Solomon and Solomonic Literature

by Moncure Daniel Conway

“If ye have not been faithful in the little who will give you the great?”

These instructions have no connotations of the end of the world. They appear like the words of a man of the world, but not a man of the people. There is a certain unity in them, indicating a mind more developed than the semi-Jahvist Alexandrian philosophers of the later Wisdom cult, as represented by Jesus Ben Sira’s “Wisdom,” and by the “Wisdom of Solomon”; also a mind more practical.

But these wise sayings do not convey the full idea of a man whose execution the Sanhedrim would require, nor a man whose resurrection from the grave would be looked for by the populace. These two phenomenal facts imply some strong antagonism to the priesthood and their system. Martyrdoms do not occur for ethical generalizations, much less for philosophical affirmations. The faith that strikes deep is that which speaks in great denials.

Trying to follow his advice to “Become proved bankers,” we may detect in some probable sayings of Jesus a transitional ring, e. g., “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” The effort at self-emancipation is still more traceable in certain incidents related in the “Gospel according to the Hebrews”:

“He saith, ‘If thy brother hath offended in anything and hath made thee amends, seven times in a day receive him,’ Simon his disciple said unto him, ‘Seven times in a day?’ The Lord answered and said unto him, ‘I tell thee also unto seventy times seven; for in the prophets likewise, after that they were anointed by the Holy Spirit, utterance of sin was found.’”

“The same day, having beheld a man working on the Sabbath, he said to him, ‘Man, if thou knowest what thou dost, blessed art thou: but if thou knowest not, thou art under a curse, and a law-breaker.’”

That a man should regard the Holy Spirit as unable to make men infallible; that he should have discovered immoral utterances in the prophets; that he should regard it as a sign of enlightenment to disregard the Sabbath deliberately and intelligently—this is surely all very striking.

Who, in the second century, could have invented these anecdotes about Jesus? They are not harmonious with the Pauline Epistles; their heretical character is proved by the repudiation of the Gospel containing them, while their genuineness is implicitly confessed by the ultimate suppression of that Gospel. For surely it cannot be supposed that such a work, well known in the fifth century, was lost; nor is there much doubt that any learned rationalist, if permitted the free range of all the libraries in Rome, without the presence of polite librarians, could bring to light that first-century Gospel, the only one written in Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

But, when we come to consider the mature and positive teachings of Jesus, there may be placed in the front a sentence preserved from the suppressed Gospel by Epiphanius, who writes (Haer. xxx. 16): “And they say that he both came, and (as their so-called Gospel has it) instructed them that he had come to dissolve the Sacrifices: ‘and unless ye cease from sacrificing the wrath shall not cease from you.’” Dr. Nicholson is shocked at this threat, and suspects the Ebionites of having altered what Jesus said. But surely it is a true and grand admonition by one superseding a phantasm of heavenly Egoism, demanding gifts from men for pacification, with the idea of a Father. Dr. Nicholson connects it, no doubt rightly, with Luke xiii. 1–3, which should probably read: “There were some present at that very season who told him of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered, Think ye these Galileans were sinners rather than all other Galileans because they suffered these things? I tell you, No! And unless ye cease from sacrificing, the Wrath will not cease from you.” That is, they would always be haunted by the delusion of a bloodthirsty god, a god of Wrath, and see a judgment, not only in every accident, but in every calamity wrought by fiendish men.

In his quotation from Hosea—“I desire charity, and not sacrifice”—Jesus speaks as if with a transitional accent, as compared with the declaration that sacrifices imply deified Wrath. The contempt of Ecclesiastes for “the sacrifice of fools who know not that they are doing evil” (v. 1), has here become a great and far-reaching affirmation, which must have impressed the orthodox Jews as atheism. For, although there are passages in several psalms and in the prophets which disparage sacrifice, they were all interpreted by the Rabbins, as now by Christian theologians, as meaning their purification and spiritualization—by no means their abolition. Indeed, this higher interpretation of sacrifices appears to have given them fresh lease; and in the time of Jesus, when to the priesthood remained only control over their religious ordinances, the sacrifices were apparently preserved with increased rigour. Jesus himself, unless the gospeller (Matt. v. 23, 24) has softened his language, had at one time only demanded that none should offer a gift at the altar until he had done justice to any who had aught against him. But a remarkable passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews (x. 5) represents Jesus as going to the world with a quotation from Psalm xl. 6, 7, for a clause of which a parenthesis is given, saying: