Meanwhile the inevitable effect of dropping the peculiar doctrines of
Jesus and going back to John the Baptist, was to make it much easier to
convert Gentiles than Jews; and it was by following the line of least
resistance that Paul became the apostle to the Gentiles. The Jews had
their own rite of initiation: the rite of circumcision; and they were
fiercely jealous for it, because it marked them as the chosen people
of God, and set them apart from the Gentiles, who were simply the
uncircumcized. When Paul, finding that baptism made way faster among the
Gentiles than among the Jews, as it enabled them to plead that they too
were sanctified by a rite of later and higher authority than the Mosaic
rite, he was compelled to admit that circumcision did not matter;
and this, to the Jews, was an intolerable blasphemy. To Gentiles like
ourselves, a good deal of the Epistle to the Romans is now tedious to
unreadableness because it consists of a hopeless attempt by Paul to
evade the conclusion that if a man were baptized it did not matter a
rap whether he was circumcized or not. Paul claims circumcision as an
excellent thing in its way for a Jew; but if it has no efficacy towards
salvation, and if salvation is the one thing needful--and Paul was
committed to both propositions--his pleas in mitigation only made the
Jews more determined to stone him.
Thus from the very beginning of apostolic Christianity, it was hampered
by a dispute as to whether salvation was to be attained by a surgical
operation or by a sprinkling of water: mere rites on which Jesus would
not have wasted twenty words. Later on, when the new sect conquered the
Gentile west, where the dispute had no practical application, the other
ceremony--that of eating the god--produced a still more disastrous
dispute, in which a difference of belief, not as to the obligation to
perform the ceremony, but as to whether it was a symbolic or a real
ingestion of divine substance, produced persecution, slaughter, hatred,
and everything that Jesus loathed, on a monstrous scale.
But long before that, the superstitions which had fastened on the new
faith made trouble. The parthenogenetic birth of Christ, simple
enough at first as a popular miracle, was not left so simple by the
theologians. They began to ask of what substance Christ was made in the
womb of the virgin. When the Trinity was added to the faith the question
arose, was the virgin the mother of God or only the mother of Jesus?
Arian schisms and Nestorian schisms arose on these questions; and the
leaders of the resultant agitations rancorously deposed one another
and excommunicated one another according to their luck in enlisting the
emperors on their side. In the IV century they began to burn one
another for differences of opinion in such matters. In the VIII century
Charlemagne made Christianity compulsory by killing those who refused
to embrace it; and though this made an end of the voluntary character of
conversion, Charlemagne may claim to be the first Christian who put men
to death for any point of doctrine that really mattered. From his time
onward the history of Christian controversy reeks with blood and
fire, torture and warfare. The Crusades, the persecutions in Albi and
elsewhere, the Inquisition, the "wars of religion" which followed the
Reformation, all presented themselves as Christian phenomena; but who
can doubt that they would have been repudiated with horror by Jesus?
Our own notion that the massacre of St. Bartholomew's was an outrage
on Christianity, whilst the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, and even of
Frederick the Great, were a defence of it, is as absurd as the opposite
notion that Frederick was Antichrist and Torquemada and Ignatius Loyola
men after the very heart of Jesus. Neither they nor their exploits had
anything to do with him. It is probable that Archbishop Laud and John
Wesley died equally persuaded that he in whose name they had made
themselves famous on earth would receive them in Heaven with open arms.
Poor Fox the Quaker would have had ten times their chance; and yet Fox
made rather a miserable business of life.
Nevertheless all these perversions of the doctrine of Jesus derived
their moral force from his credit, and so had to keep his gospel alive.
When the Protestants translated the Bible into the vernacular and let
it loose among the people, they did an extremely dangerous thing, as
the mischief which followed proves; but they incidentally let loose
the sayings of Jesus in open competition with the sayings of Paul
and Koheleth and David and Solomon and the authors of Job and the
Pentateuch; and, as we have seen, Jesus seems to be the winning name.
The glaring contradiction between his teaching and the practice of all
the States and all the Churches is no longer hidden. And it may be that
though nineteen centuries have passed since Jesus was born (the date of
his birth is now quaintly given as 7 B.C., though some contend for 100
B.C.), and though his Church has not yet been founded nor his political
system tried, the bankruptcy of all the other systems when audited
by our vital statistics, which give us a final test for all political
systems, is driving us hard into accepting him, not as a scapegoat, but
as one who was much less of a fool in practical matters than we have
hitherto all thought him.