Aside from the religious questions involved, and speaking in the light of history and law, our own judgment is that the real crucifiers of the Christ were the Romans, and that Pilate and his countrymen should bear the greater blame. It is true that the Jews were the instigators, the accusers. But Pilate was the judge whose authority was absolute. The Jews were powerless to inflict the death penalty. Pilate had the final disposition of all matters of life and death. In short, he could have prevented the crucifixion of Jesus. He did not do so; and upon him and his countrymen should rest the censure of Heaven and the execration of mankind.
But, admitting that the priests of the Sanhedrin were equally guilty with Pilate and the Romans, does it follow that all Jews of the days of Jesus who were not participants in the crime against him, should suffer for the folly and criminal conduct of a mere fragment of a Sadducean sect? Is it not true that the Jewish people, as a race, were not parties to the condemnation and execution of the Christ? Is it not reasonable to suppose that the masses in Palestine were friendly to the democratic Reformer who was the friend of the poor, the lame, and the blind? Did not the reception of his miracles and his triumphal entry into Jerusalem indicate His popularity with the plain people? Is it not historically true that the great body of the Jewish population in Judea, in Galilee, in Samaria, and in Perea, was unfriendly to the members of the Sanhedrin, and regarded them as political renegades and religious delinquents? Is it not reasonably certain that a large majority of the countrymen of Jesus were his ardent well-wishers and sincerely regretted his untimely end? Is it possible to conceive that these friends and well-wishers were the inheritors of the curse of Heaven because of the crime of Golgotha? If not, is it rational to suppose that their innocent descendants have been the victims of this curse?
The cruel and senseless notion of the implacable wrath of Deity has prevailed in all the ages as an explanation of the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion and persecution of the Jews. It is worse than nonsense to see in this event anything but the operation of vulgar physical forces of the most ordinary kind. The fall of Jerusalem was a most natural and consequential thing. It was not even an extraordinary historical occurrence, even in Jewish history. Titus did not so completely destroy Jerusalem as did Nebuchadnezzar before him. Razing cities to the ground was a customary Roman act, a form of pastime, a characteristic Roman proceeding in the case of stubborn and rebellious towns. Scipio razed Carthage and drove Carthaginians into the most remote corners of the earth. Was any Roman or Punic god interested in this event? Cæsar destroyed many Gallic cities and scattered Gauls throughout the world. Was any deity concerned about these things?
Roman admiration was at times enkindled, but Roman clemency was never gained by deeds of valor directed against the arms of Rome. Neither Hannibal nor Mithradates, Vercingetorix nor Jugurtha, the grandest of her enemies, received any mercy at her hands. To oppose her will, was to invite destruction; and the sequel was a mere question of "the survival of the fittest." The most turbulent, rebellious and determined of all the imperial dependencies was the province of Judea. The Jews regarded the Romans as idolaters; and, instead of obeying them as masters, despised and defied them as barbarians. When this spirit became manifest and promised to be perpetual, the dignity of the Roman name as well as the safety of the Roman State, demanded the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Jews. And destruction and dispersion followed as naturally as any profane effect follows any vulgar cause.
The Irish, another splendid race, are being dispersed throughout the earth by the English domination of Ireland. Is anybody so keenly discerning as to see in Irish dispersion a divine or superhuman agency? Is it not, after all, the simple operation of the same brutal, physical forces that destroyed Carthage and Jerusalem, and, in a latter century, dismembered Poland?
But the advocates of the divine wrath theory quote Scriptures and point to prophecy in support of their contention. Then Scriptures must be pitted against Scriptures. The last prayer of the Master on the cross must be made to repeal every earlier Scriptural prophecy or decree. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," is the sublimest utterance in the literature of the world. It is the epitome of every Christian virtue and of all religious truth. This proclamation from the cross repealed the Mosaic law of hereditary sin; placed upon a personal basis responsibility for offenses against God and man; and served notice upon future generations that those who "know not what they do" are entitled to be spared and forgiven. To believe that God ignored the prayer of Christ on the cross; and that the centuries of persecution of the Jews which followed, were but the fulfillment of prophecy and fate, is to assail the Messiahship of Jesus and to question the goodness and mercy of Jehovah. Jesus knew the full meaning of His prayer and was serious unto death. To believe that the Father rejected the petition of the Son is to destroy the equality of the persons of the Trinity by investing one with the authority and power to review, revise, and reject the judgments and petitions of the others. If the Christian doctrine be true that Christ was God "manifest in the flesh"; if the doctrine of the Trinity be true that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, are one and the same, eternal and inseparable, then the prayer of Jesus on the cross was not a petition, but a declaration that the malefactors of the crucifixion, who, in the blindness of ignorance, had helped to kill the Son of Man, would receive at the Last Day the benefits of the amnesty of the Father of mercy and forgiveness.
If the perpetrators of the great injustice of the Sanhedrin and of the Prætorium are to be forgiven because they knew not what they did, is there any justice, human or divine, in persecuting their innocent descendants of all lands and ages? "When Sir Moses Montefiore was taunted by a political opponent with the memory of Calvary and described by him as one who sprang from the murderers who crucified the world's Redeemer, the next morning the Jewish philanthropist, whom Christendom has learned to honor, called upon his assailant and showed him the record of his ancestors which had been kept for two thousand years, and which showed that their home had been in Spain for two hundred years before Jesus of Nazareth was born." This half-humorous anecdote illustrates the utter absurdity and supreme injustice of connecting the modern Jew with ancient tragic history. The elemental forces of reason, logic, courage and sympathy, wrapped up and interwoven in every impulse and fiber of the human mind and heart, will be forever in rebellion against the monstrous doctrine of centuries of shame, exile and persecution visited upon an entire race, because of the sins and crimes of a handful of their progenitors who lived more than a thousand years before.
But, if the visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the sons is to be maintained, and perpetuated as a form of divine, if not of human justice, then, why not, at least, be consistent in the application of the principle? Many philosophers and critics have detected a striking kinship between the teachings of Socrates and those of Jesus. A celebrated historian closes a chapter of the history of Greece with this sentence: "Thus perished the greatest and most original of the Grecian philosophers (Socrates), whose uninspired wisdom made the nearest approach to the divine morality of the Gospel."[123] The indictments against the philosopher of Athens and the Prophet of Nazareth were strikingly similar. Socrates was charged with corrupting Athenian youth; Jesus, with perverting the nation. Socrates was charged with treason against Athens; Jesus, with treason against Rome. Both were charged with blasphemy; the Athenian, with blasphemy of the Olympic gods; the Nazarene, with blaspheming Jehovah. Both sealed with their blood the faith that was in them. If the descendants of the crucifiers of the Christ are to be persecuted, brutalized, and exiled for the sins of the fathers, why not apply the same pitiless law of hereditary punishment to the descendants of the Athenian dicasts who administered hemlock to the greatest sage of antiquity? Why not persecute all the Greeks of the earth, wherever found, because of the injustice of the Areopagus?