Silanus the Christian

by Edwin Abbott Abbott

After this, came a sentence that perplexed me greatly, “This is my body, which is in your behalf. Do this to my remembering or reminding.” Not being able to make any sense at all of this, I read on, in hope of light: “In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The word “covenant” helped me a little, because I had found Paul speaking elsewhere to the Corinthians in his own person about a “new covenant” and an “old covenant.” Also to the Galatians he mentioned “two covenants,” one of which, he said, “corresponds to Mount Sinai.” So I turned to the scripture that described how God made a “covenant” with Israel that they should obey the Law given to them from Mount Sinai. It had these words: “And Moses, having taken the blood”—that is, the blood from a “sacrifice of salvation” consisting of bullocks—“sprinkled it on the people and said, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant that the Lord has covenanted with you concerning all these words’.” The blood of the old covenant (I perceived) was blood of “sprinkling,” purifying the body. David prayed for something more than that, when he said, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” So it occurred to me that the “new covenant” was to purify, not the body but the heart and the spirit, entering into man and becoming part of him so as to cleanse him from within.

This seemed to agree with Paul’s opinion, and with what I had read in Isaiah, that the sacrifices of bulls and goats cannot make the heart clean. Now, therefore, going back again to the first words “This is my body, which is in your behalf,” I inferred that Christ was speaking about Himself as being the “sacrifice of salvation” above mentioned, and that He used these words, purposing to devote Himself to death for the people, in order to redeem them from sin by purifying their hearts.

I am writing now in old age. Forty-five years have passed since the night when I first read, “This is my body, which is in your behalf.” During that interval I have done my best to ascertain the exact words spoken by the Saviour in His own tongue. And now it is much more clear to me than it was then that the Lord Jesus was herein giving Himself, His very self, both as a legacy to the disciples and also as a ransom for their souls. But even then I perceived that some such meaning must be attached to the words, and that they could not have been invented by any disciple; and they made me marvel more than anything else that I had met with in the Jewish scriptures or Paul’s epistles. Such a confidence did they shew in the power of His own love, as being stronger than death! I do not say that I believed that the words had been fulfilled. But I felt sure that Christ had uttered them in the belief of their being fulfilled; and, just for a few moments, the notion that He should have been deceived seemed to me so contrary to the fitness of things, and to the existence of any kind of Providence, that I almost believed that they must have had some kind of fulfilment. I did not stay to ask, “How fulfilled?” I merely said, “This is divine, this is like the ‘still small voice.’ This is past man’s invention. This must be from God.”

Then I checked myself, doubt rising up within me. “Paul,” I said, “was not present on the night of the Last Supper. He says concerning these words, ‘I received of the Lord that which I also delivered unto you.’ Is it not strange that the oracles or revelations supposed by Paul to have been delivered to him by Jesus after the resurrection should have included matters of historical fact, and historical utterances, which could have been ascertained from the disciples that heard them? I must wait till I receive the Christian gospels from Flaccus.”

Then this also occurred to me. “Socrates, too, like Christ, was unjustly condemned. Socrates might have escaped from death, but he refused. The dæmonic voice that told him what to do and not to do, bade him remain and die, and he obeyed. In effect, then, this voice from heaven ‘delivered over’ Socrates to death. Or he may be said to have ‘delivered himself over.’ Now what were the last words of Socrates? Did he leave any such legacy to his disciples? Might I not find some help here? For assuredly Socrates, like Christ, endeavoured to make men better and wiser.” I remembered hearing Epictetus say—and I recognised the truth of the saying—“Even now, when Socrates is dead, the memory of the words and deeds of his life is no less profitable to men, perhaps it is more so, than when he lived.” So I turned over Arrian’s notes and found several remarks of our Master about Socrates and his contempt for death; and with what a humorous appearance of sympathy he accepted the jailer’s tears, though he himself felt they were altogether misplaced. At last I came to a passage where Epictetus compared Socrates, on his trial, and in his last moments, to a man playing at ball: “And what was the ball in that case? Life, chains, exile, a draught of poison, to be parted from a wife, to leave one’s children orphans. These were his playthings, but none the less he kept on playing and throwing the ball with grace and dexterity.”

This was enough, and more than enough. It was hopeless, I perceived, to search in Epictetus for what I sought—some last legacy of Socrates to his disciples, implying that he longed to help them after death. Epictetus would have rebuked me, saying, “How could he help them when he was dissolved into the four elements? What could Socrates bequeath to them beyond the memory of his words and deeds?”

Failing Epictetus, I took out from my bookcase such works of Plato and Xenophon as might contain the last thoughts of Socrates. Both of these writers believed in the immortality of the soul. Yet I could not find either of them asserting, or suggesting, that Socrates felt any trouble or anxiety for his friends and for their faith, nor any token of a hope that his soul might help theirs after his death—or rather, to use his phrase, after he had “transferred his habitation.” When I tried to find such a hope, I could not feel sure that I was interpreting the words honestly. It seemed to me that I was importing something of the Jewish pathos, or feeling, into an utterance of the Greek logos. I still retained the conviction that Socrates, in his last moments, had his disciples at heart, and that, in enjoining that last sacrifice to Æsculapius, he wished to stimulate them to something more spiritual and more permanent than that single literal act. But I longed for something more. I thought of Christ’s “constraining love,” and how a man might be “constrained” in a natural way by the love of the dead—the love of a wife, father, mother, or child. Such a love I said, might be no less powerful, for help and comfort, than the hate of Clytemnestra following Orestes for evil. Æneas (I remembered) used the word “image,” speaking to the spirit of Anchises, “Thy image, O my father, constrained me to come hither.” But Anchises replies that he himself had been all the while following his son in his perilous wanderings, so that it was not a mere “image.” It was a presence. “Is it possible,” I asked, “that Christ, not in poetry but in fact, thought of bequeathing to His disciples such a presence, to follow and help them after His death?”

Yes. It seemed quite possible, nay, almost certain—that Christ thought this. But who, except a Christian, would believe that the thought was more than a dream? “Scaurus,” I said, “who often jests at me as a dreamer, would now jest more than ever. Here am I, pondering poetry, when I ought to be studying history! Yet how can I study history in Paul, when Paul himself tells me that he received these words from one that had died—presumably therefore in a vision? The right course will be to wait till Flaccus sends me the gospels. These may chance to be historical biographies—not records of things seen, or words heard, in visions.” And then Scaurus’s saying recurred to me, that no two writers agree independently in recording a speech or conversation for twenty consecutive words that are exactly the same. “And this,” said I, “I hope to test before many days are over, with regard to these mysterious words of Christ.”

But before rolling up the book it came into my mind that Paul said somewhere to the Romans “I beseech you therefore by the compassionate mercies of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God.” Having found these words and read them carefully over, I thought that the writer must have had in view some allusion to the sacrifice of Isaac. For that was the only “living sacrifice” that I could find (and indeed it is the only one) mentioned in scripture. Then I turned to the first book of the Law and there I found that God’s promise of Isaac to Abraham had been called a covenant, and this, said Paul to the Galatians, was, so to speak, the real thought of God. The covenant of Sinai was only an afterthought. The sign of Abraham’s covenant by promise was in the blood of circumcision stamped permanently on man’s body. The sign of the covenant of Sinai was in the blood of bullocks merely sprinkled on the body. Also there was yet another covenant between God and man, earlier than both of these. This, the earliest covenant of all, was with Noah. Now the sign of this was not on man at all, but on the sky, being the rainbow. And in the covenant with Noah there was no mention of blood (either of man or beast) except this—that man was not to taste the blood of beasts when he ate their flesh, and that he was not to pour out the blood of men, much less to taste of it.

Then it seemed to me that the words and thoughts of Christ, being a Jew, must be studied in the light of the words and thoughts of his countrymen the ancient Jews. The first covenant, that of Noah, said, “The blood is the life, therefore ye shall not taste of blood; and whosoever shall taste of blood, whether of man or beast, shall die; and whosoever shall pour out the blood of man, his blood shall be poured out and he shall die.” This was confirmed by the Covenant of Moses the Lawgiver. Then came a second covenant, that of the Son, saying, “I have changed all that. I am the New Covenant. The New Covenant is in my blood, that is, in my life. My blood is truly my life. Ye shall taste of my blood. It shall be poured out for all, as a living sacrifice. Whosoever shall taste of my blood shall not die but shall live for ever, even as I live.”