The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

CHAPTER V
THE FOLLOWERS OF JESUS

Two things stand out, when we study the character of the early church – its great complexity and variety, and its unity in the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. In spite of the general levelling which Greek culture and Roman government had made all over the Mediterranean world, the age-long influences of race and climate and cult were still at work. Everywhere there was a varnish of Greek literature; everywhere a tendency to uniformity in government, very carefully managed with great tenderness for local susceptibilities, but none the less a fixed object of the Emperors; everywhere cult was blended with cult with the lavish hospitality of polytheism; and yet, apart from denationalized men of letters, artists and dilettanti, the old types remained and reproduced themselves. And when men looked at the Christian community, it was as various as the Empire – "Thou wast slain," runs the hymn in the Apocalypse, "and thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation." There soon appeared that desire for uniformity which animated the secular government, and which appears to be an ineradicable instinct of the human mind. Yet for the first two centuries – the period under our discussion – the movement toward uniformity had not grown strong enough to overcome the race-marks and the place-marks. There are great areas over which in Christian life and thought the same general characteristics are to be seen, which were manifested in other ways before the Christian era. There is the great West of Italy, Gaul and Africa, Latin in outlook, but with strong local variations. There is the region of Asia Minor and Greece, – where the church is Hellenistic in every sense of the word, very Greek upon the surface and less Greek underneath, again with marked contrasts due to geography and race-distribution. Again there is the Christian South – Alexandria, with its Christian community, Greek and Jewish, and a little known hinterland, where Christian thought spread, we do not know how. There was Palestine with a group of Jewish Christians, very clearly differentiated. And Eastward there rose a Syrian Christendom, which as late as the fourth century kept a character of its own.[⁴¹⁹]

Into all these great divisions of the world came men eager to tell "good news" – generally quite commonplace and unimportant people with a "treasure in earthen vessels." Their message they put in various ways, with the aphasia of ill-educated men, who have something to tell that is far too big for any words at their command. It was made out at last that they meant a new relation to God in virtue of Jesus Christ. From a philosophic point of view they talked "foolishness," and they lapsed now and then, under the pressure of what was within them, into inarticulate and unintelligible talk, from which they might emerge into utterance quite beyond their ordinary range. Such symptoms were familiar enough, but these people were not like the usual exponents of "theolepsy" and "enthusiasm." They were astonishingly upright, pure and honest; they were serious; and they had in themselves inexplicable reserves of moral force and a happiness far beyond anything that the world knew. They were men transfigured, as they owned. Some would confess to wasted and evil lives, but something had happened,[⁴²⁰] which they connected with Jesus or a holy spirit, but everything in the long run turned upon Jesus.

Clearer heads came about them, and then, as they put it, the holy spirit fell upon them also. These men of education and ideas were "converted," and began at once to analyse their experience, using naturally the language with which they were familiar. It was these men who gave the tone to the groups of believers in their various regions, and that tone varied with the colour of thought in which the more reflective converts had grown up. A great deal, of course, was common to all regions of the world, – the new story and the new experience, an unphilosophized group of facts, which now, under the stimulus of man's unconquerable habit of speculation, began to be interpreted and to be related in all sorts of ways to the general experience of men. No wonder there was diversity. It took centuries to achieve a uniform account of the Christian faith.

The unity of the early church lay in the reconciliation with God, in the holy spirit, and Jesus Christ, – a unity soon felt and treasured. "There is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all."[⁴²¹] The whole body of Christians was conscious of its unity, of its distinctness and its separation. It was a "peculiar people"[⁴²²] – God's own; a "third race," as the heathen said.[⁴²³]

The recruits

To go further into detail we may consider the recruits and their experience, their explanations of this experience, and the new life in the world.

The recruits came, as the Christians very soon saw, from every race of mankind, and they brought with them much that was of value in national preconceptions and characteristics. The presence of Jew, Greek, Roman, Syrian and Phrygian, made it impossible for the church to be anything but universal; and if at times her methods of reconciling somewhat incompatible contributions were unscientific, still in practice she achieved the task and gained accordingly. Where the Empire failed in imposing unity by decree, the church produced it instinctively.

It was on Jewish ground that Christianity began, and it was from its native soil and air that it drew, transmuting as it drew them, its passionate faith in One God, its high moral standard and its lofty hopes of a Messianic age to come. For no other race of the Mediterranean world was the moral law based on the "categoric imperative." Nowhere else was that law written in the inward parts, in the very hearts of the people,[⁴²⁴] and nowhere was it observed so loyally. The absurdity and scrupulosity which the Greek ridiculed in the Jew, were the outcome of his devotion to the law of the Lord; and, when once the law was reinterpreted and taken to a higher plane by Jesus, the old passion turned naturally to the new morality. It was the Jew who brought to the common Christian stock the conception of Sin, and the significance of this is immense in the history of the religion. It differentiated Christianity from all the religious and philosophical systems of the ancient world.

 
'Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart
    At the head of a lie – taught Original Sin,
The Corruption of Man's Heart.
 

Seneca and the Stoics played with the fancy of man's being equal, or in some points superior, to God – a folly impossible for a Jewish mind. It was the Jews who gave the world the "oracles of God" in the Old Testament, who invested Christianity for the moment with the dignity of an ancient history and endowed it for all time with a unique inheritance of religious experience. Nor is it only the Old Testament that the church owes to the Jew; for the Gospels are also his gift – anchors in the actual that have saved Christianity from all kinds of intellectual, spiritual and ecclesiastical perils. And, further, at the difficult moment of transition, when Christian ideas passed from the Jewish to the Gentile world, there were Jews of the Hellenistic type ready to mediate the change. They of all men stood most clearly at the universal point of view; they knew the grandeur and the weakness of the law; they understood at once the Jewish and the Greek mind. It is hard to exaggerate what Christianity owes to men of this school – to Paul and to "John," and to a host of others, Christian Jews of the Dispersion, students of Philo, and followers of Jesus. On Jewish soil the new faith died; it was transplantation alone that made Christianity possible; for it was the true outcome of the teaching of Jesus, that the new faith should be universal.

The chief contribution of the Greek was his demand for this very thing – that Christianity must be universal. He made no secret of his contempt for Judaism, and he was emphatic in insisting on a larger outlook than the Jewish. No man could seem more naturally unlikely to welcome the thoughts of Jesus than the "little Greek" (Graæculus) of the Roman world; yet he was won; and then by making it impossible for Christianity to remain an amalgam of the ideas of Jesus and of Jewish law, the Greek really secured the triumph of Jesus. He eliminated the tribal and the temporary in the Gospel as it came from purely Jewish teachers, and, with all his irregularities of conduct and his flightiness of thought, he nevertheless set Jesus before the world as the central figure of all history and of all existence.[⁴²⁵] Even the faults of the Greek have indirectly served the church; for the Gospels gained their place in men's minds and hearts, because they were the real refuge from the vagaries of Greek speculation, and offered the ultimate means of verifying every hypothesis. The historic Jesus is never of such consequence to us as when the great intellects tell us that the true and only heaven is Nephelococcygia. For Aristophanes was right – it was the real Paradise of the Greek mind. What relief the plain matter-of-fact Gospel must have brought men in a world, where nothing throve like these cities of the clouds, would be inconceivable, if we did not know its value still. While we recognize the real contribution of the Greek Christians, it is good to see what Christianity meant to men who were not Greeks.

Tatian

There was one Christian of some note in the second century, whose attitude toward everything Greek is original and interesting. Tatian was "born in the land of the Assyrians."[⁴²⁶] He travelled widely in the Græco-Roman world,[⁴²⁷] and studied rhetoric like a Greek; he gave attention to the great collections of Greek art in Rome – monuments of shame, he called them. He was admitted to the mysteries, but he became shocked at the cruelty and licentiousness tolerated and encouraged by paganism. While in this mind, seeking for the truth, "it befel that I lit upon some barbarian writings, older than the dogmata of the Greeks, divine in their contrast with Greek error; and it befel too that I was convinced by them, because, their style was simple, because there was an absence of artifice in the speakers, because the structure of the whole was intelligible, and also because of the fore-knowledge of future events, the excellence of the precepts and the subordination of the whole universe to One Ruler (tò tôn hólôn monarchikón). My soul was taught of God, and I understood that while Greek literature (tà mèn) leads to condemnation, this ends our slavery in the world and rescues us from rulers manifold and ten thousand tyrants."[⁴²⁸] He now repudiated the Greeks and all their works, the grammarians who "set the letters of the alphabet to quarrel among themselves,"[⁴²⁹] the philosophers with their long hair and long nails and vanity,[⁴³⁰] the actors, poets and legislators; and "saying good-bye to Roman pride and Attic pedantry (psychrología) I laid hold of our barbarian philosophy."[⁴³¹] He made the first harmony of the Gospels – an early witness to the power of their sheer simplicity in a world of literary affectations.

Another famous Syrian of the century was Ignatius of Antioch, whose story is collected from seven letters he wrote, in haste and excitement, as he travelled to Rome to be thrown to the beasts in the arena – his guards in the meantime being as fierce as any leopards. The burden of them all is that Jesus Christ truly suffered on the cross. Men around him spoke of a phantom crucified by the deluded soldiers amid the deluded Jews. – No! cries Ignatius, over and over, he truly suffered, he truly rose, ate and drank, and was no dæmon without a body (daimónion asómaton) – none of it is seeming, it is all truly, truly, truly.[⁴³²] He has been called hysterical, and his position might make any nervous man hysterical – death before him, his Lord's reality denied, and only time for one word —Truly. Before we pass him by, let us take a quieter saying of his to illustrate the deepest thought of himself and his age – "He that hath the word of Jesus truly can hear his silence also."[⁴³³]

The Roman came to the Church as he came to a new province. He gravely surveyed the situation, considered the existing arrangements, accepted them, drew up as it were a lex provinciæ to secure their proper administration, and thereafter interpreted it in accordance with the usual principles of Roman law, and, like the procurator in Achæa, left the Greeks to discuss any abstract propositions they pleased. Tertullian and Cyprian were lawyers, and gave Latin Christendom the language, in which in later days the relations of man with his Divine Sovereign were worked out by the great Latin Fathers.

Freedom from dæmons

The confession of Tatian, above cited, emphasizes as one of the great features of the barbarian literature – its "monarchic" teaching – "it sets man free from ten thousand tyrants" – and this may be our starting-point in considering the new experience. To be rid of the whole dæmon-world, to have left the dæmons behind and their "hatred of men,"[⁴³⁴] their astrology,[⁴³⁵] their immorality and cruelty, their sacrifices, and the terror of "possession" and theolepsy and enchantment,[⁴³⁶] was happiness in itself. "We are above fate," said Tatian, "and, instead of dæmons that deceive, we have learnt one master who deceiveth not."[⁴³⁷] "Christ," wrote an unknown Christian of a beautiful spirit – "Christ wished to save the perishing, and such mercy has he shown us that we the living do not serve dead gods, but through him we know the Father of truth."[⁴³⁸] "Orpheus sang to beguile men, but my Singer has come to end the tyranny of dæmons," said Clement.[⁴³⁹] The perils of "meats offered to idols" impressed some, who feared that by eating of them they would come under dæmoniac influence. With what relief they must have read Paul's free speech on the subject – "the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof" – "for us there is one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him."[⁴⁴⁰] "Even the very name of Jesus is terrible to the dæmons"[⁴⁴¹] – the "name that is above every name." In no other name was there salvation from dæmons, for philosophy had made terms with them.

No one can read the Christian Apologists without remarking the stress which they lay upon the knowledge of God, which the new faith made the free and glad possession of the humblest. "They say of us that we babble nonsense among females, half-grown people, girls and old people. No! all our women are chaste and at their distaffs our maidens sing of things divine," said Tatian, and rejoined with observations on famous Greek women, Lais, Sappho and others. Justin, always kindlier, speaks of Socrates who urged men to seek God, yet owned that "it would be a hard task to find the father and maker of this All, and when one had found him, it would not be safe to declare him to all,"[⁴⁴²] but, he goes on, "our Christ did this by his power. No man ever believed Socrates so much as to die for his teaching. But Christ, who was known to Socrates in part, (for he was and is the Word that is in everything…) – on Christ, I say, not only philosophers and scholars (philólogoi) believed, but artisans, men quite without learning (idiôtai), and despised glory and fear and death." "There is not a Christian workman but finds out God and manifests him," said Tertullian.[⁴⁴³] This knowledge of God was not merely a desirable thing in theory, for it is clear that it was very earnestly sought. To Justin's quest for God, allusion has been made – "I hoped I should have the vision of God at once (katóphesthai)" he says. "Who among men had any knowledge of what God was, before he came?"[⁴⁴⁴] "This," wrote the fourth evangelist, "is eternal life – that they may know thee, the one true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."

The holy spirit

But it is one thing to be a monotheist, and another to be a child of "Abba Father," and this is one of the notes of the early Christian. It is impossible to over-emphasize the significance of Christian happiness amid the strain and doubt of the early Empire. Zeno and Isis each had something to say, but who had such a message of forgiveness and reconciliation and of the love of God? "God is within you," said Seneca; but he knew nothing of such an experience as the Christian summed up as the "grace of God," "grace sufficient" and "grace abounding." It is hard to think of these familiar phrases being new and strange – the coining of Paul to express what no man had said before – and this at the moment when Seneca was writing his "moral letters" to Lucilius. Verbal coincidences may be found between Paul and Seneca, but they are essentially verbal. The Stoic Spermaticos Logos was a cold and uninspiring dogma compared with "Abba Father" and the Spirit of Jesus – it was not the same thing at all. The one doctrine made man self-sufficient – in the other, "our sufficiency (hikanótes) is of God." It was the law of nature, contrasted with the father of the prodigal son – "our kind and tender-hearted father" as Clement of Rome calls him [⁴⁴⁵] – the personal God, whose "problem is ever to save the flock of men; that is why the good God has sent the good shepherd."[⁴⁴⁶]

The more lettered of Christian writers like to quote Plato's saying that man was born to be at home with God (oikeíôs échein pròs theòn) and that he was "a heavenly plant." Falsehood, they say, and error obscured all this, but now "that ancient natural fellowship with heaven" has "leapt forth from the darkness and beams upon us."[⁴⁴⁷] "God," says Clement, "out of his great love for men, cleaves to man, and as when a little bird has fallen out of the nest, the mother-bird hovers over it, and if perchance some creeping beast open its mouth upon the little thing,

 
Wheeling o'er his head, with screams the dam
Bewails her darling brood;
 

so God the Father seeks his image, and heals the fall, and chases away the beast, and picks up the little one again."[⁴⁴⁸]

God has "anointed and sealed" his child and given him a pledge of the new relation – the holy spirit. This is distinctly said by St Paul,[⁴⁴⁹] and the variety of the phenomena, to which he refers, is a little curious. Several things are covered by the phrase, and are classed as manifestations with a common origin. There are many allusions to "speaking with tongues"; Paul, however, clearly shows that we are not to understand a miraculous gift in using actual languages, reduced to grammar and spoken by men, as the author of the Acts suggests with a possible reminiscence of a Jewish legend of the law-giving from Sinai. The "glossolaly" was inarticulate and unintelligible; it was a feature of Greek "mantic," an accompaniment of over-strained emotion, and even to be produced by material agencies, as Plutarch lets us see. Paul himself is emphatic upon its real irrelevance to the Christian's main concern, and he deprecates the attention paid to it. Other "spiritual" manifestations were visions and prophecies. With these Dr William James has dealt in his Varieties of Religious Experience, showing that in them, as in "conversion," there is nothing distinctively Christian. The content of the vision and the outcome of the conversion are the determining factors. Where men believe that an ordinary human being can be temporarily transformed by the presence within him of a spirit, the very belief produces its own evidence. If the tenet of the holy spirit rested on nothing else, it would have filled a smaller place in Christian thought.

Jesus the saviour

But when Paul speaks of the holy spirit whereby the Christians are sealed, calling it now the spirit of God and now the spirit of Jesus, he is referring to a profounder experience. Explain conversion as we may, the word represents a real thing. Men were changed, and were conscious of it. Old desires passed away and a new life began, in which passion took a new direction, finding its centre of warmth and light, not in morality, not in religion, but in God as revealed in Jesus Christ. "To me to live is Christ," cried Paul, giving words to the experience of countless others. Life had a new centre; and duty, pain and death were turned to gladness. The early Christian was conscious of a new spirit within him. It was by this spirit that they could cry "Abba, Father"; it was the spirit that guided them into all truth; it was the spirit that united them to God,[⁴⁵⁰] that set them free from the law of sin and death, that meant life and peace and joy and holiness. Paul trusted everything to what we might call the Christian instinct and what he called the holy spirit, and he was justified. No force in the world has done so much as this nameless thing that has controlled and guided and illumined – whatever we call it. Any one who has breathed the quiet air of a gathering of men and women consciously surrendered to the influence of Jesus Christ, with all its sobering effect, its consecration, its power and gladness, will know what Paul and his friends meant. It is hardly to be known otherwise. In our documents the spirit is closely associated with the gathering of the community in prayer.

Freedom from dæmons, forgiveness and reconciliation with God, gladness and moral strength and peace in the holy spirit – of such things the early Christians speak, and they associate them all invariably with one name, the living centre of all. "Jesus the beloved" is a phrase that lights up one of the dullest of early Christian pages.[⁴⁵¹] "No! you do not so much as listen to anyone, if he speaks of anything but Jesus Christ in truth," says Ignatius.[⁴⁵²] "What can we give him in return? He gave us light … he saved us when we were perishing … We were lame in understanding, and worshipped stone and wood, the works of men. Our whole life was nothing but death… He pitied us, he had compassion, he saved us, for he saw we had no hope of salvation except from him; he called us when we were not, and from not being he willed us to be."[⁴⁵³] "The blood of Jesus, shed for our salvation, has brought to all the world the grace of repentance."[⁴⁵⁴] "Ye see what is the pattern that has been given us; what should we do who by him have come under the yoke of his grace?"[⁴⁵⁵] "Let us be earnest to be imitators of the Lord."[⁴⁵⁶] These are a few words from Christians whose writings are not in the canon. Jesus is pre-eminently and always the Saviour; the author of the new life; the revealer of God; the bringer of immortality. It made an immense impression upon the ancient world to see the transformation of those whom it despised, – women, artisans, slaves and even slave-girls. Socrates with the hemlock cup and the brave Thrasea were figures that men loved and honoured. But here were all sorts of common people doing the same thing as Socrates and Thrasea, cheerfully facing torture and death "for the name's sake" – and it was a name of contempt, too. "Christ's people" —Christianoi– was a bantering improvisation by the people of Antioch, who were notorious in antiquity for impudent wit:[⁴⁵⁷] it was a happy shot and touched the very centre of the target. "The name" and "his name," are constantly recurring phrases. But it was not only that men would die for the name – men will die for anything that touches their imagination or their sympathy – but they lived for it and showed themselves to be indeed a "new creation." "Our Jesus"[⁴⁵⁸] was the author of a new life, and a very different one from that of Hellenistic cities. That Christianity retained its own character in the face of the most desperate efforts of its friends to turn it into a philosophy congenial to the philosophies of the day, was the result of the strong hold it had taken upon innumerable simple people, who had found in it the power of God in the transformation of their own characters and instincts, and who clung to Jesus Christ – to the great objective facts of his incarnation and his death upon the cross – as the firm foundations laid in the rock against which the floods of theory might beat in vain. For now we have to consider another side of early Christian activity – the explanation of the new experience.

The early Christian community found "the unexamined life" as impossible as Plato had, and they framed all sorts of theories to account for the change in themselves. Of most immediate interest are the accounts which they give of the holy spirit and of Jesus. Here we must remember that in all definition we try to express the less known through the more known, and that the early Christians necessarily used the best language available to them, and tried to communicate a new series of experiences by means of the terms and preconceptions of the thinking world of their day – terms and preconceptions long since obsolete.

Much in the early centuries of our era is unintelligible until we form some notion of the current belief in spiritual beings, evidence of which is found in abundance in the literature of the day, pagan and Christian. A growing consensus among philosophers made God more and more remote, and emphasized the necessity for intermediaries. We have seen how Plutarch pronounced for the delegation of rule over the universe and its functions to ministering spirits. The Jews had a parallel belief in angels, and had come to think of God's spirit and God's intelligence as somehow detachable from his being. In abstract thought this may be possible just as we think of an angle without reference to matter. The great weakness in the speculation of the early Empire was this habit of supposing that men can be as certain of their deductions as of their premisses; and God's Logos, being conceivable, passed into common religious thought as a separate and proven existence.

The holy spirit

At the same time there was abundant evidence of devil-possession as there is in China to-day. Modern medicine distinguishes four classes of cases which the ancients (and their modern followers) group under this one head: – Insanity, Epilepsy, Hysteria major and the mystical state. To men who had no knowledge of modern medicine and its distinctions, the evidence of the "possessed" was enough, and it was apt to be quite clear and emphatic as it is in such cases to-day. The man said he "had a devil" – or even a "legion of devils." The priestess at the oracle said that a god was within her (éntheos). In both cases the ocular evidence was enough to convince the onlookers of the truth of the explanation, for the persons concerned were clearly changed and were not themselves.[⁴⁵⁹] Plato played with the idea that poetry even might be, as poets said, a matter of inspiration. The poet could not be merely himself when he wrote or sang words of such transforming power. The Jews gave a similar account of prophecy – the Spirit of the Lord descended upon men, as we read in the Old Testament. The Spirit, says Athenagoras to the Greeks, used the Hebrew prophets, as a flute-player does a flute, while they were in ecstasy (kat ékstasin)[⁴⁶⁰] – the holy spirit, he adds, is an effluence (apórroia) of God.[⁴⁶¹]

The Christians, finding ecstasy, prophecy, trance, and glossolaly among their own members, and having before them the parallel of Greek priestesses and Hebrew prophets, and making moreover the same very slight distinction as their pagan neighbours between matter and spirit, and, finally, possessing all the readiness of unscientific people in propounding theories, – they assumed an "effluence" from God, a spirit which entered into a man, just as in ordinary life evil demons did, but here it was a holy spirit. This they connected with God after the manner familiar to Jewish thinkers, and following the same lead, began to equate it with God, as a separate being. It is not at first always quite clear whether it is the spirit of God or of Jesus – or even a manifestation of the risen Jesus.[⁴⁶²]

When we pass to the early explanations of Jesus, we come into a region peculiarly difficult. A later age obscured the divergences of early theory. Some opinions the church decisively rejected – Christians would have nothing to do with a Jesus who was an emanation from an absolute and inconceivable Being, a Jesus who in that case would be virtually indistinguishable from Asclepios the kindly-natured divine healer. Nor would they tolerate the notion of a phantom-Jesus crucified in show, while the divine Christ was far away – like Helen in Euripides' play.[⁴⁶³] "Spare," says Tertullian, "the one hope of all the world."[⁴⁶⁴] They would not have a "daimonion without a body." But two theories, one of older Jewish, and the other of more recent Alexandrian origin, the church accepted and blended, though they do not necessarily belong to each other.

Paul

The one theory is especially Paul's – sacred to all who lean with him to the Hebrew view of things, to all who, like him, are touched with the sense of sin and feel the need of another's righteousness, to all who have come under the spell of the one great writer of the first century. A Jew, a native of a Hellenistic city – and "no mean one"[⁴⁶⁵] – a citizen of the Roman Empire, a man of wide outlooks, with a gift for experience, he passed from Pharisaism to Christ. The mediating idea was righteousness. He knew his own guilt before God, and found that by going about to establish his own righteousness he was achieving nothing.

At the same time a suffering Messiah was a contradiction in terms, unspeakably repulsive to a Jew. We can see this much in the tremendous efforts of the Apologists to overcome Jewish aversion by producing Old Testament prophecies that Christ was to suffer. Pathetós (subject to suffering) was a word that waked rage and contempt in every one, who held to contemporary views of God, or even had dabbled in Stoic or similar conceptions of human greatness. But it seems that the serenity and good conscience of Christian martyrs impressed their persecutor, who was not happy in his own conscience; and at last the thought came – along familiar lines – that Christ's sufferings might be for the benefit of others. And then he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. What exactly happened is a matter of discussion, but Paul was satisfied – he was "a man in Christ."