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there were put forth in the nineteenth century, some of them by Christians of millenarian prepossessions, but without considerable results. The movement received a great impulse in the last decades of the century from the rise of an aggressive anti-Semitism in European countries. Nationality was conceived not in a political, but in a pseudo-ethnological sense; "national culture" was the expression of the genius of a race. The Jews were a foreign element in the national body politic, socially unassimilable, a peril to the purity of the national culture just in proportion to their intellectual acuteness and their financial power. This antipathy manifested itself in different ways, from otracisms in clubs to wholesale massacres, connived at, if not instigated, by the government; but everywhere it pressed home upon the Jew the fact that he was a member of an alien race. The idea that race is the true basis of nationality, and consequently that each "race" ought to be a nation for itself fell in with the immemorial belief of the Jews and gave fresh energy to it. Zionism and anti-Semitism are, in so far, only two aspects of the same phenomenon.

The appalling condition of the Jews in Russia in consequence of economically ruinous laws and bloody pogroms, and the hardly more tolerable state of their fellows in Roumania, gave a practical turn to the movement. The only hope for these distressed millions was emigration in mass; and it is not strange that the eyes of many of them turned to the land of their fathers. In western Europe, also, the question could not fail to rise in the minds of philanthropists, as well as of idealists: Was not the solution of the perennial Jewish problem an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine under Turkish suzerainty? When in 1896 a Viennese ✓ journalist, Theodor Herzl (d. 1904), in his "Jewish State," struck out a plan for the new exodus to the promised land, his words found an instant and enthusiastic response in many quarters. Opposed by liberals as a revival of an old delusion; by hard-headed men of affairs as a visionary scheme; by the ultraconservative, partly out of prejudice

against the origin of the movement, partly because in the orthodox programme the advent of the Messiah should precede the return to Palestine, Zionism spread rapidly. A literature of pamphlets and periodicals was created, congresses in which all shades of belief and unbelief met together were held, a programme and measures for carrying it out were adopted, societies for the promotion of the cause were formed in all countries; many who at first stood aloof were swept into the current.

But when it came to realising these exalted ideals insuperable obstacles were encountered. The Sultan was polite, but the expected concessions were not forthcoming; the financiers did not respond as they were expected to. Strident discord, also, early made itself heard in the Zionist counsels; the project of a Jewish colonial state in British East Africa seemed to many nothing short of treason to the enterprise. The revolution of 1908 and the subsequent overturnings in the Turkish Empire seemed to put the realisation of the original plan further beyond the horizon of possibility than ever. The events of the present war, especially the occupation of Palestine by the British army and the prospects held out to the Jews of re-establishment in the land of their fathers, have given a new turn to the affair, the ultimate issue of which cannot at this moment be foreseen.

CHAPTER V

CHRISTIANITY

THE APOSTOLIC AGE

Jesus and his Disciples-The Work in Galilee-Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Death-The Teaching of Jesus-The Faith of his Disciples Beginnings of Gentile Christianity-Paul-The Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ-The Mystery of the Cross-The Law and the Gospel-The Spirit of Christ-The Coming of the Lord -Predestination-Angels and Demons-Influence of Paul-The Epistle to the Hebrews-The Gospel of John-The Incarnate Logos-The Knowledge of God and Eternal Life-Regeneration -The Spiritual Gospel-The Revelation of John-The Millennium and the Last Judgment-The Nazarenes and other Judaic Sects -Early Christian Churches-Heresies-Marcion and the Gnostics -The Consolidation of the Catholic Church.

THE expectation of a great deliverance, in which by the intervention of God the Jews should be liberated from the dominion of the heathen, and of a golden age of righteousness and peace and prosperity to follow the re-establishment of independence, kept alive by the lessons from Scripture which were read and expounded in the synagogues and by revelations bearing the names of ancient worthies, gave birth from time to time to prophets, who announced that the great moment was come, and sometimes drew crowds after them into the desert, where, according to a common belief, the Messiah was to appear. In the year 28 or 29 of our era such a prophet, named John, appeared in Judæa, proclaiming that the reign of God1 was at hand, the age in which his sovereignty should be universally acknowledged and his righteous will be supreme in the hearts and lives of men. It was a common belief that in that age there would

1 This is the meaning of the phrase translated in the English versions, "kingdom of Heaven" or "kingdom of God."

be no place for sinners; it was to be ushered in by a judgment in which they should perish. John urged his hearers to prepare for the crisis by repenting of their sins and thus securing God's forgiveness.1 Of those who professed repentance, he required a confession of their sins and an ablution in the waters of the Jordan, which he seems to have treated as a condition of remission. Hence the name, "John the Baptiser." The multitudes that flocked to him and his influence over them roused the suspicion of Herod Antipas, who deemed it prudent to forestall a possible outbreak by putting the leader to death.2 The arrest of John dispersed his following, but did not destroy their faith in his prediction that a greater than he was about to appear, who would winnow the chaff from the wheat, gathering the wheat into his garner and burning the chaff in unquenchable fire.

Among those who resorted to John and were baptised by him was Jesus, a young man from Nazareth in Lower Galilee. His father, Joseph, was a carpenter, and Jesus had been brought up to the trade. The names of four brothers are known, and he had sisters married and living in Nazareth. Of education Jesus had no more than in those days fell to the lot of youths of his class in a provincial town. He may have learned to read the sacred books in Hebrew in a school for boys such as were maintained in many places, but his knowledge of the Scriptures was doubtless chiefly gained from the reading and exposition of the lessons in the synagogue. Of the legal lore that was to be got only at the feet of the rabbis he had none. His mother tongue was the Aramaic vernacular of Galilee, a provincial dialect whose slovenly pronunciation is the butt of rabbinical witticisms.

3

The religion in which he grew up was the orthodox Judaism of his day, such as has been described in its own place.1 The teaching of the synagogue made the people familiar, not only with the words of the Law and the Prophets, but with

1 See above, pp. 70, 79, on the Jewish doctrine of repentance. 2 So Josephus reports the matter.

3 See above, pp. 62 ƒ.

'See pp. 68-74.

the traditional interpretation of Scripture and with the doctrines and observances which the scribes founded on Scripture and tradition. The teachers, as a class, were of the Pharisees, who were the recognised religious authorities. Jesus' ideas and beliefs were formed under these influences; the customs to which he was habituated from childhood and the piety that was cultivated in the community about him bore the same stamp.

After the arrest of John, Jesus returned to Galilee and took up, as doubtless others did, the call to repentance, "The appointed time is come; the reign of God draws near." But he did not adopt John's prophetic style of speech or life. The scene of his labours was not the desert, but the populous towns about the northern end of the Lake of Galilee, where he taught in the synagogues or discoursed to the crowds that gathered to hear him on the hillsides or the shore of the lake. He was commonly addressed with the respectful title, “Rabbi," appropriated to religious teachers. There was so little of the ascetic about him that his enemies defamed him as a man overfond of good eating and drinking and on terms of scandalous intimacy with disreputable characters.

Jesus soon gathered about him a group of disciples who kept him closer company and went about with him from place to place. Among them there was an inner circle of intimacy, Simon (Peter), and the brothers, James and John, sons of Zebedee. All of them were men of the common people; several were fishermen, one was a toll-gatherer. There was no scholar among them, and apparently none otherwise of mark except the three just mentioned.

According to the oldest narrative (Mark 1, 21 f.), Jesus' first public appearance was in the synagogue in Capernaum, where his words made an impression of authority unlike the ordinary synagogue homilies with their dependence on tradition. From Capernaum, accompanied by some of his first disciples, he made a tour among the neighbouring villages, announcing the coming of the kingdom and teaching

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