The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity

by Octavius Brooks Frothingham

The fellow-believers of James imitated him as closely as they could. They were proud of their descent from Abraham; they were tenacious of the privileges granted to the twelve tribes; they kept up their relation with the synagogue; they had faith in forms of observance; they revered the Sabbath; their trust in the literal efficacy of prayer was implicit; they were excessively jealous of intellectual activity outside of their narrow communion; their anticipations were confined to the restoration of Israel, and never wandered into the region of social improvement or moral progress; in general ethical and social culture they were not interested.

They had no ecclesiastical establishment apart from the Jewish Church; no separate priesthood, no sacraments, no cultus, no rubric, no calendar, no liturgy. The validity of sacrifice they maintained, the doctrine of sacrifice possessing a deeper significance for them from the growing faith that their Lord was himself the paschal lamb, the shedding of whose blood purchased the remission of sins. Hence a special encouragement of the sacerdotal spirit, an exaggerated sense of the efficacy of blood, a theory of atonement more searching and absolute than had prevailed in the ancient church. The later doctrine of atonement in the christian church may have grown from this small but vital germ.

They had no dogma peculiar to themselves, the doctrines of the old Church being all they needed; they had no trinity or beginning of trinity; no christology; no doctrine of Fall; no theory of first and second Adam; no metaphysic; no philosophy of sin and salvation; no interior mystery of experience. Whatever newness of creed they avowed, was owing to their acknowledgment of the Christ, and consisted in a few very simple inferences from this tenet. Of course even slow-minded, literal, external men could not entertain a belief like that, and not be pushed by it to certain practical conclusions. The expectation of the Christ's coming would necessarily raise questions respecting the conditions of acceptance with him, the character of his dominion, the duration of it, the social changes incidental to it; but it does not appear that speculation on these subjects was carried far. A crude millenarianism developed itself early; a cloudy theory of atonement found favor; for the rest, conjecture, it was little more, dwelt contentedly within the confines of rabbinical lore.

There was nothing peculiar in their moral precepts or usages, nothing that should effect a change in the received ethics of the nation. Their essential creed involved no practical innovation on private or social moralities. The mosaic code was familiar to them from childhood. The popular commentaries on it were promulgated from week to week in the synagogues, and their validity was no more questioned by the Christians than by the most orthodox of Jews.

The daily existence of these people was retired and simple. They had frequent meetings for talk, song, mutual cheer and confirmation; full of expectation and excitement they must have been; wild with memories and hopes. For the believers lived out of themselves, in an ideal, a supernatural sphere; their hearts were in heaven with their Master, whose form filled their vision, whose voice they seemed to hear, from whom came, as they fancied, impressions, intimations, influences, unspoken but breathed messages interpreted by the soul. They were visionaries. Their life was illusion. They were transported beyond themselves at times, by the prospect of the Lord's nearness. Their minds were dazed; their feelings raised to ecstasy; in vision they saw the heavens open and fiery tongues descend. Their small upper chamber seemed to tremble and dilate in sympathy with their feelings; the ceiling appeared to lift; they were moved by an impulse which they could not account for, and regarded themselves as inspired.

In these circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that they lived in communities by themselves, preferring the society of their fellows; that they had a common purse, a common table; that they were ascetic and celibate; that they withdrew from public affairs and from private business, and approached nearly to the Essenes, with whom they had much in common, perpetuating the habit of monasticism, which became afterwards so prominent a feature in the Eastern church.

Nor is it surprising that they regarded the intimate friends of their Christ with a peculiar veneration, and ascribed to them extraordinary gifts. The basis of the future hierarchy was laid in the honor paid to these few men. They were credited with supernatural insight, and with the possession of miraculous power. Their touch was healing; their mere shadow comforted; their approval was blessing; their displeasure cursed. What they ratified was fixed; what they permitted was decreed. Their word was law; it was for them to admit and to exclude. The penalty of excommunication was in their hands, to be inflicted at their discretion. Superstition went so far as to concede to them the alternatives of life and death. The legend of Ananias and Sapphira is evidence of a credulity that set not reason only, but conscience at defiance. In their infatuation they believed that the Christ above communicated a saving spiritual grace to such as the apostles touched with their fingers.

Very singular, but very consistent and logical were the views of death entertained by the brotherhood in Christ. As their Lord delayed his coming, the elders grew old and fell asleep. There was a brotherhood of the dead as well as of the living; the living became few; the dead many. Questions arose respecting the destination of those departed. That they had perished was not to be thought of; as little to be thought of was the possibility of their forfeiting their privilege of sharing the believers' triumph. The resurrection the disciples had always believed in. That, at the coming of the Messiah there would be a general resurrection of the faithful Israelites from their graves, in field or rock, was part of their ancestral faith. But now, the matter was brought home to them with painful reality. The Christ might come at any moment; the dead were their own immediate kindred, their parents and brethren. The problem presented no difficulties to their minds however agitating it might be to their hearts. The Lord would come; of that there could be no doubt; the dead would rise, that was certain; but in what form? In what order? Would the living have precedence of them? Where would the meeting take place? How would the dead know that the time of resurrection had arrived? The answer came promptly as the question. The trumpet of the angels would proclaim the event to all creatures, visible and invisible. The elect would respond to the summons; the gates of Hades would burst asunder. In etherial forms, lighter than air, more radiant than the morning, the faithful who had died "in the Lord," would ascend; the living would exchange their terrestrial bodies for bodies celestial, and thus "changed," "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye," would mount upward to join them, and all together would "meet the Lord in the air." For the believers the grave had no victory and death no sting.

In all this the Christians were strictly within the circle of Jewish thought. The belief in the resurrection wore different aspects in different minds; the vision of the hereafter floated many-hued before the imaginations of men. The fiery zealots who "took the kingdom of heaven by violence," dreamed of the resurrection of the body, and of tangible privileges of dominion in the terrestrial millennium. The milder enthusiasts, who could not believe that flesh and blood could inherit the kingdom of God, were constrained to invent a "spiritual world" for the accommodation of spiritual bodies. Some conjectured that the etherial forms would mount to their native seat, only at the termination of the thousand years reign; the spiritual world being brought in at the end, as a device of eschatology to dispose finally of the saints who could neither die nor remain longer on earth. Others surmised that the spiritual world would claim its own at once, there being no place on earth where the risen could live and no occupations in which they could engage. The cruder faith was the earlier.

The fanatics, as described in the second Book of Maccabees, an apocryphal writing of the second century before Christ, hoped for a corporeal resurrection and a visible supremacy. Of seven sons, who, with their mother, were barbarously executed because they refused to deny their religion by eating swines' flesh, one declares: "The King of the world shall raise us up who have died for his laws, into everlasting life;" another, holding forth his hands (to be cut off), said courageously, "These I had from heaven, and for his laws I despise them, and from him I hope to receive them again." The next shouts: "It is good being put to death by men, to look for hope from God, to be raised up again by him; as for thee, thou shalt have no resurrection to life." Finally, when all the seven have died heroically, with words of similar import on their lips, the mother is put to death, having exhorted her youngest born to faithfulness with the exhortation: "Doubtless the Creator of the world who formed the generation of man, and found out the beginning of all things, will also, of his own mercy, give you breath and life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for his laws' sake." The same book records the suicide of Razis: "One of the elders of Jerusalem, a lover of his countrymen, and a man of very good report, who for his kindness was called a Father of the Jews, for in former times he had been accused of Judaism, and did boldly jeopard his body and life with all vehemency for the religion of the Jews;" "choosing rather to die manfully than to come into the hands of the wicked, to be abused otherwise than beseemed his noble birth, he fell on his sword. Nevertheless, while there was yet breath within him, being inflamed with anger, he rose up, and though his blood gushed out like spouts of water, and his wounds were grievous, yet he ran through the midst of the throng, and, standing upon a steep rock, when as his blood was now quite gone, he plucked out his bowels, and taking them in both his hands, he cast them upon the throng, and calling upon the Lord of life and spirit to restore him those again, he thus died."