Take, for example, the miracles. Of Jesus alone of all the Christian
miracle workers there is no record, except in certain gospels that all
men reject, of a malicious or destructive miracle. A barren fig-tree
was the only victim of his anger. Every one of his miracles on sentient
subjects was an act of kindness. John declares that he healed the wound
of the man whose ear was cut off (by Peter, John says) at the arrest
in the garden. One of the first things the apostles did with their
miraculous power was to strike dead a wretched man and his wife who had
defrauded them by holding back some money from the common stock. They
struck people blind or dead without remorse, judging because they had
been judged. They healed the sick and raised the dead apparently in a
spirit of pure display and advertisement. Their doctrine did not contain
a ray of that light which reveals Jesus as one of the redeemers of men
from folly and error. They cancelled him, and went back straight to John
the Baptist and his formula of securing remission of sins by repentance
and the rite of baptism (being born again of water and the spirit).
Peter's first harangue softens us by the human touch of its exordium,
which was a quaint assurance to his hearers that they must believe him
to be sober because it was too early in the day to get drunk; but of
Jesus he had nothing to say except that he was the Christ foretold
by the prophets as coming from the seed of David, and that they must
believe this and be baptized. To this the other apostles added incessant
denunciations of the Jews for having crucified him, and threats of the
destruction that would overtake them if they did not repent: that is, if
they did not join the sect which the apostles were now forming. A quite
intolerable young speaker named Stephen delivered an oration to the
council, in which he first inflicted on them a tedious sketch of the
history of Israel, with which they were presumably as well acquainted
as he, and then reviled them in the most insulting terms as "stiffnecked
and uncircumcized." Finally, after boring and annoying them to the
utmost bearable extremity, he looked up and declared that he saw the
heavens open, and Christ standing on the right hand of God. This was too
much: they threw him out of the city and stoned him to death. It was
a severe way of suppressing a tactless and conceited bore; but it was
pardonable and human in comparison to the slaughter of poor Ananias and
Sapphira.