Vi'..c;'.'i*';'. ■ , ¥»-: J5,-i,-r;., fi^•■^'r'Cv'\l?^'.' -yK ,\ ^;^^. '/^^/f ^ _^^^,,,,ellKO^,,,^-. .;g;vVt PRINCETON, N. J. %. 5/;^^ BR 162 .D85 1891 Duff, David, 1824-1890 The early church aJ^V'^^j^ \-ir.^^m^'^\y ^«?: -M*-^\:^ t^'j^H THE EARLY CHURCH THE EAELY CHUECH A HIS WHY OF CHFdSTIAXITY IX THE FIRST SIX CEXTURIES. EY THE LATE DAVID "duff, M.A., D.D., LL.D., PBOFESSOB OF CHTRCH HISTOBT IX THE rSTTED PEESBTTERLLS COLLEGE. EDIXBUBGH. ElUTEI' BY HIS SOX DAVID DUFF. M.A, B.D. EDIXBUEGH: T. i- T. CLARK, 38 CxEOEGE STEEET 1891. PRINTED BT MORRISOX AXD GIBE, FOR T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH. I/)NDOK, . . . SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND CO. LIMITED. DUBLIN, . . . GEORGE HERBERT. NEW YORK, . . CHARLE.S SCBIBNER's SONS. EDITOR'S PREFACE. Pkofessor Duff prepared no part of his work for publica- tion. The manuscript of tliese Lectures on the early period of Church History is written continuously. It contains numerous corrections and additions, with which I have dealt as carefully as possible. Most of the references have been verified. I am responsible for the division into chapters, the foot-notes in square brackets, and many of the translations in the text. Use has been made of several Lectures written for special occasions. My best thanks are due to Principal Cairns, Professor Johnstone, and Dr. Alexander Mair, for their kindness in revising the proof-sheets. DAVID DUFF. Edinburgh, October 1891. CONTENTS. the Time of Christ from CHAP. I. Times of Preparing — "Wild-growing" Religions and their Decay, .... II. The Jews of Palestine, . III. The Jews of the Dispersion, IV. The Synagogue, V. Political History of the Jews about Coming, VI. The Beginning of the Christian Era, VII. Peter, .... VIII. John, .... IX. The other Disciples, X. Paul, .... XI. The Christians, the Jews, and the Roman Power Tiberius to Titus, ..... XII. Gnosticism — The Ebiouites, Cerinthus, and the Docetse, XIII. The Christians and the Roman Power — Domitian and Nerva, XIV. The Apostolic Fathers — Clemens Romanus, XV. The Christians and the Roman Power — The Times of Trajan — Pliny's Letter — Ignatius, . XVI. The Christians, the Jews, and the Roman Power — From Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius, . XVII. Xli^^Apologists — Justin Martyr, XVIII. The Observance of Easter Controversy, XIX. Gnosticism — Basilides, Valentinus, Ophites, Sethites, Cainites Marcion, XX. Irenseus, XXI. Montanism, XXII. The Christians and the Roman Power — Commodus and Severus, XXIII. The Christians and the Roman Power — From Caracalla to Philip, XXIV. The Christians and the Roman Power — Decius, Gallus Valerian, Gallienus, Claudius, Aurelian, XXV. The Christians and the Roman Power — Diocletian, XXVI. TertuUian, 1 18 33 42 46 55 57 65 73 75 79 92 102 104 113 133 157 171 179 191 200 211 221 229 235 244 CONTENTS. (HAT. PAfiE XXVII. Cyprian, ....... 254 XXVIII. Clement of Akxamlm, . . . . .274 XXIX. Origen, ....... 282 .X.XX. The Christians and the Koiiian Tower — Constantino and JIaxentius, ....... 304 X.\.\'I. The Christians and the Eoinan Power — Constantinc and Licinius, ....... 323 X X X 1 1. The Doiiatist Controversy, . . . . .336 XXXIII. The Arian Controversy — Doctrine of the Tiiiiity before the Nicene Council, . . . . . .348 XXXIV. The Arian Controversy — Arius — The Council of Nicaa, . 363 XXXV. The Arian Controversy after the Council of Nie:ea, . . 383 XXXVI. Some Notes on Hilary, . . . . .394 XXXVII. Constantine and his Sons and the Church, . . SO.*) XXXVIII. Julian, 407 XXXIX. The Christians in the Times of Jovian, Valentinian, and Gratian, ....... 427 XL. Theodosius, 432 XLI. Arcudius and Honorius, ..... 443 XLII. Justinian, ....... 449 XLIII. Ambrose, ....... 457 XLIV. Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, . . . . .466 XLV. The Origenistic Controversy — The Controversy in Palestine, 476 XLVI. Some Kotes on Jerome, ..... 481 XLVII. The Origenistic Controversy^The Controversy in Egypt and at Constantinople, ...... 483 XLVII I. Chrysostom, ....... 496 XLIX. The Origenistic Controversy — Close of the Controversy — Points Involved in the Discussion, .... 500 L. Doctrine of the Person of Christ before the time of Nestorius, 504 LI. Doctrine of the Person of Christ — Nestorius and his Heresy, 510 LII. Doctrine of the Person of Christ — The Eutychian Heresy, . 533 LIII. Doctrine of the Person of Christ — The Monophysite Heresy, 542 LIV. Doctrine of the Person of Christ — The Monothelitic Heresy, 554 LV. The Pelagian ami the Semi-Pelagian Controversy, . . 561 LVI. Augustine, ....... 592 L\1I. Development of the Doctrine of Papal Supremacy, . . 605 Index, . . . . . . .617 ERRATA. On page 19, in second last line, delete "from." On page 380, /o>- " Meletus " rcati "Meletius." THE EARLY CHURCH. CHAPTER I. TIMES OF PREPARING " WILD-GROWING " RELIGIONS AND THEIR DECAY. It is truly said Ly an ecclesiastical historian that Providence, though it may not move at a uniform pace, is not wont to advance by leaps. Extraordinary revolutions, which bring to light much that was previously unknown and unconceived, may be called a new creation ; and of all the revolutions which have taken place in the history of the world, Chris- tianity is certainly best entitled to the name. But this new creation does not come forth out of an absolute chaos. We learn from the New Testament itself that it was in the " fulness of the times " that Christ appeared ; and while that phrase may be held as referring chiefly to the completeness of the special and supernatural preparation which had been made in the midst of the people of Israel, no one will be disposed to deny tliat it comprehends also the completion of a process which took place over a vastly wider field, though some may affirm that, as respects the religious history of the Gentiles, the fulness of the times was come morally, because a full demonstration was now afforded of the utter worthless- ness and wickedness of paganism. But, at all events, pre- paration had been made ; and long, dark furrows, stretching over the great field of the world, had been opened up for the reception of the heavenly seed. Christianity was not a pro- duct of the past : it was not a product of earth. But, in the past, mountains had been levelled and valleys filled up, and there had been types and forerunners and aspirations and pro- mises among those who could do no more than feel after God, A 2 THE EAIILY CHUECH. as well, though not iu the same degree, or so directly from the hij^hest source, as among those to wliom God had revealed Himself by the prophets. Let us first look shortly at those nations whose religion, as it is sometimes expressed, " grew wild " — those who were not favoured with supernatural communications such as were vouchsafed to the Jews. Now there are different ways of regarding paganism — different points of view from which it is considered in tracing tlie history of religious development. The first refuses to recognise the distinction between a " wild- growing" religion and one which has enjoyed the special husbandry of the great God Himself : it makes no distinction between natural religion and revealed. According to this mode of apprehending it, heathenism is not only a perfectly natural condition but a necessary stage in the development of the human spirit — a transitional state which leads to Christianity as a perfectly natural result, and, in particular, to those principles of Christianity which are conceived to be its kernel. A second mode of apprehension is that which will perceive nothing but what is false in the so-called religious knowledge of the heathen, and nothing but what is devilish in their life. It is sometimes affirmed that most Protestant creeds compel their adherents to take this view, but the language used concerning human depravity, while clearly denoting that all actions performed by men in their natural condition, and uninfluenced by the highest motives, are essentially defective, and therefore sinful, must be interpreted in accordance with tlie historical evidence of a " relative virtue " among pagans. Even those who feel scruples, not unreasonable, as to the use of tlie word " virtue," cannot avoid such pln-ases as the " temperance of a Zeno," the " continence of a Scipio," or the " faitli of a Regulus." According to a third view, a partial knowledge of the truth may be discerned in or under the false systems of the heathen world. There are traces to be found of the truth of God wliich has been clianged into a lie. This seems to be implied even in the liideous picture M'hicli Paul draws in tlie Epistle to the lionians of heathen error and uncleanness, but still more plainly in the address which he delivered on Mars Hill. " WILD-GROWING EELIGIONS AND THEIR DECAY. 3 Many — perhaps the majority — of those who take this view of heathenism hold, further, that the religious history of the world naturally took a downward course, as indeed the world has witnessed of itself by the widespread tradition of an earlier, a peaceful, and blissful age, which had been long ago lost. This opinion is strongly expressed by A. W. Schlegel in language which Dean Milman quotes approvingly : " The more I investigate the ancient history of the world, the more I am convinced that the civilised nations set out from a purer worship of the Supreme Being ; that the magic power of nature over the imagination of the successive liuman races first, at a later period, produced polytheism, and, finally, altogether obscured the more spiritual religious notions in the popular belief; while the wise alone preserved within the sanctuary the primeval secret. Hence, mythology appears to me the last developed and most changeable part of the old religion. The divergence of the various mythologies, there- fore, proves nothing against the descent of the religions from a common source. The mythologies might be locally formed, according to the circumstances of climate or soil ; it is im- possible to mistake this with regard to the Egyptian myths." ^ It is to be observed that in this passage the downward tendency, with its extravagant results, is asserted only of the " popular " religion, and tliat the possibility of the " wise," as the writer calls them, holding a purer creed is by no means denied. If we take, as some have taken, the essence of religion to be the feeling of dependence, it is easy to understand how those who had lost the knowledge of the true God should find objects of worship in nature and its powers, and how the variety which meets us should be determined in great measure by the difference of climate, circumstances, and habits of life. The phenomena of the atmosphere, for example, could not have the same effect on religious con- ceptions in Egypt as among the Greeks or other nations whose sky was more variable. It was the Nile that awakened the feeling of dependence in the land of the Pharaohs, and we need not wonder that the worship of that ' [Hist, of Christianity from the Birth of Chri/tt to the Abolition of Pn^jan- ism in the Roman Empire. Bk. i. ch. i. p. 13, note. 1 4 THE EAIJLY CHURCH. country turned mainly about the river — Osiris, sought and found, then lost and mourned, by the longing Isis, the thirsty land.^ It can hardly be questioned, liowever, that Zabaisni, the worship of the heavenly bodies, originated, and prevailed chiefly, among oriental shepherd tribes, although it was by no means confined to them, but extended also to agricultural races. The form of dualism connected with this nature worship — light and darkness, Ormuzd and Ahriman, good and evil in perpetual conflict — may afterwards require par- ticular notice.- But other religious systems have much in common with Zabaism. The heavenly bodies have a place in them. And here again the influence of climate may be discerned. How diU'crent the sun-god of the Greeks from the sun-god ^Moloch, which represented the scorching, killing heat of a Syrian summer, and was honoured with the sacrifices of children, whom, according to the Jewish tradition, parents put into his burning brazen arms ! It has been remarked that the East, generally speaking, was tired of its gods when Alexander c(mquered it, and that the worship of the Olympian divinities spread over Asia Minor without encountering any formidable resistance except at the borders of that land where a purer faith had been established by special divine revelations and institutions. "What is most noteworthy with regard to the diffusion of Greek ideas and rights over the greater part of the region subdued by tlie Macedonian is, that there was as little religious zeal on the one side as on the other — on the side of the victors as on the side of the vanquished. Probably there was even less on the side of the former than on the side of the latter, for already there was deeply felt (and among multitudes w^ho could not well give an account of the origin of their scepticism) the influence of ideas hostile to the old simple faith in the divinities with which the Greek imagination had peopled all nature. But the propagation of a religion which was now suffering from internal weakness, and was rajddly declining on its native soil, was an affair of national honour, was not undesirable in the interests of ^ Osiris, however, is not uiiiversiilly iiU'iitilled witli the Nile, some regnrdiDj; hiin as god of the sun. '■' [The subjeet is not re.suined.] " WILD-GROWIXG RELIGIONS AND THEIR DECAY. 5 humanity, and certainly must have seemed to be most desirable in the interests of the new dignities which were created in the room of those which had been overthrown. Hellenic art, it is frequently said, created its gods in the Hellenic image. As it is expressed by Gieseler, " The Grecian gods were ideal Greeks, thinking and living as Greeks ; " ^ or, as it is expressed by Hase, " The Grecian world of divinity was an ideal copy of Grecian popular life, formed by art and for art ; " ^ and this copy, reflecting and exaggerating the immorality which prevailed, "was a mirror in which the light-minded people beheld themselves and justified themselves." There is undeniable truth in tliis view ; but, though the Greek divinities, in contrast with oriental rigidity, were elevated to moving individual forms with characteristic differences, and were conceived of as entering into manifold relations and alliances and conflicts, and displaying such virtues and excellences, and very often such weaknesses and vices, as are common among men, it is equally undeniable that the religion of the Greek was not mere man-worship, and that the worship of surrounding nature underlies the anthropomorphism with which we are familiar through the poetry of Homer, and which is certainly preferable to the unimaginative, stiff and monotonous, often monstrous and cruel, systems of idolatry which, as we have seen, it displaced to some extent over wide regions of Asia Minor. The divinities whose names come most readily to our lips — Zeus, Here, Poseidon, Apollo — originated as plainly as Osiris and Baal and Oromasdes ^ in the feeling of dependence on nature and its powers. It is no more necessary to prove this than to prove that the dryads and oreads were divinities of the groves and of the mountains. Deified men, and deified attributes also, are embraced in the mythology of Greece ; but, though man is included, it is the picture of a vast and varied nature-worship, drawn by a people whose fancy was fruitful, whose eye and ear were ever open, and whose great immorality, reflected from Olympus, was often restrained by the sense and love of beauty, even as the rude manslaughtering ]\lars could be tamed by the ' [KirchmQCAch. Einleit. i. § 10.] - [Kirchenjesch. lite Auflage, S. 17.] ' [The Greek form of OrrauzJ. ] b THE EAKLY CnURCII. goddess whom they worshipped iu the fairest of their temples.^ Although some divinities were worshipped with impure and debasing rites, — and such consecration of vice cannot be too deeply deplored, — it is going too far to say that the Greek religion was wholly immoral in its character and tendency, and that it exercised only a corrupting and pernicious in- fluence. It must be admitted, however, that it contrasts in this respect very unfavourably with the religion of the ancient llomans, whose gods, though many of them may have origin- ally represented objects or powers of external nature, were conceived of and adored more directly in their relation to human life, public or domestic. Thus Juno is the divine prototype of woman, the guardian of marriage, patroness of wives and mothers ; while Jupiter, the great sovereign of heaven, is worshipped above all as the invisible head and protector of the Eoman State. To such divinities, in accord- ance with the genius of the people, which was directed less to external nature than to the forces and influences that govern human life, there are added others which are simply abstrac- tions, such as Fides and Concordia and Victoria. For every variety of relation and of duty, and for every period of life, there are special deities, whose favour is to be invoked or whose wrath is to be averted. There are deities who teacli the child to cry, to walk, to speak, and to sing. Throughout the entire system the practical understanding manifests itself. It is a form of nature-worship widely different from that of the Greek ; and that its moral influences were more liealthful is not disputed. " The great historian Polybius," says Keander,- " has given us a picture of Eoman life, such as it was a century and a half before Christ, while it yet retained its ancient simplicity. Judging by those maxims of the understanding, which, as a statesman, he was in the liabit of applying to the aftairs of the world, he believed that that very trait which had been most commonly objected to in the Eoman character, — an excessive superstition wrought into their whole public and private life, — was, in truth, the firmest pillar of the Eoman State. Contemplating religion in this outward way, he saw in it only a means, which the wisdom * Pallas Athene. - [Church HUlo)~y, vol. i. p. 8, Torrey's trans.] " WILD-GROWING " RELIGIONS AND THEIR DECAY. 7 of lawgivers employed, for training and leading tlie multitude. ' If it were possible,' lie remarked, ' to form a State of wise men, such a procedure would perhaps be found unnecessary. But, as a counterpoise to the power which unruly passions and desires exercise over the excitable multitude, there is need of such contrivances to hold them in check by their fear of the invisible, and by such like tales of horror.' " This passage has been quoted as showing the moral power of the Eoman relicfion at the time when, according to Neander, Roman life retained its ancient simplicity. That its power was still felt deeply at that period is unquestionable, but it appears from the passage itself that at that very period — a century and a half before Christ — there were those who sought to undermine the old faith which had proved so salutary, and whom Polybius thought he had good reason to censure. But censure of the assailants of a religion, it is hardly needful to say, when accompanied with a contemptuous avowal of personal unbelief, is not the most likely means of upholding it when it is threatened with destruction. And at that very period great historical events, vastly more than the attacks of which Polybius complained, were hastening on the consummation. The fall of Corinth in the year 146 B.C., the year in whicli Carthage was destroyed, was a most important epoch in the religious, as well as in the civil, history of the world. The tendency strongly felt by the Eoman at this period, though not peculiar to him, to find his own gods again in those of the nations he subdued, and, when he had none of his own that in any way corresponded, to adopt the new, brought him, as respects religion also, into subjection to the superior mind of captive Greece. The stories, many of them grossly human, that were told of the gods of Olympus, were transferred to Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and the other Latin divinities. The doubts of Greece were likewise transferred to the land of the conqueror, the very multiplication and confusion of gods and rites and legends being in the highest degree provocative of the destructive criticism which Polybius so earnestly deprecated. In gaining the empire of the world, Rome lost — if you will call it a loss — her old religion so far as it was strictly national. But in the spiritual world, it has been said, " when the « THE EAELY CHURCH. old falls, the new is already present." The old systems of the civilised world were being subverted because certain ideas, as enlightenment advanced, were diffused, which made them appear, as they had been popularly understood in the past, scarcely less irrational than the fetichism of the most savage barbarians. It has already been noticed that the process of dissolution had begun long before the destruction of Corinth and the subjugation of Greece — nay, before Alexander carried his victorious arms into Asia. One might go still further back ; but, to refer to the time of him whose teaching made the greatest epoch in the history of philosophy, there is much in the character of the opposition he provoked that shows that the ancient system did not hold the popular mind with so firm a grasp as formerly. Men who were far from denying or underrating the genius of Aristophanes have remarked that the obscene language and the blaspheming orthodoxy of the great comedian furnish more conclusive evidence of widespread corruption and impiety than all the shafts which he hurls against both. But, on the other hand, the influence of philosophy, or, if you will, the progress of enlightenment, appears in a more pleasing way in the great tragedians, who so frequently introduce the " gods many " of their country as representatives of the " one " which is vaguely designated the Divine, and as subject to a higher law — not capricious and conflicting powers, as in the some- what anarchical Olympus of old times, which had been con- secrated by the immortal verse of Horner. As for Socrates himself, " the greatest forerunner of Christ in the heathen world," as he has often been called, — the lover of wisdom whom Aristophanes calumniated and ridiculed, and whom the Forty condemned to the cup of poison, — it is not my purpose to give an account of his life and teaching. 1 would simply remind you of that to which, as it is ex- pressed by Baur, this philosopher owes his epoch-making significance — the famous fyvSidi aeavrov — his demand that tjie spirit should turn from the outer to the inner world — that man should become acquainted with himself in tlie depth of his own self-consciousness, in order to learn in what relation he stands to Cod and into what relation to Him he ought to come. This demand bears a certain correspondence with the " WILD-GROMaNG " KELIGIONS AND THEIR DECAY. 9 first, made by the Christian religion — ixeravoelre — and it is clear that it was fitted to awaken the idea and desire of a redemption. It did so ; and, though the redemption con- ceived of by the followers of Socrates, and in particular by his greatest disciple Plato, was not, as it could not be expected to be, quite the same as that which was wrought by Christ, yet the conception and the desire, as well as the demand which had excited both, offered points of contact for the new religion that was to supersede the mythologies of Greece and Eome. When a man truly longs for deliverance from the blind power of nature, and at the same time for a clearer revelation of heavenly truth, he is " not far from the kingdom of God." The longing for both is expressed by Plato. And how elevated and far-reaching is that philosophy which would have itself regarded as fMeXerr] davdrou — a " preparation for death," i.e. for immortal life ! The sort of immortality which it offered, however, is sometimes described in a way that could not be generally attractive, and this leads us to notice one vital point which shows the immense superiority of Christianity. Plato's philosophy was not designed or expected to exercise any general influence of a direct kind. The multitude for him was as good as non- existent. He addresses himself to a chosen few, and not to the race. Neander indeed says : " Compared with the principle of ethical sf //-sufficiency, with that elevation of the feeling of self peculiar to the ancient world, and which appears to have reached its highest point in Stoicism — the Platonic system was distinguished by a tendency towards that which is most directly opposed to that principle, the Christian idea, viz., of humility. The word Tavreti^o?, which, according to the general sentiment of the ancient world, was employed, for the most part, in a bad sense, as indicating a slavish self-debasement, is to be met with in Plato and the Platonists as the designation of a jDious, virtuous temper ; " it is " opposed to the impious spirit of self-exaltation." Not- withstanding this statement, the oft-repeated saying remains true, that the ancients had no word in their language exactly corresponding with the grace of humility in the Christian sense. For in this sense humility has essentially a twofold ^ [Church History, vol. i. p. 26, with note.] 10 THE EARLY CHURCH. aspect — an aspect manwarJ as well as GoJward. It is not only opposed to the impious spirit of self-exaltation, — the spirit which exalts itself against tlie divinity and the order of the universe, — but it includes the disposition to honour all men and to condescend to men of low estate. Surrounded by the temples and statues of the gods, and four centuries before Paul delivered that discourse of which the inscription on the Athenian altar to " An Unknown God " was the starting-point, Plato could write that well-known sentence in which he confesses the insutficiency, for the race, of the philo- sophy which he had cultivated with genius so rare and admir- able, and which had accelerated the destruction of the popular religion : " It is difficult to discover the Divinity, and when He is discovered, it is impossible to make him known to all." This " aristocratic philosophy," as it has been called, which had begun by descending into man himself, had gone deeper still, or had found within something of the Divine, which led it upward to the Absolute and Eternal — the free and wise and righteous spirit, to which the universe stood in some such relation as the human body to the human soul. There was here a reduction of the hereditary and official polytheism to that unity from which, according to some, it had originally sprung ; and though Plato addressed the chosen few, his voice was heard by the world, some of the great thoughts which he expounded spreading abroad and producing a powerful and inevitable effect on those who were incapable of fully com- l^rehending and appreciating him. It is unjust to him to say that his intluence was merely negative and destructive ; but for the last revelation of Divine truth, pure and authoritative in doctrine and morals, constraining in motive, addressed and adapted to the race, we must look not to Plato, — he himself is far from pretending to give it, — but to Him in whom alone Plato's noblest pictures of moral beauty have been fully realised, and who was entirely free from the grave errors and imperfections with which Plato has been reproached — the Son of Man, who came down from heaven, and who, being Ta7retvo<; rfj Kaphla, preached the gospel to the poor. Pressensu applies to Plato's philosophy a quotation from his own symposium : " It desires what is supremely beautiful without possessing what it pursues," " WILD-GROWING " RELIGIONS AND THEIR DECAY. 1 1 Of all the philosophers of antiquity who have influenced the development of Chiistian theology none can be compared with Plato, except Aristotle, the philosopher of the " intellect," who was Plato's disciple for twenty years. But, whatever merits his system and method may possess in other points of view, tliey have not, as respects the preparation for Chris- tianity, the importance of his master s ; and while they un- doubtedly have their part in creating the void which the new religion came to fill, they are not so fitted to awaken religious aspiration, and do not offer the same points of contact for the true faith. Before adverting to other systems, let us go back for a moment to the teaching of Socrates, and notice a consequence of his fundamental principle that a man should go inward and come to the consciousness of himself as a moral subject. This subjectivity was subversive of the ancient principle which had long passed unquestioned, and which found some such expression as this : " The whole is before the part, the State before the individual : the individual lives in the State and for it." To this principle a fatal blow was struck by the demand to seek the grounds of thinking and acting in one's own spirit. If this be the true starting-point, then the end which a man has to pursue is not the prosperity of the State, but a virtuous life. It is not Athens, but the individual moral subject himself that becomes the measure of good. Accordingly, in the systems that were developed by the immediate disciples of Socrates, widely diverging as these systems were, this subjectivity continues to assert itself. It is indeed not uncommon to speak of Plato as an exception, and to represent him as having sacrificed the individual to the commonwealth ; but it was certainly not to any actually existing State that he would have subordinated the individual, but to one constituted and governed in accordance with everlasting ideas and principles which he believed could be educed from within. But still more powerfully did the subjectivity to which, it may be, Plato did not concede its full rights, assert itself when the old free States, to which the citizens had been wont to devote themselves so cheerfully and often so heroically, had been subjugated, first by the arms of Macedonia, and then by the arms of Eome. The 12 THE EARLY CHURCH. world-monarchy of the Piomans was a vast aggregate, in which, occupation with public affairs being for the most part impossible and, where possible, often distasteful, the individual all the more naturally turned in upon himself and sought to discover the laws and principles that were to regulate him in performing his life's task as a human being. This we see illustrated in Stoicism and Epicureanism, which were founded about three centuries before Christ, the one by Zeno of Citium, the other by Epicurus of Gargettus, near Athens, and which prevailed so widely throughout the Pioman Empire when Christianity was introduced into the world. Both, it has been said, seek the same end, — ti'anquillity, peace, freedom of mind, — dealing not so much witli great metaph.ysical problems as with rules of life which are fitted to promote the well-being of the individual. The one will have a strong Ich, by which evil is endured without pain or disgust ; the other will have a safe Ich, by which evil is avoided. The Stoic, whose system liad great attractions for noble minds, especially among the Eomans, exhibited in full length his ideal of the wise man, which possessed all possible perfections except, it has often been remarked, that of reality. It is not easy to see, however, how this is any disparagement of that philosophy ; and it should be acknowledged that it is much to have vigorously grasped and held fast, in an age of decay and corruption, the idea that man has a moral task ; to have presented that idea in its universality, as rising above all national elements and distinctions ; and, at the same time, to have taught that the right performance of the task gives to life its value — a value undimmed and undiminished, rather rendered greater and more conspicuous, by reproach and calamity and death. That such teaching was merely hollow rhetoric and was utterly without influence it is unjust to say ; but comparatively unfruitful it was and could not but be, since it lacks not only the higher motives which Christianity supplies but some of its liigher principles. Tlie Stoic had nothing of the " humility " (ja'iTeLvo(^poavv7]) which, at least in one of its aspects, as we have seen, belonged to Platonism ; and very different is the pantheistic subjection of himself under an iron necessity, from the meek submission of a soul that does not rest in the con- sciousness of its own worth, but trusts in the fatherly love of " WILD-GROWING " RELIGIONS AND THEIR DECAY. 13 the only wise God, who alone can make wise unto salvation. Of such a God the Stoic had no conception. For him all the gods of his country were but names and emblems for different manifestations of the universal life and soul, from which all Hows and which receives all into itself again. Epicureanism is usually viewed as purely antagonistic to Christianity, and indeed to all religion ; for although the existence of gods was not denied, both creation and providence were ; and we cannot therefore wonder that the system should usually be called atheistic. This philosophy, then, had its part too in creating the void which Christianity came to fill. In making pleasure the end of life, the founder had indeed recognised virtue as an indispensable means : " Claniat Epi- curus non posse jucunde vivi nisi sapienter, honeste justeque vivatur." ^ But such a system rapidly and inevitably degener- ated. Socrates and Plato had gone down to man's soul that they might go deeper still to the Divine and eternal ; the Epicurean stopped with himself as the fixed immovable point round which the universe revolves, having interest for him only as it ministers to or threatens to disturb his happiness. But there were some who despaired of attaining any certain knowledge in religion or morals, putting the question, " What is truth ? " as one which had never been answered, and to which no answer was to be expected. It is needless to say that this scepticism, represented chiefly by Arkesilaus (318— 241 B.C.) and Carneades (214-130 B.C.), increased the desola- tion and darkness caused by the decline of the popular religions. There were some, however, who, while they did not attach themselves to Epicureanism or to Stoicism — the egoism of self-indulgence and the egoism of self-righteousness, as tliey have been respectively called — or to any other system, could not prevail upon themselves to abandon all philosophising, but gathered from various sources such ideas as commended themselves to them, particularly those which seemed most likely to blossom and fructify in the moral region. This eclecticism is indeed the daughter of scepticism, since it pre- supposes not only dissatisfaction with existing systems but ^ Cicero, De Finihuft [Lib. i. c. 18. : " Epicurus declares tliat one cannot live pleasantly unless one live wisely, honourably, and justly. "] 14 THE EARLY CHURCH. despair of finding a new one, rounded and complete, that could be substituted for the old. The probabilism of the eclectic, however, leaned to the opposite side from that of the sceptic — to that of certainty, and not to that of doubt or denial. The chief representatives of this eclectic direction, which appears to have been the most prevalent mode of thinking among cultivated men when Christianity was introduced into the world, and for a considerable time afterwards, teach so much that is akin to Christianity that readers have often felt as if they were standing not merely on the territory of popular philosophy and natural theology but on that of revealed religion. With regard to Seneca, in particular, who is some- times ranked with the J'xlectics, though now fre(|uently with the Stoics, some have found it necessary to resort to the hypothesis that he was acquainted with the truths of (Jhristianity as proclaimed in his immediate neighbourhood, and some have even found the source of his teaching in the fable that he carried on a correspondence with the Apostle Paul. The resemblance is in many points close, but not so close or of such a nature as to demand this explanation, and the vast difference between Paul and Seneca on great funda- mental questions would militate against it, and dispose us to reject it, even if there were, as there is not, some show of historical evidence in its favour. It has been well said ^ of Seneca (the teacher of Nero and the brotlier of (Jallio), that while he has little of the harshness of Stoicism ; while he has a conception of a merciful God who educates men through suffering ; while he speaks of a blessed communion and friendship between the Divinity and man, whicli is to be A'alued more highly than all worldly prosperity, yet the grave doubts which have been cast upon his own moral character, and especially tlie avarice whicli has been laid to his charge with too good reason, and which was so sorely at variance with the lofty language in which he inculcates con- tempt of the world, furnish one among the many illustrations of the truth that the noblest moral teaching cannot redeem and renew, cannot produce or take the place of that great inward revelation wliich Christianity terms a new birth. There are two other representatives of Eclecticism who ' By Ilngeiibacli [Kirrhevgct^ch., i. 16]. " WILD-GKOWING " RELIGIONS AND THEIR DECAY. 1 5 are better known tlmn Seneca, and at the same time exhibit more truly than he the eclectic spirit. These are Cicero f^id Plutarch. For an account of the views of the latter, and particularly of his religious views, we may refer to Neander, who gives ample information, confirmed by copious and interesting quotations from his writings. I shall quote one passage, interesting as showing that in the case of this philo- sopher at least, when the old was falling the new was present — not certainly the Christian religion itself, but some principle or principles of a kindred nature, which might well prove preparatory to its reception. " It was the purpose," says Neander, " of this apologetic and reforming philosophy of religion, to counteract infidelity as well as superstition, by setting forth the ideal matter contained in the old religions. From this position, and with this object in view, Plutarch, in his hortatory discourse to a priestess of Tsis, thus remarks : ' As it is not the long beard and mantle that make the philosopher, so is it neither a linen robe nor a shaven head that make the priest of Isis. But the true priest of Isis is he who first of all receives from the laws the rites and customs pertaining to the gods, and then examines into their grounds, and philosophises on the truth they contain.' With some profoundness of meaning Plutarch compares the old myths — considered as representations of the ideas which have resulted from a refraction of the Divine light by some foreign sub- stance, a reappearance of it after having been broken by the intervention of some heterogeneous medium — to the rainbow as a refraction of the sun's light. We find here the first beginnings of an attempt to reconcile the natural and super- natural in religion ; to adjust the position of the rationalist with that of the supernaturalist, the scientific interest with the religious ; tendencies and ideas which, advancing beyond the position maintained by the old religions of nature, stepped forward to meet the Theism of revelation. And it was by such means alone that a reconciliation could be effectually brought about, and a true understanding of the religious development of humanity become possible." ^ Like Cicero, the philosopher of Chasronea had a strong ^ Plutarch by no means denied the supernatuitil. In the above passage he would rather seem to explain it away. 16 THE EAELY CHURCH. faith in immortality, and, though he cannot be supposed to have been acquainted with the writings of Paul, he compares life with a dream and death with an awaking, and consoles those who are in the midst of life's struggles by reminding them that the combatants receive not the crown while they light but when the battle is over and the victory won. No pagan writer of antiquity shows a more truly religious spirit. It is not astonishing, however, that among the cultivated there were those who could not find a body of truth under the mythological dress, a kernel within the shell. To them the form was without contents. They might break their teeth on the shell, but they could extract nothing that would satisfy their souls. If, then, there were some who, like I'lutarch, showed a peculiar preparedness for Christianity, there were others among eminent thinkers, like the elder Pliny, in whom we see the truth that the " fulness of the times " was come illustrated on a difi'erent side, and who prove the vastness of the gap which divine revelation was given to fill. "All religion," says Pliny, " is the offspring of necessity, weakness, and fear. What God is — if in truth He be any Being distinct from the world — it is beyond the compass of man's under- standing to know. But it is a foolish delusion, springing from human weakness and ])ride, to imagine that such an infinite Spirit would concern Himself with the petty affairs of men. The vanity of man, and his insatiable longing for existence, have led him also to dream of a life after death. A being full of contradictions, he is the most wretched of creatures, since no other has wants transcending the bounds of his nature. Man's nature is a lie, uniting the greatest poverty with the greatest pride. Among such great evils the greatest good that (Jod has bestowed upon man is the power of taking his own life." It is evident that the progress of thought and civilisation beyond the primeval simplicity which had rendered a literal belief in the mythological systems possible, would be felt, so far as it influenced the masses of society, chieily on its nega- tive and destructive side. For a long period, indeed, the mixed mythology which had spread in the empire was of such a nature that, even when sincerely accepted, it was not calcu- lated to act deeply and favourably on life and morals, and, in "WILD-GROWING " EELIGIOXS AND THEIR DECAY. 17 some respects, could not but act on them most disastrously. But the testimony of contemporary writers — not merely of tlie satirist but of the historian and moralist — exhibits the wickedness and licentiousness of the ai^e of Augustus in colours like those used by the Apostle himself in tiie first chapter of the Epistle to the Eomans. Before the tin)e of Augustus, the world-conquering Borne, drunk with the blood of nations and contaminated by foreign vices, had begun to prey on its own bowels, and had become sadly familiar with civil war, assassination, and poisoning. And now, at the birth of Christ, when the old religion, though its ceremonies might be maintained in observance, had become an insufficient engme of policy ; when, according to tlie language of Cicero so often quoted, two augurs could not meet without a smile playing on their lips ; and when, according to the same authority, no one believed any longer in fables of Tartarus and in the joys of Elysium, the empire itself was threatened with the fate of its religion. The seeds of destruction were inherent in it. A multitude of miserable slaves, unbounded luxury, and the growing power of the soldiers, who could no longer turn their arms abroad — these were among the sources of peril now menacing the world-monarchy that had risen by the sword ; and though Christianity, of course, was in no wise responsible for them, they were destined to affect powerfully its future history. Meanwhile she stepped into the wilderness of wickedness, when, according to Seneca, men could endure neither their guilt nor its remedy, but when the hope which had long been cherished in Judpea seemed to grow up and blossom like a solitary flower in the midst of barrenness and desolation. Meanwhile — and in this we cannot but recognise the special providence of God — the unity of the known and civilised world and its tranquillity were maintained and secured by the moderation and wisdom of Augustus, whose successors, partly from the inactivity of their nature, were disposed to follow his policy. CHAPTER II. THE JEWS OF PALESTINE. Among the Jews we see religion holding a place which strik- ingly contrasts witli that assigned to it among the Romans. In Judrea the religions interest was not subordinate to the civil and secular, as in Rome, but the civil and secular interest was subordinate to the religious. But we need not go so far as the capital of the world to find an illustration of the con- trast which the peculiar people offered to all other nations. On the coast in the immediate neighbourhood men were occupied with wool and glass and purple, and in the north also the inhabitants were more concerned about the com- mercial advantages that could be derived from the new Roman rinity and organisation than about such questions as agitated the descendants of those to whom God had spoken by the prophets. The burning questions on the sacred soil did not turn on matters of external policy, or commerce, or political economy, but on matters of religion, though behind them secular interests, and civil, might also be cherished, — and sometimes, especially in the case of the Sadducees, these were not concealed, — and though, as was inevitable, the conflicts which arose on the religious territory exerted a powerful intluence on the course of the nation's outward history. Tlie two principal parties, as you are aware, were the Pharisees and Sadducees. It is common to speak of them as sects, but more than one writer in recent times has noticed that the application of the term "sect" to them, as the word is now generally understood, is incorrect, since they did not separate themselves, and had no thought of separating them- selves, from the religious communion of their nation, but considered themselves on both sides to be its truest members and representatives. Ecpudly incorrect is it to speak of the Pharisees as the conservative party in such a sense of the THE JEWS OF PALESTINE, 19 expression as is current among us ; and it is scarcely less objectionable to speak of the Sadducees as the rationalistic party, for, generally speaking, they were far from questioning the Divine authority or the Divine origin of the books which they did receive, viz., the books of Moses, and sometimes adhered more rigidly to the strict interpretation where the Pharisees' disposition to exercise judgment mildly delivered them for the time from the bondage of the letter — as, for instance, in the passage " an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," where the former insisted on the strict fulfilment of the words, while the latter thought that pecuniary indemnification might be accepted in atonement for the offence. Neither party can, in the worst sense, be called " rational- istic," though the Pharisees may with some propriety be termed the " orthodox," since, with all their exaggerations and aberrations, they held the national religion in its actual development, and, however erroneous their conceptions of the Messiah, cherished the hope of His advent. If, however, either party is to be called conservative, it is not they, but the Sadducees, who have been with good reason characterised as a " priestly aristocracy." This they certainly were when the apostles began to proclaim their crucified and risen Lord.^ Among the ancestors of the men who formed this conservative party were those of whom they had little reason to be proud, and who had proved apostates and traitors ; but still, though not undisputed or uninterrupted, their influence and power were great in the Temple, as, on the other hand, the party of the Pharisees, with whom they stood in direct antagonism, ruled the synagogue, and ruled through the Synagogue. The derivation of the name Sadducee from the common word meaning " righteous " is now abandoned by many, though it had this to recommend it, that, however far their personal character might be from corresponding with it, it was at least indicative of their strict adherence to the letter of the Law. By many they are believed to have been called from the proper name Zadok, whether the ancestor of the ancient and famous and Levitical family mentioned in Ezekiel xl. 46 and in other passages, or from a Zadok who flourished about two centuries and a half before Christ, and who was a 1 Acts iv. 1 ; V. 17. 20 THE EARLY CHURCH. pupil of Antigonus Soclio, who is said to have taught that virtue ought to be cultivated without respect to any recom- pense of reward, and to have denied the doctrine of retribution in a future life.^ This doctrine, we know, was denied by the whole party, whether they derived their name from the Zadok of the third century, or, as seems to many more probable, from the more ancient Zadok spoken of by the prophet. It does not appear to be established that they expressly and openly rejected all the books of the Hebrew canon except the Penta- teuch, but, if they accepted the others, they must have under- stood them as harmonising, or explained them so as to make them harmonise, with the explicit teaching of the latter. From the books of j\Ioses, which they did revere, and not from later writings, which to us seem to contain plainer proofs, Jesus draws His answer to their perplexing question — as they supposed it to be — concerning the resurrection of the dead : " Whose wife shall she be of the seven ? " The reply was profitable for correction as well as for instruction, charging the Sadducees with want of spiritual understanding in failing to penetrate beneath the surface of the books of which they recognised the Divine autliority, and so failing to discover the germ of doctrines which were afterwards to be more fully disclosed : " Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures or the power of God." The Sadducees, however, were not uniformly true to the principle of accepting the letter, and nothing but the letter, of Scripture. It is certain that they denied the existence of angels as well as the doctrine of the resurrection. The angelic appearances, accordingly, recorded in the Penta- teuch they must have interpreted, not, as the Pharisees and the Jews generally did, literally, but as transient manifesta- tions of God Himself, by which, without employing the agency of any intermediate being. He delivered His communications to men. ' [According to the logciul in the Aholh dc-Rahhi Nathan, Antigonus, follow- ing Simon the Just, said tli;it men ouglit to serve God "without regard to recompense," that their "reward may be double in the future." Later disciples maintained that, as it was said by the fathers that we must labour without thought of recompense, tluse fathers could not have believed in a future life and a resurrection of the dead. It was thus that these doctrines came to be denied. Zadok was said to be a pupil of Antigonus. — Schiirer, The Jeirinh People in the Time of Jesus Christ. Div. IL vol. ii. p. 32, note (translation).] THE JEWS OF PALESTINE. 21 Upon the whole, the influence of the Sadducees, who, if 1 they cannot strictly be designated by the modern name " rationalists," yet laid themselves open to the charges of indifferentism and practical infidelity, was not calculated to be beneficial ; and, as they rejected along with the " traditions of the elders " much that was not only precious in itself but prized by the people, and their pride, different from that of the Pharisee, was more offensive to the common Jew, their influence was not great, and was the less likely therefore to draw down upon their heads the indignant denunciations of Him who came to infuse a new religious spirit into the nation. The traditions of the fathers, and the prescriptions and exactions of the schools, had become so numerous and minute that it was impossible for ordinary men to make themselves acquainted with them, still more to observe them. But what was impossible for the many was undertaken by the few, who, however, were not contemptible from their number, being estimated to have numbered six thousand at the time of Christ's appearing, when they also commanded great esteem and admiration as setting themselves to a task which the common man found impracticable, but regarded as praiseworthy and well-pleasing to God. As " separated " i'rom the common men they bear their name, Pherushim, : " Pharisees." This derivation is hardly questioned now, though some have traced the word to ^'}}^, "expounder of the law." The Pharisees took their rise in the Chasidim, the i strict party in the time of the Maccabees, which was I distinguished by repugnance to everything Hellenic. Of their exaggerations in various directions, and frequently at the sacrifice of the weightier matters of the law, we have numerous examples in the gospels. The extraordinary \ strictness with which they performed duties supposed by j them to be necessary for the preservation or restoration of legal purity, and the painful extent and minuteness of their observances in this direction, are illustrated by the story of the Pharisee (a priest), who subjected the golden candlestick itself to a lustration after a feast, and thus provoked the scoff of the Sadducees, " These men will in the end set themselves to cleanse the sun." The idea was that all the vessels and \ furniture of the temple should undergo purification after a | 22 THE EAKLY CIIUUCII. feast, as possibly pollution might have been contracted from the tonch of an unclean person. As this extravagant concern about things merely outward coexisted Mith the deliberate evasion and subversion of the most sacred moral precepts, — as, , in particular, the fifth commandment, — we can luiderstand the holy indignation of the words, " Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. Thou blind I'harisee, cleanse iirst that which is within the cujd and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also." Of their prayers and fasting, their phylacteries and tithe - payment, and all the multitudinous rites and practices by which, to use their own phrase, tliey set a hedge about the law — a hedge within which the law was really straitened and stunted, not, as they imagined, protected and enriched, and blossoming and fructifying to their everlasting glory, — on all this it is unnecessary to dwell. But the complaint is sometimes raised, and not without reason, that injustice is done to the Pharisees by the unmitigated and indiscriminating censure and reprobation which many have heaped upon them. They were the patriots of Israel. While the Sadducees were open to foreign influence, and, denying a future, sought to make the best of the present world, not only Ijy submitting to the conqueror but by suing his favour, the Pharisees held fast the idea of Jewish nationality ; and though the idea, as they held it, contained much that was false and dangerous, they cherished it and were devoted to it. Eeuss ^ reminds us that " their fortune and their blood were readily sacrificed to their country when it required them, and when an insurrection offered any chance of success. Troni their ranks came the heroic phalanx of the Maccabees and their adherents, who struck to the heart the power of the Seleucida}, and raised anew the flag of liberty on the walls of Zion.2 Then began the desperate resistance and heroic struggle which renewed the ancient glory of the people of God, extorted the admiration of Rome and Sparta, and led to ' [Ifistoii-e dc Thiologie Chritienne au S'dcle ApostoUque, p. 64.] * Tlic reference is to the time (175-16-1 B.C.) when Antiochus Epiplianes took possession of the holy city, caused the sacred books to be burned, and the sanctuary to be profaned, and would have compelled the Jews to take part iu the idolatrous worship of the Greeks. THE JEWS OF PALESTINE. 23 the recovery of Jerusalem by Judas Maccabeus, and tbe purification of the temple from the traces of idolatry." It was the Pharisees, Eeuss reminds us further, "who raised incessant embarrassments and obstacles to the government and policy of Herod the Great. It was they who had the courage to defy the Eoman colossus, and who quailed not when its iron club was raised to crush them." " Under their influence," he adds, however, " the national sentiment ended by becoming a political fanaticism, and found itself in- cessantly engaged in desperate struggles provoked by an instinctive antipathy, as imprudent as it was indestructible. The political dissolution of the nation was thus in great part hastened, but its very ruin has turned in some sort to the glory of the Pharisees. For if, of all the ancient communities, the Jewish community alone has survived a catastrophe which seemed to bring inevitable annihilation, it is because no other nationality was founded on a basis so solid or so independent of any political form whatever." AVhether it be considered glorious in the Pharisees, it may be admitted that they, above all others, were the bearers and representatives of the energetic and passionate national sentiment that, under God and in fulfilment of His prophetic word, has led to the preservation of the Jewish people through so many long centuries and so man}'- cruel persecutions. This strong national sentiment was nourished not merely by the recollection of the past, but also, and still more, by the hopes of the future. The Jewish nation was not only, as the Scriptures represent it to be, a nation of priests, but, as Philo says, a nation of prophets ; they were doubtless, that is to say, the channel of Divine revelation to the other nations of the world, but of a revelation which essentially contained exceeding great and precious promises. And here is perhaps the deepest difference between the Pharisees and Sadducees. The latter not only denied the resurrection of the body and the doctrine of rewards and punishments in a future life, but had no ideal goal either on this side or on that side of death. The Pharisees clung to the promises which had animated their forefathers in the struggle with the Syrian. They appear to have delighted par- ticularly in the Book of Daniel, which was a legacy all the 24 THE EARLY CHURCH. more precious because of the courage and devotion it had "been the means of inspiring in the days of the Maccabees, Such a passage as Daniel vii. 9-27, which had no meaning or power for the Saddncees, was for them living and vitalising. Here was a goal set before the Pharisee, at which the Sadducee, who was content with the present and desired no great world-catastrophe, might mock, but wliich, being sought and longed for, was well fitted — we may see something similar in the Mohammedans — to inspire not only with zeal but with fanaticism men whose notion of religion was fundamentally erroneous. And only in this view — only because they took a false view of religion, because the pure spiritual element was wanting or extremely weak — can we charge the Pharisees, as they are so often charged, with " a dead formalism." They were not men who went through a routine of duties with no conscious motive or aim. Their formalism, if we speak of them generally, was living and passionate, often furious and fiinatical. Dead, however, it was, inasmuch as the true principle of obedience to God was unknown or inoperative. When we speak of the lifeless religion of the Pharisee, we should be careful to make it plain that this is what we mean. Let us, again, see that we understand and make intelligible wliat is meant when we speak of the Pharisees in New Testa- ment phraseology as hypocrites. No party has ever given more undeniable evidence of the sincerity and energy of their convictions. Untrue they were, however, to the deep spiritual nature of man. They were self-deceivers, and they were justly termed hyp'^crites, according to the use of the word current at the time, as offering a show of piety and viitue while the heart was far from being right with God. The Pharisee was a liypocrite, but he sincerely believed what he said when he prayed thus: "God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men ai-e : extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican." That Saul of Tarsus was most sincere in his Pharisaism we have his own repeated testimony, and he who called himself the " chief of sinners " was not in any wise tempted to paint himself as, in his unconverted state, different from what he really had been, Pmt the admission of the sincerity of the Pharisees (to speak of them generally) THE JEWS OF PALESTINE. 25 does not at all wipe out tlie reproach of extraordinary and, in our eyes at least, often ridiculous ostentation. The motive for performing their works with which Jesus Himself so often charges them was constantly present and powerful. It does not follow, however, that they had no other. They trusted that they were commending themselves to God as well as to the people ; and in reading the words employed again and again by Jesus, " Verily, I say unto you, they have their reward," we are not to understand that, in winning the admiration of men, they had all the reward they looked for — they certainly looked for something ulterior and more glorious — but all the reward that could follow works of self-righteous- ness and vanity. If now it be asked why Jesus assails the Pharisees with such unsparing severity and indignation, we are already pre- pared in some measure to answer the question. Their religion was not spiritual. They shut their hearts against the great fundamental point of our Lord's teaching — that the \ kingdom of God does not exist at all unless it begins within I the man. Along with this, however, since the religion of the Sadducees also was far from being spiritual, it is necessary to keep in view the fact that they were the active and popular party. The influence of the Sadducees, as has been said, was comparatively slight, and they were not the men to use their power fanatically ; but the Pharisees offered the most formid- able opposition to the new Teacher and His doctrine — an opposition vehement, obstinate, unrelenting, and at length, in the eye of man, successful. Notwithstanding all this, their zeal and earnestness, their trust and their hopes, C|uickened and sustained the popular interest in matters of religion, and offered more points of contact for the pure faith than were offered by the cold and lifeless system of their rivals. But, to use the common expression, there were Pharisees and Pharisees, as might be supposed even if we did not know of the famous schools of Shammai and Hillel. The founders of these schools were contemporaneous, and lived shortly before the Advent. The former was strict and harsh — so much so that, as is related of him, he even required that sucklings should be made to keep the fast of the great day of atonement. The latter was so mild that no man could 26 THE EARLY CHURCH. put him out of temper. Once a man tried it for a wager of 400 denarii, but the wager was lost. It has often been related how a foreigner appeared before Shammai and said, " Make me a proselyte, but you must teach me the whole law while I stand on one foot." Shammai was enraged, and drove him away. The stranger went to Hillel, and addressed to him the same language. Tlie reply was : " I will teach you the law in one word. Do not to your neighbour what you would not have your neighbour do unto you." It can easily be inferred from this that the one would, as was actually the case, interpret and apply the law in a very different spirit from the other. And we ought to remember in this case, as in other cases, that tlie strong language used, and often used justly, of a party, is not to be understood as equally applicable to all its members. While the common Jews regarded all other nations as unclean, and while the Pharisees formed a party distinct from the common Jews, though moving in the midst of them and acting constantly and powerfully upon them, the Essenes, the only party who can with propriety be designated a sect, separated themselves from all tlie world. Baur, in speaking of the preparation for Christianity on Jewish soil, contents himself with a passing allusion to the two parties who stand so conspicuously before us in the Gospels, but calls attention particularly to the Essenes, who are not mentioned there, and who, if they be there referred to at all, are so only in the way of indirect and obscure allusion. He considers them worthy of special notice, because, although Christianity by no means derived its origin from them, it is unmistakable that the religious view of life taken by the Essenes is far more nearly akin to the spirit of primitive Christianity than all that by which we know tlie Pharisees and Sadducees to have been characterised. Though tliey put great value on outward acts and usages their religion had at the same time a far more spiritual character than that of the rest of their countrymen. Their hi'di life-task was to elevate themselves above the O things of sense. As physicians of souls — such is the mean- ing of their name — as physicians, al)0ve all, of their own soul, they were disposed to employ every means which seemed THE JEWS OF PALESTINE. 27 fitted to impart to the soul a healthy vigorous life, and to keep their mind constantly open for the infiuences and revelations of the higher world. The religiousness or religiosity of the whole people had been deepened, and in some degree purified, by the captivity of Babylon and subsequent calamities. To the same suffering some have traced the peculiarly profound religiosity of the Essenes (Eaa-aioL, Philo). Thus Eeuss, speaking of Ebionism as the " tendency " or " direction," in contradistinction to the sect in which it eventually embodied itself, says : " Bloody wars, an independence stormy and in the end illusory, agitated the country, almost without interruption, during two centuries. There were individuals upon whom oppression weighed more heavily than on the body of the nation. Ill-treatment of every kind — religious persecutions, most iniquitous spoliations, burdensome imposts, the miseries of war, the railleries of paganism, the venality of judges, and all the sad train of vexations which accompany a bad govern- ment— taught many Jews to seek Jehovah elsewhere than in the courts of the Temple, and to speak to Him more directly than by the mouth of a priest or by the smoke of his incense. . . . Union and peace with God became the principal thing ; the consciousness of this peace was the supreme felicity to which every individual ought to aspire, and the renunciation of all earthly goods was a small price to pay for it. This sentiment, indeed, did not rise to all the purity of true piety. It had much in common with Pharisaism ; it was tainted with the same spirit of pride and particularism.^ The renuncia- tion of the world was not exempt from a certain satisfaction with self, and the contempt of riches was often allied with hatred of those who possessed them. The endurance of poverty and tribulation came to be regarded by the sufferer as a proof and seal of his personal righteousness and accept- ance with God." ^ The traveller, passing from Jerusalem through the desolate resion which led down to the Dead Sea, encountered colonists of this sect whose melancholy bearing and regulated, con- ^ [" 11 etait lie siir le soldu Judaisme, et le Judaisme lui avait legue une paitio de son esprit pliarisai(|ue et jiarticulariste. "] - [Histoire de ThMofjie Chretienne au Siich ApostoUque. Tome prem. p. 117.] 28 THE EARLY CHURCH. strained life made upon liim the impression that here a multitude of men who had found existence too heavy a burden were preparing themselves, not for the king- dom of God, as the Jews generally conceived of it, hut for death. Pliny's description of them is quoted or referred to by almost all historians who notice this sect, standing out as it does peculiar among the peculiar people : " On the western border of that lake dwell the Essenes, at a sufficient distance from the shore to avoid its pestilent effluvia. A race entirely by themselves, and, beyond every other in the world, deserving of wonder; men living in com- munion with nature, witliout wives, without money. Every day their number is replenished by a new troop of settlers, since they are much visited by those whom the reverses of fortune have driven, tired of the world, to that mode of living. Thus liappens what might seem incredible, that a community, in which no one is born, yet continues to subsist through the lapse of centuries. So fruitful for them is disgust of life in others." ^ Tliere were, however, among the Essenes, as among the Pharisees, some more, and some less rigid. In some of their settlements, for example, marriage was per- mitted, in others it was not. And there were, on the one hand, Essenes who did not associate with their brethren in any settlement, but lived as hermits by solitary mountain streams, where they bathed themselves day and night, and nourished themselves on wild herbs ; and, on the other hand, there were friends and adherents of the Essenes scattered through the ttjwns and villages who adopted their principles more or less fully, and followed their way of life more or less closely. The novice who came to one of the settlements was required to spend a year in purification and preparation before he was admitted to the common bath. Two years more had to elapse before he was admitted to the common meal, though in the meantime he was permitted to be present at the worship of God. After his formal admission it was unlawful for him to partake of food which had not been pre- pared by an Essene. Even Poman torture could not compel 1 Xat. Hid. V. 15. THE JEWS OF PALESTINE. 29 captives of this sect to partake of food prepared by tlie unclean. A consequence of their mode of life was tlie community of goods. The great, if not the sole distinction which they recognised was that of clean and unclean — a higher or a lower degree of purity. So exalted and just were their notions of man's dignity that the distinction of master and slave was more odious to them than that of rich and poor. The man that set foot on tlieir colonies was a free man. They cultivated the love of truth, and inculcated mutual trust, abhorring oaths, and tolerating none except, it is said, on the occasion of the admission of new members to their communities, when an oath, as singular as it was solemn, was administered, containing this, among other things, that tlie names of the angels about to be communicated should never be divulged to the uninitiated, Josephus is given as the authority for this statement, and he undoubtedly uses the word " oath " ; but, if we look at the whole passage in the Jewish historian, it does appear very questionable whether the Essenes themselves would have called it by that name, or regarded it as an exception to their principle that a man's yea should be yea, and his nay, nay. We should certainly be inclined to use the word " vows." The proselyte, Josephus tell us, takes " tremendous oaths, that, in the first place, he will exercise piety towards God, and then that he will observe justice towards men, and that he will do no harm to any one, either of his own accord or by the command of others ; that he will always hate the wicked, and be assistant to the righteous ; that he will ever show fidelity to all men, and especially to those in authority " — and so on — ending with the promise never to reveal the "names of the angels." All this, we can perceive, is of the nature of a vow, and though Josephus drops the word oath, he does not seem to be conscious of any inconsistency between it and the strong statement which he himself makes in the immediately preceding paragraph : "They are the ministers of peace ; whatsoever they say also is firmer than an oath; but swearing is avoided by them, and they esteem it worse than perjury : for they say, that he who cannot be believed without [swearing by] God is already condemned." ^ Wars, Lk. II. ch. viii. §§ 7 and 6 CWIuston). 30 THE EARLY CnURCII. Their doctrine of the pre-existence of tlie soul, and their view of the body as its temporary prison, and, still more, the Greek dress in which their tenets and peculiarities were naturally presented by Philo and Josephus, have led many to trace a connection between them and the Platonism of Alexandria ; but, if it be necessary to go beyond the bounds of the Holy Land at all in accounting for their origin, there seems greater probability in the supposition that those peculiar tenets were derived from an oriental source, and in confirmation of this opinion is adduced their daily custom of turning reverently towards the rising sun and singing to him ancient hymns, purporting that his beams ought not to fall on anything impure. While they employed themselves in agriculture and the breeding of bees and cattle, they devoted themselves very specially to the study of diseases and the art of healing them, and to this circumstance they are thought by some to owe their name, though, as has been already said, it appears rather to be used of the soul. This, too, as well as the things mentioned by Josephus, has a part in accounting for their longevity. " They are long-lived also," says he, " insomuch that many of them live above a hundred years, by means of the simplicity of their diet, — nay, as I think, by means of the regular course of life they observe also." (He refers here to their abstinence from animal food.) We may go on with the passage in proof that, as has been already stated, the " courage of their opinions " was unconquerable. " They contemn the miseries of life," he continues, "and are above pain by the generosity of their mind. And as for death, if it will be for their glory, they esteem it better than living always ; and, indeed, our war with the IJomans gave abund- ant evidence what great souls they had in their trials, wherein, although they were tortured and distorted, burnt and torn to pieces, and went through all kinds of instru- ments of torment, that they might be forced either to blaspheme their legislator or to eat what was forbidden tliem, yet could they not be made to do either of them, no, nor once to flatter their tormentors, or to shed a tear ; but they smiled on their very pains, and laughed those to scorn who inflicted the torments upon them, and resigned up their THE JEWS OF TALESTIXE. 31 souls aerain. with ' 1 great alacrity, as expecting to receive tliem We have now mentioned the principal points known of the Essenes, though some writers dwell also on the gift of prophecy which they claim, and for which some memhers of the sect acquired an extraordinary reputation, not only among the people but at the Jewish court. But the claim is in no wise surprising in men devoted to a life of rigid asceticism. Such persons have frequently cherished the belief that, by the process which enabled them to rise above the gross world of sense to things spiritual and divine, their vision was purged to discern the things that were to come hereafter. Be it with this alleged gift as it may, we cannot but honour the Essenes for their love of truth, their hatred of war and slavery, their fidelity to their convictions, and, though with some reservation, their mutual love and service, carried to such a point that no man counted ought that he possessed to be his own. The question may well be put, "Where could the gospel preached to the poor find more receptive hearts than among these, the quiet of the land, whose piety contained so much that was akin to Christianity, and especially to Christianity in its first appearance ? " ^ Much, indeed, they had that was akin to the gospel. And yet, it must be added on the other side, they had much that was utterly alien to it. For not only the spirit of self-righteousness and self-sufficiency, — which they had in common with the Pharisees, — but their idea of the human body, which to them was a prison and not a temple, and their idea of human life as worthily led only when devoted to contemplation and \ .asceticism, in outward separation from the unclean multitude (including the Pharisee who, notwithstanding the sad coun- tenance he wore, drew upon himself from the still more rigid Essene the charge of frivolity) — these things were funda- mentally at variance with the teaching of the Divine Master, ^ War.s, Bk. II. ch. viii. § 10. The Essenes appear to have sent gifts to the Temple. They believed in a future state, conceiving the place of reward as one of delight and warmth, that of punishment as one of gloom and cold. Blunt adopts the view that the books containing their doctrines were supposed by them to have been written by angels. 2 [Baur.] 32 THE EAULY CIIURCIL who came to make all tliincis new, and they prove irresistibly, notwithstanding all the points of resemblance that may be unhesitatingly recognised, that Christ's religion was not the offspring — the natural development — of the tenets which these men held, and the manner of life they followed. CHAPTER III. THE JEWS OF THE DISPERSION. Let us now speak shortly of the Jews living beyond the borders of Palestine. A comparatively small number of them had taken advantage of the permission of Cyrus to return to their native land (53G B.c.).^ The great part remained behind in Babylon, and thence spread themselves in the adjacent regions. Alexander the Great permitted a colony of Jews to settle in the celebrated city to which he gave his name, and they soon became numerous in other parts of Africa. Their activity, and the spirit of trade which took hold of them, and for which they have been so remarkably distinguished in subsequent ages, led them also to Syria and Asia Minor, and, indeed, in the time of Augustus, enterprising members of the chosen nation were found in all parts of the Eoman Empire. In contradistinction to the inhabitants of Palestine, they were called the Jews of the Dispersion (ol iv ttj BiaaTropa). They loved, however, to maintain a connection with the mother country, especially with the capital.; and they recog- nised the authority of the supreme religious court, were wont to pay the annual contribution for the support of the temple (to SlSpa'x^fjLov), and sent offerings and made pilgrimages to the Holy City. But though, under the most various I'elations, they showed a remarkable attachment to the religion of their fathers, and retained a profound sentiment of nationality, there gradually manifested itself a disposition, which is the less wonderful that the same disposition showed itself in some degree in the mother-country itself, to accommodate them- selves as far as possible to foreign peculiarities. We should e.xpect that this disposition, existing in some degree at the ^ [Driver {Isaiah: His Life arid Tiines) and Saj-ce {Introduction to the Boohs of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther) give 538 B.C. as the date of the return. Sayce suggests that Ezra ii. 64 and Xeh. vii, 66 may mean heads of families.] C 34 THE EAKLY CHURCH. very centre of the Jewish national life, would show itself in far greater strength at a distance. This happened particu- larly in Persia and Egypt. As to the influence of Parsism, it is impossible now to go into particulars, but we shall quote a very interesting passage from Dean Mibnan, in which lie touches a point common to it with the Alexandrian philosophy and with other systems : " Wherever any approximation had been made to the sublime truth of the one great First Cause, either awful religious reverence or philosophic abstraction had removed the primal Deity entirely beyond the sphere of human sense, and supposed that tlie intercourse of the Divinity with man, the moral government, and even the original Creation, had been carried on by the intermediate agency, either, in oriental language, of an Emanation, or, in Platonic, of the Wisdom, Picason, or Intelligence, of the one Supreme. Tliis being was more or less distinctly impersonated, accord- ing to the more popular or the more philosopliic, the more material or more abstract notions of the age or people. This was the doctrine from the Ganges, or even from the shores of the Yellow Sea, to the llissus ; it was the fundamental prin- ciple of the Indian religion and Indian philosophy ; it was a basis of Zoroastrianism, it was pure Platonism, it was the Platonic Judaism of the Alexandrian school. Many fine passages might be quoted from Philo on the impossibility that the first self-existing Being should become cognizable to the sense of man ; and even in Palestine, no doubt, John the Baptist, and our Lord Himself, spoke no new doctrine, but rather the common sentiment of tlie more enlightened, when they declared that ' no man had seen God at any time.' In conformity with this princijDle, the Jews, in the interpretation of the older Scriptures, instead of direct and sensible com- munication from the one great Deity, had interposed either one or more intermediate beings, as the channels of communi- cation. According to one accredited tradition alluded to by St. Stephen, the law was delivered * by the disposition of angels ; ' according to another, this office was delegated to a single angel, sometimes called the Angel of the Law, at others the Metatron. But the more ordinary representative, as it were, of God to the sense and mind of man was the Memra, or the Divine Word ; and it is remarkable that the same THE JEWS OF THE DISPERSION. 35 appellation is found in the Indian, the Persian, the Platonic, and the Alexandrian systems. By the TargumisLs, the earliest Jewish commentators on the Scriptures, this term had already been applied to the Messiah ; nor is it necessary to observe the manner in which it has been sanctified by its introduction into the Cliristian scheme. Prom this remark- able uniformity of conception, and coincidence of languafre, has sometimes been assumed a common tradition, generally disseminated throughout the race of man. I should be content with receiving it as the general acquiescence of the human mind in the necessity of some mediation between the pure spiritual nature of the Deity and the intellectual and moral being of man, of which tlie sublimest and simplest, and there- fore the most natural development, was the revelation of God in Christ, in the inadequate language of our version of the original, ' the brightness of (God's) glory and the express image of His person.' " ^ The susceptibility of foreign iniluences was shown most strikingly in Alexandria, where it would appear that even three centuries before Christ many of the Jews had lost the knowledge of the language spoken by their fathers, so that a Greek translation of the Old Testament Scriptures became necessary. Tliis they received in the Septuagint, which was begun in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, about 280 B.C. Already in this translation the influence of Grecian culture is plainly perceptible in a tendency to evade or to ignore anthropo- morphic expressions which might be offensive to the philo- sophical. Thus, in Ex. xxiv. 9 we read : " Then went up Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, And they saw the God of Israel ; and there was under His feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel He laid not His hand : also they saw God, and did eat and drink." In the tenth verse the rendering is, etSov rbv toitov ov eiaTi]K€t 6 ^eo? rov ^laparfK : " They saw the place where the God of Israel stood ; " and in the eleventh verse, w<^6r]crav ev tS tottm rov 6eov : " They appeared in the place of God." In Gen. xxxii. 30, on the other hand, no such freedom is ^ [History of Chridianlty from the Birth of Christ, etc., vol. i. ch. i. p. 70 (1883).] 36 THE EARLY CHURCH. used by the Seventy. We have the language as in our version, because, in all probability, the translators trusted to their readers infening from the immediate context that it was not the supreme (lod but His messenger who was introduced in the narrative. In like manner the Seventy evince a dis- position to avoid anthropopathic expressions as likely to prove not less offensive to the cultivated. Thus the translation of Gen, vi. 6, " And it repented the Lord that He had made man upon the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart," is, koL evedv/jLi'jdr) o ^eo? ort CTTolrjae rov avOpcoTTov iirl r7]<; yfj'i. kuI 8tevoi']67j. Aristobulus, wlio is commonly regarded as the father of the Alexandrian philosophy, of whicli I'hilo is the most dis- tinguished representative, is supposed by some to be one of the Seventy. In a pnem ascribed to him, God is called the iashioner of the world instead of its creator, and he is accord- ingly understood to have held the pre-existence and eternity of matter. Aristobulus was a courtier and scholar. He published a commentary on the Pentateuch, which he pre- sented to his sovereign with a preface in which he was care- ful to explain that such terms as " eyes," " feet," and " arms," when applied to the Deity, were not to be understood literally. But the great representative of the Alexandrian philosophy was rhilo. He was a contemporary of Jesus, and was born about a quarter of a century before Him. He had the honour of being chosen by his fellow-citizens to represent them in an embassy to Caligula. In a city which, like Rome itself, was more than the capital of a country ; which was the world- market ; which connected East and AVest not only by bonds of trade and commerce, but by bonds of thought and culture, even as in its vast library were collected the literary treasures of all lands — in a city where, we are told, the temple of Jupiter rose in white marble beside the temple of Serapis, and where the Jewish synagogue stood not far from either ; where systems met, and where, if they did not destroy each other, it was natural that they should amalgamate : there rose Philo, the author indeed of a system which could not endure, but the representative and bearer, if not in any case the originator, of ideas which subsequently exerted a deep and widespread influence on the Church. But if his name is THE JEWS OF THE DISPERSION. 37 surrounded with a lustre such as had belonged to no Jew since the prophetic light had ceased to shine in the darkness, he won his renown in setting himself to the accomplishment of an impossible task. Convinced, on the one hand, of the truth of the Jewish religion, resting as it did upon Divine revelation, and, on the other hand, swayed by Greek specula- tion, and particularly by the teaching of Plato and Zeno, he made it his great object to found, by proving the harmony of both, a universal philosophy and religion — one wliich shuukl be equally acceptable to Jews and to Greeks, neither a stumbling-block to the former nor foolishness to the latter, but to both, Divine truth and wisdom. As the best and most suitable means for the attainment of this end he had recourse to the method of allegorical interpretation, by whicli, accord- ing to his own idea, he drew the Divine thoughts from behind the veil of the letter — such thoughts, that is, as he could bring into harmony with his philosophical theories. By this ' method he could easily, as it has been somewhat strongly put, maintain the character of the believer according to the letter, while he was an apostate according to the spirit. A striking- example of the length to which this allegorical method was carried by Philo is given by Picuss.^ It was applied not only to rites and institutions, but to the most conspicuous historical personages. The three patriarchs are not regarded as men who really lived. Their acts, their travels, their domestic relations, are so many images or symbols, to which it is the business of exegesis to attach the proper spiritual significa- tion. They represent virtue under three different aspects : Abraham, virtue achieved by the efforts of the understanding ; Isaac, virtue realised by natural instinct ; and Jacob, virtue attained by asceticism and trial. Philo sets out from the just idea that God is the absolute, eternal, and invisible Being. This God is separated from the material universe by an abyss which excludes all idea of immediate contact. What He is in Himself we cannot comprehend : opyavov ovBep ev eavrol^ e')(OfMev o) SwrjaofieSa cKelvo (f)avraa-t,ae Sacrijicanlihus.] THE JEWS OF THE DISTEIISION. 39 away by a spiritualism far better suited to the Braliminic or the Buddhistic system, than to the characteristic peculiarity of the religion of the Old Testament." But while Philo is complained of, with too good reason, for having sapped the base of the religion whose high priest, according to his own exalted notion, offered sacrifice not for the Jews only but for the entire race of man, — while he is accused of annihilating it by the means he took to' transfigure and recommend it, — it must be admitted that he did more than any other writer to diffuse ideas akin to those which had been indicated in the Old Testament, especially in the Proverbs, and which came forth fully developed in the New Testament doctrine of the Eternal "VVord. Philo's system tended to asceticism. His high ideal has an oriental character. It consists in flying from one's self, " in rising above the individual to the universal spirit, the last refuge of the soul." This tendency, however, was controlled in Philo himself, and did not lead to the same results as in many who adhered to his religious philosophy. It did not drive him permanently from the world. In remarkable language, such as there has often been occasion to employ since, he says : " Often I did leave kindred, friends, and country, and retire into the wilderness, that I might raise my thoughts to worthy contemplations ; but I gained nothing thereby. My thoughts, either distracted or wounded by some impure impression, fell into the very opposite current. Some- times, when God dispels the tumult from my breast, in the midst of thousands, I find myself alone with my soul. Thus He teaches me that it is not change of place that brings evil or good, but that all depends on that God who steers the ship of the soul in whatever direction He pleases." ^ There was formed, however, an ascetical union, in many respects resembling the Essenes, the name of which, Oepa- nrevTal, is supposed by some to have the same meaning, " healers," but seems, according to Philo, to denote simply persons devoted to the worship of God. In a land which was subsequently the birthplace of the Christian anchorite, around the Lake Moeris, not far from Alexandria, they dwelt in cells and lived on bread and water, of which it appears they were ^ Quoted by Neander, vol. i. p. 82. 40 THE EARLY CHURCH. not wont to partake before sunset, being ashamed to show their dependence on the world of sense while it shone. Even from this most scanty fare they frequently fasted, that the soul might be thoroughly purified for the contemplation of Divine things. It is to be noticed that, even as the Essenes were not confined to the borders of the Dead Sea, but had spiritual connections in the cities and villages, so there were OepairevTai, or, if that name is to be restricted to those who retired into solitude, rigid ascetics, who practised their prin- ciples without leaving the World — sometimes under a roof where the other members of the family fared sumptuously, and where offence was taken at their singular abstemiousness.^ The system of religious philosophy in which this asceticism originated ia a notable example of the influence of the Gentile world on the Jews of the Dispersion ; but through the breaches, if we may use the expression, that had been made in the old partition-wall, Jewish ideas might pass to the Gentiles as well as Gentile ideas to the Jews. This was actually the case. The peculiarity of the Jewish religion, which did not, like foreign heathen systems, admit of amalga- mation with the religion of the Eoman State (although Philo tried to amalgamate it with philosophy), and the tenacity witli which the Jews held fast their convictions,did indeed exasperate the minds of many against them, and drew even from Tacitus the strong expression ddcrrima gens {Hist. v. 5). But that which both the historians and poets called superstition, and pestilent superstition, had its attractions for not a few. In an age when neither the popular faith nor any of the preva- lent systems of philosophy could give satisfaction, multitudes, we know, had recourse to jugglers and Thaumaturgi {davfia- rovpyol), and it cannot be matter of astonishment that at the same time, moved by better and higher impulses than those of mere superstition, some were drawn to the faith of the chosen people, who, being scattered through all the most ^ ["The question whether the Therapeutae were offshoots of the Essenes or rice versa . . . must now be left undiscussed, since the only work which gives us any information concerning the Therapeutae, viz. Philo, De Vita Contem- plativa, is certainly sj)urious, and the Therapeutae very probably Christian monks." — Schiirer, Jewish People, Div. II. vol. ii. note, p. 218. But Lightfoot holds strongly to the autheuticity of De Vita {Colossians and Philemon, p. 82, note). ] THE JEWS OF THE DISI'EPvSION. 41 important provinces and cities of the empire, had, with the zeal for which they were distinguished, sown the germs of Divine knowledge, and made known throughout the world their hope of a new Divine kingdom. The belief in one God, the Creator of heaven and earth — in an invisible, purely spiritual Being, who could be repre- sented by no image — could not fail to commend itself to the reason of many among the heathens, and accordingly we see many among them, and particularly, as in the memorable instance of Cornelius of Cassarea, among those who lived in Palestine, attach themselves to the Jewish monotheism. Sucli persons are usually divided into two classes, but there is some reason for reckoning them as three. There were those wlio had a certain sympathy with the Jewish religion, and even observed certain Jewish ceremonies, without becoming prose- lytes even in the looser sense of the word, i.e. proselytes of the gate (P'Wy} '"'}}„ ol (^o^ovfievoi — ol ae/Sofievoi, rov 6e6v). The proselytes of the gate, who adopted the essential prin- ciples of the Jewish religion and the moral law of Moses without entering formally into the covenant relation with Jehovah, were far more numerous than those who did enter into this covenant — the proselytes of righteousness (y]^}^ ''"?.2). who underwent the rite of circumcision, and bound themselves to the observance of the entire system, ceremonial as well as moral and spiritual.^ That these proselytes, gained, as in certain cases they were, by the restless, passionate zeal of the Pharisees, who compassed sea and land to reach their object, were sometimes poisoned with the v/orst principles of those who converted them, we knov/ from the denunciations of Jesus Himself; but that the proselytes of the gate — the devout men and women with whom the first heralds of the Gospel so often came in contact — bridged the way beyond any other class between the heathen and the Jewish world, of this we have the plainest and amplest evidence in our earliest records, the Acts of the Apostles. ' [According to Schiirer, however, there was no distinction among the "proselytes" {■rpo(rr,Xvroi), who took upon themselves the observance of the whole Jewish law. The distinction lay between them and the ipo/SoyVsvo/, or ffiliafiivoi, who observed only so much of the Law. — Jewish People, Div. II. vol. ii. § 31.] CHAPTER IV. THE SYNAGOGUE. The institution of the Synagogue may be dated as far back as the return from tlie Babylonish Captivity. It is justly regarded as tlie complement and necessary counterpoise of the centralisation of sacrificial worship. In the capital itself, when it happened — and it did sometimes happen — that the sacred offices of the Temple were filled by unfaithful, un- devout, half-heathenish priests, the Synagogue was an asylum for those who revered the Word of God and held fast the ideas and the hopes of the Theocracy. Still more obviously was it fitted to become the focus in which the religious life of the Jews of the Dispersion w^as gathered and inflamed. " Our houses of prayer scattered throughout the land," said Philo, " are nothing else than institutions for the education of the people in prudence, bravery, moderation, and righteous- ness, piety, and holiness ; in short, in every virtue which man should practise in relation to God and his fellow." Not only tlie Israelites who w^ere scattered abroad but the inhabitants of the country towns in Palestine found some compensation in the worship of the Synagogue for absence from the services of the Temple, which was ever to them an object of love and veneration, though often turned into a house of merchandise, or den of thieves, or cage of unclean birds. In the Synagogue they could offer the sacrifice of prayer, and, as in the Temple, on days of high solemnity, the offerings were multiplied, so also in this assembly of the devout the number of prayers was on the same occasions increased, and at the very moment when the altar-fire burned at the heart of the nation, the Israelite at a distance, by lake, or sea, or river — at Capernaum or Alexandria, or Antioch — might feel himself symbolically taking part in the appointed worship of Jehovah ; and, indeed, hardly had the great TtlE SYNAGOGUE. 43 seasons of pilgrimage such an effect in strengthening the sentiment of national unity as the common hours devoted to religion on the day of rest in the places " where prayer was wont to be made." In using this phrase, we are speaking of the Synagogue proper. It is necessary to explain that, where there was a synagogue, there were usually attached to it some irpoaev-^ai, which were used, however, not merely for prayer, but for legal washings, and were consequently erected as near the bank of a stream or the shore of the sea as possible, while synagogues were built by preference on heights towering above the houses of the town, or at the street corners, or at the gateways. This last site, it may be mentioned,- was eligible in itself, and not merely chosen as being in accord- ance with the words of Proverbs : " Wisdom crieth without ; she uttereth her voice in the street : she crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the opening of the gates." The rulers of the synagogue, whose business it was to take a general direction of the proceedings and to watch over order at the meetings, was surrounded with a college of presbyters, and also with a body of deacons, whose duties were similar to those assigned to the office-bearers of the same name of whose appointment we read in Acts vi. There was likewise the officer who is called " the minister " in our version (Luke iv. 20). So close is the correspondence in constitution between the Synagogue and the early Chris- tian Church that, we are told, the choice of young men {veavLaKOi) for the performance of certain services — as, for instance, the sad duty of carrying out the dead, of which we read in Acts v. — was borrowed from the former. It frequently happened that special circles, drawn together by national ties, combined to erect a synagogue, which, of course, they came under obligation to support. Thus in Jerusalem, where it appears there were no fewer than four hundred and eighty synagogues, Jews from Alexandria, Cyrene, Cilicia, and other parts, had their separate places of worship. That rich individuals also sometimes built synagogues entirely at their own expense, appears from the well-known case of the centurion of Capernaum. The services of the synagogue were often uncommonly 44 THE EARLY UIIUKCII. protracted, partly owing to the length of the prayers, which were not reduced from regard to the circumstance that the assembly offered them in an erect posture, and whicli, as we have seen, were extended and multiplied on the solemn feast-days. There is even quoted this saying of a Rabbi : " He who prolongs his prayer shall not go empty away." That the sentiment was by no means confined to an indivi- dual is evident from the censure pronounced by Jesus on those who thought they would be heard " for their much speaking." A most important part of the service was the reading of the Scripture, especially of the Tliorah, or Law, which for this object was divided into 154 portions. When the sacred roll was produced by the oflicer, tlie ruler of the synagogue called upon one of those who sat in the chief seats to come forward and read. It was the original text that the reader used, but he paused at the end of each verse that the translator appointed for the purpose might give the Targum, i.e. the Aramaic paraphrase. It would seem, how- ever, that when the custom of reading the law" was intro- duced in the time of Ezra, the same person both read and gave the meaning (Neh. viii. 8). After the Thorah, the Prophets were also read in portions (Haphtara), and similarl}'' translated, and then followed a discourse for the edification of tlie people, when the well-instructed scribe brouglit out of his treasure things new and old, as Jesus Himself did in the synagogue at Nazareth when He recalled the old narrations of Naaman the Syrian and of the widow of Sarepta, and startled His hearers by the application to Plimself of Isaiah's prophecy : " The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor." In these meeting-places, which were the great institution by which the national education of the Jews was promoted, not only well-known members, but, as we learn from the New Testament, strangers, were sometimes invited to speak ; and so there might arise contradiction and interruption, and the assembly might become not only excited but tempestuous. It even happened at times that after a meeting which lasted for many hours, and far into the evening, the multitude remained in front of the synagogue and continued to discuss in a way far from formal, and with oriental volubility and THE SYXAGOGUE. 4o vehemence, the questions that had already been treated within the walls. In the Synagogue, the man who had hitherto been occupied with the plough, or in the boat, might speedily rise to the dignity of Eabbi, to which he was solemnly set apart by the imposition of hands, a key being at the same time delivered to him as the symbol of the exposition of Scripture. It detracted nothing from his reputation if he continued his former calling, which, indeed, was usually a necessity. He might be a tent-maker, or a needle-maker, or, like the great liabbi Hillel, a day-labourer ; none the less did the people salute him reverently in the market-place. The people were ])roud of their Eabbis, and called them the " crown of Israel." If, even in the remotest parts, where frequently there was no one who had attained to the dignity of Eabbi, there was a .synagogue, it was much. Its services nourished the religious spirit, and were a pledge and bond of union in the distant settlement. The outermost branches were nourished by the same sap as preserved and strengthened the stem. But here again, as so often we have cause to say, " Corruptio optimi pessima." Pure Monotheism and strong national sentiments were undoubtedly advanced, but the hedge which the scribes and Pharisees set about the Law was ever becoming more thick and thorny. The moral part was in danger of being wholly stifled by their additions ; the Messianic hope became at once more gross and fanatical ; and it is mournful to think tliat, in the multitude of synagogues, where, wdien the Temple was no more, the scattered Jews could still worship, it became the practice to curse the Christians and the Christian name. CHAPTER V. THE POLITICAL HISTOKY OF THE JEWS. On the political history of the Jews in the time immediately preceding the Advent, though it had undoubtedly its influence on their religious and moral life, I do not intend to dwell. I merely recall to you that, in the conflict for the throne which arose between Hyrcanus II. and Aristobulus II., the two sons of Jannitus, Pompey was nominated arbiter. The intervention of the lioman power was attended with the usual consequence — subjugation. In the year G3 B.C. Pompey stormed Jerusalem and led Aristobulus with a number of captive Jews to Pome. After a troublous period, fllled with atrocious crimes, the house of the Maccabees was overthrown, and the Iduma^an prince Herod was named king of Judica by Octavian and Antony, If you read the history of that monarch, in which one dark tragedy is succeeded by another darker still, and, in particular, if you observe how the slightest hint of impending danger put him on the rack and turned his heart to stone, you will not be astonished at his comnmnd to massacre the babes ; and you will feel that of all hyperbolical expressions there is hardly any that passes the phrase derived from his name and familiarly applied to every sort of outrageous extravagance. His end was horrible. Suffering at Jericho under a disease so disgusting that but few could remain with him, he desired to put an end to his torment with his own hand. He asked for an a})ple and for a knife with which to cut it, and he was about to plunge the instrument into his heart when the commander of his body- guard fell into his arms and prevented him. His cup was not yet drained. While he was writhing in the pains of death, his ear was suddenly filled with the jubilant shouts of the multitude as it exulted over the deliverance of Israel from the monster. Jiloodthirstv he remained to his last breath. THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE JEWS. 47 With a madman's struggle lie gathered himself up and gave command that all the elders of Judtea should be gathered together in the hippodrome, and at the moment he expired, cut down every man of them, that so those glad voices might be silenced, and there might be sorrow and sighing through- out the land. His was a miserable life, a tragic death, a hideous testament.^ Herod's magnificence was celebrated far beyond the bounds of Palestine. He possessed certain qualities in an uncommon degree, — courage in war for example, energy, fertility of resource, — and he was called the " Great." There was at least one, however, higher still in worldly position — the Emperor ; and nothing could be more severe than the lan- guage of Augustus : " I had rather be one of Herod's swine than one of his children." The image of the monarch who died at Jericho long haunted the minds of the people. We can hardly conceive what a thrill would pass through a Jewish audience in the earliest times of the Church when, immediately after the narrative of Matthew in which that bloody form stands by the cradle of the Holy Child in whom Jleaven's mercy became incarnate, there were read the words : " But when Herod was dead/' By his written will, which was confirmed by Augustus, his land was divided among his three sons — Archelaus, Antipas (Herodes Antipas), and Philip. Judaea, Samaria, and Idumoea fell to Archelaus, but, on his banishment in the year 6 A.D., his territory was entrusted to Roman procurators or governors, of whom the first was Coponius. Herod Antipas, so well known from the gospels for his adultery, his execution of the Baptist, and his conduct towards Jesus, for which he was called by Him " that fox," reigned over Galilee and Peraa for the long period of forty-three years. Philip received Batanffia, Ituraea, and Trachonitis. His subjects honoured him as a mild ruler, and the surrounding princes honoured him as a peaceable neighbour. He is said to have enjoyed the reputation of the good king Alcinous, who was content with a smaller revenue than he might reasonably have demanded, and who, wherever he journeyed, carried the seat of righteous judgment. He reigned for thirty-seven years. ^ The dying wisli was not fulfilled. 48 THE EARLY CHURCH. On tlie slope of Ilcrinon, where his father liad erected a temple to Augustus, he built the richly shaded and romantic- ally situated Ctesarea Philippi, which some regard as the most beautiful place between Hermon and Hebron. He presents a remarkable contrast to his brother Archelaus, whose cruelty and misgovernment were so intolerable that Jews and Samaritans forgot their mutual enmity and took steps in common for the overthrow of the tyrant. Elders from both divisions were sent to liome to accuse their merci- less oppressor before the Emperor. It seems that Archelaus, like many other savage despots, was the victim of gross superstition. When Jew and Samaritan were thus made friends together in their common detestation of him, he had a dream, and, as he dreamed, he saw ten ears of corn which were eaten up of oxen. At that time none were in such repute as the Essenes for the gift of interpreting dreams, and accordingly an Essene, named Simon, was sent for. The oxen, the Essene explained, denoted a change, for they turn up the land in ploughing, and the ten ears of corn denoted the ten years of his reign. The case of the embassy was so strong that the interpretation was extremely likely to prove true. Five days after he was sent for to Piome, and he was banished thence among the Allobroges. The hard lot of the people, caused by such tyranny as has been indicated, and also by the lloman plan of farming the taxes, which so naturally and generally led to cruelty and extortion, could not but intensify the jNIessianic hope, which ancient prophecy had entitled the people to cherish, and for which they were already known to the ends of tlie earth as a nation that, above all others, lived in the future. And, while it intensified it, it did not fail to give it at the same time a more worldly and violent character. Of this the rising of Judas, referred to by (Jamalicl in tlie Acts, is the most notable proof. In the days of (^uirinius, when the census was being taken for taxation, men's heads were turned Avith wild pro- phecies that the numbering of the people would be followed anew by a great mortality in Israel. Judas, the Oalilean, of Gamala by the Lake of Gennesaret, arose, and the watchword he gave to his countrymen, many of them prepared for its reception by the lessons of the schools as well as by the pre- THE POLITICAL IIISTOEY OF THE JEWS. 49 dictions wliich were in circulation, was : " No Lord but Jehovah, no tax but the temple tax, no friend but the zealot." Judas was a brave fanatic. Though he could maintain him- self but two months, and those whom he had gathered to himself were, as Gamaliel said truly enough, scattered, he was yet one of the chief instruments of Providence in accelerat- ing the destruction of Jerusalem. The fire that he had kindled was not one that could be quenched by his blood. He left four sons, who inherited his hatred of Eome and his most lamentable infatuation, and of whom none died on a sick-bed. At length, at the end of the Jewish war, a generation after Gamaliel's speech, when there was nothing more to hold in the land than a single fortress,— the fortress of Masada, — it was a grandson of Judas of Galilee, Eleazar, who commanded it. When it could no longer be held, he would not yield. There is hardly anything more affecting in history than his last words and his fate. It was his fixed resolve that the hungry victor should have nothing but ashes and corpses. " We were the very first that revolted from them, and we are the last that light against them. God is favourable no more. Had He been favourable, or been but in a lesser degree dis- jDleased with us. He had not overlooked the destruction of so many men, or delivered His most holy city to be burnt and demolished by our enemies. I cannot but wish that we had all died when Jerusalem was destroyed, but now let us make haste. Let us pity ourselves, our children, and our wives. Our hands are still at liberty and have a sword in them. Let us die before we become slaves." The historian tells us how they killed one another and burned all that they had " Yet," he adds, " was there an ancient woman, and another who was of kin to Eleazar, and superior to most women in prudence and learning, with five children, who had concealed themselves in caverns under ground, and had carried water thither for their drink, and were hidden there when the rest were intent upon the slaughter of one another. These others were nine hundred and sixty in number." ^ It appears that there were two false prophets of the name of Theudas. Besides the one who is mentioned in the Acts ^ Josephiis, Wars, Bk. vii. chaps, vii. and ix. [The first passage in the text seems not to be an exact quotation.] D 50 THE EAELY CHURCH. of the Apostles, there was one who arose after the date of Gamaliel's speech, in the year 45 or 46 a.d., when Fadus was procurator. In tlie account given us of the rising of this Theudas, we see the Jews still seeking after a sign and still believing that the Kingdom of God would come with observa- tion. He " persuaded a great part of the people to take their effects witli them, and follow him to the river Jordan ; for he told them that he was a propliet, and that he would, by his own command, divide the river, and offered them an easy passage over it ; and many were deluded by his words." But Fadus " sent a troop of horsemen out against them, who, falling upon them unexpectedly, slew many of them, and took many of them alive." ^ We have another illustration of the Jewish demand for a sign and of tlie nature of the Messianic expectations, as well as of the readiness of false prophets to meet them, in him with whom the chief captain of the band would have identified Paul : " Art not thou that Egyptian, M'hich before these days madest an uproar, and leddest out into the wilderness four thousand men that were murderers?" (Acts xxi. 38). There came out of Egypt, says the Jewish historian, one that said he was a prophet, and advised the multitude of the common people to go along with him to the Mount of Olives, promis- ing that the walls of Jerusalem would fall down at his command, and that he would lead them triumphantly into the city which had been desecrated by the heathen. As in the former instance many of the deluded people were slain. The Egyptian himself escaped, but did not appear again. 2 In accordance with what we read in Matt, xxiv., the historian tells us there were many such deceivers before and during the Jewish war, some of them representing themselves to be only forerunners, but others claiming for themselves the Messianic dignity. He dwells, on the one hand, on the lamentable credulity with which they gave heed to every deceiver who promised deliverance, and, on the other hand, on their not less lamentable blindness to all the signs and prophecies that foretold their inevitable ruin. When speak- ing of the latter, he tells us what sounds very strange. ^ AntL Ilk. XX. cli. v. - And. T.k. xx. ch. viii. 6. THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE JEWS. 51 " There was one Jesus," he says, " the son of Ananus, a plebeian and a husbandman, who, for four years before the war began, cried out at the Feast of Tabernacles : ' A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice af:;ainst Jerusalem and the holy house, a voice against the bridegrooms and the brides, a voice against the whole people.' " He was often beaten. Once before the procurator he was scourged till his bones were laid bare. He shed no tears, but at every stroke his answer was still the same, " Wo to Jerusalem." Thus he continued to cry in the doomed city for seven years and five months, and then at last upon the wall, exclaiming, " Wo to the city again, and to the people, and to the holy house," he added, " and to me also," when a stone from one of the driving engines smote and killed him. Had Josephus been a Christian, the very name of this man would have recalled the sorrowful words and the tears of an infinitely greater, but almost in the breath in which he tells ns of the persistent cry he uses language most unworthy of a Jew. What chiefly influenced his countrymen, he informs us, in undertaking the war, was an ambiguous oracle which was also found in their sacred writings, how, about that time, one from their country should become governor of the habitable earth. Josephus could interpret Scripture to please his masters. " The oracle," he explains, " certainly denoted the government of Vespasian, who was appointed emperor in Judaea." ^ This leads us to notice the position which in recent times some who deny the supernatural in New Testament history have strenuously defended. The existence and profound influence of the Messianic hope, they contend, naturally led Jesus, when his self-consciousness was fully developed, to claim the Messianic title. Numerous prophecies, and the history of many centuries, had educated the people to the faith in a great deliverer who should break every yoke. One had the choice, then, either to give up, as some did, the dearest convictions of the nation, or, as most did, boldly to hope that the long-cherished ideal would soon be realised. Everyone who entertained this hope, and who, at the same time, was conscious of high gifts which 1 Warn, 13k. vi. chap. v. 4. 52 THE EARLY CHURCH. qualified him to become a saviour to the people, most inevit- ably put to himself the question, " Art thou he that should come?" and he might most sincerely believe that he was, and that no other was to be looked for. Now, this kind of reasoning may dispose us to admit that the false prophets, or some of the false prophets, who claimed the title, began by deceiving themselves. But some of those who apply this reasoning to the true ]\Iessiah themselves declare that the great doctrine of Judas of (Jalilee and of the Pharisees who followed him was the doctrine of the knife, and no one will deny that, whether we take our examples from the time preceding or from the time subsequent to the appearing of Christ down to Barcochba, the " Son of the Star," all of them held fast the same doctrine, and hoped, by violence and bloodshed, to establish the truth of their claims, and to win the diadem of glory which the desire of all nations was to wear. The false Messiahs were all cast pretty much in the same mould ; and how unlike they were to the true ! Had He been, like them, the mere creation of His time, or even had He united with His claims wisdom and gentleness and sound moral instincts, such as liabbi Hillel possessed, He could not have purged the Messianic hope so perfectly as He did purge it from all base admixture, and far less could He have fulfilled it. He could not on that mountain have said at the beginning of His ministry : " Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God." He could not on that other mount at the end of His ministry, when He was lifted up, have drawn to Himself the dying thief as an earnest of the power by which He should draw all men, and cheered his heart with the hope of heavenly glory. These false Messiahs, then, who were springing up anew, and ever finding multitudes of followers, bear witness irresistibly to the pre- valence and power of the great hope ; but, as they pale their ineffectual fires, are we not constrained to full down before the adorable splendour of the Sun of Righteous- ness ? We see the amazing difference now. But that Jesus of Nazareth, so unlike others who claimed the title, was indeed the Messiah, the Son of God — this, in the days of His flesh, was a conviction that was wrought by the THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE JEWS. 53 Heavenly Father Himself, and was matured as the fruit of year-long intercourse. In looking back over the ground we have traversed, we may surely say with the apostle that tlie " fulness of the times " was come. Xot only was the period of seventy weeks (490 years) predicted by Daniel completed; not only had the sceptre departed from Judah, as prophesied by the dying patriarch, but both the need and the expectation of the promised Deliverer had reached their highest point, and, at the same time, remarkable preparation had been made in Providence for the diffusion of the truth. It has been said that " Judaism prepared salvation for mankind, and heathenism prepared mankind for salvation." This is one of those pointed, portable sentences that must not be stretched too far, but in which is contained a great amount of truth. Salvation is of the Jews, and the very hollowness and insufficiency of mythological systems, which had been made manifest in the light of advancing culture, might well create the disposition to listen to a revelation that brought truth and rest. The better systems of philosophy, moreover, that had flourished in the heathen workl, imperfect and defective as they were, offered certain points of contact for the new religion. Again, the union of so many nations under the one sceptre of the Eoman emperor obviously presented facilities for the diffusion of Christianity. The father of Church History, indeed, assigns this as the reason why Eome, under Providence, achieved such vast conquests : that it might be easier for the apostles to fulfil the last great commission of their Master, " Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." At the same time the Greek language was so generally known that Paul could write in it not only to the ' believers of Corinth and Philippi, but to those of Ephesus and Colosse and of Eome itself. Add to all this that, when the Prince of Peace appeared, Augustus had closed the temple of Janus after a succession of wars which had lasted, with two brief interruptions, through seven hundred years. All these things coexisted when, to take the often quoted phrase of the celebrated moralist, " the world could endure neither its guilt nor any remedy conceiv- able by man." All were concluded in unbelief or disobedience. 54 THE EARLY CHURCH. but God had prepared the way for showing mercy to ail- not to the Jews only but also to the Gentiles. It is in contemplating great evolutions in history that the apostle exclaims: "0 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God ! how unsearchable are His judg- ments, and His ways past finding out !" CHAPTER VI. THE BEGINNING OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA. On the history of Christ Himself, the Founder and the Foundation of the Church, I do not mean to enter. It would be impossible to treat of it in a profitable manner without devoting to it more time than we can afibrd to spare from ecclesiastical history in the restricted sense. Let us remem- ber, however, not only that He is the central theme of the gospels, but that, even as the very word " Church " should perpetually remind us that He is Lord, every page of its history, if we read it aright, testifies of Him, either showing more or less perfectly the one image of God that came down from heaven, or presenting Him afresh as rejected, denied, betrayed, and crucified. We must ever recognise the presence and the power of Him by whose name we call ourselves and our era, as well as the spiritual kingdom to which we belong. I say the name by which we call ourselves and our era. Even to the present day, however, the date at which He was born, who is justly said to have moved the history of the world from its hinges, — with whom the history of the old ends and the history of the new begins, — has not been determined with certainty. The year from which we actually reckon, and which was fixed for us by the Eoman abbot Dionysius the Little (Exiguus) about the middle of the sixth century, appears now to be abandoned by both Catholic and Protestant writers. Some of the latest inquiries have led to a decision in favour of 747 or 748 from the foundation of Piome. There is no difficulty in showing that it could not be later than 750, for we have the positive statement of the Jewish historian, which there is no reason to question, that King Herod the Great died in that year ; and we know from Matthew that that monarch was alive when Christ was born, and for a time, left altogether indefinite, subsequent to that event. Another datum is furnished bv Luke, who states that the 56 THE EARLY CHURCH. public appearing of John the Baptist took place in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Ciesar. It cannot be said that this datum of itself would lead to a satisfactory conclusion, but it goes some way to confirm the result reached from the former. If we include in the reckoning the two years during which Tiberius reigned along with Augustus, and thus fix the beginning of his reign at the year 765 A.U.C., then we have, by adding fifteen, the year 780 as that in which John's manifestation to Israel took place. Now we know that Jesus began His public ministry soon after John's appearing, and that He was then about thirty years of age. Subtract the thirty from 780 and again we have 750 as the year of the birth. In confirmation of this particular date it has been stated as a result of calculation that for a long time the Passover fell upon a Thursday only in the year 783, and Christ, as is commonly accepted, celebrated the last Passover, at which the Supper was instituted, in the thirty-third year of His age.^ Taking then thirty-three from 783 we have again the figure 750. It must be admitted, however, that the datum, furnished by Luke when speaking of the imperial census in Palestine at the time of Quirinius, the Governor of Syria, would lead to a somewhat later date. It would appear from what has been stated, that while we have the negative certainty that Christ was not born in the year from which we are accustomed to reckon, we have nothing more than proba- bilities, more or less strong, as to the actual year that should be substituted. The difficulty of fixing the exact month and the exact day is still greater — so great that the attempt is now almost universally abandoned. A recent Roman Catholic writer expresses his astonishment at the confidence with which some authors belonging to his own Church arrive, by the boldest combinations, at the conclusion that Jesus was born precisely on the 25 th of December, while the great father, St. Jerome, in discoursing on the Nativity says : " Sive hodie Christus natus est, sive baptisatus est, diversa quidem fertur opinio in mundo et pro traditionum varietate sententia est diversa" — Opinions and traditions were equally various on the points. ^ The surprisinf; opinion of so early a father as Iren.Tus, that Jesus was over forty years of age when He died, remained quite isolated. CHAPTER VII. PETER. On the cupola of St. Peter's in Pome there stand in great, golden letters, which can be distinctly read from the depth below, these words : " Tu es Petrus et super banc petram redificabo ecclesiam rueam et tibi dabo claves regni coelorum." As for the keys, the emblem of authority in the new kingdom, it may be contended truly enough that the same power was subsequently conferred on all the apostles : '•' Verily I say unto you, whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven ; " but that Peter should be singled out first and individually for investiture with this spiritual power, does, it ought in fairness to be admitted, indicate a certain pre-eminence to which it was the Lord's will to exalt him, as plainly as the circumstance on which, naturally, great stress has been laid, that, though he was not the first converted, he is invariably named first in the catalogues of the Twelve which we have in the gospels. Again, as to the first part of the golden sentence which adorns that vast cathedral — " Tu es Petrus et super banc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam " — it may be argued that not only many modern interpreters but many of the ancient fathers, having regard to the solemn declaration that Christ Himself is the one foundation, than which no other can be laid, have understood the Lord to be speaking of Himself as the rock on which the Church was to be built, or — what is substantially equivalent — of His disciple's confession of faith in Him as the Son of the living God. There was no propriety, it may be urged, in calling any of the Twelve the rock on which the Church should be built — surely none in applying it to him who was characterised by that rashness in word and deed with which immovable firmness of character cannot 58 , THE EAELY CIlUllCH. possibly coexist ; to that mixture of strength and weakness, of courageous faith and desponding unbelief; to the man who drew upon himself the rebuke, " Get thee Ijeliind me, Satan : thou art an offence unto me : for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men"; the man wlio not only denied his Lord when it could be said that the Spirit was not yet given, but who, after he had not only received the Holy Spirit in the fulness of His influences, but had imparted heavenly gifts to many, was overcome by his fear of Jewish zealots at Antioch, and practically denied, and was rebuked to his face for denying, the great principle for which Paul was ready to give his life, and which, in truth, was necessary to make the religion of Christ the religion of tlie world. But, on the other hand, it must be considered that tlie fuller revelation of Peter's faults and sins arises in some measure from this pre-eminence above his brethren, and from impulses that were not ungenerous, though they needed to be purified and directed. But this also is to be considered — that the Lord, who knoweth the end from the beginning, and calleth the things that are not as though they were, no sooner saw this man coming to Him as a disciple tlian He said, " Thou art Simon the son of Jonas ; thou shalt be called Cephas, which is, by interpretation, a stone." This man miglit, like other men, and more than some men, be as " a reed shaken with the wind," but the Lord could glorify His power in him, and, remaining Himself the chief Corner-stone, could assign him the chief place in the foundation of apostles and prophets. Accordingly, many Protestant writers, believ- ing this to be not only possible, but to have been verified by fact, have no difficulty in concurring, so far as Peter person- ally is concerned, with the Poman Catholic interpretation of the great words, " Upon this rock will I build my Church." In the bright cloud of Christian witnesses that spans the firmament of the Church's history, and which reaches even to us, whether wc see the first glorious speck arise on Mount Zion when the day of Pentecost was come, or on the slope of Hermon when the great truth wliicli had not been learned from flesh and blood was confessed, we discern the Apostle Peter at the end nearest the Lord, who is made higher than PETER. 59 the heavens ; and if we look even at tlie cloud of Gentile witnesses, we see indeed one wlio shines with stronger and purer lustre, but still the cloud arises by the distant shore of the Great Sea, over the house where Peter prayed. Among the living stones — to return to the figure of the name — which are built up a spiritual house for the offering of spiritual sacrifices, his place is unique. It is the noblest and highest position in the building, next that of Him who honours His servants, but will not give His own honour to another, who says, " Upon this rock M'ill I build my Church," and con- cerning whom Peter himself quotes the ancient prophecy : " Behold, I lay in Zion a chief corner-stone, elect, precious ; and he that believeth on Him shall not be confounded." Here, then, is the grand fact that fulfils the great words standing over St Peter's. They might stand over any Church, though we should possibly prefer a text in which the whole cloud of witnesses vanishes and Jesus is found alone. It was not that he was the first to propose that the place which became vacant by the apostasy and self-murder of Judas should be filled up ; or because he was the first to unfold that power of working miracles which the Iledeemer, ere He departed, had conferred on His chosen followers ; or because he was the first to give to the rulers a reason for the hope that was in him ; or because he was the first to give expression to the glorious moral necessity under which devout conviction lays a man — " we must obey God rather than men " ; or because he was the first to execute, or, at all events, to pronounce judgment on the miserable man and woman who by hypocrisy and lying defiled the Church in the days of her virgin purity — it is not so much in these things that we see the fulfilment of the great promise as in the fact that he preached the first sermon testifying of a crucified and risen Saviour, by which three thousand souls were converted, and in the additional fact that to him first was revealed the full significance of the Master's word, " The field is the world," and that he was the first labourer who broke a way through the thorny hedge of Judaism, and, putting in his sickle, reaped the first-fruits of the white and plentiful harvest that lay beyond. In truth, were it not that the name is justly reserved for another and an infinitely 60 THE EARLY CIIUECir. greater, we might call Peter the founder of the Christian Church in much the same sense as others have been designated founders of particular sections comprehended in the one great name. The fact is incontestable that Christ employed Peter, as He employed no other of the disciples, in founding His Church ; and, this constituting the peculiar glory which the Lord was pleased to confer upon hira, it is manifest not only that a satisfactory sense is thus given to the vast promise made at Cicsarea Philippi, but that in this respect, from the nature of the thing, he could not possibly have a successor. And it is noteworthy that while, in the earliest days of the Church, Peter appears ever in the foreground, no sooner is the foundation laid both among Jews and Gentiles than he begins gradually to recede. After the famous so-called Council of which we have an account in Acts xv., in which he neither presides nor claims any authority above his brethren, he altogether disappears from the page of sacred history. Labours and suffering still awaited him in common with other wit- nesses of the risen Saviour, until the day he should put off his tabernacle, but it is as if his special life-task were now accomplished ; and, in point of fact, the Lord glorified Him- self henceforth more signally by another chosen to carry on and extend the work which He had begun by Peter. Let us, then, recognise this Apostle as surrounded with the peculiar lustre which the Lord put upon him ; but we are not dero- gating from him — we are but acting in accordance with the teaching of his own Epistles — -when we refuse to ascribe to him titles of pre-eminence that do not proceed from the same Divine fountain. It assuredly does not follow from his being chosen as the rock on which the Church should be built, that he was at the same time set over it as the visible repre- sentative of its invisible Head. Peter never dreamed that his brethren would fall down before him : he never acted as lord over God's heritage. K he ever had the dream, it was when others had it as well as himself, and when none of them had it from God. Jesus " took a little child and set him in the midst of them, and when He had taken him in His arms, He said unto them : Whosoever sliall receive one of such children in my name receiveth me ; and whosoever receiveth me, receiveth not me, but Him that sent me." The lesson was PETER. 61 subsequent to the promise, but the dispute which had arisen among the disciples by the way was not settled by recalling the promise and more especially assigning to Peter the pre- eminence which it is thought by Eoman Catholics necessarily to involve. But, it may be argued, the time was not yet come for formally and explicitly investing him with that supremacy, and the wisdom and love shown in deferring it were all the greater that the heart of the chosen disciple, like that of the others, was at that moment fired with worldly ambition, and unprepared for the high spiritual honour which was to be conferred on him after he had passed through a deep valley of humiliation and sorrow. It came after his Master's resurrection, when he was invested with authority over both the sheep and the lambs — over the clergy and the laity, says one class of Eoman Catholic writers ; over the old and young, say others more naturally ; both classes, however, agreeing that he was invested with authority over the whole Church. It is marvellous that such a sense can be put on the threefold command that corresponded with tlie threefold question, which recalled the threefold denial. To dwell on the question whether these words, " Feed my sheep," " Feed my lambs," can possibly mean so much, is unnecessary : but it is to be considered whether there be any historical trace of the supreme authority which they have been supposed to confer. Is there anything inconsistent with the view that the claim of supremacy was neither made nor conceded ? When Peter and John go up together to the temple, or when they appear together before the Sanhedrim, or when they go down together to Samaria, there is nothing to indicate that one is a prince and the other a subject. They seem as brethren under the one Master, and as much on terms of perfect equality now as on that day when, on the Lake, the son of Jonas and tlie son of Zebedee were each in his own boat, and the one beck- oned to the other that he should come and help him. But princes sometimes associate with their subjects as if they were equals. The King of kings once said to His fol- lowers, "I call you not servants, but friends." Such reasoning as this, however, is clearly inapplicable to one of the cases referred to — the joint mission to Samaria, which was undertaken with the view of confirming the new 62 THE EA-RLY CIIUUCH. converts.^ In like manner, we read in the sixtli chapter that the apostles together set apart the deacons who had been previously elected by the community, lleference has already been made to the deliberations of which an account is given in the fifteenth chapter, which could not have been carried on as they were if Peter had been the visible representative of the invisible Lord, and also to the just censure which the Apostle of the circumcision drew upon himself at Autioch. ]]ut in the chapter of Galatians in which Paul tells us how he \vithstood Peter to the face because he was to be blamed, there is another verse which to me appears quite decisive. Passing over the language of the seventh verse, which is likewise most unfavourable to the idea of Peter's primacy, we read at the ninth verse : " And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision." The very arrangement of the names in tliis verse, to say nothing of the clause in which the three are characterised, would be inexplicable if we entertained the idea that Peter occupied a peculiar and pre-eminent position in the Church. In that other passage, " All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas," it might be said we have a climax, Paul in his humility beginning with himself and rising to the highest ambassador and representative of Christ on earth. But in the passage in Galatians we have neither climax nor anti-climax, and of course the supposition of either would be of no avail. The actual arrangement — " James, Cephas, and John " — is wholly irreconcilable with the Eonian Catholic belief that Peter was invested with supreme authority by his Master and exercised it during his lifetime. While then we leave Peter, as we ought most heartily to do, in possession of the special lustre with which the Saviour Himself surrounded his name, we have a right to deny the fundamental position on which the claim of papal supremacy is based, and it is not necessary for us to go further. But the defenders of the claim are obviously bound to go further and to establish a great deal more. And they have endeav- ' Acts viii. PETER. 6 3 oured to do so. They have set themselves to prove that Peter became Bishop of Home, and, dying in that see, trans- mitted to his successor the authority with which he had been himself divinely invested. Not a few Protestants are willing to admit — and certainly there is no danger to their Protestantism in the admission — that Peter spent his last earthly hours in the bosom of the Eomau community, and here, at the heart of the world, under Nero, and about the same time as Paul was martyred, endured the death which his Lord had predicted as for him the gateway into the heavenly city. The legend that, at his own request, to which he was prompted by his deep humility, he was cruciiied with his head downward, is not older than Origen. Some have argued that there is something like internal evidence in favour of this story ; it is so beautifully in keeping with the fervent temperament of the disciple who had fallen, but had been the humblest and most devoted of men since he was restored. There may, however, arise a doubt whether the humility which evinced itself so remarkably be not of a some- what morbid and artificial character, and unlike the holy simplicity of the Apostolic age. An older legend tells us that, before his own departure, Peter's wife was led to death, and that the Apostle, calling her by name, said to her in an encouraging and consoling voice, " Eemember the Lord." A later legend, for which St. Ambrose is the authority, tells us that, when the persecution broke out, the Christians, anxious to preserve the Apostle's life, persuaded him to flee. But at the gate he met our Lord. " Doviine qiio vadis .^— Lord, whither goest Thou ? " asked the Apostle. " I go to Piome," was the answer, " there to be crucified once more." Peter well understood the meaning of these words, and returned alone and was crucified. The lioman tradition that Peter was twenty-five years bishop of the capital, and at the end of that period suffered martyrdom along with Paul, would not, if it were true, establish the claim of papal supremacy. But this tradition, which cannot be traced further back than the end of the fourth century (Jerome's revision of Eusebius), is not only unsupported by satisfactory historic evidence, as may be said of the legends given above, and even of the position that 64 THE EAKLY CHURCH. Peter was ever at Eome at all ; but, with the Scripture data we have in our hands, it is so incredible that some lloman Catholic writers have themselves abandoned it and reduced the twenty-five to one. To say nothing of the total silence of the Acts of the Apostles, and especially of its last chapter, the letter to the liomans, which was written in 58 a.d., and which ends with an unusually long catalogue of persons to whom salutations were sent, makes no mention of Peter, and we seek in vain even the slightest allusion to him. The letters written by Paul during his imprisonment likewise observe a silence that would be simply unintelligible on tlie hypothesis of Peter's having been twenty-five years bishop of the capital. The truth is that we know nothing with certainty of Peter but what we learn from the New Testament itself. Clement of Rome speaks (at the end of the first century) of the Apostle's martyrdom, but without clearly indicating the place ; so that we learn from him merely that the prediction recorded in John was fulfilled. All else is post-apostolic, and the growth and transmission of the legend are naturally accounted for by the desire to find a basis at once historical and spiritual for the prodigious pretensions of the Ptoman See. The deepest foundation of the Poman power does not lie, however, in the fiction, although the fiction may be useful in maintaining it. It lies in the fact that the spirit of the old capital, from which the nations had been wont to receive laws, seized its bishops. When the rank of honour next to that of the Bishop of Rome was claimed for the Patriarch of Con- stantinople by the Second Ecumenical Council, the reason assigned was simply that his see was the new Rome. If the shadow of Peter hovers round the building which is adorned with the golden sentence, it is of Peter as he was in the hours which were not his best, but as he was when he said, " We have followed Thee, what shall we have therefore ? " when he drew the sword to fight for the Kiugdom which is not of this world ; and when, we may even add, he denied the Lord that boucrht him. CHAPTER VIIL JOHN. As we learn from the fourth gospel, there was an unnamed disciple who, in the company of Andrew, Peter's brother, stood by the Baptist in the valley of the Jordan when he uttered his great declaration concerning Jesus of N'azareth, whom he saw approaching : " Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world." It is almost universally believed that this disciple was John himself, who describes the ever-memorable scene and records the ever-memorable words. He could never forget the hour when first he saw Him to whom his heart clung with suj)reme devotion, whom he afterwards beheld on the ]\Iount of Transfiguration, on the Mount of Olives nigh imto Bethany, and from the island of Patmos — transfigured, ascending, enthroned — but who then walked in obscurity, and was still in the background of history when designated as the Saviour round whom all history turns. Of the twelve who were chosen to be apostles, John is connnonly supposed to have been the youngest. The belief is based on tradition, and it must be admitted that the date assigned for his decease tends some- what to confirm it. It is generally thought, indeed, that all who composed the little company were young men when they were called to the apostleship ; and certainly, to say nothing of the great receptivity of early years for new doctrine, youthful vigour was needed for the arduous and trying mission to which they were set apart. But among the young and fresh John is represented both by history and by art as the youngest and freshest of all ; and this circumstance in part, though only in part, may have suggested the striking remark of Godet : " The well-beloved disciple personifies the eternal youth and unmarred virginity of the spouse of Christ." E 66 THE EARLY CHURCH, It is liardly necessary to say that the relation in which he stood to the Lord was singularly close. Some have even imagined that this disciple and his Master were connected by the tie of blood ; but, even if they had been, that would not account for the relation of which we actually know. John stood nearer Christ than any of the Lord's bretiiren according to the flesh. Not only was he one of " the chosen from the chosen," as they have been designated, — of the three who were witnesses of the resurrection of the daughter of Jairus, of the scene of glory on the mount of transfiguration, and of the agony in the garden, — but he appeai-s as the object of a special personal affection, which has led to the supposition that, from tlie first, there was in him (and if there was, we know to what source he would trace it) a special depth of devotion M'hich had no parallel, unless it was in Mary, the sister of Lazarus, and which was peculiarly attractive to Him on whose bosom he leaned, and out of whose fulness he received. At all events, he is designated as " the disciple whom Jesus loved ; " and to him Jesus, speaking from the cross, becjueathed the legacy of the heart. If there was conferred on Peter a distinction all his own, there are natures to whom the words " Behold thy mother ! " spoken at that hour, would sound as high and blissful as the words uttered at C^esarea Philippi. Though Peter is usually described as the man of action, and John as the man of contemplation and deep fervid feeling, we are not to suppose that the nature of the one was unemotional, or that of the other inactive. In the beginning of the Cliurch's history John appears not only as Peter's friend and counsellor but as his fellow-labourer. But after the return from the mission to Samaria, on which they had been sent together for the confirmation of the new converts and for the communication of spiritual gifts, the younger son of Zebedee is not again mentioned in the sacred narrative. We learn, however, from Paul (Gal, ii.) that, when he came up to Jerusalem to confer with the twelve and the mother- church on his special vocation as apostle of the Gentiles, John was then present in the holy city, and he and Peter and James (the Lord's brother) are described as those who seemed to be, that is were recognised as, pillars of the JOHN". 67 Church. To take the date commonly accepted for this visit of Paul's, which is also the date of the Council of which we read in Acts xv., John was still in Jerusalem in the year 53 A.D., nine years after his brother James had suffered martyrdom in fulfilment of the Lord's word that he should drink of His cup and be baptised with His baptism. Up to 53, then, John does not appear to have undertaken any foreign apostolic mission. The great epoch in his life — the date at which he left Jerusalem for the last time — is uncertain. AVhether it preceded the time of Paul's last visit to Jerusalem, when he found James at the head of the Church there, or occurred somewhat later, and about the time of the Jewish war, we have no means of determining. After he left Jeru- salem, Ephesus, according to ancient and unanimous accounts, became the centre of his apostolic labours, which were not confined to that city, but extended far and wide over the surrounding regions. This statement will be the more readily accepted if we remember the names of the six churches mentioned along with Ephesus in the Apocalypse — Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. We may suppose that John did not place himself at the head of the apostolic mission to that vast eastern field till after the death of Paul, who, in the period of his imprisonment at Eome, continued to charge himself with the care of the churches of Asia Minor, of which Ephesus was the parent community, addressed to them epistles, or sent to them messengers out of the circle of those who had been most closely associated with him in his work. According to Irena^us of Lyons (Lugdunum), who was a native of Asia Minor, and in his youth had seen and heard Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, one of John's disciples, the apostle lived and laboured long in Ephesus and its neigh- bourhood, and died in the time of the Emperor Trajan— that is, not before 98 A.D., which is the year of Trajan's accession. That John was banished to the island Patmos, and there wrote the Apocalypse, rests on higher authority than that of tradition ; but whether the banishment followed or preceded his first coming to Ephesus, whether it took place in the reign of Domitian (81-96 a.d.), or of an earlier Pioman emperor, is a question for the settlement of which there are 68 THE EAPxLY CHURCH. no clear historical data. The legend that, in tlie time of Domitian, he was cast at liome into a vessel of burning oil and came forth unharmed, is generally rejected. But to return to John's long residence in Ephesus, which we are entitled to accept as historical, and which has never been disputed till the most recent times, we may see reason for adoring the wise providence of God in bringing into the regions where dangerous sects were chiefly spreading, that Apostle who, in the unveiling of Divine things, evinces a peculiar depth of spirit and a peculiar fervour and purity of feeling. That John, with his apostolic authority and his sanctified zeal, contended there for the true humanity and the supreme Divinity of his Lord, was for the Church of those days and of all succeeding ages an inestimable blessing. The most touching of all the scenes presented in the first book of Church History is that in which we behold Paul at Miletns surrounded with the elders of the Church of Ephesus. We liear him speak of the cloud which is over his own future, and of the darker cloud which is over theirs (Acts xx.) We read that, after he had spoken, they all wept sore, and fell on his neck and kissed him, sorrowing most of all for the words which he spake, that " they should see his face no more." All is sadness in that parting except this : we read that, before they wept, he kneeled down and prayed with them all. We know not what they asked, but shall we hesitate to say that the Lord did unto them exceedingly abundantly above what they asked or thought ? If we are entitled to see, as has been seen from the days of old, a connection between Stephen's prayer and Paul's conversion, what shall hinder us from connecting the prayer of that sorrowful hour with John's blissful mission to the East ? This we do know, that the men of Ephesus who were then sowing in tears, sorrowing because they should see Paul's face no more, would reap in joy when they beheld the face of him who had lain on the bosom of Jesus, and had taken the mother of Jesus to his own home. When the wolf came there was none who would care more for tlie sheep ; there was none who united in a higher degree the wisdom of the serpent with the purity of the dove. Most deeply interested are we in that mission to the East, JOHN. 6 9 for there John taught not only orally but by his writing, and, in particular, by his " spiritual gospel " (euayyeXiov Trvev/jba- TLKov), as it was called first by Clement of Alexandria, which penetrated more deeply into the innermost life and spirit of the Lord than the other three gospels, and, for the same reason, termed also, by a German theologian, the " pectus Christi." While this gospel supplements the Synoptics (it is, however, a most inadequate way of speaking when we represent it as a mere supplement), and while it is the most exalted model of devout contemplation we possess, there can be no doubt that much of the historical matter that is added, and many aspects in which the Eedeemer's person and work are contemplated, were specially fitted to meet pernicious forms of error which had begun to prevail, as in the first epistle heretical teachers are not mentioned by name, but the tenets which they notoriously held are rejected by the exhibition, in sharp and unmistakable contrast, of the truths which they denied. Of this the prologue furnishes ample and striking illustration. I do not mean now to enter upon particulars with regard to any sects or their founders, but merely mention that in the introduction there are great truths emphatically stated that were already denied, and the presumption is that they were stated because they were denied. The Logos is the Creator of all things, not, as some taught, subordinate, or of an inferior nature, to the supreme God, but from eternity with Him, and from eternity God. The Logos had not descended, as some taught, upon Jesus at His baptism, but the Logos Himself became man. And He became truly man (6 \0709 crap^ ijevero); He did not wear the mere semblance of humanity, as some supposed. Notwithstanding the Baptist's own repudia- tion of the title of Messiah, and his most humble protest against it, there were those who ascribed it to him (these, however, are disciples who are not to be confounded with those mentioned in Acts xix.) : " He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light." Notwithstanding the decision of which we read in Acts xv., in which all appear to have acquiesced at the time, there had arisen before John wrote a heretical opposition, holding the old doctrine of the necessity of circumcision, against which Paul had contended so long and warmly. It is most probable that 70 THE EARLY CHURCH. these heretics were before tlie mind of John when he wrote : "To as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them which believe on his name ; which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." How distinctly in these words does he teach the same doctrine as the great apostle who had founded the Church in Ephesus ! The history of the period which John spent in that city has been embellished with a considerable number of legends ; and certainly it is quite a possible thing that some of them, though tliey may not be supported by sufficient evidence, may rest on a foundation of truth. One of the best known stands in immediate connection with the point we have just been considering, and if it is not literally true, it may have been conceived as a reflection from actual life of the terrible sentences which the beloved disciple, who was also one of the sons of thunder, utters against the enemies of that truth. It is related ^ that, having met the arch-heretic Cerinthus in one of the public baths, he immediately left it, declaring his fear that the building would fall and crush them. In contrast with this, as showing the other side of John's nature, another tradition tells how the aged disciple found pleasure in the playfulnesss and fondness of a favourite bird, and defended himself against the charge of unworthy trifling by the familiar comparison of the bow which must sometimes be unbent. You all know that other tradition,^ which is not only more frequently told, but worthy of being told, that brings before us the last scene of his public life, when, weak and dying, unable e\en to stand, he was borne into the midst of the assembly, and there continued to repeat only the one sentence, " Little children, love one another," till, being asked why he thus repeated the words, he replied : " It is the Lord's command, which sums up all His will." It is the Lord's command, and some one has called it "John's Testament." By him, certainly, above all the apostles, — by the disciple whom Jesus loved, and to whom He bequeathed the legacy of the heart, — the Lord's command has been transmitted to the generations following. There is a beautiful narrative proceed- ing from a more ancient source (Clement of Alexandria), and ^ Ireiiaeus and Eusebius. ^ Given l>y Jerome. JOHN. 71 illustrative of the love of the true shepherd, who goes after the wanderer and brings him back to the fold. On one of his apostolic journeys Jolin beheld in Smyrna a youth whose bearing struck him, and for whom he conceived a great affection. He committed him to the special care of the bishop and con- tinued his journe}'. After some years he returned to Smyrna, and his first question was for the youth. " He is dead," was the reply ; and, on further inquiry, it was explained that he was dead to God. He had forsaken the way of life, and had become the captain of a band of robbers. Immediately John demanded a horse, and he rested not till he had discovered the robbers' retreat. He was made prisoner. " Lead me to your captain," he said to those who took him. They complied, but when the captain beheld him he began to flee, and John, forgetting his age, pursued, exclaiming : " Why flee from me, my son ? Have pity upon me. As the Lord hath laid down His life for us, willingly would I lay down my life for thee. Oh, stand, for Christ hath sent me to thee ! " The youth was overcome. He threw aside his wild garb and was restored to the bosom of the Church. As to the time of John's death, we know that it was at the end of the first century, or toward the beginning of the second. As to the manner of it, we know nothing. That the fact was early questioned, and continues to be questioned, is obviously traceable to the misunderstanding of the words of Jesus noticed in the last chapter of John's gospel itself (John xxi.). After his departure, some really believed that he had been translated, like Enoch and Elijah ; others supposed that he was preserved alive somewhere on earth, and would reappear at the coming of the personal Antichrist. Among those who believed that he was actually dead there grew up a legend (mentioned by Augustine) that, when he felt his end approaching, he gave orders for the construction of his own sepulchre, and then laid himself down, as on a bed, to die, but that afterwards there were strange movements in the earth that covered him. This legend seems to have been afterwards expanded in various ways. The addition was made that the grave was opened and found empty, which would suit either the hypothesis of a resurrection or that of a merely seeming death. But the legendary cycle is not com- 72 THE EARLY CHURCH. plete, and it is not necessary to complete it. Xo such wreath is needed for tlie head of him who is called the Theologian, the Eagle.^ The imperishable crown which he wears in the church we see in his writings. It is a crown which the wearer would doubtless cast at his Lord's feet, yet meet for the head of him who lay on the Lord's breast. As Mr. riumptre has said of those apocryphal materials, " "We strain our sight in vain to distinguish between the false and the true, between the shadows with which the gloom is peopled and the living forms of whom we are in search. We find it better and more satisfactory to turn again, for all our con- ceptions of the Apostle's mind and character, to the scanty records of the New Testament and the writings which he him- self has left. Nowhere is the vision of the Eternal Word, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, so unclouded ; nowhere are there such distinctive personal reminiscences of the Christ in His most distinctively human characteristics." 1 "Volatavis sine iiieta"is the motto of Olsliauscii's commentary. It is taken from a livmn of Adam of St. Victor. CHAPTER IX. THE OTHER DISCIPLES. ISToTHiNG is known with certainty of the apostles but what we learn from the New Testament itself. At the end of the period to which the sacred record brings us the world may- be said to have been already filled with the light of the gospel, but the living torches which had been kindled by Jesus Himself, and by which the light had been borne from land to land, vanish from our view. But in addition to those con- cerning Peter and John, some traditions with regard to the other disciples may be mentioned in a word. Of Matthew the publican it is said that, having first preached among the Jews, he afterwards went on a mission to the tribes of Ethiopia. Of Bartholomew, who is commonly identified with ISTathanael, so well known to us from the first chapter of John's gospel, the legend, in which, of course, he appears as a different person from the guileless Israelite, says that he was of royal descent, the son of a king named Ptolemy, and that, even when a disciple of the Lord, he wore his purple robe. The Saviour, it is further said, once prophesied to him that he should put off the purple robe of his body, and the prediction was fulfilled when, in Armenia, to which he had gone to preach tlie gospel, he was killed by being flayed alive. The legend, however, varies as to the region in which he taught and suffered. To Thomas a sphere of labour has been assigned in India ; to Thaddseus, in Ptome ; to Simon the Canaanite, in Africa. Philip of Bethsaida, who is not to be confounded with the deacon Philip, by whom the Ethiopian eunuch was converted, is said to have preached the gospel in Phrygia, and to have died at Hierapolis at an advanced age, having survived all his fellow-apostles but John. As to the end of James, the brother of the Lord, to whom the Epistle 73 74 THE EAKLY CnURCII. is commonly ascribed, the following account is given by Josephus (Ant. xx. 9. 1): — " Ananus, the high priest, being of the sect of the Sadducees, ■who are very rigid in judging ofienders above all the rest of Jews, . . . assembled the Sanhedrim of the Judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others. And when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned." For this procedure, however, of which people generally disapproved, Ananus, as Josephus further states, was removed from office three months afterwards. The account given in Eusebius ^ from Hegesippus, who lived in the time of the Antonines, differs greatly from that of the Jewish authors. It is often quoted, and is certainly very interesting, and by many it is accepted as historical. James, according to Hegesippus, used to go alone into the temple, and there he was commonly found upon his knees praying for forgiveness for the people, so that his knees grew dry and hard like a camel's from his constantly bending them in prayer. On account of his exceeding righteousness he was called the Just, and Oblias, which means " the bulwark of the people." The scribes and Pharisees set him on the gable of the temple, requiring him to address the multitude and persuade them not to go astray after Jesus. But James testified powerfully of the Lord, and many exclaimed, " Hosanna to the Son of David ! " The enemies of the truth had him thrown down, and, as he was not killed by the fall, they began to stone him. On the knees which had been so often bent he cried, " I beseech thee, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." And while they were stoning him, one of the priests of the sons of Eechab cried out and said, " Stop ! what are you doing ? The just one is praying for you." Then a fuller took the club with which he pressed the clothes and brought it down on the head of the just one. " And so he bore his witness. And they buried him on the spot by the temple, and the column still remains by the temple." " And," the account continues, " immediately Vespasian com- menced the siege." 1 Eccl. IlMt. ii. 23. CHAPTEE X. PAUL. It is not necessary to go further into the merely traditional. It is to be noted in general that from this source we learn that all the apostles suffered martyrdom except John, whose brother James had been the first of the apostles put to death for his religion. Still more remarkable is it that, where such widely separated fields of labour are assigned to so many different persons, we have not even the authority of tradition for supposing that, with the exception of Peter, any of the Twelve who were originally apostles came as heralds of the gospel into Europe. There is undoubtedly a tradition, though there is no clear historical evidence to support it, that Peter came to Corinth and to Eome ; that he laboured at Eome for a longer or shorter period ; and that at length by his martyr- dom, in which he was " made equal to his Lord " by being crucified, yet " not made equal," being, at his own request, crucified with his head downward, his name was added to the roll of the illustrious examples (ja <^evvala virohei^ixara) of those times. When we think what Europe, as compared with other continents, has become through the influence of Christian truth, and remember that the only apostle of whom we know with certainty that he laboured in this continent at all was he " that was born out of due time," perhaps there is not a more striking illustration in all history of the Lord's own declaration that the last shall be first ; and we cannot exag- gerate the importance of that turning-point in Luke's narrative at which the man of Macedonia appeared to Paul in a vision, saying, " Come over and help us." It is exceedingly little, indeed, that we learn of the Twelve in the Acts — comparatively little even of those who were reputed to be the pillars of the mother-church. More than half of the narrative is given to him who was called into the vineyard last, yet laboured more abundantly than they all. And with him the book ends. It 75 76 THE EAPiLY CIIUUCII. Lrings him into the world's capital. In Eome, it has been somewhere stated, the hut where Itomulus had once dwelt was still pointed out in the time of the emperors. What a change had taken place in the eight hundred years which had elapsed from the day on which the furrow was drawn by the founder ! In the time of Xero, little did the descendants of tlie old Iiomans imagine that there dwelt in a hired house in tlieir city a man who, while he wore a chain, was chosen above all others to build up an empire unspeakably greater and more durable tban that founded by the occupant of the ancient hut. A poor common monk long afterwards visited in obscurity the same city, and there received some part of the preparation needed for the accomplishment of the greatest revolution that has taken place since the introduction of Christianity. " Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and received all that came unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Clirist with all confidence, no man forbidding him." AVith these words the JSTew Testament narrative comes to a close. How did the two years end ? Was it with his martyrdom ? Or was he, as perhaps the greater number of writers believe, set free, and thus enabled for a while longer to labour for the Divine Kingdom in different regions, and, in particular, to accomplish that intended journey to Spain of which he speaks in the Epistle to the Eomans ? If the last question is to be answered in the affirmative, it becomes necessary to suppose further that he fell into a second cap- tivity, which ended in his execution. These questions have Ijeen answered with the greatest confidence on both sides. It has been sometimes asserted that, though we have no definite information as to tlie subsequent history of the Apostle, the very silence of Luke leads inevitably to the con- clusion that Paul did not suffer martyrdom at the end of the two years. Had he been put to death then, Luke would have brought the history to the natural termination by recording the fact. The conclusion, however, is not inevit- able. Leaving out of view the consideration that the New Testament records few death scenes, and does not dwell on any except that of the Lord Himself, on which it does dwell with ex- traordinary fulness and minuteness of detail — Stephen's death- PAUL. 7 7 scene being hardly an exception, since his sufferings are not dwelt upon — we may ask, " What do we know with certainty of the subsequent history of the historian any more than of the subsequent history of the subject of those closing chapters ? " There is, indeed, a tradition that Luke reached a considerable age, but the tradition is not uniform, and, even if it were, it would settle nothing unless it could be traced to competent witnesses. Supposing that there was only one imprisonment, and that it ended in the apostle's martyrdom, there is little to prevent us from supposing further that the beloved physician, who alone was his companion when othei.s had forsaken him, was his companion still in his last hours and in the suffering of death. JSTo one, of course, is entitled to state this as a historical fact, or to do more than suggest it as quite a possible supposition. And that is sufficient to show that the conclusion drawn in favour of a release and a second imprisonment is by no means inevitable. The main argument adduced to prove that Paul did not suffer for several years after the termination of the captivity spoken of by Luke is derived from the pastoral epistles, which are thought to involve journeys belonging to a later period than 64 A.D. ; such, for example, as a journey to Crete, witli apostolic labours there, as well as a second visit to Troas. Some, however, — though it must be confessed that their con- clusion can be reached only by the exercise of ingenuity, — find room enough within the frame of the Acts of the Apostles, and therefore before 64, for all that is necessary to explain the Epistles to Titus and Timothy. A different class of critics — those who deny the genuineness of the pastoral epistles — naturally favour the opinion that there was no second imprisonment, and argue on that ground. But it may be asked if there is no historical ground what- ever for the opinion that Paul was liberated in 64 a.d. By some an argument has been based on the anticipation of the journey to Spain already alluded to. In 58 Paul wrote: " Whensoever I take my journey into Spain, I will come unto you ; for I trust to see you in my journey, and to be brought on my way thitherward by you, if first I be somewhat filled with your company." Now, altogether apart from any particular theory of inspiration, one is reluctant to believe 78 THE EARLY CHURCH. that an anticipation so confidently expressed by the Apostle was disappointed. This, however, is not an argument that will have any weight with those whose point of view is purely historical. But we have that expression in a letter addressed by the lioman Bishop Clement (tirst century) to the Church of Corinth, where it is said of Paul that, in preaching the gospel, he had come even to the repfia tt}? hva€(o<; — " the limit (or boundary) of the west." Here is the language of the most ancient authority in the time immediately succeed- ing that of the apostles. But it has been variously inter- preted. Some of the High Church party in the southern part of our island have supposed Clement to mean England, and have thus reached the conclusion that the origin of their Church is apostolic in the most strict and literal sense. Of course there was an old British Church in existence long before Augustine was sent from Piome to convert the Anglo- Saxon conquerors, and it is not impossible that it was founded in the first century by immigrants from Asia Minor. Another interpretation put upon the phrase more frequently, and by writers belomjincj to different sections of the universal Church, is " the limit of Paul's journey toward the west " ; and by this limit is understood the same as that recorded by the Acts of the Apostles — Ptome. The interpretation adopted, with the exceptions above mentioned, by those who hold that there was a second captivity, is that it denotes Spain. It must be admitted that this explanation of the words is both ancient — and that is something — and, what is more, perfectly natural It would not readily occur to a bishop writing from Pome to call that city repfia t?}? 8v(r€03