THE FOLLOWERS OF JESUS
Two things stand out, when we study the character of the early
church--its great complexity and variety, and its unity in the
personality of Jesus of Nazareth. In spite of the general levelling
which Greek culture and Roman government had made all over the
Mediterranean world, the age-long influences of race and climate and
cult were still at work. Everywhere there was a varnish of Greek
literature; everywhere a tendency to uniformity in government, very
carefully managed with great tenderness for local susceptibilities, but
none the less a fixed object of the Emperors; everywhere cult was
blended with cult with the lavish hospitality of polytheism; and yet,
apart from denationalized men of letters, artists and dilettanti, the
old types remained and reproduced themselves. And when men looked at
the Christian community, it was as various as the Empire--"Thou wast
slain," runs the hymn in the Apocalypse, "and thou hast redeemed us to
God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and
nation." There soon appeared that desire for uniformity which animated
the secular government, and which appears to be an ineradicable
instinct of the human mind. Yet for the first two centuries--the
period under our discussion--the movement toward uniformity had not
grown strong enough to overcome the race-marks and the place-marks.
There are great areas over which in Christian life and thought the same
general characteristics are to be seen, which were manifested in other
ways before the Christian era. There is the great West of Italy, Gaul
and Africa, Latin in outlook, but with strong local variations. There
is the region of Asia Minor and Greece,--where the church is
Hellenistic in every sense of the word, very Greek upon the surface and
less Greek underneath, again with marked contrasts due to geography and
race-distribution. Again there is the Christian South--Alexandria,
with its Christian community, Greek and {142} Jewish, and a little
known hinterland, where Christian thought spread, we do not know how.
There was Palestine with a group of Jewish Christians, very clearly
differentiated. And Eastward there rose a Syrian Christendom, which as
late as the fourth century kept a character of its own.[1]
Into all these great divisions of the world came men eager to tell
"good news"--generally quite commonplace and unimportant people with a
"treasure in earthen vessels." Their message they put in various ways,
with the aphasia of ill-educated men, who have something to tell that
is far too big for any words at their command. It was made out at last
that they meant a new relation to God in virtue of Jesus Christ. From
a philosophic point of view they talked "foolishness," and they lapsed
now and then, under the pressure of what was within them, into
inarticulate and unintelligible talk, from which they might emerge into
utterance quite beyond their ordinary range. Such symptoms were
familiar enough, but these people were not like the usual exponents of
"theolepsy" and "enthusiasm." They were astonishingly upright, pure
and honest; they were serious; and they had in themselves inexplicable
reserves of moral force and a happiness far beyond anything that the
world knew. They were men transfigured, as they owned. Some would
confess to wasted and evil lives, but something had happened,[2] which
they connected with Jesus or a holy spirit, but everything in the long
run turned upon Jesus.
Clearer heads came about them, and then, as they put it, the holy
spirit fell upon them also. These men of education and ideas were
"converted," and began at once to analyse their experience, using
naturally the language with which they were familiar. It was these men
who gave the tone to the groups of believers in their various regions,
and that tone varied with the colour of thought in which the more
reflective converts had grown up. A great deal, of course, was common
to all regions of the world,--the new story and the new experience, an
unphilosophized group of facts, which now, under the stimulus of man's
unconquerable habit of speculation, began to be interpreted {143} and
to be related in all sorts of ways to the general experience of men.
No wonder there was diversity. It took centuries to achieve a uniform
account of the Christian faith.
The unity of the early church lay in the reconciliation with God, in
the holy spirit, and Jesus Christ,--a unity soon felt and treasured.
"There is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of
your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of
all, who is above all and through all and in you all."[3] The whole
body of Christians was conscious of its unity, of its distinctness and
its separation. It was a "peculiar people"[4]--God's own; a "third
race," as the heathen said.[5]
[Sidenote: The recruits]
To go further into detail we may consider the recruits and their
experience, their explanations of this experience, and the new life in
the world.
The recruits came, as the Christians very soon saw, from every race of
mankind, and they brought with them much that was of value in national
preconceptions and characteristics. The presence of Jew, Greek, Roman,
Syrian and Phrygian, made it impossible for the church to be anything
but universal; and if at times her methods of reconciling somewhat
incompatible contributions were unscientific, still in practice she
achieved the task and gained accordingly. Where the Empire failed in
imposing unity by decree, the church produced it instinctively.
It was on Jewish ground that Christianity began, and it was from its
native soil and air that it drew, transmuting as it drew them, its
passionate faith in One God, its high moral standard and its lofty
hopes of a Messianic age to come. For no other race of the
Mediterranean world was the moral law based on the "categoric
imperative." Nowhere else was that law written in the inward parts, in
the very hearts of the people,[6] and nowhere was it observed so
loyally. The absurdity and scrupulosity which the Greek ridiculed in
the Jew, were the outcome of his devotion to the law of the Lord; and,
when once the law was reinterpreted and taken to a higher plane by
Jesus, the {144} old passion turned naturally to the new morality. It
was the Jew who brought to the common Christian stock the conception of
Sin, and the significance of this is immense in the history of the
religion. It differentiated Christianity from all the religious and
philosophical systems of the ancient world.
'Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart
At the head of a lie--taught Original Sin,
The Corruption of Man's Heart.
Seneca and the Stoics played with the fancy of man's being equal, or in
some points superior, to God--a folly impossible for a Jewish mind. It
was the Jews who gave the world the "oracles of God" in the Old
Testament, who invested Christianity for the moment with the dignity of
an ancient history and endowed it for all time with a unique
inheritance of religious experience. Nor is it only the Old Testament
that the church owes to the Jew; for the Gospels are also his
gift--anchors in the actual that have saved Christianity from all kinds
of intellectual, spiritual and ecclesiastical perils. And, further, at
the difficult moment of transition, when Christian ideas passed from
the Jewish to the Gentile world, there were Jews of the Hellenistic
type ready to mediate the change. They of all men stood most clearly
at the universal point of view; they knew the grandeur and the weakness
of the law; they understood at once the Jewish and the Greek mind. It
is hard to exaggerate what Christianity owes to men of this school--to
Paul and to "John," and to a host of others, Christian Jews of the
Dispersion, students of Philo, and followers of Jesus. On Jewish soil
the new faith died; it was transplantation alone that made Christianity
possible; for it was the true outcome of the teaching of Jesus, that
the new faith should be universal.
The chief contribution of the Greek was his demand for this very
thing--that Christianity must be universal. He made no secret of his
contempt for Judaism, and he was emphatic in insisting on a larger
outlook than the Jewish. No man could seem more naturally unlikely to
welcome the thoughts of Jesus than the "little Greek" (_Graaeculus_) of
the Roman world; yet he was won; and then by making it impossible for
Christianity to remain an amalgam of the ideas of Jesus and of Jewish
law, {145} the Greek really secured the triumph of Jesus. He
eliminated the tribal and the temporary in the Gospel as it came from
purely Jewish teachers, and, with all his irregularities of conduct and
his flightiness of thought, he nevertheless set Jesus before the world
as the central figure of all history and of all existence.[7] Even the
faults of the Greek have indirectly served the church; for the Gospels
gained their place in men's minds and hearts, because they were the
real refuge from the vagaries of Greek speculation, and offered the
ultimate means of verifying every hypothesis. The historic Jesus is
never of such consequence to us as when the great intellects tell us
that the true and only heaven is Nephelococcygia. For Aristophanes was
right--it was the real Paradise of the Greek mind. What relief the
plain matter-of-fact Gospel must have brought men in a world, where
nothing throve like these cities of the clouds, would be inconceivable,
if we did not know its value still. While we recognize the real
contribution of the Greek Christians, it is good to see what
Christianity meant to men who were not Greeks.
[Sidenote: Tatian]
There was one Christian of some note in the second century, whose
attitude toward everything Greek is original and interesting. Tatian
was "born in the land of the Assyrians."[8] He travelled widely in the
Graeco-Roman world,[9] and studied rhetoric like a Greek; he gave
attention to the great collections of Greek art in Rome--monuments of
shame, he called them. He was admitted to the mysteries, but he became
shocked at the cruelty and licentiousness tolerated and encouraged by
paganism. While in this mind, seeking for the truth, "it befel that I
lit upon some barbarian writings, older than the dogmata of the Greeks,
divine in their contrast with Greek error; and it befel too that I was
convinced by them, because, their style was simple, because there was
an absence of artifice in the speakers, because the structure of the
whole was intelligible, and also because of the fore-knowledge of
future {146} events, the excellence of the precepts and the
subordination of the whole universe to One Ruler (_to ton holon
monarchikon_). My soul was taught of God, and I understood that while
Greek literature (_ta men_) leads to condemnation, this ends our
slavery in the world and rescues us from rulers manifold and ten
thousand tyrants."[10] He now repudiated the Greeks and all their
works, the grammarians who "set the letters of the alphabet to quarrel
among themselves,"[11] the philosophers with their long hair and long
nails and vanity,[12] the actors, poets and legislators; and "saying
good-bye to Roman pride and Attic pedantry (_psychrologia_) I laid hold
of our barbarian philosophy."[13] He made the first harmony of the
Gospels--an early witness to the power of their sheer simplicity in a
world of literary affectations.
Another famous Syrian of the century was Ignatius of Antioch, whose
story is collected from seven letters he wrote, in haste and
excitement, as he travelled to Rome to be thrown to the beasts in the
arena--his guards in the meantime being as fierce as any leopards. The
burden of them all is that Jesus Christ _truly_ suffered on the cross.
Men around him spoke of a phantom crucified by the deluded soldiers
amid the deluded Jews.--No! cries Ignatius, over and over, he _truly_
suffered, he _truly_ rose, ate and drank, and was no daemon without a
body (_daimonion asomaton_)--none of it is _seeming_, it is all truly,
truly, truly.[14] He has been called hysterical, and his position
might make any nervous man hysterical--death before him, his Lord's
reality denied, and only time for one word--_Truly_. Before we pass
him by, let us take a quieter saying of his to illustrate the deepest
thought of himself and his age--"He that hath the word of Jesus truly
can hear his silence also."[15]
The Roman came to the Church as he came to a new province. He gravely
surveyed the situation, considered the existing arrangements, accepted
them, drew up as it were a _lex provinciae_ to secure their proper
administration, and thereafter interpreted it in accordance with the
usual principles of Roman {147} law, and, like the procurator in Achaea,
left the Greeks to discuss any abstract propositions they pleased.
Tertullian and Cyprian were lawyers, and gave Latin Christendom the
language, in which in later days the relations of man with his Divine
Sovereign were worked out by the great Latin Fathers.
[Sidenote: Freedom from daemons]
The confession of Tatian, above cited, emphasizes as one of the great
features of the barbarian literature--its "monarchic" teaching--"it
sets man free from ten thousand tyrants"--and this may be our
starting-point in considering the new experience. To be rid of the
whole daemon-world, to have left the daemons behind and their "hatred of
men,"[16] their astrology,[17] their immorality and cruelty, their
sacrifices, and the terror of "possession" and theolepsy and
enchantment,[18] was happiness in itself. "We are above fate," said
Tatian, "and, instead of daemons that deceive, we have learnt one master
who deceiveth not."[19] "Christ," wrote an unknown Christian of a
beautiful spirit--"Christ wished to save the perishing, and such mercy
has he shown us that we the living do not serve dead gods, but through
him we know the Father of truth."[20] "Orpheus sang to beguile men,
but my Singer has come to end the tyranny of daemons," said Clement.[21]
The perils of "meats offered to idols" impressed some, who feared that
by eating of them they would come under daemoniac influence. With what
relief they must have read Paul's free speech on the subject--"the
earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof"--"for us there is one
God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all
things, and we through him."[22] "Even the very name of Jesus is
terrible to the daemons"[23]--the "name that is above every name." In
no other name was there salvation from daemons, for philosophy had made
terms with them.
No one can read the Christian Apologists without remarking the stress
which they lay upon the _knowledge_ of God, which the new faith made
the free and glad possession of the humblest. {148} "They say of us
that we babble nonsense among females, half-grown people, girls and old
people. No! all our women are chaste and at their distaffs our maidens
sing of things divine," said Tatian, and rejoined with observations on
famous Greek women, Lais, Sappho and others. Justin, always kindlier,
speaks of Socrates who urged men to seek God, yet owned that "it would
be a hard task to find the father and maker of this All, and when one
had found him, it would not be safe to declare him to all,"[24] but, he
goes on, "our Christ did this by his power. No man ever believed
Socrates so much as to die for his teaching. But Christ, who was known
to Socrates in part, (for he was and is the Word that is in
everything...)--on Christ, I say, not only philosophers and scholars
(_philologoi_) believed, but artisans, men quite without learning
(_idiotai_), and despised glory and fear and death." "There is not a
Christian workman but finds out God and manifests him," said
Tertullian.[25] This knowledge of God was not merely a desirable thing
in theory, for it is clear that it was very earnestly sought. To
Justin's quest for God, allusion has been made--"I hoped I should have
the vision of God at once (_katophesthai_)" he says. "Who among men
had any knowledge of what God was, before he came?"[26] "This," wrote
the fourth evangelist, "is eternal life--that they may know thee, the
one true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."
[Sidenote: The holy spirit]
But it is one thing to be a monotheist, and another to be a child of
"Abba Father," and this is one of the notes of the early Christian. It
is impossible to over-emphasize the significance of Christian happiness
amid the strain and doubt of the early Empire. Zeno and Isis each had
something to say, but who had such a message of forgiveness and
reconciliation and of the love of God? "God is within you," said
Seneca; but he knew nothing of such an experience as the Christian
summed up as the "grace of God," "grace sufficient" and "grace {149}
abounding." It is hard to think of these familiar phrases being new
and strange--the coining of Paul to express what no man had said
before--and this at the moment when Seneca was writing his "moral
letters" to Lucilius. Verbal coincidences may be found between Paul
and Seneca, but they are essentially verbal. The Stoic Spermaticos
Logos was a cold and uninspiring dogma compared with "Abba Father" and
the Spirit of Jesus--it was not the same thing at all. The one
doctrine made man self-sufficient--in the other, "our sufficiency
(_hikanotes_) is of God." It was the law of nature, contrasted with the
father of the prodigal son--"our kind and tender-hearted father" as
Clement of Rome calls him [27]--the personal God, whose "problem is
ever to save the flock of men; that is why the good God has sent the
good shepherd."[28]
The more lettered of Christian writers like to quote Plato's saying
that man was born to be at home with God (_oikeios echein pros theon_)
and that he was "a heavenly plant." Falsehood, they say, and error
obscured all this, but now "that ancient natural fellowship with
heaven" has "leapt forth from the darkness and beams upon us."[29]
"God," says Clement, "out of his great love for men, cleaves to man,
and as when a little bird has fallen out of the nest, the mother-bird
hovers over it, and if perchance some creeping beast open its mouth
upon the little thing,
Wheeling o'er his head, with screams the dam
Bewails her darling brood;
so God the Father seeks his image, and heals the fall, and chases away
the beast, and picks up the little one again."[30]
God has "anointed and sealed" his child and given him a pledge of the
new relation--the holy spirit. This is distinctly said by St Paul,[31]
and the variety of the phenomena, to which he refers, is a little
curious. Several things are covered by the phrase, and are classed as
manifestations with a common origin. There are many allusions to
"speaking with tongues"; Paul, however, clearly shows that we are not
to understand a miraculous gift in using actual languages, reduced to
grammar and {150} spoken by men, as the author of the _Acts_ suggests
with a possible reminiscence of a Jewish legend of the law-giving from
Sinai. The "glossolaly" was inarticulate and unintelligible; it was a
feature of Greek "mantic," an accompaniment of over-strained emotion,
and even to be produced by material agencies, as Plutarch lets us see.
Paul himself is emphatic upon its real irrelevance to the Christian's
main concern, and he deprecates the attention paid to it. Other
"spiritual" manifestations were visions and prophecies. With these Dr
William James has dealt in his _Varieties of Religious Experience_,
showing that in them, as in "conversion," there is nothing
distinctively Christian. The content of the vision and the outcome of
the conversion are the determining factors. Where men believe that an
ordinary human being can be temporarily transformed by the presence
within him of a spirit, the very belief produces its own evidence. If
the tenet of the holy spirit rested on nothing else, it would have
filled a smaller place in Christian thought.
[Sidenote: Jesus the saviour]
But when Paul speaks of the holy spirit whereby the Christians are
sealed, calling it now the spirit of God and now the spirit of Jesus,
he is referring to a profounder experience. Explain conversion as we
may, the word represents a real thing. Men were changed, and were
conscious of it. Old desires passed away and a new life began, in
which passion took a new direction, finding its centre of warmth and
light, not in morality, not in religion, but in God as revealed in
Jesus Christ. "To me to live is Christ," cried Paul, giving words to
the experience of countless others. Life had a new centre; and duty,
pain and death were turned to gladness. The early Christian was
conscious of a new spirit within him. It was by this spirit that they
could cry "Abba, Father"; it was the spirit that guided them into all
truth; it was the spirit that united them to God,[32] that set them
free from the law of sin and death, that meant life and peace and joy
and holiness. Paul trusted everything to what we might call the
Christian instinct and what he called the holy spirit, and he was
justified. No force in the world has done so much as this nameless
thing that has controlled and guided and illumined--whatever we call
it. Any one who has breathed the quiet air of a gathering of men and
women consciously surrendered to the influence of Jesus Christ, with
all its {151} sobering effect, its consecration, its power and
gladness, will know what Paul and his friends meant. It is hardly to
be known otherwise. In our documents the spirit is closely associated
with the gathering of the community in prayer.
Freedom from daemons, forgiveness and reconciliation with God, gladness
and moral strength and peace in the holy spirit--of such things the
early Christians speak, and they associate them all invariably with one
name, the living centre of all. "Jesus the beloved" is a phrase that
lights up one of the dullest of early Christian pages.[33] "No! you do
not so much as listen to anyone, if he speaks of anything but Jesus
Christ in truth," says Ignatius.[34] "What can we give him in return?
He gave us light ... he saved us when we were perishing ... We were
lame in understanding, and worshipped stone and wood, the works of men.
Our whole life was nothing but death.... He pitied us, he had
compassion, he saved us, for he saw we had no hope of salvation except
from him; he called us when we were not, and from not being he willed
us to be."[35] "The blood of Jesus, shed for our salvation, has brought
to all the world the grace of repentance."[36] "Ye see what is the
pattern that has been given us; what should we do who by him have come
under the yoke of his grace?"[37] "Let us be earnest to be imitators
of the Lord."[38] These are a few words from Christians whose writings
are not in the canon. Jesus is pre-eminently and always the Saviour;
the author of the new life; the revealer of God; the bringer of
immortality. It made an immense impression upon the ancient world to
see the transformation of those whom it despised,--women, artisans,
slaves and even slave-girls. Socrates with the hemlock cup and the
brave Thrasea were figures that men loved and honoured. But here were
all sorts of common people doing the same thing as Socrates and
Thrasea, cheerfully facing torture and death "for the name's sake"--and
it was a name of contempt, too. "Christ's people"--_Christianoi_--was
a bantering improvisation by the people of Antioch, who were notorious
in antiquity for impudent wit:[39] it was a happy shot {152} and
touched the very centre of the target. "The name" and "his name," are
constantly recurring phrases. But it was not only that men would die
for the name--men will die for anything that touches their imagination
or their sympathy--but they lived for it and showed themselves to be
indeed a "new creation." "Our Jesus"[40] was the author of a new life,
and a very different one from that of Hellenistic cities. That
Christianity retained its own character in the face of the most
desperate efforts of its friends to turn it into a philosophy congenial
to the philosophies of the day, was the result of the strong hold it
had taken upon innumerable simple people, who had found in it the power
of God in the transformation of their own characters and instincts, and
who clung to Jesus Christ--to the great objective facts of his
incarnation and his death upon the cross--as the firm foundations laid
in the rock against which the floods of theory might beat in vain. For
now we have to consider another side of early Christian activity--the
explanation of the new experience.
The early Christian community found "the unexamined life" as impossible
as Plato had, and they framed all sorts of theories to account for the
change in themselves. Of most immediate interest are the accounts
which they give of the holy spirit and of Jesus. Here we must remember
that in all definition we try to express the less known through the
more known, and that the early Christians necessarily used the best
language available to them, and tried to communicate a new series of
experiences by means of the terms and preconceptions of the thinking
world of their day--terms and preconceptions long since obsolete.
Much in the early centuries of our era is unintelligible until we form
some notion of the current belief in spiritual beings, evidence of
which is found in abundance in the literature of the day, pagan and
Christian. A growing consensus among philosophers made God more and
more remote, and emphasized the necessity for intermediaries. We have
seen how Plutarch pronounced for the delegation of rule over the
universe and its functions to ministering spirits. The Jews had a
parallel belief in angels, and had come to think of God's spirit and
God's intelligence as somehow detachable from his being. In abstract
{153} thought this may be possible just as we think of an angle without
reference to matter. The great weakness in the speculation of the
early Empire was this habit of supposing that men can be as certain of
their deductions as of their premisses; and God's Logos, being
conceivable, passed into common religious thought as a separate and
proven existence.
[Sidenote: The holy spirit]
At the same time there was abundant evidence of devil-possession as
there is in China to-day. Modern medicine distinguishes four classes
of cases which the ancients (and their modern followers) group under
this one head:--Insanity, Epilepsy, Hysteria major and the mystical
state. To men who had no knowledge of modern medicine and its
distinctions, the evidence of the "possessed" was enough, and it was
apt to be quite clear and emphatic as it is in such cases to-day. The
man said he "had a devil"--or even a "legion of devils." The priestess
at the oracle said that a god was within her (_entheos_). In both
cases the ocular evidence was enough to convince the onlookers of the
truth of the explanation, for the persons concerned were clearly
changed and were not themselves.[41] Plato played with the idea that
poetry even might be, as poets said, a matter of inspiration. The poet
could not be merely himself when he wrote or sang words of such
transforming power. The Jews gave a similar account of prophecy--the
Spirit of the Lord descended upon men, as we read in the Old Testament.
The Spirit, says Athenagoras to the Greeks, used the Hebrew prophets,
as a flute-player does a flute, while they were in ecstasy (_kat
ekstasin_)[42]--the holy spirit, he adds, is an effluence (_aporroia_)
of God.[43]
The Christians, finding ecstasy, prophecy, trance, and glossolaly among
their own members, and having before them the parallel of Greek
priestesses and Hebrew prophets, and making moreover the same _very_
slight distinction as their pagan {154} neighbours between matter and
spirit, and, finally, possessing all the readiness of unscientific
people in propounding theories,--they assumed an "effluence" from God,
a spirit which entered into a man, just as in ordinary life evil demons
did, but here it was a holy spirit. This they connected with God after
the manner familiar to Jewish thinkers, and following the same lead,
began to equate it with God, as a separate being. It is not at first
always quite clear whether it is the spirit of God or of Jesus--or even
a manifestation of the risen Jesus.[44]
When we pass to the early explanations of Jesus, we come into a region
peculiarly difficult. A later age obscured the divergences of early
theory. Some opinions the church decisively rejected--Christians would
have nothing to do with a Jesus who was an emanation from an absolute
and inconceivable Being, a Jesus who in that case would be virtually
indistinguishable from Asclepios the kindly-natured divine healer. Nor
would they tolerate the notion of a phantom-Jesus crucified in show,
while the divine Christ was far away--like Helen in Euripides'
play.[45] "Spare," says Tertullian, "the one hope of all the
world."[46] They would not have a "daimonion without a body." But two
theories, one of older Jewish, and the other of more recent Alexandrian
origin, the church accepted and blended, though they do not necessarily
belong to each other.
[Sidenote: Paul]
The one theory is especially Paul's--sacred to all who lean with him to
the Hebrew view of things, to all who, like him, are touched with the
sense of sin and feel the need of another's righteousness, to all who
have come under the spell of the one great writer of the first century.
A Jew, a native of a Hellenistic city--and "no mean one"[47]--a citizen
of the Roman Empire, a man of wide outlooks, with a gift for
experience, he passed from {155} Pharisaism to Christ. The mediating
idea was righteousness. He knew his own guilt before God, and found
that by going about to establish his own righteousness he was achieving
nothing.
At the same time a suffering Messiah was a contradiction in terms,
unspeakably repulsive to a Jew. We can see this much in the tremendous
efforts of the Apologists to overcome Jewish aversion by producing Old
Testament prophecies that Christ was to suffer. _Pathetos_ (subject to
suffering) was a word that waked rage and contempt in every one, who
held to contemporary views of God, or even had dabbled in Stoic or
similar conceptions of human greatness. But it seems that the serenity
and good conscience of Christian martyrs impressed their persecutor,
who was not happy in his own conscience; and at last the thought
came--along familiar lines--that Christ's sufferings might be for the
benefit of others. And then he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus.
What exactly happened is a matter of discussion, but Paul was
satisfied--he was "a man in Christ."
Much might be said in criticism of Paul's Christology--if it were not
for Paul and his followers. They have done too much and been too much
for it to be possible to dissect their great conception in cold blood.
Paul's theories are truer than another man's experiences--they pulse
with life, they have (in Luther's phrase) hands and feet to carry a man
away. The man is so large and so strong, so simple and true, so
various in his knowledge of the world, so tender in his feeling for
men--"all things to all men"--such a master of language, so sympathetic
and so open--he is irresistible. The quick movement of his thought,
his sudden flashes of anger and of tenderness, his apostrophes, his
ejaculations--one feels that pen and paper never got such a man written
down before or since. Every sentence comes charged with the whole
man--half a dozen Greek words, and not always the best Greek--and the
Christian world for ever will sum up its deepest experience in "God
forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world."
Close examination reveals a good deal of Judaism surviving in Paul,--a
curious way of playing with the text of Scripture, {156} odd
reminiscences of old methods, and deeper infiltrations of a Jewish
thought which is not that of Jesus. Yet it does not affect our feeling
for him--he stands too close to us as a man, too much over us as the
teacher of Augustine, Calvin and Luther--a man, whom it took more
genius to explain than the church had for fifteen centuries, and yet
the man to whom the church owes its universal reach and unity, its
theology and the best of the language in which it has expressed its
love for his master.
[Sidenote: Explanation of Jesus]
Paul went back to the Jewish conception of a Messiah, modified, in the
real spirit of Jesus, by the thought of suffering. But when we put
side by side the Messiah of Jesus and the Messiah of Paul, we become
conscious of a difference. The latter is a mediator between God and
man, making atonement, transferring righteousness by a sort of legal
fiction, and implying a conception of God's fatherhood far below that
taught by Jesus. At the same time Paul has other thoughts of a
profounder and more permanent value. It is hard, for instance, to
imagine that any change, which time and thought may bring, can alter a
word in his statement that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to
himself"--here there is no local or temporal element even in the
wording. It may be noted that Paul has his own names for Jesus, for
while he uses "Messiah" (in Greek) and "Son of God," he is the first to
speak of "the Lord" and "the Saviour." Paul held the door open for the
other great theory of the early church, when he emphasized the
pre-existence of the heavenly Christ and made him the beginning, the
centre and the end of all history.
The Logos, as we have seen, was not an original idea of the Christian
world. It was long familiar to Greek philosophy, and Philo and the
Stoics base much of their thought upon it. It must have come into the
church from a Greek or Hellenistic source, perhaps as a translation of
Paul's "heavenly Christ." As it stands, it is a peculiarly bold
annexation from Philosophy. No Stoic would have denied that the
Spermaticos Logos was in Jesus, but the bold identification of the
Logos with Jesus must have been "foolishness to the Greek." Still in
contemporary thought there was much to dispose men to believe in such
an incarnation of the Logos in a human being, though there is no
suggestion that a spiritual being of any at all commensurate {157}
greatness was ever so incarnated before. But the thought appealed to
the Christian mind, when once the shock to Greek susceptibilities was
overcome. Once accepted, it "solved all questions in the earth and out
of it." It permitted the congenial idea of Greek theology to
remain--the transcendence of God being saved by this personification of
his Thought. It was a final blow to all theories that made Jesus an
emanation, a phantom or a demi-god, and it kept his historic
personality well in the centre of thought, though leaving it now
comparatively much less significance.
Surveying the two accounts, Jewish and Greek, we cannot help remarking
that they belong to other ages of thought than our own. Columbus,
Copernicus and Darwin were neither philosophers nor theologians, but
they have changed the perspectives of philosophy and theology, and we
think to-day with a totally different series of preconceptions from
those of Jew and Greek of the first century. The Greek himself never
thought much of the "chosen race," and it was only when he realized
that Jesus was not a tribal hero, that he accepted him. To the Greek
the Messiah was as strange a thought as to ourselves. To us the Logos
is as strange as the Messiah was to the Greek. We have really at
present no terms in which to express what we feel to be the permanent
significance of Jesus, and the old expressions may repel us until we
realize, first, that they are not of the original essence of the
Gospel, and second, that they represent the best language which Greek
and Jew could find for a conviction which we share--that Jesus of
Nazareth does stand in the centre of human history, that he has brought
God and man into a new relation, that he is the personal concern of
everyone of us, and that there is more in him than we have yet
accounted for.
Into the question of the organization adopted by the early Christians
and the development of the idea of the church, it is not essential to
our present purpose to inquire. Opinion varies as to how far we should
seek the origin of the church in the teaching and work of Jesus. If
his mind has been at all rightly represented in this book, it seems to
follow that he was not responsible either for the name or the idea of
the church. Minds of the class to which his belongs have as a rule
little or no interest in organizations and arrangements, and nothing
can {158} be more alien to the tone and spirit of his thinking than the
ecclesiastical idea as represented by Cyprian and Ignatius. That out
of the group of followers who lived with Jesus, a society should grow,
is natural; and societies instinctively organize themselves. The Jew
offered the pattern of a theocracy, and the Roman of a hierarchy of
officials, but it took two centuries to produce the church of Cyprian.
The series of running fights with Greek speculation in the second
century contributed to the natural and acquired instincts for order and
system,--particularly in a world where such instincts had little
opportunity of exercise in municipal, and less in political, life. The
name was, as Harnack says, a masterly stroke--the "ecclesia of God"
suggested to the Greek the noble and free life of a self-governing
organism such as the ancient world had known, but raised to a higher
plane and transfigured from a Periclean Athens to a Heavenly Jerusalem.
Fine conceptions and high ideals clung about the idea of the church in
the best minds,[48] but in practice it meant the transformation of the
gospel into a code, the repression of liberty of thought, and the final
extinction of prophecy. For the view that every one of these results
was desirable, reason might be shown in the vagaries of life and
speculation which the age knew, but it was obviously a departure from
the ideas of Jesus.
[Sidenote: The new life]
The rise of the church was accompanied by the rise of mysteries. There
is a growing consensus of opinion among independent scholars that Jesus
instituted no sacraments, yet Paul found the rudiments of them among
the Christians and believed he had the warrant of Jesus for the
heightening which he gave to them. Ignatius speaks of the Ephesians
"breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality (_pharkmakon
athanasias_) and the antidote that we should not die"--the former
phrase reappearing in Clement of Alexandria.[49] That such ideas
should emerge in the Christian community is natural enough, when we
consider its environment--a world without natural science, steeped in
belief in every kind of magic and enchantment, and full of public and
private religious societies, every one of which had its mysteries and
miracles and its blood-bond with its peculiar deity. It was from such
a world {159} and such societies that most of the converts came and
brought with them the thoughts and instincts of countless generations,
who had never conceived of a religion without rites and mysteries.
Baptism similarly took on a miraculous colour--men were baptized for
the dead in Paul's time--and before long it bore the names familiarly
given by the world to all such rituals of admission--enlightenment
(_photismos_) and initiation; and with the names came many added
symbolic practices in its administration. The Christians readily
recognized the parallel between their rites and those of the heathen,
but no one seems to have perceived the real connexion between them.
Quite naively they suggest the exact opposite--it was the daemons, who
foresaw what the Christian rites (_hiera_) would be, and forestalled
them with all sorts of pagan parodies.[50]
But, after all, the force of the Christian movement lay neither in
church, nor in sacrament, but in men. "How did Christianity rise and
spread among men?" asks Carlyle, "was it by institutions, and
establishments, and well arranged systems of mechanism? No! ... It
arose in the mystic deeps of man's soul; and was spread by the
'preaching of the word,' by simple, altogether natural and individual
efforts; and flew, like hallowed fire, from heart to heart, till all
were purified and illuminated by it. Here was no Mechanism; man's
highest attainment was accomplished Dynamically, not Mechanically."[51]
Nothing could be more just. The Gospel set fire to men's hearts, and
they needed to do nothing but live to spread their faith. The ancient
evidence is abundant for this. The Christian had an "insatiable
passion for doing good"[52]--not as yet a technical term--and he "did
good" in the simplest kind of ways. "Even those things which you do
after the flesh are spiritual," says Ignatius himself, "for you do all
things in Jesus Christ."[53] "Christians," says a writer whose name is
lost, "are not distinguishable from the rest of mankind in land or
speech or customs. They inhabit no special cities of their own, nor do
they use any different form of speech, nor do they cultivate any
out-of-the-way life.... But while they live in Greek and barbarian
cities as their lot may be {160} cast, and follow local customs in
dress and food and life generally, ... yet they live in their own
countries as sojourners only; they take part in everything as citizens
and submit to everything as strangers. Every strange land is native to
them, and every native land is strange. They marry and have children
like everyone else--but they do not expose their children. They have
meals in common, but not wives. They are in the flesh, but they do not
live after the flesh. They continue on earth, but their citizenship is
in heaven. They obey the laws ordained, and by their private lives
they overcome the laws.... In a word, what the soul is in the body,
that is what Christians are in the world."[54]
"As a rule," wrote Galen, "men need to be educated in parables. Just
as in our day we see those who are called Christians[55] have gained
their faith from parables. Yet they sometimes act exactly as true
philosophers would. That they despise death is a fact we all have
before our eyes; and by some impulse of modesty they abstain from
sexual intercourse--some among them, men and women, have done so all
their lives. And some, in ruling and controlling themselves, and in
their keen passion for virtue, have gone so far that real philosophers
could not excel them."[56] So wrote a great heathen, and Celsus admits
as much himself. In life at least, if not in theory, the Christians
daily kept to the teaching of their Master. "Which is ampler?" asks
Tertullian, "to say, Thou shalt not kill; or to teach, Be not even
angry? Which is more perfect, to forbid adultery or to bid refrain
from a single lustful look?"[57] There was as yet no flight from the
world, though Christians had no illusions about it or about the devil
who played so large a part in its affairs. They lived in an age that
saw Antinous deified.[58] They stood for marriage and family life,
while all around "holy" men felt there was an unclean and daemonic
element in marriage.[59] One Christian writer even speaks of women
being {161} saved by child-bearing.[60] Social conditions they
accepted--even slavery among them--but they brought a new spirit into
all; love and the sense of brotherhood could transform every thing.
Slavery continued, but the word "slave" is not found in Christian
catacombs.[61]
Above all, they were filled with their Master's own desire to save men.
"I am debtor," wrote Paul, "both to Greeks and to barbarians, wise and
unwise."[62] If modern criticism is right in detaching the "missionary
commission" (in Matthew) from the words of Jesus, the fact remains that
the early Christians were "going into all the world" and "preaching the
gospel to every creature" for half a century before the words were
written. Why? "He that has the word of Jesus truly can hear his
silence," said Ignatius; and if Jesus did not speak these words, men
heard his silence to the same effect. Celsus, like Julian long after
him, was shocked at the kind of people to whom the gospel was
preached.[63]
The Christian came to the helpless and hopeless, whom men despised, and
of whom men despaired, with a message of the love and tenderness of
God, and he brought it home by a new type of love and tenderness of his
own. Kindness to friends the world knew; gentleness, too, for the sake
of philosophic calm; clemency and other more or less self-contained
virtues. The "third race" had other ideas--in all their virtues there
was the note of "going out of oneself," the unconsciousness which Jesus
loved--an instinctive habit of negating self (_aparnesasthai heauton_),
which does not mean medieval asceticism, nor the dingy modern virtue of
self-denial. There was no sentimentalism in it; it was the spirit of
Jesus spiritualizing and transforming and extending the natural
instinct of brotherliness by making it theocentric. Christians for a
century or two never thought of _ataraxia_ or apathy, and, though
Clement of Alexandria plays with them, he tries to give them a new
turn. Fortunately the Gospels were more read than the _Stromateis_ and
"Christian apathy" never succeeded. The heathen recognized sympathy as
a Christian characteristic--"How these {162} Christians love each
other!" they said. Lucian bears the same testimony to the mutual care
and helpfulness of Christians. "You see," wrote Lucian, "these poor
creatures have persuaded themselves that they are immortal for all time
and will live for ever, which explains why they despise death and
voluntarily give themselves up, as a general rule; and then their
original law-giver persuaded them that they are all brothers, from the
moment that they cross over and deny the gods of Greece and worship
their sophist who was gibbeted, and live after his laws. All this they
accept, with the result that they despise all worldly goods alike and
count them common property." In a later century Julian, perhaps
following Maximin Daza, whom he copied in trying to organize heathenism
into a new catholic church, urged benevolence on his fellow-pagans, if
they wished to compete with the Christians. It was the only thing, he
felt, that could revive paganism, and his appeal met with no response.
"Infinite love in ordinary intercourse" is the Christian life, and it
must come from within or nowhere. No organization can produce it, and,
however much we may have to discount Christian charity in some
directions as sometimes mechanical, the new spirit of brotherhood in
the world presupposed a great change in the hearts of men.
It was not Stoic cosmopolitanism. The Christian was not "the citizen
of the world" nor "the Friend of Man"; he was a plain person who gave
himself up for other people, cared for the sick and the worthless, had
a word of friendship and hope for the sinful and despised, would not go
and see men killed in the amphitheatre, and--most curious of all--was
careful to have indigent brothers taught trades by which they could
help themselves. A lazy Christian was no Christian, he was a "trader
in Christ."[64] If the Christians' citizenship was in heaven, he had a
social message for this world in the meantime.
[Sidenote: Woman]
Every great religious movement coincides with a new discovery of truth
of some kind, and such discoveries induce a new temper. Men inquire
more freely and speak more freely the truth they feel. Mistakes are
made and a movement begins {163} for "quenching the spirit." But the
gains that have been made by the liberated spirits are not lost. Thus
the early Christian rose quickly to a sense of the value of woman. Dr
Verrall pronounces that "the radical disease, of which, more than of
anything else, ancient civilization perished "was" an imperfect ideal
of woman."[65] In the early church woman did a good many things, which
in later days the authorities preferred not to mention. Thekla's name
is prominent in early story, and the prophetesses of Phrygia, Prisca
and Maximilla, have a place in Church History. They were not popular;
but the church was committed to the Gospel of Luke and the ministry of
women to the Lord. And whatever the Christian priesthood did or said,
Jesus and his followers had set woman on a level with man. "There is
neither male nor female." The same freedom of spirit is attested by
the way in which pagan prophets and their dupes classed Christians with
Epicureans[66]--they saw and understood too much. The Christians were
the only people (apart from the Jews) who openly denounced the folly of
worshipping and deifying Emperors. Even Ignatius, who is most famous
for his belief in authority, breaks into independence when men try to
make the Gospel dependent on the Old Testament--"for me the documents
(_ta archeia_) are Jesus Christ; my unassailable documents are his
cross, and his death and resurrection, and the faith that is through
him; in which things I hope with your prayers to be saved."[67] "Where
the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty," as Paul said.
God and immortality were associated in Christian thought. Christians,
said a writer using the name of Peter, are to be "partakers of the
divine nature." "If the soul," says Tatian, "enters into union with
the divine spirit, it is no longer helpless, but ascends to regions
whither the spirit guides it; for the dwelling-place of the spirit is
above, but the origin of the soul is from beneath."[68] "God sent
forth to us the Saviour and Prince of immortality, by whom he also made
manifest to us the truth and the heavenly life."[69] The Christian's
life is "hid with Christ in God," and Christ's resurrection is to the
{164} early church the pledge of immortality--"we shall be ever with
the Lord." For the transmigration of souls and "eternal re-dying,"
life was substituted.[70] "We have believed," said Tatian, "that there
will be a resurrection of our bodies, after the consummation of all
things--not, as the Stoics dogmatize, that in periodic cycles the same
things for ever come into being and pass out of it for no good
whatever,--but once for all," and this for judgment. The judge is not
Minos nor Rhadamanthus, but "God the maker is the arbiter."[71] "They
shall see him (Jesus) then on that day," wrote the so-called Barnabas,
"wearing the long scarlet robe upon his flesh, and they will say 'Is
this not he whom we crucified, whom we spat upon, and rejected?'"[72]
Persecution tempted the thought of what "that day" would mean for the
persecutor. But it was a real concern of the Christian himself. "I
myself, utterly sinful, not yet escaped from temptation, but still in
the midst of the devil's engines,--I do my diligence to follow after
righteousness that I may prevail so far as at least to come near it,
fearing the judgment that is to come."[73] Immortality and
righteousness--the two thoughts go together, and both depend upon Jesus
Christ. He is emphatically called "our Hope"--a favourite phrase with
Ignatius.[74]
[Sidenote: Martyrdom and happiness]
Some strong hope was needed--some "anchor of the soul, sure and
steadfast."[75] Death lay in wait for the Christian at every turn,
never certain, always probable. The daemons whom he had renounced took
their revenge in exciting his neighbours against him.[76] The whim of
a mob[77] or the cruelty of a governor[78] might bring him face to face
with death in no man knew what horrible form. One writer spoke of "the
burning that came for trial,"[79] and the phrase was not exclusively a
metaphor. {165} "Away with the atheists--where is Polycarp?" was a
sudden shout at Smyrna--the mob already excited with sight of "the
right noble Germanicus fighting the wild beasts in a signal way." The
old man was sought and found--with the words "God's will be done" upon
his lips. He was pressed to curse Christ. "Eighty-six years I have
been his slave," he said, "and he has done me no wrong. How can I
blaspheme my King who saved me?"[80] The suddenness of these attacks,
and the cruelty, were enough to unnerve anyone who was not "built upon
the foundation." Nero's treatment of the Christians waked distaste in
Rome itself. But it was the martyrdoms that made the church.
Stephen's death captured Paul. "I delighted in Plato's teachings,"
says Justin, "and I heard Christians abused, but I saw they were
fearless in the face of death and all the other things men count
fearful."[81] Tertullian and others with him emphasize that "the blood
of martyrs is the seed of the church." It was the death of Jesus over
again--the last word that carried conviction with it.
With "the sentence of death in themselves" the early Christians faced
the world, and astonished it by more than their "stubbornness." They
were the most essentially happy people of the day--Jesus was their
hope, their sufficiency was of God, their names were written in heaven,
they were full of love for all men--they had "become little children,"
as Jesus put it, glad and natural. Jesus had brought them into a new
world of possibilities. A conduct that ancient moralists dared not
ask, the character of Jesus suggested, and the love of Jesus made
actual. "I can do all things," said Paul, "in him that strengtheneth
me." They looked to assured victory over evil and they achieved it.
"This is the victory that _has_ overcome the world--our faith." Very
soon a new note is heard in their words. Stoicism was never
"essentially musical"; Epictetus announces a hymn to Zeus,[82] but he
never starts the tune. Over and over again there is a sound of singing
in Paul--as in the eighth chapter of the _Romans_, and the thirteenth
of _First Corinthians_,[83] and it repeats itself. "Children of joy"
is Barnabas' name for his friends.[84] {166} "Doing the will of Christ
we shall find rest," wrote the unknown author of "Second Clement."[85]
"Praising we plough; and singing we sail," wrote the greater
Clement.[86] "Candidates for angelhood, even here we learn the strain
hereafter to be raised to God, the function of our future glory," said
Tertullian.[87] "Clothe thyself in gladness, that always has grace with
God and is welcome to him--and revel in it. For every glad man does
what is good, and thinks what is good.... The holy spirit is a glad
spirit ... yes, they shall all live to God, who put away sadness from
themselves and clothe themselves in all gladness." So said the angel
to Hermas,[88] and he was right. The holy spirit was a glad spirit,
and gladness--joy in the holy spirit--was the secret of Christian
morality. Nothing could well be more gay and happy than Clement's
_Protrepticus_. Augustine was attracted to the church because he saw
it _non dissolute hilaris_. Such happiness in men is never without a
personal centre, and the church made no secret that this centre was
"Jesus Christ, whom you have not seen, but you love him; whom yet you
see not, but you believe in him and rejoice with joy unspeakable and
glorified."[89]