For example, in the following passage from Zechariah, no one will suppose for a moment that it is meant that Jehovah will appear visibly in person and reign in Jerusalem, but only that his promise shall be fulfilled, and his law shall prevail there in the triumphant establishment of his chosen people: "Behold the day of Jehovah cometh, when I will gather all nations to battle against Jerusalem; and the city shall be taken. Then shall Jehovah go forth, and fight against those nations. And his feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives. And Jehovah shall be king over all the earth. And it shall be that whoso of all the families of the earth will not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, Jehovah of hosts, upon them shall be no rain."
When the prophets burst out in the lyric metaphors, "Jehovah will roar from Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem;" "Egypt shall be a waste and Edom a wilderness for their violence to the sons of Judah; but Jerusalem shall be inhabited forever, and Jehovah shall dwell upon Zion," the meaning is simply that "Jehovah will be a refuge to his people, a stronghold to the sons of Israel, and all people shall know that Jehovah is God." It would imply the grossest ignorance in any critic if he imagined that the Jews ever believed that Jehovah was visibly to come down and reign over them in person. They did however, believe that an awful token or the presence of Jehovah dwelt in the holy of holies of their temple. They also believed that every anointed ruler who governed them in justice and piety represented the authority of Jehovah. And as, in the long times of their natural captivity and oppression, their hopes sought refuge from the depressing present in bright visions of a glorious future, when some inspired deliverer should justify their faith by carrying the national power and happiness to the highest pitch, they naturally believed that the spirit and signet of the Lord would, in a special manner, rest on that Messianic hero.
By the assimilative action of faith and imagination, this idea of a divinely accredited Messiah developed, and grew ever richer and more complete. It began simply with the expectation of a holy leader and ruler who should subdue the heathen and establish the favored people of Jehovah in peerless purity, power, and happiness in the land of Judea. Little by little the rewards of the righteous and the punishments of the wicked were extended beyond those living on the earth, and took in the dead. The prophet Ezekiel depicted the promised restoration of the Jews from their captivity at Babylon to Jerusalem under the poetic image of a revivification of a heap of dead bones. This metaphor slowly assumed the form of a literal dogma, which grew from its beginning as an exceptional belief in the resurrection of a chosen few, stated in the book of Daniel and the second book of Maccabees, to the belief in the universal resurrection of the dead, avowed by Paul as the common Pharisaic belief. The belief, too, in regard to the scene of the Messianic triumph, the penalties to be inflicted on the enemies of Jehovah, and the kind and number of those enemies, underwent the same process of development and growth. The world was conceived as a sort of three story house connected with passage ways; heaven above the firmament, the earth between, and a penal region below. The imagery of fire and brimstone associated in the Hebrew mind with Sodom and Gomorrah, and the fearful imagery of idolatory, filth, and flames in the detested valley of Hinnom where the refuse of Jerusalem was carried to be burned, had been transferred by the popular imagination to the subterranean place of departed souls. The story in the book of Genesis about the sons of God forming an alliance with the daughters of men, and begetting a wicked brood of giants, had been wrought into the belief in a race of fallen angels, foes of God and men, whose dwelling place was the upper air. Above these wicked spirits in high places, but below the heaven of Jehovah, was the paradise whither Enoch and Elijah were supposed to have been translated, and whence they would come again in the last days. The Jewish apocryphal book of Enoch which was written probably about a century and a half before the birth of Christ, and is explicitly quoted in the Epistle of Jude contains a minute account of the final judgment, including in its scope this whole scenery and all these agents, and closely anticipating both the doctrinal and verbal details of the same subject as recorded in the New Testament itself. There is not, with one exception, a single essential feature of the now current Christian belief, in regard to the day of judgment at the end of the world, which is not distinctly brought out in the same form in the book of Enoch, written certainly more than a hundred years before a line of the Gospels was composed. The exception referred to relates to the person of the Messiah. In the book of Enoch he is indeed called the Son of man, but is wrapt in mysterious obscurity, undefined and unnamed: in the Christian documents and faith he is, of course, identified with Jesus of Nazareth, and, at a later period, identified also with God.
The growth of the Messianic personality in distinctness, prominence, importance, and completeness of associated grouping, is not only historically traceable, but was also perfectly natural. At first the prophecy of the triumphant re establishment of the Jews was conceived as the result of the favoring power of Jehovah, not in a personal manifestation, but providentially displayed. Thus Joel represents Jehovah as saying, in his promise to vindicate Jerusalem, "Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat; for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about." It cannot be denied that this was purely metaphorical. But in all imagery of a kingdom, of war, of judgment, the idea of the king, the leader, the judge, would naturally be the strongest point of imaginative action, the center of crystalizing association around which congruous particulars would be drawn until the picture was complete. So it actually happened. Perhaps the most striking example of this is seen in the growth of the notion of the great Adversary who precedes and fights against the Messiah. The book of Daniel, written just after Antiochus Epiphanes had oppressed the Jews with such frightful cruelties and profaned their temple with such abominable desecrations, impersonated in him the whole head and front of the impious hostility which the promised deliverer would have to subdue in vindicating the rights and hopes of the chosen people. "The figure of Antiochus Epiphanes," Martineau has happily said, "placed in immediate antecedence and antithesis to that of the Messiah, as the predicted crisis moved forward, was carried with it, and spread its portentous shadow over the expected close." The writer of the book of Daniel looked for the immediate arising of some inspired hero and servant of Jehovah to overthrow this wicked despot, this persecuting monster, and avenge the oppressed Jews on their Gentile tyrants. When subsequent events postponed this expected sequel, the opposed parties in it, the Antichrist and the Christ, were thrown forward together in ever dilating proportions of gloom and brightness: the fierce countenanced king in Daniel becomes the Man of Sin in Paul and the Beast drunk with the blood of saints in the Apocalypse. And in the Rabbinical books of the Jews the belief in Antichrist, under the name of Armillus, is developed into a mass of mythological details, afterwards adopted quite in the gross by the Mohammedans. Terrible signs will precede the appearance of the Messiah, such as a dew of blood, the darkening of the sun, the destruction of the holy city, with the slaughter and dispersion of the Israelites, and the suffering of awful woes. The Messiah shall gather his people and rebuild and occupy Jerusalem. Armillus shall collect an army and besiege that city. But God shall say to Messiah, "Sit thou on my right hand," and to the Israelites, "Stand still, and see what God will work for you to day." Then God will pour down sulphur and fire from heaven, and consume Armillus and his hosts. Then the trumpet will sound, the tombs be opened, the ten tribes be led to Paradise to celebrate the marriage supper of the Messiah, the aliens be consigned to Gehenna, and the earth be renovated.
As the doctrine of the functions of the Messiah, in this finished form, is not stated in the Old Testament, but was familiar in the Christian Church, it is commonly supposed to be exclusively a later Christian development from the Jewish germ. It did, however, exist in the Jewish mind, before the birth of Christ, in the mature form already set forth. It is found clearly laid down and drawn out in Jewish apocryphal books dated earlier than the Christian era. It is likewise explicitly and minutely detailed in the Talmud, where its subsequent adoption from the Christians must have been impossible to the bigoted scorn and hate of the Jews for the Christians; while the historic affiliation of Christianity on Judaism made the Christians avowedly adopt all the vital doctrines of the older creed. The gradual growth of the Christian doctrine of the connection of the Messiah with the final judgment, out of the previous Jewish and Rabbinical notions, by the hardening of metaphors into dogmas and the universalizing of local peculiarities, is confessedly an obscure process, in many of its particulars extremely difficult to trace. But that it did thus grow up, no impartial scholar, who has mastered what is now known on the subject, can doubt. A world of new knowledge and light has been thrown on this whole field during the last thirty five years by Gfrorer, Baur, Ewald, Hoffmann, Hilgenfeld, Dilmann, Ceriani, Volkmar, and other students of kindred power and spirit. Researches and discussions in this department are still pushed with the greatest zeal; and it is confidently believed that in a few years the views adopted in the present writing will be established beyond all cavil from any fair minded critic. Then all the steps will have been clearly defined in the development of that doctrine of the great Day of the Lord, which, beginning with a poetic picture of a Jewish overthrow of the Gentiles, through the inspiring power of Jehovah, before the walls of Jerusalem, ended with a literal belief in the setting up, by the Messiah, of a tribunal in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the assemblage there of all the living and the dead for judgment, the installation of the immortalized righteous in Paradise, and the submerging of the wicked under the Vale of Hinnom in a rainstorm of blazing brimstone.
And now what must we think in regard to the truth or falsehood of the outward, forensic, military, and ritual part of the doctrine of historic and literary development we have imperfectly followed. Is it not perfectly clear, that the growth of the doctrine in question has been but a natural action of the imagination on the materials furnished it; adding congruous particulars, one after another, until the view was complete, and therefore could extend no further? And is it not equally obvious, that it can lay no sort of claim to logical validity? The superstitious and arbitrary character of its intrinsic constituents, its irreconcilableness with science and philosophy, disprove, to all who dare honestly face the facts, every plea set up for it as an inspired revelation of truth. It is a mixture of poetry and speculation, credible enough in an early and uncritical age, but a hopeless stumbling block to the educated reason of the present day. Every one who brings a free intelligence to the subject will find it impossible not to recognize the same fanciful process of thought, the same poetic ingredients, here as in the schemes of those heathen religions whose principal portrayals we all regard as mythology. To argue that because earthly rulers, in their anger and power, send retributive armies against their rebellious subjects, to bring them to judgment, destroy their homes and cities, and lay waste their lands with fire and sword, therefore God, the supreme King, will do so by the whole world, is not to reason logically, but to poetize creatively. There can be no warrant for transferring the political and military relations between men and earthly sovereigns to the moral and spiritual relations between the human race and God, since the two sets of relations are wholly different. The relation of Creator and creature is immensely higher and wider than that of king and subject. He whose laws are everywhere incessantly self executing needs not to select and group and reserve his friends or foes for any climateric catastrophe. The common notion of a final judgment day the fanciful association of all the good together, on one side, to be saved; of all the bad together, on the other side, to be damned, applies to the divine government an imperfection belonging only to human governments. Surely every one must see, the moment the thought is stated, that this imaginative universalizing of the indignation of God, and carrying it to a climax, in the destruction of the world, is a mythological procedure utterly inapplicable to a Being who can know no anger, no caprice, no change, a Being whose will is universal truth, whose throne is immensity, whose robe is omnipresence.
Original Christianity, internally regarded in its divine truth, was the pure moral law exemplified in the personal traits of Jesus Christ, and universalized by his ascent out of the flesh into that kingdom of heaven which knows not nationalities or ceremonies. But original Christianity, externally and historically regarded, in the belief of its first disciples, was simply Judaism, with the addition of the faith that the Messiah had actually come in the person of Jesus Christ. The first disciples vividly cherished the prevalent Pharisaic doctrine that the Messiah would glorify his people, vanquish the heathen, raise and judge the dead, change the face of the earth, and inaugurate a holy reign of Israel in joy and splendor. This the Messiah was to do. But they believed Jesus to be the Messiah. Yet, before doing these things, he had been put to death. Therefore, they argued, he must come again, to finish his uncompleted mission. Such was the derivation of the apostolic and ecclesiastical doctrine of the speedy second advent of Christ to judge the dead and the living, and to wind up the present scheme of things. The belief was inevitable under the circumstances. To have believed otherwise, they must have reconstructed the current idea of the Messiah, and have seen in him no political monarch with an outward realm, but purely a king of truth.
For this they were not ready; though it seems as if, after the experience of eighteen hundred years, we ought by this time to be prepared to see that such was really the intention of Providence.
It is a question of primary interest, whether Jesus himself, in assuming the Messiahship, regarded it personally as an exclusively spiritual office, or as a literally including these royal and judicial functions in a visible form.
Jesus foretold, in the same imaginary used by the previous prophets, and familiar to the minds of his contemporaries, the speedy approach of frightful calamities, wars, rumor of wars, famine and slaughter, Jerusalem compassed with armies and destroyed. Then, he adds, the Son of man shall come in the clouds of heaven, with all his holy angels, and take possession of the scene, apportioning the destinies of the righteous and the wicked. The question is, whether this pictured reappearance, in such transcendent pomp and power, was meant by him as a literal prophecy, to be physically fulfilled in his own person; or as a moral horoscope of the destined fortunes of his religion, a figurative representation of the establishment and reign of his spiritual truth. The latter view seems to us to be the correct one.