The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity

by Octavius Brooks Frothingham

The Messianic hope was strong in these people; all the stronger on account of their political degradation. Born in sorrow, the anticipation grew keen in bitter hours. That Jehovah would abandon them, could not be believed. The thought would be atheism. The hope kept the eastern Jews in a perpetual state of insurrection. The cry, "lo here, lo there!" was incessant. The last great insurrection, that of Bar-Cochab, revealed an astonishing frenzy of zeal. It was purely a Messianic uprising. Judaism had excited the fears of the Emperor Hadrian,[4] and induced him to inflict unusual severities on the people. He had forbidden circumcision, the rite of initiation into their church; he had prohibited the observance of the Sabbath and the public reading of the law, thus drying up the sources of the national faith. He had even threatened to abolish the historical rallying point of the religion by planting a Roman colony on the site of Jerusalem and building a shrine to Jupiter on the place where the temple had stood. Measures so violent and radical could hardly have been prompted by anything less alarming than the upspringing of that indomitable conviction which worked at the heart of the people. The effect of the violence was to stimulate that conviction to fury. The night of their despair was once more illumined by the star of the east. The banner of the Messiah was raised. Portents as of old were seen in the sky; the clouds were watched for the glory that should appear. Bar-Cochab, the "son of the star," seemed to fill out the popular idea of the deliverer. Miracles were ascribed to him; flames issued from his mouth. The vulgar imagination made haste to transform the audacious fanatic into a child of David. Multitudes flocked to his standard. "The whole Jewish race throughout the world," says Milman, "was in commotion; those who dared not betray their interest in the common cause openly, did so in secret, and perhaps some of the wealthy Jews in the remote provinces privately contributed from their resources." "Native Jews and strangers swelled his ranks. It is probable that many of the fugitives from the insurgents in Egypt and Cyrene had found their way to Palestine and lay hid in caves and fastnesses. No doubt some from the Mesopotamian provinces came to the aid of their brethren." "Those who had denied or disguised their circumcision, hastened to renew that distinguishing mark of their Israelitish descent, to entitle themselves to a share in the great redemption." The insurrection gained head. The heights about Jerusalem were seized and occupied; fortifications were erected; caves were dug, and subterranean passages cut between the garrisoned positions; arms were collected; nothing but the "host of angels" was needed to insure victory. The angels did not appear; the Roman legions did. The carnage, during the three or four years of the war—for so long and possibly longer, the war lasted—was frightful. The Messiah, not proving himself a conqueror, was held to have proved himself an impostor, the "son of a lie." The holy city was once more destroyed, this time completely. A new city, peopled by foreigners, arose on its site. The effect of the outbreak, which was felt far and wide, in time and space, was disastrous to Jewish influence in the empire. From this time Judaism lost its good name, and at the same time its hold on the cultivated mind of Europe. Fanaticism so wild and destructive was entitled to no respect.

The Christians, of course, took no part in the great rising, and had no interest in it. It was their faith that the Messiah had already come; and however confident their expectation of his reappearance to judge the nations and redeem his elect, time had so far sobered the hopes of even the rudest among them, that they no longer looked for a man of war, no longer were attracted by banners in the hands of ruffians or trumpet blasts blown by human lips. The feeling was gaining ground, if it was not quite confirmed, that instead of waiting for the Christ to come to them, they were to go to him in his heaven. Hence, Jews, though they might be in the essentials of their religious faith, they were wholly alienated from those of their race who looked for a cosmical or political demonstration. That this want of sympathy and failure to participate, widened the breach between them and the Jews who still expected a temporal deliverer, there can be little question; that in times of great excitement, the Christian Jews were exposed to scoffing and persecution is equally undeniable. Bar-Cochab treated them with extreme cruelty. It is even probable that in Rome and the provinces of the empire a settled hatred of the Christians animated Jews of the average stamp, and found expression in the usual forms of popular malignity. It is easy to believe that Jews in Rome, possessing influence in high quarters, thrust Christians between themselves and persecution. This, indeed, is extremely probable.[5] But that, in ordinary times, an active animosity prevailed on the part of the Jews of the old school against Jews of the new school, is not clearly proved. The latter were orthodox, conservative Jews, loyal to the national faith in every respect save one, namely, their persuasion that the Christ was no longer to be looked for, having already appeared. To those Jews, who had abandoned the belief that he would appear, or who had allowed that belief to sink into the background of their minds, the belief of the Christians would occasion no bitterness. It is still a common impression that the persecution recorded in the book of "The Acts of the Apostles," to which Stephanos, the Greek convert, fell a victim, was directed by Jews against Christians. But it has been made to appear more than probable,—admitting the historical truth of the narrative—that the assault was made by the Judaizing upon the anti-Judaizing Christians; the Jews who were not Christians at all, taking no part in it. The reasoning upon which this conclusion is based, will be found in Zeller's book on the "Acts," an exhaustive treatise which must be studied by anybody who would understand that curious composition. The main positions may be apprehended by the intelligent reader on carefully perusing the story as written, and noting the conspicuous fact, that the quarrel is between radicals and conservatives; between the advocates of a broad policy, comprehending Greeks and Romans on the same terms with Jews, and the champions of a restricted policy, confining the benefits of the Messiah's advent to the true Israelites.

The destruction of Jerusalem was one of the causes that may have operated to close this gulf. By breaking up the head-quarters of the Christian conservatism, and dispersing the lingerers there among the inhabitants of Gentile cities, it weakened their ties, widened their experience, softened their prejudices, and prepared them to accept the larger interpretation of their faith. The writings of the New Testament, all of them produced after the destruction of Jerusalem, some of them fifty or sixty years after, none of them less than ten or fifteen years, bear traces of this enlargement. The Jewish christians living in Greek and Roman Cities could hardly avoid the temptations to adopt that view of their faith which commended it to the communities whereof they were a part, and this was the view presented by Paul and his school, the intellectual, or, as some prefer to call it, the "spiritual" view. According to this view, also, the new religion was grafted on the old, Judaism was the foundation; the root from which sprung the branches, however widely spreading. Paul, as has been remarked, addressed himself invariably to Jews, in the first instance, and turned to the Gentiles only when the Jews rejected him. The essential beliefs of the religious Jew he retained, never exchanging them for the beliefs of Paganism, or qualifying them with the speculations of heathen philosophy. He labored in the interest of the faith of Israel, broadly interpreted, nor, in respect of his fundamental conceptions, did he ever wander far from the religion of his fathers. The spiritual distance between the school he founded, and the school that in his life time he opposed, was not so wide that it might not in course of time, be diminished, until at length it disappeared entirely. Parties holding the same cardinal belief, will not forever be separated by incidental barriers, especially when, as was the case with the destruction of Jerusalem, providence moves the chief barriers away.

Other inducements to a good understanding between the two parties of Christian Jews were at work. Heresies of all sorts were springing up within the churches, which could be suppressed only by the moral power of a common persuasion in the minds of the chief bodies. Questions were raised which neither branch of the christian community could satisfactorily answer; controversies arose, demanding something like an ecclesiastical authority to adjust. Unless the new religion was to split into petty sections and be pulverized to nothingness, the restoration of old breaches was an absolute necessity. The danger was of too sudden and artificial a compromise between the main divisions, resulting in a compact organization that might arrest the movements of the spirit of liberty. The church did eventually obtain supremacy in dogma and rite, through the imperative demand for unity that was urgently pressed early in the second century.

Judaism contained in its bosom two elements, one stationary, the other progressive; one close, the other expansive; one centralizing in Judæa and waiting till it should attract the outer world to it, the other forth reaching beyond Palestine, and seeking to commend the faith of Israel to those who knew it not. These two elements coëxisted from early times, and caused perpetual ferment by their struggles to overmaster each other. The priest stood for the one principle, the narrower, the fixed, the instituted; the prophet stood for the other, the intellectual, the expansive, the progressive. The priest stayed at home to administer the ordinances; the prophet journeyed about, to spread the salvation. The priest was a fixture, the prophet was a missionary.

The two divisions of the earliest Christian community represented these counter tendencies. The school of Peter, James, and John, the hierarchal, conservative school, maintained the attitude of expectation. They waited and prayed, exacted rigid compliance with ordinances; clung to their associations with places and seasons; were tenacious of holy usages; required punctuality and accuracy of posturing, were strict in conformity with legal prescriptions, made a point of circumcision, or other rites of initiation into the true church. The school of Paul and Apollos took up the principle of universality, dispensed with whatever hampered their movements and impeded their action, and, taking essential ideas only, making themselves "all things to all men, if peradventure, they might win some," preached the message freely, to as many as would hear. The two principles, however discordant in operation, demanded each other. They could not long exist apart; the unity and the universality were mutually complementary. Unity alone, would bring isolation, solitariness, and ultimate death from diminution. Universality alone would lead to dissipation, attenuation, and disappearance. It was therefore not long before the extremes drew together and met.

Lecky, the historian of European morals, assigns as a reason why the Jews in Rome were less vehemently persecuted than the Christians, that "the Jewish religion was essentially conservative and unexpansive. The Christians, on the other hand, were ardent missionaries." Would it not be more exact to say that the Jews of one school were essentially conservative and unexpansive; that the Jews of another school were ardent missionaries? That the one school should be persecuted, while the other was left in peace, was perfectly natural, especially in communities where their essential identity was not understood. There is no necessity for supposing that the two faiths were actually distinguished because one attracted attention and provoked attack, while the other did nothing of the kind. Not history only, but common observation furnishes abundant examples of faiths fundamentally the same, meeting very different fortunes, according to the attitude which circumstances compelled them to assume. The Christians might have presented the aggressive front of Judaism, as Paul did, and still not have forfeited their claim to be true children of Israel.

There is, in fact, no doubt that discerning persons perceived the substantial identity of the two religions. It is conceded on all sides, by Jewish and by Christian writers,—Milman and Salvador, Jost and Merivale, corroborating one another,—that Jews were taken for Christians and Christians for Jews. They were subjected to the same criticism; they were exposed to the same contumely. Indeed it may be questioned whether the early persecutions that were inflicted on the Christians were not really directed against the Jews, whose reputation for restlessness and fanaticism, for stiffness and intolerance, was established in the minds of all classes of society. The Jews were a mark for persecution before there was a Christian in Rome, before the Christian era began. They were persecuted on precisely the same pretexts that were used in the case of the Christians. They had a recognized locality, standing and character. They were many in number and considerable in influence. The lower orders disliked their austerity; the higher orders dreaded their organization; philosophers despised them as superstitious; politicians hated them as intractable; emperors used them when they wished to divert angry comment from their own acts. They were "fair game" for imperial pursuit. A raid on the Jews was popular. It is possible, to say the least, that the Christians would have passed unmolested but for their association with the Israelites. This is no novel insinuation; Milman hinted at it more than a quarter of a century ago, in his "History of Christianity." "When the public peace was disturbed by the dissensions among the Jewish population of Rome, the summary sentence of Claudius visited both Jews and Christians with the same indifferent severity. So the Neronian persecution was an accident arising out of the fire at Rome; no part of a systematic plan for the suppression of foreign religions. It might have fallen on any other sect or body of men who might have been designated as victims to appease the popular resentment. Accustomed to the separate worship of the Jews, to the many, Christianity appeared at first only as a modification of that belief."[6] The same conjecture is more boldly ventured in the History of Latin Christianity. "What caprice of cruelty directed the attention of Nero to the Christians, and made him suppose them victims important enough to glut the popular indignation at the burning of Rome, it is impossible to determine. The cause and extent of the Domitian persecution is equally obscure. The son of Vespasian was not likely to be merciful to any connected with the fanatic Jews." "At the commencement of the second century, under Trajan, persecution against the Christians is raging in the East. That, however, (I feel increased confidence in the opinion), was a local, or rather Asiatic persecution, arising out of the vigilant and not groundless apprehension of the sullen and brooding preparation for insurrection among the whole Jewish race (with whom Roman terror and hatred still confounded the Christians), which broke out in the bloody massacres of Cyrene and Cyprus, and in the final rebellion, during the reign of Hadrian, under Bar-Cochab."[7] If the Christians made themselves particularly obnoxious, they did so by their zeal for beliefs which they shared with the Jews and derived from them; beliefs in the personality of God, the immediateness of Providence, the law of moral retribution, and the immortal destinies of the human soul. Their belief in the ascended and reigning Christ gave point to their zeal; but the Jews, too, clung to their hope of the Christ, and through the vitality of their hope were known.

The importance ascribed to Christianity as a special moral force working in the constitution of the heathen world, is, by recent admission, acknowledged to have been much exaggerated. The chapter on "The state of the world toward the middle of the first century" in Renan's "Apostles," sums up with singular calmness, clearness and easy strength, the influences that were slowly transforming the social condition of the empire; the nobler ideas, the purer morals, the amenities and humanities that were stealing in to temper the violence, mitigate the ferocity, soften the hardness and uplift the grossness of the western world. Samuel Johnson's little essay on "The Worship of Jesus" is a subtle glance into the same facts, tracing the efficacy of powers that co-operated in producing the atmospheric change which was as summer succeeding winter over the civilized earth. Mr. Lecky, with broader touch, but accurately and conscientiously, paints a noble picture on the same subject. But other artists, of a different school, make the same representation. Merivale, lecturing in 1864, on the Boyle foundation, in the Chapel Royal, at Whitehall, on the "Conversion of the Roman Empire," in the interest of the christian Church, says, "the influence of Grecian conquest was eminently soothing and civilizing; it diffused ideas of humanity and moral culture, while the conquerors themselves imbibed on their side the highest of moral lessons, lessons of liberality, of toleration, of sympathy with all God's human creation." "Plutarch, in a few rapid touches, enforced by a vivid illustration which we may pass over, gives the picture of the new humane polity, the new idea of human society flashed upon the imagination of mankind by the establishment of the Macedonian Empire. Such, at least, it appeared to the mind of a writer five centuries later; but there are traces preserved, even in the wrecks of ancient civilization, of the moral effect which it actually produced on the feelings of society, much more nearly contemporaneous. The conqueror, indeed, perished early, but not prematurely. The great empire was split into fragments, but each long preserved a sense of the unity from which it was broken off. All were leavened more or less with a common idea of civilization, and recognized man as one being in various stages of development, to be trained under one guidance and elevated to one spiritual level. In the two great kingdoms of Egypt and Syria, which sprang out of the Macedonian,—in the two great cities of Alexandria and Antioch, to which the true religion owes so deep a debt,—the unity of the human race was practically asserted and maintained." "After three centuries of national amalgamation, the result of a widespread political revolution, after the diffusion of Grecian ideas among every people, from the Ionian to the Caspian or the Red Sea, and the reception in return, of manifold ideas, and in religious matters of much higher ideas, from the Persian, the Indian, the Egyptian and the Jew, the people even of Athens, the very centre and eye of Greece, were prepared to admit the cardinal doctrine of Paul's preaching."

The same writer cordially admits the moral grandeur and the moral power of the philosophers whose teaching had, for several generations, been leavening the thought and ennobling the humanity of the Roman world. "The philosophy of the Stoics, the highest and holiest moral theory at the time of our Lord's coming,—the theory which most worthily contended against the merely political religion of the day, the theory which opposed the purest ideas and the loftiest aims to the grovelling principles of a narrow and selfish expediency on which the frame of the heathen ritual rested—was the direct creation of the sense of unity and equality disseminated among the choicer spirits of heathen society by the results of the Macedonian conquest. But for that conquest it could hardly have existed at all. It was the philosophy of Plato, sublimed and harmonized by the political circumstances of the times. It was what Plato would have imagined, had he been a subject of Alexander."