CHAPTER III.

THE FULNESS OF THE TIME.

WHEN the early Christians maintained that Jesus had come into the world in the fulness of the time, they were not at all thinking of an especially favour able conjunction of affairs in the world, but simply of the termination of that apocalyptic age—the duration of which was unknown to themselves—which God had determined should precede the end of all things. The historian, too, has to exercise the greatest caution in the use that he makes of such statements as to the necessity of any occurrence in history. Even if he can prove in a general way that the conditions favourable to this or that event were present, he has done no more thereby than to point out that the thing was possible in the abstract. For who can say that these conditions were not already present a few decades earlier, or were present in a still more favourable degree a few decades later? By the side of the proof that the age was especially favourable to the spread of the Gospel, it would be possible to advance the counter proof with almost equally cogent arguments that the rapid transformation and decay of Christianity was due to the unfavourable circumstances of the age. It is sufficient 32for our present purpose to draw attention to some especially important characteristics of the position of Judaism in that age, without drawing any conclusions from them beyond what the actual facts warrant.

First, then, we have the facts that throughout the Mediterranean countries we find a type of civilization which was on the whole uniform, and that the Jews were affected by it. This is shown above all by the universal supremacy of the Greek language into which the Old Testament was translated, in which the Jews philosophized, which St. Paul spoke and understood, in which the greatest portion of early Christian literature was written. Community of language implies to a very great extent community of thought. Traces of this community we find in the latest books of the Old Testament, but above all in Alexandrian Judaism. The Jews take possession first of the forms of Greek literature—we even find hexameters in the Sibylline books, then of the conceptions and of the aims and objects of Greek philosophy.

Cosmology and ethics are developed into sciences in the Greek sense of the word; allegory becomes the connecting link between the Jewish word and the Greek spirit. We can already trace the first steps of that Jewish apologetic and criticism which paved the way for their Christian successors. The earliest form of Christianity is little influenced by all this, as long as it does not go beyond the boundaries of Palestine. The Greek spirit had no influence upon Jesus either directly or indirectly. But even the great missionary, who in many ways 33betrayed so anti-Greek, or at least anti-philosophical an instinct, cannot avoid contact with Greek conceptions. The literature of the sub-apostolic age, then, consciously throws the bridge over to the Greek world. Besides this, the guild system, which had grown up amongst the Jews of the dispersion, and was afterwards taken over by the Christians, was a creation of the Greek mind, which managed to bring together again in new combinations the individual atoms that were floating about separately in that great cosmopolitan age, when all old bonds were in process of dissolution.

The mingling of religions was a prominent factor in the civilization of that age. It was effected consciously by the propaganda of the Oriental religions, unconsciously by the strange intermixture of all nations. This, too, was a preparation for Christianity. The only question is whether Christianity had not from the very first partaken of all these foreign elements, since Judaism, from which it had sprung, had been drawn into the process of decomposition. If in reality the Babylonian, Persian, Syrian, Egyptian, and Greek religions had been influencing later Judaism from all the different quarters of this chaos of people, then Christianity would have acquired its character of world-religion even from its very origin.

We are scarcely in a position yet to put these questions, let alone answering them. One thing is certain, that Jesus and His Gospel are intelligible from Judaism alone; and for this, for Jesus and for His relation to Palestinian Judaism, other and more accurate data are available. He appeared in the last 34dying moments of the theocracy and before the exclusive rule of the Rabbis which succeeded it. Here, it is true, it can be affirmed that only a few decades later the origin of Christianity would be inconceivable. The political situation was a decisive factor in this case. The little Jewish people had freed itself from the embrace of the vast surrounding empire in a magnificent struggle for liberty, only soon after to share the fate of every other Mediterranean country and bow the neck beneath the Roman yoke. It retained, however, its hatred of the foreigner and its aspirations for liberty, and consoled itself with the thought of its glorious future. It was these feelings, passions, and Utopias that gave birth to the last terrible insurrection which ended in destruction. Now Christianity arose while the ground was being prepared for this insurrection. In the New Testament itself mention is made of the Zealots, of the murder of the Galileans, of false Christs, all signs of this preparation. Through its most distinctive phrases, ‘Kingdom of God’ and ‘Messiah,’ the Gospel stands in the closest and most direct connection with this period of political ferment. It precedes the judgment of the year 70 A.D., exactly as the old prophecy once preceded the fall of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

In the next place we have to endeavour to present to ourselves the state of feeling among the Jews before Jesus appeared. It was a mysterious and a restless age. True, there was no lack of mercenary souls and of worldlings, who, leaving the future to take care of itself, devoted themselves to deriving what profit and pleasure they could from the passing moment. Jesus 35comes into contact at every step with this materialistic spirit, that knows not the signs of the times. But then besides these there are countless others, expectant, anxious and exultant souls, eagerly longing for the future. There were men and women there ready to sacrifice house and hearth, family and fatherland. It was a great time, pregnant with heroes and martyrs.

All the hopes and longings, the serious earnestness, and the anger that lived in this people, were concentrated in one man—John the Baptist. He was the “fulness of the time” of Jesus. He stirred the masses as no man had done before. His preaching is only handed down to us in the Christian tradition, and therefore we do not know it accurately. The results of his activity were twofold. He suddenly applied the thought of the coming judgment, which lay forgotten and ineffective amidst the great confused mass of eschatological fancies, not to the Gentiles, but to the Jews themselves, and thereby shook their ecclesiastical system to the very foundation. The wrath of God descends upon the children of Abraham; it is of no avail to belong to the sacred people. Thereby in the next place the Baptist set each individual man the anxious question, What shall I do to be saved? This question, with which so many came to Jesus, is very far indeed from being a matter of course for a Jew, and not for a Jew alone. It was the result of the Baptist’s preaching.

Directly, John the Baptist was merely the founder of a sect which succumbed to the influence of the Pharisaic tendency. The entrance to this sect was 36through baptism. Then followed ascetic observances to prepare for the judgment. There had been many movements like this before. The merely negative predominated, and that after all does not lead men out from Judaism. John hurled his decisive ‘nay’ against all the church life of the Jews. Jesus took up the ‘nay’ and added to it His ‘yea.’

Jesus Himself was stirred by John to enter upon His own work. That was the greatest thing that John did.