The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity

The advantage his scheme gave him as a preacher to the Gentiles is too obvious to be dwelt on. As a Greek by birth and culture, he was interested in the fate of other nations besides the Jews. A system of religion adapted to the traditions and satisfactory to the hopes of a peculiar people, – a national, exclusive religion in the benefits whereof none but Jews might share, and from whose grace no lineal descendant of Abraham could be excluded, did not commend itself to this man, half Jew, half Greek. The faith that obtained his allegiance, and awoke his zeal must possess a

human

 character by virtue of which its message could be carried to all mankind. Such a faith his new theory of the Christ gave him. He could say to his Greek friends: "This religion that I bring you is no Hebrew peculiarity. Its Christ is no son of David, but a son of God; its heaven is no Messianic kingdom in Judæa, but a region of light above the skies; its principle is faith, not obedience to a ceremonial or legal code; it dispenses entirely with the requirements of the law of Moses; makes no account of sacrifices or priests; presumes on no acquaintance with Hebrew scriptures, or reverence for Hebrew men; questions of circumcision and uncircumcision are trivial and impertinent. The religion of Christ addresses you as men, not as Jewish men; it appeals to the universal sense of moral and spiritual infirmity, and offers a moral and spiritual, not a technical deliverance; instead of limiting, it will enlarge you; instead of binding, it will emancipate you; its genius is liberty, through which you are set free from ceremonialism, ritualism, dogmatism, moralism, and are made partakers of a new intellectual life."

Not all at once did this scheme unfold itself before the apostle's vision. Gradually it came to him as he meditated alone, or experimented with it on listeners in remote places. Naturally, he avoided the associations of the people he had persecuted, and the teachers they looked up to. He had nothing to learn from them; he understood their system and was dissatisfied with it, in short, rejected it. Their Jewish Messiah, literal, national, hebraic, was not an attractive personage to his mind. The promise of felicity in a Jewish kingdom of heaven was not enchanting. The daily life of the believers in Jerusalem was formal, unnatural, repulsive to one who had "walked large" in foreign cities and realms of thought. The apostles, Peter, James, John, had nothing important to tell him that he did not know already. The earthly details of the life of Jesus might have interested him, but the interior character and the human significance of the Christ were the main thing, and these he may have thought himself more in the way of appreciating by a temporary retirement to the depths of his own consciousness. Having matured his thoughts, he did put himself in communication with the original disciples, with what result is frankly stated in his letter to the Galatians: "To those who seemed to be somewhat (what they were is no concern of mine, God accepteth no man's person), but who in conference added nothing to me, I did not give way, in subjection, no, not for an hour." So heated he becomes, as he remembers this interview, that he can scarcely write coherently about it. The two conceptions of the Christ and his office were so far apart, that he did not, to his dying day, form intimate relations with the teachers of the primitive gospel. They taught an uncongenial scheme.

From the first, Paul's sphere of action was the Gentile world to which his message was adapted. If his first appeal was addressed to Jews, it was simply because Christianity, as he understood it, being an outgrowth from Jewish thought, a development of Jewish tradition, should naturally be more intelligible and more welcome to them than to people who had no historical or literary preparation for it. But he took the broad ground with them, and addressed his word to outsiders the moment stubbornly dogmatical Jews declined to receive it on his terms. The attempt made by the author of the "Acts of the Apostles," to show that Paul modified or qualified his scheme to bring it into harmony with the older scheme that he supplanted, fails from the circumstance that the writer discerns no peculiarity in his theory of the Christ, and consequently misses completely the ground of any antagonism.

This is written in the persuasion that the "Acts of the Apostles" is not trustworthy as history; has in fact no historical intent, but belongs to the class of writings that may be called conciliatory, or mediatorial, designed to bring opposing views together, to heal divisions, and smooth over rough places. By pulling hard at both ends of the string, dragging Peter towards Paul, and Paul towards Peter, ascribing to both the same opinions, imputing to both the same designs, and passing both through the same experiences, the author would make his readers believe that they stood on the same foundation. The grounds of the opinion above stated cannot be given here; but there are grounds for it, and solid ones, as any one may discover who will take the pains to look at Edward Zeller's essay on the "Acts," or any other argument from an unprejudiced point of view. The conclusion may be arrived at, however, by a shorter process, namely, by taking Paul's Christology as given by himself in his own letters, and then considering how completely it is excluded from the book. It seems to the present writer nothing less than certain, as plain as any point of literary criticism can be, that the "Acts of the Apostles" is not to be relied on for information respecting the life and opinions of the apostle Paul. In this opinion writers belonging to very different schools of religious philosophy, Mackay, for example, and Martineau, are cordially agreed. This must henceforth be regarded as one of the points established. The firmer the apprehension of Paul's peculiarity, the stronger is the conviction that the description of his conduct in the book of "Acts" must be fanciful. If he tells the truth, as there is no reason to doubt, the unknown author of the "Acts" romances.

The necessity that Paul was under of commending his christology to the Jews, a self-imposed necessity in part, inasmuch as his own genius being Jewish, imposed it on him, embarrassed the movement of his mind to such a degree that he was never able to do perfect justice to his own theory. Much time was spent in explaining his conduct to orthodox Jews, or in answering questions raised by hebrew casuistry. The epistle to the Romans, the most labored of his compositions, is a long argument addressed to his countrymen in Rome, with the design of persuading them that Jehovah was quite justified in accepting Gentiles who conformed to his requirements, and in rejecting children of Abraham who did not. This is the burden of the letter. The argument is lighted up by splendid bursts of eloquence, and diversified by keen remarks on points of psychology. But, omitting two or three of the chapters and scattered passages in others, the remainder is intellectually arid and devoid of human interest. The same may be said of the letter to the Galatians. The epistles to the Thessalonians, and those to the Corinthians, are occupied chiefly with matters of local and incidental concern. It is probable that Paul's genius was disastrously circumscribed within hebrew limits after all; that he never completely emancipated himself even from the old time traditions of his people; that the Jewish half of the man was not the weaker half. A philosopher he was not; a theologian, in the great sense, he was not; a metaphysician he was not; a psychologist he was not. He was an apostle, a preacher. The problems he discussed were formal rather than vital, and the spirit in which he discussed them was the temper of the dogmatist rather than that of the seer. However this may be, it may be affirmed that his system contained no strictly original ideas; that his leading thoughts, and even the phases of his thought, were borrowed from the literature of his nation, or, at least, may be found there.

It is a frequent remark that, but for St. Paul, Christianity might have had no life out of Judæa; which is tantamount to saying that it might have had no prolonged or extended life at all, but would have perished as an incidental phase of Judaism. The remark is essentially just; at the same time it must be remembered that the Christianity which Paul devised and planted was a system quite unlike that of his predecessors, though still another phase of Judaism, a divergent and cosmopolitan phase.

Other pieces of literature, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, Hebrews, which, whether the compositions of Paul or not, contain developments of his thought, and may be called "Pauline," carry further his central speculation and apply his principle to the new problems that presented themselves in the social life of the religion; yet these do not go beyond the lines of Jewish thought. The significant passage in Philippians, "Who, although he was in the form of God, thought not that an equality with God, was a thing he ought greedily to grasp at," suggests the Greek mythus of Lucifer, who fell because, being already the brightest of beings, he was discontented with a formal inferiority of rank. His crime consisted in rapaciously grasping at a power which was, in all but the name, his own. The Christ, in contrast, was satisfied with the substance; he willingly resigned pretension to the position. But the Greek mythus was the reflection of a legend from the farther East, and came to this author more naturally through Judaism than through Paganism. According to Neander's classification the Gnostics, from whom this theosophic conception came, were Judaistic. Gieseler's classification leads to the same inference, for the Alexandrian Gnosis was the product of Greek thought, blended with Jewish. The classification of Gieseler has regard to the source whence the speculation came; that of Neander to the tendency of the speculation. In whichever aspect we view the myth, its Jewish character is apparent. The writer has pushed his speculations into new fields that yet lay within the ancestral domain. He describes the Christ as being but the semblance of a man, in "fashion" a man, not in substance. The thought is a further development, yet a strictly logical one, of Paul's idea that the Christ was made "in the likeness of sinful flesh." The two expressions are parallel, in fact identical; "body," in Pauline phrase being, from the nature of the case, "sinful body." The writer speaks of the dominion of the Christ as extended over the three spheres, heaven, earth, and the under-world; scarcely thereby enlarging the scope of a previous thought, for as much as these spheres were comprehended in the dominion of the Christ who "created the worlds," the new worlds that constituted the new creation, whereof he was Lord.

The letter to the Hebrews, an exceedingly elaborate exposition of the close relation between the new faith and the old, an argument and a plea for the new faith as containing in substance all that the old contained in form, is Jewish in coloring throughout, an exaggeration of Jewish ideas. The argument is that Christianity excels Judaism in its own excellencies. The Christ is called "high priest," "perpetual priest," possessing the power to confer endless life. By the sacrifice of himself he has entered at once into the holy of holies. He has tasted death for every man – another way of saying that he has deprived death for every man of its bitterness. He has destroyed the devil who held the kingdom of death. He has reconciled man with God by abolishing death, and with death sin, which is the strength of death. The Christ is represented as the author of salvation to all that obey him; he lives forever to make intercession; his blood purges men's consciences from reliance on dead works; he, once for all, has devoted himself to bear the sins of many; he will come again, and bring salvation to such as wait for him; all these are merely completed expressions of the idea enunciated by Paul.

The Christ himself is described in this epistle as "the appointed heir of all things;" "the brightness of God's glory and the express image of His person;" "upholding all things by the word of His power;" "the First Begotten;" "the object of adoration by the angels." To support this view, the Old Testament is ingeniously quoted and misapplied. The influence of Jewish thought appears also in the passages that describe the Christ as an agent, appointed to his office; an official, "sitting at the right hand of the Majesty on High;" as fulfilling His mission and obtaining His glory through suffering; as subjected to human experiences of temptation; as strictly sub-ordinate to God.

The scriptures entitled "Colossians" and "Ephesians" betray still greater familiarity with Alexandro-Jewish conceptions, and a yet deeper sympathy with them. The Christ is here "the image of God, the first-born of every creature." It is declared that "by Him were all things created that are in heaven and on earth; things visible and invisible; thrones, dominions, principalities, powers; by Him and for Him they were created." "He is far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, whether in this world or the world to come." He is "all in all." He is the pleroma, the fulness, the abyss of possibility. "The fulness of the Godhead dwells in Him visibly." He exhausts the divine capacity of expression. He is the reality of God. Towards mankind he is the reconciler. In him "all things are gathered together in one." By the blood of his cross he has made peace and reconciled all things to himself; things on earth and things in heaven. In a striking passage, the writer of "Ephesians" describes the Christ as first descending into the under world to release the captives bound in the chains of Satan, and thence ascending up on high and sending down gifts to men.

Both of these compositions abound in Gnostic phraesology. The abstruse terms "Mystery," "Wisdom," "Æon," "Prince of the Powers" recur again and again, and always with the cabalistic meaning. The writers are caught in the meshes of Oriental speculation, and apparently make no effort to extricate themselves. On the contrary, they welcome their enthralment, taking the binding cords to be guiding strings towards the truth. So far, again, instead of escaping from the Jewish tradition we are tethered to it more securely than before. The literature of the New Testament is seen to be still a continuation and completion of the literature of the Old. The earliest form of the Messianic doctrine is completely distanced. Scarcely a trace of it remains. Of the throne of David not a word. Not a word of Moses and the Prophets, of the historical fulfilment of ancient prediction, of the temple worship, of the chosen people. Pharisees and Sadducees are alike omitted. The very word "kingdom," as denoting a visible Messianic reign, is dropped. But the territory of Judaism has not been abandoned. Galilee is deserted; Jerusalem is overthrown; but the schools of the rabbins are open.

It will be remarked that the moral teaching is more vague and mystical than it was in the early time. The theological spirit prevails over the human; the ecclesiastical supersedes the ethical. Practical principle is postponed to theoretical doctrine. The virtues prescribed are ghostly, technical; the graces of a church, not the qualities of a brotherhood. The intellectual air is thinner and more difficult to inhale. The spiritual atmosphere is not inspiring. Intelligence can make nothing of writing like this: "The husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church; and He is the Saviour of the body. Therefore, as the Church is subject to Christ, so let wives be subject in all things to their husbands. Husbands love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself for it, that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word; that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish." The absence of rational ground for duty in the most familiar relations of life could not be more explicitly declared than in a passage like this. That such an age should have had a scientific system of morality cannot be expected; but that the traditional system should have been lost, and a fantastical one set up in its place, is a testimony to the influence of the mystical spirit. The fanciful morality of a small and enthusiastic body may be interesting to the members of the body and influential on their conduct; but it is no evidence of health in the moral constitution of the generation. The representation of the Christian warfare as a conflict "not against flesh and blood," – that is, against organized evil in society and the State, – "but against principalities, against powers, against the princes of darkness, against wicked spirits that dwell in the air," is another evidence that conscience had become visionary. Such reasoning is of a piece with the argument for there being four gospels and no more, namely, that there were four quarters of the heaven, and four winds; or with the argument for perpetual virginity, that it supplied the Church with vestals. Such theologising shows how far speculation may be separated from reality and yet be entertained by human minds.

VII.

THE LAST GOSPEL

The author of the fourth Gospel is unknown, but it is incredible that this wonderful book, wonderful for finish of literary execution as well as for vigor of intellectual conception, was written by a Galilean fisherman; a man of brooding and morbid disposition, whose intemperate zeal earned for him the title "son of thunder;" who, according to Luke, proposed to call down fire from heaven to consume certain Samaritans that declined to receive the master; who, according to the same authority, rebuked certain others that conjured by the Christ's name, but did not join his company; who, through his mother, asked for one of the best seats in the "kingdom;" a man who was most intimately associated with the James described in a former chapter; a man who late in life, had a reputation for intolerance which started a tradition of him to the effect that being in the public bath, and seeing enter the heretic Cerinthus, he rushed out, calling on all others to follow, if they would not be overwhelmed by the ruin such a blasphemer would pull down on their heads. All the traditions respecting John are to the same purport; his constant association with James and Peter, both disciples of the narrowest creed; his advocacy of chiliasm, the doctrine of the millennial reign of a thousand years, as testified to by Ephesian presbyters on the authority of Irenæus; the description of him, reported by Eusebius, as a "high priest wearing the mitre," standing in the order of succession therefore as a hierarch of the ancient dispensation, a churchman maintaining the ancient symbolical rites.

That such a composition as the fourth Gospel was written by such a man, in his old age too, the laws of literary criticism cannot admit. To the present writer the ungenuineness of the fourth Gospel has for several years seemed as distinctly proved as any point in literary criticism can be. To maintain the Johannean origin of the book, it must be assumed that the apostle lived to an extreme old age, nearly double the full three score years and ten allotted to mankind; that his entire nature changed in the interval between his youth and his senility; that, without studying in the schools, he became a profound adept in speculative philosophy; and that by the same miraculous bestowment, he acquired a skill in letters surpassing that of any in his generation, far surpassing that of Paul, who was an educated man, and completely casting into the shade Philo, the best scholar of a former era. All this, too, must be assumed, for there is not a fragment of the evidence to support the bold presumption of authorship.

The book belongs nearer to the middle than the beginning of the second century, and is the result of an attempt to present the Christ as the incarnate Word of God. The author is not obliged to go far to find his materials; they lie ready shaped to his hand in the writings of Philo and the Gnostics of his century. The thread of Hebrew tradition, has, by this time, become exceedingly thin; vestiges of the popular Jewish conception appear, but faintly, here and there. Nicodemus recognizes the divine character of the Christ by his power to work miracles. The Christ respects the tradition which accorded special privileges to the genuine "children of Abraham;" he declares to the woman of Samaria that "salvation is of the Jews;" he announces that eternal life consists in the knowledge of God, and the acceptance of his Son. Moses is said to have written of the Christ. Father Abraham rejoiced to see his day. Isaiah sang his glory, and spake of him. The brazen serpent is a type of his mission to deliver.

For the rest, the conceptions of deity, of providence, of salvation, of the eternal world, are quite different from the recognized Hebrew conceptions – the title given to God sixty times in the gospel, while the word "God," occurs less than twenty, is "Father," and this term is used, not in the sense of Matthew's "Our Father in Heaven," which describes the Old Testament Jehovah under his more amiable aspect, but rather as designating the

abyss of potential being

, as the term is employed in the trinitarian formula, in which the Godhead is broken up into three distinctions; the declaration "God is Spirit," or, as the language equally well permits, "Spirit is God," intimates that the individuality of God has disappeared, that the idea of deity has become intellectual. The one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm expresses perhaps as mystical an apprehension of God as the old Hebrew thought admits of, but that psalm retains the divine individuality; the limits are nowhere transgressed; it is a sympathetic, regardful eye that searches the secret place, and an attentive mind that notes the unarticulated thought. The intelligence loses no point of clearness in becoming penetrative. But in the fourth Gospel, the individuality is gone altogether. The Father "loveth," but with an abstract, impersonal sympathy; the Father "draweth," but with an organic, elemental attraction; the Father "hath life in himself," and hath given the Son to "have life in himself;" but neither the possession nor the communication of this power implies the bestowal of a concrete gift. The Father "judgeth no man, but hath given all judgment to the Son" – a phrase intimating that he had gone into retirement, had withdrawn from active interest in human concerns, had sunk into the depths of the Absolute. The expression "God is Spirit," taken alone, conveys no idea that is not contained in the Hebrew conception of the formless Jehovah; but when taken in connection with other expressions, it is seen to convey something more, and something different. The formless God may be strictly local; the "Spirit" is diffused.

In this book, the Christ takes the place of God, as the revealed or manifest God; he is the Logos, the incarnate word. "He was with God in the beginning." "All things were made by him." "In him was life, and the life was the light of men." "He hath life in himself." He is the only begotten son, who came down from heaven; he is in heaven. All judgment is committed to him; in him the divine glory is manifest; apart from him is no spiritual life; he is the vine, the door; he is the intercessor through whom prayer must be transmitted in order to be made availing.

The divine presence is taken out of nature, and transferred to the spiritual world; God is made ecclesiastical and dogmatic. Men are saved, not by natural piety and excellence, but by faith in the Christ as the Logos. The whole sum of Christianity is conveyed in this one position:

the manifestation of the Divine Glory in the Only Begotten Son

. This manifestation is of itself, the coming of salvation, the gift of God's life to mankind. By this, the Christ overcomes the powers of darkness and evil. He has come a light into the world; by him come grace and truth; to believe in him is a sign of God's working. He that cometh to him shall never hunger; he that believeth on him shall never thirst. It is enough that blind men believe; to die, believing in him, is to live; to live, believing in him, is to be saved from the power of death, and made immortal. To believe in him is the same thing as to believe in the Father. Not to believe in him, is to be consigned to spiritual death with sinners; to believe on the Son is to have everlasting life. This idea recurs with monotonous perseverance, some sixty times.

That this conception of the Christ is not original with our author has already been said many times. It had been in the world two hundred years before his day, and had worked its way into the substance of the later Jewish thought. The personification of the divine reason early occurred to the Jews who had been touched with the passion for speculation in the city of Alexandria. Long ago attention was called by Andrews Norton, among ourselves, to bold personifications of wisdom and the divine reason, in the Apocrypha of the Old Testament. "She is the breath of the power of God, a pure influence proceeding from the glory of the Almighty. She is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness." Chapters seven and eight of the Book of Wisdom contain an apotheosis of wisdom as the creative power. In the eighteenth chapter the imagery grows much stronger. "Thine almighty word leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne, as a fierce man-of-war into the midst of a land of destruction." The twenty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus is devoted to the same theme. The Word is described as a being: the first born of God; the active agent in creation; having its dwelling-place in Israel, its seat in the Law of Moses.

Philo pushes the speculation much further. The Logos is with him a most interesting subject of discourse, tempting him to wonderful feats of imagination. There is scarcely a personifying or exalting epithet that he does not bestow on the divine Reason. He describes it as a distinct being; calls it "A Rock," "The Summit of the Universe," "Before All Things," "First-begotten Son of God," "Eternal Bread from Heaven," "Fountain of Wisdom," "Guide to God," "Substitute for God," "Image of God," "Priest," "Creator of the Worlds," "Second God," "Interpreter of God," "Ambassador of God," "Power of God," "King," "Angel," "Man," "Mediator," "Light," "The Beginning," "The East," "The Name of God," "Intercessor." The curious on this subject may consult Lücke's Introduction to the Fourth Gospel, or Gfrörer's Philo, and he will be more than satisfied that the Logos of the fourth Gospel is the same as Philo's, and has the same origin.

Christian scholars who admit this have been anxious to break the force of the inference, by allowing the similarity of the conception and then supposing the evangelist to have stated the doctrine that he might stamp it as heresy. But he nowhere does stamp it as heresy. He puts it boldly on the front of his exposition and constructs his whole work in conformity with it. Instead of refuting it or denouncing it, he carries the idea out in all its applications, supplementing it with a completeness that Philo never thought of.

The Logos becomes a man; "is made flesh;" appears as an incarnation; in order that the God whom "no man has seen at any time," may be manifested. He has no parentage; is n