All that was best and worst in the Jewish character and history
combined to render the Roman yoke intolerably galling to the nation.
The peculiar position of Jerusalem—a sort of Mecca to the tribes
acknowledging the Mosaic law—made Syria the most dangerous of all the
Roman provinces. To that city enormous crowds of pilgrims of the most
stiff-necked and fanatical of all races flocked, three times at least
in every year, bringing with them offerings and tribute for the temple
and its guardians, on a scale which must have made the hierarchy at
Jerusalem formidable even to the world’s master, by their mere command
of wealth.
But this would be the least of the causes of anxiety to the Roman
governor, as he spent year after year face to face with these terrible
leaders of a terrible people.
These high priests and rulers of the Jews were indeed quite another
kind of adversaries from the leaders, secular or religious, of any of
those conquered countries which the Romans were wont to treat with
contemptuous toleration. They still represented living traditions of
the glory and sanctity of their nation, and of Jerusalem, and exercised
still a power over that nation which the most resolute and ruthless of
Roman procurators did not care wantonly to brave.
At the same time the yoke of high priest and scribe and Pharisee was
even heavier on the necks of their own people than that of the Roman.
They had built up a huge superstructure of traditions and ceremonies
round the law of Moses, which they held up to the people as more sacred
and binding than the law itself. This superstructure was their special
charge. This was, according to them, the great national inheritance,
the most valuable portion of the covenant which God had made with
their fathers. To them, as leaders of their nation—a select, priestly,
and learned caste—this precious inheritance had been committed. Outside
that caste, the dim multitude, “the people which knoweth not the law,”
were despised while they obeyed, accursed as soon as they showed any
sign of disobedience. Such being the state of Judea, it would not be
easy to name in all history a less hopeful place for the reforming
mission of a young carpenter, a stranger from a despised province, one
entirely outside the ruling caste, though of the royal race, and who
had no position whatever in any rabbinical school.
In Galilee the surroundings were slightly different, but scarcely
more promising. Herod Antipas, the weakest of that tyrant family, the
seducer of his brother’s wife, the fawner on Cæsar, the spendthrift
oppressor of the people of his tetrarchy, still ruled in name over the
country, but with Roman garrisons in the cities and strongholds. Face
to face with him, and exercising an _imperium in imperio_ throughout
Galilee were the same priestly caste, though far less formidable to
the civil power and to the people, than in the southern province.
Along the western coast of the Sea of Galilee, the chief scene of our
Lord’s northern ministry, lay a net-work of towns densely inhabited,
and containing a large admixture of Gentile traders. This infusion of
foreign blood, the want of any such religious centre as Jerusalem, and
the contempt with which the southern Jews regarded their provincial
brethren of Galilee, had no doubt loosened to some extent the yoke of
the priests and scribes and lawyers in that province. But even here
their traditionary power over the masses of the people was very great,
and the consequences of defying their authority as penal, though the
penalty might be neither so swift or so certain, as in Jerusalem
itself. Such was the society into which Christ came.
It is not easy to find a parallel case in the modern world, but perhaps
the nearest exists in a portion of our own empire. The condition of
parts of India in our day resembles in some respects that of Palestine
in the year A. D. 30. In the Mahratta country, princes, not of the
native dynasty, but the descendants of foreign courtiers (like the
Idumean Herods), are reigning. British residents at their courts,
hated and feared, but practically all-powerful as Roman procurators,
answer to the officers and garrisons of Rome in Palestine. The people
are in bondage to a priestly caste scarcely less heavy than that which
weighed on the Judean and Galilean peasantry. If the Mahrattas were
Mohammedans, and Mecca were situate in the territory of Scindia or
Holkar; if the influence of twelve centuries of Christian training
could be wiped out of the English character, and the stubborn and
fierce nature of the Jew substituted for that of the Mahratta; a
village reformer amongst them, whose preaching outraged the Brahmins,
threatened the dynasties, and disturbed the English residents, would
start under somewhat similar conditions to those which surrounded
Christ when he commenced his ministry.
In one respect, and one only, the time seemed propitious. The mind and
heart of the nation was full of the expectation of a coming Messiah—a
King who should break every yoke from off the necks of his people,
and should rule over the nations, sitting on the throne of David. The
intensity of this expectation had, in the opening days of his ministry,
drawn crowds into the wilderness beyond Jordan from all parts of Judea
and Galilee, at the summons of a preacher who had caught up the last
cadence of the song of their last great prophet, and was proclaiming
that both the deliverance and the kingdom which they were looking for
were at hand. In those crowds who flocked to hear John the Baptist
there were doubtless some even amongst the priests and scribes, and
many amongst the poor Jewish and Galilean peasantry, who felt that
there was a heavier yoke upon them than that of Rome or of Herod
Antipas. But the record of the next three years shows too clearly that
even these were wholly unprepared for any other than a kingdom of this
world, and a temporal throne to be set up in the holy city.
And so, from the first, Christ had to contend not only against the
whole of the established powers of Palestine, but against the highest
aspirations of the best of his countrymen. These very Messianic hopes,
in fact, proved the greatest stumbling-block in his path. Those who
entertained them most vividly had the greatest difficulty in accepting
the carpenter’s son as the promised Deliverer. A few days only before
the end he had sorrowfully to warn the most intimate and loving of his
companions and disciples, “Ye know not what spirit ye are of.”