The Apostles

by Ernest Renan

From the year 38 to the year 44 no persecution seems to have weighed upon the Church.[11.1] The faithful, no doubt, were far more prudent than before the death of Stephen, and avoided speaking in public. Perhaps, also, the troubles of the Jews who, during all the second part of the reign of Caligula, were at variance with that prince, contributed to favor the nascent sect. The Jews, in fact, were active persecutors in proportion to the good understanding they maintained with the Romans. To buy or to recompense their tranquillity, the latter were led to augment their privileges, and in particular that one to which they clung most closely—the right of killing persons whom they regarded as unfaithful to their law.[11.2] Now the period at which we have arrived was one of the most stormy of all in the turbulent history of this singular people.

The antipathy which the Jews, by their moral superiority, their odd customs, and also by their severity, excited in the populations among whom they lived, was at its height, especially at Alexandria.[11.3] This accumulated hatred took advantage, for its own satisfaction, of the coming to the imperial throne of one of the most dangerous madmen that ever wore a crown. Caligula, at least after the malady which consummated his mental derangement (October 37), presented the frightful spectacle of a maniac governing the world with the most enormous powers ever put into the hands of any man. The disastrous law of Cæsarism rendered such horrors possible, and left them without remedy. This lasted three years and three months. One cannot without shame narrate in a serious history that which is now to follow. Before entering upon the recital of these saturnalia we cannot but exclaim with Suetonius: Reliqua ut de monstro narranda sunt.

The most inoffensive pastime of this madman was the care of his own divinity.[11.4] In this he used a sort of bitter irony, a mixture of the serious and the comic (for the monster was not wanting in wit), a sort of profound derision of the human race. The enemies of the Jews were not slow to perceive the advantage they might derive from this mania. The religious abasement of the world was such that not a protest was heard against the sacrilege of the Cæsar; every worship hastened to bestow upon him the titles and the honors which it had reserved for its gods. It is to the eternal glory of the Jews that, in the midst of this ignoble idolatry, they uttered the cry of outraged conscience. The principle of intolerance which was in them, and which led them to so many cruel acts, showed here its bright side. Alone affirming their religion to be the absolute religion, they would not bend to the odious caprice of the tyrant. This was the source of untold troubles for them. It needed only that there should be in any city some man discontented with the synagogue, spiteful, or simply mischievous, to bring about frightful consequences. At one time the people would insist on erecting an altar to Caligula in the very place where the Jews could least of all suffer it.[11.5] At another, a troupe of ragamuffins would collect, hooting and crying out against the Jews for alone refusing to place the statue of the emperor in their houses of prayer; then the people would run to the synagogues and the oratories; they would install there the bust of Caligula;[11.6] and the unfortunate Jews were placed in the alternative of either renouncing their religion, or committing treason. Thence followed frightful vexations.

Such pleasantries had been several times repeated, when a still more diabolical idea was suggested to the emperor. This was to place a colossal golden statue of himself in the sanctuary of the temple at Jerusalem, and to have the temple itself dedicated to his own divinity.[11.7] This odious intrigue had very nearly hastened by thirty years the revolt and the ruin of the Jewish nation. The moderation of the imperial legate, Publius Petronius, and the intervention of King Herod Agrippa, favorite of Caligula, prevented the catastrophe. But until the moment in which the sword of Chæræa delivered the earth from the most execrable tyrant it had as yet endured, the Jews lived everywhere in terror. Philo has preserved for us the unheard-of scene which occurred when the deputation of which he was the chief was admitted to see the emperor.[11.8] Caligula received them during a visit he was paying to the villas of Mæcenas and of Lamia, near the sea, in the environs of Pozzuoli. He was on that day in a vein of gaiety. Helicon, his favorite joker, had been relating to him all sorts of buffooneries about the Jews. “Ah, then, it is you,” said he to them with a bitter smile and showing his teeth, “who alone will not recognise me for a god, and prefer to adore one whose name you cannot even utter!” He accompanied these words with a frightful blasphemy. The Jews trembled; their Alexandrian enemies were the first to take up the word: “You would still more, O Sire, detest these people and all their nation, if you knew the aversion they have for you; for they alone have refused to offer sacrifices for your health when all other people did so!”

At these words, the Jews cried out that it was a calumny, and that they had three times offered for the prosperity of the emperor the most solemn sacrifices known to their religion. “Yes,” said Caligula, with a very comical seriousness, “you have sacrificed, and so far, well; but then it was not to me that you sacrificed. What advantage do I derive from it?” Thereupon, turning his back upon them, he strode through the apartments, giving orders for repairs, incessantly going up and down stairs. The unfortunate deputies, and among them Philo, eighty years of age, the most venerable man of the time, perhaps—Jesus being no longer living—followed him up and down out of breath, trembling, the object of derision to the assembled company. Caligula turning suddenly, said to them: “By the by, why will you not eat pork?” The flatterers burst into laughter; some of the officers, with a severe tone, reminded them that they offended the majesty of the emperor by immoderate laughter. The Jews stammered; one of them awkwardly said: “There are some persons who do not eat lamb.” “Ah!” said the emperor, “they have good reason; lamb is insipid.” Some time after, he made a show of inquiring into their business; then, when speaking had just begun, he left them and went off to give orders about the decoration of a hall which he wanted to have furnished with polished stones. He returned, affecting an air of moderation, and asked the deputation if they had anything to add; and as the latter resumed their interrupted discourse, he turned his back upon them to go and see another hall which he was ornamenting with paintings. This game of tiger sporting with its prey lasted for hours. The Jews were expecting death; but at the last moment the claws of the beast relaxed. “Well,” said Caligula, while repassing, “these folks are decidedly less guilty than pitiable for not believing in my divinity.” Thus could the gravest questions be treated under the horrible regimen created by the baseness of the world, cherished by a soldiery and a populace about equally vile, and maintained by the dissoluteness of nearly all.

We can easily understand how so oppressive a situation must have taken from the Jews of the time of Marcellus much of that audacity which made them speak so proudly to Pilate. Already almost entirely detached from the temple, the Christians must have been much less alarmed than the Jews at the sacrilegious projects of Caligula. They were, moreover, too little numerous for their existence to be known at Rome. The storm of the time of Caligula, like that which resulted in the taking of Jerusalem by Titus, passed over their heads, and was in many regards serviceable to them. Everything which weakened Jewish independence was favorable to them, since it was so much taken away from the power of a suspicious orthodoxy, maintaining its pretensions by severe penalties.

This period of peace was fruitful in interior developments. The nascent Church was divided into three provinces: Judea, Samaria, Galilee[11.9], to which Damascus was no doubt attached. The primacy of Jerusalem was uncontested. The Church of this city, which had been dispersed after the death of Stephen, was quickly reconstituted. The Apostles had never quitted the city. The brothers of the Lord continued to reside there, and to wield a great authority.[11.10] It does not seem that this new Church of Jerusalem was organized in so rigorous a manner as the first; the community of goods was not strictly reëstablished in it. But there was founded a large fund for the poor, to which were added the contributions sent by minor churches to the mother church, the origin and permanent source of their faith.[11.11]

Peter undertook frequent apostolical journeys in the environs of Jerusalem.[11.12] He always enjoyed a great reputation as a thaumaturgist. At Lydda[11.13] in particular he passed for having cured a paralytic named Æneas, a miracle which is said to have led to numerous conversions in the plain of Saron.[11.14] From Lydda he repaired to Joppa,[11.15] a city which appears to have been a centre for Christianity. Cities of workmen, of sailors, of poor people, where the orthodox Jews were not dominant, were those in which the new sect found the best dispositions. Peter made a long sojourn at Joppa, at the house of a tanner named Simon who dwelt near the sea.[11.16] Working in leather was an industry almost unclean, according to the Mosaic code; it was not lawful to visit too frequently those who carried it on, so that the curriers had to live in a district by themselves.[11.17] Peter, in choosing such a host, gave a proof of his indifference to Jewish prejudices, and worked for that ennoblement of petty callings which constitutes a noble feature of the Christian spirit.

The organization of works of charity was soon actively pursued. The church of Joppa possessed a woman admirably named in Aramaic, Tabitha (gazelle), and in Greek, Dorcas,[11.18] who consecrated all her cares to the poor.[11.19] She was rich, it seems, and distributed her wealth in alms. This worthy lady had formed a society of pious widows, who spent their days with her in weaving clothes for the poor.[11.20] As the schism between Christianity and Judaism was not yet consummated, it is probable that the Jews shared in the benefit of these acts of charity. The “saints and widows”[11.21] were thus pious persons, doing good to all, a sort of friars and nuns, whom only the most austere devotees of a pedantic orthodoxy could suspect, fraticelli, loved by the people, devout, charitable, full of pity.

The germ of those associations of women, which are one of the glories of Christianity, thus existed in the first churches of Judea. At Jaffa commenced that series of the veiled women, clothed in linen, who were destined to continue through centuries the tradition of charitable acts. Tabitha was the mother of a family which will have no end as long as there are miseries to be solaced and good feminine instincts to assuage them. It is related further on, that Peter raised her from the dead. Alas! death, utterly senseless, utterly revolting as it is in such a case, is inflexible. When the most exquisite soul has evaporated, the decree is irrevocable; the most excellent woman can no more respond to the invitation of the friendly voices which would fain recall her, than can the vulgar and frivolous. But ideas are not subject to the conditions of matter. Virtue and goodness escape the fangs of death. Tabitha had no need to be resuscitated. For the sake of three or four days more of this sad life, why disturb her sweet and eternal repose? Let her sleep in peace; the day of the just will come!