The Apostles

by Ernest Renan

The powers which they ascribed to an assembled Church and to its chiefs was enormous. All mission was conferred by the Church, which was entirely guided in its choice by signs given by the spirit.[5.42] Its authority extended as far as the death penalty. They related how, at the voice of Peter, guilty persons fell backwards and expired immediately.[5.43] St. Paul, at a later period, was not afraid, when excommunicating an incestuous person, “to deliver him to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.[{5.44}]” Excommunication was considered equivalent to a sentence of death. They doubted not that an individual whom the apostles or chiefs of the Church had cut off from the body of the saints and delivered over to the power of the Evil One, was lost.[5.45] Satan was considered to be the author of the diseases; to deliver to him the infected member was to hand him over to the natural executioner. A premature death was ordinarily considered as the result of one of those secret judgments, which, according to the expressive Hebrew term, “cut off a soul from Israel.”[5.46] The apostles believed themselves to be invested with supernatural powers; while pronouncing such condemnations, they believed that their anathemas could not fail to be effectual.

The terrible impression which these excommunications made, and the hatred of all the brethren towards the members thus cut off, were powerful enough in fact to produce death in many cases, or at least to compel the guilty person to expatriate himself. The same frightful ambiguity was found in the old law. “Extirpation” implied, at once decease, expulsion from the community, exile, and a solitary and mysterious death.[5.47] To kill the apostate, or blasphemer, to beat his body in order to save his soul, would seem quite lawful. It must be remembered that we are treating of the times of zealots, who considered it a virtuous act to assassinate any one who failed in obedience to the law;[5.48] nor must we forget that some of the Christians were, or had been, zealots.[5.49] Stories like that of the death of Ananias and Sapphira[5.50] raised no scruples. The idea of the civil power was so strange to all this world situated outside of the Roman law, they were so persuaded that the Church was a complete society sufficient for all its own needs, that nobody regarded the death or mutilation of an individual as an outrage punishable by the civil law. Enthusiasm and burning faith covered all, yea, excused all. But the frightful danger which these theocratic maxims entailed on the future was easily perceived. The Church is armed with a sword; excommunication will be a sentence of death. There is henceforth in the world a power above that of the State which disposes of the lives of citizens. Assuredly if the Roman power had limited itself to the repression among the Jews and the Christians of such abominable principles, it would have been a thousand times in the right. Only in its brutality it confounded the most legitimate of liberties, that of worshipping according to one’s own conviction, with abuses which no society has ever been able to endure with impunity.

Peter had a certain primacy amongst the apostles; the result of his daring zeal and activity.[5.51] In these early times he is scarcely ever separated from John, the son of Zebedee. They went together almost always,[5.52] and their perfect concord was doubtless the corner-stone of the new faith. James, brother of the Lord, was nearly their equal in authority, at least in one section of the Church. In respect to certain intimate friends of Jesus, like the women of Galilee and the family of Bethany, we have already observed that we have no more to do with them. Less anxious to organize and found a society, the faithful companions of Jesus were satisfied to love in death Him whom they had loved when alive. Totally occupied with their waiting, these noble women, who have established the faith of the world, were almost unknown to the important men of Jerusalem. When they died, the most important traits in the history of nascent Christianity were buried in the tomb with them. The active characters alone became renowned; those who are content to love secretly remain in obscurity, but assuredly they have the better part.

It is superfluous to remark that this little group had no speculative theology. Jesus kept himself far removed from everything metaphysical. He had only one dogma, His own divine Sonship and the divine authority of His mission. Every symbol of the primitive Church might be contained in one line: “Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.” This belief rested upon a peremptory argument, the fact of the resurrection, of which the disciples claimed to be witnesses. In reality, no one (not even the Galilean women) declared that they had seen the resurrection.[5.53] But the absence of the body and the apparitions which had followed appeared to be equivalent to the fact itself. To attest the resurrection of Jesus was the task which all considered as being specially imposed upon them.[5.54] They quickly entertained the idea that the Master had predicted this event. They recollected different sayings of His, which they fancied that they had never thoroughly understood, and in which they saw too late an announcement of the resurrection.[5.55] Belief in the next glorious manifestation of Jesus was universal.[5.56] The secret word which the associated brethren used among themselves for purposes of mutual recognition and confirmation was Maranatha, “The Lord will come.”[5.57] They fancied that they remembered a declaration of Jesus, according to which their preaching would not have time to reach to all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man appeared in His majesty.[5.58] In the meanwhile, Jesus risen is seated at the right hand of His Father. There He remains until the solemn day on which He shall come, seated on the clouds, to judge the quick and the dead.[5.59]

The idea which they had of Jesus was the very same which Jesus had given them of Himself. Jesus had been a mighty prophet in word and in deed,[5.60] a man elect of God, having received a special mission in behalf of mankind,[5.61] a mission the truth of which he had proved by His miracles, and, above all, by His resurrection. God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and endued Him with power; He went about doing good and healing those who were under the power of the devil;[5.62] for God was with Him.[5.63] He is the Son of God, that is, a man entirely sent of God, a representative of God on earth; He is the Messiah, the Saviour of Israel announced by the prophets.[5.64] The perusal of the books of the Old Testament, above all of the Psalms and the prophets, was a constant habit of the sect. In these readings one fixed idea ever accompanied them, and that was to discover, above all other considerations, the type of Jesus. They were persuaded that the ancient Hebrew books were full of Him, and, from the very first, He was moulded into a collection of texts drawn from the prophets and the Psalms and certain of the apocryphal books, wherein they were convinced that the life of Jesus was foretold and described in advance.[5.65] This arbitrary mode of interpretation was, at that time, that of all the Jewish schools. The Messianic allusions were a description of witty trifling, analogous to the use which the ancient preachers made of passages of the Bible, diverted from their natural meaning, and received as simple ornaments of sacred rhetoric. Jesus, with His exquisite tact in religious matters, had instituted no new ritual movement. The new sect had not, as yet, any special ceremonies.[{5.66}] Habits of piety were Jewish habits. The assemblies had nothing precisely liturgic about them; they were the sessions of confraternities, in which they devoted themselves to prayer, to glossological or prophetic[{5.67}] exercises, and to the reading of correspondence. There was nothing yet of sacerdotalism. There was no priest (cohen, or ἱερεύς); the presbyter is the “elder” of the community, nothing more. The only priest is Jesus;[{5.68}] in another sense, all the faithful are priests.[{5.69}] Fasting was considered a very meritorious usage.[{5.70}] Baptism was the sign of entrance into the sect.[{5.71}] The rite was the same in form as the baptism of John, but it was administered in the name of Jesus.[{5.72}] Baptism was always considered an insufficient initiation into the society. It should be followed by a conferring of the gifts of the Holy Spirit,[{5.73}] which was produced by means of a prayer pronounced over the head of the neophyte with the imposition of hands.

This imposition of hands, already so familiar to Jesus,[{5.74}] was the crowning sacramental act.[{5.75}] It conferred inspiration, inward illumination, the power of working wonders, of prophesying and of speaking languages. This was what they called the baptism of the Spirit. They believed that they recollected a saying of Jesus: “John baptized you with water: but as for you, you shall be baptized with the Spirit.”[{5.76}] Little by little these ideas became confused, and baptism was conferred “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”[{5.77}] But it is not probable that this formula, at the early period which we are describing, was as yet employed. The simplicity of this primitive Christian worship is evident. Neither Jesus nor the apostles had invented it. Certain Jewish sects had adopted, before them, grave and solemn ceremonies, which appear to have come partly from Chaldæa, where they are still practised with special liturgies, by the Sabæans and Mendäites.[{5.78}] The Persian religion contained, likewise, many rites of the same description.[{5.79}] The beliefs in popular medicine, which had accompanied the strength of Jesus, continued to be held by his disciples. The power of healing was one of the marvellous graces conferred by the Spirit.[{5.80}] The first Christians, like all the Jews of the age, regarded diseases as the punishment due to a fault,[{5.81}] or the work of a malicious demon.[{5.82}] The apostles, as well as Jesus, passed for powerful exorcists.[{5.83}] They imagined that anointings with oil, administered by them, with imposition of hands and invocation of the name of Jesus, were all-powerful to wash away the sins which were the causes of the disease, and to cure the sick.[{5.84}] Oil has always been in the East the chiefest of medicines.[{5.85}] Of itself, moreover, the imposition of hands by the apostles was supposed to have the same effect.[{5.86}] This imposition was conferred by immediate contact with the person; and it is not impossible that, in certain cases, the warmth of the hands, being sensibly communicated to the head, produced some little relief to the sick man. The sect being young and few in number, the question of the dead was only subsequently brought under their notice. The effect caused by the first deaths which took place in the ranks of the brotherhood was strange.[{5.87}] They disquieted themselves about the condition of the departed; they inquired if they would be less favored than those who were reserved to see with their eyes the second advent of the Son of Man. They generally came to the conclusion that the interval between death and the resurrection was a sort of blank in the recollection of the defunct.[{5.88}] The idea, expressed in the Phædon that the soul exists before and after death; that death is a benefit; that it is even the state above all others favorable to philosophy, because the soul is then altogether free and disengaged—this idea, I say, was in no respect entertained by the first Christians. They appear generally to have believed that man has no existence apart from his body. This persuasion lasted a long time, and only gave way when the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, in the sense of the Greek philosophy, had been received into the Church, and become associated, for good or for evil, with the Christian dogma of the resurrection and universal restoration. At the time of which we speak, a belief in the resurrection prevailed almost alone.[{5.89}] The funeral rites were doubtless Jewish. No importance was attached to them; no inscription pointed out the name of the departed. The great resurrection was at hand; the body of the faithful had only to sojourn for a very short time in the rock. They took but little pains to come to an agreement upon the question whether the resurrection would be universal—that is to say, whether it would embrace both good and wicked, or would apply to the elect only.[{5.90}]

One of the most remarkable phenomena of the new religion was the reappearance of prophecy. For a long time previous, prophets in Israel were scarcely mentioned. This peculiar kind of inspiration appeared to revive in the little sect. The primitive Church had many prophets and prophetesses,[{5.91}] answering to those of the Old Testament. Psalmists reappeared also. The model of the Christian Psalmody is, no doubt, to be found in the Canticles, which Luke loves to scatter about the pages of his Gospel,[{5.92}] and which are imitated from the Canticles of the Old Testament. These Psalms and prophecies are, in point of form, destitute of originality; but an admirable spirit of tenderness and piety animates and pervades them. It is like an attenuated echo of the later productions of the sacred lyre of Israel. The book of Psalms was, in some sort, the calyx of the flower from which the Christian bee stole its first juice. The Pentateuch, on the contrary, was, as it appears, but little read and less pondered; allegories were substituted in the form of Jewish midraschim, in which all the historical meaning of the books was suppressed.

The chanting with which they accompanied the new hymns[{5.93}] was probably that species of groaning without distinct notes, which is still the chant of the Greek Church, of the Maronites, and of the Eastern Christians in general.[{5.94}] It is not so much a musical modulation as a manner of forcing the voice, and of emitting through the nose a sort of groaning, in which all the inflexions follow each other with rapidity. They performed this extraordinary melopœia standing, with fixed eye, knit forehead, and contracted eyebrows, using an appearance of effort. The word amen, above all, was uttered in a tremulous voice with bodily shaking. This word was of great importance in the liturgy. After the manner of the Jews,[{5.95}] the new faithful employed it to mark the assent of the people to the word spoken by the prophet or precentor.[{5.96}] They perhaps already attributed to it concealed virtues, and it was only pronounced with a certain emphasis. We know not whether the primitive ecclesiastical chant was accompanied with instruments.[{5.97}] As to the inward chant, which the faithful “sang in their hearts,”[{5.98}] and which was nothing else than the overflowing of those tender spirits, ardent and dreamy as they were, they performed it no doubt like the slow chants of the Lollards of the Middle Ages, in a sort of whisper.[{5.99}] In general, joyousness manifested itself in these hymns. One of the maxims of the sages of the sect was, “If thou art sad, pray; if thou art merry, sing.”[{5.100}]

Moreover, this first Christian literature, designed as it was entirely for the edification of the assembled brethren, was not committed to writing. It entered into the mind of none to compose books. Jesus had spoken; they remembered his words. Had he not promised that that generation of his hearers should not pass away before he re-appeared among them?[{5.101}]