To understand how wisely things were ordered, we must give a glance to what would have been [pg 192] the result of the most obvious and apparently “the most natural” course. Our Lord's brethren recommended that He should go and show Himself and teach at Jerusalem. I have shown the ill effects this would have had on the training of the disciples; I will now say a word on the way in which it would have affected the Church. If Jerusalem had been the seat of teaching, the disciples there, instead of numbering “a hundred and twenty,” would have been a large body. Possibly they might have offered armed resistance to the apprehension of our Lord; and the whole moral of the action would have been lost if they had. But passing this by, if a large body of disciples dwelling at Jerusalem had claimed our Lord as peculiarly their own, the universality of His work would have been obscured. The Church at Jerusalem might have dwelt more on His being their particular Founder and Bishop than on His being the Redeemer of the World.
Again, How would it have been with the authority of the Twelve? Those who had sat at His feet and listened, just as the Apostles had done, might have hesitated when He was gone to acknowledge the Twelve as the founders of the Church; for the Church, they would have said, began with themselves. More than this, practical evils would have come about; for these original disciples, regarding themselves as the depositaries of tradition, would have recalled every practice of [pg 193] their Lord,—for instance the way in which He had given thanks at meat, or ordered service in prayer, as well as His practice as to the Sabbath and fasting,—these would have been passed down as Divinely sanctioned, and the externals of religion would have been stereotyped as thoroughly as though they had been a new Ceremonial Law, like that from which He desired to release mankind. Moreover the body of believers who had personally known our Lord, would have constituted a kind of ecclesiastical aristocracy; and distinctions—respect of persons—would have been introduced from the first. What actually happened was far more consistent with the general tenour of Christ's plan so far as we can make it out. The few original disciples at Jerusalem were lost in the crowd who were added to the Church after the day of Pentecost, and the Apostles ruled with unquestioned authority from the first.
Galilee we have seen, as a retired spot with an honest-hearted people, was admirably fitted for the scene of the ministry; but yet it could not be “that a prophet should perish out of Jerusalem,” and it was imperative that there the end should come. The Holy City was also fitted, in a very peculiar manner, to be the centre from which the new movement was to radiate forth. The Lord's death, the Supreme Event in the history of mankind, was not to take place in a corner. The circumstances of it could not be too notorious or too widely [pg 194] vouched. It was to be made known in East and West to the Hebrew, the Greek, the Roman and to all mankind. Now Jerusalem, both geographically, and as the point to which the Jews of the dispersion bent watchful eyes from many lands, was wondrously adapted to be a centre of diffusion. It was in a very remarkable way a “city set upon a hill.” It stood accessible to three continents, at the centre of gravity of the known world, and it was on the watershed of two civilizations: the Aryan and Semitic races and languages and the different modes of thinking which go along with the languages were brought together there.
Moreover, owing to the dispersion of the Jews and their custom of visiting Jerusalem at the great feasts when they possibly could, “devout men from every nation under Heaven” were drawn together there from time to time, and a common interest in what concerned “Israel” was spread over the globe. The agency of these festivals connected Jerusalem, as by electric threads, with every great city in the inhabited world, and the Israelites who were settled in every large town of the empire afterwards provided nests for the new Faith.
The Apostles, as was natural, after the Resurrection went back to Galilee. It can only have been owing to directions they must have received, that they all returned to Jerusalem for the Ascension. Our Lord then enjoined them to remain and from thence to propagate the Faith. This injunction [pg 195] explains their abandonment of their homes and callings, which is hard to account for otherwise.
I now proceed with the history. During this chapter I shall for the most part follow St Mark, who relates the events nearly in the order in which I believe they happened. After a brief notice of John and of the temptation he proceeds thus:
“Now after that John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe in the gospel.”[140]
The Evangelist does not say that our Lord came from Judæa, but He could have come from nowhere else. It would seem that our Lord on arriving in Galilee went at once to the Lake shore and called the two pair of fisher brethren to His side.
“And passing along by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew brother of Simon casting a net in the sea: for they were fishers. And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men. And straightway they left the nets, and followed him. And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, who also were in the boat mending the nets. And straightway he called them: and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and went after him.”[141]
This passage would offer an opening for criticism, if it were not for the light thrown on it by St [pg 196] John's Gospel, by help of which an apparent difficulty is turned into a coincidence.