CHAPTER III.

EDUCATION OF JESUS.

Nature here, at once smiling and grand, was the whole education of Jesus. He learnt to read and to write, no doubt, according to the Eastern method, which consisted in putting into the hands of the child a book, which he repeated rhythmically with his little comrades, until he knew it by heart. It is doubtful, however, whether he understood the Hebrew writings in their original tongue. His biographers make him quote them according to the translations in the Aramean language; and his methods of exegesis, as far as we can make them out from his disciples, much resembled those which were then common, and which form the spirit of the Targummim and the Midraschim.

The schoolmaster in the small Jewish towns was the hazzan, or reader in the synagogues. Jesus frequented little the higher schools of the scribes or sopherim (Nazareth had perhaps none of them), and he had not any of those titles which confer, in the eyes of the vulgar, the privileges of knowledge. It would, nevertheless, be a great error to imagine that Jesus was what we call an ignoramus. Scholastic education among us draws a great distinction, in respect of personal worth, between those who have received and those who have been deprived of it. It was different in the East, and in the good 19old days. The rude state in which among us the person remains who has not passed through the schools—in consequence of our isolated and entirely individual life—was unknown in those societies where moral culture, and, above all, the general spirit of the age, was transmitted by the constant intercourse between men of all kinds. The Arab, who has never had a teacher, is, notwithstanding that, a decidedly superior man; for the tent is a sort of academy, always open, where, from meeting with well-educated people, very considerable intellectual and even literary activity is produced. Refinement of manners and acuteness of intellect have, in the East, nothing in common with what we call education. The men of the schools, on the contrary, are those who pass for pedantic and badly-trained people. In this social state, ignorance, which among us at once relegates a man to an inferior grade, is the condition of great things and of great originality.

It is not at all likely that Jesus knew Greek. This language had spread only to a small extent in Judæa beyond the classes who participated in the government, and the towns which were inhabited by Pagans, like Cæsarea. The mother tongue of Jesus was the Syrian dialect mixed with Hebrew, which was spoken in Palestine at that time. There is even greater reason to conclude that he knew nothing of Greek culture. This culture was indeed proscribed by the doctors of Palestine, who included in the same malediction “the man who breeds swine, and the person who teaches his son Greek science.” At all events, it had not penetrated to little towns such as Nazareth. Notwithstanding the anathema of the doctors, some Jews, it is true, had already embraced the Hellenic culture. Without speaking of the Jewish school of Egypt, in which the attempts to amalgamate 20Hellenism 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 Grecianised. But Nicholas was only a Jew in blood. Josephus declares that he himself was an exception among his contemporaries; 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. At Jerusalem itself Greek was very little studied: indeed, Greek studies were considered to be dangerous, and even servile; at the best they were held to be only an effeminate accomplishment. The study of the Law stood alone as “liberal,” and worthy of a thoughtful man. When he was asked as to the time when it would be right to teach children “Greek wisdom,” a learned Rabbi replied: “At the time which is neither day nor night; for it is written of the Law, Thou shalt study it day and night.”

It seems clear, therefore, that neither directly nor indirectly did any element of “profane” culture reach Jesus. He knew nothing beyond Judaism; his mind preserved that free innocence which is invariably weakened by an extended and varied culture. In the very bosom of this Judaism he remained a stranger to many efforts somewhat parallel to his own. On the one hand, the asceticism of the Essenes or Therapeutæ did not seem to have had any direct influence upon him; on the other, the fine efforts of religious philosophy made by the Jewish school of Alexandria, of which Philo, his contemporary, was the ingenious interpreter, were unknown to him. The frequent resemblances 21which may be discovered between himself and Philo, those excellent maxims concerning the love of God, of charity, and rest in God, which sound like an echo between the Gospel and the writings of the illustrious Alexandrian thinker, arise from the common tendencies which the demands of the age inspired in all lofty minds.

Happily for him, he was also ignorant of the strange scholasticism which was taught at Jerusalem, and which soon was to form the Talmud. If some Pharisees had already brought it into Galilee, Jesus did not associate with them, and when later he met this silly casuistry face to face, it only inspired him with disgust. We may believe, however, that the principles of Hillel were not unknown to him. This Rabbi, fifty years before him, had uttered certain aphorisms which were almost analogous to his own. By his poverty so meekly borne, by the sweetness of his character, by his antagonism to priests and hypocrites, Hillel was the true master of Jesus, if it may be allowed that one should speak of a master in connection with such a lofty genius as his.

The perusal of the books of the Old Testament made a deep impression on Jesus. The canon of the holy books was composed of two principal parts—the Law, that is to say, the Pentateuch, and the Prophets, such as we possess them now. An extensive and allegorical method of interpretation was applied to all these books; and the attempt was made to draw from them what was a response to the aspirations of the age. The Law, which did not represent the ancient laws of the country, but Utopias—the factitious laws, and the pious frauds 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 22all the somewhat mysterious details that were in these books had reference to the Messiah, and it was sought to find there the type of him who should realise the hopes of the nation. Jesus participated in the liking which every one had for these allegorical interpretations. But the true poetry of the Bible which escaped the doctors of Jerusalem disclosed itself most fully to the fine genius of Jesus. The Law does not seem to have had much charm for him; he believed he could accomplish better things. But the religious poetry of the Psalms discovered a wonderful agreement with his own lyrical soul; and they remained, during his whole life, his nourishment and support. The prophets, especially Isaiah and the writer who continued his record of the times of the captivity, with their brilliant dreams of the future, their impetuous eloquence, and their invectives mingled with enchanting pictures, were his true masters. He, doubtless, also read many apocryphal works—somewhat modern writings, whose authors, in order to give their productions an authority which would not be granted except to very ancient scriptures, had invested themselves with the names of prophets and patriarchs. One of these books above all others moved him; that was the book of Daniel. This work, composed by an enthusiastic Jew of the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, and headed by the name of an ancient sage, was the resumé of the spirit of these later days. Its author, a true creator of the philosophy of history, was the first who had been bold enough to see in the onward march of the world and the succession of empires only a series of facts subordinated to the destinies of the Jewish people. Jesus was at an early age penetrated by these high hopes. Perhaps, moreover, he had read the books of Enoch, then regarded with equal reverence as the holy books, and the 23other writings of the same class, which kept up so much excitement in the popular imagination. The advent of the Messiah, with its glories and terrors, the nations falling to pieces one after another, the cataclysm of heaven and earth, were the familiar food of his imagination; and, as these revolutions were believed to be so close at hand that numbers of people sought to calculate their exact dates, the supernatural state into which men are led by such visions appeared to Jesus from the first quite simple and perfectly natural.

That he had no acquaintance with the general condition of the world is a fact which is seen in each feature of his best authenticated discourses. The earth to him appeared as still divided into kingdoms making war upon each other; he seemed to ignore the “Roman peace,” and the new state of society which its age inaugurated. He had no exact idea of the Roman power; the name of “Cæsar” was all that had reached him. He saw being built, in Galilee or its neighbourhood, Tiberias, Julias, Diocæsarea, Cæsarea—splendid works of the Herods, who sought by these magnificent structures to prove their admiration for Roman civilisation, and their devotion to the members of the family of Augustus; and the names of these places, although strangely altered, now serve to designate, as by a caprice of fate, miserable hamlets of Bedouins. Jesus probably also saw Sebaste, a work of Herod the Great, a showy city, whose ruins would make one believe that it had been transported there ready made, like some machine which had only to be set up in its place. This ostentatious piece of architecture was shipped to Judæa in portions; the 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 the glory of them.” 24But this luxury of power, this administrative and official art, displeased him. What he really loved were his Galilean villages, a confused mixture of huts, of nests and holes cut in the rocks, of wells, of tombs, of fig-trees and olives. He always clung closely to nature. The courts of kings constantly presented to him the idea of places where men wear fine clothes. The charming impossibilities with which his parables abound, when he brings kings and mighty ones on the stage, prove that he never had any conception of aristocratic society except as a young villager who sees the world through the prism of his own simplicity.

Jesus was still less acquainted with the new idea, created by Grecian science, which is the basis of all philosophy and which modern science has largely confirmed, viz., the exclusion of the supernatural forces to which the simple faith of the ancient times 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 25from his companions. He believed in the devil, whom he regarded as a kind of evil genius, 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 to him; it was his normal state. The idea of the supernatural, with its impossibilities, does not arise except with the birth of the experimental science of nature. The man who is a stranger to all idea of physical law, and who believes that by prayer he can alter the path of the clouds, can arrest disease and even death, finds nothing extraordinary in miracle, inasmuch as the whole course of things is for him the result of the freewill of the Divinity. This intellectual condition was always that of Jesus. But in his great soul such a belief produced effects altogether opposed to those wrought on the vulgar. Among the latter, faith in the special action of God led to a foolish credulity, and deceptions on the part of charlatans. With him it led to a profound idea of the familiar relations of man with God, and to an exaggerated belief in the power of man—beautiful errors which were the secret of his influence; for, if they became one day the means of putting him in a position of error in the eyes of the natural philosopher and the chemist, they gave him, over his own age, a power which no individual has ever possessed before or since.

At an early age his extraordinary character revealed itself. Legend delights to show him even in his infancy in revolt against parental authority, and deviating from the common lines to follow his vocation. It is at least certain that for the relations of kinship he cared little. His family do not seem to have loved him, and more than once he appears to have been severe towards them. Jesus, like all men exclusively preoccupied by an idea, 26came to think little of the ties of blood. It is the bond of thought alone which natures like his recognise. “Behold my mother and my brethren,” said he, extending his hand towards his disciples; “he that doeth the will of my Father, the same is my brother and sister.” The simple people did not understand this view of things, and one day a woman who was passing near him cried out, “Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps that thou hast sucked!” But he replied, “Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it!” Soon, in his daring revolt against nature, he went still further; we shall soon see him trample under foot everything that is human—blood, love, country—preserving soul and mind simply for the idea which presented itself to him in the guise of absolute goodness and truth.