a "monstrous cantle" out of paganism, it excludes, not only all
Judæo-Christians, but all who doubt that such are heretics. Ever since
the thirteenth century, the Inquisition would have cheerfully burned,
and in Spain did abundantly burn, all persons who came under the
categories II., III. IV., V. And the wolf would play the same havoc now,
if it could only get its blood-stained jaws free from the muzzle imposed
by the secular arm.
Further, there is not a Protestant body except the Unitarian, which
would not declare Justin himself a heretic, on account of his doctrine
of the inferior godship of the Logos; while I am very much afraid that,
in strict logic, Dr. Wace would be under the necessity, so painful to
him, of calling him an "infidel," on the same and on other grounds.
Now let us turn to our other authority. If there is any result of
critical investigations of the sources of Christianity which is
certain,[49] it is that Paul of Tarsus wrote the Epistle to the
Galatians somewhere between the years 55 and 60 A.D., that is to say,
roughly, twenty, or five-and-twenty years after the crucifixion. If this
is so, the Epistle to the Galatians is one of the oldest, if not the
very oldest, of extant documentary evidences of the state of the
primitive Church. And, be it observed, if it is Paul's writing, it
unquestionably furnishes us with the evidence of a participator in the
transactions narrated. With the exception of two or three of the other
Pauline Epistles, there is not one solitary book in the New Testament of
the authorship and authority of which we have such good evidence.
And what is the state of things we find disclosed? A bitter quarrel, in
his account of which Paul by no means minces matters, or hesitates to
hurl defiant sarcasms against those who were "reputed to be pillars":
James, "the brother of the Lord," Peter, the rock on whom Jesus is said
to have built his Church, and John, "the beloved disciple." And no
deference toward "the rock" withholds Paul from charging Peter to his
face with "dissimulation."
The subject of the hot dispute was simply this. Were Gentile converts
bound to obey the Law or not? Paul answered in the negative; and, acting
upon his opinion, he had created at Antioch (and elsewhere) a
specifically "Christian" community, the sole qualifications for
admission into which were the confession of the belief that Jesus was
the Messiah, and baptism upon that confession. In the epistle in
question, Paul puts this--his "gospel," as he calls it--in its most
extreme form. Not only does he deny the necessity of conformity with the
Law, but he declares such conformity to have a negative value, "Behold,
I, Paul, say unto you, that if ye receive circumcision, Christ will
profit you nothing" (Galatians v. 2). He calls the legal observances
"beggarly rudiments," and anathematises every one who preaches to the
Galatians any other gospel than his own. That is to say, by direct
consequence, he anathematises the Nazarenes of Jerusalem, whose zeal for
the Law is testified by James in a passage of the Acts cited further on.
In the first Epistle to the Corinthians, dealing with the question of
eating meat offered to idols, it is clear that Paul himself thinks it a
matter of indifference; but he advises that it should not be done, for
the sake of the weaker brethren. On the other hand, the Nazarenes of
Jerusalem most strenuously opposed Paul's "gospel," insisting on every
convert becoming a regular Jewish proselyte, and consequently on his
observance of the whole Law; and this party was led by James and Peter
and John (Galatians ii. 9). Paul does not suggest that the question of
principle was settled by the discussion referred to in Galatians. All he
says is, that it ended in the practical agreement that he and Barnabas
should do as they had been doing, in respect to the Gentiles: while
James and Peter and John should deal in their own fashion with Jewish
converts. Afterwards, he complains bitterly of Peter, because, when on a
visit to Antioch, he, at first, inclined to Paul's view and ate with the
Gentile converts; but when "certain came from James," "drew back, and
separated himself, fearing them that were of the circumcision. And the
rest of the Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that even
Barnabas was carried away with their dissimulation" (Galatians ii.
12-13).
There is but one conclusion to be drawn from Paul's account of this
famous dispute, the settlement of which determined the fortunes of the
nascent religion. It is that the disciples at Jerusalem, headed by
"James, the Lord's brother," and by the leading apostles, Peter and
John, were strict Jews, who had objected to admit any converts into
their body, unless these, either by birth, or by becoming proselytes,
were also strict Jews. In fact, the sole difference between James and
Peter and John, with the body of the disciples whom they led and the
Jews by whom they were surrounded, and with whom they, for many years,
shared the religous observances of the Temple, was that they believed
that the Messiah, whom the leaders of the nation yet looked for, had
already come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Acts of the Apostles is hardly a very trustworthy history; it is
certainly of later date than the Pauline Epistles, supposing them to be
genuine. And the writer's version of the conference of which Paul gives
so graphic a description, if that is correct, is unmistakably coloured
with all the art of a reconciler, anxious to cover up a scandal. But it
is none the less instructive on this account. The judgment of the
"council" delivered by James is that the Gentile converts shall merely
"abstain from things sacrificed to idols, and from blood and from things
strangled, and from fornication." But notwithstanding the accommodation
in which the writer of the Acts would have us believe, the Jerusalem
Church held to its endeavour to retain the observance of the Law. Long
after the conference, some time after the writing of the Epistles to the
Galatians and Corinthians, and immediately after the despatch of that to
the Romans, Paul makes his last visit to Jerusalem, and presents himself
to James and all the elders. And this is what the Acts tells us of the
interview:--
And they said unto him, Thou seest, brother, how many thousands [or
myriads] there are among the Jews of them which have believed; and
they are all zealous for the law; and they have been informed
concerning thee, that thou teachest all the Jews which are among
the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their
children, neither to walk after the customs. (Acts xxi. 20, 21.)
They therefore request that he should perform a certain public religious
act in the Temple, in order that
all shall know that there is no truth in the things whereof they
have been informed concerning thee; but that thou thyself walkest
orderly, keeping the law (_ibid._ 24).[50]
How far Paul could do what he is here requested to do, and which the
writer of the Acts goes on to say he did, with a clear conscience, if he
wrote the Epistles to the Galatians and Corinthians I may leave any
candid reader of these epistles to decide. The point to which I wish to
direct attention is the declaration that the Jerusalem Church, led by
the brother of Jesus and by his personal disciples and friends, twenty
years and more after his death, consisted of strict and zealous Jews.
Tertullus, the orator, caring very little about the internal dissensions
of the followers of Jesus, speaks of Paul as a "ringleader of the sect
of the Nazarenes" (Acts xxiv. 5), which must have affected James much in
the same way as it would have moved the Archbishop of Canterbury, in
George Fox's day, to hear the latter called a "ringleader of the sect of
Anglicans." In fact, "Nazarene" was, as is well known, the distinctive
appellation applied to Jesus; his immediate followers were known as
Nazarenes; while the congregation of the disciples, and, later, of
converts at Jerusalem--the Jerusalem Church--was emphatically the "sect
of the Nazarenes," no more, in itself, to be regarded as anything
outside Judaism than the sect of the Sadducees, or that of the
Essenes[51]. In fact, the tenets of both the Sadducees and the Essenes
diverged much more widely from the Pharisaic standard of orthodoxy than
Nazarenism did.
Let us consider the position of affairs now (A.D. 50-60) in relation to
that which obtained in Justin's time, a century later. It is plain that
the Nazarenes--presided over by James, "the brother of the Lord," and
comprising within their body all the twelve apostles--belonged to
Justin's second category of "Jews who observe the Law, believe Jesus to
be the Christ, but who insist on the observance of the Law by Gentile
converts," up till the time at which the controversy reported by Paul
arose. They then, according to Paul, simply allowed him to form his
congregations of non-legal Gentile converts at Antioch and elsewhere;
and it would seem that it was to these converts, who would come under
Justin's fifth category, that the title of "Christian" was first
applied. If any of these Christians had acted upon the more than
half-permission given by Paul, and had eaten meats offered to idols,
they would have belonged to Justin's seventh category.
Hence, it appears that, if Justin's opinion, which was probably that of
the Church generally in the middle of the second century, was correct,
James and Peter and John and their followers could not be saved; neither
could Paul, if he carried into practice his views as to the indifference
of eating meats offered to idols. Or, to put the matter another way, the
centre of gravity of orthodoxy, which is at the extreme right of the
series in the nineteenth century, was at the extreme left, just before
the middle of the first century, when the "sect of the Nazarenes"
constituted the whole church founded by Jesus and the apostles; while,
in the time of Justin, it lay midway between the two. It is therefore a
profound mistake to imagine that the Judæo-Christians (Nazarenes and
Ebionites) of later times were heretical outgrowths from a primitive
universalist "Christianity." On the contrary, the universalist
"Christianity" is an outgrowth from the primitive, purely Jewish,
Nazarenism; which, gradually eliminating all the ceremonial and dietary
parts of the Jewish law, has thrust aside its parent, and all the
intermediate stages of its development, into the position of damnable
heresies.
Such being the case, we are in a position to form a safe judgment of the
limits within which the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth must have been
confined. Ecclesiastical authority would have us believe that the words
which are given at the end of the first Gospel, "Go ye, therefore, and
make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," are part of the last
commands of Jesus, issued at the moment of his parting with the eleven.
If so, Peter and John must have heard these words; they are too plain to
be misunderstood; and the occasion is too solemn for them ever to be
forgotten. Yet the "Acts" tells us that Peter needed a vision to enable
him so much as to baptize Cornelius; and Paul, in the Galatians, knows
nothing of words which would have completely borne him out as against
those who, though they heard, must be supposed to have either forgotten,
or ignored them. On the other hand, Peter and John, who are supposed to
have heard the "Sermon on the Mount," know nothing of the saying that
Jesus had not come to destroy the Law, but that every jot and tittle of
the Law must be fulfilled, which surely would have been pretty good
evidence for their view of the question.
We are sometimes told that the personal friends and daily companions of
Jesus remained zealous Jews and opposed Paul's innovations, because they
were hard of heart and dull of comprehension. This hypothesis is hardly
in accordance with the concomitant faith of those who adopt it, in the
miraculous insight and superhuman sagacity of their Master; nor do I see
any way of getting it to harmonise with the orthodox postulate; namely,
that Matthew was the author of the first gospel and John of the fourth.
If that is so, then, most assuredly, Matthew was no dullard; and as for
the fourth gospel--a theosophic romance of the first order--it could
have been written by none but a man of remarkable literary capacity, who
had deep of Alexandrian philosophy. Moreover, the doctrine of the writer
of the fourth gospel is more remote from that of the "sect of the
Nazarenes" than is that of Paul himself. I am quite aware that orthodox
critics have been capable of maintaining that John, the Nazarene, who
was probably well past fifty years of age, when he is supposed to have
written the most thoroughly Judaising book in the New Testament--the
Apocalypse--in the roughest of Greek, underwent an astounding
metamorphosis of both doctrine and style by the time he reached the ripe
age of ninety or so, and provided the world with a history in which the
acutest critic cannot [always] make out where the speeches of Jesus end
and the text of the narrative begins; while that narrative, is utterly
irreconcilable, in regard to matters of fact, with that of his
fellow-apostle, Matthew.
The end of the whole matter is this:--The "sect of the Nazarenes," the
brother and the immediate followers of Jesus, commissioned by him as
apostles, and those were taught by them up to the year 50A.D., were not
"Christians" in the sense in which that term has been understood ever
since its asserted origin at Antioch, but Jews--strict orthodox
Jews--whose belief in the Messiahship of Jesus never led to their
exclusion from the Temple services, nor would have shut them out from
the wide embrace of Judaism.[52] The open proclamation of their special
view about the Messiah was doubtless offensive to the Pharisees, just as
rampant Low Churchism is offensive to bigoted High Churchism in our own
country; or as any kind of dissent is offensive to fervid religionists
of all creeds. To the Sadducees, no doubt, the political danger of any
Messianic movement was serious; and they would have been glad to put
down Nazarenism, lest it should end in useless rebellion against their
Roman masters, like that other Galilean movement headed by Judas, a
generation earlier. Galilee was always a hotbed of seditious enthusiasm
against the rule of Rome; and high priest and procurator alike had need
to keep a sharp eye upon natives of that district. On the whole,
however, the Nazarenes were but little troubled for the first twenty
years of their existence; and the undying hatred of the Jews against
those later converts, whom they regarded as apostates and fautors of a
sham Judaism, was awakened by Paul. From their point of view, he was a
mere renegade Jew, opposed alike to orthodox Judaism and to orthodox
Nazarenism; and whose teachings threatened Judaism with destruction.
And, from their point of view, they were quite right. In the course of a
century, Pauline influences had a large share in driving primitive
Nazarenism from being the very heart of the new faith into the position
of scouted error; and the spirit of Paul's doctrine continued its work
of driving Christianity farther and farther away from Judaism, until
"meats offered to idols" might be eaten without scruple, while the
Nazarene methods of observing even the Sabbath, or the Passover, were
branded with the mark of Judaising heresy.
But if the primitive Nazarenes of whom the Acts speaks were orthodox
Jews, what sort of probability can there be that Jesus was anything
else? How can he have founded the universal religion which was not heard
of till twenty years after his death?[53] That Jesus possessed, in a
rare degree, the gift of attaching men to his person and to his
fortunes; that he was the author of many a striking saying, and the
advocate of equity, of love, and of humility; that he may have
disregarded the subtleties of the bigots for legal observance, and
appealed rather to those noble conceptions of religion which constituted
the pith and kernel of the teaching of the great prophets of his nation
seven hundred years earlier; and that, in the last scenes of his career,
he may have embodied the ideal sufferer of Isaiah, may be, as I think it
is, extremely probable. But all this involves not a step beyond the
borders of orthodox Judaism. Again, who is to say whether Jesus
proclaimed himself the veritable Messiah, expected by his nation since
the appearance of the pseudo-prophetic work of Daniel, a century and a
half before his time; or whether the enthusiasm of his followers
gradually forced him to assume that position?
But one thing is quite certain: if that belief in the speedy second
coming of the Messiah which was shared by all parties in the primitive
Church, whether Nazarene or Pauline; which Jesus is made to prophesy,
over and over again in the Synoptic gospels; and which dominated the
life of Christians during the first century after the crucifixion;--if
he believed and taught that, then assuredly he was under an illusion,
and he is responsible for that which the mere effluxion of time has
demonstrated to be a prodigious error.
AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Nemo ergo ex me scire quærat, quod me nescire scio, nisi forte ut
nescire discat.--AUGUSTINUS. _De Civ. Dei_, xii. 7.
The people who call themselves "Agnostics" have been charged with doing
so because they have not the courage to declare themselves "Infidels."
It has been insinuated that they have adopted a new name in order to
escape the unpleasantness which attaches to their proper denomination.
To this wholly erroneous imputation, I have replied by showing that the
term "Agnostic" did, as a matter of fact, arise in a manner which
negatives it; and my statement has not been, and cannot be, refuted.
Moreover, speaking for myself, and without impugning the right of any
other person to use the term in another sense, I further say that
Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed
as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith
in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as
intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all
amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of
the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence
which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism
asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism.
That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary
doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe,
without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to
attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported
propositions. The justification of the Agnostic principle lies in the
success which follows upon its application, whether in the field of
natural, or in that of civil, history; and in the fact that, so far as
these topics are concerned, no sane man thinks of denying its validity.
Still speaking for myself, I add, that though Agnosticism is not, and
cannot be, a creed, except in so far as its general principle is
concerned; yet that the application of that principle results in the
denial of, or the suspension of judgment concerning, a number of
propositions respecting which our contemporary ecclesiastical "gnostics"
profess entire certainty. And, in so far as these ecclesiastical persons
can be justified in their old-established custom (which many nowadays
think more honoured in the breach than the observance) of using
opprobrious names to those who differ from them, I fully admit their
right to call me and those who think with me "Infidels"; all I have
ventured to urge is that they must not expect us to speak of ourselves
by that title.
The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems
the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary
according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual
Agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as "unknowable."
[54] What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I
know nothing; and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my
faculties. But whether these things are knowable by any one else is
exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may
have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case.
Relatively to myself, I am quite sure that the region of
uncertainty--the nebulous country in which words play the part of
realities--is far more extensive than I could wish. Materialism and
Idealism; Theism and Atheism; the doctrine of the soul and its mortality
or immortality--appear in the history of philosophy like the shades of
Scandinavian heroes, eternally slaying one another and eternally coming
to life again in a metaphysical "Nifelheim." It is getting on for
twenty-five centuries, at least, since mankind began seriously to give
their minds to these topics. Generation after generation, philosophy has
been doomed to roll the stone uphill; and, just as all the world swore
it was at the top, down it has rolled to the bottom again. All this is
written in innumerable books; and he who will toil through them will
discover that the stone is just where it was when the work began. Hume
saw this; Kant saw it; since their time, more and more eyes have been
cleansed of the films which prevented them from seeing it; until now the
weight and number of those who refuse to be the prey of verbal
mystifications has begun to tell in practical life.
It was inevitable that a conflict should arise between Agnosticism and
Theology; or, rather, I ought to say, between Agnosticism and
Ecclesiasticism. For Theology, the science, is one thing; and
Ecclesiasticism, the championship of a foregone conclusion[55] as to the
truth of a particular form of Theology, is another. With scientific
Theology, Agnosticism has no quarrel. On the contrary, the Agnostic,
knowing too well the influence of prejudice and idiosyncrasy, even on
those who desire most earnestly to be impartial, can wish for nothing
more urgently than that the scientific theologian should not only be at
perfect liberty to thresh out the matter in his own fashion; but that he
should, if he can, find flaws in the Agnostic position; and, even if
demonstration is not to be had, that he should put, in their full force,
the grounds of the conclusions he thinks probable. The scientific
theologian admits the Agnostic principle, however widely his results may
differ from those reached by the majority of Agnostics.
But, as between Agnosticism and Ecclesiasticism, or, as our neighbours
across the Channel call it, Clericalism, there can be neither peace nor
truce. The Cleric asserts that it is morally wrong not to believe
certain propositions, whatever the results of a strict scientific
investigation of the evidence of these propositions. He tells us "that
religious error is, in itself, of an immoral nature." [56] He declares
that he has prejudged certain conclusions, and looks upon those who show
cause for arrest of judgment as emissaries of Satan. It necessarily
follows that, for him, the attainment of faith, not the ascertainment of
truth, is the highest aim of mental life. And, on careful analysis of
the nature of this faith, it will too often be found to be, not the
mystic process of unity with the Divine, understood by the religious
enthusiast; but that which the candid simplicity of a Sunday scholar
once defined it to be. "Faith," said this unconscious plagiarist of
Tertullian, "is the power of saying you believe things which are
incredible."