A single quotation from Mr. Savage Landor’s work on The Hairy Ainu of Japan will also serve as an excellent summary of such encyclopaedic barbaric theology. “If they have any belief at all,” he says, “it is an imperfect kind of Totemism, and the central point of that belief is their own descent from the bear. This does not include the smallest reverence for their ancestor. They capture their Totem and keep it in captivity; they speak to it and feed it; but no prayers are offered to it. When the bear is fat, it is taken out of the cage to be ill-treated and baited by all the men present.” Like the Khond Meriah and the tortures of martyrs. “It is tied to a stake” or stauros or accursed tree, “and a pole is thrust into its mouth; and when the poor beast has been sufficiently tortured, pricked with pointed sticks, shot at with blunted arrows,” like St. Sebastian, “bruised with stones,” like St. Stephen, “maddened with rage and ill-usage, it is killed outright, and, ancestor as it may be, it makes the chief dish and raison d’etre of a festival, where all the members of the tribe partake of its flesh. The owner of the hut in which the feast takes place then sticks the skull on to a forked pole, and sets it outside with the others at the east end of his hut. The skin is made into garments, or is spread on the ground to sleep on.” Here, I need hardly say, we have sacrifice, sacrament, orientation, the sacred head, the use of the skin as a covering of the worshipper, and all the other traits of theanthropic substitution.
It is more to our purpose now, however, to remember these two cardinal points: first, that a dying god, human or animal, is usually selected as a convenient vehicle for the sins of the people; and second, that “without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.” These two doctrines were commonly current all over the world, but especially in that Eastern Mediterranean world where Christianity was first evolved. Indeed, they were there so generally recognised that the writers of the earliest Christian tractates, the Apostolic Epistles, take them for granted as self-evident—as principles of which every intelligent man would at once admit the truth and cogency.
CHAPTER XVII.—THE WORLD BEFORE CHRIST.
Christianity grew. It was a natural product. It did not spring, full-fledged, from any one man’s brain, as Athene sprang from the head of Zeus. It was not even invented by any little group or school of men, Petrine or Pauline, the apostles or the disciples, the early church of Jerusalem, Antioch, or Alexandria. Christianity grew—slowly. It developed, bit by bit, for three long centuries, taking shape by gradual stages in all the teeming centres of the Roman world; and even after it had assumed a consistent form as the Holy Catholic Church, it still went on growing in the minds of men, with a growth which never ends, but which reveals itself even now in a thousand modes, from a Vatican Council to the last new departure of the last new group of American sectaries.
Christianity grew—in the crowded cosmopolitanised seaports and cities of the Roman empire—in Antioch, Alexandria, Thessalonica, Cyrene, Byzantium, Rome. Its highway was the sea. Though partly Jewish in origin, it yet appears from its earliest days essentially as a universal and international religion. Therefore we may gain some approximate knowledge of its origin and antecedents by considering the religious condition of these various great towns at the time when Christianity began to spring spontaneous in their midst. We can arrive at some idea of the product itself by observing the environment in which it was evolved.
Once more, Christianity grew—for the most part among the lower orders of the cosmopolitan seaports. It fashioned itself among the slaves, the freedmen, the Jewish, Syrian, and African immigrants, the Druidical Gauls and Britons of Rome, the petty shopkeepers, the pauperised clients, the babes and sucklings of the populous centres. Hence, while based upon Judaism, it gathered hospitably into itself all those elements of religious thought and religious practice that were common to the whole world, and especially to the Eastern Mediterranean basin. Furthermore, it gathered hospitably into itself in particular those elements which belonged to the older and deeper-seated part of the popular religions, rather than those which belonged to the civilised, Hellenised, and recognised modifications of the state religions. It was a democratic rather than an official product. We have to look, therefore, at the elder far more than the younger stratum of religious thought in the great cities, for the influences which went to mould Christianity. I do not deny, indeed, that the new faith was touched and tinged in all its higher parts by beautiful influences from Neo-Platonism, Alexandrian Judaism, and other half-mystical philosophic systems; but for its essential groundwork we have still to go to the root-stratum of religious practice and belief in Antioch and Alexandria, in Phrygia and Galatia, in Jerusalem and Rome. It based itself above all on sacrament, sacrifice, atonement, and resurrection. Yet again, Christianity originated first of all among the Jewish, Syrian, or Semitic population of these great towns of the empire, at the very moment of its full cosmopolitanisation; it spread rapidly from them, no doubt at first with serious modifications, to the mixed mass of sailors, slaves, freedwomen, and townspeople who formed apparently its earliest adherents. Hence, we must look in it for an intimate blend of Judaism with the central ideas of the popular religions, Aryan or Hamitic, of the Mediterranean basin. We must expect in it much that was common in Syria, Asia Minor, Hellas, and Egypt,—something even from Gaul, Hispania, Carthage. Its first o w great apostle, if we may believe our authorities, was one Saul or Paul, a half-Hellenised Jew of Semitic and commercial Tarsus in Cilicia, and a Roman citizen. Its first great churches sprang up in the busy ports and marts of the Levant. Its very name of Christian was given to it first in the crowded and cosmopolitan city of Antioch.
It is here, then, in these huge slave-peopled hives of Hellenised and Romanised commerce, that we must look for the mother-ideas of Christianity.
Antioch was quite undoubtedly in the earliest times the principal cradle of the new religion. I do not mean that Jerusalem was not very probably the place where men first began to form a small sect of esoteric Christ-worshippers, or that Galilee was not the region where the Christ himself most largely lived and taught, if indeed such a person ever really existed. In those matters the traditions handed down to us in the relatively late Gospels may be perfectly correct: and again, they may not. But Christianity as we know it, the Christianity of the Pauline epistles and the later writings, such as the Gospels and the works of the Fathers, must have been essentially a cult of wider Syrian and Gentile growth. It embraces in itself elements which doubtless lingered on in secluded corners more or less among the mass of the people even in Judæa itself, though discountenanced by the adherents of the priestly and official Jahweh-worship; but which were integral parts of the popular and even the recognised religion throughout the whole of northern Syria.