Thus the Christians made progress among the people by a device that
invariably seduces ignorant folk. But they had a still more powerful
means. They declaimed against the rich. They preached community of
goods; in their secret meetings they enjoined their neophytes to give
them the little money they had earned; and they quoted the alleged
instance of Sapphira and Ananias (_Acts_ v., 1-11), whom Simon
Barjona, called Cephas, which means Peter, caused to die suddenly
because they had kept a crown to themselves--the first and most
detestable example of priestly covetousness.
But they would not have succeeded in extorting the money of their
neophytes if they had not preached the doctrine of the cynic
philosophers--the idea of voluntary poverty. Even this, however, was
not enough to form a new flock. The end of the world had been long
announced. You will find it in Epicurus and Lucretius, his chief
disciple. Ovid had said, in the days of Augustus:
Esse quoque in fatis meminisceret adfore tempus,
Quo mare, quo tellus, correptaque regio coeli
Ardeat, et mundi moles operosa laboret.[52]
According to others, the world had been made by a fortuitous
concourse of atoms, and would be destroyed by another fortuitous
concourse, as we find in the poems of Lucretius.
This idea came originally from the Brahmans of India. Many Jews had
adopted it by the time of Herod. It is formally stated in the gospel
of Luke, as you have seen; it is in Paul’s epistles; and it is in all
those who are known as fathers of the Church. The world was about
to be destroyed, it was thought; and the Christians announced a new
Jerusalem, which was seen in the air by night.[53] The Jews talked of
nothing but a new kingdom of heaven; it was the system of John the
Baptist, who had introduced on the Jordan the ancient Hindoo practice
of baptism in the Ganges. Baptism was practised by the Egyptians, and
adopted by the Jews. This new kingdom of heaven, to which the poor
alone would be admitted, was preached by Jesus and his followers.
They threatened with eternal torment those who would not believe in
the new heaven. This hell, invented by the first Zoroaster, became
one of the chief points of Egyptian theology.[54] From the latter
came the barque of Charon, Cerberus, the river Lethe, Tartarus, and
the Furies. From Egypt the idea passed to Greece, and from there to
the Romans; the Jews were unacquainted with it until the time when
the Pharisees preached it, shortly before the reign of Herod. It was
one of their contradictions to admit both hell and metempsychosis
(transmigration of souls); but who would look for reasoning among the
Jews? Their powers in that direction are confined to money matters.
The Sadducees and Samaritans rejected the immortality of the soul,
because it is not found anywhere in the Mosaic law.
This was the great spring which the early Christians, all
half-Jewish, relied upon to put the new machinery in action:
community of goods, secret meals, hidden mysteries, gospels read to
the initiated only, paradise for the poor, hell for the rich, and
exorcisms by charlatans. Here, in strict truth, we have the first
foundations of the Christian sect. If I deceive you--or, rather, if
I deliberately deceive you--I pray the God of the universe, the God
of all men, to wither the hand that writes this, to shatter with his
lightning a head that is convinced of the existence of a good and
just God, and to tear out from me a heart that worships him.