burning over that scene of horror with a power such as it has in the
full depth of an English summer-time. But instead of this, the face of
the heavens was black, and the noonday sun was "turned into darkness,"
on "this great and terrible day of the Lord." It could have been no
darkness of any natural eclipse, for the Paschal moon was at the full;
but it was one of those "signs from heaven" for which, during the
ministry of Jesus, the Pharisees had so often clamored in vain. The
early Fathers appealed to pagan authorities--the historian Phallus, the
chronicler Phlegon--for such a darkness; but we have no means of testing
the accuracy of these references, and it is quite possible that the
darkness was a local gloom which hung densely over the guilty city and
its immediate neighborhood. But whatever it was, it clearly filled the
minds of all who beheld it with yet deeper misgiving. The taunts and
jeers of the Jewish priests and the heathen soldiers were evidently
confined to the earlier hours of the Crucifixion. Its later stages seem
to have thrilled alike the guilty and the innocent with emotions of
dread and horror. Of the incidents of those last three hours we are told
nothing, and that awful obscuration of the noonday sun may well have
overawed every heart into an inaction respecting which there was nothing
to relate. What Jesus suffered _then_ for us men and our salvation we
cannot know, for during those three hours he hung upon his cross in
silence and darkness; or, if he spoke, there was none there to record
his words. But toward the close of that time his anguish culminated,
and, emptied to the very uttermost of that glory which he had since the
world began, drinking to the very deepest dregs the cup of humiliation
and bitterness, enduring not only to have taken upon him the form of a
servant, but also to suffer the last infamy which human hatred could
impose on servile helplessness, he uttered that mysterious cry, of which
the full significance will never be fathomed by man: _Eli, Eli, lama
Sabachthani?_ ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?")
In those words, quoting the psalm in which the early Fathers rightly
saw a far-off prophecy of the whole passion of Christ, he borrowed from
David's utter agony the expression of his own. In that hour he was
alone. Sinking from depth to depth of unfathomable suffering, until, at
the close approach of a death which--because he was God, and yet had
been made man--was more awful to him than it could ever be to any of the
sons of men, it seemed as if even his divine humanity could endure no
more.
Doubtless the voice of the sufferer--though uttered loudly in that
paroxysm of an emotion which, in another, would almost have touched the
verge of despair--was yet rendered more uncertain and indistinct from
the condition of exhaustion in which he hung; and so, amid the darkness,
and confused noise, and dull footsteps of the moving multitude, there
were some who did not hear what he had said. They had caught only the
first syllable, and said to one another that he had called on the name
of Elijah. The readiness with which they seized this false impression is
another proof of the wild state of excitement and terror--the
involuntary dread of something great and unforeseen and terrible--to
which they had been reduced from their former savage insolence. For
Elijah, the great prophet of the Old Covenant, was inextricably mingled
with all the Jewish expectations of a Messiah, and these expectations
were full of wrath. The coming of Elijah would be the coming of a day of
fire, in which the sun should be turned into blackness and the moon into
blood, and the powers of heaven should be shaken. Already the noonday
sun was shrouded in unnatural eclipse; might not some awful form at any
moment rend the heavens and come down, touch the mountains and they
should smoke? The vague anticipation of conscious guilt was unfulfilled.
Not such as yet was to be the method of God's workings. His messages to
man for many ages more were not to be in the thunder and earthquake, not
in rushing wind or roaring flame, but in the "still small voice"
speaking always amid the apparent silences of Time in whispers
intelligible to man's heart, but in which there is neither speech nor
language, though the voice is heard.
But now the end was very rapidly approaching, and Jesus, who had been
hanging for nearly six hours upon the cross, was suffering from that
torment of thirst which is most difficult of all for the human frame to
bear--perhaps the most unmitigated of the many separate sources of
anguish which were combined in this worst form of death. No doubt this
burning thirst was aggravated by seeing the Roman soldiers drinking so
near the cross; and happily for mankind, Jesus had never sanctioned the
unnatural affectation of stoic impassibility. And so he uttered the one
sole word of physical suffering which had been wrung from him by all the
hours in which he had endured the extreme of all that man can inflict.
He cried aloud, "I thirst." Probably a few hours before, the cry would
have only provoked a roar of frantic mockery; but now the lookers-on
were reduced by awe to a readier humanity. Near the cross there lay on
the ground the large earthen vessel containing the _posca_, which was
the ordinary drink of the Roman soldiers. The mouth of it was filled
with a piece of sponge, which served as a cork. Instantly some one--we
know not whether he was friend or enemy, or merely one who was there out
of idle curiosity--took out the sponge and dipped it in the posca to
give it to Jesus. But low as was the elevation of the cross, the head of
the sufferer, as it rested on the horizontal beam of the accursed tree,
was just beyond the man's reach; and therefore he put the sponge at the
end of a stalk of hyssop--about a foot long--and held it up to the
parched and dying lips. Even this simple act of pity, which Jesus did
not refuse, seemed to jar upon the condition of nervous excitement with
which some of the multitude were looking on. "Let be," they said to the
man, "let us see whether Elias is coming to save him." The man did not
desist from his act of mercy, but when it was done he, too, seems to
have echoed those uneasy words. But Elias came not, nor human comforter,
nor angel deliverer. It was the will of God, it was the will of the Son
of God, that he should be "perfected through sufferings"; that--for the
eternal example of all his children as long as the world should last--he
should "endure unto the end."
And now the end was come. Once more, in the words of the sweet Psalmist
of Israel, but adding to them that title of trustful love which, through
him, is permitted to the use of all mankind, "Father," he said, "into
thy hands I commend my spirit." Then with one more great effort he
uttered the last cry--"It is finished." It may be that that great cry
ruptured some of the vessels of his heart, for no sooner had it been
uttered than he bowed his head upon his breast and yielded his life, "a
ransom for many"--a willing sacrifice to his Heavenly Father. "Finished
was his holy life; with his life his struggle, with his struggle his
work, with his work the redemption, with the redemption the foundation
of the new world." At that moment the veil of the Temple was rent in
twain from the top to the bottom. An earthquake shook the earth and
split the rocks, and as it rolled away from their places the great
stones which closed and covered the cavern sepulchres of the Jews, so it
seemed to the imaginations of many to have disimprisoned the spirits of
the dead, and to have filled the air with ghostly visitants, who after
Christ had risen appeared to linger in the Holy City. These
circumstances of amazement, joined to all they had observed in the
bearing of the Crucified, cowed even the cruel and gay indifference of
the Roman soldiers. On the centurion who was in command of them the
whole scene had exercised a yet deeper influence. As he stood opposite
to the cross and saw the Saviour die, he glorified God and exclaimed,
"This Man was in truth righteous"--nay, more, "This Man was a Son of
God." Even the multitude, utterly sobered from their furious excitement
and frantic rage, began to be weighed down with a guilty consciousness
that the scene which they had witnessed had in it something more awful
than they could have conceived, and as they returned to Jerusalem they
wailed and beat upon their breasts. Well might they do so! This was the
last drop in a full cup of wickedness: this was the beginning of the end
of their city and name and race.
And in truth that scene was more awful than they, or even we, can know.
The secular historian, be he ever so sceptical, cannot fail to see in it
the central point of the world's history. Whether he be a believer in
Christ or not, he cannot refuse to admit that this new religion grew
from the smallest of all seeds to be a mighty tree, so that the birds of
the air took refuge in its branches; that it was the little stone cut
without hands which dashed into pieces the colossal image of heathen
greatness, and grew till it became a great mountain and filled the
earth. Alike to the infidel and to the believer the Crucifixion is the
boundary instant between ancient and modern days. Morally and
physically, no less than spiritually, the faith of Christ was the
_palingenesia_ of the world. It came like the dawn of a new spring to
nations "effete with the drunkenness of crime." The struggle was long
and hard, but from the hour when Christ died began the death-knell to
every satanic tyranny and every tolerated abomination. From that hour
holiness became the universal ideal of all who name the name of Christ
as their Lord, and the attainment of that ideal the common heritage of
souls in which his spirit dwells.
The effects, then, of the work of Christ are even to the unbeliever
indisputable and historical. It expelled cruelty; it curbed passion; it
branded suicide; it punished and repressed an execrable infanticide; it
drove the shameless impurities of heathendom into a congenial darkness.
There was hardly a class whose wrongs it did not remedy. It rescued the
gladiator; it freed the slave; it protected the captive; it nursed the
sick; it sheltered the orphan; it elevated the woman; it shrouded as
with a halo of sacred innocence the tender years of the child. In every
region of life its ameliorating influence was felt. It changed pity from
a vice into a virtue. It elevated poverty from a curse into a beatitude.
It ennobled labor from a vulgarity into a dignity and a duty. It
sanctified marriage from little more than a burdensome convention into
little less than a blessed sacrament. It revealed for the first time the
angelic beauty of a purity of which men had despaired and of a meekness
at which they had utterly scoffed. It created the very conception of
charity, and broadened the limits of its obligation from the narrow
circle of a neighborhood to the widest horizons of the race. And while
it thus evolved the idea of humanity as a common brotherhood, even where
its tidings were _not_ believed--all over the world, wherever its
tidings _were_ believed, it cleansed the life and elevated the soul of
each individual man. And in all lands where it has moulded the
characters of its true believers it has created hearts so pure and lives
so peaceful and homes so sweet that it might seem as though those angels
who had heralded its advent had also whispered to every depressed and
despairing sufferer among the sons of men: "Though ye have lien among
the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove, that is covered with
silver wings, and her feathers like gold."
Others, if they _can_ and _will_, may see in such a work as this no
divine Providence, they may think it philosophical enlightenment to hold
that Christianity and Christendom are adequately accounted for by the
idle dreams of a noble self-deceiver and the passionate hallucinations
of a recovered demoniac. We persecute them not, we denounce them not, we
judge them not; but we say that, unless all life be a hollow, there
could have been no such miserable origin to the sole religion of the
world which holds the perfect balance between philosophy and popularity,
between religion and morals, between meek submissiveness and the pride
of freedom, between the ideal and the real, between the inward and the
outward, between modest stillness and heroic energy--nay, between the
tenderest conservatism and the boldest plans of world-wide reformation.
The witness of history to Christ is a witness which has been given with
irresistible cogency; and it has been so given to none but him.
But while even the unbeliever must see what the life and death of Jesus
have effected in the world, to the believer that life and death are
something deeper still; to him they are nothing less than a resurrection
from the dead. He sees in the cross of Christ something which far
transcends its historical significance. He sees in it the fulfilment of
all prophecy as well as the consummation of all history; he sees in it
the explanation of the mystery of birth, and the conquest over the
mystery of the grave. In that life he finds a perfect example; in that
death an infinite redemption. As he contemplates the Incarnation and the
Crucifixion, he no longer feels that God is far away, and that this
earth is but a disregarded speck in the infinite azure, and he himself
but an insignificant atom chance-thrown amid the thousand million living
souls of an innumerable race, but he exclaims in faith and hope and
love: "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men; yea, he will be their
God, and they shall be his people." "Ye are the temple of the living
God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them."
The sun was westering as the darkness rolled away from the completed
sacrifice. They who had not thought it a pollution to inaugurate their
feast by the murder of their Messiah, were seriously alarmed lest the
sanctity of the following day--which began at sunset--should be
compromised by the hanging of the corpses on the cross. And horrible to
relate, the crucified often lived for many hours--nay, even for two
days--in their torture. The Jews therefore begged Pilate that their legs
might be broken, and their bodies taken down. This _crurifragium_, as it
was called, consisted in striking the legs of the sufferers with a heavy
mallet, a violence which seemed always to have hastened, if it did not
instantly cause, their death. Nor would the Jews be the only persons who
would be anxious to hasten the end by giving the deadly blow. Until life
was extinct the soldiers appointed to guard the execution dared not
leave the ground. The wish, therefore, was readily granted. The soldiers
broke the legs of the two malefactors first, and then, coming to Jesus,
found that the great cry had been indeed his last, and that he was dead
already. They did not therefore break his legs, and thus unwittingly
preserved the symbolism of that Paschal lamb, of which he was the
antetype, and of which it had been commanded that "a bone of it shall
not be broken." And yet, as he might be only in a syncope--as instances
had been known in which men apparently dead had been taken down from the
cross and resuscitated--and as the lives of the soldiers would have had
to answer for any irregularity, one of them, in order to make death
certain, drove the broad head of his _hasta_ into his side. The wound,
as it was meant to do, pierced the region of the heart, and "forthwith,"
says St. John, with an emphatic appeal to the truthfulness of his
eye-witness--an appeal which would be singularly and impossibly
blasphemous if the narrative were the forgery which so much elaborate
modern criticism has wholly failed to prove that it is--"forthwith came
there out blood and water." Whether the water was due to some abnormal
pathological conditions caused by the dreadful complication of the
Saviour's sufferings, or whether it rather means that the pericardium
had been rent by the spear point, and that those who took down the body
observed some drops of its serum mingled with the blood, in either case
that lance thrust was sufficient to hush all the heretical assertions
that Jesus had only _seemed_ to die; and as it assured the soldiers, so
should it assure all who have doubted, that he, who on the third day
rose again, had in truth been crucified, dead, and buried, and that his
soul had passed into the unseen world.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] The disputed date of the Crucifixion of Jesus--long variously
placed between A.D. 29 and 33--is definitely fixed by many later
authorities at the year 30.
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY
A.D. 33
RENAN WISE NEWMAN
It is a favorite view of historians and critical students that
Jesus was born at a time when the world seemed especially prepared
for his birth. The correspondence between world conditions then and
the actual process of Christianity in its rise and early spread
appears to conform to evolutionary laws as regarded in the light of
modern interpretation.
In its origin Christianity is most intimately connected with
Judaism, the parent religion. The known world, however, in the time
of Jesus was largely under Roman dominion. This was true of the
land where Jesus was born. The Roman Empire was then comparatively
at peace, and it was the admonition of St. Paul that the first
Christians should maintain that peace. The wide sovereignty of Rome
gave the apostles of Christ access to different nations, many of
whom had become civilized under Roman influence. But pure
monotheism existed only among the Jews. All other nations had a
variety of gods and peculiar forms of worship. In most of the pagan
religions there were elements of truth and beauty, but they lacked
in ethical principles and in moral application to life. Most of
their priestcraft was a vulgar imposition upon the ignorance and
credulity of the common people. The prevailing philosophies--which,
among the more enlightened, took the place of religion--were the
Grecian, adopted also by the Romans, and the oriental, with
numerous followers in Persia, Syria, Chaldæa, Egypt, and likewise
among the Jews. But the philosophers were divided into antagonistic
sects. Out of such conditions no practical religion could develop.
In the doctrines of Buddhism were to be found the spirit and
purpose of a devout and humanely religious people, but the
intricate mythology and racial and other limitations of Buddhism
forbade that, although it conquered the half of Asia, it should
ever become a universal faith.
The condition of the Jews at this period was little better than
that of other peoples. Among the Jews there was a lack of
intellectual unity, and their moral ideals had been lowered.
Oppressed by Herod, the tributary Roman King--who, although
professedly a Jew, copied the open despisers of all religion--they
yielded to the influences of Roman luxury and licentiousness which
spread over Palestine. Although still conducted by the priests and
Levites and under the eye of the Sanhedrim or senate, the Jewish
religion had lost much of its earlier character. Like philosophy,
it was vexed with contending sects. Strict observance of the Mosaic
law and the performance of prescriptive rites and duties were in
the main regarded as the sum of religion.
The race of prophets appeared extinct until prophecy was revived in
John the Baptist. The successors of the Maccabæan patriots were not
animated by their spirit. There was widespread and passionate
expectation of a national messiah, but not such a messiah as John
proclaimed and Jesus proved to be; rather a powerful warrior and
vindicator of Jewish liberty. Galilee, the early home of Jesus, was
especially stirred with messianic fervor. In such a condition of
the national mind, and at such a stage of the world's empire, it
seems natural in the course of spiritual evolution that such a
teacher as Jesus--a spiritual messiah--should arise to be the
deliverer not of one people only, but of the world itself. Among
the Jewish doctors when Jesus was a child was at least one wise and
liberal rabbi, Hillel, a Pharisee, the great reformer of his time,
and "the most eminent Jew of the generation before the birth of
Jesus." At his feet the boy Jesus may have sat and learned lessons
of wisdom and liberality. It gives us a reassurance of spiritual
continuity to think that the teachings of Hillel may have "helped
to inspire the humane and tender counsels of the founder of
Christianity."
In grouping the glowing words of Renan, with their fine spiritual
interpretations and descriptive eloquence, the judgments of an
eminent contemporary Jewish scholar, and Newman's learned yet
simple portrayal of the Church as it took form in its early
environment, and as it was seen through the media of contemporary
governments, customs, and criticisms, it is believed that readers
will derive satisfaction, and will be aided in their own inquiries,
through this threefold presentation. On so vast a subject, with its
momentous implications, no single author, however profound his
genius, can do more than contribute a partial essay toward the
many-sided truth.
JOSEPH ERNEST RENAN
From the moment of the arrest of Jesus, and immediately after his death,
it is probable that many of the disciples had already found their way to
the northern provinces. At the time of the Resurrection a rumor was
spread abroad, according to which it was in Galilee that he would be
seen again. Some of the women who had been to the sepulchre came back
with the report that the angel had said to them that Jesus had already
preceded them into Galilee. Others said that it was Jesus himself who
had ordered them to go there. Now and then some people said that they
themselves remembered that he had said so during his lifetime.
What is certain is that at the end of a few days, probably after the
Paschal Feast of the Passover had been quite over, the disciples
believed they had a command to return into their own country, and to it
accordingly they returned. Perhaps the visions began to abate at
Jerusalem. A species of melancholy seized them. The brief appearances of
Jesus were not sufficient to compensate for the enormous void left by
his absence. In a melancholy mood they thought of the lake and of the
beautiful mountains where they had received a foretaste of the kingdom
of God. The women especially wished, at any cost, to return to the
country where they had enjoyed so much happiness. It must be observed
that the order to depart came especially from them. That odious city
weighed them down. They longed to see once more the ground where they
had possessed Him whom they loved, well assured in advance of meeting
him again there.
The majority of the disciples then departed, full of joy and hope,
perhaps in the company of the caravan which took back the pilgrims from
the Feast of the Passover. What they hoped to find in Galilee were not
only transient visions, but Jesus himself to continue with them, as he
had done before his death. An intense expectation filled their souls.
Was he going to restore the kingdom of Israel, to found definitely the
kingdom of God, and, as was said, "reveal his justice"? Everything was
possible. They already called to mind the smiling landscapes where they
had enjoyed his presence. Many believed that he had given to them a
rendezvous upon a mountain, probably the same to which with them there
clung so many sweet recollections. Never, it is certain, had there been
a more pleasant journey. All their dreams of happiness were on the point
of being realized. They were going to see him once more! And, in fact,
they did see him again. Hardly restored to their harmless chimeras, they
believed themselves to be in the midst of the gospel-dispensation
period. It was now drawing near to the end of April. The ground is then
strewn with red anemones, which were probably those "lilies of the
fields" from which Jesus delighted to draw his similes. At each step his
words were brought to mind, adhering, as it were, to the thousand
accidental objects they met by the way. Here was the tree, the flower,
the seed, from which he had taken his parables; there was the hill on
which he delivered his most touching discourses; here was the little
ship from which he taught. It was like the recommencement of a beautiful
dream--like a vanished illusion which had reappeared. The enchantment
seemed to revive. The sweet Galilean "Kingdom of God" had recovered its
sway. The clear atmosphere, the mornings upon the shore or upon the
mountain, the nights passed on the lakes watching the nets, all these
returned again to them in distinct visions. They saw him everywhere
where they had lived with him. Of course it was not the joy of the first
enjoyment. Sometimes the lake had to them the appearance of being very
solitary. But a great love is satisfied with little. If all of us, while
we are alive, could surreptitiously, once a year, and during a moment
long enough to exchange but a few words, behold again those loved ones
whom we have lost--death would not be death!