CHAPTER VIII.

THE LEADERS.

JESUS did not leave His disciples without leaders. During His lifetime He had organized and trained a compact body, a little company, the twelve. By participating in His missionary labours they were to multiply His activity, and when He was not Himself present, they were to take His place. Upon the twelve He had laid the duty of leading the same wandering life as His own. He had given them the authority to preach and to heal which He Himself possessed. He made them sharers in all His rights. “He that receiveth you receiveth Me; he that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me.” It was the twelve who accompanied Jesus when He entered Jerusalem, who received His last commands and were witnesses of His capture.

The first appearance of the risen Master, soon after the first flight of the disciples, fell to Peter, the captain of this company. The second was to all the eleven. We know nothing beyond the bare fact of these appearances; we do not know what words were then heard. The consequences alone are evident: the assembling 118of the company in Galilee, the start for Jerusalem, city of danger and mournful memories, their appearance there with the glad confession of the Messiah.

Round the nucleus of this little company there gathered the former disciples as well as the new adherents. The old name, ‘the twelve,’ gave way to the new official designation, ‘the apostles,’ though it is possible that this did not take place before Greek soil was reached. The chief recommendation of the new name lay in the fact that it could be transferred to the later missionaries as well, but its original meaning was strictly limited: “One who had companied with Jesus in His missionary work, and had been witness of the resurrection.”

Nothing can exceed the significance of the apostles in the history of the development of Christianity. Jesus did not Himself found the Church. He who shattered the institution of the Jewish Church had no understanding for such an organization. But the company of the apostles is His own peculiar creation. He had faith in the power of the word and in the influence of personality. The call of the companions of His mission was the result of this faith. In this call He was not uniformly successful; that is proved by much else besides the one name Judas Ischariot. But, on the whole, the work that He had begun lasted. The foundation of the Church, all the work of consolidating the early community of believers, rests upon the apostles, upon their enthusiasm, their courage and their endurance. Here, again, the saying is proved true, that it is men that make history. The belief in the resurrection, the future 119foundation-stone of Christianity, arose in the circle of the twelve, and here alone.

The apostles were animated by a lofty self-consciousness. They felt themselves to be the representatives of Jesus. They were continuing His work. As ambassadors for Christ, they were ambassadors for God. The new office of mediation between God and man was continued by the apostles. Their manner of life was an extraordinary one, like that of Jesus. Besides their work as missionaries, the twelve had no calling: for their sustenance they depended entirely on the hospitality of the faithful.

But Jesus’ miraculous powers likewise continued effective in the apostles. It came to be universally accepted that an apostle could prove himself such by signs and wonders. Jesus Himself, so it was said, had given them power to tread on serpents and scorpions without danger. As a reward for their faithful services they should sit upon twelve thrones in the future kingdom and judge the twelve tribes of Israel.

In sayings such as these can be traced the glorification of the legend which dates from the earliest times. The self-consciousness of the apostles and the veneration of the disciples helped to complete each other almost from the first. At all events it was counted as an especial privilege of this early time that the twelve were there to lead; the twelve in whom Jesus Himself continued to live.

In spite, however, of all their high authority, there was not the remotest attempt to place the apostles on the same level as Jesus. Subordination to the Master, resting in the feeling that he owes his position 120to Him alone, is the sure sign of an apostle. The apostle is to give nothing of his own, but only that which Jesus has already given. He is to create nothing original: he has simply to hand down that which Jesus has already created. From the very first the apostles were to be the incarnation of the idea of tradition. However much they might differ externally from the rabbis, they were to agree with them in the value they attached to the careful handing down of the sacred tradition, in the one case the oral law, in the other the words of Jesus. Not only were the apostles intended to be this thing, they were this in reality. The messenger is completely lost in the Master. No single original saying of an apostle has been preserved for us, and yet this want of all originality does not diminish their authority in the very slightest; it was looked upon as perfectly natural.

In the Acts they lead a collective life, partly all together, partly two and two. They are merely types; there is no single person. It is true that there were differences enough of temperament, education and culture among them, but, on the whole, they were the representatives of the cause of Jesus; that, and nothing more.

The clearest proof of this is to be found in the way in which they conceived of their calling. It was just to hold firmly to the calling of Jesus. The judgment and the kingdom were near at hand. In spite of the rejection of Jesus on the part of the Jews, which His death involved, the duty of the apostles, after their Master’s death, was to preach repentance to these very Jews, to see whether they might not 121yet be converted in time. It is true that Jesus Himself had passed judgment upon the Temple and upon Jerusalem, in words trenchant and unmistakable. But could it not yet be averted, after all, even in the last hour, if the Jews should turn and repent? Once before, Isaiah’s disciples had tried to avert in the last hour the terrible doom prophesied by him over Judah, by the reform of which our book of Deuteronomy is the witness. The disciples of Jesus made a similar attempt when they set out upon their missionary labours. Jesus had broken entirely with Israel: this they could not grasp. They suffered themselves to be imprisoned, to be ill-treated, to be executed by the Jewish authorities, and proved thereby that Jesus was to them more than all else in the world. But for all that, their own beloved nation was not to be abandoned. And so the picture has a reverse side: foreign mission work makes scarcely any progress in the hands of the twelve. They rejoiced whenever news was brought to them that Gentiles had joined the ranks of the disciples, but they did not go forth themselves. The Messiah was to meet His own again in Israel. We have a clear proof of this in the agreement come to at Jerusalem (Gal. ii.). James, Cephas, John, the pillars of the Church, declare their determination to remain constant to their mission to the Jews. If this is true of the leaders, it is certainly true of all the twelve. They just suffered St. Paul’s work; they did not further it. Truly there is a certain grandeur in the way in which these messengers of Jesus, in spite of all, never wearied of the attempt to win over the very people that persecuted them, and whose rulers showed them such illfavour. It 122was also necessary and salutary that the connection between the old and the new religion should be maintained until the separation could be effected without damage. But progress on the line clearly marked out by Jesus there was none.

By the side of the twelve there early arose an authority of quite a different kind: the brethren, and the whole family of Jesus. While Jesus lived they believed not, or at least they doubted. It was only after His death that they were convinced of their brother’s high calling. He appeared to James. This occurrence immediately secured him and the whole family a place at the head of the new community. Paul speaks of James, the brother of the Lord, once side by side with Peter, another time as a pillar, together with Peter and John, thus making his authority equal to that of an apostle. But that which secured the ‘brethren’ their prerogative was just this tie of relationship, and not the call to the work. The veneration felt for Jesus was transferred quite naturally to His brethren after the flesh, and these again were nothing loth to share in the honour paid to their great brother. The apostles and brethren of the Lord almost became rival powers. We can find traces of a dynasty of Jesus at Jerusalem. After the death of James a cousin of Jesus is chosen to be his successor, and so it goes on, to the great detriment of the new community. The free spirit of Jesus had not descended upon James, nor had he learnt anything from his experience in life. In him the unnatural reversion to Judaism found its leader. Those fanatics who so cowed Peter at Antioch that he refused to eat any longer with the 123Gentile Christians were “certain that came from James.” Fortunately, however, the first generation of Christians was spared such struggles for the succession of the Master as are known to the oldest history of Islam. But while the apostle to the Gentiles represents the upward progress and expansion of Christianity, we have in James the drag on the wheel, the reactionary element.

Both together, apostles and brethren, were the authorities on the side of tradition. By their side the prophets, the representatives of the new ideas, find a place. This place depended upon special psychical gifts and upon religious enthusiasm.

The prophets did not present an entirely new feature in contemporary Jewish life. They had never entirely died out since the age of the Maccabees. A prophet, John, is Jesus’ forerunner. In the story of the birth of Jesus, prophets and prophetesses find a place. Jesus foretells the coming of false prophets, and they appear in great numbers in the period immediately preceding the final insurrection of the Jews. They were the stormy petrels before the coming of the terrible tempest. True, it is possible that the arrival of the Christian prophets on the scene stood in some connection with the first rumblings of that mysterious political movement. But for all that something new does here begin, something unknown to the Judaism of that time. Shortly after the death of Jesus, the pent-up fires of enthusiasm break forth in the community of believers at Jerusalem. That mysterious movement began which, on the one hand, spread, all-powerful, like wildfire amongst the masses, causing the risen Lord to appear to five hundred 124brethren at once, transforming high and low, men and women, into inspired beings; and, on the other hand, caught up single individuals out of their ordinary every day life and drove them out into special forms of activity which often lasted a lifetime. The conception which men then formed of these single individuals—who alone were rightly call prophets—was that which had been held in all ages. A spirit enters into man from without, and from him tells forth God’s message by ecstatic “speaking with tongues,” by intelligible words or by symbolic action. His word then counts as the pure word of God. With reference to the future it is an oracle; with reference to the present, a command.

Both from the Acts of the Apostles and from St Paul’s letters, we see that ‘prophets’ are amongst the distinctive marks of this first age of Christianity. But we learn at the same time that their authority was secondary. That is to say, that the ultimate authority, the foundation, was in all cases the tradition of Jesus. This might be supplemented by the prophetic word, by the spirit, but never transformed. That was a principle which does all honour to the perception of the guiding minds of the new religion. For the spirit which spoke out of the mouths of the prophets was impersonal, vague, and beyond control; all manner of influences and tendencies there competed with the influence of the Jesus of history. It was, after all, the religious impulse in its exclusiveness, for it forced back all other spiritual powers, but at the same time in its arbitrariness, and often in its moral indifference. To make the spirit of the prophets the ultimate authority 125would have been tantamount to subjecting oneself to the whims and fancies of men whose religious nature was powerful while their moral character was immature and undisciplined. It was therefore indeed fortunate that the word of Jesus, handed down by the apostles, was accounted higher than the Spirit, that the master of sane sobriety and temperance kept in check all those waves of exuberant enthusiasm and unrestricted power. Yet even with this restriction—this subjection to the apostles—the influence and significance of the prophets were the greatest that can be conceived. God spoke again. He continued to speak. Once more there were men of God on earth, directly inspired. He that laid hands upon them and blasphemed them committed the sin that should never be forgiven—blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. These prophets are of no great importance for the development of theology, but the history of the mighty religious impulse of the earliest age of Christianity would be unintelligible without them. The spirits of these men are still quivering with all the gladness, restlessness and enthusiasm of Jesus.

But the list of the leaders of the oldest time is far from being complete yet. We come next to the teachers, men likewise filled with the ‘Spirit,’ who, through their spiritual gifts, fathomed the hidden meaning of Holy Scriptures. They are the representatives of the ‘Gnosis,’ i.e. of the right spiritual understanding of the Revelation of God. Thus, Christian theology begins with them. Apollos is the first typical ‘teacher.’ A great future awaits them. Furthermore, there are the mysterious seven deacons. Stephen and Philip belonged to them. 126They were all Hellenists, and, as it appears, originally representatives of the Hellenists in Jerusalem.

Then there were apostles of the second rank, missionaries like Barnabas, Judas, and Silas, chosen by the Churches and sent forth by them or by the twelve as their delegates. As time went on and the twelve died one after the other, these apostles in the wider sense of the word stepped into their place. Lastly, there were the heads of the different Churches, called presbyters or bishops. They, too, were chosen on the ground of spiritual qualifications and by the voice of the Spirit. But their position, on the whole, was entirely subordinate to that of the itinerant leaders into whose hands the Spirit placed the supreme authority over the whole infant Church that was now just coming into being. These presbyter bishops did not then dream of the position of dignity to which they were destined later to attain.

Look where you will, there is nowhere a want of leaders; it is rather the superabundance, the too great variety in the body of officers, that strikes one. There would appear to be no one man in supreme command, no one to dominate all these different spiritual forces and carry on the work of Jesus without hesitation or confusion. There is indeed something marvellous in the sight—so soon after the death of Jesus—of this great organized host of able, enthusiastic, and courageous men all engaged heart and soul in the work of preserving for the world their Master’s in heritance. The cause of Jesus cannot fail.