The necessity of his own martyrdom would soon become part of his belief. In the state in which Judæa was then, the forces tending in this direction were sufficiently obvious. Only an increase of the opposition he had already encountered, such as would be produced by his coming into collision with the fanatical orthodoxy of Jerusalem, was needed to secure his death as a criminal. There must have been many reasons to make him welcome a speedy death. M. Renan is probably right in conjecturing that Christ began to lose ground during the later days of his life, the irritability produced by constant controversy weakening the personal charm of his character. Death would seem the only remedy for this. The fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, which Mr. Arnold supposes to have been always present to Christ’s mind as the embodiment of his Messianic ideal, is likely to have been thus before him in this closing period. There death is represented as crowning the afflictions of the righteous servant of Jahveh, and a glorious triumph is promised as its result. Christ would of course apply the passage to himself, and would look forward to his death as the condition necessarily preceding his Messianic glory. Personal shrinking from pain would count for nothing with him. If he believed himself to be the divinely appointed Messiah, the central figure of all the world’s history, he could not have had one feeling that was not subservient to his mission.
As soon as this conception of his Messiahship was developed in his thoughts, he would at once adopt in its fulness the spiritual Messianic ideal. Rejected by the vast majority of the Jews—rejected, moreover, because he was not the national Messiah, he would be irresistibly impelled to proclaim himself the spiritual Messiah, in whose eyes no distinctions of race separated men from God. Failing with the Jews, there was the more need that he should turn to the Gentiles; defeated by Jewish nationalism, Jewish nationalism must have become hateful to him. He would look now for the establishment of a spiritual Israel, formed of all mankind reconciled to God and delivered from sin. From this time, though he probably did not preach to them himself, he must have included the Gentiles in his system.[56]
He would, of course, impress this new ideal on his disciples as strongly as he could. It was now necessary that his system should be preached by them after his death, so that when he came again in the clouds of heaven he might find faithful adherents to share in the glories of his reign. He would strive to prepare his disciples for his death, to prevent them from being disheartened by it, and in doing so he would promise them his return in power. Thus he would himself originate the dogma of his second advent, which was the main support of the early Christian Church. It would not be very difficult to induce his disciples to accept the doctrine. They believed in the resurrection of the dead, and he would merely have to fix in their minds a conviction that his resurrection would be immediate; that he, as Messiah, would rise at once to heaven after his death, thence to return with unlimited powers to punish and reward. To get the first part of the doctrine into their heads may not have been easy; they would not readily understand that their lord was to die still publicly unrecognized, with no proclamation of his greatness; but once they did understand this, his promised return in glory would seem best to explain it, and would suit it to their ambitious dreams. Probably they never fully understood this portion of his teaching until after his death, when, of course, there would be every inducement to accept it.
It is unnecessary to state how strongly the evidence of the gospels supports this conclusion. Again and again in them Christ appears preparing his disciples for his death, and promising his return afterwards in heavenly glory. But the evidence of probability would be sufficient to establish it. It solves the great problem in the history of Christianity; it explains the passage of Christianity through the perilous period immediately after its founder’s death.
Being thus forced to justify himself by appealing to the supernatural elements of Judaism, supernatural conditions would necessarily assume more importance in his eyes. The post-prophetic additions to Judaism mentioned in the last chapter had by this time developed a complete system of salvation and damnation. Heaven and hell were now fully established in the creed of the Jew, heaven being appointed for himself and hell for the Gentile. Christ would naturally accentuate this part of his religion, and adopt the same spirit of exclusiveness. Heaven would be for those who accepted, hell for those who rejected the Messiah. Probably he now began to lay special stress on the salvation of the soul in his preaching. And thus we can understand how Christianity came to possess in a heightened form the more Pagan features of Judaism.
The same circumstances which were leading Christ to exaggerate the portions of Judaism most favourable to general proselytism, would also cause him to lay aside the portions of Judaism most unfavourable to it. His opposition to the legal and ceremonial elements of Judaism would now be greatly increased. His worst enemies, of course, were those who attached most importance to these, and in their attacks on him formalism must have supplied them with their most effective weapons. This would lead him in time to reject formalism completely. In doing so, he was, as we saw in the last chapter, strictly fulfilling the spiritual Messianic ideal. To what extent he made the renunciation of the law an actual part of his system we cannot tell, but we may be sure it was to a larger extent than his disciples were ready to accept. The forms of Judaism, at least, could not have been regarded by him as necessary elements of his religion. He was forced to make his system a movement out of orthodox Judaism, and he could not have cared to encumber his new religion with the worn-out forms of the old.
The account in the gospels of the closing incidents of Christ’s life is probably in the main strictly correct. Sooner or later he was sure to go to Jerusalem. The need to justify his system by preaching it in the capital, and the wish to found it securely by his death under persecution, would alike impel him in this direction. And he would naturally choose one of the great feasts as the occasion for his visit to the city. Though the forms of Judaism had now probably ceased to be an essential portion of his religion, there is no reason to suppose that he personally objected to observing the more important of them. Coming to Jerusalem to keep the passover, he would find it crowded with strangers; practically the whole Jewish world would be concentrated there; and thus he would obtain the widest possible publicity, both for his preaching and his martyrdom. That the latter would necessarily follow the former he must have clearly seen. In the capital of Judaism, at a time when a great religious festival excited the fanaticism of the people to the highest pitch, to preach a religion that involved the overthrow of legalism and the equality of Jew and Gentile in the sight of God, and to do this while claiming to fulfil the popular expectations, obviously meant a speedy extinction. So we may conclude that Christ came to Jerusalem at the time of the passover, probably accompanied by many of his country adherents who were also going to the feast, and that there by his preaching he provoked against himself the fanaticism of the priests and the populace, and was put to death as an offender against the law. Among the incidents related as occurring now, is one that established a great dogma.
In the description which the gospels give of the institution of the Lord’s supper, we have statements which are corroborated by an important external authority. The first epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians is unquestionably genuine, and accordingly it ranks as one of the earliest documents of the New Testament. In it Christ, on the occasion of his passover feast in Jerusalem, is said to have broken bread and distributed it among his disciples, and to have poured out wine and given it to them, asserting that the bread was his body and the wine his blood, and ordering them to continue the practice as a memorial of him. Taking this passage in conjunction with the corresponding passages of the gospels, we have in all four statements so much distinctly expressed; while equally in all four it is either expressed or clearly implied that this distribution of his body and blood meant that his body was broken and his blood shed for the remission of sins; the only variation in the passages being the omission by the first two gospels of the injunction to repeat the ceremony. Putting this point aside for the moment, we have in the rest of the description an account in which the three gospels agree, and in which they are corroborated by a trustworthy external authority. Unless probability is decidedly against it, this concurrence of evidence is sufficient to establish its truth.[57]
The account, however, has probability distinctly in its favour. If Christ was alive on the day of the passover—and there is every reason to suppose that the gospels are correct when they assert that he was—he would naturally keep the passover supper with his disciples, as otherwise his presence in Jerusalem would be inexplicable. But keeping the passover, with the expectation of his immediate death vividly before him, the celebration must have seemed to him to possess a strange significance. He believed that the first passover feast had been celebrated in the time of Moses, that the blood of the victim sprinkled on their doorways had preserved the Israelites from harm on the eve of their departure from Egypt, and that this had been the earliest rite of the Jewish law. Now he, of course, must have regarded his system, which was to be fully established by his death, as the fulfilment of Judaism. The ceremonies of Judaism, of which the passover, as first, was chief, belonged only to the old unfulfilled religion, and not to the mature Judaism founded by him. So this passover he was keeping would seem to him, not merely a commemoration of the first, but, in a proper sense, actually the last ceremony of the Jewish ritual. And as it was the last rite of the old, so it was the first of the new Judaism. His disciples now, like the early Israelites, were leaving old ways and beginning a new life as wanderers on strange paths. As the first ceremony of Judaism had sanctified its commencement, so this first ceremony of Christianity might well appear to him to sanctify its commencement, and to mark the transition from the old religion to the new.