There can be little doubt that Ananias, the Sadducean high-priest who
had slain James, thirsted also after the blood of Paul. But it is
certainly not true that Felix was governor of Judea when Ananias was
high-priest. Felix and Festus had been removed from their offices before
Ananias was made high-priest, as the authentic sources of history show.
If tried at Cæsarea at all--which is doubtful, because Paul had appealed
to Cæsar--he was tried before Albinus. His speeches recorded in the Acts
contain sentences of Paul, but many more additions from the author of
the Acts.
It matters little, however, whether Paul was tried before Albinus or
Felix, or whether there was a trial at all. He had appealed to Cæsar, in
order to estrange himself from his colleagues in Jerusalem and to come
before his converts as an expatriated man, although Agrippa himself had
said, "This man might have been set at liberty had he not appealed unto
Cæsar."
Fortunately he was detained in Cæsarea, when Nero in Rome put to death
the Christians in his own gardens with exquisite cruelty, and added
mockery and derision to their sufferings. Had he been brought to Rome
_then_, no angels could have saved his life, and no power could have
protected him for two years. He came to Rome in the year 65, when the
cruelty of Nero's proceedings against the Christians filled every breast
with compassion, and humanity relented in favor of the Christians. Then
it was possible for Paul to have a hearing in Rome, where he lived in a
hired house for two years.
Neither Paul nor Peter was ever bishop of Rome, nor was either of them
beheaded in Rome or anywhere else. All the legends and myths concerning
them are void of truth. We know that Paul, who was then about
thirty-five years old, wrote from Rome epistles in defence of his gospel
and against his colleagues in Jerusalem, in the same spirit as those
from Cæsarea. We know, furthermore, that he went from Rome to Illyricum,
where he preached his gospel. We know that he returned to Asia, and
wrote the quintessence of his gospel in his epistle to the Romans. We
know that many passages in his epistles were written, after the
destruction of Jerusalem, when Paul was about forty years old, and his
principal activity commenced still later, in opposition to Rabbi Akiba
and his colleagues. We know from the _Talmud_ that he married and left
daughters. We know also numerous stories of Acher or Paul and his
disciple, Rabbi Mair.
Long after the death of the apostles the Christianity of Paul and the
Messiahism of Peter were Platonized by the Alexandrian eclectics in a
semi-gnostic manner, which gave birth to the fourth gospel, according to
John, and the two epistles of John the Elder, not the apostle, about
A.D. 160, of which the Synoptics have no idea. They had only the
Christianity of Paul and of Peter before them. An original Peter gospel,
Paul's epistles, and the different traditions of the various
congregations were their sources, which they attempted to blend into one
system. All the gospel writers lived in the second century; were not
acquainted with the particulars of the story; had an imperfect knowledge
of the Jews, their laws and doctrines; wrote in favor of the Romans,
whom they wished to convert, and against the Jews, whom they could not
convert.
The third century inherited four distinct systems of Christianity: that
of Jesus with the pure theocracy, that of Peter with the Messiah and his
second advent, that of Paul with the Son of God and the approaching end
of all flesh, and that of John with the Logos and the self-aggrandizing
demi-god or man-god on earth. The difficulties and dissensions arising
from the attempts at uniting all these contradictory systems in one,
ended with the Council of Nice, in the beginning of the fourth century,
and the establishment of an orthodox creed, the excommunication of the
Jewish Christians, and the establishment of the Church as a state
institution. Then the sword and the pyre established doctrines.
On comparison you will find that Jesus became the Saviour of the
Gentiles by the exertion of Paul; that the means which Peter and Paul
adopted for momentary purposes have been turned into main dogmas; that
the religion which Jesus taught and believed is partly laid aside, and
the rest is unimportant in Christology, but he himself has been adopted
in place of his religion; and that the entire New Testament has no
knowledge of the Trinity and the orthodox creed. On comparison you will
discover that, if any of our modern congregations are Christian, the
apostolic congregation of Jerusalem was heretic. If the pope is a
Christian, Paul was not. If the orthodox creed tells what one must
believe in order to be a Christian, then Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew. If
the religion and the theocracy which Jesus preached are to become the
universal religion, all dogmas must fall, and God alone be all in all.
Man must become his own priest, prince, and prophet. Justice must govern
the nations, love must construe the law, virtue and righteousness must
lead to satisfaction and happiness, and man's consciousness of God,
immortality, morals, and moral responsibility must be his catechism, his
guiding star, his protecting angel in life and death. No dogmas; truth,
in the name of God!
I see it, although it is not now; I behold it, although it is not nigh.
A star will arise from Jacob in whose soft brilliancy will shine forth
all the great and redeeming truth. Freedom and humanity, justice and
love in the name of God, are the right religion; to strive for them is
divine worship, to love them is holiness.
This was the object of Paul. The means to accomplish that object were
the necessities of the age to convert that generation. He could not
dream of the idea that the means would obscure the object, that the
servant would occupy the master's seat. His was a fearless, powerful,
and unyielding character, terribly in earnest to break down the ancient
world and create a new one, and his success, though incomplete, was
wonderful. Men like Jesus and Paul, whose great aim was to benefit and
to elevate human nature, however widely we may differ from them, deserve
the student's laborious research, the philanthropist's most profound
admiration, the monuments which the human mind rears to their memory.
Great works are the testimony of their authors, and great minds are the
diadem and honor, the ornament and pride of human nature. The God Jesus
and the supernatural Paul appear small in the focus of reason. The
patriotic and enthusiastic Jesus and the brave, bold, wise, and mighty
Paul are grand types of humanity among those hundred stars in the
horizon of history which have made the history of the human family.
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
The _prima-facie_ view of early Christianity, in the eyes of witnesses
external to it, is presented to us in the brief but vivid descriptions
given by Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny, the only heathen writers who
distinctly mention it for the first hundred and fifty years.
Tacitus is led to speak of the religion, on occasion of the
conflagration of Rome, which was popularly imputed to Nero. "To put an
end to the report," he says, "he laid the guilt on others, and visited
them with the most exquisite punishment, those, namely, who, held in
abhorrence for their crimes (_per flagitia invisos_), were popularly
called Christians. The author of that profession (_nominis_) was Christ,
who, in the reign of Tiberius, was capitally punished by the procurator,
Pontius Pilate. The deadly superstition (_exitiabilis superstitio_),
though checked for a while, broke out afresh; and that, not only
throughout Judea, the original seat of the evil, but through the city
also, whither all things atrocious or shocking (_atrocia aut pudenda_)
flow together from every quarter and thrive. At first, certain were
seized who avowed it; then, on their report, a vast multitude were
convicted not so much of firing the city, as of hatred of mankind (_odio
humani generis_)." After describing their tortures, he continues: "In
consequence, though they were guilty, and deserved most signal
punishment, they began to be pitied, as if destroyed not for any public
object, but from the barbarity of one man."
Suetonius relates the same transactions thus: "Capital punishments were
inflicted on the Christians, a class of men of a new and magical
superstition (_superstitionis novæ et maleficæ_)." What gives additional
character to this statement is its context, for it occurs as one out of
various police or sanctuary or domestic regulations, which Nero made,
such as "controlling private expenses, forbidding taverns to serve meat,
repressing the contests of theatrical parties, and securing the
integrity of wills."
When Pliny was governor of Pontus, he wrote his celebrated letter to the
emperor Trajan, to ask advice how he was to deal with the Christians,
whom he found there in great numbers. One of his points of hesitation
was whether the very profession of Christianity was not by itself
sufficient to justify punishment; "whether the name itself should be
visited, though clear of flagitious acts (_flagitia_), or only when
connected with them." He says he had ordered for execution such as
persevered in their profession after repeated warnings, "as not
doubting, whatever it was they professed, that at any rate contumacy and
inflexible obstinacy ought to be punished." He required them to invoke
the gods, to sacrifice wine and frankincense to the images of the
Emperor, and to blaspheme Christ; "to which," he adds, "it is said no
real Christian can be compelled." Renegades informed him that "the sum
total of their offence or fault was meeting before light on an appointed
day, and saying with one another a form of words (_carmen_) to Christ,
as if to a god, and binding themselves by oath (not to the commission of
any wickedness, but) against the commission of theft, robbery, adultery,
breach of trust, denial of deposits; that, after this they were
accustomed to separate, and then to meet again for a meal, but eaten all
together and harmless; however, that they had even left this off after
his edicts enforcing the imperial prohibition of _hetæriæ_ or
associations." He proceeded to put two women to the torture, but
"discovered nothing beyond a bad and excessive superstition"
(_superstitionem pravam et immodicam_), "the contagion" of which, he
continues, "had spread through villages and country, till the temples
were emptied of worshippers."
In these testimonies, which will form a natural and convenient text for
what is to follow, we have various characteristics brought before us of
the religion to which they relate. It was a superstition, as all three
writers agree; a bad and excessive superstition, according to Pliny; a
magical superstition, according to Suetonius; a deadly superstition,
according to Tacitus. Next, it was embodied in a society, and, moreover,
a secret and unlawful society or _hetæria_; and it was a proselytizing
society; and its very name was connected with "flagitious," "atrocious,"
and "shocking" acts.
Now these few points, which are not all which might be set down, contain
in themselves a distinct and significant description of Christianity;
but they have far greater meaning when illustrated by the history of the
times, the testimony of later writers, and the acts of the Roman
government toward its professors. It is impossible to mistake the
judgment passed on the religion by these three writers, and still more
clearly by other writers and imperial functionaries. They evidently
associated Christianity with the oriental superstitions, whether
propagated by individuals or embodied in a rite, which were in that day
traversing the empire, and which in the event acted so remarkable a part
in breaking up the national forms of worship, and so in preparing the
way for Christianity. This, then, is the broad view which the educated
heathen took of Christianity; and, if it had been very unlike those
rites and curious arts in external appearance, they would not have
confused it with them.
Changes in society are by a providential appointment commonly preceded
and facilitated by the setting in of a certain current in men's thoughts
and feelings in that direction toward which a change is to be made.
And, as lighter substances whirl about before the tempest and presage
it, so words and deeds, ominous but not effective of the coming
revolution, are circulated beforehand through the multitude or pass
across the field of events. This was specially the case with
Christianity, as became its high dignity; it came heralded and attended
by a crowd of shadows, shadows of itself, impotent and monstrous as
shadows are, but not at first sight distinguishable from it by common
spectators. Before the mission of the apostles a movement, of which
there had been earlier parallels, had begun in Egypt, Syria, and the
neighboring countries, tending to the propagation of new and peculiar
forms of worship throughout the empire. Prophecies were afloat that some
new order of things was coming in from the East, which increased the
existing unsettlement of the popular mind; pretenders made attempts to
satisfy its wants, and old traditions of the truth, embodied for ages in
local or in national religions, gave to these attempts a doctrinal and
ritual shape, which became an additional point of resemblance to that
truth which was soon visibly to appear.
The distinctive character of the rites in question lay in their
appealing to the gloomy rather than to the cheerful and hopeful
feelings, and in their influencing the mind through fear. The notions of
guilt and expiation, of evil and good to come, and of dealings with the
invisible world, were in some shape or other preëminent in them, and
formed a striking contrast to the classical polytheism, which was gay
and graceful, as was natural in a civilized age. The new rites, on the
other hand, were secret; their doctrine was mysterious; their profession
was a discipline, beginning in a formal initiation, manifested in an
association, and exercised in privation and pain. They were from the
nature of the case proselytizing societies, for they were rising into
power; nor were they local, but vagrant, restless, intrusive, and
encroaching. Their pretensions to supernatural knowledge brought them
into easy connection with magic and astrology, which are as attractive
to the wealthy and luxurious as the more vulgar superstitions to the
populace.
The Christian, being at first accounted a kind of Jew, was even on that
score included in whatever odium, and whatever bad associations,
attended on the Jewish name. But in a little time his independence of
the rejected people was clearly understood, as even the persecutions
show; and he stood upon his own ground. Still his character did not
change in the eyes of the world; for favor or for reproach, he was still
associated with the votaries of secret and magical rites. The emperor
Hadrian, noted as he is for his inquisitive temper, and a partaker in so
many mysteries, still believed that the Christians of Egypt allowed
themselves in the worship of Serapis. They are brought into connection
with the magic of Egypt in the history of what is commonly called the
Thundering legion, so far as this, that the rain which relieved the
Emperor's army in the field, and which the Church ascribed to the
prayers of the Christian soldiers, is by Dio Cassius attributed to an
Egyptian magician, who obtained it by invoking Mercury and other
spirits. This war had been the occasion of one of the first recognitions
which the State had conceded to the oriental rites, though statesmen and
emperors, as private men, had long taken part in them. The emperor
Marcus had been urged by his fears of the Marcomanni to resort to these
foreign introductions, and is said to have employed Magi and Chaldæans
in averting an unsuccessful issue of the war.
It is observable that, in the growing countenance which was extended to
these rites in the third century, Christianity came in for a share. The
chapel of Alexander Severus contained statues of Abraham, Orpheus,
Apollonius, Pythagoras, and our Lord. Here indeed, as in the case of
Zenobia's Judaism, an eclectic philosophy aided the comprehension of
religions. But, immediately before Alexander, Heliogabalus, who was no
philosopher, while he formally seated his Syrian idol in the Palatine,
while he observed the mysteries of Cybele and Adonis, and celebrated his
magic rites with human victims, intended also, according to Lampridius,
to unite with his horrible superstition "the Jewish and Samaritan
religions and the Christian rite, that so the priesthood of Heliogabalus
might comprise the mystery of every worship." Hence, more or less, the
stories which occur in ecclesiastical history of the conversion or
good-will of the emperors to the Christian faith, of Hadrian, Mammæa,
and others, besides Heliogabalus and Alexander. Such stories might often
mean little more than that they favored it among other forms of oriental
superstition.
What has been said is sufficient to bring before the mind an historical
fact, which indeed does not need evidence. Upon the established
religions of Europe the East had renewed her encroachments, and was
pouring forth a family of rites which in various ways attracted the
attention of the luxurious, the political, the ignorant, the restless,
and the remorseful. Armenian, Chaldee, Egyptian, Jew, Syrian, Phrygian,
as the case might be, was the designation of the new hierophant; and
magic, superstition, barbarism, jugglery, were the names given to his
rite by the world. In this company appeared Christianity. When then
three well-informed writers call Christianity a superstition and a
magical superstition, they were not using words at random, or the
language of abuse, but they were describing it in distinct and
recognized terms as cognate to those gloomy, secret, odious,
disreputable religions which were making so much disturbance up and down
the empire.
The Gnostic family suitably traces its origin to a mixed race, which had
commenced its national history by associating orientalism with
revelation. After the captivity of the ten tribes Samaria was colonized
by "men from Babylon and Cushan, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from
Sepharvaim," who were instructed at their own instance in "the manner of
the God of the land," by one of the priests of the Church of Jeroboam.
The consequence was that "they feared the Lord and served their own
gods." Of this country was Simon, the reputed patriarch of the Gnostics;
and he is introduced in the Acts of the Apostles as professing those
magical powers which were so principal a characteristic of the oriental
mysteries. His heresy, though broken into a multitude of sects, was
poured over the world with a catholicity not inferior in its day to that
of Christianity. St. Peter, who fell in with him originally in Samaria,
seems to have encountered him again at Rome. At Rome St. Polycarp met
Marcion of Pontus, whose followers spread through Italy, Egypt, Syria,
Arabia, and Persia.
"When [the reader of Christian history] comes to the second century,"
says Dr. Burton, "he finds that Gnosticism, under some form or other,
was professed in every part of the then civilized world. He finds it
divided into schools, as numerously and as zealously attended as any
which Greece or Asia could boast in their happiest days. He meets with
names totally unknown to him before, which excited as much sensation as
those of Aristotle or Plato. He hears of volumes having been written in
support of this new philosophy, not one of which has survived to our own
day." Many of the founders of these sects had been Christians. Others
were of Jewish parentage; others were more or less connected in fact
with the pagan rites to which their own bore so great a resemblance.
Whatever might be the history of these sects, and though it may be a
question whether they can be properly called "superstitions," and though
many of them numbered educated men among their teachers and followers,
they closely resembled--at least in ritual and profession--the vagrant
pagan mysteries which have been above described. Their very name of
"Gnostic" implied the possession of a secret, which was to be
communicated to their disciples. Ceremonial observances were the
preparation, and symbolical rites the instrument, of initiation. Tatian
and Montanus, the representatives of very distinct schools, agreed in
making asceticism a rule of life.
Such were the Gnostics; and to external and prejudiced spectators,
whether philosophers, as Celsus and Porphyry, or the multitude, they
wore an appearance sufficiently like the Church to be mistaken for her
in the latter part of the ante-Nicene period, as she was confused with
the pagan mysteries in the earlier.
Let us proceed in our contemplation of this reflection, as it may be
called, of primitive Christianity in the mirror of the world. All three
writers, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny, call it a "superstition"; this
is no accidental imputation, but is repeated by a variety of subsequent
writers and speakers. The charge of Thyestean banquets scarcely lasts a
hundred years; but, while pagan witnesses are to be found, the Church is
accused of superstition. Now what is meant by the word thus attached by
a _consensus_ of heathen authorities to Christianity? At least it cannot
mean a religion in which a man might think what he pleased, and was set
free from all yokes, whether of ignorance, fear, authority, or
priestcraft. When heathen writers call the oriental rites superstitions,
they evidently use the word in its modern sense. It cannot surely be
doubted that they apply it in the same sense to Christianity. But
Plutarch explains for us the word at length in his treatise which bears
the name: "Of all kinds of fear," he says, "superstition is the most
fatal to action and resource. He does not fear the sea who does not
sail, nor war who does not serve, nor robbers who keeps at home, nor the
sycophant who is poor, nor the envious if he is a private man, nor an
earthquake if he lives in Gaul, nor thunder if he lives in Æthiopia; but
he who fears the gods fears everything--earth, seas, air, sky, darkness,
light, noises, silence, sleep. Slaves sleep and forget their masters; of
the fettered doth sleep lighten the chain; inflamed wounds, ulcers cruel
and agonizing, are not felt by the sleeping. Superstition alone has come
to no terms with sleep; but in the very sleep of her victims, as though
they were in the realms of the impious, she raises horrible spectres and
monstrous phantoms and various pains, and whirls the miserable soul
about and persecutes it. They rise, and, instead of making light of what
is unreal, they fall into the hands of quacks and conjurers, who say,
'Call the crone to expiate, bathe in the sea, and sit all day on the
ground.'"