PRELIMINARY DISSERTATION.

IT

T is not because this truly great work needs any commendation from me that I consent to stand, as it were, for a little while between the learned authors and their readers, but because I have ventured to hope that what I have to say by way of introduction may be accepted as a humble contribution to the usefulness of "The People's Edition." This Life of Paul the Apostle, with his writings incorporated as biographical documents in a free but conscientious translation, was designed originally for the use of scholars conversant in some degree with the sources of the affluent and various learning by which the narrative is enriched and illustrated; but in a People's Edition it will find, I doubt not, many intelligent readers to whom the facts and considerations offered in these few pages may be helpful.

Even an unbeliever, if he be at all intelligent, must admit that the Christian religion is, at this moment, one of the most important facts in the condition of the civilized world; and that, ever since its first appearance in history, it has been one of the most powerful among the forces that have impelled or controlled the world's progress. The year which was fixed upon, fourteen hundred years ago, as that in which Jesus Christ was born, has become, by the general consent of civilized nations, the point from which all time is measured, backward to the dimmest antiquity, and forward into the yet unknown future. In other words, the importance of Christianity as a fact and a force in history is recognized in the recognition of the Christian era. Any other method of dating, as, for example, in the British Empire, from the accession of the reigning sovereign, or, in our country, from the Declaration of Independence, is more for form than The attempt of revolutionary France to abolish the Christian era, and to substitute for it the era of the Republic, was as futile as the simultaneous attempt to abolish the division of time into weeks, and is already remembered

only as a curiosity of history. Nothing future is more certain than that, in the progress of civilization and of international intercourse, making the knowledge and the arts of Christendom a common possession for mankind, all nations will learn to count their years and centuries from the supposed birthday of Christ. So signally has this Christian religion inserted itself into the world's history. It is not only a marvellous fact; it is a transcendent power: its beginning is the one epoch from which all the centuries before and after must be measured.

No thoughtful man, then, can fail to be deeply interested in the inquiry concerning the origin of Christianity, however he may doubt or deny its authority as a revelation from God. When, where, and how did this religion begin? It appears to-day under various forms and aspects, but always resting on the same basis of alleged facts. In its dogmas, in its ritual, in its external discipline, it has been modified from age to age; at one time gradually corrupted by enthusiasms or superstitions, at another time reformed. What was it in its beginning? What were the ideas and sentiments, the faith, the expectations, the practices, and the character, of those who were first called Christians? Such questions, surely, even if considered as historical questions only, are profoundly interesting to a thoughtful mind. What sources of information are there from which we may obtain a satisfactory answer to such questions?

Apart from that little collection of writings which we call the New Testament, we have really no information concerning the origin of Christianity. The greatest of all revolutions in human thinking and in human affairs began, and passed through the earliest stage of its progress, in an obscurity beneath the notice of philosophers and historians. When it first comes into recognition in secular literature, its existence is already a mystery to be accounted for, and no light appears in regard to its origin. Yet that was not a barbarous age. It was just the age in which the old civilization had reached its highest advancement. Over the wide extent of the empire that called itself the world, literature and the arts were in their glory. Grecian culture and the Grecian spirit of speculation had been superinduced upon the sterner qualities of the Roman race; and many a provincial city, as well as the great centre of dominion, had its literary men, and its institute or college, in which accomplished teachers gave instruction in philosophy and rhetoric to crowds of pupils. But the literature of that age took no careful notice, and made no deliberate record, of a movement, which, as we now see, was destined to change the history of the world. Three eminent Roman authors, who lived near the close of the first century and in the beginning of the second, and they only, mention distinctly the fact of Christianity as a new religion; but they give no intelligent report of how it came into being.

It happens that those three authors were related to each other as friends. 14e oldest of them, CAIUS CORNELIUS TACITUS, was born about the year 55 of the Christian era. CAIUS PLINIUS CECILIUS SECUNDUS, commonly called in English the younger PLINY, was born in 61 or 62. CAIUS SUETONIUS TRANQUILLUS was born about the year 70, or two years before the fall of Jerusalem. They were all eminent men, of rare talents, accomplished by the best culture which the time could give, personally conversant with public affairs, employed in various offices of great responsibility, honored with the friendship of such an emperor as Trajan, yet more desirous of winning celebrity with future ages by literary achievements than by rising to the highest honors in the forum or in the imperial court. Two of them were historians, recording with exquisite art, and with something of philosophic sagacity, the events of their own age and of the age immediately preceding. The other survives in a voluminous collection of familiar letters to his friends,—just such memorials of men and times as the student of history most delights in. What information, then, do these three illustrious authors give us concerning that most important theme in the history of their century, the origin and early progress of the Christian religion?

The great work of Suetonius is his "Lives of the Twelve Cæsars," beginning with Julius, and ending with Domitian. In his "Life of Claudius Cæsar," whose reign began A.D. 42, and continued about eight years, there is one sentence which is commonly understood as referring to disturbances occasioned by Jewish hostility to the belief in Jesus as the Christ: "He [Claudius] expelled from Rome the Jews, who were continually raising tumults at the instigation of Chrestus."1 That brief sentence, as the reader of this volume will have occasion to observe, describes, no doubt, the expulsion which brought the Christian Jew Aquila and his wife Priscilla from Italy to Corinth. But at present we need only observe how meagre and unsatisfactory is the notice of a fact about which our curiosity in this nineteenth century demands full information. If the historian heedlessly wrote Chrestus for Christus, without inquiring what any person of that name had to do with the riots, then the Christian religion, some time after the year 42, and before the year 50, had become a subject of controversy among the Jews at Rome, and its enemies had attempted to suppress it by violence; and farther this witness has nothing to say.

But in his "Life of Nero," the successor of Claudius, there is another passage, more explicit. Describing summarily those things done by Nero which were in part blameless and in part praiseworthy, before touching upon the crimes

1 “Judæos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantes Roma expulit." — Suetonius, Claud. 25.

Acts xviii. 2. See pp. 835, 336, of this volume.

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which have made that name forever infamous, he says, "The Christians, a sort of men of a new and mischievous superstition, were severely punished." It seems, then, there were Christians at Rome when Nero was emperor. Their religion was at that time new, and was considered (then, and forty or fifty years later, when Suetonius told the story) a mischievous superstition. They were severely punished for being Christians; and, in the opinion of the historian, one of the good things which Nero did, or at least one of the things in that reign which deserve no reprehension, was the fact that Christians were thus punished. But why did he not tell us something more about those Christians? Surely he might have told us (had he thought it worth the telling) what their new superstition was, whence it came, what mischievous practice or tendency there was in it. Could he have had only the faintest anticipation of what was to be about two hundred years from the date of his writing, a Christian Cæsar in the place of Nero, and that "new superstition" everywhere triumphant over the old religion, surely he would have taken pains to find out and to report some authentic particulars concerning the origin and early progress of a movement that was to bring about so great a change.

Of what Tacitus wrote, much has been lost; but there is one memorable passage in which he speaks distinctly of the Christian religion. His "Annals" gave the succession of leading events in the empire, from the death of Augustus, A.D. 14, to the death of Nero, A.D. 68; and only about one-third of the great work has been lost. In the composition of such a work, nothing, it would seem, could be more natural than that he should find occasion to describe with some degree of minuteness, and with careful attention, the beginning and the early propagation of Christianity. Such an occasion occurred to him. He could not avoid speaking of the new religion; but his account of it is very unsatisfactory to us, who know the historic importance of the facts which he ought to have described. Having narrated with picturesque effect the great conflagration of Rome in the reign of Nero, and the efforts which the emperor made to efface from the minds of men the suspicion that he was himself the author of that destruction, Tacitus says, "Therefore Nero, to get rid of the rumor, substituted as the criminals, and punished with most exquisite tortures, those persons, odious for shameful practices, whom the vulgar called Christians. Christ, the author of that name, was punished by the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius; and the deadly superstition, repressed for a while, broke out again not only

1 "Afflicti suppliciis Christiani, genus hominum superstitionis novæ ac maleficæ."- Suet., Nero, 16. "Hæc partim nulla reprehensione, partim etiam non

mediocri laude digna, in unum contuli: ut secernerem a probris ac sceleribus ejus, de quibus dehine dicam." - Ibid. 19.

through Judæa, the original seat of that evil, but through the city also, whither, from every side, all things horrible or shameful flow together and come into vogue. First, some were arrested who made confession; then, by the information obtained from them, a great multitude were found guilty, not so much of burning the city as of a hatred of the human race. Even in their dying, they were made sport of,-some covered with skins of beasts, that they might be mangled to death by dogs; others nailed to crosses; others condemned to the flames, and, when the day went down, they were burned for illumination in the night. Nero had offered his own gardens for that spectacle, and gave at the same time a circus exhibition, going about himself among the rabble in the dress of a charioteer, or actually driving a chariot. The consequence was, that although the sufferers were wicked, and worthy of extreme punishment, commiseration was awakened, as if they suffered not from any consideration of the public welfare, but for the gratification of one man's cruelty.""

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Tacitus, then, making his record of public events, was compelled to take notice of the Christian religion as a fact in the reign of Nero. He describes more at length, what Suetonius mentions so briefly, the persecution of the Christians at Rome by that emperor. He tells us that it followed the great conflagration, which is known to have been A.D. 64. From him we learn, in addition to what Suetonius has told us, the occasion and motive of the persecution, and what cruelties were inflicted on the sufferers. He even gives some information concerning the origin of that new religion; that it arose in Judæa under the reign of Tiberius, which extended, as we know, from A.D. 14 to A.D. 37; that its name was derived from Christ, who was punished by the procurator Pilate, whose term of office began, as is ascertained from other sources of information, in the twelfth year of that reign; that, instead of being suppressed by the punishment inflicted on its author, it spread through Judæa, and through Rome itself. Yet the description which he gives of Christianity is no more satisfactory to our reasonable curiosity than the more compendious statement given by Suetonius. The great conflagration, and the torture of Christians in Nero's gardens, were

1 "Ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos, et quæsitissimis pœnis adfecit, quos per flagitia invisos, vulgus Christianos appellabat. Auctor nominis ejus Christus, Tiberio imperitante, per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum, supplicio affectus erat. Repres saque in præsens exitiabilis superstitio rursùs erumpebat non modò per Judæam, originem ejus mali, sed per urbem etiam quò cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt, celebranturque. Igitur primùm correpti, qui fatebantur, deinde, indicio eorum multitudo ingens, haud perinde in crimine incendii, quam odio humani generis convicti sunt. Et pereuntibus

addita ludibria, ut ferarum tergis contecti laniatu canum interirent, aut crucibus affixi, aut flammandi atque ubi deficisset dies in usum nocturni luminis urerentur. Hortos suos ei spectaculo Nero obtulerat, et Circense ludicrum edebat, habitu aurigæ permixtus plebi, vel curriculo insistens. Unde, qui r quam adversus sontes, et novissima exempia meritos, miseratio oriebatur, tanquam non utilitate publicâ, sed in sævitiam unius absumerentur."-Tacit., Ann. xv. 44. The translation which I have given is as nearly literal as the difference of the two languages and the sententious brevity of the author will permit.