The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

CHAPTER VI
THE CONFLICT OF CHRISTIAN AND JEW

It is a much discussed question as to how far Jesus realized the profound gulf between his own religious position and that of his contemporaries. Probably, since tradition meant more to them, they were quicker to see declension from orthodox Judaism than a mind more open and experimental; and when they contrived his death, it was with a clear sense of acting in defence of God's Law and God's Covenant with Israel. From their own point of view they were right, for the triumph of the ideas of Jesus was the abolition of tribal religions and their supersession by a new mind or spirit with nothing local or racial about it.

The death of Jesus meant to the little community, which he left behind him, a final cleavage with the system of their fathers, under which they had been born, and with which was associated every religious idea they had known before their great intimacy began. It was a moment of boundless import in the history of mankind. Slowly and reluctantly they moved out into the great unknown, – pilgrim fathers, unconscious of the great issues they carried, but obedient to an impulse, the truth of which history has long since established. Once again it was their opponents who were the quickest to realize what was involved, for affection blinded their own eyes.

The career of Paul raised the whole question between Judaism and Christianity. He was the first to speak decisively of going to the Gentiles. The author of the Acts cites precedents for his action; and, as no great movement in man's affairs comes unheralded, it is easy to believe that even before Paul "the word" reached Gentile ears. None the less the leader in the movement was Paul; and whatever we may imagine might have been the history of Christianity without him, it remains that he declared, decisively and for all time, the church's independence of the synagogue. It is not unlikely that, even before his conversion, he had grasped the fact that church and synagogue were not to be reconciled, and that, when "it pleased God to reveal his Son in him," he knew at once that he was in "a new creation" and that he was to be a prophet of a new dispensation.

The Jewish heritage

There is no doubt that the hostile Jews very quickly realised Paul's significance, but the Christians were not so quick. Paul was a newcomer and very much the ablest man among them – they were "not many wise, not many learned," and Paul, though he does not mention it, was both. He was moreover proposing to take them into regions far beyond their range; he had not personally known "the Lord" and they had; and there was no clear word of Jesus on the Gentile question. There was a conference. What took place, Paul tries in the Galatians to tell; but he is far too quick a thinker to be a master of mere narrative; the question of Christian freedom was too hot in his heart to leave him free for reminiscence, and the matter is not very clear. The author of the Acts was not at the council, and, whatever his authorities may have been, there is a constant suggestion in his writing that he has a purpose in view – a purpose of peace between parties. Whether they liked the result or not, the Christian community seem loyally to have submitted themselves to "the Spirit of Jesus." "It seemed good to the holy spirit and to us" tells the story of their deliberations, whether they put the phrase at the top of a resolution or did not. Paul came to the personal followers of Jesus with a new and strange conception of the religion of their Master. They laid it alongside of their memories of their Master, and they heard him say "Go ye into all the world"; and they went.

The natural outcome of this forward step at once became evident. Paul did not go among the Gentiles to "preach circumcision," and there quickly came into being, throughout Asia Minor and in the Balkan provinces, many groups of Christians of a new type – Gentile in mind and tradition, and in Christian life no less Gentile. They remained uncircumcised, they did not observe the Sabbath nor any other distinctive usage of Judaism – they were a new people, a "third race." Their very existence put Judaism on the defensive; for, if their position was justified, it was hard to see what right Judaism had to be. It was not yet quite clear what exactly the new religion was, nor into what it might develope; but if, as the Gentile Christians and their Apostle claimed, they stood in a new relation to God, a higher and a more tender than the greatest and best spirits in Israel had known, and this without the seal of God's covenant with Israel and independently of his law, then it was evident that the unique privileges of Israel were void, and that, as Paul put it, "there is neither Jew nor Greek."

That part of the Jewish race, and it was the larger part, which did not accept the new religion, was in no mind to admit either Paul's premisses or his conclusions. They stood for God's covenant with Israel. Nor did they stand alone, for it took time to convince even Christian Jews that the old dispensation had yielded to a new one, and that the day of Moses was past. To the one class the rise of the Christian community was a menace, to the other a problem. The one left no means untried to check it. By argument, by appeals to the past, by working on his superstitions, they sought to make the Christian convert into a Jew; and, when they failed, they had other methods in reserve. Themselves everywhere despised and hated, as they are still, for their ability and their foreign air, they stirred up their heathen neighbours against the new race. Again and again, in the Acts and in later documents, we read of the Jews being the authors of pagan persecution.[⁵⁰⁸] The "unbelieving Jew" was a spiritual and a social danger to the Christian in every city of the East. The converted Jew was, in his way, almost as great a difficulty within the community.

It is not hard to understand the feeling of the Jews within or without the Church. Other races had their ancient histories, and the Jew had his – a history long and peculiar. From the day of Abraham, the friend of God, the chosen race had been the special care of Jehovah. Jehovah had watched over them; he had saved them from their enemies; he had visited them for their iniquities; he had sent them prophets; he had given them his law. In a long series of beautiful images, which move us yet, Jehovah had spoken, through holy men of old, of his love for Israel. To Israel belonged the oracles of God and his promises. For here again the national consciousness of Israel differed from that of every other race. It was something that in the past God had spoken to no human family except the seed of Abraham; it was more that to them, and to them alone, he had assured the future. Deeply as Israel felt the trials of the present, the Roman would yet follow the Persian and the Greek, and the day of Israel would dawn. The Messiah was to come and restore all things.

"He shall destroy the ungodly nations with the word of his mouth, so that at his rebuke the nations may flee before him, and he shall convict the sinners in the thoughts of their hearts.

"And he shall gather together a holy people whom he shall lead in righteousness; and shall judge the tribes of his people that hath been sanctified by the Lord his God.

"And he shall not suffer iniquity to lodge in their midst, and none that knoweth wickedness shall dwell with them…

"And he shall possess the nations of the heathen to serve him beneath his yoke; and he shall glorify the Lord in a place to be seen of the whole earth;

"And he shall purge Jerusalem and make it holy, even as it was in the days of old.

"So that the nations may come from the ends of the earth to see his glory, bringing as gifts her sons that had fainted,

"And may see the glory of the Lord, wherewith God hath glorified her."

So runs one of the Psalms of Solomon written between 70 and 40 B.C.[⁵⁰⁹] Parallel passages might be multiplied, but one may suffice, written perhaps in the lifetime of Jesus.

"Then thou, O Israel, wilt be happy, and thou wilt mount upon the neck of the eagle, and [the days of thy mourning] will be ended,

"And God will exalt thee, and he will cause thee to approach to the heaven of the stars, and he will establish thy habitation among them,

"And thou wilt look from on high, and wilt see thine enemies in Ge[henna], and thou wilt recognize them and rejoice, and wilt give thanks and confess thy Creator."[⁵¹⁰]

No people in the Mediterranean world had such a past behind them, and none a future so sure and so glorious before them – none indeed seems to have had any great hope of the future at all; their Golden Ages were all in the past, or far away in mythical islands of the Eastern seas or beyond the Rhine. And if the Christian doctrine was true, that great past was as dead as Babylon, and the Messianic Kingdom was a mockery – Israel was "feeding on the east wind," and the nation was not Jehovah's chosen. At one stroke Israel was abolished, and every national memory and every national instinct, rooted in a past of suffering and revelation, and watered with tears in a present of pain, were to wither like the gardens of Adonis. No man with a human heart but must face the alternative of surrendering national for Christian ideals, or hating and exterminating the enemy of his race.

So much for the nation, and what Christianity meant for it, but much beside was at stake. There was the seal of circumcision, the hereditary token of God's covenant with Abraham, a sacrament passed on from father to son and associated with generations of faith and piety. Week by week the Sabbath came with its transforming memories – the "Princess Sabbath," for Heine was not the first to feel the magic that at sunset on Friday restores the Jew to the "halls of his royal father, the tents of Jacob." Every one of their religious usages spoke irresistibly of childhood. "When your children shall say unto you 'What mean ye by this service,' ye shall say…" so ran the old law, binding every Jew to his father by the dearest and strongest of all bonds. To become a Christian was thus to be alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, to renounce a father's faith and his home. If the pagan had to suffer for his conversion, the Jew's heritage was nobler and holier, and the harder to forego. Even the friendly Jew pleads, "Cannot a man be saved who trusts in Christ and also keeps the law – keeps it so far as he can under the conditions of the dispersion, – the Sabbath, circumcision, the months, and certain washings?"[⁵¹¹]

The Jewish attack on Jesus

But this was not all. Israel had stood for monotheism and that not the monotheism of Greek philosophy, a dogma of the schools consistent with the cults of Egypt and Phrygia, with hierodules and a deified Antinous. The whole nation had been consecrated to the worship of One God, a personal God, who had, at least where Israel was concerned, no hint of philosophic Apathy. The Jew was now asked by the Christian to admit a second God – a God beside the Creator (állos theòs parà tòn poiêtèn tôn hólôn[⁵¹²]) – and such a God! The Jews knew all about Jesus of Nazareth – it was absurd to try to pass him off even as the Messiah. "Sir," said Trypho, "these scriptures compel us to expect one glorious and great, who receives from 'the Ancient of Days' the 'eternal Kingdom' as 'Son of Man'; but this man of yours – your so-called Christ – was unhonoured and inglorious, so that he actually fell under the extreme curse that is in the law of God; for he was crucified."[⁵¹³] The whole thing was a paradox, incapable of proof.[⁵¹⁴] "It is an incredible thing, and almost impossible that you are trying to prove – that God endured to be begotten and to become a man."[⁵¹⁵]

The Jews had a propaganda of their own about Jesus. They sent emissaries from Palestine to supply their countrymen and pagans with the truth.[⁵¹⁶] Celsus imagines a Jew disputing with a Christian, – a more life-like Jew, according to Harnack, than Christian apologists draw, – and the arguments he uses came from Jewish sources. Jesus was born, they said, in a village, the bastard child of a peasant woman, a poor person who worked with her hands, divorced by her husband (who was a carpenter) for adultery.[⁵¹⁷] The father was a soldier called Panthera. As to the Christian story, what could have attracted the attention of God to her? Was she pretty? The carpenter at all events hated her and cast her out.[⁵¹⁸] ("I do not think I need trouble about this argument," is all Origen says.) Who saw the dove, or heard the voice from heaven, at the baptism? Jesus suffered death in Palestine for the guilt he had committed (plemmelésanta). He convinced no one while he lived; even his disciples betrayed him – a thing even brigands would not have done by their chief – so far was he from improving them, and so little ground is there for saying that he foretold to them what he should surfer. He even complained of thirst on the cross. As for the resurrection, that rests on the evidence of a mad woman (pároistros) – or some other such person among the same set of deceivers, dreaming, or deluded, or "wishing to startle the rest with the miracle, and by a lie of that kind to give other impostors a lead." Does the resurrection of Jesus at all differ from those of Pythagoras or Zamolxis or Orpheus or Herakles – "or do you think that the tales of other men both are and seem myths, but that the catastrophe of your play is a well-managed and plausible piece of invention – the cry upon the gibbet, when he died, and the earthquake and the darkness?"[⁵¹⁹] The Christians systematically edited and altered the Gospels to meet the needs of the moment;[⁵²⁰] but Jesus did not fulfil the prophecies of the Messiah – "the prophets say he shall be great, a dynast, lord of all the earth and all its nations and armies."[⁵²¹] There are ten thousand other men to whom the prophecies are more applicable than to Jesus,[⁵²²] and as many who in frenzy claim to "come from God."[⁵²³] In short the whole story of the Christians rests on no evidence that will stand investigation.

Even men who would refrain from the hot-tempered method of controversy, which these quotations reflect, might well feel the contrast between the historic Jesus and the expected Messiah – between the proved failure of the cross and the world-empire of a purified and glorious Israel. And when it was suggested further that Jesus was God, an effluence coming from God, as light is lit by light – even if this were true, it would seem that the Jew was asked to give up the worship of the One God, which he had learnt of his fathers, and to turn to a being not unlike the pagan gods around him in every land, who also, their apologists said, came from the Supreme, and were his emanations and ministers and might therefore be worshipped.

Thus everything that was distinctive of their race and their religion – the past of Israel, the Messiah and the glorious future, the beautiful symbols of family religion, and the One God Himself – all was to be surrendered by the man who became a Christian. We realize the extraordinary and compelling force of the new religion, when we remember that, in spite of all to hold them back, there were those who made the surrender and "suffered the loss of all things to win Christ and be found in him." Paul however rested, as he said, on revelation, and ordinary men, who were not conscious of any such distinction, who mistrusted themselves and their emotions, and who rested most naturally upon the cumulative religious experience of their race, might well ask whether after all they were right in breaking with a sacred past – whether, apart from subjective grounds, there were any clear warrant from outside to enable them to go forward. The Jew had of course oracles of God given by inspiration (theópneustos[⁵²⁴]), written by "holy men of God, moved by the holy spirit." These were his warrant. Here circumcision, the Sabbath, the Passover, and all his religious life was definitely and minutely prescribed in what was almost, like the original two tables, the autograph of the One God. The law had its own history bound up with that of the race, and the experience and associations of every new generation made it more deeply awful and mysterious. Had the Christian any law? had he any oracles, apart from the unintelligible glossolalies of men possessed (enthousiôntes)? When Justin spoke of the gifts of the Spirit, Trypho interjected, "I should like you to know that you are talking nonsense."[⁵²⁵]

The problem

Not unnaturally then did men say to Ignatius (as we have seen), "If I do not find it in the ancient documents, I do not believe it in the gospel." And when Ignatius rejoined, "It is written"; "That is the problem," said they.[⁵²⁶] It was their problem, though it was not his. For him Judaism is "a leaven old and sour," and "to use the name of Jesus Christ and yet observe Jewish customs is absurd (átopon)" or really "to confess we have not received grace."[⁵²⁷] His documents were Jesus Christ, his cross and death and resurrection, and faith through him.

"That is the problem" – can it be shown from the infallible Hebrew Scriptures that the crucified Jesus is the Messiah of prophecy, that he is a "God beside the Creator," that Sabbath and Circumcision are to be superseded, that Israel's covenant is temporary, and that the larger outlook of the Christian is after all the eternal dispensation of which the Jewish was a copy made for a time? If this could be shown, it might in some measure stop the mouths of hostile Jews, and calm the uneasy consciences of Jews and proselytes who had become Christians. And it might serve another and a distinct purpose. It was one of the difficulties of the Christian that his religion was a new thing in the world. Around him were men who gloried in ancient literatures and historic cults. All the support that men can derive from tradition and authority, or even from the mere fact of having a past behind them, was wanting to the new faith, as its opponents pointed out. If, by establishing his contention against the Jew, the Christian could achieve another end, and could demonstrate to the Greek that he too had a history and a literature, that his religion was no mere accident of a day, but was rooted in the past, that it had been foretold by God himself, and was part of the divine scheme for the destiny of mankind, then, resting on the sure ground of Providence made plain, he could call upon the Greek in his turn to forsake his errors and superstitions for the first of all religions, which should also be the last – the faith of Jesus Christ.

The one method thus served two ends. Justin addressed an Apology to Antoninus Pius, and one-half of his book is occupied with the demonstration that every major characteristic of Christianity had been prophesied and was a fulfilment. The thirty chapters show what weight the sheer miracle of this had with the apologist, though, if the Emperor actually read the Apology, it was probably his first contact with Jewish scripture. Some difference of treatment was necessary, according as the method was directed to Jew or Gentile. For the Jew it was axiomatic that Scripture was the word of God, and, if he did not grant the Christian's postulate of allegory, he was withholding from an opponent what had been allowed to Philo. The Greek would probably allow the allegory, and the first task in his case was to show by chronological reckoning that the greater prophets, and above all Moses, antedated the bloom of Greek literature, and then to draw the inference that it was from Hebrew sources that the best thoughts of Hellas had been derived. Here the notorious interest of early Greek thinkers in Egypt helped to establish the necessary, though rather remote, connexion. When once the priority of the Hebrew prophets had been proved, and, by means of allegory, a coincidence (age by age more striking) had been established between prophecy and event, the demonstration was complete. There could be only one interpretation of such facts.

A number of these refutations of the Jew survive from early times. Justin's Dialogue with Trypho is the most famous, as it deserves to be. It opens in a pleasant Platonic style with a chance meeting one morning in a colonnade at Ephesus.[⁵²⁸] Trypho accosts the philosopher Justin – "When I see a man in your garb, I gladly approach him, and that is why I spoke to you, hoping to hear something profitable from you." When Trypho says he is a Jew, Justin asks in what he expects to be more helped by philosophy than by his own prophets and law-giver. Is not all the philosophers' talk about God? Trypho asks. Justin then tells him of his own wanderings in philosophy, – how he went from school to school, and at last was directed by an old man to read the Jewish prophets, and how "a fire was kindled in my soul, and a passion seized me for the prophets and those men who are Christ's friends; and so, discussing their words with myself, I found this philosophy alone to be safe and helpful. And that is how and why I am a philosopher."[⁵²⁹] Trypho smiled, but, while approving Justin's ardour in seeking after God, he added that he would have done better to philosophize with Plato or one of the others, practising endurance, continence and temperance, than "to be deceived by lies and to follow men who are worthless." Then the battle begins, and it is waged in a courteous and kindly spirit, as befits philosophers, till after two days they part with prayers and goodwill for each other – Trypho unconvinced. Other writers have less skill, and the features of dialogue are sadly whittled away. Others again abandon all pretence of discussion and frankly group their matter as a scheme of proof-texts. In what follows, Justin shall be our chief authority.

We may start with the first point that Trypho raises. "If you will listen to me (for I count you a friend already), first of all be circumcised, and then keep, in the traditional way, the Sabbath and the feasts and new moons of God, and, in a word, do all that is written in the law, and then perhaps God will have mercy upon you. As for Christ, if indeed he has been born and already exists, he is unknown – nay! he does not even know himself yet, nor has he any power, till Elijah come and anoint him and make him manifest to all men. You people have accepted an empty tale, and are imagining a Christ for yourselves, and for the sake of him you are perishing quite aimlessly."[⁵³⁰]

Salvation, according to the Jew, was inconceivable outside the pale of Judaism. "Except ye be circumcised, ye cannot be saved," men had said in Paul's time. Paul's repudiation of this assertion is to be read in his Epistle to the Galatians– in his whole life and mind. But genius such as Paul's was not to be found in the early church, and men looked outside of themselves for arguments to prove what he had seen and known of his own experience and insight.

The letter to Diognetus

Some apologists merely laughed at the Jew. Thus the brilliant and winsome writer known only by his Epistle to Diognetus has a short and ready way of dealing with Jewish usages, which is not conciliatory. "In the next place I think you wish to hear why Christians do not worship in the same way as the Jews. Now the Jews do well in abstaining from the mode of service I have described [paganism], in that they claim to reverence One God of the universe and count Him their master; but, in offering this worship to Him in the same way as those I have mentioned, they go far astray. For the Greeks offer those things to senseless and deaf images and so give an exhibition of folly, while the Jews – considering they are presenting them to God as if He had need of them – ought in all reason to count it foolery and not piety. For He that made the heaven and the earth and all that is in them, and gives freely to every one of us what we need, could not Himself need any of the things which He Himself actually gives to those who imagine they are giving them to Him…

"But again of their nervousness (psophodeés) about meats, and their superstition about the Sabbath, and the quackery (aladoneía) of circumcision, and the pretence (eiróneia) of fasts and new moons – ridiculous and worthless as it all is, I do not suppose you wish me to tell you. For to accept some of the things which God has made for man's need as well created, and to reject others as useless and superfluous, is it not rebellion (athémiston)? To lie against God as if He forbade us to do good on the Sabbath day, is not that impiety? To brag that the mutilation of the flesh is a proof of election – as if God specially loved them for it – ridiculous! And that they should keep a look-out on the stars and the moon and so observe months and days and distinguish the ordinances of God and the changes of the seasons, as their impulses prompt them to make some into feasts and some into times of mourning – who would count this a mark of piety towards God and not much rather of folly?

"That Christians are right to keep aloof from the general silliness and deceit of the Jews, their fussiness and quackery, I think you are well enough instructed. The mystery of their own piety towards God you must not expect to be able to learn from man."[⁵³¹]

This was to deal with the distinctive usages of Judaism on general principles and from a standpoint outside it. It would doubtless be convincing enough to men who did not need to be convinced, but of little weight with those to whom the Scriptures meant everything. Accordingly the Apologists went to the Scriptures and arrayed their evidence with spirit and system.

We may begin, as the writer to Diognetus begins, with sacrifices. Here the Apologists could appeal to the Prophets, who had spoken of sacrifice in no sparing terms. Tertullian's fifth chapter in his book Against the Jews presents the evidence shortly and clearly. I will give the passages cited in a tabular form: —

Malachi 1, 10: I will not receive sacrifice from your hands, since from the rising sun to the setting my name is glorified among the Gentiles, saith the Lord Almighty, and in every place they offer pure sacrifices to my name.

Psalm 96, 7: Offer to God glory and honour, offer to God the sacrifices of his name; away with victims (tollite) and enter into his court.

Psalm 51, 17: A heart contrite and humbled is a sacrifice for God.

Psalm 50, 14: Sacrifice to God the sacrifice of praise and render thy vows to the Most High.

Isaiah 1, 11: Wherefore to me the multitude of your sacrifices? … Whole burnt offerings and your sacrifices and the fat of goats and the blood of bulls I will not … Who has sought these from your hands?

Justin has other passages as decisive. Does not God say by Amos (5, 21) "I hate, I loathe your feasts, and I will not smell [your offerings] in your assemblies. When ye offer me your whole burnt offerings and your sacrifices, I will not receive them," and so forth, in a long passage quoted at length. And again

Jeremiah 7, 21-22: Gather your flesh and your sacrifices and eat, for neither concerning sacrifices nor drink offerings did I command your fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt.[⁵³²]

Next as to circumcision and the Sabbath. "You need a second circumcision," says Justin, "and yet you glory in the flesh; the new law bids you keep a perpetual Sabbath, while you idle for one day and suppose you are pious in so doing; you do not understand why it was enjoined upon you. And, if you eat unleavened bread, you say you have fulfilled the will of God."[⁵³³] Even by Moses, who gave the law, God cried "You shall circumcise the hardness of your hearts and stiffen your necks no more";[⁵³⁴] and Jeremiah long afterwards said the same more than once.[⁵³⁵] On the Sabbath question, Tertullian and the others distinguished two Sabbaths, an eternal and a temporal,[⁵³⁶] citing: —

Isaiah 1, 14: My soul hates your sabbaths.

Ezekiel 22, 8: Ye have profaned my sabbath.

The Jew is referred back to the righteous men of early days – Was Adam circumcised, or did he keep the Sabbath? or Abel, or Noah, or Enoch, or Melchizedek? Did Abraham keep the Sabbath, or any of the patriarchs down to Moses?[⁵³⁷] "But," rejoins the Jew, "was not Abraham circumcised? Would not the son of Moses have been strangled, had not his mother circumcised him?"[⁵³⁸]

Old law or new covenant

To this the Christian had several replies. Circumcision was merely given for a sign, as is shown by the fact that a woman cannot receive it, "for God has made women as well able as men to do what is just and right." There is no righteousness in being of one sex rather than of the other.[⁵³⁹] Circumcision then was imposed upon the Jews "to mark you off from the rest of the nations and from us, that you alone might suffer what now you are suffering, and so deservedly suffering – that your lands should be desolate and your cities burnt with fire, that strangers should eat your fruits before your faces, and none of you set his foot in Jerusalem. For in nothing are you known from other men apart from the circumcision of your flesh. None of you, I suppose, will venture to say that God did not foresee what should come to pass. And it is all deserved; for you slew the Righteous one and his prophets before him; and now you reject and dishonour – so far as you can – those who set their hopes on him and on the Almighty God, maker of all things, who sent him; and in your synagogues you curse those who believe on Christ."[⁵⁴⁰] The Sabbath was given to remind the Jews of God; and restrictions were laid on certain foods because of the Jewish proclivity to forsake the knowledge of God.[⁵⁴¹] In general, all these commands were called for by the sins of Israel,[⁵⁴²] they were signs of judgment.

On the other hand the so-called Barnabas maintains that the Jews never had understood their law at all. Fasts, feasts and sacrifices were prescribed, not literally, but in a spiritual sense which the Jews had missed. The taboos on meats were not prohibitions of the flesh of weasels, hares and hyænas and so forth, but were allegoric warnings against fleshly lusts, to which ancient zoologists and modern Arabs have supposed these animals to be prone.[⁵⁴³] Circumcision was meant, as the prophets showed, to be that of the heart; evil dæmons had misled the Jews into practising it upon the flesh.[⁵⁴⁴] The whole Jewish dispensation was a riddle, and of no value, unless it is understood as signifying Christianity.