An older and probably more original form of the parable was discovered by Steinschneider in a work by Abraham Abulafia of the thirteenth century, running as follows: “A father intended to bequeath a precious jewel to his only son, but was exasperated by his ingratitude, and therefore buried [pg 432] it. His servants, however, knowing of the treasure, took it and claimed to have received it from the father. In the course of time they became so arrogant that the son repented of his conduct, whereupon the father gave him the jewel as his rightful possession.” The story ends by stating that Israel is the son and the Moslem and Christian the servants.
Beside this witty solution of a delicate problem, some Mohammedans made attempts very early, doubtless on account of discussions with learned Jews, to prove the justification of the three religions from the Jewish Scriptures themselves. Thus they referred the verse speaking of the revelation of God on Sinai, Mount Seir, and Mount Paran[1394] to the religious teachings of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. Naturally, the Jewish exegetes and philosophers objected vigorously to such an interpretation.
6. The question which religion is the best, has been most satisfactorily answered for Judaism by R. Joshua ben Hanania, who said that “the righteous of the heathen have also a share in the world to come.”[1395] The question which religion is true, has been, alas, too long arbitrated by the sword, and will be decided peacefully only when the whole earth will be full of the knowledge of God. Our own age, however, has begun to examine the title to existence of every religion from the broad standpoint of history and ethnology, assigning to each its proper rank. In this large purview even the crude beliefs of savages are shown to be of value, and the various heathen religions are seen to have a historical task of their own. Each of them has to some extent awakened the dormant divine spark in man; one has aided in the growth of the ideal of the beautiful in art, another in the rise of the ideal of the true in philosophy and science; a third in the cultivation of the ideal of the [pg 433] good and in stimulating sympathy and love so as to ennoble men and nations. Thus after a careful examination of the historical documents of the Christian and Mohammedan religions, it is possible to state clearly their great historic mission and their achievements in the whole domain of civilization. The Jewish religion, as the mother who gave birth to both, must deliver the verdict, how far they still contribute to the upbuilding of God's kingdom on earth. In fulfilling their appointed mission, each has given rise to valuable and peculiar institutions, and each has fallen short of the Messianic ideal as visualized by our great prophets of old. Only an impartial judgment can say which one has reached the higher stage of civilization.
7. Christianity's origin from Judaism is proved by its religious documents as well as by its very name, which is derived from the Greek for the title Messiah (Christos), bestowed on the Nazarene by his followers. Still the name Christianity arose in Antioch among non-Jews who scarcely knew its meaning. All the sources of the New Testament, however much they conflict in details, agree that the movement of Christianity began with the appearance of John the Baptist, a popular Essene saint. He rallied the multitude at the shore of the Jordan, preparing them for the approaching end of the Roman world-kingdom with the proclamation, “Wash yourselves clean from your sins!” that is, “Take the baptismal bath of repentance, for the kingdom of heaven is nigh.”[1396] He conferred the baptismal bath of repentance upon Jesus of Nazareth and the first apostles.[1397] Jesus took up this message when John was imprisoned and finally killed by [pg 434] Herod Antipas on account of his preachment against him.[1398] The life of Jesus is wrapt in legends which may be reduced to the following historical elements:[1399] The young Nazarene was of an altogether different temperament from that of John the Baptist, the stern, Elijah-like preacher in the wilderness;[1400] he manifested as preacher and as a healer of the sick a profound love for, and tender sympathy with suffering humanity, a trait especially fostered among the Essenes. This drew him toward that class of people who were shunned as unclean by the uncompromising leaders of the Pharisees, and also by the rigid brotherhoods of the Essenes, whose chief object was to attain the highest degree of holiness by a life of asceticism. His simple countrymen, the fishers and shepherds of Galilee, on hearing his wise and humane teachings and seeing his miraculous cures, considered him a prophet and a conqueror of the hosts of demons, the workers of disease. In contrast to the learned Pharisees, he felt it to be his calling to bring the good tidings of salvation to the poor and outcast, to “seek the lost sheep of the house of Israel” and win them for God. He soon found himself surrounded by a multitude of followers, who, on a Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem, induced him to announce himself as the expected Messiah. He attracted the people in Jerusalem by his vehement attacks upon the Sadducean hierarchy, which he threatened with the wrath of heaven for its abuses, and also by his denunciations of the self-sufficient Pharisean doctors of the law. Soon the crisis came when he openly declared war against the avarice of the priests, who owned the markets where the sacrificial fowl for the Temple were sold, overthrowing the tables of the money-changers, and declaring the Temple to have become “a den [pg 435] of robbers.”[1401] The hierarchical council delivered him to Pontius Pilatus, the Roman prefect, as an aspirant to the royal title of Messiah, which in the eyes of the Romans meant a revolutionary leader. The Roman soldiers crucified him and mocked him, calling him, “Jesus, the king of the Jews.”[1402]
The fate of crucifixion, however, did not end the career of Jesus, as it had that of many other claimants to the Messiahship in those turbulent times. His personality had impressed itself so deeply upon his followers that they could not admit that he had gone from them forever. They awaited his resurrection and return in all the heavenly glory of the “Son of Man,” and saw him in their ecstatic visions, attending their love-feasts,[1403] or walking about on the lake of Nazareth while they were fishing from their boats, or hovering at the summit of the mountains.[1404] This was but the starting point of that remarkable religious movement which grew first among the lower classes in northern Palestine and Syria,[1405] then gradually throughout the entire Roman Empire, shaking the whole of heathendom until all its deities gave way to the God of Israel, the divine Father of the crucified Messiah. The Jewish tidings of salvation for the poor and lowly offered by the Nazarene became the death-knell to the proud might of paganism.
8. But the ways of Providence are as inscrutable as they are wonderful. The poor and lowly members of the early Christian Churches, with their leaders, called “apostles” or “messengers” of the community,—elected originally to carry out works of charity and love,[1406]—would never have been able [pg 436] to conquer the great world, if they had persisted in the Essene traditions. They owed their success to the large Hellenistic groups who joined them at an early period and introduced the Greek language as their medium of expression. Henceforth the propaganda activity of the Alexandrian Jews was adopted by the young Church, which likewise took up all the works of wisdom and ethics written in Greek for the instruction of the proselytes and the young, scarcely known to the Palestinian schools. The Essene baptism for repentance was replaced by baptism for conversion or initiation into the new faith, while the neophyte to be prepared for this rite was for a long time instructed mainly in the doctrines of the Jewish faith.[1407] Subsequently collections of wise sayings and moral teachings ascribed to the Nazarene and handed down in the Aramaic vernacular, orally or in writing, were translated into Greek. These together with the manuals for proselytes were the original Church teachings. The Greek language paved the way for the Church to enter the great pagan world, exactly as the Greek translation of the Bible in Alexandria brought the teachings of Judaism to the knowledge of the outside world.
At first the same obstacle confronted the early Church which had prevented the Synagogue from becoming a world conqueror, namely, the rite of circumcision, which was required for full membership. Without this, baptized converts were only half-proselytes and could not be fully assimilated. This classification was still upheld by the Apostolic Convention, which met under the presidency of James the Elder.[1408] The time was ripe for a bold and radical innovation, and at this psychological moment arose a man of great zeal and unbridled energy as well as of a creative genius and a mystical imagination,—Saul of Tarsus, known by his Roman name [pg 437] Paulus.[1409] He had been sent by the authorities at Jerusalem to pursue the adherents of the new sect, but when he had come as far as Damascus in Syria, he suddenly turned from a persecutor into the most ardent promoter of the nascent Church, impelled by a strange hallucination. Paul was a carpet weaver by trade, born and reared in Tarsus, a seaport of Asia Minor, where he seems to have had a Greek training and to have imbibed Gnostic or semi-pagan ideas beside his Biblical knowledge. In this ecstatic vision on his journey he beheld the figure of Jesus, “the crucified Christ,” whose adherents he was pursuing, yet whom he had never seen in the flesh, appearing as a heavenly being whom Paul identified as the heavenly Adam, the archetypal “godlike” man.
Upon this strange vision he constructed a theological system far more pagan than Jewish in type, according to which man was corrupt through the sin of the first couple, and the death of Jesus on the cross was to be the atoning sacrifice offered by God himself, who gave His own son as a ransom for the sins of humanity. This doctrine he used as a lever with which, at one bold stroke, he was to unhinge the Mosaic law and make the infant Church a world-religion. Through baptism in the name of the Christ, the old sin-laden Adam was to be cast off and the new heavenly Adam, in the image of Christ, put on instead. The new covenant of God's atoning love was to replace the old covenant of Sinai, to abolish forever the old covenant based upon the Jewish law, and to set mankind free from all law, “which begets sin and works wrath.” In Christ, “who is the end of the law,” the sinfulness of the flesh should be overcome and the gates of salvation be opened to a world redeemed from both death and sin.[1410] The one [pg 438] essential for salvation was to accept the mystery concerning the birth and death of Christ, after the manner of the heathen mystery-religions, and to employ as sacramental symbols of the mystery the rites of baptism and communion with Christ.
9. This system of Paul, however, demanded a high price of its votaries. Acceptance of the belief meant the surrender of reason and free thinking. This breach in pure monotheism opened the door for the whole heathen mythology and the worship of the heathen deities in a new form. But the saddest result was the dualism of the system; the kingdom of God predicted by the prophets and sages of Israel for all humanity was transferred to the hereafter, and this life with all its healthy aspirations was considered sinful and in the hands of Satan. The cross, originally a sign of life,[1411] became from this time and through the Middle Ages a sign of death, casting a shadow of sin upon the Christian world and a shadow of terror upon the Jew.
The greatest harm of all, however, was done to Judaism itself. Paul made a caricature of the Law, which he declared to be a rigid, external system, not elevating life, but only inciting to transgression and engendering curse. He even aroused a feeling of hatred toward the Law, which grew in intensity, until it became a source of untold cruelty for many centuries. This spirit permeated the Gospels more and more in their successive appearance, even finding its way into the Sermon on the Mount. In the simple form given in the Gospel of Luke this was a teaching of love and tenderness; in Matthew, Jesus is represented as offering a new dispensation to replace the revelation of Sinai.[1412] Here the Mosaic law is presented as a system of commandments demanding [pg 439] austere adherence to the letter with no regard to the inner life, whereas, on the other hand, the actual teachings of the Nazarene were animated by love and sympathy, emanating from the ethical spirit of the Law. Yet the very words of Jesus in this same sermon disavow every hint of antinomianism: “Verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law till all be fulfilled.”[1413] As a matter of fact, the very teachings of love and inwardness which are embodied in both the Sermon on the Mount and the epistles of Paul were largely adopted from the Pharisean schools and Hasidean works as well as from the Alexandrian Propaganda literature and the Proselyte Manuals preserved by the Church.