asperities of the Baptist:
He neither practised fasting Himself, nor encouraged His
disciples to do so. His whole attitude towards life show
us that " self-chosen, self-inflicted suffering, where it is not
a wise discipline, is ingratitude to God, or rather it is
partial suicide. The suffering in itself is nothing worth,
the moral end for which it is the means gives it its
value." *
He only recognised fasting as the natural expression of
natural grief. He was radically opposed to the conception
which looked upon self-inflicted burdens as a method for
extorting God's approval. He compared the ministry of
John to children playing at funerals in the market-places,
among companions who would not mourn ; and His own
ministry to the games of merry children, playing at wed-
dings, and piping for sullen comrades who would not dance.
Throughout His life Jesus must have had in His heart pure
fountains of perennial joy. He never knew. He could not
know — except by keen sympathy with the lost — the accu-
mulated miseries of selfishness, and its inevitable disappoint-
ments. He never knew, He could not know, those terrors
of a fearful expectation of most just judgment when
" Iniquity hath played her part, and Vengeance leaps upon
the stage " — when " man's gifts begin to fade as though a
worm were gnawing at them " — when " the gnawing con-
science reawakens the warning conscience " — when " Fear
and Anguish divide the man's soul between them, and the
Furies of Hell leap upon his heart like a stage " — when
" Thought calleth to Fear, Fear whistleth to Horror ; Hatred
beckoneth to Despair, and saith, ' Come and help me to
torment this sinner.' One saith that she cometh from this
sin, and another saith that she cometh from that sin — so the
man goes through a thousand deaths and cannot die. Irons
*Westcott, The Victory of the Cross, p. 82.
304 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
are laid upon his body like a prisoner. All his lights are
put out at once." *
These worst tragedies of human existence could never be
personally experienced by Him who was " holy, harmless,
undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the
heavens."
All that we read of His ministry illustrates the noble
words of the poet :
" Gladness be with Thee, Saviour of the world !
I think this is the essential sign and seal
Of goodness, that it ever waxes glad.
And more glad, till the gladness blossoms forth
Into a rage to suffer for mankind
And recommence at sorrow."
It was almost exclusively after the culmination of His
ministry that sorrows burst like a hurricane upon the life of
the Saviour of the world. His afflictions came from the
wickedness of men, and always, in our human career,
" Man is to man the sorest, surest ill,"
Yet we have learnt from Him that '^ otir light affliction,
which is but for a moment, worketh for us, more and more
exceedingly, an eternal weight of glory, while we look not
at the things which are seen, but at the things which are
not seen." f We must remember that, far more than is the
case with us, Christ, in the midst of things temporal, and
the worst trials which they could bring, was living in the
constant realisation of the things unseen and eternal. The
human privations — the homeliness of Him who had not
where to lay His Head, the poverty, the wanderings, the
intense, bitter, unscrupulous hatred and opposition of the
religious leaders of His day, the calumnious meanness of
those who called Him " a gluttonous man and a wine-
bibber," "a Samaritan," "a blasphemer," "a Sabbath-
breaker," and said that He had a demon, and was the agent
* Henry More, The Betraying of Christ. f 2 Cor. iv. 17.
HIS GLADNESS AND SORROW. 305
of Beelzebul — these He could lightly disregard. They
simply arose from the fact that —
" The base man, judging of the good,
Puts his own baseness to him, by default
Of will and nature."
It has never been otherwise in any age or nation.
" It is the penalty of being great
Still to be aimed at " ;
and even Plato wrote, " The just man will be scourged,
racked, bound, blinded and after suffering many ills, will
be crucified " (arKao'^zrcJi'Aff^^o'fra'z).*
Calumny and misrepresentation pained Him, not at all
on His own account, but out of pity for the wretches who,
under pretence of religion, could be so grossly guilty of
such slanderous lies. That men who proposed to teach
truth should revel in falsehood ; that men who claimed to
be sources of light should live in a self-chosen darkness;
that men who ought to have set the example of love and
humility should use every power they possessed to dis-
seminate an arrogant hatred — these were thorns in His
crown of sorrow ; and
" Face loved of little children long ago,
Head hated of the Priests and Elders then,
Say was not this Thy sorrow — to foreknow
In Thy last hour the deeds of Christian men? "
Christ bore the worst which a bad world and a corrupted
Church could inflict upon Him ; yet, through His invisible
aid and presence, His followers in all ages have learnt how
to be in need as well as how to abound. Amid the utmost
evils with which men could torture them, they have known
how to be " pressed on every side, yet not straitened ;
perplexed, yet not unto despair ; pursued, yet not for-
saken ; smitten down, yet not destroyed ; always bearing
^ Plato, De Rep. ii. 362.
3o6 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the
life also of Jesus may be manifested in their body." *
There was one trial which, most of all, made the iron
enter into Christ's soul. When the gleam of enthusiasm
which welcomed His early preaching had died out ; when
the people took wilful offence at the words which they
would not understand ; when he began to doubt whetner
even His beloved disciples might not fall away from Him;
when He could hardly speak in any Synagogue without
seeing the Scribes and Pharisees, who came to spy upon
Him from Jerusalem, scowling at Him in bitter envy, or
regarding Him with supercilious smiles of fancied superi-
ority ; when He heard their
" Blind and naked Ignorance
Delivering brawling judgments all day long
On all things unashamed " ;
when He, in His Divine, ethereal loftiness of soul, was
thrust into daily contact with every form of meanness and
misery, in the vulgarities, the garrulities, the disgraces,
the insinuated slanders, the infinitesimal littleness of fallen
human souls, which boasted of their immaculate upright-
ness ; when He was hardly safe from personal molestation
even in the towns and villages of Galilee ; when He heard
that " the fox" Herod Antipasf had designs to seize Him ;
when He learnt that not only the disciples of John, but
even the Baptist himself, in his rocky dungeon, were be-
ginning to yield to doubts respecting Him ; when flight
into heathen lands and concealment in distant cities
became a necessity ; when on every side He encountered
opposition and unbelief ; when He witnessed around Him
the ravages of disease and the triumphs of the Evil One,
*2 Cor. iv. 8, 9, lo.
t Literally, "Go ye and tell this she-fox" {t^ aliitreKi Tavrrj) ' kluivEKi(,u in
Aristophanes {Vesp. i. 241) means "to make covert-attacks." It is remark-
able as being the only recorded word of unmitigated contempt which our Lord
ever used.
HIS GLADNESS AND SORROW. 307
and looked out over a Dead Sea of human debasement,
whose raging and swelling waters cast up mire and dirt;
when He saw " faces with the terrible stamp of various
degradation, and features scarred by sickness, dimmed by
sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by poverty,
shadowed by sorrow, branded with remorse, broken down
by labour, tortured by disease, dishonoured with foul
uses ; " when He saw religion itself degraded into petty
feebleness and rotted with conceit and posturing hypoc-
risy ; when He saw ** intellects without power, hearts with-
out life, men with their bones full of the sin of their
youth ; " when instead of what should be the true noble-
ness of Humanity, with
" Its godlike head crowned with spiritual stars
And touching other worlds,"
He saw the pretence of religion conjoined with the depths
of wickedness: — then, that which was far more full of
anguish to the perfect holiness of Jesus than the sting
of death itself, was trembling pity for the victims of the
world, the flesh, and the devil, in their apparently hopeless
overthrow ; in their awful, and, to all love short of the
Divine, their apparently irremediable degradation.
It is interesting and deeply instructive to consider the
words used by the Evangelists to indicate the emotions of
Jesus as He was brought face to face with these all but
universal" indications of human weakness, misery, and sin —
of false religion and of hopes vain or vile.
I. One of the commonest feelings attributed to Him is
Pity* St. Paul tells his beloved Phillippians how he
longed after them all " in the tender mercies of Jesus
Christ"; and we are told again and again in the Gospels
of the yearning compassion of Jesus over human beings in
'*' l.irTiayxviCo/iai. The word (JTrldyxva, "tender compassion," in several
passages of the Autliorised Version, is with disastrous literalness rendered
"bowels," 2 Cor. vi. I2, vii. 15 ; Phil. i. 8 ; Col. iii. 12 ; Philem. 7. I2, go
I John iii. 17.
3o8 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
their afflictions. Thus, when He saw the multitudes in the
cities and villages, " He was moved with compassion for
them because they were harassed '^ and scattered,! as
sheep when they have no shepherd." And when the great
multitudes had followed Him on foot out of their cities
into a desert place. He had compassion on them, and
healed their sick, and would not let them depart in hunger,
but
" He fed their souls with bread from Heaven
Then stayed their sinking frame." I
Again, on the eastern side of the lake, after healing the
lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many whom they cast
down at His feet. He said, "I have compassion on the
multitude," and, once more, miraculously provided for
their needs.§ He had compassion on Bartimaeus and his
blind companion at Jericho ; |1 and on the leper who came
beseeching Him as He descended from the Mount of
Beatitudes,^[ and on the Demoniac Boy,*"^ and on the
widow of Nain.ff We cannot doubt that His heart was
thrilled by incessant pity. We cannot fathom the depths
of His sympathy. But t/iis sorrow had its own alleviation,
for it was the intensest joy to Him to relieve the sufferings
of men.
2. We are also told of the "tconder" or " surprise" of
Jesus. This was sometimes awakened by the happy dis-
covery of faith in unexpected quarters^ as, for instance, in
the Gentile Centurion at Capernaum.:}::}: More often His
wonder was mingled with deepening regret at the unbelief
* iaKv'k[ihoi. The original meaning of the verb is " to flay," and then " to
worry."
f kpptficvoi, " outcast," utterly neglected (by their proper teachers).
I Matt. xiv. 14, 15 ; Mark vi. 34.
§Matt. XV. 32 ; Mark viii. 2.
II Matt. XX. 34. 1[ Mark i. 41.
** Mark ix. 22.
If Luke vii. 13. The word is not found in St. John's Gospel.
. Matt. viii. 10; Luke vii. 9.
HIS GLADNESS AND SORROW. 309
of those who should have known Hinnt, and who prevented
all possibility of His doing many good works among them
by their lack of faith. This was the case at His own city,
Nazareth, and here it must have grieved him most.*
3. Sometimes this surprise deepened into grief and
anger. In the synagogue, when He was about to heal the
man with the withered hand, and came into collision with
the obstinate, conceited, sham-infallibility of the small-
minded sticklers for religious convention, " He looked
round about on them with anger, being at the same time
grieved at the callosity of their heart." f Jesus also felt
most deeply the sting of thanldessness in those who had
been the recipients of inestimable gifts. He sometimes
felt as if all His mercies were " falling into a deep, silent
grave," and He might have said :
" Blow, blow, thou winter wind.
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude." J
This the only passage in which " anger " {opytj) is directly
attributed to Jesus ; and the only other scene in which His
^^grief is spoken of is when in the Garden of Gethsemane
His soul was " exceeding sorrowful even unto death." §
4. It is interesting to observe that the verb " He was
much displeased" or, more accurately, '* was indignant "
{r]yavaKT7]GE), is used of our Lord but once (Mark x. 14).
It is used of the Apostles, || and of the Chief Priests,^ and
of the foolish ruler of the synagogue ;** but only once of
Christ. And what was it that thus kindled the indignation
of the " Blessed One " ? Simply the fact that the Apostles
in their lack of sympathy had gone so far as to " rebuke "
* Mark vi. 6. \ Mark iii., 5, avUvirovnEVog inl tj/ nupuaei.
X See Luke xvii. 18.
§ iTEpDivnoq. Matt. xxvi. 38 ; Mark xiv. 34. Comp. eKBafipEioQai, Mark
xiv. 33.
I Matt. XX. 24, xxvi. 8 ; Mark xiv. 4, ^ Matt. xxi. 15.
** Luke xiii. 14.
3IO THE LIFE OF LIVES.
the mothers who brought to Jesus the little children whom
He so tenderly loved. Nothing so deeply stirs the heart
of the Lord of love as the lack of love in those whom He
loves.
5. We find, however, a strong and expressive verb
{£j.i/3pi/xdo/xai) used to indicate His self-restraint amid the
impulses of holy indignation. * In the Authorised and
Revised Versions it is rendered " He groaned in the spirit "
(Vulg, infreimiit spiritii), and in the margin, " He was
moved with indignation in the spirit." f This feeling was
caused by the heart-rending spectacle of the wailing of the
Jews, and of Martha and Mary, for the dead Lazarus. It
perhaps implies emotion " at the sight of the momentary
triumph of evil, as death, or the devil, who had brought sin
into the world, and death through sin, which was here
shown under circumstances of the deepest pathos."
6. It is followed by the word, " He was troubled" or
(more literally) ^^ He troubled Hijnself." This is a peculiar
and striking expression. It is true that in other passages
St. John merely says that our Lord " was troubled in
Spirit ;":|: but still the phrase "He troubled Himself"
seems to imply His entire control over all the impulses of
His own heart. His emotions never swept Him away, as
ours do, with a resistless force, but were firmly under His
* On this word, see Matt. ix. 30 ; Mark i. 43, xiv. 4, and comp. Lam. ii.
6 (LXX.). It perhaps means that He put constraint on His Spirit in John
xi. 33-
\ John xi. 33. In Matt. ix. 31, it is rendered " He strictly" (or " sternly")
" charged them," where it is used of the injunction to the blind men not to
spread aljroad the news of their healing. So in Mark i. 43 of the leper. In
Mark xiv. 4 it is used of the " indignation " of Judas and others against Mary
of Bethany. In Classical Greek it is used of the roaring of a lion, or the snorting
of a steed (/Esch. Theb. 461) ; and then of vehement threats (Ar. Eq. 855).
Brittle or Brimo was a name for Persephone, " the Angered." See Trench, On
the Miracles, p. 432. Euthymius explains the verb £yW/3pro Rab. 5.
" Quid dicam in crucem tolli ? Verbo satis digno tam nefaria res
appellari nullo modo potest." — CiC. Verr. v. 66.
To TrdQof ;fp«oroii I'lftuv airoBeia ianv, Kal 6 Odvarog avTov y/iuv aBavaaia. —
Athanas., Be Incarfi.
It is difficult adequately to realise the multitude and variety
of the forms of spiritual distress and mental an.s^uish, of scorn,
and torture, to which the sinless Son of Man was continuously
subjected from the time that He left the Mount of Olives to
enter Jerusalem for the Last Supper.*
1. At the Last Svipper He had the heavy sorrow of reading
the heart of the traitor, and of uttering His last farewells —
mingled with prophecies of persecution as the path to final
triumph — to those whom He loved best on earth.
2. Then came the agony in the garden, which filled Him with
speechless amazement and shuddering, until He had to fling
Himself with His face to the earth in the tense absorption of
* I will not again re-enter on the highly disputed questions which do not bear
directly on my subject. I still, however, remain unshaken in the conviction
that St. John rightly represents our Lord as crucified on Friday, Nisan 14,
the day before the actual Passover. It is impossible to believe that all the wild
and hurried events of the trials and crucifixion took place on a feast day of
special solemnity. To what I have said on an earlier page (p. 359, footnote) I
will only add that Mr. Wright {Some New Testament Problems) concludes that,
as to the date, " certainty is unattainable, but unless the ministry lasted about
ten years, the most probable date of the Crucifixion is 9 a. m. to 3 p. m. on
Friday, Nisan 14, A. d. 29, and Nisan 14 probably fell on March 18."
384
THE SUFFERINGS OF JESUS. 385
prayer, and His sweat was like great gouts of blood streaming
to the ground.
3. Then the horror of Judas's over-acted traitor-kiss, the seiz-
ure, the binding, the leading away, the desertion of Him by all
His disciples in His hour of need.
4. Then the long trials which, only broken by insult, lasted
the whole night through ; the sense of utter injustice; the proof
that all those hierophants who should have been the very first
to welcome Him with humble yet triumphant gladness, were
fiercely bent on destroying Him by any means, however foul.
5. Then the insolent blow in the face from one of the serv-
ants.*
6. Then the hearing His chief Apostle deny Him with oaths
and curses.
7. Then the night trial before Caiaphas and his most confi-
dential adherents, with all its agitating incidents, its tumult of
sneering voices, its dreadful adjuration, and the sentence on
Him as " a Man of Death " by the " spiritual " court.
8. Then the accumulations of brutal insult as the crowd of
vile underlings mocked Him,t and slapped and beat Him,:]: and
spat in his face,§ and, bandaging His eyes,|| bade Him name
the wretches who had smitten Him.
9. Then the early morning trial before the whole Sanhedrin,
with its continuance of agitating appeals, and the final proof
that " He had come unto His own possessions, and His people
received Him not."
10. Then, if we read the record rightly, another derision by
the Priests and Sanhedrists.
11. Then the long and thrilling scenes of the trial before
Pilate, as He stood in the centre of a crowd thirsting for His
* John xviii. 22. The word pdma/xa is used both for a blow with the fist and
a blow with a rod.
\ Luke xxii. 63, ivETrai^ov avru Sepovrog.
:|: Luke xxii. 63-65, SepovTsc . . . 6 iraiaag ; Mark xiv. 65, Kola(l>ii;eiv; Matt,
xxvi. 67, EKoXdcjuaav . . . epdniaav.
§ Matt. xxvi. 67, tvenrvaav elg to npoaunov.
J Luke xxii. 64, TrepmTivipavTEg avTov ; Matt, xxv. 67,
386 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
blood, yelling for His crucifixion; heaping lies and insults upon
Him; preferring to Him the robber and the murderer; defeat-
ing, by their ferocious pertinacity, the obvious desire of the
Roman Governor to set Him free.
12. Then the leading through the city to Herod, and the
vain attempt of that despicable prince to wring some answer
or some sign from Him.
13. Then the coarse derision of Herod's myrmidons * as, in
mock homage, they stripped Him of His own garments and ar-
rayed Him in a shining robe, with every accumulation of dis-
dainful insolence and cruelty.
14. Then the final sentence of crucifixion, pronounced by
Pilate after vain appeals and efforts to overcome the furious
animosity of His accusers.
15. Then the brutal mockery by the whole band of Roman
soldiers as He stood helpless among them. These coarse le-
gionaries were only too much rejoiced to pour on Him the con-
tempt and detestation which they felt for all Jews,! and seized
the opportunity to vent their callous savagery on One who, as
they were taught to believe, had claimed to be a King. This
King should have the insignia of royalty — a cast-off military
sagum of scarlet ;J: a crown — only twisted of torturing thorns ;§
a sceptre — a reed which they could every now and then snatch
out of His tied hands, and beat Him with it as well as with
rods ; the mock homage of bended knees varied by execrable
spitting, 1 1 and blows on the head, and slaps on the face with the
open palm, and words of uttermost contempt.
16. Then He was mangled and lacerated almost to death by
the horrible and excruciating ■ftagclluni, inflicted by execution-
ers who had no sense of pity, with scourges loaded with balls
of lead and sharp-pointed bones.^
*Luke xxiii. II, tfoj;0ev7/CTaf . . . ifnrat^ac . . . irepc^aluv laOf/Ta ^afinpdv.
f See Jos. B./. II, 12, v. II ; Anii. xix, 9.
X Matt, xxvii. 28, ;i;/la/i{it5a KOKKtvr/v.
§ Matt, xxvii. 2g, aricpavov ff uKnvQuv.
I Matt, xxvii. 30; Mark xv. 19. This was regarded by the Jews with special
loathing (Num. xii. 14 ; Deut. xxv. 9 ; Is. 1. 6).
T[ John xix. I ; Luke xxiii. 16 ; Matt, xxvii. 26. Ilor, Sai. i, 3, 119 ; Apul.
Metam. viii.
THE SUFFERINGS OF JESUS. 387
17. Then came the stripping bare of the robes, and the bend-
ing under the load of the cross — or rather, of its patibuliim —
the transverse beam of the cross, which He was too much ex-
hausted to carry, while the herald went before Him proclaim-
ing the supposed crime for which He was condemned.
18. Then the sight of the weeping and wailing daughters of
Jerusalem.*
19. Then the driving of the lacerating, crushing nails
through His feet, and through either hand, and the uplifting on
the cross, that " servile," " infame'' " crudclissinium," " tceterri-
mum," " extremum" " supplicium."
20. Then the sight of all the world's worst vileness flowing
beneath His eyes in its noisy stream, as the Elders, in their
heartlessness, wagged their heads at Him, and jeered, and blas-
phemed ; t and the soldiers mocked, and the crowd howled their
insults, and the two wretched robbers who shared with Him
that hour of shame — though they were guilty and He was in-
nocent — joined in the continuous pitiless reviling.:]:
21. Then the sight of His mother in her unspeakable desola-
tion.
22. Then the darkening by anguish of His human soul,
which wrung from Him the cry, " My God, My God, why hast
Thou forsaken Me ? "
Yet, amid all these accumulations of anguish, only one word
of physical pain was wrung from Him — the cry, " / thirst " §
— and so deep was the impression caused by His majestic pa-
tience, as well as by the portents which followed, that the whole
crowd was overawed and hushed, and returned to Jerusalem
beating their breasts, and saying, " Truly, this was a righteous
* Luke xxiii. 27.
f To what awful depths of decadence these formalising hierarchs must have
sunk before they could be capable of conduct so execrable may be illustrated
by the fact that King Alexander Jannasus met with universal reprobation from
the Jews when he adopted crucifixion as a mode of punishment (Jos. B. J.
i- 4. 5).
X Mark xv. 29 ; Luke xxiii. 35 ; Matt, xxvii. 44.
§ He had refused to drink the stupefying potion offered to Him before His
crucifixion (Matt, xxvii. 34 ; Mark xv. 23 ; Ps, Ixix. 21).
388 THE LIFE OF LIVES.
man ; " and the penitent robber implored Him to receive him
into His Kingdom ; and even the Pagan Roman centurion spoke
of Him as " a Son of God."*
The uttermost depth of superhuman woe seems to be re-
vealed by His cry, " My God, My God, why hast
Than forsaken Mc? " But it has often been pressed
to unwarrantable conclusions. The twenty-second Psalm
was doubtless present to his mind as a zvhole, when
He hung in the extremity of His lonely anguish ; and
it should never be forgotten that David's cry of despair
is but the brief human prelude to the expression of utter-
most trust, and to the outpouring of confident hope and tri-
umphant praise, li in the " burning fiery furnace " of Nebu-
chadnezzar the Spirit of God was to the Three Children as " a
moist whistling wind," we are not warranted in pressing the
quotation by our Lord of one sad verse of a Psalm of which the
gladness and trust no less than the sorrow must have been pres-
ent to His mind, though He only uttered aloud the first verse
of it. Nor must it be overlooked that, if one of the seven ut-
terances from the Cross expressed spiritual anguish, and an-
other the extreme of physical torment, all the other five were
words of love, of forgiveness, and of triumph. The first was
the prayer for His murderers ; the second was the promise to
the pardoned penitent; the third, the tender provision for the
future of His mother : then came the " Why dost thou forsake
me? " and " I thirst ;" but they were followed by the one loud,
triumphant word, " rsWAf crorz," " It is over for ever ! " and
the ejaculation, " Father, into Thy hands I commend My
Spirit," with which He bowed His head, and yielded up His
human life.* " With a word," says Tertullian, " He volun-
tarily gave up His Spirit, anticipating the duty of the execu-
tioner." " He died," says St. Augustine, " because He willed
* In Luke xxiii. 47 it is " Certainly this was a righteous man." This in any
case was the meaning of the centurion's exclamation. See Wisd. ii. 18.
f The words TrapiSuKev to nvev/ia (John xix. 30), a4i
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