The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

Much might be said in criticism of Paul's Christology – if it were not for Paul and his followers. They have done too much and been too much for it to be possible to dissect their great conception in cold blood. Paul's theories are truer than another man's experiences – they pulse with life, they have (in Luther's phrase) hands and feet to carry a man away. The man is so large and so strong, so simple and true, so various in his knowledge of the world, so tender in his feeling for men – "all things to all men" – such a master of language, so sympathetic and so open – he is irresistible. The quick movement of his thought, his sudden flashes of anger and of tenderness, his apostrophes, his ejaculations – one feels that pen and paper never got such a man written down before or since. Every sentence comes charged with the whole man – half a dozen Greek words, and not always the best Greek – and the Christian world for ever will sum up its deepest experience in "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world."

Close examination reveals a good deal of Judaism surviving in Paul, – a curious way of playing with the text of Scripture, odd reminiscences of old methods, and deeper infiltrations of a Jewish thought which is not that of Jesus. Yet it does not affect our feeling for him – he stands too close to us as a man, too much over us as the teacher of Augustine, Calvin and Luther – a man, whom it took more genius to explain than the church had for fifteen centuries, and yet the man to whom the church owes its universal reach and unity, its theology and the best of the language in which it has expressed its love for his master.

Explanation of Jesus

Paul went back to the Jewish conception of a Messiah, modified, in the real spirit of Jesus, by the thought of suffering. But when we put side by side the Messiah of Jesus and the Messiah of Paul, we become conscious of a difference. The latter is a mediator between God and man, making atonement, transferring righteousness by a sort of legal fiction, and implying a conception of God's fatherhood far below that taught by Jesus. At the same time Paul has other thoughts of a profounder and more permanent value. It is hard, for instance, to imagine that any change, which time and thought may bring, can alter a word in his statement that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself" – here there is no local or temporal element even in the wording. It may be noted that Paul has his own names for Jesus, for while he uses "Messiah" (in Greek) and "Son of God," he is the first to speak of "the Lord" and "the Saviour." Paul held the door open for the other great theory of the early church, when he emphasized the pre-existence of the heavenly Christ and made him the beginning, the centre and the end of all history.

The Logos, as we have seen, was not an original idea of the Christian world. It was long familiar to Greek philosophy, and Philo and the Stoics base much of their thought upon it. It must have come into the church from a Greek or Hellenistic source, perhaps as a translation of Paul's "heavenly Christ." As it stands, it is a peculiarly bold annexation from Philosophy. No Stoic would have denied that the Spermaticos Logos was in Jesus, but the bold identification of the Logos with Jesus must have been "foolishness to the Greek." Still in contemporary thought there was much to dispose men to believe in such an incarnation of the Logos in a human being, though there is no suggestion that a spiritual being of any at all commensurate greatness was ever so incarnated before. But the thought appealed to the Christian mind, when once the shock to Greek susceptibilities was overcome. Once accepted, it "solved all questions in the earth and out of it." It permitted the congenial idea of Greek theology to remain – the transcendence of God being saved by this personification of his Thought. It was a final blow to all theories that made Jesus an emanation, a phantom or a demi-god, and it kept his historic personality well in the centre of thought, though leaving it now comparatively much less significance.

Surveying the two accounts, Jewish and Greek, we cannot help remarking that they belong to other ages of thought than our own. Columbus, Copernicus and Darwin were neither philosophers nor theologians, but they have changed the perspectives of philosophy and theology, and we think to-day with a totally different series of preconceptions from those of Jew and Greek of the first century. The Greek himself never thought much of the "chosen race," and it was only when he realized that Jesus was not a tribal hero, that he accepted him. To the Greek the Messiah was as strange a thought as to ourselves. To us the Logos is as strange as the Messiah was to the Greek. We have really at present no terms in which to express what we feel to be the permanent significance of Jesus, and the old expressions may repel us until we realize, first, that they are not of the original essence of the Gospel, and second, that they represent the best language which Greek and Jew could find for a conviction which we share – that Jesus of Nazareth does stand in the centre of human history, that he has brought God and man into a new relation, that he is the personal concern of everyone of us, and that there is more in him than we have yet accounted for.

Into the question of the organization adopted by the early Christians and the development of the idea of the church, it is not essential to our present purpose to inquire. Opinion varies as to how far we should seek the origin of the church in the teaching and work of Jesus. If his mind has been at all rightly represented in this book, it seems to follow that he was not responsible either for the name or the idea of the church. Minds of the class to which his belongs have as a rule little or no interest in organizations and arrangements, and nothing can be more alien to the tone and spirit of his thinking than the ecclesiastical idea as represented by Cyprian and Ignatius. That out of the group of followers who lived with Jesus, a society should grow, is natural; and societies instinctively organize themselves. The Jew offered the pattern of a theocracy, and the Roman of a hierarchy of officials, but it took two centuries to produce the church of Cyprian. The series of running fights with Greek speculation in the second century contributed to the natural and acquired instincts for order and system, – particularly in a world where such instincts had little opportunity of exercise in municipal, and less in political, life. The name was, as Harnack says, a masterly stroke – the "ecclesia of God" suggested to the Greek the noble and free life of a self-governing organism such as the ancient world had known, but raised to a higher plane and transfigured from a Periclean Athens to a Heavenly Jerusalem. Fine conceptions and high ideals clung about the idea of the church in the best minds,[⁴⁶⁶] but in practice it meant the transformation of the gospel into a code, the repression of liberty of thought, and the final extinction of prophecy. For the view that every one of these results was desirable, reason might be shown in the vagaries of life and speculation which the age knew, but it was obviously a departure from the ideas of Jesus.

The new life

The rise of the church was accompanied by the rise of mysteries. There is a growing consensus of opinion among independent scholars that Jesus instituted no sacraments, yet Paul found the rudiments of them among the Christians and believed he had the warrant of Jesus for the heightening which he gave to them. Ignatius speaks of the Ephesians "breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality (phárkmakon athanasías) and the antidote that we should not die" – the former phrase reappearing in Clement of Alexandria.[⁴⁶⁷] That such ideas should emerge in the Christian community is natural enough, when we consider its environment – a world without natural science, steeped in belief in every kind of magic and enchantment, and full of public and private religious societies, every one of which had its mysteries and miracles and its blood-bond with its peculiar deity. It was from such a world and such societies that most of the converts came and brought with them the thoughts and instincts of countless generations, who had never conceived of a religion without rites and mysteries. Baptism similarly took on a miraculous colour – men were baptized for the dead in Paul's time – and before long it bore the names familiarly given by the world to all such rituals of admission – enlightenment (phôtismós) and initiation; and with the names came many added symbolic practices in its administration. The Christians readily recognized the parallel between their rites and those of the heathen, but no one seems to have perceived the real connexion between them. Quite naïvely they suggest the exact opposite – it was the dæmons, who foresaw what the Christian rites (hierá) would be, and forestalled them with all sorts of pagan parodies.[⁴⁶⁸]

But, after all, the force of the Christian movement lay neither in church, nor in sacrament, but in men. "How did Christianity rise and spread among men?" asks Carlyle, "was it by institutions, and establishments, and well arranged systems of mechanism? No! … It arose in the mystic deeps of man's soul; and was spread by the 'preaching of the word,' by simple, altogether natural and individual efforts; and flew, like hallowed fire, from heart to heart, till all were purified and illuminated by it. Here was no Mechanism; man's highest attainment was accomplished Dynamically, not Mechanically."[⁴⁶⁹] Nothing could be more just. The Gospel set fire to men's hearts, and they needed to do nothing but live to spread their faith. The ancient evidence is abundant for this. The Christian had an "insatiable passion for doing good"[⁴⁷⁰] – not as yet a technical term – and he "did good" in the simplest kind of ways. "Even those things which you do after the flesh are spiritual," says Ignatius himself, "for you do all things in Jesus Christ."[⁴⁷¹] "Christians," says a writer whose name is lost, "are not distinguishable from the rest of mankind in land or speech or customs. They inhabit no special cities of their own, nor do they use any different form of speech, nor do they cultivate any out-of-the-way life… But while they live in Greek and barbarian cities as their lot may be cast, and follow local customs in dress and food and life generally, … yet they live in their own countries as sojourners only; they take part in everything as citizens and submit to everything as strangers. Every strange land is native to them, and every native land is strange. They marry and have children like everyone else – but they do not expose their children. They have meals in common, but not wives. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They continue on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the laws ordained, and by their private lives they overcome the laws… In a word, what the soul is in the body, that is what Christians are in the world."[⁴⁷²]

"As a rule," wrote Galen, "men need to be educated in parables. Just as in our day we see those who are called Christians[⁴⁷³] have gained their faith from parables. Yet they sometimes act exactly as true philosophers would. That they despise death is a fact we all have before our eyes; and by some impulse of modesty they abstain from sexual intercourse – some among them, men and women, have done so all their lives. And some, in ruling and controlling themselves, and in their keen passion for virtue, have gone so far that real philosophers could not excel them."[⁴⁷⁴] So wrote a great heathen, and Celsus admits as much himself. In life at least, if not in theory, the Christians daily kept to the teaching of their Master. "Which is ampler?" asks Tertullian, "to say, Thou shalt not kill; or to teach, Be not even angry? Which is more perfect, to forbid adultery or to bid refrain from a single lustful look?"[⁴⁷⁵] There was as yet no flight from the world, though Christians had no illusions about it or about the devil who played so large a part in its affairs. They lived in an age that saw Antinous deified.[⁴⁷⁶] They stood for marriage and family life, while all around "holy" men felt there was an unclean and dæmonic element in marriage.[⁴⁷⁷] One Christian writer even speaks of women being saved by child-bearing.[⁴⁷⁸] Social conditions they accepted – even slavery among them – but they brought a new spirit into all; love and the sense of brotherhood could transform every thing. Slavery continued, but the word "slave" is not found in Christian catacombs.[⁴⁷⁹]

Above all, they were filled with their Master's own desire to save men. "I am debtor," wrote Paul, "both to Greeks and to barbarians, wise and unwise."[⁴⁸⁰] If modern criticism is right in detaching the "missionary commission" (in Matthew) from the words of Jesus, the fact remains that the early Christians were "going into all the world" and "preaching the gospel to every creature" for half a century before the words were written. Why? "He that has the word of Jesus truly can hear his silence," said Ignatius; and if Jesus did not speak these words, men heard his silence to the same effect. Celsus, like Julian long after him, was shocked at the kind of people to whom the gospel was preached.[⁴⁸¹]

The Christian came to the helpless and hopeless, whom men despised, and of whom men despaired, with a message of the love and tenderness of God, and he brought it home by a new type of love and tenderness of his own. Kindness to friends the world knew; gentleness, too, for the sake of philosophic calm; clemency and other more or less self-contained virtues. The "third race" had other ideas – in all their virtues there was the note of "going out of oneself," the unconsciousness which Jesus loved – an instinctive habit of negating self (aparnésasthai heautón), which does not mean medieval asceticism, nor the dingy modern virtue of self-denial. There was no sentimentalism in it; it was the spirit of Jesus spiritualizing and transforming and extending the natural instinct of brotherliness by making it theocentric. Christians for a century or two never thought of ataraxia or apathy, and, though Clement of Alexandria plays with them, he tries to give them a new turn. Fortunately the Gospels were more read than the Stromateis and "Christian apathy" never succeeded. The heathen recognized sympathy as a Christian characteristic – "How these Christians love each other!" they said. Lucian bears the same testimony to the mutual care and helpfulness of Christians. "You see," wrote Lucian, "these poor creatures have persuaded themselves that they are immortal for all time and will live for ever, which explains why they despise death and voluntarily give themselves up, as a general rule; and then their original law-giver persuaded them that they are all brothers, from the moment that they cross over and deny the gods of Greece and worship their sophist who was gibbeted, and live after his laws. All this they accept, with the result that they despise all worldly goods alike and count them common property." In a later century Julian, perhaps following Maximin Daza, whom he copied in trying to organize heathenism into a new catholic church, urged benevolence on his fellow-pagans, if they wished to compete with the Christians. It was the only thing, he felt, that could revive paganism, and his appeal met with no response. "Infinite love in ordinary intercourse" is the Christian life, and it must come from within or nowhere. No organization can produce it, and, however much we may have to discount Christian charity in some directions as sometimes mechanical, the new spirit of brotherhood in the world presupposed a great change in the hearts of men.

It was not Stoic cosmopolitanism. The Christian was not "the citizen of the world" nor "the Friend of Man"; he was a plain person who gave himself up for other people, cared for the sick and the worthless, had a word of friendship and hope for the sinful and despised, would not go and see men killed in the amphitheatre, and – most curious of all – was careful to have indigent brothers taught trades by which they could help themselves. A lazy Christian was no Christian, he was a "trader in Christ."[⁴⁸²] If the Christians' citizenship was in heaven, he had a social message for this world in the meantime.

Woman

Every great religious movement coincides with a new discovery of truth of some kind, and such discoveries induce a new temper. Men inquire more freely and speak more freely the truth they feel. Mistakes are made and a movement begins for "quenching the spirit." But the gains that have been made by the liberated spirits are not lost. Thus the early Christian rose quickly to a sense of the value of woman. Dr Verrall pronounces that "the radical disease, of which, more than of anything else, ancient civilization perished "was" an imperfect ideal of woman."[⁴⁸³] In the early church woman did a good many things, which in later days the authorities preferred not to mention. Thekla's name is prominent in early story, and the prophetesses of Phrygia, Prisca and Maximilla, have a place in Church History. They were not popular; but the church was committed to the Gospel of Luke and the ministry of women to the Lord. And whatever the Christian priesthood did or said, Jesus and his followers had set woman on a level with man. "There is neither male nor female." The same freedom of spirit is attested by the way in which pagan prophets and their dupes classed Christians with Epicureans[⁴⁸⁴] – they saw and understood too much. The Christians were the only people (apart from the Jews) who openly denounced the folly of worshipping and deifying Emperors. Even Ignatius, who is most famous for his belief in authority, breaks into independence when men try to make the Gospel dependent on the Old Testament – "for me the documents (tà archeia) are Jesus Christ; my unassailable documents are his cross, and his death and resurrection, and the faith that is through him; in which things I hope with your prayers to be saved."[⁴⁸⁵] "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty," as Paul said.

God and immortality were associated in Christian thought. Christians, said a writer using the name of Peter, are to be "partakers of the divine nature." "If the soul," says Tatian, "enters into union with the divine spirit, it is no longer helpless, but ascends to regions whither the spirit guides it; for the dwelling-place of the spirit is above, but the origin of the soul is from beneath."[⁴⁸⁶] "God sent forth to us the Saviour and Prince of immortality, by whom he also made manifest to us the truth and the heavenly life."[⁴⁸⁷] The Christian's life is "hid with Christ in God," and Christ's resurrection is to the early church the pledge of immortality – "we shall be ever with the Lord." For the transmigration of souls and "eternal re-dying," life was substituted.[⁴⁸⁸] "We have believed," said Tatian, "that there will be a resurrection of our bodies, after the consummation of all things – not, as the Stoics dogmatize, that in periodic cycles the same things for ever come into being and pass out of it for no good whatever, – but once for all," and this for judgment. The judge is not Minos nor Rhadamanthus, but "God the maker is the arbiter."[⁴⁸⁹] "They shall see him (Jesus) then on that day," wrote the so-called Barnabas, "wearing the long scarlet robe upon his flesh, and they will say 'Is this not he whom we crucified, whom we spat upon, and rejected?'"[⁴⁹⁰] Persecution tempted the thought of what "that day" would mean for the persecutor. But it was a real concern of the Christian himself. "I myself, utterly sinful, not yet escaped from temptation, but still in the midst of the devil's engines, – I do my diligence to follow after righteousness that I may prevail so far as at least to come near it, fearing the judgment that is to come."[⁴⁹¹] Immortality and righteousness – the two thoughts go together, and both depend upon Jesus Christ. He is emphatically called "our Hope" – a favourite phrase with Ignatius.[⁴⁹²]

Martyrdom and happiness

Some strong hope was needed – some "anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast."[⁴⁹³] Death lay in wait for the Christian at every turn, never certain, always probable. The dæmons whom he had renounced took their revenge in exciting his neighbours against him.[⁴⁹⁴] The whim of a mob[⁴⁹⁵] or the cruelty of a governor[⁴⁹⁶] might bring him face to face with death in no man knew what horrible form. One writer spoke of "the burning that came for trial,"[⁴⁹⁷] and the phrase was not exclusively a metaphor. "Away with the atheists – where is Polycarp?" was a sudden shout at Smyrna – the mob already excited with sight of "the right noble Germanicus fighting the wild beasts in a signal way." The old man was sought and found – with the words "God's will be done" upon his lips. He was pressed to curse Christ. "Eighty-six years I have been his slave," he said, "and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?"[⁴⁹⁸] The suddenness of these attacks, and the cruelty, were enough to unnerve anyone who was not "built upon the foundation." Nero's treatment of the Christians waked distaste in Rome itself. But it was the martyrdoms that made the church. Stephen's death captured Paul. "I delighted in Plato's teachings," says Justin, "and I heard Christians abused, but I saw they were fearless in the face of death and all the other things men count fearful."[⁴⁹⁹] Tertullian and others with him emphasize that "the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church." It was the death of Jesus over again – the last word that carried conviction with it.

With "the sentence of death in themselves" the early Christians faced the world, and astonished it by more than their "stubbornness." They were the most essentially happy people of the day – Jesus was their hope, their sufficiency was of God, their names were written in heaven, they were full of love for all men – they had "become little children," as Jesus put it, glad and natural. Jesus had brought them into a new world of possibilities. A conduct that ancient moralists dared not ask, the character of Jesus suggested, and the love of Jesus made actual. "I can do all things," said Paul, "in him that strengtheneth me." They looked to assured victory over evil and they achieved it. "This is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith." Very soon a new note is heard in their words. Stoicism was never "essentially musical"; Epictetus announces a hymn to Zeus,[⁵⁰⁰] but he never starts the tune. Over and over again there is a sound of singing in Paul – as in the eighth chapter of the Romans, and the thirteenth of First Corinthians,[⁵⁰¹] and it repeats itself. "Children of joy" is Barnabas' name for his friends.[⁵⁰²] "Doing the will of Christ we shall find rest," wrote the unknown author of "Second Clement."[⁵⁰³] "Praising we plough; and singing we sail," wrote the greater Clement.[⁵⁰⁴] "Candidates for angelhood, even here we learn the strain hereafter to be raised to God, the function of our future glory," said Tertullian.[⁵⁰⁵] "Clothe thyself in gladness, that always has grace with God and is welcome to him – and revel in it. For every glad man does what is good, and thinks what is good… The holy spirit is a glad spirit … yes, they shall all live to God, who put away sadness from themselves and clothe themselves in all gladness." So said the angel to Hermas,[⁵⁰⁶] and he was right. The holy spirit was a glad spirit, and gladness – joy in the holy spirit – was the secret of Christian morality. Nothing could well be more gay and happy than Clement's Protrepticus. Augustine was attracted to the church because he saw it non dissolute hilaris. Such happiness in men is never without a personal centre, and the church made no secret that this centre was "Jesus Christ, whom you have not seen, but you love him; whom yet you see not, but you believe in him and rejoice with joy unspeakable and glorified."[⁵⁰⁷]