PEACE AND INTERIOR DEVELOPMENTS OF THE CHURCH OF JUDEA.
From the year 38 to the year 44 no persecution seems to have weighed
upon the Church.[11.1] The faithful, no doubt, were far more prudent
than before the death of Stephen, and avoided speaking in public.
Perhaps, also, the troubles of the Jews who, during all the second
part of the reign of Caligula, were at variance with that prince,
contributed to favor the nascent sect. The Jews, in fact, were active
persecutors in proportion to the good understanding they maintained
with the Romans. To buy or to recompense their tranquillity, the latter
were led to augment their privileges, and in particular that one to
which they clung most closely--the right of killing persons whom they
regarded as unfaithful to their law.[11.2] Now the period at which we
have arrived was one of the most stormy of all in the turbulent history
of this singular people.
The antipathy which the Jews, by their moral superiority, their odd
customs, and also by their severity, excited in the populations among
whom they lived, was at its height, especially at Alexandria.[11.3]
This accumulated hatred took advantage, for its own satisfaction,
of the coming to the imperial throne of one of the most dangerous
madmen that ever wore a crown. Caligula, at least after the malady
which consummated his mental derangement (October 37), presented the
frightful spectacle of a maniac governing the world with the most
enormous powers ever put into the hands of any man. The disastrous
law of Cæsarism rendered such horrors possible, and left them without
remedy. This lasted three years and three months. One cannot without
shame narrate in a serious history that which is now to follow. Before
entering upon the recital of these saturnalia we cannot but exclaim
with Suetonius: _Reliqua ut de monstro narranda sunt_.
The most inoffensive pastime of this madman was the care of his own
divinity.[11.4] In this he used a sort of bitter irony, a mixture of
the serious and the comic (for the monster was not wanting in wit), a
sort of profound derision of the human race. The enemies of the Jews
were not slow to perceive the advantage they might derive from this
mania. The religious abasement of the world was such that not a protest
was heard against the sacrilege of the Cæsar; every worship hastened
to bestow upon him the titles and the honors which it had reserved for
its gods. It is to the eternal glory of the Jews that, in the midst of
this ignoble idolatry, they uttered the cry of outraged conscience.
The principle of intolerance which was in them, and which led them to
so many cruel acts, showed here its bright side. Alone affirming their
religion to be the absolute religion, they would not bend to the odious
caprice of the tyrant. This was the source of untold troubles for them.
It needed only that there should be in any city some man discontented
with the synagogue, spiteful, or simply mischievous, to bring about
frightful consequences. At one time the people would insist on erecting
an altar to Caligula in the very place where the Jews could least of
all suffer it.[11.5] At another, a troupe of ragamuffins would collect,
hooting and crying out against the Jews for alone refusing to place the
statue of the emperor in their houses of prayer; then the people would
run to the synagogues and the oratories; they would install there the
bust of Caligula;[11.6] and the unfortunate Jews were placed in the
alternative of either renouncing their religion, or committing treason.
Thence followed frightful vexations.
Such pleasantries had been several times repeated, when a still more
diabolical idea was suggested to the emperor. This was to place a
colossal golden statue of himself in the sanctuary of the temple
at Jerusalem, and to have the temple itself dedicated to his own
divinity.[11.7] This odious intrigue had very nearly hastened by thirty
years the revolt and the ruin of the Jewish nation. The moderation
of the imperial legate, Publius Petronius, and the intervention of
King Herod Agrippa, favorite of Caligula, prevented the catastrophe.
But until the moment in which the sword of Chæræa delivered the earth
from the most execrable tyrant it had as yet endured, the Jews lived
everywhere in terror. Philo has preserved for us the unheard-of scene
which occurred when the deputation of which he was the chief was
admitted to see the emperor.[11.8] Caligula received them during a
visit he was paying to the villas of Mæcenas and of Lamia, near the
sea, in the environs of Pozzuoli. He was on that day in a vein of
gaiety. Helicon, his favorite joker, had been relating to him all
sorts of buffooneries about the Jews. "Ah, then, it is you," said he
to them with a bitter smile and showing his teeth, "who alone will not
recognise me for a god, and prefer to adore one whose name you cannot
even utter!" He accompanied these words with a frightful blasphemy. The
Jews trembled; their Alexandrian enemies were the first to take up the
word: "You would still more, O Sire, detest these people and all their
nation, if you knew the aversion they have for you; for they alone have
refused to offer sacrifices for your health when all other people did
so!"
At these words, the Jews cried out that it was a calumny, and that they
had three times offered for the prosperity of the emperor the most
solemn sacrifices known to their religion. "Yes," said Caligula, with a
very comical seriousness, "you have sacrificed, and so far, well; but
then it was not to me that you sacrificed. What advantage do I derive
from it?" Thereupon, turning his back upon them, he strode through the
apartments, giving orders for repairs, incessantly going up and down
stairs. The unfortunate deputies, and among them Philo, eighty years of
age, the most venerable man of the time, perhaps--Jesus being no longer
living--followed him up and down out of breath, trembling, the object
of derision to the assembled company. Caligula turning suddenly, said
to them: "By the by, why will you not eat pork?" The flatterers burst
into laughter; some of the officers, with a severe tone, reminded them
that they offended the majesty of the emperor by immoderate laughter.
The Jews stammered; one of them awkwardly said: "There are some persons
who do not eat lamb." "Ah!" said the emperor, "they have good reason;
lamb is insipid." Some time after, he made a show of inquiring into
their business; then, when speaking had just begun, he left them and
went off to give orders about the decoration of a hall which he wanted
to have furnished with polished stones. He returned, affecting an air
of moderation, and asked the deputation if they had anything to add;
and as the latter resumed their interrupted discourse, he turned his
back upon them to go and see another hall which he was ornamenting with
paintings. This game of tiger sporting with its prey lasted for hours.
The Jews were expecting death; but at the last moment the claws of the
beast relaxed. "Well," said Caligula, while repassing, "these folks are
decidedly less guilty than pitiable for not believing in my divinity."
Thus could the gravest questions be treated under the horrible regimen
created by the baseness of the world, cherished by a soldiery and a
populace about equally vile, and maintained by the dissoluteness of
nearly all.
We can easily understand how so oppressive a situation must have taken
from the Jews of the time of Marcellus much of that audacity which made
them speak so proudly to Pilate. Already almost entirely detached from
the temple, the Christians must have been much less alarmed than the
Jews at the sacrilegious projects of Caligula. They were, moreover,
too little numerous for their existence to be known at Rome. The storm
of the time of Caligula, like that which resulted in the taking of
Jerusalem by Titus, passed over their heads, and was in many regards
serviceable to them. Everything which weakened Jewish independence was
favorable to them, since it was so much taken away from the power of a
suspicious orthodoxy, maintaining its pretensions by severe penalties.
This period of peace was fruitful in interior developments. The nascent
Church was divided into three provinces: Judea, Samaria, Galilee[11.9],
to which Damascus was no doubt attached. The primacy of Jerusalem was
uncontested. The Church of this city, which had been dispersed after
the death of Stephen, was quickly reconstituted. The Apostles had never
quitted the city. The brothers of the Lord continued to reside there,
and to wield a great authority.[11.10] It does not seem that this
new Church of Jerusalem was organized in so rigorous a manner as the
first; the community of goods was not strictly reëstablished in it. But
there was founded a large fund for the poor, to which were added the
contributions sent by minor churches to the mother church, the origin
and permanent source of their faith.[11.11]
Peter undertook frequent apostolical journeys in the environs
of Jerusalem.[11.12] He always enjoyed a great reputation as a
thaumaturgist. At Lydda[11.13] in particular he passed for having
cured a paralytic named Æneas, a miracle which is said to have led
to numerous conversions in the plain of Saron.[11.14] From Lydda he
repaired to Joppa,[11.15] a city which appears to have been a centre
for Christianity. Cities of workmen, of sailors, of poor people, where
the orthodox Jews were not dominant, were those in which the new sect
found the best dispositions. Peter made a long sojourn at Joppa, at the
house of a tanner named Simon who dwelt near the sea.[11.16] Working in
leather was an industry almost unclean, according to the Mosaic code;
it was not lawful to visit too frequently those who carried it on,
so that the curriers had to live in a district by themselves.[11.17]
Peter, in choosing such a host, gave a proof of his indifference to
Jewish prejudices, and worked for that ennoblement of petty callings
which constitutes a noble feature of the Christian spirit.
The organization of works of charity was soon actively pursued. The
church of Joppa possessed a woman admirably named in Aramaic, _Tabitha_
(gazelle), and in Greek, _Dorcas_,[11.18] who consecrated all her cares
to the poor.[11.19] She was rich, it seems, and distributed her wealth
in alms. This worthy lady had formed a society of pious widows, who
spent their days with her in weaving clothes for the poor.[11.20] As
the schism between Christianity and Judaism was not yet consummated,
it is probable that the Jews shared in the benefit of these acts of
charity. The "saints and widows"[11.21] were thus pious persons, doing
good to all, a sort of friars and nuns, whom only the most austere
devotees of a pedantic orthodoxy could suspect, _fraticelli_, loved by
the people, devout, charitable, full of pity.
The germ of those associations of women, which are one of the glories
of Christianity, thus existed in the first churches of Judea. At Jaffa
commenced that series of the veiled women, clothed in linen, who were
destined to continue through centuries the tradition of charitable
acts. Tabitha was the mother of a family which will have no end as
long as there are miseries to be solaced and good feminine instincts
to assuage them. It is related further on, that Peter raised her from
the dead. Alas! death, utterly senseless, utterly revolting as it
is in such a case, is inflexible. When the most exquisite soul has
evaporated, the decree is irrevocable; the most excellent woman can
no more respond to the invitation of the friendly voices which would
fain recall her, than can the vulgar and frivolous. But ideas are not
subject to the conditions of matter. Virtue and goodness escape the
fangs of death. Tabitha had no need to be resuscitated. For the sake
of three or four days more of this sad life, why disturb her sweet and
eternal repose? Let her sleep in peace; the day of the just will come!
In these very mixed cities, the problem of the admission of pagans
to baptism was propounded with much urgency. Peter was strongly
preöccupied with it. One day while he was praying at Joppa, on the
terrace of the tanner's house, having before him this sea that was
soon going to bear the new faith to all the empire, he had a prophetic
ecstasy. Plunged into a state of dreamy reverie, he thought he
experienced a sensation of hunger, and asked for something to eat. Now
while they were making it ready for him, he saw the heavens opened, and
a cloth tied at the four corners come down thence. Looking inside the
cloth he saw there all sorts of animals, and thought he heard a voice
saying to him: "Kill and eat." And on his objecting that many of these
animals were impure, he was answered: "Call not that unclean which God
has cleansed." This, as it appears, was repeated three times. Peter
was persuaded that these animals represented the mass of the Gentiles,
which God Himself had just rendered fit for the holy communion of the
kingdom of God.[11.22]
An occasion was soon presented for applying these principles. From
Joppa, Peter repaired to Cesarea. There he came into relations with
a centurion named Cornelius.[11.23] The garrison of Cesarea was
formed, at least in part, of one of those cohorts composed of Italian
volunteers which were called _Italicæ_.[11.24] The complete name
for which this stood may have been _cohors prima Augustus Italica
civium Romanorum_.[11.25] Cornelius was a centurion of this cohort,
consequently an Italian and a Roman citizen. He was a man of probity,
who had long felt drawn towards the aconotheistic worship of the
Jews. He prayed, gave alms; practised, in a word, those precepts of
natural religion which are taken for granted by Judaism; but he was
not circumcised; he was not a proselyte in any degree whatever; he was
a pious pagan, an Israelite in heart, nothing more.[11.26] All his
household and some soldiers of his command were, it is said, in the
same state of mind.[11.27] Cornelius applied for admission into the new
Church. Peter, whose nature was open and benevolent, granted it to him,
and the centurion was baptized.[11.28]
Perhaps Peter saw at first no difficulty[11.29] in this; but on his
return to Jerusalem he was severely reproached for it. He had openly
violated the law, he had gone in among the uncircumcised and had eaten
with them. The question was an important one; it was no other than
whether the law were abolished, whether it was permissible to violate
it in proselytism, whether Gentiles could be received on an equal
footing into the Church. Peter, to defend himself, related the vision
he had at Joppa. Subsequently the fact of the centurion served as an
argument in the great question of the baptism of the uncircumcised. To
give it more force it was supposed that each phase of this important
business had been marked by a revelation from Heaven. It was related
that after long prayers Cornelius had seen an angel who ordered him
to go and inquire for Peter at Joppa; that the symbolical vision of
Peter took place at the very hour of the arrival of the messengers from
Cornelius; that, moreover, God had taken it upon Himself to legitimize
all that had been done, seeing that the Holy Ghost had descended upon
Cornelius and upon his household, the latter having spoken strange
tongues and sung psalms after the fashion of the other believers. Was
it natural to refuse baptism to persons who had received the Holy Ghost?
The Church of Jerusalem was still exclusively composed of Jews and of
proselytes. The Holy Ghost being shed upon the uncircumcised before
baptism, appeared an extraordinary fact. It is probable that there
existed thenceforth a party opposed in principle to the admission of
Gentiles, and that every one did not accept the explanations of Peter.
The author of the _Acts_[11.30] would have it that the approbation was
unanimous. But in a few years we shall see the question revived with
much greater intensity.[11.31] The fact of the good centurion was,
perhaps, like that of the Ethiopian eunuch, accepted as an exceptional
one, justified by a revelation and an express order from God. The
matter was far from being settled. This was the first controversy in
the bosom of the Church; the paradise of interior peace had lasted six
or seven years.
About the year 40, the great question on which hung all the future of
Christianity appears thus to have been propounded. Peter and Philip
took a very just view of the true solution, and baptized pagans. It
is difficult, no doubt, in the two accounts given us by the author of
the _Acts_ on this subject, and which are partly sketched one from the
other, not to recognise a system. The author of the _Acts_ belongs to a
party of conciliation, favorable to the introduction of pagans into the
Church, and who is not willing to confess the violence of the divisions
to which the affair gave rise. One feels strongly that in writing the
episodes of the eunuch, of the centurion, and even of the conversion of
the Samaritans, this author means not only to narrate facts, but seeks
especially precedents for an opinion. On the other hand, we cannot
admit that he invents the facts which he narrates. The conversions of
the eunuch of Candace, and of the centurion Cornelius, are probably
real facts, presented and transformed according to the needs of the
thesis in view of which the book of the Acts was composed.
Paul, who was destined, some ten or eleven years later, to give to this
discussion so decisive a bearing, had not yet meddled with it. He was
in the Hauran, or at Damascus, preaching, refuting the Jews, placing at
the service of the new faith as much ardor as he had shown in fighting
against it. The fanaticism, of which he had been the instrument, was
not long in pursuing him in his turn. The Jews resolved to destroy him.
They obtained from the ethnarch, who governed Damascus in the name of
Hârath, an order to arrest him. Paul hid himself. It was known that he
had to leave the city; the ethnarch, who wanted to please the Jews,
placed detachments at the gates to seize his person; but the brethren
enabled him to escape by night, letting him down in a basket from the
window of a house which overhung the ramparts.[11.32]
Having escaped this danger, Paul turned his eyes towards Jerusalem.
He had been a Christian for three years,[11.33] and had not yet seen
the apostles. His rigid, unyielding character, prone to isolation,
had made him at first turn his back as it were upon the great family
into which he had just entered in spite of himself, and prefer for his
first apostolate a new country, in which he would find no colleague.
There was awakened in him, however, a desire to see Peter.[11.34] He
recognised his authority, and designated him, as every one did, by the
name of _Cephas_, "the stone." He repaired then to Jerusalem, taking
the same road, but in an opposite direction to that he had traversed
three years before in a state of mind so different.
His position at Jerusalem was extremely false and embarrassing. It
had been understood there, no doubt, that the persecutor had become
the most zealous of evangelists, and the first defender of the faith
which he had formerly sought to destroy.[11.35] But there remained
great prejudices against him. Many feared some horrible plot on his
part. They had seen him so enraged, so cruel, so zealous in entering
houses and rending open family secrets in order to find victims, that
he was believed capable of playing an odious farce in order to destroy
those whom he hated.[11.36] He stayed, as it seems, in the house of
Peter.[11.37] Many disciples remained deaf to his advances, and shrank
from him.[11.38] A man of courage and will, Barnabas, played at this
moment a decisive part. As a Cyprian and a new convert, he understood
better than the Galilean disciples the position of Paul. He came to
meet him, took him in a manner by the hand, introduced him to the
most suspicious, and became his surety.[11.39] By this act of wisdom
and penetration, Barnabas won at the hands of the Christian world the
highest degree of merit. It was he who appreciated Paul; it was to
him that the Church owes the most extraordinary of her founders. The
fruitful friendship of these two apostolic men, a friendship that no
cloud ever tarnished, notwithstanding many differences in opinion,
afterwards led to their association in the work of missions to the
Gentiles. This grand association dates, in one sense, from Paul's first
sojourn at Jerusalem. Among the causes of the faith of the world we
must count the generous movement of Barnabas, stretching out his hand
to the suspected and forsaken Paul; the profound intuition which led
him to discover the soul of an apostle under that humiliated air; the
frankness with which he broke the ice and levelled the obstacles raised
between the convert and his new brethren by the unfortunate antecedents
of the former, and perhaps, also, by certain traits of his character.
Paul, meantime, systematically as it were, avoided seeing the apostles.
It is he himself says so, and he takes the trouble to affirm it with
an oath; he saw only Peter, and James the brother of the Lord.[11.40]
His sojourn lasted only two weeks.[11.41] Assuredly it is possible
that at the epoch in which he wrote the Epistle to the Galatians
(towards 56), Paul may have found himself led, by the needs of the
moment, to give some little coloring to his relations with the
apostles; to represent them as more harsh, more imperious, than they
were in reality. Towards 56 the essential point for him to prove was
that he had received nothing from Jerusalem--that he was in no wise
the mandatory of the Council of Twelve established in this city. His
attitude at Jerusalem would have been the proud and lofty bearing
of a master who avoids relations with other masters in order not to
have the air of subordinating himself to them, and not the humble and
repentant mien of a sinner ashamed of the past, as the author of the
_Acts_ represents. We cannot believe that from the year 44 Paul was
animated by this jealous care to preserve his own originality, which he
showed at a later day. The rarity of his interviews with the apostles,
and the brevity of his sojourn at Jerusalem, arose probably from his
embarrassment in the presence of people of quite another nature than
his own, and full of prejudices against him, rather than from a refined
polity, which would have revealed to him fifteen years in advance the
disadvantages there might be in his frequenting their society.
In reality, that which must have erected a sort of wall between the
apostles and Paul, was chiefly the difference of their character and
of their education. The apostles were all Galileans; they had not been
at the great Jewish schools; they had seen Jesus; they remembered
his words; they were good and pious folk, at times a little solemn
and simple-hearted. Paul was a man of action, full of fire, only
moderately mystical, enrolled, as by a superior force, in a sect which
was not that of his first adoption. Revolt, protestation, were his
habitual sentiments.[11.42] His Jewish education was much superior to
that of all his new brethren. But not having heard Jesus, not having
been appointed by him, he had, according to Christian ideas, a great
inferiority. Now Paul was not made to accept any secondary place. His
haughty individuality demanded a position for himself. It is probably
towards this time that there sprang up in his mind the proud idea that
after all he had nothing to envy those who had known Jesus and had been
chosen by him, since he also had seen Jesus and had received from Jesus
a direct revelation and the commission of his apostleship. Even those
who had been honored by the personal appearance to them of the risen
Christ, had no more than he had. Although the last, his vision had been
no less remarkable. It had taken place under circumstances which gave
it a peculiar mark of importance and of distinction.[11.43] Signal
error! The echo of the voice of Jesus was found in the discourses of
the humblest of His disciples. With all his Jewish science, Paul could
not make up for the immense disadvantage under which he was placed
by his tardy initiation. The Christ whom he had seen on the road to
Damascus was not, whatever he might say, the Christ of Galilee; it was
the Christ of his imagination, of his own senses. Although he may have
been most attentive to gather the words of the Master,[11.44] it is
clear that he was only a disciple at second-hand. If Paul had met Jesus
during his life, it may be doubtful whether he would have attached
himself to Him. His doctrine will be his own, not that of Jesus; the
revelations of which he is so proud are the fruit of his own brain.
These ideas, which he dared not as yet communicate, rendered his stay
at Jerusalem very disagreeable. At the end of a fortnight he took leave
of Peter and went away. He had seen so few people that he ventured
to say that no one in the churches of Judea knew him by sight, or
knew aught of him, save by hearsay.[11.45] At a subsequent period he
attributed this sudden departure to a revelation. He related that being
one day in the temple praying, he was in an extasy, and saw Jesus in
person, and received from Him the order to quit Jerusalem immediately,
"because they were not inclined to receive his testimony." In exchange
for these hard hearts, Jesus had promised him the apostolate of distant
nations, and an auditory more docile to his voice.[11.46] Those who
would fain hide the traces of the many ruptures caused by the coming of
this insubordinate disciple into the Church, pretended that Paul passed
quite a long time at Jerusalem, living with the brethren on a footing
of the most complete liberty; but that, having undertaken to preach
to the Hellenist Jews, he was very nearly killed by them, so that the
brethren had to watch over him and protect him, and finally took him to
Cesarea.[11.47]
It is probable, in fact, that from Jerusalem he did repair to Cesarea.
But he stayed there only a short time, and then set out to traverse
Syria, and afterwards Cilicia.[11.48] He was, no doubt, already
preaching, but on his own account, and without any understanding with
anybody. Tarsus, his native place, was his habitual sojourn during this
period of his apostolical life, which we may reckon as having lasted
about two years.[11.49] It is possible that the churches of Cilicia
owed their origin to him.[11.50] Still, the life of Paul was not at
this epoch that which we see it to have been subsequently. He did
not assume the title of an apostle, which was then strictly reserved
to the Twelve.[11.51] It was only from the time of his association
with Barnabas (year 45) that he entered upon that career of sacred
peregrinations and preachings which made of him the type of the
travelling missionary.