CHAPTER IX.

PROPAGATION OF CHRISTIANITY—EGYPT—SIBYLLISIM.

The tolerance which Christianity enjoyed under the reign of the Flavii was eminently favourable to its development. Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, especially, were the active centres where the name of Jesus became every day more and more important, and from which the new faith shone out. If we except the exclusive Ebionites of Batanea, the relations between the Judeo-Christians and the converted Pagans became every day more easy; prejudices were set aside; a fusion was wrought. In many important towns there were two Presbyteries and two Episcopi, one for Christians of Jewish extraction, the other for the faithful of Pagan origin. It is supposed that the Episcopos of the converted Pagans had been instituted by St Paul, and the other by some apostle of Jerusalem. It is true that in the third and fourth centuries this hypothesis was abused, in order that the Churches might escape from the difficulty in which they found themselves when they sought to found a regular succession of bishops with antagonistic elements of tradition. Nevertheless, the double character of the two Churches appears to have been a real fact. Such was the diversity of education of the two sections of the Christian community, that the same pastor could scarcely give to both the teaching of which they stood in need.

Matters fell out thus especially when, as at Antioch, the difference of origin was joined with difference of language, where one of the groups spoke Syriac and the other Greek. Antioch appears to have had two successions of Presbyteri, one belonging in theory to St Peter, the other to St Paul. The constitution of the two lists was managed in the same way as the 82lists of the Bishops of Rome. They took the oldest names of the Presbyteri whom they remembered, that of a certain Evhode much respected—that of Ignatius who was greatly celebrated—and put them at the heads of the files of the two series. Ignatius died only under the reign of Trajan; St Paul saw Antioch for the last time in 54. The same thing then happened for Ignatius as for Clement, for Papias and for a great number of personages of the second and third Christian generations—the dates were garbled, so that they might be supposed to have received from the Apostles their institution or their teaching.

Egypt, which for a long time was much behind-hand in the matter of Christianity, probably received the germ of the new faith under the Flavii. The tradition of the preaching of St Mark at Alexandria is one of those tardy inventions by which the great Churches sought to give themselves an Apostolic antiquity. The general outline of the life of St Mark is well known; it is in Rome and not in Alexandria that it must be sought. When all the great Churches pretended to an Apostolic foundation, the Church of Alexandria, already very considerable, wished to supply titles of nobility which it did not possess. Mark was almost the only one amongst the personages of Apostolic history who had not yet been appropriated. In reality the cause of the absence of the name of Egypt from the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles and from the Epistles of St Paul is that Egypt had a sort of pre-Christianity which long held it closed against Christianity properly so called. She had Philo, she had the Therapeutes, that is to say, doctrines so like those which grew up in Judea and Galilee that it was unnecessary for her to lend an attentive ear to the latter. Later, it was maintained that the Therapeutes were nothing else than the Christians of St Mark, whose kind of life Philo had described. It was a strange hallucination. In a certain sense, however, this bizarre 83confusion was not altogether so devoid of truth as might be imagined at the first glance.

Christianity appears indeed to have had a very undecided character in Egypt for a long time. The members of the old Therapeutic communities of Lake Narcotis, if their existence must be admitted, ought to appear like saints to the disciples of Jesus, the Exegetas of the school of Philo, like Apollos, marched side by side with Christianity, entered into it even without staying there; the other Alexandrine Jewish authors of the apocryphal books shared largely, it is said, in the ideas which prevailed in the Council of Jerusalem. When the Jews, animated, it is said, by like sentiments, heard Jesus spoken of, it was unnecessary that they should be converted in order to sympathise with his disciples. The confraternity established itself. A curious monument of the spirit, peculiar to Egypt, has been preserved in one of the Sibylline poems—a poem dated with great precision from the reign of Titus or one of the first years of Domitian, which the critics have been able, with almost equal reason, to accept as Christian on the one hand and Essenian or Therapeutic on the other. The truth is that the author was a Jewish sectary, floating between Christianity, Baptism, Essenism, and inspired, before all things, by the dominant idea of the Sibyllists, who were the first preachers of monotheism to the Pagans, and of morality, under cover of a simplified Judaism.

Sibyllism was born in Alexandria about the time when apocalypticism came into existence in Palestine. The two parallel theories owed their existence to analogous spiritual conditions. One of the laws of every apocalypse is the attribution of the work to some celebrity of past times. The opinion of the present day is that the list of great prophets is closed, and that no modern can pretend to equal the ancient inspired ones. What then was a man to do who was possessed with the idea of producing his thought and 84giving to it the authority which would be lacking if he published it as his own? He takes the mantle of an ancient man of God and boldly puts forth his book under the shelter of a venerated name. The forger who, to expound an idea which he thinks just, abnegates his own personality in this way, has not a shadow of scruple. Far from believing that he injures the antique sage whose name he takes, he thinks he does him honour by attributing to him good and beautiful thoughts. And as to the public to whom these writings were addressed, the complete absence of criticism prevented anyone from raising a shadow of objection. In Palestine the authorities chosen to serve as name-lenders to these new revelations were real or fictitious personages whose holiness was known to and admitted by all—Daniel, Enoch, Moses, Solomon, Baruch, Esdras. At Alexandria, where the Jews were initiated into the Greek literature, and where they aspired to exercise an intellectual and moral influence over the Pagans, the forgers chose renowned Greek philosophers or moralists. It is thus that we see Aristobalus alleging false quotations from Homer, Hesiod, and Linus, and that there was soon a pseudo-Orpheus, a pseudo-Pythagoras, an aprocryphal correspondence of Heraclites, a moral poem attributed to Phocylides. The object of all these works was the same; they preached deism to idolators and the precepts known as Noachian, that is to say, Judaism mitigated for their use or reduced almost to the proportions of the natural law. Two or three observances only were retained which in the eyes of the most liberal Jews passed almost as forming part of the natural law.

The Sibyls present themselves to the mind as forgers in search of incontestable authorities under cover of whom they may present themselves to the Greeks the ideas which were dear to them. They already circulated little poems, pretended Cumæans, Erythæans, 85full of threats, prophesying calamities to different countries. These dicta, which had a great effect on the popular imagination, especially when fortuitous coincidences appeared to justify them, were conceived in the old epic hexameter, in a language which affected a resemblance to that of Homer. The Jewish forgers adopted the same rhythm, and, the better to deceive credulous people, they served in their text some of those threats which they thought in harmony with the character of the ancient prophetic virgins.

Sibyllism was thus the form of the Alexandrine Apocalypse. When a Jew—a friend of the good and of the true in that tolerant and sympathetic school—wished to address warnings or counsels to the Pagans, he made one of the prophetesses of the Pagan world to speak, to give to his utterances a force which they would not otherwise have had. He took the tone of the Erythæan oracles, forced himself to imitate the traditional style of the prophetic poetry of the Greeks, provided himself with some of these versified threats which made a great impression on the people, and framed the whole in pious utterances. Let us repeat it—such frauds with a good object were in no way repugnant to anybody. By the side of the Jewish manufactory of false classics, the art of which consisted in putting into the mouths of Greek philosophers and moralists the maxims which they were desirous of inculcating, there was established in the second century before Christ a pseudo-Sibyllism in the interest of the same ideas. In the time of the Flavii, an Alexandrine looked up the long interrupted tradition and added some new pages to the former oracles. These pages are of a remarkable beauty.

Happy is he who worships the Great God, him whom human hands have not made, who hath no temple, whom mortal eye cannot see nor haul measure. Happy are those who pray before they eat, and before they drink; who, at sight of the temples make a sign of protestation, and who turn away with horror 86from the altars bedabbled with blood. Murder, shameful gain, adultery, the crimes against nature, do they hold in horror. Other men given over to their perverse desires run after these holy men with laughter and with insult; in their madness they charge them with the crimes of which they themselves have been guilty; but the judgment of God shall be accomplished. The impious shall be cast into darkness, but the godly shall dwell in a fertile land, and the Spirit of God shall give to them light and grace.

After this exordium came the essential parts of every apocalypse; first a theory concerning the succession of empires—a species of philosophy of history imitated from Daniel; then signs in heaven, tremblings of the earth, islands emerging from the depths of the sea, wars, famines, and all the preparations which announce the coming of God’s judgment. The author particularly mentions the earthquake at Laodicaea in 60; that of Myra; the invasions of the sea at Lycia, which took place in 68. The sufferings of Jerusalem then appeared to him. A powerful king, the murderer of his mother, flees from Italy, ignored, unknown, under the disguise of a slave, and takes refuge beyond the Euphrates. There he waits in hiding whilst the candidates for the Empire make bloody war. A Roman chief will deliver the Temple to the flames and will destroy the Jewish nation. The bowels of Italy will be torn; a flame will come out of her and will mount to heaven, destroying the cities, consuming thousands of men; a black dust will fill the air; lapilli like vermillion red will fall from heaven. Then it may be hoped men will recognise the wrath of God Most High, the wrath which has fallen on them because they have destroyed the innocent tribe of pious men. As the topstone of misfortune, the fugitive king, hidden behind the Euphrates, will draw his great sword and will recross the Euphrates with myriads of men.

It will be remarked how immediately this work follows the Apocalypse of St John. Taking up the 87ideas of the seer of 68 or 69, the Sibyllist of 81 or 82, confirmed in his dark previsions by the eruption of Vesuvius, revives the popular belief of Nero living beyond the Euphrates, and announces his immediate return. Some indications exist that there was a false Nero under Titus. A more serious attempt was made in 88, and nearly brought about a war with the Parthians. The prophecy of our Sibyllist is without doubt prior to that date. He announces in effect a terrible war; now the affair of the false Nero under Titus, if it ever occurred, was not serious, and as to the false Nero of 88, he created nothing more than a false alarm.

When piety, faith, and justice shall have entirely disappeared, when no one will care for pious men, when all will seek to kill them, taking pleasure in insulting them, plunging their hands in their blood, then will be seen an end to the Divine patience; trembling with wrath, God will annihilate the human race with fire.

Was the author of this poem a Christian? He certainly was one at heart, but he was one also by his style. The critics who see in this fragment the work of a disciple of Jesus, support their view principally upon the invitation to the Gentiles to be converted and to wash their whole bodies in the rivers. But baptism was not an exclusively Christian rite. There were by the side of Christianity sects of Baptists, of Hemero-Baptists, with whom the Sibylline verse would agree better, since Christian baptism can be administered but once, whilst the baptism mentioned in the poem would seem to have been like the prayer which accompanied it, a pious practice for the washing away of sin, a sacrament which might be renewed, and which the penitent administered to himself. What would be altogether inconceivable is that in a Christian apocalypse of nearly two hundred verses written at the beginning of the age of Domitian there was not a single word about the resurrection of Jesus or of the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds to judge the quick and the dead. If we add to that the employment of mythological expressions, of which there is no example in the first century, an artificial style which is a pasticcio of the old Homeric style which takes for granted a study of the profane poets and a long stay in the schools of the grammarians of Alexandria, our case is complete.

The Sibylline literature appears then to have originated amongst the Essenian or Therapeutic communities; now the Therapeutists, the Essenians, the Baptists, the 89Sibyllists, lived in an order of ideas very like that of the Christians, and differing from them only on the point of the worship of the person of Jesus. Later on, without doubt, all these sects were merged in the Church. More and more but two classes of Jews came to be left; on the one hand, the Jew who was a strict observer of the Law—Talmudist, Casuist, Pharisee, in a word; on the other, the liberal Jew who reduced Judaism to a sort of natural religion open to virtuous Pagans. About the year 80 there were, especially in Egypt, sects which took up this position without, however, adhering to Jesus. Soon there will be more, and the Christian Church will include all those who wish to withdraw themselves from the excessive demands of the Law, without ceasing to belong to the spiritual family of Abraham.

The book numbered fourth in the Sibylline collection is not the only one of its class which the period of Domitian may have produced. The fragment which serves as the preface to the entire collection, and which has been preserved for us by Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch (end of second century), greatly resembles the fourth book, and ends in the same way: “A torrent of fire will fall upon you; burning torches will scorch you through all eternity; but those who have worshipped the true and infinite God, shall inherit life for ever, dwelling in the free and laughing garden of Paradise, and eating the sweet bread which shall fall from the starry skies.” This fragment appears at first sight to present in some expressions indications of Christianity, but expressions altogether analogous may be found in Philo. The nascent Christianity had outside the divine aspect lent to it by the person of Jesus so few features specially proper to it, that the rigid distinction between what is Christian and what is not, becomes at times extremely delicate.

A characteristic detail of the Sibylline Apocalypses 90is that, according to them, the world will finish by a conflagration. Many passages in the Bible lead to this idea. Nevertheless, it is not found in the great Christian Apocalypse attributed to John. The first trace of it, found amongst the Christians, is in the Second Epistle of Peter, written, it is supposed, at a very late date. The belief thus appears to have sprung up in Alexandrian centres, and we are justified in believing that it came in part from the Greek philosophy; many schools, particularly the Stoics, held it as a principle that the world would be consumed by fire. The Essenes had adopted the same opinion; it became, in some sort, the basis of all the writings attributed to the Sibyl, so long as that literary fiction continued to serve as a skeleton for the dreams of unquiet minds as to the future. It is there and in the writings of the psuedo Hytasper that the Christian doctors found it. Such was the authority of these supposed oracles, that they were accepted as inspired, with the utmost simplicity. The imagination of the Pagan crowd was haunted by terrors of the same kind, utilised by more than one impostor.

Ananias, Avilius, Cerdon, Primus, who are described as the successors of St Mark, were without doubt old presbyters whose names had been preserved and of whom bishops were made when the divine origin of the episcopate was recognised, and when every see was expected to show an unbroken succession of presidents up to the apostolic personage who was accredited with its foundation. Whatever it may have been, the Church of Alexandria appears to have been from the first of a very isolated character. It was exceedingly anti-Jewish; it is from its bosom that we shall see emerge, in the course of the next fourteen or fifteen years, the most energetic manifesto of separation between Judaism and Christianity, the treatise known by the name of “the Epistle of Barnabas.” It 91will be a different matter in fifty years, when gnosticism shall be born there proclaiming that Judaism was the work of an evil God, and that the essential mission of Jesus was to dethrone Jehovah. The importance of Alexandria, or, if you choose, of Egypt, in the development of Christian theology, will then clearly describe itself. A new Christ will appear resembling the Christ whom we know, just as the parables of Galilee resemble the myths of Osiris or the symbolism of the mother of Apis.