Christianism would never have grown to be even a church, to say nothing
of its prospects of becoming a power in the world. Its adherents in the
beginning were good, zealous, believing folk, but among them were no men
of education or of commanding ability. The first congregation in
Jerusalem, therefore, unable to comprehend the lofty views of the
Crucified, took their stand on a narrow ground not essentially different
from that of Judaism; for example, they held that no one was worthy to
be baptized who would not first undergo circumcision, thus becoming by
adoption a Jew. The Apostle James, a devout ascetic, was the head of
this school, the adherents of which were called Jewish Christians. The
first to demand repudiation of Judaism was Stephen, a man of Grecian
education; but he paid the penalty of his ambitious plans by a martyr’s
death. The congregation at Antioch adopted Stephen’s view, according to
which the “Gentile Christians” and the “Jewish Christians” stood on an
equality. The intellectual leader of the Gentile-Christian school was
Paul, a man who, in talents and in force of character, stood high above
all the original apostles of the Nazarene. Through Paul’s exertions
Christianism overstepped the narrow limits of Palestine and Syria. Well
schooled, both in Grecian philosophy and Jewish theology, he was at the
first a fanatical persecutor of the Christians, but had a sudden
conversion while journeying to Damascus on a persecuting raid, and
thenceforth was a zealous apostle of the new religion. Being a victim of
epilepsy, Paul had frequent fits and visions, and he spoke of them
often, thus implanting in the minds of the Christians a firm belief in
such occurrences. Of course, the way was thus made ready for the
introduction of the legends of a resurrection, an ascension, etc.
Furthermore, a foundation was in this way laid for a great theological
superstructure, which very soon was seen to rise. As the foundation, so
was the superstructure—mystical. Over against the first man, Adam,
representing the sensuous life, sin, servitude, and death, Paul set up
the God-man Christ, representing the spirit, grace, freedom, and life;
man was to crucify the “old Adam,” and to be born anew in Christ, even
to become one with him. By this union, he said, the law of Moses is done
away, being superseded by “faith,” whereby alone the sinner is justified
and made worthy of God’s grace. For true faith, he added, carries with
it good works, and the true believer cannot be otherwise than righteous.
Paul thus stood, in a certain sense, on the Protestant ground as
contradistinguished from the Judaeo-Christian (which is partly also the
Catholic) ground of Peter, James, and John, who upheld the Mosaic law,
and received into the Church only circumcised converts. Peter wavered,
being a Jew among Jews, but often forgetting the Mosaic law in the
company of Gentile Christians; but Paul would never consent that Gentile
converts should be obliged to conform to the Jewish rites: hence Paul
was the real founder of the Christian Church, which, had his opponents
been victorious, would have remained a Jewish sect. The Church was split
into two parties. To the Jewish-Christian party adhered the numerous
converts from Essenism, with whom the tie of blood was stronger than the
spiritual bond which united them with the school of Pythagoras. This
party did not regard Jesus as God, but classed him with the angels.
Between the two parties, Judaeo-Christian and Gentile-Christian, arose a
third party, that of the Alexandrine Christian Jews. Their leader was
Apollos (properly Apollonius), of whom it is related in the Acts of the
Apostles, that he recognized only the baptism of John, and not that of
Jesus, but that he was converted to belief in the latter by certain of
Paul’s disciples at Ephesus. He it was that imported into Christianism
the Alexandrine doctrine of the Logos or Word.
6. THE NEW TESTAMENT.
With such a distribution of parties, the New Testament literature arose.
It may now be affirmed without hesitation that not one piece of this
literature was composed by any of the disciples of Jesus, who were all
uneducated men. The early Christians had at first no Sacred Scripture
other than the Old Testament; with regard to the doctrine of Jesus they
depended on oral instruction. Even the language in which the New
Testament was written, the Hellenistic (or literary dialect of the
Alexandrines) is proof that it was the work of men of Greek education.
As far as can be determined now the earliest New Testament writer was
Paul. The Pauline epistles that are his indisputably, are those to the
Romans, the Corinthians, and the Galatians; the most dubious among them
are the epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. There are epistles of
some of the other apostles, as James, Peter, John, and Jude, and these,
of course, according to the party stand of their writers, represent
views opposed to those of Paul. They are of later date than Paul’s
epistles, and are hardly to be credited to the apostles whose names are
prefixed to them. To the Alexandrine school is to be referred the
epistle to the Hebrews, distinguished from the Pauline writings by the
fact that it holds the Old and New Testaments to be, not opposites, but
complements of each other.
Apart from the Epistles the Revelation of John (Apocalypse) is the
oldest book of the New Testament. Written in the spirit of an Old
Testament prophet, it expresses the indignation of a Jew against the
Romans during the siege and shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem,
A. D. 70; it contains the prediction that not Jerusalem, but the whore
of Babylon (Rome), together with the entire heathen world, will perish
amid fire, blood, and ruin; but that there will be let down from Heaven
a new and glorious Jerusalem, abode of the blest, seat of the “bride of
the lamb.” After the destruction of Jerusalem the Apocalypse was written
anew by an unknown hand, in the Christian sense. As every one knows, the
prophecies of the book did not come true; but its fantastic, morbid
imaginings have ever since been interpreted by enthusiasts as infallible
forewarnings of things to come; and many a searcher of its pages has
lost what modicum of sense they ever had in working out its meaning.
The other historical writings of the New Testament consist of four
Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. It is now evident that, when in
the course of time the oral traditions were committed to writing, Jesus’
discourses, which, with an admirable simplicity and admirable clearness,
expressed a good deal in a few words, must have been handed down in far
more authentic form than the history of his deeds; and that among his
discourses, those which contained truths of general application were
more faithfully remembered than those which expressed personal views—as,
for example, those in which he claims to be Messiah. The oldest written
accounts of his life and work are lost to us forever; they were, without
doubt, written in the language which was used by Jesus and his
disciples, Aramaic, a sister tongue of Hebrew. Of the existing Gospels,
written in Greek, the first three, called “synoptics” (i. e., agreeing),
are based on one older original gospel or account; the third Gospel,
John’s, stands by itself. The new criticism regards Mark’s Gospel as the
most ancient: it contains almost exclusively narratives of facts,
written down from memory, with the accruing embellishments and
modifications; but Mark gives little of the discourses of Jesus; he says
nothing, knows nothing of any supernatural birth of Jesus, and regards
him simply as man. Mark’s Gospel is the basis of the other two
synoptics, which draw on him for narrative, while they both add the
discourses. The Gospel according to Matthew gives the discourses a
Judaeo-Christian tinge; that according to Luke (who also wrote the Acts)
a Gentile-Christian coloring: but they both waver between the opinions
that Jesus is God and man, and that he is only man. But the Gospel
literature was lifted out of this state of hesitation by the fourth
Gospel. This Gospel bears the name of the Judaeo-Christian apostle John,
but erroneously, for it had its origin in the Alexandrine school, and
was written probably A. D. 160 to 170. The Alexandrines, as we have
seen, were wont to resolve all accounts of facts, whether real or
fictitious, into mental concepts, and, therefore, lived in a cloudworld
of ideas. Whereas, the first apostles regarded the Nazarene merely as
man, and while for Paul and the evangelists Matthew and Luke he was a
god-man, the Joannine Gospel makes him God, and represents his existence
on earth in palpable human form, as a mere passing incident. Hence it
proclaims him the “Word” (logos), which Philo Judaeus discovered; which
Logos not only was “in the beginning” with God, but was God himself. For
the author of the fourth Gospel the narrative of occurrences in the life
of Jesus is a secondary matter, serving only as a setting for his own
peculiar doctrines. Thus the doctrine of the godhead of Jesus is the
result of Grecian influence.
Besides these four generally received Gospels several others, in one
place or another, at one time or another, have passed for revealed
writings. They are written, some in Aramaic, some in Greek, some in
Latin, and, since their uncanonical character was decided, have been
classed as Apocrypha. Their contents, barring a few passages that show
some elevation of thought, are mostly in the jejune and tasteless vein
of those trivial accounts of miracles which we find in the canonical
Gospels, such as the changing of water into wine, the cursing of the
figtree, Peter’s draught of fishes, etc.; or they are of a still more
paltry sort, and tell of a number of miracles wrought by Jesus in his
childhood. There are also apocryphal Acts of Apostles, apocryphal
Apocalypses, and apocryphal Epistles, all of them what we should now
call “pamphlets” composed in the interest of parties in the church.
But the “Word” of the Joannine Gospel became the password for the
reunion of all parties. The influences that had brought thousands of
Gentiles into the Church were all too strong for the resistance of the
Judaeo-Christian party to overcome. The little Judaeo-Christian fold had
no choice, therefore, but either to go back to Judaism or to become
Gentile Christians—unless they were ready to suffer excommunication by
the latter. Only small fractions of the Jewish-Christian body held out
as sects apart, while the union of the ever-multiplying Gentile
Christians, now styled the “Catholic” church, unchurched the “heretics,”
and set up the “new law” in opposition to the old, as its own inviolable
foundation. Thus came into being the present collection of New Testament
books, the “Church Catholic” having, about the end of the second
century, separated the apocryphal from the canonical Scriptures. But
still for a long time the character of individual books was in dispute,
and John’s “Revelation,” together with several of the Epistles, was till
recent times regarded by different persons or parties as apocryphal. To
the decrees of councils and popes alone is it owing that there exists
to-day a canonical collection of Scriptures, and that the books of the
Canon are held to be inspired.
7. THE ELEMENTS OF THE CHURCH.
In this wise was Christianism developed out of the secret associations
of the ancient world. The early Christians themselves were, while under
persecution, in a certain sense a secret society. Their worship
possessed an essentially mystic character. It was not so from the
beginning. In Jesus’ teachings there is not one word about divine
service or cults; his surviving disciples knew of no other cult than the
Jewish, and they assembled for “breaking bread” in their houses without
any parade. Not until the Christians had been excluded from the
synagogues were distinctive rites developed among them. There arose
among them prophets whose inspired words were the principal feature of
the religious service. Psalms were sung, not yet in the grand,
impressive melodies of the Middle Age, but in “the long-drawn, partly
nasal moaning tones, still usual in Eastern lands—tones that defy all
musical harmony.” Besides, men then “spake tongues,” or at least uttered
“heaven-storming words” pell-mell in the heat of enthusiasm, which no
one, speaker or hearer, could well understand; and men “prophesied,”
especially about the end of the world, the too slow oncoming of which
caused much wonderment in those days. All these stupidities, by degrees,
gave way before the efforts of strong-willed men like Paul. The “words
in meeting” and the Lord’s Supper (or Love Feast), fell into the
background, and the supper came to be simply a souvenir of the Saviour’s
death, and at last was developed into a sacrament possessing the
character of a “mystery;” i. e., a performance that must remain
inscrutable to men, though it was men that contrived it. Baptism was
associated as a sacrament with the supper, and the mysteries were
multiplied. We have already seen how the mysteries of the Incarnation
and Resurrection arose, namely, out of the necessity of giving to Jesus
the stamp of deity, for without that Christianism never would have
attained a commanding place in the world. How to these mysteries, by the
purely human decrees of the Nicaean Synod, the supreme and most
incomprehensible mystery of all was added, the mystery of the Trinity;
how, because of the impossibility of coming to agreement regarding this,
the Church Catholic was split into the Roman and Greek, or Western and
Eastern churches; how in the Western Church the bishops of Rome achieved
supremacy; all this belongs, not to the history of the mysteries, but to
the history of the Church.
_PART FIFTH._
_A Pseudo-Messiah. A Lying Prophet._
1. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA.
Great must have been the amazement of the Greeks when of a sudden, in
different localities within the broad Roman Empire, communities arose
which announced the suffering and dying God Jasios as the savior of a
new age—a Jasios who, under the form of a Jew, all unknown outside his
own country, had but lately been crucified; whereas, Jasios, as all
Initiates of the Eleusinia and of the mysteries of Samothrace well knew,
was ages and ages before slain by the thunderbolt of Zeus. And still
populations were passing day after day over to the crucified Jew, the
Son of God, the wonderworker, who rose from the grave, who went up to
heaven. And, in consequence of his teaching, though, after all, that did
but complement the teaching of a Pythagoras, a Socrates, a Plato, the
noble statues of the Grecian gods were falling from their bases. Ought
the Beautiful to fall in order to make room for the Good? Might not both
stand side by side? And if a son of God and a thaumaturge was required,
might not one be found without making of Zeus the Thunderer a victim to
that fearful Jewish Yahve of Mt. Sinai?
And such a son of God and wonderworker they found. The heathen prophet
Apollonius of Tyana was a contemporary of Jesus, and was deeply
venerated. And, as it chanced, a certain learned Greek, Flavius
Philostratus, wrote a heathen gospel of the life of this Grecian saint,
not as one hostile toward the Christians, nor as one who would prove
their doctrine false, but with intent to come to the aid of decaying
heathendom, and prevent for a time its overthrow by Christianism. To
attain this end there must be no mention of Christianism or its author,
so that Olympus might tower again in all its ancient glory and triumph
over Sinai and Tabor. Philostratus composed his work, as he states, out
of the notes of a disciple of Apollonius, one Damis, native of Ninive,
by order of Julia Domna, wife of the Emperor Septimius Severus. What
part of his work consisted of matter drawn from Damis’s notes, and what
he added out of his own fancy, we can never determine. But he showed
true insight in making out his hero to have been a Pythagorean. He
therefore represents Apollonius as deriving his wisdom indirectly from
the most ancient mysteries, those of Egypt, and from the venerated
Grecian sacred leagues.
Apollonius was born in Tyana, a town in Cappadocia. Previous to his
birth, says Philostratus, the god Proteus appeared to his mother and
told her that the child soon to see the light was the God himself. This
happened in a meadow, where, after gathering flowers, she had fallen
asleep, while swans gathered round her and intoned their song. When the
child was grown up he became a strict observer of the Pythagorean rule
of life, abstaining from fleshmeat and wine, and wearing linen garments.
His abode was a temple sacred to Aesculapius, god of healing. Unworthy
offerers of gifts to the god he drove out, and healed such of the sick
as repented of their transgressions. He rejected the Grecian mythology
as fabulous, preferring far to it the fables of Esop, and his only
prayer was addressed to the sun. He refused to take possession of an
estate inherited from his father, and imposed on himself a silence of
several years’ duration. During his extensive travels he always lodged
in temples, corrected abuses in the conduct of the divine service,
couched his teachings in brief sentences, gathered around him disciples,
of whom one was false and a traitor; sided with the persecuted and
righted the wrongs of the oppressed. Everywhere he understood the
languages of the natives without learning them, and even read the
thoughts of men; but the language of the beasts he learned from the
Arabs of Mesopotamia. On entering that country the publican asked him
whether he had with him anything subject to toll. The answer of
Apollonius was that he carried about righteousness, temperance, a manly
soul and a patient spirit—and many another virtue named he. The sullen
taxman, who had no mind for anything that lay outside his own duties,
took the names of virtues for names of women, saying: “There, your maids
are all down in the book.” But Apollonius calmly went his way, with the
brief remark: “They are not maids, but high-born dames;” nor paid he
impost on his ideal goods. In spite of his frankness of speech he was
treated with great distinction by the king of that country. He told the
king that he would best strengthen his royal power by honoring many and
putting trust in but a few. The king, who was ill, having been comforted
by the prophet, confessed that he had been freed from anxiety, not only
with regard to his kingdom, but also with regard to death. From Babylon
Apollonius bent his steps toward India, and there, according to the
highly embellished story, saw men four or five ells in height, also men
who were half white and half black; dragons, too, of various size he
saw. He constantly carried on with Damis, the one disciple who
accompanied him, instructive conversations about the animals and the
people whom they met. An Indian king, dazzled by the splendor of the
prophet’s genius, would not wear the crown in his presence. With the
Brahmans, many of whose conjurfeats are recorded, e. g., flitting
through the air, or at touch of their wands causing the earth to spring
aloft, Apollonius swapped wisdoms; and as, in the opinion of Damis, the
wisdom of the Brahmans was derived from Pythagoras, it was from
Pythagoras also, of course, that they got their doctrine of
metempsychosis. We learn that Apollonius also entertained that curious
idea, and that he imagined himself to have been once an Indian
tax-gatherer, and was wont to tell of many incidents of that phase of
his life. Furthermore, in his presence the Brahmans cured the possessed,
the lame, the blind, and women in difficult labor, by imposition of
hands, and by giving good counsels—practices resembling those used in
our day by sympathists, so-called. Apollonius returned to Babylon and
Ninive, passing through fabulous lands, and then journeyed to the
Ionians of Asia Minor. Apollonius banished from Ephesus an epidemic
which was there raging, by requiring the citizens to stone a beggar in
whom he discerned the daemon who was the cause of the disease; the
culprit, under the storm of stones, was changed into a dog. Voyaging by
sea to Greece, the Sage Apollonius imposed on his shipmates with the
story that Achilles had appeared unto him five ells in height, and
before his eyes had grown to twelve ells. At Athens, where he arrived
during the Eleusinian mysteries, the priests refused to initiate him,
because he was a conjurer; whereupon the Sage of Tyana told them that
already he knew more about the mysteries than the priests. This alarmed
them, and they wished to recall their refusal; but it was Apollonius’s
turn now to refuse them, so he deferred to another time his initiation,
but in public discourses let his light shine before the Athenians. In
Athens, too, there was a youth possessed, who laughed and cried without
cause. Apollonius having detected the true nature of the ailment, of
which no one else had any suspicion, with stern looks and words of
menace confronted the daemon, who thereupon fled away, and in token of
his passage overturned a statue that no one had touched. But the youth,
rubbing his eyes as though waking from sleep, was seen to be cured. At
Corinth the Sage detected in the bride of a comely youth a lamia or
empusa; i. e., one of a class of spectral beings that used to haunt
people, and under pretense of being in love with them, would eat the
flesh off their bones. In the presence of Apollonius all her arts and
all her imps disappeared, and the spectre was unmasked and confessed her
evil intent. At the Olympian Games also this apostle of the Pythagorean
philosophy preached. His following was increased by the accession of
several members with their slaves; these he called his “congregation.”
With them he went to Rome, where the infamous Nero then reigned, who had
prohibited philosophy, which he classed with soothsaying. But one who
was in the service of the tyrant, impressed by the wisdom of the
traveler, allowed him to lecture in the temples, and to these lectures
there was great concourse. But one of his disciples who had accompanied
him from Corinth, and who in Rome had ventured to condemn publicly the
conduct of Nero and the prevailing immorality, was expelled from the
city by Tigellinus, captain of the emperor’s bodyguard, and trusty tool
of the tyrant, while Apollonius himself was kept under surveillance. But
not only could nothing be proved against him; his wisdom filled even the
sanguinary minions with admiration, though he spoke to them only the
stern truth. For example, being asked by Tigellinus why he had no fear
of Nero, he answered: “The God who makes him an object of fear made me
fearless.” Asked what he thought of Nero, “Better than you do,” he
replied; “ye think him gifted for singing, I for silence.” Whereupon
Tigellinus: “Go wherever you please; you are stronger than any power of
mine.” A bride in Rome having died, the body was on the way to the place
of interment. Apollonius bade the bearers to halt, touched the damsel,
uttering some secret words, and called her back from death. Philostratus
himself is in doubt whether the death was not apparent only. The
philosopher then journeyed to the Strait of Gibraltar, whence he
traversed Spain, Sicily and Greece, and then revisited Egypt. At
Alexandria he recognized the innocence of one among eight criminals,
interceded for him and had the man’s execution put off till the last
moment; then arrived the order to spare his life; he had confessed only
under torture. The story is also told that Apollonius, on paying a visit
to Vespasian, in Alexandria, “made him Caesar,” thus giving to the Roman
Empire once again, after a long interval, a just ruler; but after
Vespasian’s elevation to the throne, the philosopher frankly spoke the
truth to him, when the Emperor annulled, as an unjust privilege, the
liberties of Greece, which Nero had in a capricious humor granted on the
occasion of the Olympian Games. Leaving Egypt, Apollonius journeyed to
Ethiopia to visit the Gymnosophists, who dwelt in a sort of little
republic of their own, on a mountain, and conducted a famous school.
Probably because they were less conceited, went naked, and performed no
magical feats, our Sage deemed them less wise than the Brahmans, and had
resultless controversies with them about the relative superiority of
Grecian and Egyptian art, the former representing the gods as resembling
man, the latter as resembling animals. In that region Apollonius
exorcised a satyr that was said to have killed two women. About the time
of the taking of Jerusalem by Titus, Apollonius happened to be in the
neighborhood of that city, and praised the Roman general for his
“moderation” (though it was a curious sort of moderation which leveled a
great city with the ground). Titus answered: “I have made conquest of
Solyma; you have made conquest of me,” and thereafter employed
Apollonius as his adviser. At Tarsus he not only cured a young man of
hydrophobia, but the dog also that had bitten him.