The Life of Jesus Part 5

[Footnote 2: _Testam. of the Twelve Patriarchs_, Levi. 6.]

[Footnote 3: Matt. xxvii. 46; Mark xv. 34.]

[Footnote 4: Jewish translations and commentaries of the Talmudic epoch.]

The schoolmaster in the small Jewish towns was the _hazzan_, or reader in the synagogues.[1] Jesus frequented little the higher schools of the scribes or _sopherim_ (Nazareth had perhaps none of them), and he had none of those t.i.tles which confer, in the eyes of the vulgar, the privileges of knowledge.[2] It would, nevertheless, be a great error to imagine that Jesus was what we call ignorant. Scholastic education among us draws a profound distinction, in respect of personal worth, between those who have received and those who have been deprived of it. It was not so in the East, nor, in general, in the good old times. The state of ignorance in which, among us, owing to our isolated and entirely individual life, those remain who have not pa.s.sed through the schools, was unknown in those societies where moral culture, and especially the general spirit of the age, was transmitted by the perpetual intercourse of man with man. The Arab, who has never had a teacher, is often, nevertheless, a very superior man; for the tent is a kind of school always open, where, from the contact of well-educated men, there is produced a great intellectual and even literary movement. The refinement of manners and the acuteness of the intellect have, in the East, nothing in common with what we call education. It is the men from the schools, on the contrary, who are considered badly trained and pedantic. In this social state, ignorance, which, among us, condemns a man to an inferior rank, is the condition of great things and of great originality.

[Footnote 1: Mishnah, _Shabbath_, i. 3.]

[Footnote 2: Matt. xiii. 54, and following; John vii. 15.]

It is not probable that Jesus knew Greek. This language was very little spread in Judea beyond the cla.s.ses who partic.i.p.ated in the government, and the towns inhabited by pagans, like Caesarea.[1] The real mother tongue of Jesus was the Syrian dialect mixed with Hebrew, which was then spoken in Palestine.[2] Still less probably had he any knowledge of Greek culture. This culture was proscribed by the doctors of Palestine, who included in the same malediction "he who rears swine, and he who teaches his son Greek science."[3] At all events it had not penetrated into little towns like Nazareth. Notwithstanding the anathema of the doctors, some Jews, it is true, had already embraced the h.e.l.lenic culture. Without speaking of the Jewish school of Egypt, in which the attempts to amalgamate h.e.l.lenism and Judaism had been in operation nearly two hundred years, a Jew--Nicholas of Damascus--had become, even at this time, one of the most distinguished men, one of the best informed, and one of the most respected of his age. Josephus was destined soon to furnish another example of a Jew completely Grecianized. But Nicholas was only a Jew in blood. Josephus declares that he himself was an exception among his contemporaries;[4]

and the whole schismatic school of Egypt was detached to such a degree from Jerusalem that we do not find the least allusion to it either in the Talmud or in Jewish tradition. Certain it is that Greek was very little studied at Jerusalem, that Greek studies were considered as dangerous, and even servile, that they were regarded, at the best, as a mere womanly accomplishment.[5] The study of the Law was the only one accounted liberal and worthy of a thoughtful man.[6] Questioned as to the time when it would be proper to teach children "Greek wisdom,"

a learned rabbi had answered, "At the time when it is neither day nor night; since it is written of the Law, Thou shalt study it day and night."[7]

[Footnote 1: Mishnah, _Shekalim_, iii. 2; Talmud of Jerusalem, _Megilla_, halaca xi.; _Sota_, vii. 1; Talmud of Babylon, _Baba Kama_, 83 _a_; _Megilla_, 8 _b_, and following.]

[Footnote 2: Matthew xxvii. 46; Mark iii. 17, v. 41, vii. 34, xiv. 36, xv. 34. The expression [Greek: e patrios phone] in the writers of the time, always designates the Semitic dialect, which was spoken in Palestine (II. Macc. vii. 21, 27, xii. 37; _Acts_ xxi. 37, 40, xxii.

2, xxvi. 14; Josephus, _Ant._, XVIII. vi. 10, xx. sub fin.; _B.J._, prooem I; V. vi. 3, V. ix. 2, VI. ii. 1: _Against Appian_, I. 9; _De Macc._, 12, 16). We shall show, later, that some of the doc.u.ments which served as the basis for the synoptic Gospels were written in this Semitic dialect. It was the same with many of the Apocrypha (IV.

Book of Macc. xvi. ad calcem, &c.). In fine, the sects issuing directly from the first Galilean movement (Nazarenes, _Ebionim_, &c.), which continued a long time in Batanea and Hauran, spoke a Semitic dialect (Eusebius, _De Situ et Nomin. Loc. Hebr._, at the word [Greek: Choba]; Epiph., _Adv. Haer._, xxix. 7, 9, x.x.x. 3; St. Jerome, _In Matt._, xii. 13; _Dial. adv. Pelag._, iii. 2).]

[Footnote 3: Mishnah, _Sanhedrim_, xi. 1; Talmud of Babylon, _Baba Kama_, 82 _b_ and 83 _a_; _Sota_, 49 _a_ and _b_; _Menachoth_, 64 _b_; comp. II. Macc. iv. 10, and following.]

[Footnote 4: Jos., _Ant._ XX. xi. 2.]

[Footnote 5: Talmud of Jerusalem, _Peah_, i. 1.]

[Footnote 6: Jos., _Ant._, _loc. cit._; Orig., _Contra Celsum_, ii.

34.]

[Footnote 7: Talmud of Jerusalem, _Peah_, i. 1; Talmud of Babylon, _Menachoth_, 99 _b_.]

Neither directly nor indirectly, then, did any element of Greek culture reach Jesus. He knew nothing beyond Judaism; his mind preserved that free innocence which an extended and varied culture always weakens. In the very bosom of Judaism he remained a stranger to many efforts often parallel to his own. On the one hand, the asceticism of the Essenes or the Therapeutae;[1] on the other, the fine efforts of religious philosophy put forth by the Jewish school of Alexandria, and of which Philo, his contemporary, was the ingenious interpreter, were unknown to him. The frequent resemblances which we find between him and Philo, those excellent maxims about the love of G.o.d, charity, rest in G.o.d,[2] which are like an echo between the Gospel and the writings of the ill.u.s.trious Alexandrian thinker, proceed from the common tendencies which the wants of the time inspired in all elevated minds.

[Footnote 1: The _Therapeutae_ of Philo are a branch of the Essenes.

Their name appears to be but a Greek translation of that of the _Essenes_ ([Greek: Essaioi], _asaya_, "doctors"). Cf. Philo, _De Vita Contempl._, init.]

[Footnote 2: See especially the treatises _Quis Rerum Divinarum Haeres Sit_ and _De Philanthropia_ of Philo.]

Happily for him, he was also ignorant of the strange scholasticism which was taught at Jerusalem, and which was soon to const.i.tute the Talmud. If some Pharisees had already brought it into Galilee, he did not a.s.sociate with them, and when, later, he encountered this silly casuistry, it only inspired him with disgust. We may suppose, however, that the principles of Hillel were not unknown to him. Hillel, fifty years before him, had given utterance to aphorisms very a.n.a.logous to his own. By his poverty, so meekly endured, by the sweetness of his character, by his opposition to priests and hypocrites, Hillel was the true master of Jesus,[1] if indeed it may be permitted to speak of a master in connection with so high an originality as his.

[Footnote 1: _Pirke Aboth_, chap. i. and ii.; Talm. of Jerus., _Pesachim_, vi. 1; Talm. of Bab., _Pesachim_, 66 _a_; _Shabbath_, 30 _b_ and 31 _a_; _Joma_, 35 _b_.]

The perusal of the books of the Old Testament made much impression upon him. The canon of the holy books was composed of two princ.i.p.al parts--the Law, that is to say, the Pentateuch, and the Prophets, such as we now possess them. An extensive allegorical exegesis was applied to all these books; and it was sought to draw from them something that was not in them, but which responded to the aspirations of the age.

The Law, which represented not the ancient laws of the country, but Utopias, the fact.i.tious laws and pious frauds of the time of the pietistic kings, had become, since the nation had ceased to govern itself, an inexhaustible theme of subtle interpretations. As to the Prophets and the Psalms, the popular persuasion was that almost all the somewhat mysterious traits that were in these books had reference to the Messiah, and it was sought to find there the type of him who should realize the hopes of the nation. Jesus partic.i.p.ated in the taste which every one had for these allegorical interpretations. But the true poetry of the Bible, which escaped the puerile exegetists of Jerusalem, was fully revealed to his grand genius. The Law does not appear to have had much charm for him; he thought that he could do something better. But the religious lyrics of the Psalms were in marvellous accordance with his poetic soul; they were, all his life, his food and sustenance. The prophets--Isaiah in particular, and his successor in the record of the time of the captivity,--with their brilliant dreams of the future, their impetuous eloquence, and their invectives mingled with enchanting pictures, were his true teachers.

He read also, no doubt, many apocryphal works--_i.e._, writings somewhat modern, the authors of which, for the sake of an authority only granted to very ancient writings, had clothed themselves with the names of prophets and patriarchs. One of these books especially struck him, namely, the Book of Daniel. This book, composed by an enthusiastic Jew of the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, under the name of an ancient sage,[1] was the _resume_ of the spirit of those later times. Its author, a true creator of the philosophy of history, had for the first time dared to see in the march of the world and the succession of empires, only a purpose subordinate to the destinies of the Jewish people. Jesus was early penetrated by these high hopes.

Perhaps, also, he had read the books of Enoch, then revered equally with the holy books,[2] and the other writings of the same cla.s.s, which kept up so much excitement in the popular imagination. The advent of the Messiah, with his glories and his terrors--the nations falling down one after another, the cataclysm of heaven and earth--were the familiar food of his imagination; and, as these revolutions were reputed near, and a great number of persons sought to calculate the time when they should happen, the supernatural state of things into which such visions transport us, appeared to him from the first perfectly natural and simple.

[Footnote 1: The legend of Daniel existed as early as the seventh century B.C. (Ezekiel xiv. 14 and following, xxviii. 3). It was for the necessities of the legend that he was made to live at the time of the Babylonian captivity.]

[Footnote 2: _Epist. Jude_, 14 and following; 2 Peter ii. 4, 11; _Testam. of the Twelve Patriarchs_, Simeon, 5; Levi, 14, 16; Judah, 18; Zab., 3; Dan, 5; Naphtali, 4. The "Book of Enoch" still forms an integral part of the Ethiopian Bible. Such as we know it from the Ethiopian version, it is composed of pieces of different dates, of which the most ancient are from the year 130 to 150 B.C. Some of these pieces have an a.n.a.logy with the discourses of Jesus. Compare chaps.

xcvi.-xcix. with Luke vi. 24, and following.]

That he had no knowledge of the general state of the world is apparent from each feature of his most authentic discourses. The earth appeared to him still divided into kingdoms warring with one another; he seemed to ignore the "Roman peace," and the new state of society which its age inaugurated. He had no precise idea of the Roman power; the name of "Caesar" alone reached him. He saw building, in Galilee or its environs, Tiberias, Julias, Diocaesarea, Caesarea, gorgeous works of the Herods, who sought, by these magnificent structures, to prove their admiration for Roman civilization, and their devotion toward the members of the family of Augustus, structures whose names, by a caprice of fate, now serve, though strangely altered, to designate miserable hamlets of Bedouins. He also probably saw Sebaste, a work of Herod the Great, a showy city, whose ruins would lead to the belief that it had been carried there ready made, like a machine which had only to be put up in its place. This ostentatious piece of architecture arrived in Judea by cargoes; these hundreds of columns, all of the same diameter, the ornament of some insipid "_Rue de Rivoli_" these were what he called "the kingdoms of the world and all their glory." But this luxury of power, this administrative and official art, displeased him. What he loved were his Galilean villages, confused mixtures of huts, of nests and holes cut in the rocks, of wells, of tombs, of fig-trees, and of olives. He always clung close to Nature. The courts of kings appeared to him as places where men wear fine clothes. The charming impossibilities with which his parables abound, when he brings kings and the mighty ones on the stage,[1] prove that he never conceived of aristocratic society but as a young villager who sees the world through the prism of his simplicity.

[Footnote 1: See, for example, Matt. xxii. 2, and following.]

Still less was he acquainted with the new idea, created by Grecian science, which was the basis of all philosophy, and which modern science has greatly confirmed, to wit, the exclusion of capricious G.o.ds, to whom the simple belief of ancient ages attributed the government of the universe. Almost a century before him, Lucretius had expressed, in an admirable manner, the unchangeableness of the general system of Nature. The negation of miracle--the idea that everything in the world happens by laws in which the personal intervention of superior beings has no share--was universally admitted in the great schools of all the countries which had accepted Grecian science.

Perhaps even Babylon and Persia were not strangers to it. Jesus knew nothing of this progress. Although born at a time when the principle of positive science was already proclaimed, he lived entirely in the supernatural. Never, perhaps, had the Jews been more possessed with the thirst for the marvellous. Philo, who lived in a great intellectual centre, and who had received a very complete education, possessed only a chimerical and inferior knowledge of science.

Jesus, on this point, differed in no respect from his companions. He believed in the devil, whom he regarded as a kind of evil genius,[1]

and he imagined, like all the world, that nervous maladies were produced by demons who possessed the patient and agitated him. The marvellous was not the exceptional for him; it was his normal state.

The notion of the supernatural, with its impossibilities, is coincident with the birth of experimental science. The man who is strange to all ideas of physical laws, who believes that by praying he can change the path of the clouds, arrest disease, and even death, finds nothing extraordinary in miracle, inasmuch as the entire course of things is to him the result of the free will of the Divinity. This intellectual state was constantly that of Jesus. But in his great soul such a belief produced effects quite opposed to those produced on the vulgar. Among the latter, the belief in the special action of G.o.d led to a foolish credulity, and the deceptions of charlatans. With him it led to a profound idea of the familiar relations of man with G.o.d, and an exaggerated belief in the power of man--beautiful errors, which were the secret of his power; for if they were the means of one day showing his deficiencies in the eyes of the physicist and the chemist, they gave him a power over his own age of which no individual had been possessed before his time, or has been since.

[Footnote 1: Matt. vi. 13.]

His distinctive character very early revealed itself. Legend delights to show him even from his infancy in revolt against paternal authority, and departing from the common way to fulfill his vocation.[1] It is certain, at least, that he cared little for the relations of kins.h.i.+p. His family do not seem to have loved him,[2]

and at times he seems to have been hard toward them.[3] Jesus, like all men exclusively preoccupied by an idea, came to think little of the ties of blood. The bond of thought is the only one that natures of this kind recognize. "Behold my mother and my brethren," said he, in extending his hand toward his disciples; "he who does the will of my Father, he is my brother and my sister." The simple people did not understand the matter thus, and one day a woman pa.s.sing near him cried out, "Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which gave thee suck!" But he said, "Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of G.o.d, and keep it."[4] Soon, in his bold revolt against nature, he went still further, and we shall see him trampling under foot everything that is human, blood, love, and country, and only keeping soul and heart for the idea which presented itself to him as the absolute form of goodness and truth.

[Footnote 1: Luke ii. 42 and following. The Apocryphal Gospels are full of similar histories carried to the grotesque.]

[Footnote 2: Matt. xiii. 57; Mark vi. 4; John vii. 3, and following.]

[Footnote 3: Matt. xii. 48; Mark iii. 33; Luke viii. 21; John ii. 4; Gospel according to the Hebrews, in St. Jerome, _Dial. adv. Pelag._, iii. 2.]

[Footnote 4: Luke xi. 27, and following.]

CHAPTER IV.

THE ORDER OF THOUGHT WHICH SURROUNDED THE DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS.

As the cooled earth no longer permits us to understand the phenomena of primitive creation, because the fire which penetrated it is extinct, so deliberate explanations have always appeared somewhat insufficient when applying our timid methods of induction to the revolutions of the creative epochs which have decided the fate of humanity. Jesus lived at one of those times when the game of public life is freely played, and when the stake of human activity is increased a hundredfold. Every great part, then, entails death; for such movements suppose liberty and an absence of preventive measures, which could not exist without a terrible alternative. In these days, man risks little and gains little. In heroic periods of human activity, man risked all and gained all. The good and the wicked, or at least those who believe themselves and are believed to be such, form opposite armies. The apotheosis is reached by the scaffold; characters have distinctive features, which engrave them as eternal types in the memory of men. Except in the French Revolution, no historical centre was as suitable as that in which Jesus was formed, to develop those hidden forces which humanity holds as in reserve, and which are not seen except in days of excitement and peril.

If the government of the world were a speculative problem, and the greatest philosopher were the man best fitted to tell his fellows what they ought to believe, it would be from calmness and reflection that those great moral and dogmatic truths called religions would proceed. But it is not so. If we except Cakya-Mouni, the great religious founders have not been metaphysicians. Buddhism itself, whose origin is in pure thought, has conquered one-half of Asia, by motives wholly political and moral. As to the Semitic religions, they are as little philosophical as possible. Moses and Mahomet were not men of speculation; they were men of action. It was in proposing action to their fellow-countrymen, and to their contemporaries, that they governed humanity. Jesus, in like manner, was not a theologian, or a philosopher, having a more or less well-composed system. In order to be a disciple of Jesus, it was not necessary to sign any formulary, or to p.r.o.nounce any confession of faith; one thing only was necessary--to be attached to him, to love him. He never disputed about G.o.d, for he felt Him directly in himself. The rock of metaphysical subtleties, against which Christianity broke from the third century, was in nowise created by the Founder. Jesus had neither dogma nor system, but a fixed personal resolution, which, exceeding in intensity every other created will, directs to this hour the destinies of humanity.

The Jewish people had the advantage, from the captivity of Babylon up to the Middle Ages, of being in a state of the greatest tension. This is why the interpreters of the spirit of the nation during this long period seemed to write under the action of an intense fever, which placed them constantly either above or below reason, rarely in its middle path. Never did man seize the problem of the future and of his destiny with a more desperate courage, more determined to go to extremes. Not separating the lot of humanity from that of their little race, the Jewish thinkers were the first who sought for a general theory of the progress of our species. Greece, always confined within itself, and solely attentive to petty quarrels, has had admirable historians; but before the Roman epoch, it would be in vain to seek in her a general system of the philosophy of history, embracing all humanity. The Jew, on the contrary, thanks to a kind of prophetic sense which renders the Semite at times marvellously apt to see the great lines of the future, has made history enter into religion. Perhaps he owes a little of this spirit to Persia. Persia, from an ancient period, conceived the history of the world as a series of evolutions, over each of which a prophet presided. Each prophet had his _hazar_, or reign of a thousand years (chiliasm), and from these successive ages, a.n.a.logous to the Avatar of India, is composed the course of events which prepared the reign of Ormuzd. At the end of the time when the cycle of chiliasms shall be exhausted, the complete paradise will come. Men then will live happy; the earth will be as one plain; there will be only one language, one law, and one government for all. But this advent will be preceded by terrible calamities.

Dahak (the Satan of Persia) will break his chains and fall upon the world. Two prophets will come to console mankind, and to prepare the great advent.[1] These ideas ran through the world, and penetrated even to Rome, where they inspired a cycle of prophetic poems, of which the fundamental ideas were the division of the history of humanity into periods, the succession of the G.o.ds corresponding to these periods--a complete renovation of the world, and the final advent of a golden age.[2] The book of Daniel, the book of Enoch, and certain parts of the Sibylline books,[3] are the Jewish expression of the same theory. These thoughts were certainly far from being shared by all; they were only embraced at first by a few persons of lively imagination, who were inclined toward strange doctrines. The dry and narrow author of the book of Esther never thought of the rest of the world except to despise it, and to wish it evil.[4] The disabused epicurean who wrote Ecclesiastes, thought so little of the future, that he considered it even useless to labor for his children; in the eyes of this egotistical celibate, the highest stroke of wisdom was to use his fortune for his own enjoyment.[5] But the great achievements of a people are generally wrought by the minority. Notwithstanding all their enormous defects, hard, egotistical, scoffing, cruel, narrow, subtle, and sophistical, the Jewish people are the authors of the finest movement of disinterested enthusiasm which history records.

Opposition always makes the glory of a country. The greatest men of a nation are those whom it puts to death. Socrates was the glory of the Athenians, who would not suffer him to live amongst them. Spinoza was the greatest Jew of modern times, and the synagogue expelled him with ignominy. Jesus was the glory of the people of Israel, who crucified him.

[Footnote 1: _Yacna_, xiii. 24: Theopompus, in Plut., _De Iside et Osiride_, sec. 47; _Minokhired_, a pa.s.sage published in the _Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft_, i., p.

263.]

[Footnote 2: Virg., Ecl. iv.; Servius, at v. 4 of this Eclogue; Nigidius, quoted by Servius, at v. 10.]