The victory of Rome was complete. A captain of our race, of our blood, a
man like us, at the head of legions in whose roll, if we could read it,
we should meet many of our ancestors, had come to crush the fortress of
Semitism, to inflict upon the revealed, accepted law the greatest injury
which it had received. It was the triumph of Roman right, or rather
rational right, a creation utterly philosophical, presupposing no
revelation, above the Jewish Thora, the fruit of a revelation. This
right, whose roots were partly Greek, but in which the practical genius
of the Latins made so fine a part, was the excellent gift which Rome
brought to the vanquished in return for their independence. Each victory
for Rome was a victory for right. Rome bore into the world a better
principle in several respects than that of the Jews: I mean the profane
state, reposing on a purely civil conception of society.
The triumph of Titus was then legitimate in many ways, and still there
never was a more useless triumph. The deplorable religious nothingness
of Rome rendered its victory unfruitful. This victory did not retard the
progress of Judaism a single day: it did not give the religion of the
empire an added chance to struggle against this redoubtable rival. The
national existence of the Jewish people was lost forever; but that was a
blessing. The true glory of Judaism was Christianity, about to be born.
The ruin of Jerusalem and the temple was an unequalled good for
Christianity.
If the reasoning of Titus according to Tacitus is correctly reported,
the victorious general believed that the destruction of the temple would
be the ruin of Christianity as well as that of Judaism. No one was ever
more completely deceived. The Romans imagined, that, in tearing up the
root, they should eradicate the shoot at the same time; but the shoot
was already a shrub that lived its own life. If the temple had survived,
Christianity would certainly have been arrested in its development. The
surviving temple would have continued to be the centre of all Judaic
works. It would always have been regarded as the most holy place of the
world: pilgrims would have come there, and would there have brought
their tributes. The Church of Jerusalem, grouped around by consecrated
parvises, would have continued, by the strength of its primacy, to
receive the homage of all the world, to persecute the Christians of the
Church of Paul, to exact, that, in order to have the right to call one's
self the disciple of Jesus, one should practise the circumcision, and
observe the Mosaic code. All effectual propagandism would have been
interdicted: letters of obedience signed at Jerusalem would have been
exacted from the missionary. A centre of irrefragable authority, a
patriarchate composed of a sort of college of cardinals under the
presidency of men like James, pure Jews belonging to the family of
Jesus, would have been established, and would have constituted an
immense danger for the new-born Church. When one sees St. Paul after so
many mishaps remaining always attached to the Church of Jerusalem, one
understands what difficulties a rupture with these holy personages would
have presented. Such a schism would have been considered as an enormity.
The separation from Judaism would have been impossible; and this
separation was the indispensable condition of the existence of the new
religion. The mother was about to kill the child. The temple, on the
contrary, once destroyed, the Christians thought no more of it: very
soon, indeed, they will consider it a profane place: Jesus will be every
thing to them. The Christian Church of Jerusalem was by the same stroke
reduced to a secondary importance. It was re-organized around the
element which made its force, the _desposyni_, the members of the family
of Jesus, the sons of Clopas; but it will reign no more. This centre of
hate and exclusion once destroyed, the reconciliation of the opposing
parties in the Church of Jesus will become easy. Peter and Paul will be
brought into accord, and the terrible duality of the new-born
Christianity will cease to be a mortal sore. Lost in the depth of the
interior of the Batanæa and the Hauran, the little group which attached
itself to James and Clopas becomes the Ebionite sect, and slowly dies.
These relatives of Jesus were pious, tranquil, mild, modest,
hard-working men, faithful to the severest precepts of Jesus concerning
poverty, but at the same time very exact Jews, considering the title of
"Child of Israel" before every other advantage. From the year 70 to
about the year 110, they really governed the churches beyond the Jordan,
and formed a sort of Christian senate. There is no need to demonstrate
the immense danger which these pre-occupations, with genealogies, were
to the new-born Christianity. A sort of nobility of Christianity was
about to be formed. In the political order the nobility is almost a
necessity to the state. Politics having elements of gross struggles
which render it more material than ideal, a state is very strong only
when a certain number of families has, by tradition and privilege, the
duty and interest of guarding its welfare, representing and defending
it. But, in the order of the ideal government, birth is nothing: each
one is valued in proportion to the truth he shows, and the good he does.
The institutions which have a religious, literary, moral end, are lost,
when considerations of family, caste, heredity, prevail in them. The
nephews and cousins of Jesus would have ruined Christianity, if the
churches of Paul had not already been strong enough to act as a
counterpoise to this aristocracy, the tendency of which would have been
to proclaim itself alone respectable, and to treat all converts as
intruders. Some pretensions analogous to those of the Alides in Islam
were established. Islamism would certainly have perished under the
embarrassment caused by the family of the prophet, if the result of the
struggles of the first century of the Hegira had not been to reject,
upon second thought, all those who were too near the person of the
prophet. The true heirs of a great man are those who continue his work,
and not his relatives by blood. Considering the tradition of Jesus as
his own possession, the little _coterie_ of the Nazarenes, as they are
called, would certainly have stifled it. Happily this narrow circle
disappeared in good season: the relatives of Jesus were soon forgotten
in the interior of the Hauran. They lost all importance, and left Jesus
to his true family, the only one which he has recognized,--those of whom
he said, "They hear the word of God, and keep it."