The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

We come now to the central question of man's relation with God, never before so vital a matter to serious people in the Mediterranean world. Jew and Greek and Egyptian were all full of it, and men's talk ran much upon it. Men were anxious to be right with God, and sought earnestly in the ways of their fathers for the means of communion with God and the attainment of some kind of safety in their position with regard to him. Jew and Greek alike talked of heaven and hell and of the ways to them. They talked of righteousness and holiness – "holy" is one of the great words of the period – and they sought these things in ritual and abstinence. Modern Jews resent the suggestion that the thousand and one regulations as to ceremonial purity, and the casuistries, as many or more, spun out of the law and the traditions, ranked with the great commandments of neighbourly love and the worship of the One God. No doubt they are right, but it is noticeable that in practice the common type of mind is more impressed with minutiæ than with principles. The Southern European to-day will do murder on little provocation, but to eat meat in Lent is sin. But, without attributing such conspicuous sins as theft and adultery and murder to the Pharisees, it is clear that in establishing their own righteousness they laid excessive stress on the details of the law, on Sabbath-keeping (a constant topic with the Christian apologists), on tithes, and temple ritual, on the washing of pots and plates – still rigorously maintained by the modern Jew – and all this was supposed to constitute holiness. Jesus with the clear incisive word of genius dismissed it all as "acting." The Pharisee was essentially an actor – playing to himself the most contemptible little comedies of holiness. Listen, cries Jesus, and he tells the tale of the man fallen among thieves and left for dead, and how priest and Levite passed by on the other side, fearing the pollution of a corpse, and how they left mercy, God's own work – "I will have mercy and not sacrifice" was one of his quotations from Hosea, – to be done by one unclean and damned – the Samaritan. Whited sepulchres! he cries, pretty to look at, but full of what? of death, corruption and foulness. "How can you escape from the judgment of hell?" he asked them, and no one records what they answered or could answer.

Jesus the liberator

It is clear, however, that, outside Palestine, the Jews in the great world were moving to a more purely moral conception of religion – their environment made mere Pharisaism impossible, and Greek criticism compelled them to think more or less in the terms of the fundamental. The debt of the Jew to the Gentile is not very generously acknowledged. None the less, the distinctive badge of all his tribe was and remained what the Greeks called fussiness (tò psophodeés).[⁴¹³] The Sabbath, circumcision, the blood and butter taboos remained – as they still remain in the most liberal of "Liberal Judaisms" – tribe marks with no religious value, but maintained by patriotism. And side by side with this lived and lives that hatred of the Gentile, which is attributed to Christian persecution, but which Juvenal saw and noted before the Christian had ceased to be persecuted by the Jew. The extravagant nonsense found in Jewish speculation as to how many Gentile souls were equivalent in God's sight to that of one Jew is symptomatic. To this day it is confessedly the weakness of Judaism that it offers no impulse and knows no enthusiasm for self-sacrificing love where the interests of the tribe are not concerned.[⁴¹⁴]

The great work of Jesus in this matter was the final and decisive cleavage with antiquity. Greek rationalism had long since laughed at the puerilities of the Greek cults; but rationalism and laughter are' unequally matched against Religion, and it triumphed over them, and, as we see in Plutarch and the Neo-Platonists, it imposed its puerilities – yes, and its obscenities – upon Philosophy and made her in sober truth "procuress to the lords of hell." It was a new thing when Religion, in the name of truth and for the love of God, abolished the connexion with a trivial past. Jesus cut away at once every vestige of the primitive and every savage survival – all natural growths perhaps, and helpful too to primitive man and to the savage, but confusing to men on a higher plane, – either mere play-acting or the "damnation of hell." Pagan cults he summed up as much speaking. Once for all he set Religion free from all taboos and rituals. Paul, once, on the spur of the moment, called Jesus the "Yes" of all the promises of God – a most suggestive name for the vindicator and exponent of God's realities. It is such a man as this who liberates mankind, cutting us clear of make-believes and negations and taboos, and living in the open-air, whether it is cloud or sun. That Jesus shocked his contemporaries with the abrupt nakedness of his religious ideas is not surprising. The church made decent haste to cover a good many of them up, but not very successfully. A mind like that of Jesus propagates itself, and reappears with startling vitality, as history in many a strange page can reveal.

We must now consider what was the thought of Jesus upon God and how he conceived of the relation between God and man. He approached the matter originally from the standpoint of Judaism, and no attempt to prove the influence of Greek philosophy is likely to succeed. The result of Greek speculation upon God – where it did not end in pure pantheism – was that of God nothing whatever could be predicated – not even being, but that he was to be expressed by the negation of every idea that could be formed of him. To this men had been led by their preconception of absolute being, and so strong was the influence of contemporary philosophy that Christian thinkers adopted the same conclusion, managing what clumsy combinations they could of it and of the doctrine of incarnation. Clement of Alexandria is a marked example of this method.

To the philosophic mind God remains a difficult problem, but to the religious temper things are very different. To it God is the one great reality never very far away, and is conceived not as an abstraction, nor as a force, but as a personality. It has been and is the strength and redemption of Judaism, that God is the God of Israel – "Oh God, thou art my God!" How intuition is to be reconciled with philosophy has been the problem of Christian thinkers in every age, but it may be remarked that the varying term is philosophy. To the intuition of Jesus Christians have held fast – though Greeks and others have called it "folly"; and in the meantime a good many philosophies have had their day.

The central thought of Jesus is the Fatherhood of God. For this, as for much else, parallels have been found in the words of Hebrew thinkers, ancient and contemporary, and we may readily concede that it was not original with Jesus to call God Father. The name was given to God by the prophets, but it was also given to him by the Stoics – and by Homer; so that to speak of God's Fatherhood might mean anything between the two extremes of everything and nothing. Christian theology, for instance, starting with the idea of the Fatherhood of God, has not hesitated to speak in the same breath of his "vindicating his majesty" – a phrase which there is no record or suggestion that Jesus ever used. There may be fathers who vindicate their majesty, as there are many other kinds, but until we realize the connotation of the word for men who speak of God as Father, it is idle to speak of it being a thought common to them. The name may be in the Old Testament and in Homer, but the meaning which Jesus gave to it is his own.

Jesus never uses the name Father without an air of gladness. Men are anxious as to what they shall eat, and what they shall drink, and wherewithal they shall be clothed – "your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." Children ask father and mother for bread – will they receive a stone? The women had hid the leaven in the three measures of meal long before the children began to feel hungry. And as to clothes – God has clothed the flower far better than Solomon ever clothed himself, "and shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" The picture is one of the strong and tender parent, smiling at the child's anxiety with no notion of his own majesty or of anything but love. So incredibly simple is the relation between God and man – simple, unconstrained, heedless and tender as the talk round a table in Nazareth. Jesus is greater than the men who have elaborated his ideas, and majesty is the foible of little minds. The great man, if he thinks of his dignity, lets it take care of itself; he is more interested in love and truth, and he forgets to think of what is due to himself. Aristotle said that his "magnificent man" would never run; but, says Jesus, when the prodigal son was yet a great way off, "his father saw him, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." This contrast measures the distance between the thought of Jesus and some Christian theologies. It is worth noting that in the two parables, in which a father directly addresses his son, it is with the tender word téknon, which is more like a pet name. It adds to the meaning of the parable of the prodigal, when the father calls the elder brother by the little name that has come down from childhood. It was a word which Jesus himself used in speaking to his friends.[⁴¹⁵] The heavenly Father does not cease to be a father because his children are ungracious and bad. He sends rain and sun – and all they mean – to evil and to good. The whole New Testament is tuned to the thought of Jesus – "the philanthropy of God our saviour."[⁴¹⁶]

Plato had long before defined the object of human life as "becoming like to God." Jesus finds the means to this likeness to God in the simplest of every day's opportunities. "Love your enemies and do good, and ye shall be sons of the Highest, for he is good and pitiful." "Blessed are the peace-makers," he said, "for they shall be called children of God." This is sometimes limited to the reconciliation of quarrels, but the worst of quarrels is the rift in a man's own soul, the "division of his spiritual substance against itself" which is the essence of all tragedy. There are some whose least word, or whose momentary presence, can somehow make peace wherever they go, and leave men stronger for the rest they have found in another's soul. This, according to Jesus, is the family likeness by which God's children are recognized in all sorts of company. To have the faculty of communicating peace of mind – and it is more often than not done unconsciously, as most great things are – is no light or accidental gift.

Jesus lays a good deal more stress upon unconscious instinct than most moralists do. Once only he is reported to have spoken of the Last Judgment, which was a favourite theme with the eschatologists of his period, Jewish, pagan, and Christian. He borrowed the whole framework of the scene, but he changed, and doubly changed, the significance of it. For he discarded the national or political criterion which the Jew preferred, and he did not have recourse to the rather individualistic moral test which Greek thinkers proposed, in imitation of Plato; still less did it occur to him to suggest a Credo. With him the ultimate standard was one of sheer kindness and good-heartedness – "inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these my brethren." But it is still more interesting to note how this standard is applied. Every one at the Last Judgment accepts it, just as every one accepts the propositions of moralists in general. But the real cleavage between the classes of men does not depend on morality, as the chilly suggestion of the mere word reminds us. Men judge other men not by their morality, professed or practised, so much as by their unconscious selves – by instinct, impulse and so forth, the things that really give a clue to the innermost man. The most noticeable point then in Jesus' picture of the Last Judgment is that, when "sheep" and "goats" are separated, neither party at once understands the reasons of the decision. These are conscious of duties done; the others have no very clear idea about it. Elsewhere Jesus suggests that, when men have done all required of them, they may still have the feeling that they are unprofitable servants; and it is precisely the peace-makers and the pure in heart who do not realize how near they come to God. The priest and the Levite in the parable were conscious of their purity, but Jesus gives no hint that they saw God. The Samaritan lived in another atmosphere, but it was natural to him and he breathed it unconsciously. The cultivation of likeness to God by Greek philosophers and their pupils was very different. Plutarch has left a tract, kindly and sensible, on "How a man may recognize his own progress in virtue," but there is no native Christian product of the kind.

The Kingdom of God

From what Jesus directly says of God, and from what he says of God's children, we may conclude that he classes God with the strong and sunny natures; with the people of bright eyes who see through things and into things, who have the feeling for reality, and love every aspect of the real. God has that sense which is peculiar to the creative mind – the keen joy in beauty, that loves star and bird and child. God has the father's instinct, a full understanding of human nature, and a heart open for the prodigal son, the publican and the woman with seven devils. "In his will is our peace," wrote the great Christian poet of the middle ages. "Doing the will we find rest," said a humble and forgotten Christian of the second century.[⁴¹⁷] They both learnt the thought from Jesus, who set it in the prayer beginning with Abba which he taught his disciples, and who prayed it himself in the garden with the same Abba in his heart. "In the Lord's prayer," said Tertullian, "there is an epitome of the whole Gospel."[⁴¹⁸]

At this point two questions rise, which are of some historical importance, and bear upon Jesus' view of God. It is clear, first of all, that the expression "the Kingdom of God" was much upon the lips of Jesus, at least in the earlier part of his ministry. It was not of his own coining, and scholars have differed as to what he really meant. Such controversy always rises about the terms in which a great mind expresses itself. The great thinker, even the statesman, has to use the best language he can find to convey his ideas, and if the ideas are new, the difficulty of expression is sometimes very great. The words imply one thing to the listener, and another to the speaker who is really trying (as Diogenes put it) to "re-mint the currency," and how far he succeeds depends mostly upon his personality. To-day "the Kingdom," or more accurately "the Kingship of God," is in some quarters interpreted rather vigorously in the sense which the ordinary Jew gave to the phrase in the age of Jesus; but it is more than usually unsound criticism to take the words of such a man as meaning merely what they would in the common talk of unreflective persons, who use words as counters and nothing else. There was a vulgar interpretation of the "Kingship of God," and there was a higher one, current among the better spirits; and it is only reasonable to interpret this phrase, or any other, in the light of the total mind of the man who uses it. It is clear then that, when Jesus used "the Kingship of God," he must have subordinated it to his general idea of God; and what that was, we have seen. To-day the phrase is returning into religious speech to signify the permeation of society by the mind of Christ, which cannot be far from what it meant to the earliest disciples. It is significant that the author of the fourth gospel virtually dropped the phrase altogether, that Paul preferred other expressions as a rule, and that it was merged and lost in the idea of the church.

Closely bound up with the "Kingdom of God" is the name Messiah, with a similarly wide range of meanings. The question has also been raised as to how far Jesus identified himself with the Messiah. It might be more pertinent to ask with which Messiah. On the whole, the importance of the matter can be gauged by the fate of the word. It was translated into Greek, and very soon Christos, or Chrestos, was a proper name and hardly a title at all except in apologetics, where alone the conception retained some importance. The Divine Son and the Divine Logos – terms which Jesus did not use – superseded the old Hebrew title, at any rate in the Gentile world, and this could hardly have occurred if the idea had been of fundamental moment in Jesus' mind and speech. If he used the name, as seems probable, it too must have been subordinated to his master-thought of God's fatherhood. It would then imply at most a close relation to the purposes of God, and a mission to men, the stewardship of thoughts that would put mankind on a new footing with God. The idea of his being a mediator in the Pauline sense is foreign to the gospels, and the later conception of a purchase of mankind from the devil, or from the justice of God, by the blood of a victim is still more alien to Jesus' mind.

The cross

These are some of the features of the founder of the new religion as revealed in the Gospels – features that permanently compel attention, but after all it was not the consideration of these that conquered the world. Of far more account in winning the world was the death of this man upon the cross. It was the cross that gave certainty to all that Jesus had taught about God. The church sturdily and indignantly repudiated any suggestion, however philosophic, that in any way seemed likely to lessen the significance of the cross. That he should taste the ultimate bitterness of death undisguised, that he should refuse the palliative wine and myrrh (an action symbolic of his whole attitude to everything and to death itself), that with open eyes he should set his face for Jerusalem, and with all the sensitiveness of a character, so susceptive of impression and so rich in imagination, he should expose himself to our experience – to the foretaste of death, to the horror of the unknown, and to the supreme fear – the dread of the extinction of personality; and that he should actually undergo all he foresaw, as the last cry upon the cross testified – all this let the world into the real meaning of his central thought upon God. It was the pledge of his truth, and thus made possible our reconciliation with God. If we may take an illustration from English literature, Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar may suggest something here. It has been noticed how small a part Cæsar plays in the drama – how little he speaks; what weakness he shows – epilepsy, deafness, arrogance, vacillation; and how soon he disappears. Would not the play have been better named Brutus? Yet Shakespeare knew what he was doing; for the whole play is Julius Cæsar, from the outbreak of Cassius at the beginning —

Why! man he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a colossus,

to the bitter cry of Brutus at the end —

O Julius Cæsar, thou art mighty yet!

Cæsar determines everything in the story. Every character in it is a mirror in which we see some figure of him, and the life of every man there is made or unmade by his mind toward Cæsar. Cæsar is the one great determining factor in the story; living and dead, he is the centre and explanation of it all.

What was written in the Gospels of the life and death of Jesus, might by now be ancient history, if the Gospels had told the whole story. But they did not tell the whole story; and they neither were, nor are, the source of the Christian movement, great as their influence is and has been. The Jesus who has impressed himself upon mankind is not a character, however strong and beautiful, that is to be read about in a book. Before the Gospels were written, men spoke of the "Spirit of Jesus" as an active force amongst them. We may criticize their phrase and their psychology as we like, but they were speaking of something they knew, something they had seen and felt, and it is that "something" which changed the course of history. Jesus lives for us in the pages of the Gospels, but we are not his followers on that account, nor were the Christians of the first century. They, like ourselves, followed him under the irresistible attraction of his character repeating itself in the lives of men and women whom they knew. The Son of God, they said, revealed himself in men, and it was true. Of his immediate followers we know almost nothing, but it was they who passed him on to the next generation, consciously in their preaching, which was not always very good; and unconsciously in their lives, which he had transformed, and which had gained from him something of the power of his own life. The church was a nexus of quickened and redeemed personalities, – men and women in whom Christ lived. So Paul wrote of it. A century later another nameless Christian spoke of Christ being "new born every day over again in the hearts of believers," and it would be hard to correct the statement. If we are to give a true account of such men as Alexander and Cæsar, we consider them in the light of the centuries through which their ideas lived and worked. In the same way, the life, the mind and the personality of Jesus will not be understood till we have realized by some intimate experience something of the worth and beauty of the countless souls that in every century have found and still find in him the Alpha and Omega of their being. For the Gospels are not four but "ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands," and the last word of every one of them is "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."