CHAPTER VIII.

JESUS AT CAPERNAUM.

Haunted by a more and more imperious idea, Jesus, with a quiet determination, henceforth follows the path his extraordinary genius and the 77circumstances in which he lived have traced out for him. Till now, he had only communicated his thoughts to a few persons who had been secretly drawn towards him; henceforward his teaching was public and sought after. He was now about thirty years of age. The small group of hearers who went with him to John was undoubtedly increased, and perhaps he had been joined by some of the disciples of John. It was with this first nucleus of a church, on his return into Galilee, that he boldly proclaimed the “glad tidings of the kingdom of God.” This kingdom was at hand; and it was he, Jesus, who was that “Son of Man,” whom Daniel in his vision had beheld as the divine herald of the final and supreme revelation.

We must remember that in the Jewish ideas, which were averse to art and mythology, the simple form of man had a superiority over that of Cherubim, and of the fantastic animals which the imagination of the people, since it had been subjected to the influence of Assyria, had ranged around the Divine Majesty. Already in Ezekiel, the Being seated on the supreme throne, far above the monsters of the mysterious chariot, the great revealer of prophetic visions, had the figure of a man. In the book of Daniel, in the midst of the vision of the empires, represented by animals, at the moment when the great judgment commences, and when the books are opened, a Being, “like unto a Son of Man,” advances towards the Ancient of days, who confers on him the power to judge the world, and to govern it for eternity. Son of Man, in the Semitic languages, especially in the Aramean dialects, is a simple synonym of man. But this chief passage of Daniel struck the mind; the words, Son of Man, became, at least in certain schools, one of the titles of the Messiah, regarded as judge of the world, and as king of the new era about to be inaugurated. 78The application which Jesus made of it to himself was therefore the proclamation of his Messiahship, and the affirmation of the coming catastrophe in which he was to figure as judge, clothed with the full powers which had been delegated to him by the Ancient of days.

The success of the teaching of the new prophet was this time decisive. A group of men and women, all characterised by the same spirit of juvenile frankness and of simple innocence, adhered to him and said: “Thou art the Messiah!” As the Messiah was to be the Son of David, he was naturally conceded this appellation, which was synonymous with the former. Jesus accepted it with pleasure, although it might cause him some embarrassment, his origin being so well known. For himself, he preferred the title of “Son of Man,” an apparently humble title, but it was connected directly with the Messianic hopes. That was the appellation by which he designated himself, although, in his mouth, the “Son of Man” was a synonym of the pronoun I, which he avoided using. But no one ever thus addressed him, doubtless because the name in question did not quite suit him, until the day of his coming advent.

Jesus' centre of action, at this period of his life, was the little town of Capernaum—situated on the shore of the lake of Gennesareth. The name of Capernaum, into which enters the word caphar, village, seems to denote a small town of the old character, in contradistinction to the great towns built according to the Roman fashion, such as Tiberias. The name was so little known that Josephus, in one place in his writings, takes it for the name of a fountain, the fountain having more celebrity than the village close to it. Like Nazareth, Capernaum had no history, and had not participated in the profane movement favoured by the Herods. Jesus 79was much attached to this town, and made it a second home. Shortly after his return, he made an unsuccessful experiment upon Nazareth. One of his biographers naïvely remarks that he could work no miracle there. The knowledge that was possessed of his family—a family of little importance—destroyed his authority. People could not regard as the son of David one whose brother, sister, and sister-in-law they were seeing every day. Besides, it is to be remarked that his family were very decidedly opposed to him, refusing point blank to believe in his divine mission. At one time, his mother and his brothers maintained that he had lost his senses, and, treating him as an exalted idiot, attempted to put him under restraint. The Nazarenes, much more violent, desired, it is said, to kill him by throwing him down from a steep rock. Jesus pointedly retorted that this risk was common to all great men, and applied to himself the proverb—“A prophet hath no honour in his own country.”

This check was far from discouraging him. He returned to Capernaum, where he found the people much more favourably disposed to him, and from there he organised a series of missions into the small surrounding towns. The people of this beautiful and fertile country rarely assembled together except on the Sabbath. This was the day he selected for his teaching. Each town had then a synagogue or place of meeting. It was a rectangular room, not very large, with a portico, decorated in the Greek style. The Jews, not having any architecture of their own, never attempted to give to those edifices an original design. The remains of many ancient synagogues are still to be seen in Galilee. They have all been constructed of large and good materials; but their appearance is rather paltry, owing to the profusion 80of floral ornaments, foliage, and network which characterise Jewish edifices. In the interior there were benches, a pulpit for public reading, and a recess for holding the sacred rolls. These edifices, which had nothing of the temple about them, were the centres of Jewish life. There the people assembled on the Sabbath for prayer, and to listen to the reading of the Law and the Prophets. As Judaism, outside of Jerusalem, had, properly speaking, no clergy, the first to arrive stood up and read the lessons, paraschæ et haphtara, of the day, adding thereto an original, a personal midrasch, or commentary, in which he expounded his own views. This was the origin of the “homily,” whose finished models we find in the smaller treatises of Philo. The auditors had a right to interrupt and to question the reader; thus, the meeting degenerated quickly into a kind of free discussion assembly. It had a president, “elders,” a hazzan—a recognised reader or apparitor, “deputies”— a sort of secretaries or messengers, who conducted the correspondence between the different synagogues—a shammasch or sacristan. The synagogues were thus really small independent republics; they had an extended jurisdiction, guaranteed enfranchisement, exercised an authority over the enfranchised. Like all the municipal corporations up to an advanced period of the Roman Empire, they issued honorary decrees, which had the force of law in the community, and pronounced sentences of corporal punishment, which were executed ordinarily by the hazzan.

With the marked activity of mind that has always characterised the Jews, such an institution, despite the arbitrary restraints it tolerated, could not fail to give rise to very animated discussions. Thanks to the synagogues, Judaism has been able 81to pass unscathed through eighteen centuries of persecution. These were so many little separate worlds which at once conserved the national spirit, and offered a ready field for intestine struggles. Within the walls of the synagogues there was vented an enormous amount of passion. Disputes for precedence were keen. To have a reserved seat in the first row was the recompense for great piety, or the privilege of wealth which was the most envied. On the other hand, the liberty accorded to every one, of instituting himself reader and expounder of the sacred text, offered wonderful facilities for the propagation of new ideas. This was one of the great opportunities of Jesus, and the means he most often used in laying down his doctrines. He entered the synagogue and stood up to read; the hazzan gave him the scroll, which he unrolled, and from which he read the lesson of the day. From this reading he evolved some points bearing on his own ideas. As there were few Pharisees in Galilee, the discussion did not assume that degree of animation and that acrimonious tone of opposition which he would have encountered at the very first step at Jerusalem. These good Galileans had never heard a discourse so well adapted to their happy dispositions. They admired him, and they encouraged him; they found that he spoke well, and that his reasonings were convincing. He resolved the hardest questions without any difficulty; the charm of his speech and of his person captivated these ingenuous folk, whose minds had not yet been contaminated by the pedantry of the doctors.

Thus, the authority of the young Master increased daily, and, as a matter of course, the more people believed in him the more he believed in himself. His sphere, however, was limited. It was confined to the basin of the lake of Tiberias, and even here 82there was one locality which he preferred. The lake is five or six leagues long and three or four broad; though it has the appearance of an all but perfect oval, it forms, from Tiberias to the mouth of the Jordan, a sort of gulf, whose curve measures about three leagues. This was the field in which the seed sown by Jesus found at length a congenial soil. Let us run over it step by step, and endeavour to raise the mantle of aridity and of desolation with which the demon of Islamism has covered it.

The first objects we encounter on leaving Tiberias are steep rocks, a mountain which appears to roll into the sea. The mountains then gradually recede, and a plain (El Ghoueir), almost level with the sea, opens out. It is a charming grove of rich verdure, furrowed by the plentiful waters which issue partly from a great round reservoir of ancient construction (Aïn Medawara). On the verge of this plain, which is, strictly speaking, the country of Gennesareth, we find the miserable village of Medjdel. At the opposite side of the plain (always following the lake) we come upon the site of a town (Khan Minyeh) with charming streams (Aïn-et-Tin), a pretty road, narrow and deep, cut out of the rocks, which Jesus certainly often traversed, and which serves as an outlet into the plain of Gennesareth and to the northern slopes of the lake. A mile from this place the traveller crosses a stream of salt water (Aïn Tabiga), issuing from several large springs a few yards from the lake, and entering it through the middle of a dense mass of verdure. After a further journey of forty minutes over the bare slopes which stretch from Aïn Tabiga to the mouth of the Jordan, we at last find some huts and a collection of monumental ruins, called Tell-Houm.

Five small towns (which will be as long spoken of 83by mankind as Rome or Athens) were in the time of Jesus scattered about the space which extends from the village of Medjdel to Tell-Houm. Of these five towns, Magdala, Dalmanutha, Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Chorazin, the first alone can to-day be identified with any certainty. The horrible village of Medjdel has doubtless retained the name and the situation of the little town that gave to Jesus his most faithful friend (Mary Magdalene); Dalmanutha is altogether unknown. Possibly Chorazin was a little more inland, on the north side. As for Bethsaida and Capernaum, conjecture has placed them at Tell-Houm, Aïn-et-Tin, Khan Minyeh, and at Aïn Medawara. In topography, as in history, it might indeed be said that a profound design has sought to conceal the traces of the great founder. It is doubtful whether, upon that wofully devastated soil, we shall ever succeed in fixing the spots whence mankind would gladly flock to kiss the imprints of his feet.

The lake, the horizon, the shrubs, the flowers, are all that remain of the little canton, three or four leagues in extent, where Jesus began his Divine work. The trees have totally disappeared. In this country, where the vegetation was formerly so rich that Josephus saw in it a kind of miracle—Nature, according to him, being pleased to bring forth side by side the plants indigenous to cold countries, the products of the torrid zones, the trees of temperate climates, laden all the year round with flowers and fruits—in this country travellers are now obliged to calculate a day beforehand the place where they will on the morrow find a shady nook to sit down to lunch. The lake has become deserted. A solitary, dilapidated barque now ploughs the waves, formerly the scene of so much activity and of happiness. But the waters are still smooth and transparent. The coast, formed of rocks and pebbles, is indeed 84that of a small sea, not that of a mere pond, like the banks of Lake Huleh. It is clean, neat, mudless, always beaten on the same spot by the gentle waves. There are small clearly-defined promontories, covered with rose laurels, tamarisks, and prickly caper bushes; at two places especially, at the mouth of the Jordan near Tarichea and at the edge of the plain of Gennesareth, there are delightful parterres where the waves ebb and flow over masses of turf and flowers. The Aïn-Tabiga brook forms a little estuary, which is full of pretty shells. Flocks of aquatic birds cover the lake. The sky is dazzling with light. The empyrean blue waters, deeply embedded between glittering rocks, appear, when viewed from the summit of the mountains of Safed, to lie at the bottom of a cup of gold. To the north, the snowy ravines of Hermon are traced in white lines upon the sky; to the west, the high undulating plateaux of Gaulonitis and Peræa, absolutely barren and clothed by the sun with a kind of velvety atmosphere, form one compact mountain, or rather a long high terrace, which runs from Cæsarea-Philippi to the south as far as the eye can reach.

The heat upon the shore is, in summer, very oppressive. The lake occupies a hollow which is over six hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean, and thus is subjected to the torrid conditions of the Dead Sea. A luxurious vegetation tempered in former times these excessive heats. One can hardly understand that a furnace such as the whole lake basin now is, beginning with the month of May, had ever been the scene of marvellous activity. Josephus, however, found the climate very temperate. Undoubtedly, there has been here, as in the Campagna of Rome, some change of climate, attributable to historical causes. It is Islamism, and, above all, the Mussulman reaction against the crusades, which has withered, as with a blast of 85death, the region preferred by Jesus. The beautiful country of Gennesareth did not suspect that within the brain of this peaceful wayfarer were concealed its destinies.

A dangerous compatriot indeed! He has ruined the country which had the insuperable honour of giving him birth. Coveted by two rival fanaticisms, after it had become the object of universal love or hate, Galilee, as the price of its glory, has been changed into a desert. But who will say that Jesus would have been happier if he had lived in obscurity in his own village until he had reached the age of mature manhood? and as for the ungrateful Nazarenes, who would ever think of them if one of their number had not, at the risk of compromising the future prosperity of their town, discovered his Father and proclaimed himself the Son of God ?

At the time of which we speak, four or five large villages, situated about half an hour's walk from one another, formed the little world of Jesus. He seems never to have visited Tiberias, a heathen city, peopled for the most part by Pagans, and the permanent residence of Antipas. Sometimes, however, he wandered forth of his favourite region. For instance, he went by boat along the eastern shore to Gergesa. In the north, we find him at Paneas, or Cæsarea-Philippi, at the foot of Mount Hermon. Moreover, he finally made a journey to Tyre and Sidon, a country which at that time must have been in an exceedingly flourishing condition. In all these countries he was surrounded with Paganism. At Cæsarea he saw the celebrated grotto of Panium, which was considered the source of the Jordan, and around which popular belief had entwined many strange legends; he could admire the marble temple that Herod had erected near there in honour of Augustus; 86he stopped probably before the numerous votive statues erected to Pan, to the Nymphs, to the Echo of the Grotto, which piety had already accumulated in this beautiful spot. The rationalistic Jew, accustomed to look on strange gods for deified men or for demons, had come to consider all these symbolical representations as idols. The attractions of naturalistic worship, which carried away the more sanguine races, did not move him. It is undoubted that he had no knowledge of what the ancient sanctuary of Melkarth at Tyre might still contain of a primitive worship more or less analogous to that of the Jews. Paganism, which, in Phœnicia, had raised on every hill a temple and a sacred grove—outward evidences of great industry and vulgar riches—hardly elicited a smile from him. Monotheism takes away the capacity for understanding Pagan religions. A Mussulman suddenly introduced into polytheistic countries seems to have no eyes. Certainly, Jesus learned little or nothing in these journeys. He always came back to his beloved shores of Gennesareth. His thoughts were centred there, and there he found faith and love.