Part 6

In all this the Christians were strictly within the circle of Jewish thought. The belief in the resurrection wore different aspects in different minds; the vision of the hereafter floated many-hued before the imaginations of men. The fiery zealots who "took the kingdom of heaven by violence," dreamed of the resurrection of the body, and of tangible privileges of dominion in the terrestrial millennium. The milder enthusiasts, who could not believe that flesh and blood could inherit the kingdom of God, were constrained to invent a "spiritual world" for the accommodation of spiritual bodies. Some conjectured that the etherial forms would mount to their native seat, only at the termination of the thousand years reign; the spiritual world being brought in at the end, as a device of eschatology to dispose finally of the saints who could neither die nor remain longer on earth. Others surmised that the spiritual world would claim its own at once, there being no place on earth where the risen could live and no occupations in which they could engage. The cruder faith was the earlier.

The fanatics, as described in the second Book of Maccabees, an apocryphal writing of the second century before Christ, hoped for a corporeal resurrection and a visible supremacy. Of seven sons, who, with their mother, were barbarously executed because they refused to deny their religion by eating swines' flesh, one declares: "The King of the world shall raise us up who have died for his laws, into everlasting life;" another, holding forth his hands (to be cut off), said courageously, "These I had from heaven, and for his laws I despise them, and from him I hope to receive them again." The next shouts: "It is good being put to death by men, to look for hope from God, to be raised up again by him; as for thee, thou shalt have no resurrection to life." Finally, when all the seven have died heroically, with words of similar import on their lips, the mother is put to death, having exhorted her youngest born to faithfulness with the exhortation: "Doubtless the Creator of the world who formed the generation of man, and found out the beginning of all things, will also, of his own mercy, give you breath and life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for his laws' sake." The same book records the suicide of Razis: "One of the elders of Jerusalem, a lover of his countrymen, and a man of very good report, who for his kindness was called a Father of the Jews, for in former times he had been accused of Judaism, and did boldly jeopard his body and life with all vehemency for the religion of the Jews;" "choosing rather to die manfully than to come into the hands of the wicked, to be abused otherwise than beseemed his noble birth, he fell on his sword. Nevertheless, while there was yet breath within him, being inflamed with anger, he rose up, and though his blood gushed out like spouts of water, and his wounds were grievous, yet he ran through the midst of the throng, and, standing upon a steep rock, when as his blood was now quite gone, he plucked out his bowels, and taking them in both his hands, he cast them upon the throng, and calling upon the Lord of life and spirit to restore him those again, he thus died."

The angel of the book of Daniel calls up a fairer vision: "Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars for ever and ever."

Something like this, perhaps, was the anticipation of the Christ sketched in the last chapter. The personal conception is shadowy. There is nothing to indicate positively that he departed from the usual opinion of a physical resurrection and a kingdom of heaven on earth, a period of terrestrial happiness under the rule of Jehovah. The declaration to the thief on the cross: "This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise," belongs to a later tradition, corresponding to the ideas of Paul. The parable of Dives and Lazarus must be assigned to the same circle of doctrine. The saying respecting children, "Their angels always behold the face of my father in heaven," conveys no more than the belief in guardian spirits. The "angels" are not departed children, but the watchers over the lives of living ones. The reply given to the Sadducees, in Matt. XXII., "In the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven," implies that the temporal condition of the Messiah's subjects will differ in important respects from their present social estate, but does not suggest a celestial locality for its organization; and the declaration that follows: "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living," affirms merely that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not annihilated, that they are, or will be, alive; but how, where, or when, is left undecided. The expression, "Thy kingdom come," in the paternoster, so different from the latter petition: "May we come into thy kingdom," looks towards an earthly paradise. The succeeding phrase, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," points in the same direction. It is probable that the Christ, living and expecting to live, contemplated the establishment of his Messianic dominion in Palestine. After his death and disappearance, the thoughts of his friends turned elsewhither, and with an increasing steadiness, as his return was delayed, and the probabilities of their going to him outweighed the probabilities of his coming to them. The change of expectation was, it is likely, a gradual, silent, and unperceived one, effected slowly, and not completed till a new conception of the Christ supplanted the old one, and transformed every feature of the Messianic belief. In less than twenty-five years after the death of Jesus, this change was so far effected that it was capable of full literary expression. The writings that publish it, are the genuine letters of Paul, and other scriptures produced under the inspiration of his idea.

VI.

PAUL'S NEW DEPARTURE.

There is reason to think, as we have said, that the first Messianic impulse would have spent itself ineffectually in a few years, had not a fresh impulse been given by a new conception of the Messiah. The Christ outlined in the earliest literature of the New Testament would hardly have founded a permanent church, or given his name to a distinct religion. A new conception came, in due time, from an unexpected quarter, through a man who was both Jew and Greek; Jew by parentage, nurture, training and genius; Greek by birth-place, residence and association; a man well versed in scripture, a pupil of approved rabbis, familiar with the talmud, and deeply interested in talmudical speculation; a Pharisee of the straitest sect; an enthusiast--yes, a fanatic by temperament; on the other hand, a mind somewhat expanded by intercourse with the people and the literature of other nations. Paul's feeling on the "Christ question" was always intense. He made it a personal matter, even in his comparative youth; distinguishing himself by his zeal in behalf of correct opinion on the subject. He appears, first, a young man, as a persecutor of the Jews who believed that the Christ had actually come, and who were waiting for his return in clouds. That idea seemed to him visionary and dangerous; he made it his business to exterminate it by violence, if necessary. But the fury of his demonstration proved his interest in the general idea. He was at heart a Messianic believer, though not in that style. A Messianic believer he continued to be, but to the end as little as at first, in that style. To the ordinary belief he never was "converted;" his repudiation of it was perhaps at no time less vehement than it was at the beginning; as his own thought matured, his rejection of the faith he persecuted in his youth, became it seems more deliberate, if less violent.

As he pursued one phase of the Messianic expectation, another aspect of it burst upon him with the splendor of a revelation, and determined his career. The man who had breathed fury against one type, became the apostle of another. The same fiery zeal that blasted the one, warmed the other into life. In the book of the "Acts of the Apostles," the first martyr at whose stoning Paul assisted, bore the Greek name "Stephen," whence, as well as from other indications, it has been surmised by Baur and others that he was a precursor of the future "Gentile party," pursued and slain by the "orthodox" on account of his infidelity to the cause of Hebrew national exclusiveness. If this conjecture be admitted, the deed Paul had abetted, may have been the immediate cause of his own moral revulsion of feeling. The slain over-came the slayer. The dying hand committed to the fierce bystander the torch it could carry no further. The murdered Greek raised up the apostle to the Greeks, thus avenging himself by sending his adversary to martyrdom in the same cause for which he himself bled. In religious fervors such reactions have been frequent.

For Paul was, from first to last, the same person, in no natural feature of mind or character changed. His religious belief remained essentially, even incidentally unaltered. A Pharisee he was born, and a Pharisee he continued. The pharisaic doctrine of the resurrection was the corner stone of his system, the beginning, middle and end of his faith, the starting point of his creed. His conception of God was the ordinary conception, unqualified, unmitigated, uncompromised. The divine sovereignty never suffered weakening at his hands. One can hardly open the epistle to the Jewish Christians in Rome, without coming across some tremendous assertion of the absolute supremacy of God. Read the passage in the first chapter, 20-26 verses; in the second chapter, 6-12 verses; in the ninth chapter, 14-23 verses; in the eleventh chapter, first verse and onward. Read 1 Corin., fifteenth chapter, 24-29 verses. The old fashioned Jewish conception is expressed in language simply revolting in its bald inhumanity. The views of Divine Providence set forth in some of these sentences are anthropomorphitic to a degree that is amazing in an intellectual man of his age and race. His discussions of fate and free-will betoken the sternness of a dogmatic, rather than the discernment of a philosophic, mind. His notion of history has the narrowness of the national character. His ethics are taken from the law of Moses, and not from the more benignant versions of it. The grandest ethical chapter he ever wrote, the twelfth chapter of Romans, contains no less than three instances of grave infidelity to the highest standard of morality in his own scriptures. Rabbi Hillel said: "Love peace, and pursue peace; love mankind, and bring them near the law. The moral condition of the world depends on three things,--Truth, Justice, and Peace." Paul says: "If it be possible, _so much as lyeth in you_, live peaceably with all men," implying clearly that it might not always be possible, and in such cases was not to be expected. The tacit proviso in the phrase "so much as lyeth in you," discharges the obligation of its imperative character; as if conscious that the duty might prove too much for the moral power, he will not impose it. It is written in the Talmud: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor; even if he be a criminal, and has forfeited his life, practise charity towards him in the last moments." Paul drops far below this when he bids his disciples, "Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath" (make room for wrath that is wrath indeed.) "For it is written, 'vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.'" Therefore (because the Lord's vengeance will be more terrible than yours), "if thine enemy hunger, feed him: if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing, thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head." That is, by showing kindness you will inflict on him tenfold agony!

Such a disciple would not adorn the membership of a modern Peace Society. The language ascribed to him in Ephesians bristles with military metaphor; "Fight the good fight of faith," "The helmet of salvation," "The sword of the Spirit," "Armor of light."

In the days of our own anti-slavery conflict, his dictum, "Slaves obey your masters, in fear and trembling, in singleness of heart," was a tower of strength and a fountain of refreshment to many an upholder of the patriarchal system. The later Christians in the West could safely justify their quiet toleration of the system of slavery in the Roman Empire by the precepts of the foremost apostle. If the genuineness of the epistle to Philemon could be maintained, the case would wear a different look. But it is much more than doubtful whether even that qualified humanity proceeded from his pen.

In our own generation the apostle is a serious stumbling block in the way of "evangelical" women who are friendly to the aspirations of their sex. He showed the most stubborn Hebrew principles on this subject. "Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands"; "Let your women keep silence in the churches; if they wish to learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home; for it is a shame for women to speak in the church." "It is permitted them to be under obedience." The Hindoo scripture spoke better: "Where women are honored, there the deities are pleased. Where they are dishonored there all religious acts become fruitless."

How can the most conservative Republicans accept as teacher a man who counsels religious men, in _proportion as they are religious_, to surrender their full, unqualified, sincere allegiance to established authorities because they are established, however despotic, ferocious nay vile they may be; even to such despotisms as that of Nero;--maintaining that resistance to such is equivalent to resisting the ordinance of God?--giving this not as the counsel of prudence, but as the dictate of conscience, thus proclaiming exemption from criticism or assault, for inhuman tyrannies? Nothing short of this is inculcated by the sweeping declaration: "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers: for there is no power but of God; the established powers are ordained of God." No doubt the bidding was given in view of a turbulent or insurrectionary spirit among the Israelites in Rome, but it is given without explanation or limit. It ratifies the divine right of kings: sanctions the principle that might makes right. Paul was an enthusiast for ideas; not a theologian, not a social reformer, but one whose zeal was spent on doctrines. Prevailingly intellectual, his whole nature was fused by the electric touch of a new thought.

Paul's acquaintance with the Talmud is evidenced by his writings. His use of allegory, his fanciful analogies, his mystical interpretations, his play on words, his passion for types and symbols, his ingenious speculations on history and eschatology, betray his familiarity with that curious literature. He found a mine of precious material in the mythical Adam Caedmon, the progenitor, the prototype, the "federal head" of the race, the man who was not a man but a microcosm, created by special act from sifted clay; a creature whose erected head touched the firmament, whose extended body reached across the earth; a being to whom all save Satan did obeisance; who, but for his transgression, would have enjoyed an immortality on earth; whose sin entailed on the human race all the evils, material and moral, that have cursed the world; the primordial man, who contained in himself the germs of all mankind; whose corruption tainted the nature of generations of descendants. The Talmud exhausts speculation on this prodigious personality. The doctrine of the christian church for fifteen hundred years was not so much colored as shaped by the rabbis who exercised their subtlety on this tempting theme. Philo, a contemporary of Paul, is in no respect behind the most imaginative in his conjectures on this sublime legend. That Paul, a student of the Talmud, fell in with them, should excite no surprise. That he added nothing is due probably to the fact that there was nothing to add.

From the Talmud, also, and from other rabbinical writings, Paul derived a complete angelology, a department of speculation in which the Jewish literature after the captivity was exceedingly prolific--Metathron, Sandalphon, Akathriel, Suriel, were familiar to his mind. It is a bold suggestion made by Dr. Isaac M. Wise, the Hebrew rabbi fresh from the Talmud,[1] that Metathron,--[Greek: meta thronon], near the throne, called by eminent titles, "king of the angels," "prince of the countenance," impressed Paul's imagination and was the original of his Christ. Between this supreme angel, co-ordinate with deity and spiritually akin to him, and the Christ of Paul's conception, the correspondence seems to be too close to be accidental; so close, indeed, that some, unable to deny or to confute it, are driven to surmise that the first conception originated with the apostle. It is more probable however, though not provable, that the rabbinical idea was the earlier, and that the apostle took that as well as the Adam Caedmon from the rabbis. The "prince of angels" precisely met his requirement as a counter-vailing power to Adam, and supplied a ground for his theory of the second Adam, the "living spirit," the "Lord from Heaven," the primal man of a new creation, the first born of a new progeny, the originator of a "law of life" which should check and counteract the "law of sin and death." The second Man was the counterpart of the first.

[Footnote 1: Origin of Christianity, p. 335-341.]

He is a man, yet is he no man; his flesh is only "the likeness of sinful flesh," liable to death, but not implicating the personality in dying. He is the spiritual, heavenly, ideal man; celestial, glorious, image of God, translucent, sinless, impeccable; pre-existent, of course; without father or mother; an expression of divinity; a creator of new worlds for the habitation of the "Sons of God." His birth is an entrance into humanity from an abode of light. The mission of this transcendent being is, in a word, to break the force of transmitted sin, and reverse the destiny of the race. He imparts the principle of life, which is to restore all things. A multitude of incidental points are involved in this fundamental one, points of theology, anthropology, history, ethics, metaphysics, that present no difficulty to one who has this key. The long disquisitions on the Mosaic law, the discussions on the privileges of the Hebrew race and the rights of other races were necessary. The familiar doctrine of the resurrection derived fresh interest from association with the general theory, inasmuch as it supplied a ground-work for the expectation that the glorified One would reappear; and the hypothesis of a "spiritual" body, ventured and fully developed by the rabbis, even illustrated by analogies of the "corn of wheat" which the apostle makes so much of in the fifteenth chapter of I. Corinthians, supplied all else that was wanting to complete the scheme. The Christ, being sinless, was held to be incorruptible; death had no dominion over him, was in fact in his case, an "excarnation," the preparation for an ascent to the realm of light he came from, and to his seat at the right hand of his Father, instead of being a descent into the region of darkness to which mortals are doomed. The doctrine of last things follows from the doctrine of first things. They who are one with Christ through faith share his deathlessness. If they die, it is merely a temporary retirement, in which they await the coming of their Lord, who will in his own time call them out of their prison house. The larger number, however, were not, in the apostle's belief, destined to die at all; but might look as he did, to be transfigured, by the putting off of their vile bodies, and the putting on of glorious bodies like that of the great forerunner. In his amplifications on this theme, Paul shows little originality, and adds nothing important to the material lying ready to his hand.

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 Judaea, 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.