Among no people was the longing for redemption so lively and the
expectation of a speedy end of the world so strong as among the
Jews. Since the Babylonian captivity (586-536 B.C.) the former Jewish
outlook upon the world had undergone a great change. Fifty years had
been spent by the Israelites in the land of the stranger. For two
hundred years after their return to their own land they were under
Persian overlordship. As a consequence of this they were in close
connection politically and economically with the Achæmenidean Empire,
and this did not cease when Alexander overthrew the Persian power
and brought the whole Eastern world under Greek influence. During
this lengthy period Persian modes of thinking and Persian religious
views had influenced in many ways the old Jewish opinions, and had
introduced a large number of new ideas. First of all the extreme
dualism of the Persians had impressed a distinctly dual character
upon Jewish Monotheism. God and the world, which in the old ideas
had often mingled with one another, were separated and made to stand
in opposition to each other. Following the same train of thought,
the old national God Jahwe, in imitation of the Persian Ahuramazda
(Ormuzd), had developed from a God of fire, light, and sky into a God
of supernatural purity and holiness. Surrounded by light and enthroned
in the Beyond, like Ahuramazda, the source of all life, the living
God held intercourse with his creatures upon the earth only through
the instrumentality of a court of angels. These messengers of God or
intermediate beings in countless numbers moved between heaven and earth
upon his service. And just as Angromainyu (Ahriman), the evil, was
opposed to Ahuramazda, the good, and the struggle between darkness and
light, truth and falsehood, life and death, was, according to Persian
ideas, reproduced in the course of earthly events, so the Jews too
ascribed to Satan the rôle of an adversary of God, a corrupter of the
divine creation, and made him, as Prince of this world and leader of
the forces of hell, measure his strength with the King of Heaven. [16]
In the struggle of the two opposing worlds, according to Persian
ideas, Mithras stood in the foreground, the spirit of light,
truth, and justice, the divine "friend" of men, the "mediator,"
"deliverer," and "saviour" of the world. He shared his office with
Honover, Ahuramazda's Word of creation and revelation; and indeed in
most things their attributes were mingled. An incarnation of fire or
the sun, above all of the struggling, suffering, triumphant light,
which presses victoriously through night and darkness, Mithras was
also connected with death and immortality, and passed as guide of
souls and judge in the under-world. He was the "divine son," of whom
it was said that Ahuramazda had fashioned him as great and worthy
of reverence as his own self. Indeed, he was in essence Ahuramazda
himself, proceeding from his supernatural light, and given a concrete
individuality. As companion in creation and "protector" of the world
he kept the universe standing in its struggle against its enemies. At
the head of the heavenly host he fought for God, and with his sword
of flame he drove the Dæmons of Darkness in terror back into the
shadows. To take part in this combat on the side of God, to build up
the future kingdom of God by the work of a life-giving civilisation,
by the rendering fruitful of sterile wastes, the extinction of noxious
animals, and by moral self-education, seemed the proper end of human
existence. But when the time should have been fulfilled and the present
epoch come to an end, according to Persian belief, Ahuramazda was
then to raise up from the seed of Zarathustra, the founder of this
religion, the "virgin's son," Saoshyant (Sraosha, Sosiosch, which
signifies the Saviour), or, as it ran according to another rendering,
Mithras himself should descend upon the earth and in a last fierce
struggle overwhelm Angromainyu and his hosts, and cast them down
into the Nether World. He would then raise the dead in bodily shape,
and after a General Judgment of the whole world, in which the wicked
should be condemned to the punishments of hell and the good raised
to heavenly glory, establish the "millennial Kingdom of Peace." Hell
itself was not to last for ever, for a great reconciliation was to
be finally held out even to the damned. Then Angromainyu also would
make peace with Ahuramazda, and upon a new earth beneath a new heaven
all were to be united to one another in everlasting blessedness.
These ideas entered the circle of Jewish thought and there brought
about a complete transformation of the former belief in a Messiah.
Messiah--that is, the Anointed (in Greek, Christos)--originally
signified the king as representative of Jahwe before the people and of
the people before Jahwe. According to 2 Sam. vii. 13 sq., he was placed
in the same relation of an obedient "son" to his "father," in which
the whole people was conscious of standing. [17] Then the opposition
between the holy dignity of the "Anointed" of God and the humanly
imperfect personality of the Jewish kings led to the ideal of the
Messiah being transferred to the future and the complete realisation
of the rule of Jahwe over his people being expected only then. In
this sense the ancient prophets had already celebrated the Messiah
as an ideal King of the future, who would experience in the fullest
sense the high assurances of Jahwe's favour, of which David had been
deemed worthy, since he would be completely worthy of them. They had
described him as the Hero, who would be more than Moses and Joshua,
who would establish the promised glory of Israel, dispose the people
anew, and bring Jahwe's religion even to the heathen. [18] They had
glorified him in that he would span the heavens afresh, establish a
new earth, and make Israel Lord over all nations. [19] In this they
had at first understood the Messiah only as a human being, as a new
David or of his seed--theocratic king, divinely favoured prince of
peace and just ruler over his people, just as the Persian Saoshyant
was to be a man of the seed of Zarathustra. In this sense a Cyrus,
the deliverer of the people from the Babylonian captivity, the rescuer
and overlord of Israel, had been acclaimed Messiah. [20] But just as
Saoshyant had been undesignedly transfigured in the imagination of the
people into a divine being and made one with the figure of Mithras,
[21] so also among the prophets the Messiah was more and more assigned
the part of a divine king. He was called "divine hero," "Father of
Eternity," and the prophet Isaiah indulged in a description of his
kingdom of peace, in which the wolf would lie down by the lamb, men
would no longer die before their time, and would enjoy the fruit of
their fields without tithe, while right and justice would reign upon
earth under this king of a golden age as it had never done before. [22]
Secret and supernatural, as was his nature, so should the birth of
the Messiah be. Though a divine child, he was to be born in lowly
state. [23] The personality of the Messiah mingled with that of Jahwe
himself, as though it were God himself of whose ascending the throne
and journey heavenwards the Psalmists sing. [24]
These alternations of the Messiah between a human and a divine nature
appear still more clearly in the Jewish apocalyptics of the last
century before and the first century after Christ. Thus the Apocalypse
of Daniel (about 165 B.C.) speaks of one who as Son of Man will descend
upon the clouds of heaven and will be brought before the "Ancient of
Days." The whole tone of the passage leaves no doubt that the Son of
Man (barnasa) is a superhuman being representing the Deity. To him the
majesty and kingdom of God have been entrusted in order that, at the
end of the existing epoch, he should descend upon the clouds of heaven,
surrounded by a troop of angels, and establish an everlasting power, a
Kingdom of Heaven. In the picture-language of Enoch (in the last decade
before Christ) the Messiah, the "Chosen One," the "Son of Man," appears
as a supernatural pre-existing being, who was hidden in God before the
world was created, whose glory continues from eternity to eternity and
his might from generation to generation, in whom the spirit of wisdom
and power dwells, who judges hidden things, punishes the wicked, but
will save the holy and just. [25] Indeed, the Apocalypse of Esdras
(the so-called fourth Book of Esdras) expressly combats the opinion
that the judgment of the world will come through another than God,
and likewise describes the Messiah as a kind of "second God," as the
"Son of God," as the human incarnation of the Godhead. [26]
In all of this the influence of Persian beliefs is unmistakable,
whether these arose in Iran itself directly, or whether the idea of
a God-appointed king and deliverer of the world was borrowed by the
Persians from the circle of Babylonian ideas. Here this conception
had taken deep root and was applied at different times now to this
king, now to that. [27] Just as in the Persian religion the image
of Saoshyant, so also in the Jewish view the picture of the Messiah
wavered between a human king of the race of David and a supernatural
being of divine nature descended from heaven. And just as in the
Persian representation of the coming of Saoshyant and the final victory
of the Kingdom of Light there would be a preceding period during which
threatening signs would appear in the heavens, the whole of nature
would find itself in upheaval and mankind would be scourged with
fearful plagues, so also the Jewish Apocalypse speaks of the "woes"
of the Messiah and describes a period of terror which would precede
the coming of the Messiah. The coming of the power of God was looked
upon as a miraculous catastrophe suddenly breaking in from on high,
as a conflagration of the world followed by a new creation. The Jewish
agreed with the Persian view in this also, that it made a heavenly
kingdom of undisturbed bliss "in the light of the everlasting life
and in likeness of the angels" follow the earthly world-wide empire
of the Messiah. This they imagined on exactly the same lines as the
Persian Paradise. There would the holy drink of the "Water of Life"
and nourish themselves on the fruit which hang upon the "Tree of
Life." The wicked, on the other hand, would be cast into hell and
suffer in fearful torments the just punishment of their sins. [28]
The conception of a resurrection of the dead and a last judgment had
hitherto been strange to the Jews. In pre-exilic days they allowed the
body to die and the soul after death to go down as a shadow without
feeling into Hades (Sheol), without disturbing themselves further
about its fate. Now, however, with the doctrine of the destruction
of the world by fire and the general judgment, the idea of personal
immortality entered the world of Jewish thought. Thus it is said by
Daniel that on the day of judgment the dead will rise again, some
waking to everlasting life, others to everlasting perdition. "But the
teachers will shine as the brightness of heaven, and those who led
the multitude to justice as the stars for ever and ever." [29] With
the acceptance of personal immortality the whole tone of religious
thought was deepened and enriched in the direction of thought for
the individual. Former Jewish morality had been essentially of a
collective kind. It was not so much the individual as the people
viewed collectively that was looked upon as the object of divine
solicitude. At this point the position, the road to which had been
already prepared by the prophets, was definitely established, that
the individual hoped for a personal religious salvation and as a
consequence felt in direct personal relationship with Jahwe. God
indeed remained, as the Persians had taught them to understand
him, the superhuman lord of heaven enthroned in pure light, the
source of all life, the living God. His metaphysical qualities,
however, his dazzling glory and unconquerable might were ever more
and more overshadowed by his moral attributes: goodness, grace,
and mercy appeared as the most prominent features in the character
of Jahwe. God seemed a loving father who leads his children through
life with kindly care, and without whose consent not a hair of one of
his creatures could be touched. The strong tendency within Judaism,
represented by the upper currents of pharisaic rabbinism, continually
drew the national boundaries closer, and was ever more anxiously
occupied with a painfully strict observance of the letter of the
law and a conscientious observance of ritualistic ordinances. Ethics
threatened to be extinguished under a system of conventional rules
of an essentially juristic nature. Yet all the while a more human
and natural morality was arising, an inward piety, warm-hearted,
popular, and sound, which broke through the narrow limits of Jewish
nationalism, and sent a fresh current into the heavy atmosphere of
official legality. It was then that the groundwork of later Christian
ethics was laid in the purified morality of the psalms, aphorisms,
and other edificatory writings of a Job, Baruch, Jesus son of Sirach,
&c. It was then that the Jewish Monotheism set itself to extend
its sway beyond the boundaries of its own land and to enter into
competition with the other religions of antiquity, from which it was
to draw back vanquished only before a matured Christianity.