LECTURE II BEGINNINGS AND GROWTH OF THE GOSPEL OF 1. Movement of Israel's Religious Development from Nationalism to Universalism From the view-point of the historian of religion the Christian era should begin with the 25th of December, 165 B. C. On that date the worship of Jehovah was restored in the temple at Jerusalem purified from heathen defilement, and God began to make all things new. The heroic sons of Mattathias who had won back both religious freedom and national independence founded a native dynasty of priest kings, and with the beginning of the new epoch religion too advanced with mighty strides. Prophecy took on the new form of apocalypse. Its goal was no longer a kingdom of this world but a cosmic deliverance. Its conflict was no longer against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, world-rulers of darkness in heavenly places. Israel's enemy was no longer the alien oppressor, but the invisible foes of humanity, the powers of Sin and Death. Next to apocalyptic prophecy among the factors of the new religious age stands legalism. It had been an uprising of the people which saved the religion of Jehovah when the priesthood proved largely faithless. It was now the people's place of worship, the Synagogue, an institution unknown to the Law, which began rapidly to eclipse the prescribed and official worship of the temple in the real religious life of the nation. And with the Synagogue came the scribe, the interpreter of Scripture, and the Pharisee, its faithful devotee, who seeks to attain the national hope by faith and obedience. The later Maccabees became selfish and degenerate time-servers. The Pharisees proved by hundreds of martyrdoms the sincerity of their devotion to the ideals advanced during the war of liberation: Not conquest, but freedom to worship God. The book-religion of scribe and Pharisee strains every nerve to attain for the nation reconciliation of Jehovah's favor. For the individual it seeks "a share in the world to come," that "resurrection of the just which now for the first time began to play a part, soon to become the controlling part in Jewish piety. This was the contribution of apocalypse. But side by side with apocalypse and legalism there comes into view a third development of other import. This same new age of Judaism sees the rise and culmination of the Wisdom literature, re-interpreting the religion of Jehovah in terms of ethics and philosophy. This type of thought flourished chiefly in Alexandria, and culminated in the Logos-doctrine of Philo, the earlier contemporary of Jesus. A Wisdom fragment preserved in the Gospels presents these three great agents of Jehovah's new-creative Spirit as prophets, wise men, and scribes." Thus while Gentile religions crumbled, or turned back toward nature-worship, Judaism advanced; though showing itself anything but impervious to the currents of thought and life around it. Outward expansion went hand in hand with inward renewal. It was growth promoted not only under pressure of adverse circumstance, but also under stimulus of contemporary Gentile thought. However contrary to our inherited ideas, evidence is not lacking of rapid evolution even in that supreme expression of Israel's religious genius of which Jesus be came the leader and representative. Not only was there a great advance from the baptism of John to the preaching of Jesus, the Gospels themselves, little as they are disposed to admit a process of development, do not conceal the fact that Jesus himself increased in wisdom as in stature, and that his faith was both broadened and deepened by the things which he experienced and suffered. The humble, expectant faith of a heathen woman could open to him new vistas of the comprehensiveness of his calling, as he sought refuge from the hostility of his own people in the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. And this was not the only incident of Gentile faith to lead him to broader views. Contrasts such as that of the believing centurion with Jewish unbelief could make him warn the Galilean cities that Tyre and Sidon, Nineveh and Sodom, would meet a better fate than they in the judgment. So he said to Jerusalem also: "The kingdom of God shall be taken away from you and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof." If rejection in Galilee led Jesus to a broader view of his mission, the more disastrous rejection in Jerusalem led to a deeper and higher. When he set his face steadfastly to go up to Jerusalem, accompanied by a mere handful out of the great multitudes that had eaten of the loaves and then withdrawn, it was with a clear premonition of his fate. He could not but foresee that if he had failed to carry with him the adherents of the Synagogue in Galilee, his attempt to take the temple out of the hands of the hierocracy, and make it a house of prayer for all the people, might have no better result. And the penalty of failure would be death. He spoke plainly to those whom he invited to join with him in this forlorn hope, of what was involved in the issue. If he carried the people with him it meant that judgment would begin at the house of God. The step would have been taken which according to Malachi was the supreme act of national purification in preparation for Jehovah's coming. The King's palace would be purged and ready for His dwelling among a repentant and loyal people. If he did not, his cause would not survive another Passover.1 There is nothing improbable in the representation of the Gospels that it was at the time when Jesus laid before the Twelve his purpose to carry the campaign for the reign of God to the central sanctuary that the question was first raised as to the real nature of his mission. He certainly had neither the desire nor the intention to be a political Messiah. Of that the story of Peter's Rebuke leaves no doubt. On the other hand direct action such as he now proposed meant the assumption of national leadership in a sense beyond that of mere prophet and teacher. And failure, such as was only too probable, meant that the kingdom, if realized at all, must come by the intervention of God. The alternative is expressed in the titles Son of David Son of Man. Critics who reject the views of the fashionable eschatological school" consider that 66 66 1 The driving out of the traders from the temple was a coup d'état, the carefully planned climax of Jesus' career, by which he at once symbolized the significance of his mission and staked his all upon the event. The significance then attaching to the act will be apparent from a Jewish interpretation in parable of the Isaian figure of Israel as the forsaken wife. (Ex. Rabba, c. 51.) It is a comment on the name tent of witness" applied in Exodus to the Tabernacle: "A king was angry with his wife and forsook her. The neighbors declared, ' He will not return.' Then the king sent word to her (Mal. 1:6-14; 3: 1-12): 'Cleanse my palace, and on such and such a day I will return to thee.' He came and was reconciled to her. Therefore is the sanctuary called the tent of witness.' It is a witness to the Gentiles that God is no longer wroth." To Jesus the restoration of his Father's house as "a house of prayer' was a token of national repentance and divine "reconciliation." Jesus was no more carried off his feet by apocalyptic messianism than by the nationalism of the Zealots. He used the term Son of Man, as he used that of "the Christ" with his own reserves. But he could scarcely avoid using it on such an occasion as this at Cæsarea Philippi. Disap The author of Hebrews tells us that Jesus "learned by the things that he suffered." For my own part I cannot see how it is possible to deny the evidences of development in his message as the Synoptists report it. There is an unceasing process of action and reaction between the urge of the splendid ideal, and the pressure of stern reality. He finds victory in defeat. pointment in his case only lends wings to faith, so that the unbelief of Galilee gives but the greater scope and the deeper intensity to his self-dedication. The catastrophe in Jerusalem was more disastrous. It left him not only deserted by every follower, but betrayed to a felon's death. Yet faith was victorious. Not, however, by following his own way, but the way of his Father's leading. The Eschatological school of interpreters, who make apocalypse the one key to all problems of Jesus' career, are very likely right in maintaining that Jesus went up to Jerusalem in the conviction that if he did not carry Israel with him God himself would visibly intervene. If so, that was one of the phases of Jesus' faith that had to be transcended. And there is good reason to believe that it was transcended; not only later, by the faith of a Church disappointed in its cruder expectations, but by the faith of Jesus himself. Of this we have more than one intimation in the so-called Second Source. At present I will refer to one only. The demand of a sign from heaven is addressed to Jesus by certain scribes who had come down from Jerusalem to destroy his work in Galilee and drive him |