surprised by finding that the ideal political construction which the
writer's knowledge and imagination have ascribed to Caesar was to
consist of three elements--the Roman, the Hellenic, and the
Jewish[170]. Yet striking as the paradox is, it is chiefly in the
facts themselves. Whether we look at the ethnological character of the
Jews amidst a system whose strength is from the West; or at their
historical position, as a nation in some sense in decadence, with a
history of independence and glories long lost; or at the minuteness of
their original seat, and its insignificance at that time as
(ordinarily) a subordinate district under the Roman province of Syria,
it is alike surprising that it should be possible to speak of them as
the third factor of the Roman Empire. Yet, in the main, the same
surprise is created by any acquaintance with the circumstances of the
Jewish Dispersion, as it may be learnt from easily accessible books,
such as Edersheim's or Schürer's[171]. There is first the ubiquity of
the race: testified alike by Josephus, Strabo, and Philo, and by the
witness of inscriptions. They are everywhere, and everywhere in force,
throughout the Roman world. Outside the Roman world their great
colonies in Babylon and Mesopotamia are another headquarters of the
race. They are an eighth part (one million) of the population of
Egypt: they yield 10,000 at the least to one massacre in Antioch. To
numbers and ubiquity they add privilege in the shape of rights and
immunities, begun by the policy of the successors of Alexander, but
vigorously taken up and pushed by Rome as early as 139 B.C., greatly
developed by Caesar round whose pyre at Rome they wept, and maintained
by the almost consistent policy of the earlier Empire: rights of equal
citizenship in the towns where they lived, and equal enjoyment of the
boons granted to citizens: rights of self-government and internal
administration: and rights or immunities guarding their distinctive
customs, such as their observance of the Sabbath or their transmission
of tribute to Jerusalem. The opportunities thus secured from without
were vigorously turned to account by their trading instinct, their
tenacity, their power of living at a low cost, and above all by their
admirable freemasonry among themselves, which bound Jews throughout
the world into a society of self-help, and must have greatly assisted
the enterprises which depend on facility of information,
communication, and movement. So far we merely get an impression of
their importance. But there are other points which, while they greatly
heighten this impression, add to it that of remarkable peculiarity. To
ask what was their influence plunges us into a tumult of paradoxes.
They had, for example, everywhere the double character of citizens and
strangers, speaking the language of the countries where they dwelt,
'being Antiochenes,' as Josephus says, 'at Antioch, Ephesians at
Ephesus,' and so forth: possessing and using the rights and franchises
of citizens, and yet every one of them counting the Holy Land his
country and Jerusalem his capital: respecting the Sanhedrin of
Jerusalem as the supreme authority of the race: sending up their
tribute annually, flocking thither themselves in vast numbers to keep
the feasts, or again not seldom returning there to die. They possessed
in fact the combined advantages of the most elastic diffusion, and the
strongest national concentration. Such a position could hardly make
their relations to their neighbours entirely simple or harmonious. It
'involved an internal contradiction[172].' It could not but be felt
that while enjoying all the advantages of citizenship, their hearts
were really elsewhere. From all the religious and social side of the
common life, which in the ancient world was far less separable from
the political than it is now, they were sensibly aliens. They were
visibly making the best of two inconsistent positions. And accordingly
the irritation against them in the towns (we have a glimpse of it in
Acts xix. 34) and the ensuing encroachments and riots, form as chronic
a feature of the position, as does their protection by the Empire. But
the causes of irritation went wider and deeper. It has been said that
'the feelings cherished towards the Jews throughout the entire
Graeco-Roman world were not so much those of hatred as of pure
contempt[173].' Their exterior was doubtless unlovely: a Jewry, as M.
Renan reminds us, was perhaps not more attractive in ancient than in
modern times. But what was even more offensive, especially to that
cosmopolitan age, and what struck it as altogether the dominant
characteristic of the Jews, was their stubborn and inhuman perversity.
They would be unlike all the rest of the world. Tacitus has even
formulated this for them as the principle guiding their whole action,
reduced to practice in details which were singularly well fitted to
exhibit its offensiveness[174]. His picture should be read by any one
who wishes to realize how cultivated opinion thought of them: and,
even if evidence were lacking, we can see that this was just the kind
of dislike to be shared by all classes, cultivated and uncultivated
alike. Yet it is against the background of this intense prejudice,
ever more scornful and irritated as it was exasperated by the
incidents of daily contact at close quarters, that we have to paint
the phenomena, as striking and as abundantly testified, of the vast
and penetrating influence of the Jews over their neighbours. These
also lie upon the surface. In very various degrees multitudes (of whom
women doubtless formed a considerable majority) adopted the customs
and brought themselves into connection with the religion of the Jews.
The boasts or claims of Josephus, who refers any sceptical
contemporary to 'his own country or his own family,' are confirmed by
the admissions of classical writers, by the indignant sarcasms
directed against the converts, and by the vivid touches in the Acts of
the Apostles[175]. 'Victi victoribus leges dederunt' is the strong
phrase of Seneca, and it was a very persuasive influence which could
cause it to be said that in Damascus 'nearly the whole female
population was devoted to Judaism': which could give S. Paul's Jewish
opponents in the towns of Greece and Asia Minor the power at one time
of raising the mob, at another of working upon the 'chief' and
'honourable women,' the ladies of the upper classes: or which could
bring 'almost the whole city' together in a provincial town because a
new teacher appears in the Jews' synagogue[176]. This influence had
its results in a considerable number of actual proselytes who through
circumcision received admission, somewhat grudging indeed and guarded,
within the Jewish pale, but still more in a much larger number of
adherents (the 'devout persons,' 'devout Greeks,' &c., of the
Acts[177]) attracted by the doctrines, and acquainted with the
Scriptures of Israel, who formed a fringe of partly leavened Gentile
life round every synagogue.
We hardly need evidence to shew us that to this picture of the
influence of Jew over Gentile, there need to be added another which
will shew how the subtle, persuasive, and powerful culture of the
Graeco-Roman world made itself felt upon the Jews of the Dispersion.
The contrast between the Jews of Palestine and those of the
Dispersion, the translation of the Scriptures into Greek, the rise of
a literature which in different ways tried to recommend what was
Jewish to the heathen or to fuse what was Jewish with what was Greek,
the single figure of Philo at Alexandria, are all evidences of an
influence, which must have told continually with penetrating power on
all that was ablest and most thoughtful in the Jewish mind. It was not
the least considerable result of this that all the great thoughts and
beliefs of Israel learned to talk the language of the civilized world,
and so acquired before the time of Christ an adequate and congenial
vehicle.
Such was the position of Israel at the Christian era. It was one which
had been gradually brought about during the last three centuries B.C.;
but it only came to its full growth in the last few decades (the
Jewish settlement in Rome may date from Pompey's time) under favour of
the imperial policy and the peace of the times: and it was soon to
change; indeed the fall of Jerusalem A.D. 70 altered it within and
without. Thus it stood complete during the half-century in which the
work of founding the Christian Church throughout the Empire was
accomplished, and then passed away. We remark upon it how admirable an
organization it offered for the dissemination of a world-religion,
originated upon Jewish soil. The significance of this, occurring at
the time when such a religion actually appeared, is heightened when we
observe that the position had continued long enough fully to try the
experiment of what by its own forces Judaism could accomplish for the
world. As S. James argued[178] 'Moses had,' now for a long time, in
every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every
Sabbath day'--and it might have so gone on for ever without any
conversion of the Gentile world. That world could never have been
drawn within a system, which, however zealous to make proselytes, had
nothing better to offer to those whom it made than that they might
come in, if they liked, and sit down in the lowest place, tolerated
rather than welcomed, dependents rather than members of an intensely
national community, leaving father and mother and all that they had,
not for a position of spiritual freedom, but for a change of earthly
nationality.
(2) But we trench upon the second question. What was the nation that
held this position of vantage? What signs are there about it which
suggest a special preparation for a purposed result?
It is one answer to this question to say that this wonderfully placed
people had, alone among the nations, a genuine faith, a genuine hope,
and a genuine charity. They at least, says Seneca, when he complains
of their influence, 'knew the reasons of their customs.' There was a
_raison d'être_ to their religion. In a world which still kept up the
forms of worship and respect for gods whose character and existence
could not stand the criticism of its own best moral and religious
insight, any more than that of its scepticism; or which was framing
for itself thoughts of Deity by intellectual abstraction; or which was
betraying its real ignorance of the very idea of God by worshipping
the two great powers which, as a matter of fact, it knew to be mighty,
Nature and the Roman Empire,--the Jew had a _faith_, distinct,
colossal, and unfailing, in a Living God, Maker of heaven and earth.
This we may be sure was the inner secret of the true attraction which
drew the hearts of such men as Cornelius the centurion to the despised
and repulsive Jew. This God, they further believed, was their God for
ever and ever. 'Let us kneel,' they said, 'before the Lord our Maker,
for He is the Lord our God.' And therefore, let them have gained it
how they may, they had an indomitable _hope_, or rather, confidence,
which all unpropitiousness of outer appearances had only served to
stimulate, that He would bring them through, that He had a purpose for
them, and that He would bring it to pass: that the world was no
mechanical system of meaningless vicissitudes, but an order, of which
indeed they little realized the scope, moving under the hand of a
Ruler for a purpose of glory and beneficence. That the confidence of
the extraordinary destiny which, under this order, was reserved for
Israel, as well as the present possession of the Divine law and
covenant, should have produced an intense sense of unity and
fellowship was a matter of course. The Roman is obliged to recognise
their mutual _charity_, however deformed, as he thinks, by their
antipathy to all who were not of their kindred and faith.
But such an answer to our question, though it brings before us a sign,
and a sign of the very highest, that is of the moral and spiritual,
order, does not perhaps set us at the point from which the whole
meaning of the position opens to us most naturally. It may do this
more effectually to ask whether there was any material in Judaism for
a world-religion, and for that world-religion which grew out of it?
Perhaps if we performed the futile task of trying to imagine a
world-religion, we should, with some generality of consent, define as
its essentials three or four points which it is striking to find were
fundamentals of the religion of Israel, and at that time of no other.
We should require a doctrine of God, lofty, spiritual, moral: a
doctrine of man which should affirm and secure his spiritual being and
his immortality: and a doctrine of the relations between God and man,
which should give reality to prayer and to the belief in providence,
and root man's sense of responsibility in the fact of his obligation
to a righteousness outside and above himself, a doctrine in short of
judgment. It needs no words to shew how the religion of Israel in its
full development not only taught these truths, but gave them the
dignity and importance which belong to the cornerstones of a religion.
But then along with these that religion taught other beliefs as
clearly conceived, which seemed to be of the most opposite character:
just as distinctive and exclusive as the former were universal. It
taught the obligation in every detail of a very stringent written law,
and of a ceremonial and sacrificial system, centred at Jerusalem, and
forming the recognised communication between God and man. It taught a
special election of Israel and covenant of God with Israel, a special
purpose and future for Israel. Nor was the conception of the
participation by other nations in the blessings of Messiah's rule, (to
which we, reading for example the prophecies of Isaiah in the light of
the sequel, cannot but give a dominant place,) more to an Israelite
than a striking incident in a distinctively Israelite glory.
It would seem then, combining these two sides, that there was in
Israel the foundation on which a religion for the world could be laid,
but that it could only be made available under stringent and, as it
might appear, impossible conditions. An attempt to make a religion by
extracting the universal truths in Judaism would have been simply to
desert at once the vantage-ground which it was proposed to occupy,
because it would have conflicted directly with every Jewish instinct,
belief, tradition, and hope. If the thing was to be done, it must be
done by some power and teaching which, while extricating into
clearness all that was truest in the theology and morality of Israel,
was also able to shew to the judgment of plain men and earnest
seekers, that it constituted a true climax of Israel's history, a true
fulfilment of the promises and prophecies which Jews had now made
matters of notoriety everywhere, a true final cause of all the
peculiar and distinctive system of Israel. It must be able to take
Israel to witness, and therefore it must be able to convince men not
only that it had a high theology and a refined morality, but that God
had 'visited His people': and that 'what He had spoken unto the
fathers He had so fulfilled.' It must produce accordingly not only
doctrine, but fact. It must carry on, what was implied in the whole
discipline of Israel, the assertion that truth was not a matter of
speculation, but a word from God; or the knowledge of a dealing of God
with man clothing itself with reality, embodying itself in fact,
making a home for itself in history. It is true that the Judaism of
the synagogue in its idolatry of the law, had assumed the appearance
of a paper system, but in that form it had no promise or power of
expansion: and on the side where the religion of Israel admitted of
development into some higher and wider state, it was distinctly a
religion not of theory or teaching only, but of Divine action
revealing itself in history.
It will not escape any observer of the beginnings of Christianity that
it was precisely this attempt which the Gospel of Jesus made. If we
watch S. Paul speaking to his Gentile audiences at Lystra or Athens,
he brings to bear upon the instincts of his hearers the strong magnet
of a clear and definite Theism. But these addresses themselves
implicitly contain another element: and we must now look to them for
examples of the process, the careful earnest process, by which the
Gospel did its rapid and yet most gradual work of conversion.
Unquestionably, as S. Paul himself affirms, and as the Acts and the
early apologetic writers shew us, it was done by asserting, and making
good the assertion with careful proof and reasoning, that in the
historical appearance and character of Jesus Christ, in His treatment
while on earth, in His resurrection and heavenly exaltation, was to be
found the true, natural, and legitimate fulfilment of that to which
the Scriptures in various ways, direct and indirect, pointed, and of
that which the hope of Israel, slowly fashioned by the Scriptures
under the discipline of experience, had learnt to expect. This could
be pressed home most directly on Jews, but it was available also for
the large prepared class among Gentiles, to whom the pre-existence of
these prophecies and anticipations was known matter of fact, and to
some of whom the Jewish Scriptures had been a personal discipline: the
truth of the Gospel was one 'now made manifest and by the Scriptures
of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God,
made known to all nations for the obedience of faith.' The double
requirement was fulfilled, and a religion, intrinsically universal and
eternal, was seen by spiritually clear-sighted eyes to be in a most
real and organic sense the flower of Israel's stalk.
(3) If it has appeared that in the placing of the nation at the era,
and in its character and belief, there was something much to be
'wondered at,' and, more definitely, something marvellously suited,
not indeed to generate such a religion as that of the Gospel, but to
foster and assist its growth when the seed of Divine fact should be
sown on the prepared soil; then we shall ask, finally, whether there
is anything of like striking significance in the way in which this
state of things had come about? Let us pass by the causes by which the
people of Israel obtained their external position. These, even
including a thing so remarkable as the spontaneous restoration by an
Oriental Empire of a deported people, are not in themselves different
from the ordinary workings of history; though in combination they may
contribute to deepen the impression of a hand fashioning out of many
elements, and in many ways, a single great result. But how had the
Jews come to be what they were? how had they gained the religious
treasure which they possessed, and the tenacity of religious and
national life which played guardian to it? The whole course of
Israel's history must, in one sense, give the answer to this question:
and there are no controversies more difficult or more unsolved than
those which are now raging round the problem of that course, its
origin, stages, and order. But it may be possible to make some
reflections on it without entangling ourselves very much in those
controversies.
(_a_) At the outset it is impossible not to be struck by the interest
which the Jews themselves felt in the process of their history. That
interest belongs to the very centre of their life and thought. It is
not an offshoot of national vainglory, for (as has been so often
remarked) it resulted in a record full-charged with the incidents of
national failure and defection: it is not the result of a
self-conscious people analysing its own moral and other development,
for though the moral judgment is indeed always at work in the
narratives and the poems, it is more occupied in drawing out the
teaching of recurring sequences of sin and punishment than in framing
a picture of the whole. The result is to lay a picture of development
before us, but the aim is to treasure and record every detail of God's
dealings with the nation of His choice. This is what gives continuity
and unity to the whole: this is what lends to it its intense and
characteristic uniqueness. And when we look steadily at this, we
perceive afresh, what familiarity almost conceals from us, the
distinctive quality of Israel's religion; that it is not a system of
teaching, nor a tradition of worship, nor a personal discipline,
though it may include all these; but that it is in itself a belief in
the working of God, Who is the God of all the earth, but specially the
God of Israel, and Who works indeed everywhere, but in an altogether
special sense in Israel. In reflecting on their history they
contemplate the object of their faith. Hence truth is to them not a
philosophic acquisition, but lies in the words which had come from God
faithfully treasured and received: it is _revealed_ in word and act:
goodness, in man or nation, is the faithful adherence to those
conditions, under which the good purpose of God can work itself out
and take effect: it is a correspondence to a purpose of _grace_: and
the centre and depositary of their hope is neither the human race, nor
any association for moral and religious effort, but an organism raised
by Him who raises all the organisms of nature from a chosen seed, and
drawn onwards through the stages by which family passes into nation
and kingdom, and then through that higher discipline by which the
natural commonwealth changes into the spiritual community of the
faithful 'remnant.' If any one will try to realize the impression
which Christianity made upon the heathen world, he will not fail to
see how the new truth was able to impress men because it found these
conceptions of revelation, grace, and an organic society of God's
choice and shaping, all so strange and so impressive to the heathen
world, ingrained as the natural elements of religion in the men whom
it made its instruments.
But why did the Jews so regard their history? For the answer we may
revert to the other question, What made them what they were at the
Christian era? For they had gone through a crisis calculated to
destroy both their existence and their religion. It has been in
fashion with some writers to emphasize the resemblances, and minimize
the differences, between the religion of Israel and that of its
neighbours. In view of this it becomes important to note the specific
peril of ancient religions. That peril was that the close association
of the nation with its god caused the failure of the one to appear a
failure of the other, and to endanger or destroy the respect paid to
him. The religion of a subdued or ruined people was, as we may say, a
demonstrated failure. Sennacherib's defiance of Hezekiah urges this
with a conqueror's irony[179]. The case of the Ten Tribes had,
probably, given an illustration of it within the circle of Israel
itself. And in Judah, upon any shewing, there was enough of the
feeling that Jehovah was responsible for His people, of the conviction
that He would certainly protect His own, of the confidence resting on
prosperity and liable to be shaken by its loss, to make the downfall
of the state, carrying with it that of the Temple and the outer order
of religion, an enormous peril to the religion itself and with it to
the very existence of Israel. It is not difficult to discern the
agency by which the peril was averted. That agency was Prophecy.
Modern criticism, though it may quarrel with the inspiration or
predictive power of the prophets, has given fresh and unbiassed
witness to their importance as an historical phenomenon. Kuenen[180],
for example, points out how at every turning-point in Israel's later
history there stands a man who claims to bring a word of God to the
people. Prof. Huxley[181], in a recent article, has told us that 'a
vigorous minority of Babylonian Jews,' that is, the Jews upon whom the
full forces of prophecy bore, 'created the first consistent,
remorseless, naked Monotheism, which, so far as history records,
appeared in the world ... and they inseparably united therewith an
ethical code, which, for its purity and its efficiency as a bond of
social life, was, and is, unsurpassed.' Of whatever fact may underlie
this description, the prophets are at once evidence and authors.
Now prophecy confronted the impending peril in the name of Jehovah: on
the one side it displayed the enemy (whether as by Isaiah it
prescribed a bound to his advance, or as by Jeremiah announced the
catastrophe to be wrought by him) as himself utterly in Jehovah's
hands, His axe or saw for discipline upon the trees of the forest; on
the other side it shewed that Jehovah's obligation to Israel was
conditioned by His essential righteousness; that national disaster
might be Jehovah's necessary vengeance, and that His purpose for
Israel--which it re-asserted with fullest emphasis--might need to be
realized for an Israel purified by such discipline, a shoot from the
stock of the felled tree, the remnant of an 'afflicted and poor
people[182].' And prophecy was beforehand with all this: it was not an
afterthought to explain away a calamity: and so it fashioned in Israel
at least a core of spiritual faith, to which outward disaster of
polity and religion, however destructive, was not confounding, and
which had stamina enough in it to draw wholesome though bitter
nourishment from the hard Captivity discipline. This, when the flood
came, was an ark for Israel's religion, and, in its religion, for the
national life, which re-organized itself under new conditions round
the nucleus of the religion.