A HISTORY OF NEW TESTAMENT TIMES IN PALESTINE, 175 BC-70 AD

CHAPTER VI

THE MESSIANIC HOPE AND JESUS THE MESSIAH

As something definitely expected, the kingdom of God was the slow outgrowth of the successive periods of misfortune which characterized the entire history of the Jewish people. Before the Persian period its faith had always looked to a regenerate Israel brought to greatness by Jehovah. Sometimes this faith grew specific, and saw with Isaiah and Jeremiah a miserably divided people reunited under the house of David, but oftener with Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Nahum, Obadiah, Joel, and Malachi, it dealt with national prosperity without naming the human king. The exile deepened the nation's consciousness of its peculiar relations with Jehovah, and with the return of the most devoted of its members there came a deepening of the hope that Israel would become a world power, directly ruled by God. But it was short-lived. The rise of the priestly class and of that practical spirit which finds expression in literature like Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus, left little room for the idealism of faith. When, however, the misery of religious perse­cution awoke the Chasidim to a fuller realization of their need of Jehovah and to a new prophetic era, the Kingdom became again an object of religious interest. In this revival any hope of a specially appointed king—a Messiah—appeared but incidentally. Daniel’s Son of Man was even less an individual than had been the Servant of Jehovah—nothing more than a type of the kingdom of the saints that should arise from the revolt against Syrian oppression. But shortly afterward there came also an increasing belief that none but an Anointed of God could lead the Jewish people into their great future. The authors of the earlier chapters in Enoch and the Sibylline Oracles foresaw a man as well as a kingdom, and it has already appeared that the Pharisees, after their bitter disappointment at the course taken by the Asmonean house, still looked for the “Son of David”, who should be “a just king taught of God”. In this descent the two rival schools of Shammai and Hillel agreed. However they might differ as to the character of the Messiah,—whether, as the school of Shammai would say, he was to sweep away the Romans by the breath of his mouth, or, as the followers of Hillel believed, he was to be a prince of peace,—in either case he was to be from the branch of David. And of his kingdom of pious Jews there was to be no end.

In its essential elements this progressive conception was practically complete by the first century of our era. The rabbis were, it is true, to meet their Christian opponents and the fearful disillusions of history with new teachings, but they did little more than elaborate and supplement the older ideal with a suffering Messiah and a profusion of eschatological details. Thus, the Messianic hope, both as regards the kingdom and the Christ, was born of national misfortunes, and was cherished by those who dared to hope and trust Jehovah for a brighter future. It was no philosophy. It was a part of a national spirit, from the days of Alexandra growing more intense. Above all was it the possession of the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Zealots. Yet it can hardly have been limited to them. The history of the Messianic movement begun by John, as well as the occurrences under the later procurators, make it clear that the masses also looked forward to a new and divine Jewish kingdom to be established by someone especially appointed (anointed) by God for the purpose. The Sadducees alone seem not to have shared in the hope.

It is naturally difficult to reproduce exactly and in detail this national expectation as it appeared among so many groups of men. The literature which has survived was probably that of but one or two schools of religionists, and the hope of the masses has to be reconstructed from incidental statements and allusions. Speaking generally, however, the hope took two expressions,—that of literature and that of popular feeling. In one thing, however, both agreed—the kingdom of God was to be a kingdom of Jews. All other people were to be its subjects or proselyted citizens. Of a kingdom in any other sense there is no trace, either in Pharisaic literature or in popular expectations, for whenever its subjects are said to be “the righteous” or “the sons of God”, the context excludes a broader interpretation. But at this point divergence begins. There were those who expected some specially appointed hero, and others who apparently awaited no individual Messiah. Some expected the kingdom to be established politically in the world as they knew it; others in despair of earthly success awaited some fearful cataclysm that should presage a kingdom of risen saints.

The Messianic hope, as it appears in literature, is varied, if not inconsistent, in its details. If, however, we disregard all late rabbinical elements; it is possible to present it in its main outline. The advent of the kingdom of God was not only to be heralded by the return of Elijah, and possibly other prophets, but it was to be preceded by a period of fearful suffering, especially within Jerusalem. Nature itself would abound in awful portents, the moon and the sun turning to blood, the stars falling from their courses. The Messiah would suddenly appear—whence no one knew, perhaps from Bethlehem, perhaps from Jerusalem, perhaps—though this is probably a later conjecture—from Rome. When he should come none knew, although the rabbis endeavored to set the day by ingenious calculations. With the Messiah’s coming would begin a last fierce war and judgment, in which the enemies of the Jews and all the evil angels would be destroyed, God himself being the judge.

With this judgment “this age” would end, and “the age to come” would begin. The new kingdom would be set up in Jerusalem, which itself would be renovated by the Messiah, if, indeed, a new Jerusalem did not descend from heaven. Peace would then spread over the world, the Dispersion would be recalled, and the righteous dead be raised from their graves to join the kingdom centered in, but by no means limited to, Palestine. God then would take over the kingdom, now as holy as glorious.

The character of the Messiah himself as expected by the Pharisees is somewhat indistinct, because of no attempt on their part to present it systematically. With the Word of Alexandrine Stoicism and the Memra of rabbinism, the Messiah had little in common. He was, it will be recalled, rather an ideal king who should be God’s agent in the establishment of his kingdom. This ideal was never so elaborated as to predicate divine qualities of the Messiah. Once or twice he was ascribed preexistence, but so far as the earlier rabbinism is concerned this was probably only ideal in the purpose of God, rather than personal. His titles, “Son of Man”and “Son of God” are seldom used, and his true character is to be seen in such titles as “King”, “Anointed”, “Son of David”. He was, in fact, most likely thought of as a human king, especially chosen and fitted by God for establishing his kingdom, and as one who should after its consummation surrender it to his Lord.

If this be the literary and most refined Messianic hope, and especially if, as seems altogether probable, the hopes set forth in the Book of Enoch are those only of a narrow if not esoteric group, it is not difficult to imagine, even without the few hints of the gospels and Josephus, what the hope was among the masses. They, too, expected a new kingdom for Israel, but without waiting upon some conquest of righteousness. Repentance was but a means of escaping the punishment of the Judge. The Anointed of God would be no hero to overcome with “the word of his mouth”, but a warrior under whose leadership the Jews would surely “tread upon the neck of the eagle”. Rabbinical refinements, panaceas of eschatological visions, were thrust one side. The Christ would work miracles, but only when he had summoned Jews to arms.

Jesus

It is precisely this aspect of the religious development of Judaism that offers the best point of view for understanding the movement inaugurated by Jesus of Nazareth. To discuss his work as a teacher of personal religion would carry us too far from our present study of the history of the Jews as a nation; but as a Jew transforming Judaism he cannot be over­looked. Like the Pharisees, Jesus found in the kingdom of God his highest ideal, but unlike them he deliberately refused to see in it anything political or ethnic; and while the Pharisees taught men to await it, Jesus urged men to join it as something already among them. Nor was it something outside the sphere of ethics. Far otherwise, it presupposed moral strenuousness, for one must strive to enter it. And, above all, he set himself forth as its founder—the Messiah.

It is very little that we know of Jesus outside his founding of the Messianic kingdom. He was a Galilean, though born in Bethlehem (6-5 BC). He was of Davidic descent, although he never appealed to this fact in the endeavor to win followers, and distinctly repudiated the rabbinical notions which had gathered about the term “Son of David”. He learned his father’s trade of carpentry and probably followed it until he began his public work. It is possible that before his public life he had won some local reputation as a pious and comparatively educated man, who, superficially judged, was in sympathy with Pharisaism of the less rigorous type. Of his inner life during these years of obscurity we can infer little except that he was an independent and profound student of the Hebrew Scriptures, a reader of other Jewish literature, and above all a man in a unique and utterly unparalleled degree at one with a God whom from his boyhood he knew as Father.

Both from his surroundings and his own nature, he must have been increasingly concerned with the kingdom of God. Yet the first steps in the actual Messianic movement which bears his name were not taken by him. In fact, up to the very beginning of his public career he appears to have had no suspicion that his sense of divine sonship would necessitate his abandonment of his quiet life in Nazareth. His awakening was occasioned by John the Baptist—a product of the extreme ascetic religious spirit that always existed sporadically among the Jews, and altogether a different man from Jesus. In the garb of the poorest fellah John appeared suddenly among the effeminate inhabitants of the Jordan valley near Jericho, and gave his startling message. The day of Jehovah was at hand! The Christ was about to appear to sit in judgment upon all men! There was no time to be lost, and he summoned men and women to be bathed in the Jordan as evidence of their abandoning their sins in hopes of avoiding the punishment of the approaching Judge. His conceptions of the Kingdom differed from those of the Pharisees and Essenes, in that with him Jewish birth counted but little; but his words ran like wild­fire among a people eager to believe that their hopes were to be fulfilled. Penitents came to him in crowds from Judea and Perea. As he worked northward the news of his work reached Nazareth, and Jesus, recognizing in him a messenger of God, went to be baptized.

In the very water his duty burst upon him like a voice from God. He was to be the Messiah whom John, in ignorance, had foretold. He, and he alone, must found the kingdom of God.

In one way, the task was easy. He had but to accommodate himself to the hope of his people, win over Pharisee and populace by an appeal to national pride, organize a state. That such a plan would have succeeded is made almost certain by the subsequent career of Mohamet in almost the same region and among a people inferior to the Jews. But over against this current ideal of the kingdom lay the ideal of Jesus himself: of a new social order, in which God should reign, and men should do his will; in which men should be sons of God, and, therefore, brothers of each other. And he chose to establish this ethical and religious fraternity, though he saw that the attempt, so similar to those of the prophets of his race, would almost certainly bring him to their fate. Over against conquest and worldwide supremacy he chose love and self-sacrifice.

His method was at once simple and farsighted. From the start, the movement was Messianic, but Jesus was more concerned to show that the Messiah was such as he, than to show that he was the Messiah. In other words, like a prophet, rather than a rabbi, he used current hopes in the service of ethics and religion. His effort was also social. Thanks to John, who believed him to be the Christ, Jesus immediately found himself the centre of a little group of common people—'am haarets—who accepted him as the Christ of popular expectation. Perhaps because of this fact, the first few months of the new movement were filled with work similar to that of John, and men were summoned to repentance and baptism. These months were spent in Judea, but proximity to John exposed each Messianic movement to danger and Jesus returned to Galilee. There, when John had been imprisoned, he began his great work of evangelization, philanthropy, and the education of his closest friends, and it is of his life among the Galileans that we know most from the gospels.

Of his teaching during these months, we cannot speak. It is enough to say that, as the founder of the kingdom of God, he did not commit himself to either Pharisaic or popular Messianic hopes. For a considerable time he was less interested in being accepted as the Messiah than in showing men the requisites of membership in the Messianic kingdom. He seldom, if ever, used the term “Christ” with reference to himself, and commonly spoke of himself as “the Son of Man”, which, though Messianic in Enoch, apparently had little or no such content in the thoughts of the people at large. For this very reason, it was a most serviceable term. In its original force in Daniel it presented a man as the type of a “kingdom of the saints”, as beasts were the types of other kingdoms. By using it, Jesus could clearly and without precipitating any disturbance, set forth a distinct ideal of membership in the kingdom of God, for the word would suggest to every Jew the simple typology of Daniel, and Jesus would thus stand as the type of the kingdom he announced. His character should be that of its members. For, as the Messiah, he was something more than a teacher—he was a Life. It was his consciousness of divine sonship that had led him to undertake the Messianic work of establishing God’s kingdom, and it was the same consciousness that gave him his power of inspiring a few men with an undying loyalty to himself. As a teacher of ethics, he could do little more than restate, though with astonishing simplicity and force, the great principles already taught by the Hebrew prophets; but as the Messiah, he founded the kingdom of God, by compelling men who could not understand him or his ideals to love him, and grow to be like him, the ideal of the kingdom.

From the beginning of his preaching in Galilee, Jesus was a popular hero. His sweetness of temper, the authority and attractiveness in his teaching, his undisguised sympathy with the despised masses, his superiority to his religious superiors, his philanthropy, the very mystery in his Messianic character—all brought thousands to him. But he did not exploit his popularity. He once retired to the hills when the crowds were on the point of making him a leader of revolution, and repeatedly he endeavored to escape their presence. Nor did he attempt to win everybody to himself. In his teachings he seems occasionally to magnify difficulties that he might dissuade any half­hearted person from joining the group of his immediate friends.

The beginning of opposition to Jesus.

To the members of this never very numerous, though by no means small, circle he showed his ideals as rapidly as they could appreciate them, and thus developed their better natures without destroying prematurely their old beliefs. By degrees one thing grew true of them all—they grew less devoted to Pharisaic supremacy. Jesus, it is true, was always loyal to the pre-Pharisaic faith of his people, the temple and its services, the Law in its broader teachings, and even to professional teachers. But with Pharisaism as a system he broke entirely. To him righteousness was an affair of motive and inner character, and religion as he knew it and lived it was not a keeping of traditional laws, but a life with God, and his opposition to the heartless pedantry that so often was the ideal of Pharisaism grew intense. By degrees his disciples came to take the same position, and almost before they could appreciate it, the Pharisees found themselves confronting a popular movement, which, if successful, would end fasting as a religious duty, make the Sabbath observance vastly less strict, abolish the distinction between clean and unclean things altogether, make stricter all teachings as to marriage and divorce, lessen the influence of the oral Law, give new importance to the masses and less to the professional classes, destroy the ultra-national character of the expected kingdom,—a movement which, in a word, would undo most of the political and social development which had made them the popular leaders. That a struggle should have ensued was inevitable. The very foundations of society seemed threatened.

The attack came from the rabbis of Jerusalem, and was not upon the new fraternity, but upon Jesus himself. It passed rapidly through the several stages of suspicion, hatred, and conspiracy. As long as Jesus was in Galilee, it is true, his popularity among the 'am haarets, as well as the distance from Jerusalem, kept his opponents from inflicting upon him the punishment due to heretics, but they hindered his public work in the country, and at last forced him to leave Galilee altogether.

Before they succeeded even this far, however, Jesus had a few months—or rather, perhaps, weeks—in which he conducted an indefatigable canvass of Galilee. His kingdom was not to be an institution, but a fraternity, as broad as human life. Choosing twelve men from the many who believed in him,—a belief that was only imperfect in his Messiahship, but complete in his ability to teach truth and work cures,—he sent them out to announce the coming kingdom to villages he could not himself visit. But their efforts were apparently not often repeated, and he preferred to keep them with him that their ideas as to him and his fraternity might be clarified.

When at last he was forced to leave Galilee these men went with him, first into the neighboring regions of Tyre and Sidon, then into the heathen Decapolis, and finally into Perea and Judea. It was at the beginning of these few months of wanderings, half as fugitives and half as teachers, that Jesus brought his twelve followers to see clearly that despite all the opposition of the Pharisees and the startling differences between his life and their own expectations, he was yet the Christ. From the moment of their confession of a faith which if incomplete was larger and more intelligent than when they had first joined him, he unfolded to them the suffering he saw must be the outcome of the opposition of their religious leaders, and for which as a final test their faith must be prepared. He himself did not waver in either purpose or teaching, and when in the spring of 29 he and the twelve other young men went up to the Passover, it was with the purpose of publicly announcing himself as the Christ. With this end in view, during the last few days in his life, he performed a number of acts expected of the Messiah. Thus, he rode into the city on an ass, accepting the shouts of those who hailed him as the Son of David; he cleansed the temple; he defined Messiahship. But all was in vain. His very popularity, which suddenly blazed up as if in Galilee itself, increased his danger. So far from being only an heretical Galilean lay preacher, he appeared an incipient, if not an open, revolutionist. His persistent effort to be understood as unpolitical was overlooked. The Sadducees joined with the Pharisees in planning to put him out of the way. It was better, the high priest said, that one man should die than that the nation should perish. Jesus knew his danger, but still lingered in Jerusalem to eat the Passover of his people, and, if possible, win over the crowds of religionists to his conception of the real kingdom of God. For he saw clearly to what political death the popular conception would lead the nation. Secure in his belief that his Father yet had work for him to do, and protected by the presence of his Galilean friends, he went openly about the capital, and openly attacked the Pharisees and rabbis because of their elevation of the unimportant over the essential elements of religion. Yet it is probable he would have returned to Galilee in safety had he not been betrayed by one of the twelve. During the night after the Passover he was suddenly arrested. Early the next morning he was tried and condemned at an irregular meeting of the Sanhedrin. The Sadducean priests were especially insistent, and finally the procurator, Pontius Pilate, was induced to approve the sentence as a political necessity. Jesus was crucified as a revolutionist and buried before night. 

Had he been simply a teacher, the story would probably have to stop here. But he had done more than teach—he had founded the kingdom of God, and its members, then in Jerusalem, though few in number, remained together, and not being molested by the city officials, waited, they knew not what. And then on the Sunday after the Friday on which Jesus had been buried began a series of experiences, which, were they not well attested, it would be impossible to believe. For not one or two, but many—even hundreds—maintained they saw Jesus again, no longer dead, but living gloriously, “the first fruits of those who slept”.

Then, better than before, though still but incompletely, did they appreciate the significance of his life and death as parts of his Messianic work, and, after a few weeks spent at Jerusalem, they began the task of converting their nation. But Jesus was no longer the humble, neglected teacher. He was a man anointed of God with the Holy Ghost, and shown to be the Christ by having been raised from the dead But at once the influence of their old Messianic hopes was felt. Jesus himself during the last days of his life had made some use of the eschatological elements of the older hope, and these the disciples now seized upon almost to the exclusion of all else. The kingdom had not yet come, but would appear suddenly. Jesus was, indeed, the Messiah; but his proper Messianic work would not begin until his second coming, this time in glory in the clouds of heaven. The group of disciples, now growing rapidly, no longer was thought of as a kingdom that, however small, would yet, like leaven, transform all society; but as a congregation, a community of men and women engaged in preparing themselves by a holy life to welcome their Lord at his appearing, and then to reign with him in glory indescribable.

The two Messianic Hopes

And thus out of a Judaism, at once legalistic and idealistic, there sprang a movement which, though not abandoning either Mosaism or Pharisaism, supplemented both by a passionate belief that the Messiah had appeared, that the preparation for his final coming in judgment was moral and ethical, and that the great Messianic kingdom was at any moment to be established by the very Jesus whom the Jews had in their ignorance crucified. From the day of Jesus, the Jewish people were thus to cherish two ideals of the kingdom of God—that of the Pharisee and Zealot and that of the Christian. Each ideal had its future, but so far as we know, Jesus was the one person who foresaw what these futures would be. His lamentations over the cities of Galilee and Jerusalem were prophecies of the inevitable outcome of the rejection of the future he might have given Judea, as certainly as, through his followers, he has made Christian people the arbiters of the world. For the Messianism of Pharisee and Zealot was to bring the Jewish nation to its end.

HEROD AGRIPPA I AND HEROD AGRIPPA II

The early years of Christianity had little or no influence upon Judaism. The community of those who accepted Jesus as the Messiah, the church, remained loyal to the temple and the synagogue, and was in fact a sect of the Jews. But before any considerable time had passed there sprang up within the church a new group headed by Stephen, one of seven men chosen to relieve the twelve of a part of their rapidly increasing work. This group saw that if Jesus really were the Christ, Judaism was no longer final, and with this conviction its members attacked the exclusiveness of Pharisaism in much the same spirit as Jesus himself. As might have been expected, Judaism was enraged. Stephen met his Master’s fate, and there broke out a fierce attack upon the new sect. This persecution, however, but intensified the Christians’ zeal, and wherever they were scattered they organized new communities. The persecution was doubtless Sadducean in part, but its chief agent was a Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus. In him religious persecution had its most conscientious agent, and Judaism its most consistent representative. Yet when the persecution was at its height Saul himself was converted, and immediately took Stephen’s position more distinctly than had Stephen himself. Although his first work is not clearly recorded, it seems that from the moment of his conversion he saw that others than Jews would share in the Messianic kingdom, and that therefore the good news should be preached to them. His work as a result lay outside of Palestine, and the churches of Jerusalem and Judea remained Jewish, the mass of their members as devoted to the oral Law as before their acceptance of Jesus as the Christ. None the less, the religious authorities of Judea seem to have been suspicious of them, even if persecution for a time was stilled.

While thus the new fraternity was spreading in all directions, the history of Palestinian Judaism developed along the lines already set by Pharisaism. The administration of Pilate was brought to a close by events that very well represent the power of the rabbis. As if in imitation of Jesus, there appeared a prophet in Samaria who promised to reveal the hiding place of the sacred vessels Moses was believed to have buried on Mount Gerizim. The Samaritans assembled in large numbers in answer to his call, all with arms. Pilate, fearing a revolt, attacked the gathering, killing and imprisoning many of the crowd. Thereupon the Samaritans complained to Vitellius, then on a special mission to Syria, and by him Pilate was compelled to go to Rome for trial, Marcellus being made procurator in his stead.

The downfall of Pilate is only one evidence of the more friendly attitude of Rome toward Judea that characterized the later years of Tiberius. Even before this event Pilate had been obliged by the emperor, in answer to the urgent petition of the sons of Herod, to take down some votive shields he had hung up in the royal palace at Jerusalem. Vitellius now apparently attempted still further to conciliate the Jews. He attended the Passover at Jerusalem, where he remitted taxes upon the sale of fruit, and gave up the high priests’ robes, which, since the beginning of the procuratorial administration, partly because of an ancient custom, partly as a sort of pledge of good conduct, had been honorably kept by the Romans in the castle of Antonia. He still kept control of the appointment of high priests, however, but probably used it also in such a way as to please the people. A further act of conciliation was shown, when, in his expedition against Petra, he marched through Esdraelon and Perea, rather than carry his standards through Judea.

The death of Tiberius enabled Caligula to do Pharisaism an even greater service by appointing Herod Agrippa, son of Aristobulus, and grandson of Herod I, as king over what had been the tetrarchy of Philip as well as the small tetrarchy of Lysanias (37 AD).

Agrippa I

The account of this man’s life reads like a romance. Educated, like the other Herodian princes, in Rome, he had there acquired the habits of the early empire, and at the age of forty found himself in disfavor with Tiberius, bankrupt, and a fugitive from his creditors. He succeeded in reaching Palestine, where he shut himself up in a tower on the border of the southern desert, and would have committed suicide had it not been for his energetic wife, Cypros. As a last resort she went to Agrippa’s sister, Herodias, who had already married Herod Antipas, and through her obtained from the tetrarch the appointment of Agrippa as superintendent of markets in Tiberias. Such a humiliating position could not long satisfy the man, and, because of a quarrel over their cups, Agrippa left his uncle-brother-in-law to get aid from his friend Flaccus, the propraetor of Syria. With him he remained until his brother, Aristobulus, detecting him accepting bribes from the citizens of Damascus, reported him to Flaccus, who forced the unhappy man again out upon his wanderings. Reduced to the last extremities, Agrippa determined to go once more to Italy. With the aid of his freedman, Maesgas, he succeeded in borrowing a considerable sum of money and started for Egypt, barely escaping arrest for debt as he was leaving Anthedon. At Alexandria he borrowed a much larger sum from the brother of Philo on his wife’s credit, and thus equipped, sent his family back to Judea, while he went on to Rome. There he became intimate with Caius, who, with all the empire, was waiting impatiently for Tiberius to die. Unfortunately Agrippa expressed this desire before a charioteer who, in revenge for some injury, repeated it to the old emperor, and Agrippa was promptly thrown into chains. He was not released until Caius was finally seated as emperor. Once appointed king he seems to have spent much of his time in Rome, where his friendship with the emperor won him also the territories of the unlucky Herod Antipas (39 AD), and enabled him to render the Jews service at an important crisis.

The accession of the mad Caligula was an occasion for a new outburst of anti-semitism, and Agrippa was unintentionally its occasion. For his presence in Alexandria was made the occasion for a considerable outbreak against the Jews, who would not join with the other provincials in paying divine honors to the emperor. The Jewish quarter was pillaged, men and women abused, and statues of Caligula were placed in the synagogues. The governor of Alexandria had even taken from the Jews the rights of citizenship in the city. The outbreak finally became a genuine persecution, and the Jews appealed to the emperor. But their embassy, although headed by Philo himself, accomplished nothing; for Caligula, instead of listening to their petition, asked them why they would not eat pork! At the same time, the monomania of Caligula as to his divinity, brought even more serious difficulties upon Judea itself. The heathen citizens of Jamnia erected an altar to the emperor, and the Jewish citizens immediately destroyed it. The deed was reported to the emperor, and immediately he gave orders to have his statue erected in the temple at Jerusalem, and Petronius, the legate of Syria, was sent with a strong force to see that the command was fulfilled. The Jews were overwhelmed with despair, and begged Petronius to kill them rather than do their temple the indignity. Fortunately, the legate was a considerate man, and at the request of Agrippa and other prominent Jews in various ways delayed the fulfillment of the order until he had personally appealed to Caligula. Agrippa was himself in Rome when the legate’s letter arrived, and was able, at a banquet, to win from the emperor a reversal of the command. Petronius, however, was directed to commit suicide, but escaped his fate through the assassination of the emperor.

Claudius 

With the accession of Claudius (41 AD), a new era seemed to open for the Jews. Singularly enough, Claudius was under considerable obligation to Agrippa for his elevation to the empire, and promptly met it by giving him all the territory that had belonged to Herod I, together with the right to appoint the high priests. In addition hegave Agrippa’s brother, Herod, the little kingdom of Chalcis, returned to the Jews of Alexandria their old privileges, and extended equal rights to Jews throughout the empire (41 AD).

This revival of the kingdom of Judea, under an Asmonean-Herodian, gave a new impulse to Judaism. Far more than his grandfather, Agrippa, though by no means unfriendly to Hellenism, was regardful of his subjects’ religious convictions. From the first he observed the customs and ceremonies enforced by Pharisaism; lived in Jerusalem; kept all portraits off the coinage of Jerusalem; guarded the sanctity of Jewish synagogues, even in Phoenicia; appointed an acceptable high priest; compelled a prospective son-in-law to be circumcised; and himself took part in the services of the temple, where he was saluted by the people as their true brother. He also attacked Christianity, killing James and arresting Peter. There are even indications that he had ambitions to build up Judea into the head of a confederacy of allied kingdoms, for he strengthened the fortifications of Jerusalem greatly, and would undoubtedly have made the city impregnable had Claudius not commanded him to stop the work. He also held a conference of five kings at Tiberias, although this was broken up by the legate of Syria before it had accomplished anything.

Yet, while thus careful to maintain the best relations with his people, Agrippa was enough of a Herodian to be fond of the amusements of the Greco-Roman world. One of his coins, struck by Gaza, represents a temple of Mama, and at Berytus (Beirut) he built baths, colonnades, a theatre, and an amphitheatre, at the opening of which fourteen hundred criminals were made to slaughter each other. He also celebrated games at Caesarea, in honor of the emperor. It was, in fact, at these games that he was suddenly struck down by a mysterious and fatal disease, just as he had allowed his courtiers to address him as a god (44 AD).

With his death the second short halcyon age of Judaism closed. It had been the first intention of Claudius to make Agrippa II, the only son of Agrippa I, then a boy of seventeen years, king in his father’s place; but his court had persuaded him to do otherwise, and for a short time the entire kingdom of Judea was under a procurator. Agrippa, however, was soon to enjoy something of the good fortune that belonged to his house. The procurator, Fadus, though clearing Judea of robbers, had marked the return of a Roman administration by seizing the vestment of the high priest, and putting it again into the castle of Antonia, where it might be under his control, as it had been under that of the earlier procurators. The Jews bitterly resented the act, and with the consent of Fadus, and Longinus, the propraetor of Syria, they sent an embassy to Claudius, asking that the vestments be left in their own keeping. Agrippa lent his influence to the petition, and was able to gain a favorable decision from the emperor. As a further proof of his regard, Claudius gave Agrippa, in the eighth year of his reign (49-50 AD), the kingdom of Chalcis, which had belonged to his uncle, Herod. With this little kingdom went the authority over the temple and the sacred money, as well as the right to appoint the high priest, all of which Herod had obtained from Claudius. About this time Agrippa was again of great service to the Jews in bringing about the acquittal of the high priest Ananias, and Ananus the commander of Jerusalem, both of whom Cumanus had sent to the imperial court, under the charge of fomenting rebellion. In 53 AD he exchanged the kingdom of Chalcis for the tetrarchy of Philip, to which were added, by Nero, portions of Perea and Galilee, including, among others, the city of Tiberias. A much weaker man than his father, Agrippa II maintained friendships with Pharisee and heathen alike, but succeeded in winning considerable favor from the rabbis themselves. Yet his long reign (50-100) resulted in nothing of importance, and when the Jew and Roman were at last at war, Agrippa II was found fighting against his countrymen.

THE FALL OF JUDEA AND THE RISE OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

  With the death of Agrippa I there began a series of procurators who, with the exception of Fadus, were worthy representatives in Judea of emperors like Claudius and Nero in Rome. Yet under Fadus, Judaism seemed to enjoy nearly the same privileges as under Agrippa I, for although he attempted at first to control the vestments of the high priest, he readily allowed the matter to be adjudicated. During his administration, also, Queen Helena, of Adiabene, visited the city, sent it provisions in time of famine, and finally was buried just outside its walls. But under him began the succession of disturbances that led directly to the great outbreak in 66 AD. The nation was filled with Messianic hopes and at one time a certain Theudas promised to divide the Jordan and to lead his followers across it to some unknown blessings. Fadus dispersed the crowd and beheaded Theudas, but brought no quiet to the country. Under Alexander, the next procurator, who, though a nephew of Philo, had abandoned Judaism, the two sons of that Judas of Galilee who had led the revolt at the time of the taxing under Quirinius, were crucified, probably for some attempt at insurrection. Under Cumanus a terrible massacre of Jews took place at the Passover, as a punishment for their rioting, because of a soldier’s indecent insult to the temple. Another riot, due to another soldier’s abuse of some sacred books, was prevented only by the execution of the offender. At another time, as the Galileans were going up to the Passover through Samaria, they were attacked near Ginea (Jenin) by the Samaritans. As Cumanus had been bribed not to punish the offenders, a body of Jews under Eleazar and Alexander, two “robbers”, burned several Samaritan villages and killed their inhabitants. Cumanus, in turn, fell upon the invaders, killing some and imprisoning others. The matter was then carried to Quadratus, legate of Syria, and by him to Claudius. Thanks to the influence of Agrippa II the Jews won their case, and Cumanus was banished; Felix, the brother of the notorious Pallas, being sent as procurator in his stead.

Under Felix the rebellious elements of Jewish life became even more evident, and the country was disturbed by Zealots and impostors who persuaded crowds to follow them into the wilderness where they promised to work signs by the power of God. How far these men represented some turbulent Messianism it is not possible to say, but doubtless to a considerable extent. One prophet in particular, an Egyptian, seems to have posed as a sort of Messiah, for he gathered a great crowd upon the Mount of Olives, promising to make the walls of Jerusalem fall. Felix scattered the mob, but the Egyptian himself escaped. The disturbances, however, were repeated, and Felix was constantly compelled to disperse crowds of men, “clean in their hands”, who were looking for divine deliverance. In addition there were the bands of “robbers”, in whom, because of their popularity, it is easy to see revolutionists rather than mere bandits. One of their leaders, Eleazar, maintained himself for twenty years. Felix captured great numbers of these men, crucifying some and sending others to Rome, but was unable to destroy the movement. Instead, the feeling of the people grew the more intense. Bands of Zealots ranged through the country, urging men to revolt, plundering the well-to-do citizens, killing and burning. At the same time bands of Sicarii—men who carried daggers under their clothes—began an almost systematic assassination of their enemies, beginning with the high priest, whose death was also desired by the procurator himself.

Had Felix been a strong governor or a good man, this incipient anarchy might have been checked, but he lost the respect of his subjects as much by the laxity of his life as by the bursts of severity with which he punished all offenders. The country grew full of unrest and violence, of high priests quarrelling with the lower priests, or Jews quarrelling with heathen, of humble people eager to join in a revolt, and when Felix was recalled by Nero, he left a country which though legally enjoying exceptional privileges, had been excited by its fanatical citizens into incipient rebellion (60-61 AD).

Paul and the procurators.

The successor of Felix was Porcius Festus [60(61)-62], a man of good intentions, but whose untimely death forbade his short administration’s leaving any permanent good effects. Like Felix, he was compelled to deal with the Sicarii and with an impostor who promised his followers deliverance from their miseries if they would but follow him into the wilderness.

Both Felix and Festus are of especial interest from the fact that Paul—the Saul of earlier days—was brought before them on charges preferred by the authorities of Jerusalem. He had been arrested in the temple on the false charge of having brought Gentiles beyond their court; had been nearly killed by the mob, and nearly tortured by the Roman centurion as one of the numerous impostors. After a trial before the Sanhedrin, he had been sent down to Caesarea to protect him from a band of Sicarii who had vowed to kill him. Neither Felix nor Festus could find any ground on which to keep him in prison, beyond the general hostility of the Jews and the possibility that he might be another agitator. Festus proposed to take him up to Jerusalem again for trial, but Paul appealed to Caesar and accordingly was sent to Home shortly after the arrival of Festus. It is noteworthy that beyond the case of Paul, the Christians do not seem to have attracted the attention of the procurators.

The successor of Festus was one Albinus (62-64), but he did not reach Judea until several months after the death of Festus. During this interregnum, the high priest Ananus, the second of the name, a noble man and a persistent enemy of Zealotry, to which he at last fell a victim, undertook to clear the country of dangerous characters. He therefore seized James the brother of Jesus, and after having had him tried by the Sanhedrin, caused him to be stoned. Agrippa, however, deposed Ananus after a pontificate of only three months, and the national unrest was left without an enemy. While the Pharisees were ready to abide by their legal rights, the anti-Roman feeling grew more intense among the Zealots. The Sicarii constantly kidnapped the servants of the high priest in order to compel their master to bring about by exchange the release of some of their own number then in prison, and not content with this ravaged the whole country. Rival high priests engaged in miniature civil war. Desperate members of the nobility turned robbers, and to cap all, Albinus, who seems to have received bribes by the wholesale, in order to gain favor with the Jews when once he learned he was to be removed, sold their freedom to all Jews who had been imprisoned on trifling charges, killed the others, and left the jails empty. And in the midst of all this disorder we find Levites petitioning Agrippa to let them wear the robes of priests, and Agrippa permitting the priests to use the temple treasures to pave the entire city with white, stone and thus give employment to eighteen thousand workmen left idle by the (64 AD) completion of the temple. .

The last procurator was Gessius Florus, who, according to Josephus, so outdid Albinus in wickedness, that procurators, in comparison that rascal seemed a benefactor. He is said to have robbed cities and to have become a partner with highwaymen. He devastated whole toparchies, mocked his subjects’ complaints to Cestius Gallus, legate of Syria, and in order to prevent complaints reaching the emperor, endeavored to drive the Jews into open rebellion. But these charges are so indefinite as to raise suspicion. In fact, most of the accusations brought by Josephus against the procurators, when thoroughly sifted, witness to their desire to maintain order by punishing murderers and agitators rather than to wickedness. Doubtless they did fail to sympathize with all the prejudices of the Jews, and they were certainly open to bribes; but their bad administration might, like that of Felix, have been brought to punishment at the imperial court. The real destroyers of the Jewish state, as Jesus had foretold and as Josephus himself at times sees, were the Zealot Messianic party with its following among the poorer classes. They deliberately sought to found a kingdom of God upon earth with the dagger and the sword. And they had their wish.

Under Florus, the revolutionary movement got control of Jerusalem, and so of Judea, through a succession of events that were thoroughly trivial. A Jewish war quarrel in Caesarea over buildings crowding in upon a synagogue, a series of petty insults added to the old causes of hatred between Jews and Greeks in that city, a mistake of Florus, an impudent jest against the procurator—these it was that precipitated as desperate and murderous a war as the world has seen. It is needless to recall the details fully. It is enough to say that when Florus had gone to Jerusalem instead of to Caesarea, despite the prayers of Berenice, sister of Agrippa II, then in Jerusalem fulfilling a vow, he allowed his soldiers to plunder the city and even to kill many of its inhabitants as a punishment. For a moment it looked as if Agrippa and the well-to-do classes would be able to persuade the masses to follow the legal course of complaint to the emperor, and to pay their taxes already due; but when it came to submitting again to Florus, the people would not listen, and broke out into new violence. A band of Sicarii captured Masada, and other revolutionists seized the lower city and the temple, shutting up the more aristocratic classes in the upper city, and engaged in desultory battles with such forces as were at hand to maintain the peace. The long-standing hatred between social classes helped to swell the madness. The Sicarii joined the crowds in the lower city, attacked and burned the palaces of the high priest, Agrippa, and Berenice, and then set fire to the public archives and all bonds in order to cancel all debts. In the meantime a Galilean, Manahem, another son of Judas, forced the garrison to flee from Antonia, killed the high priest Ananias, and set himself up as king.

But he was not the sort of Messiah wanted, and the Zealots under Eleazar captured him, and, after torturing, killed him. The breach with Rome was completed by the priests ceasing to offer sacrifices for the emperor and by the slaughter of the Roman garrison who had surrendered.

Massacres.

As in France after the capture of the Bastille, the news of these events threw all Syria into disorder. Palestine was filled with wandering bands of Jews, who sacked and burned many of the Greco-Roman cities, or their dependent towns, while others of these cities—and Alexandria as well—massacred the Jews living within them. At this juncture Cestius Gallus, the Syrian legate, undertook to restore peace. Dividing his forces, he sent one army to capture Joppa and its neighborhood, while the other reduced Galilee. Both objects were accomplished without great difficulty, and he then marched upon Jerusalem, driving the few Jewish troops before him. At Gabao (el Jeb), a few miles from the capital, he was attacked fiercely, but unsuccessfully, and then, unwilling to appeal to force, endeavored to persuade the Jews to surrender by the appeals of Agrippa. In this he was thwarted by the murderous patriotism of the Zealots. Then, perhaps seeing the impossibility of taking the city, he retired. The Jews followed him, hanging upon his rear and flanks, and at last attacked him in the narrow valley of Beth-horon, nearly annihilating his entire army. Cestius saved himself and a fraction of his forces, only by precipitate flight to Antioch. All his artillery, together with most of his baggage and large quantities of weapons, fell into the hands of the Jews, most of the treasure going to Eleazar the Zealot.

With this victory a new stage began in the revolt, for the well-to-do and official classes, seeing war to be inevitable, undertook to organize the state upon a revolutionary basis. Although many prominent citizens left Jerusalem at this time, enough remained to begin the organization of the state upon Pharisaic lines. If the Messiah had not come, Judea should at least be a nation; and the subsequent history of this period (66-70 AD) may very well be viewed as a political experiment on the part of the moderate, and then of the fanatical devotees to Messianism. At the outset, of the two parties, the more radical, with Eleazar, the treasurer of the temple, at its head, was not represented in the government. Although the people of Jerusalem conducted the revolt, the Sanhedrin was undoubtedly in control of affairs, and its appointees were from the party of aristocratic, moderate revolutionists. At the head of this moderate party—whose purpose, undoubtedly, was to treat as soon as possible with the Romans— stood Ananus, the former high priest. A number of prominent men were chosen to organize the revolt throughout the country, and to take the first steps in the establishment of the old aristocratic republic of pre-Asmonean days, though apparently with a high priest deprived of political powers.

Josephus in Galilee

Probably the most important of the fields thus allotted to these “deputies on mission” was Galilee, certain to be the first point of the Roman attack, and Galilee was given to the young and clever, but thoroughly inexperienced, Josephus, the future historian. His position was by no means a sinecure. The Galileans were divided into two parties: one of which, composed of Greeks, and, doubtless, the great mass of the Jews, had no desire to become involved in a war with Rome; while the other was composed of as fanatical Zealots as were to be found in Judea itself. With the first party, Josephus succeeded very well. Doubtless, they shared in his general policy of carrying resistance just far enough to forestall the Zealots, and to win favorable terms from Rome. But, with those possessed of downright determination to fight to the death; with the fanatics who destroyed the palace of Herod Antipas at Tiberias because of its sculptures; and especially with one John of Gischala, the leader of a band of four hundred desperate patriots—with such men, Josephus had the greatest difficulty. While he was bustling about the country, building walls, organizing his raw levies as best he knew after the Roman fashion, haranguing them in the cause of discipline and moderation, forcing his troops to return stolen goods, and organizing a revolutionary government, with its central council of seventy and its local councils of seven, John was imploring the Sanhedrin to remove the half-hearted doctrinaire, and, when that effort failed, was endeavoring to assassinate him. Many and great were the dangers to which the shifty Josephus was exposed; but, by infinite strategy, he delivered himself out of them all—to live to write of his experiences with such delightful self-appreciation that, despite its horrors, his story of the war in Galilee almost serves as a serio-comic introduction to the fearful tragedy enacted, three years later, at Jerusalem.

When Vespasian finally marched against Galilee, most of the work of Josephus went to the limbo of all paper republics. Sephoris, the most powerful city in Galilee, opened its gates to the invaders, and the revolutionary army with its captains of thousands and hundreds and tens fled to the mountain strong­holds. The war in Galilee thus became simply the process of capturing these strongholds. Jotapata, in which Josephus himself had taken refuge, fell after a siege full of desperate adventures, and Josephus was taken prisoner, but only to be treated with honor by Vespasian because of his prophecy as to the victor’s future. Gadara, Joppa, Tiberias, fell into Vespasian’s hands. Tarichaea, a city a little at south of Tiberias, was taken after a bloody naval battle upon the Sea of Galilee and its citizens slaughtered, sold into slavery, or sent to Greece to help dig Nero’s canal across the isthmus of Corinth. The Samaritans were slaughtered on Mount Gerizim, and by September all Galilee and the other rebellious regions north of Judea were subdued with the exception of Gamala in Gaulanitis, Mount Tabor, and Gischala. Gamala alone offered any resistance, but fell after a heroic defence. Vespasian systematically completed the isolation of Jerusalem by the capture of all outlying cities of importance, and in each case the history of Galilee was repeated. The mass of people submitted readily to the Romans, while the bands of Zealots, like John of Gischala, retreated to Jerusalem, there to swell the already crowded population.

Reign of Terror

But with these successes of the Romans came a new phase in the history of the revolt. Vespasian had begun the second year’s campaign with vigor, but had hardly completed the subjection of the outlying cities of Judea, when news of the death of Nero caused him to suspend hostilities and await events. The Jews, thus relieved from immediate danger, at once came under the influence of the radical revolutionary party in Jerusalem. The fall of Galilee had showed the inefficiency of the aristocratic revolution, and with the arrival of John of Gischala, who had escaped from his city just before it fell, Jerusalem was divided between the two parties—the Zealots, with Eleazar and John at their head, and the moderates led by Ananus and other prominent priests and rabbis. In a way, the struggle is thus seen to be a rising of the poor against the rich, as well as against Civil war in Rome. At first the moderate party was successful, and shut their opponents up in the temple, where, in fact, they might have been destroyed but for the regard in which the temple was held. As it was, Ananus set a guard around the sacred enclosure, and kept the Zealots close prisoners. The moderate party was at the point of victory, when, at the suggestion of John, the Zealots induced a band of fanatical Idumeans to come to their aid by the plea that Ananus and his party were tyrants. During a great storm these “men from Marseilles” were admitted into the city, and instantly inaugurated a reign of terror. Ananus and all prominent members of the moderate party were slaughtered mercilessly. For days robbery and murder held high carnival in the name of liberty and the kingdom of God, until, at last, the Idumeans, convinced that they had been deceived by the Zealots, sickened of their work, released such prisoners as lived, and left the city, leaving John of Gischala in control of the revolution. The revolt had become anti-aristocratic, as well as anti-Roman, and the old hatred of the Sadducees and the rich now was unchecked. A certain Simon ben-Giora—Simon, the son of the Proselyte—gathered a band of desperate malcontents, and succeeded in getting control of much of the region east of Jordan, and of Idumea, including Hebron. The Zealots, still bent upon an orderly republic, attempted to check him, and had at one time captured his wife, but Simon soon brought them to terms. In the meantime, perhaps from his desire to prepare for the struggle with Rome, to which no one else in Jerusalem seems to have given any thought, John seems to have governed somewhat tyrannically, and the remnants of the old moderate party, together with many disaffected Zealots, brought Simon into the city as an ally.

Immediately a new reign of terror was begun, and the crowds of Jews within the walls were exposed to new miseries. So far from Simon’s reducing John, there were now in Jerusalem three hostile revolutionary armies: the Galilean Zealots under John, encamped upon the Temple Mount; the other Zealots who held the inner court of the temple—in itself a formidable fortress; and the wild men of Simon ben-Giora, who held the upper city, and indeed practically the rest of Jerusalem. These three bands—by no means to be confused with the wretched inhabitants of the city themselves—soon engaged in a mad war of mutual destruction. Although neither party interfered in the sacrifices in the temple, all the places about the temple were destroyed, the sacred timbers used for engines of war, the city itself became half desert and half camp, and almost all of the grain in the city was burnt.

Siege of Jerusalem.

All this misery lasted throughout 69 AD, when Vespasian was fighting for possession of the empire; and even when Titus appeared before the city just before the Passover of 70 AD, he found the city still less intent upon defence than upon the issues of civil war. Titus was actually before the gates of the city when John of Gischala, taking advantage of the crowds at the feast, smuggled some of his men into the inner court of the temple and overcame Eleazar. With the rival parties thus reduced to two, union was somewhat easier, and thereafter John and Simon labored together in the defence of the city.

Jerusalem was impregnable on all sides but the north. There, the wall begun by Agrippa I, and completed by the Jews just as the Romans appeared, surrounded the suburb of Bezetha. Within it ran the second wall from east to west, and within this lay the great castle-like temple flanked by the Tower of Antonia and separated from the city by a series of walls, while upon the higher western hill lay the upper city, protected by its own massive fortifications. Jerusalem was in fact a cluster of fortresses, approachable only from the north. Had its provisions not been destroyed, it is hard to see why it might not have withstood the Romans indefinitely.

As it was, the siege, though conducted with great skill and vigor, lasted from the middle of April till September—five months of constant and desperate fighting. Twelve days were required to break through the hastily built outer wall, and it was not until July that Antonia was taken, and then only after the city had been completely surrounded by a wall. Then the miseries of the besieged city, filled to overflowing with the pilgrims to the Passover, grew indescribable. Without the city captives were crucified by the hundred, and deserters were cut open for the gold they had swallowed.

Within the walls famine and civil war filled the streets and houses with unburied dead. Prophets foretold the fearful punishments of God. Portents and wonders in the heaven showed approaching doom. Yet through it all the daily morning and evening sacrifices were kept up until priests and animals alike failed, and on the 17th of July they ceased forever. After this, the siege progressed steadily. Antonia was taken and razed. The beautiful colonnades of the temple were burnt. The outer wall of the temple was broken through, and at last on the tenth day of the month Ab (August) the Romans burst through the burning gates into the sacred area. Titus had hoped to save the temple itself, but some soldier threw a blazing brand into one of its rooms, and the building was soon destroyed. After a fearful slaughter of the inhabitants of the city, Titus began the siege of the upper city in which Simon ben-Giora and John of Gischala made their last desperate stand. The lower city was burned to give room for towers and battering-rams, and after a month the entire city fell into the hands of the Romans (September, 70 AD). Thousands of the inhabitants were killed, sold into slavery, or kept for gladiatorial games. John of Gischala was condemned to imprisonment for life. Simon ben-Giora was kept for the triumph at Rome, where he was put to death. The city itself was destroyed as far as any city can be destroyed, and its ruins left in charge of the tenth legion and some auxiliary troops. Although two years were to elapse before the whole-sale suicide of the garrison of Sicarii at Masada proclaimed the land at peace, Titus celebrated his Triumph of victory at Caesarea Philippi, Berytus (Beirut), and Antioch, and in the summer of 71 AD was given a triumph in Rome. The noble arch which the senate later erected to his memory still shows in its bas-relief the table of shewbread, the priestly trumpets, and the seven-branched candlestick that, with the rest of the wreckage of the Jewish state, were carried in the great procession.

For the Jewish state had indeed fallen. Vespasian kept Palestine as his private property, a colony of eight hundred veterans was settled at Emmaus just out from Jerusalem, and the Jewish people were everywhere made to pay to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus the two drachmas they had formerly paid to the support of the temple at Jerusalem. The misery foreseen by Jesus had come—fully, irretrievably. The fall of Jerusalem was the outcome of the Jews’ choice as to the kingdom of God. Had they but known the things that pertained to peace!

Yet Judaism was not destroyed, nor the Jewish Messianic hope. The one was to develop in Babylon and Galilee into something severer and farther reaching than Shammai himself could have foreseen, and the other was to blaze forth, not only as a scholar’s hope, but as the incentive to new religious war against Hadrian, under Akiba and his Messiah, Bar Cochbar, the Son of the Star. In comparison with these later developments, the Judaism of New Testament times, elaborate as it was, seems almost embryonic. With no country, or temple, or high priest, the only future for Judaism was the Talmud and apologetic Messianism, and each alike bears witness to the earnestness of generations of rabbis.

Yet in neither of these two particulars was to be the greatest significance of the Jew, but rather in that other Messianic movement despised by the rabbis, the Christian church.

For while Pharisee and Zealot, constrained by their scholastic ideals of righteousness, looked for a divinely founded kingdom of the Jews that should be inaugurated by the expulsion of the Romans; and while, maddened by the apparent delay of Jehovah, charlatans and Sicarii and Zealots were turning against the petty oppressions of unworthy governors and plunging the nation into war that the coming of God’s kingdom might thus be hastened; the little group of humble men and women who had accepted Jesus as Christ and were finding in his teachings a discipline, had crossed to Greece and Macedonia, and at last had its representatives among the inhabitants of Rome itself. Under the inspiration of Paul it had withstood all efforts to bring the new fraternities under Judaism as a system, and had at last become so strong that few cities of importance in the empire did not contain bands of simple, religious men and women, who were looking for a return of Jesus the Messiah, but were practicing none of the requirements of Judaism.

It is, however, a mistake to think of Christianity as standing wholly as the enemy of Judaism. Far more truly is it indebted to Judaism. Without the life and feelings and conditions born of the history of the three centuries we have sketched, the work of Jesus and of Paul would have been very different, if indeed possible. Neither Jesus nor Paul broke utterly with their marvelous nation. Rather, they were the noblest fruitage of Moses and the prophets, and whenever the Christian church names its Christ, it is unconsciously paying tribute to the deep piety of those later Hebrews, who, through persecution and disappointment, with unswerving devotion to their ideas of divine righteousness, looked forward to a time when God would found his kingdom upon the earth, and bequeathed to later generations a faith and an ideal. But, for him who accepts Jesus as the Christ, the faith of Chasidim and Pharisees, of Zealot and Scribe, is no longer national, their ideal has become the story of a Life, and the Kingdom of God is already working its peaceful conquests over humanity.

the end .

HISTORY OF THE JEWS