CHAPTER III.

STATE OF THE CHURCHES IN JUDEA.—DEATH OF JAMES.

The ill-will of which the Christian Church was the object at Rome, perhaps even in Asia Minor and Greece, made itself felt even in Judea; but the persecution there had other causes. There were rich Sadducees, the aristocracy of the Temple, who showed themselves enraged against the honest poor and blasphemed the name of “Christian.” About the time we have reached there was circulated a letter of James, “servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,” addressed to “the twelve tribes of the Dispersion.” It is one of the finest pieces of early Christian literature, recalling sometimes the Gospel, and at other times the sweet and restful wisdom of Ecclesiastes. The authenticity of such writings, seeing the number of false apostolic letters which circulated, is always doubtful. Perhaps the Judeo-Christian party, accustomed to use to its own taste the authority of James, attributed to him this manifesto in which the desire to oppose the innovators made itself felt. Certainly, if James had some share in it, he was not its editor. It is doubtful if James knew Greek; his language was Syriac; now the epistle of James is much the best written work in the New Testament, its Greek is pure and almost classical. As to this, the writing agrees perfectly with the character of James. The author is a Jewish Rabbi, he holds strongly by the Law; to express the meeting of the faithful, he makes use of the word “synagogue”; he is Paul’s adversary; the tone of his epistle resembles the synoptical gospel which we shall see later on came from the Christian family of which James was the head. Nevertheless, the 23name of Jesus is only mentioned there two or three times, with the simple qualification of Messiah, and without any of the ambitious hyperboles which the ardent imagination of Paul had accumulated.

James, or the Jewish moralist who desired to cover himself with his authority, introduces us all at once into a little conventicle of the persecuted. Trials are a good thing, for in putting faith through the crucible, they produce patience; now patience is the perfection of virtue; the man who is tempted receives the crown of life. But what preoccupies our doctor especially is the difference between the rich and the poor. He must have produced in the community some rivalry between the favoured brothers of fortune and those who were not. Those complain of the harshness of the rich and their pride, while they groaned under them:

Let the brother of low degree rejoice in that he is exalted; but the rich, in that he is made low, because as the flower of the grass he shall pass away. . . . My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory, with respect of persons. For if there come into your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment, and ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place, and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool. Are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts? Hearken, my beloved brethren, hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the Kingdom which He hath promised to them that love Him? But ye have despised the poor. Do not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats? Do not they blaspheme that worthy name by the which ye are called?

Pride, corruption, brutality, and the luxury of the rich Sadducees had indeed arrived at their height. The women bought the high priesthood from Agrippa II. with gold. Martha, daughter of Boethus, one of those Simonists, who went to see her husband officiate, made them stretch carpets from the gate of her house to the Sanctuary. The high-priesthood was thus fearfully 24debased. These worldly priests blushed for the most holy part of their functions. The offering of sacrifice had become repulsive to refined people, whom their duty condemned to the trade of butcher and knacker! Many of them did this in silk gloves not to soil the skin of their hands by contact with the victim. The whole tradition, agreeing on this point with the Gospels and the Epistle of James, represents to us the priests of the last year before the destruction of the Temple as gourmands, given up to luxury, and hard to the poor people. The Talmud contains the fabulous list of what was needed for the table of a high priest; it surpasses all likelihood, but indicates the dominant opinion. “Four cries come from the vestibule of the Temple,” says one tradition; the first, “Come forth, ye descendants of Eli, you stain the Temple of the Eternal”; the second, “Come forth, Issachar of Kaphar-Barkai, who only dost respect thyself, and who profanest the victims consecrated to Heaven”—(it was he who wrapped his hands in silk while doing his service); the third, “Open, ye gates, let in Ishmael, the son of Phabi, the disciple of Phinehas, that he may fulfil the functions of the high-priesthood”; the fourth, “Open, ye gates, and let John, son of Nebedeus, the disciple of gourmands, enter in, that he may gorge himself with victims.” A sort of song, or rather malediction, against the sacerdotal families, which ran its course in the streets of Jerusalem at the same period, has been preserved to us.

There was open war between these opulent priests, friends of the Romans, taking these lucrative appointments to themselves and their families, and the poor priests maintained by the people. Every day there were bloody brawls. The impudence and audacity of the high-priestly families went so far as to send their servants to the threshing-floors to collect the tithes which belonged to the high clergy, and they beat those who refused; the poor priests were in a wretched state. Fancy the feelings of the pious man, the democratic Jew, rich in the promises of all the prophets, maltreated in the Temple (his own house) by the insolent lackeys of unbelieving and epicurean priests. The Christians grouped around James made common cause with those oppressed ones who probably were like themselves, holy people (hasidim) favourites with the public. Mendicity appears to have become a virtue and the mark of patriotism. The rich classes were friends of the Romans, and could scarcely become that except by a sort of apostacy and treason. To hate the rich was thus a mark of piety. Obliged, so as not to die of hunger, to work in those constructions of the Herodians, in which they saw nothing but an ostentatious vanity, the hasidim looked on themselves as victims of the unbelieving. “Poor” passed as the synonym of “Saint.”

“Now weep, ye rich, howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as if it were fire. Ye have heaped treasures together for the last days. Behold the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud crieth, and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth and been wanton. Ye have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.”

We feel in these pages that there is already fermenting the spirit of those social revolutions which some 26years later filled Jerusalem with blood. Nothing expresses with so much force the sentiment of aversion to the world which was the soul of Primitive Christianity. “To keep oneself unspotted from the world” is the supreme command. “He who would be the friend of the world is constituted the enemy of God.” All desire is vanity—illusion. The end is so near? why complain of one another? why engage in litigation? the true judge is coming: He is at the door!

“And now you others who say: To-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell and get gain. Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life. It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, if the Lord will we shall live, and do this or that.”

When he speaks of humility, patience, mercy, the exaltation of the humble, and of the joy which is below tears, James seems to have kept in memory the very words of Jesus. We feel, nevertheless, that he holds much by the law. Quite a paragraph of his Epistle is dedicated to warn the faithful against Paul’s doctrine on the uselessness of works and salvation by faith. A phrase of James (ii., 24) is the direct denial of a phrase in the Epistle to the Romans (iii., 28). In opposition to the Apostle of the Gentiles (Rom. iv., 1 and ff.) the Apostle of Jerusalem maintains (ii., 21 and ff.) that Abraham was saved by works, and that faith without works is a dead faith. The devils have faith and apparently are not saved. Departing here from his usual moderation, James calls his opponent a “vain man.” In one or two other passages, we can see an allusion to the debates which already divided the Church, and which shall fill up the history of Christian theology some centuries later.

A spirit of lofty piety and touching charity animated this Church of the Saints. “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction,” said James.

The power of curing diseases, especially by anointing with oil, was considered as of common right among believers: indeed the unbelievers saw in this healing a gift peculiar to the Christians. The elders were reputed to enjoy it in a high degree, and became thus a band of spiritual physicians. James attaches to those practices of supernatural medicine the greatest importance. The germ of nearly all the Catholic Sacraments was laid here. Confession of sins, for a long time practised by the Jews, was looked on as an excellent means of pardon and healing, two ideas inseparable in the beliefs of the age.

“Is any among you afflicted? Let him pray. Is any merry? Let him sing. Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up, and if he have committed sins they shall be forgiven him. Confess your faults one to another and pray one for another that ye may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is strong when it is made with a fixed object.”

The apocryphal apocalypses where the religious passions of the people expressed themselves with so much fire, were greedily collected in this little group of enthusiastic Jews, or rather were born alongside of it, almost in its bosom, so much so that the tissue of these singular writings and that of the writings of the New Testament are often hard to disentangle from each other. They really took these pamphlets, born of yesterday, for the words of Enoch, Baruch and Moses. The strangest beliefs as to hell, the rebel angels, the wicked giants who brought on the flood, were spread about, and had as their principal source the books of Enoch. There were in all these fables some lively allusions to contemporaneous events. That foreseeing Noah, that pious Enoch, who did not cease to predict the Deluge to those heedless ones who, during this whole period, ate, drank, married, and enriched 28themselves, who are they if they be not the seers of these last days, vainly warning a frivolous generation, which is unwilling to admit that the world is nearly at an end? An entire branch, a sort of period of subterranean life is added to the legend of Jesus. It was asked what he did during the three days he passed in the grave. They would have it that during this time he had gone down, by giving battle to death, into the infernal prisons where were confined the rebellious or unbelieving spirits; that there he had preached to the shades and devils and prepared for their deliverance. That conception was necessary that Jesus might be, in the strongest sense of the term, the universal Saviour; as St. Paul presents the idea also in his last writings. Yet the fictions we speak of did not find a place within the limits of the Synoptical Gospels, doubtless because these limits had been already fixed when they were created. They remained floating outside the Gospel and did not find body until later in the apocryphal writing called the “Gospel of Nicodemus.”

The work par excellence of the Christian conscience was, nevertheless, accomplished in silence in Judea or the adjacent countries. The Synoptical Gospels were created part by part, as a living organism is completed little by little, and attained, under the action of a deep mysterious reason, to perfect unity. At the date we have reached, was there already some text written on the acts and words of Jesus? Has the Apostle Matthew, if it is he who is in question, written in Hebrew the discourses of the Lord? Has Mark, or he who takes his name, entrusted to paper his notes on the life of Jesus? We may doubt it. Paul, in particular had certainly in his hands no writing as to the words of Jesus. Did he at least possess an oral tradition, mnemonic in some degree, of these words? We observe such a tradition for the account of the Supper, perhaps for that of the Passion, and up to a certain point for that of the Resurrection, but not for the 29parables and discourses. Jesus is in his eyes as expiatory victim, a superhuman being, a risen one, not a moralist. His quotation of the words of Jesus are undecided and are not related to the discourses which the Synoptical Gospels put into Jesus’ mouth. The apostolical epistles which we possess, other than those of Paul, do not lead us to suppose any production of this kind.

What seems to result from this is that certain accounts, such as that of the Supper, of the Passion, and the Resurrection, were known by heart, in terms which admitted of little variety. The plan of the Synoptical Gospels was already probably agreed on: but while the Apostles lived, books which would have pretended to fix the tradition of which they believed themselves the sole depositories would not have had any chance of being accepted. Why, besides, write the life of Jesus? He is coming back. A world on the eve of closing has no need of new books. It is when the witnesses shall be dead that it will be important to render durable by the Scripture a representation which is effacing itself every day. In this point of view the Churches of Judea and the neighbouring countries had a great superiority. The knowledge of the discourses of Jesus was much more exact and extended than elsewhere. We remark under this connection a certain difference between the Epistle of James and the Epistle of Paul. The little writing of James is quite impregnated by a sort of evangelical perfume. We hear these sometimes like an echo of the word of Jesus; the sentiment of the life of Galilee is found there still with vivid power.

We know nothing historical as to the missions sent directly by the Church of Jerusalem. That Church, according to its own principles, ought scarcely to be looked on as a propaganda. In general there were few Ebionite and Judeo-Christian Missions. The strict spirit of the Ebionim only admitted of circumcised missionaries. According to the picture which is traced 30to us by some writings of the second century, suspected of exaggeration, but faithful to the Jerusalem spirit, the Judeo-Christianity preacher was held in a sort of suspicion; they made sure about him, they imposed on him some proofs, a noviciate of six years; he must have regular papers, a sort of labelled confession of faith, conformable to that of the Apostles of Jerusalem. Such impediments were a decided obstacle to a fruitful Apostleship: under such conditions Christianity would never have been preached. Thus the messengers of James appeared much more occupied in overturning Paul’s foundations than in building on their own account, The Churches of Bithynia, Pontus and Cappadocia which appeared about this time alongside of the Churches of Asia and Galatia, did not proceed it is true, from Paul, but it is not likely that they were the work of James or Peter: they owed their foundation no doubt to that anonymous preaching of the faithful which was the most efficacious of all. We suppose, on the contrary, that Batania, the Hauran, Decapolis, and in general all the region to the east of the Jordan which were soon to be the centre of the fortress of Judeo-Christianity, were evangelized by some adherents of the Church of Jerusalem. They found the Roman limit very near on that side. Now the Arabian countries inclined in no way to the new preaching, and the countries subject to the Arsacides were little open to efforts coming from Roman lands. In the geography of the Apostles the earth was very little. The first Christians never thought of the barbarian or Persian world; the Arabian world itself scarcely existed for them. The missions of St. Thomas among the Parthians, of St. Andrew among the Scythians, and of Bartholomew in India are only legendary. The Christian imagination of the first ages turned little towards the East: the goal of Apostolic Pilgrimages was the extremity of the West; as to the East, they spoke as if the missionaries regarded the boundary as already reached.

Had Edessa heard of the name of Jesus in the first century? Was there at that time beside Osrhoene a Syriac-speaking Christianity? The fables by which the Church has surrounded its cradle do not permit us to express ourselves with certainty on that point. Yet it is very probable that the strong relations which Judaism had on this side were used for the propagation of Christianity. Samosata and Comagena had at an early period educated persons forming part of the Church or at least very favourable to Jesus. It was from Antioch in any case that this region of the Euphrates received the seed of the faith.

The clouds which were gathering over the East disturbed these pacific preachings. The good administration of Festus could do nothing against the evils which Judea carried in her bosom. Brigands, zealots, assassins, and impostors of all kinds overran the country. A magician presented himself, among twenty others, promising the people salvation and the end of evil, if they would accompany him to the desert. Those who followed him were massacred by the Roman soldiers; but no one was undeceived as to the false prophets. Festus died in Judea about the beginning of the year 62. Nero appointed Albinus as his successor. About the same time, Herod Agrippa II. took the high priesthood from Joseph Cabi to give it to Hanan, son of the celebrated Hanan or Annas, who had contributed more than anyone to the death of Jesus. He was the fifth of Annas’ eons who occupied that dignity.

Hanan the younger was a haughty, harsh and audacious man. He was the flower of Sadduceeism, the complete expression of that cruel and inhuman sect, always ready to render the exercise of authority odious and insupportable. James, the brother of the Lord, was known in all Jerusalem as a bitter defender of the poor, as a prophet in the old style, inveighing against the rich and powerful. Hanan resolved on his death, and taking advantage of the absence of Agrippa, and of the 32fact that Albinus had not yet arrived in Judea, he assembled the judicial Sanhedrin and caused James and several other saints to appear before him. They accused them of breaking the law; they were condemned to be stoned. The authority of Agrippa was necessary to assemble the Sanhedrim, and that of Albinus would have been needed to proceed to punishment; but the violent Hanan went beyond all rules. James was, in fact, stoned near the temple. As they had a difficulty in accomplishing it, a fuller broke his head with his cudgel which was used to measure stuffs. He was, it is said, forty-six years old.

The death of this saintly personage had the worst effect on the city. The Pharisee devotees and the strict observers of the law were very discontented. James was universally esteemed; he was considered one of those men whose prayers were most efficacious. It is asserted that a Rechabite (probably an Essene), or according to others, Simeon son of Clopas, nephew of Jesus, cried while they stoned him, “Stop, what are you doing? What! you kill the just who prays for you?” They applied to him the passage in Isaiah, iii., 10, which they had heard from him, “Let us suppress they say, the righteous, because he is vexatious to us: this is why the fruit of their works is devoured.” Some Hebrew Elegies were written on his death, full of allusion to Biblical passages and to his name of Obliam. Nearly everybody at last was found in sympathy asking Herod Agrippa II. to set bounds to the audacity of the high-priest. Albinus was informed of the actions of Hanan, when he had left Alexandria for Judea. He wrote Hanan a threatening letter, then he unseated him. Hanan thus only occupied the high-priesthood three months. The misfortunes which soon fell on the nation were looked on by many people as the consequence of James’ murder. As to the Christians, they saw in this death a sign of the times, a proof that the final catastrophes were approaching.

The enthusiasm, indeed, assumed at Jerusalem great proportions. Anarchy was at its height. The zealots although decimated by punishment, were masters of everything. Albinus in no way resembled Festus; he only thought of making money by connivance with the brigands. On all sides, one saw prognostications of some unheard-of event. It was at the end of the year 62 that one named Jesus, son of Hanan, a sort of risen Jeremiah, began to run night and day through the streets of Jerusalem, crying, “A voice from the East! a voice from the West! a voice from the four winds a voice against Jerusalem and the temple! a voice against the bridegrooms and the brides! a voice against all the people!” They scourged him; but he repeated the same cry. They beat him with rods till his bones were seen; at each blow he repeated in a lamentable voice, “Woe to Jerusalem! woe to Jerusalem!” He was never seen to speak to anyone. He went along repeating, “Woe! woe to Jerusalem!” without reproaching those who beat him, and thanking those who gave him alms. He went on thus until the siege, his voice never appearing to grow weaker.

If this Jesus, son of Hanan, was not a disciple of Jesus, his weird cry was at least the true expression of what was at the core of the Christian conscience. Jerusalem had filled up its measure. That city which slew the prophets and stoned those who were sent to it, beating some, crucifying others, was henceforth the city of anathemas. About the time at which we have arrived were formed those little apocalypses which some attributed to Enoch, others to Jesus, and which offered the greatest analogies to the exclamations of Jesus, son of Hanan. These writings extend later into the framework of the synoptical gospels; they were represented as discourses, which Jesus had given in his last days. Perhaps already the mot d’ordre was given to leave Judea and flee to the mountains. The synoptical gospels always bear deeply the mark of these sorrows; they keep it 34like a birth-mark—an indelible impression. With the peaceful axioms of Jesus mingled the colours of a gloomy apocalypse, the presentiments of a disgusted and troubled imagination. But the gentleness of the Christians put them in the shadow compared with the madnesses which agitated the other parties in the nation, possessed like them by Messianic ideas. To them the Messiah had come; he had been in the desert, he had ascended to heaven after thirty years; the impostors or enthusiasts who sought to carry the people away after them were false Christs and false prophets. The death of James and perhaps of some other brethren, led them, besides, to separate their cause more and more from Judaism. A butt to the hatred of all, they comforted themselves by thinking of the precepts of Jesus. According to many, Jesus had predicted that, in the midst of all these trials, not a hair of their heads should perish.

The situation was so precarious, and they felt so plainly that they were on the eve of a catastrophe that an immediate successor was given to James in the presiding of the Church of Jerusalem. The other “brethren of the Lord,” such as Jude, Simon, son of Clopas, continued to be the principal authorities in the community. After the war, we shall see them serving as a rallying point to all the faithful of Judea. Jerusalem had no more than eight years to live, and indeed, even before the fatal hour, the eruption of the volcano, will thrust to a distance the little group of pious Jews who are bound to one another by the memory of Jesus.