Rome, occupied the Jewish mind in every quarter of the world, in Palestine mingling personal apprehensions, and either a trembling sense of the insecurity of life, or a desperate determination to risk life itself for liberty, with the more appalling anticipations of the national destiny, the total extinction of the Heaven-ordained polity, the ruin of the city of Sion, and the Temple of God. To the ferocious and fanatical party, who gradually assumed the ascendancy, Christianity would be obnoxious, as secluding its peaceful followers from all participation in the hopes, the crimes, or what, in a worldly sense, might have been, not unjustly, considered the glories of the insurrection. Still, to whatever dangers or trials they were exposed, they were the desultory and casual attacks of individual hostility, rather than the systematic and determined persecution of one ruling party. Nor, perhaps, were they looked upon with the same animosity as many of the more eminent and influential of the Jews, who vainly attempted to allay the wild ferment. A general tradition, preserved by Eusebius, intimates that the Christian community, especially forewarned by Providence, left Jerusalem before the formation of the siege, and took refuge in the town of Pella, in the Trans-Jordanic province. According to Josephus, the same course was pursued by most of the higher order, who could escape in time from the sword of the Zealot or the Idumean. Rabbinical tradition dates from the same period the flight of the Sanhedrin from the Capital its first place of refuge, without the walls of Jerusalem, was Jafna (Jamnia), from whence it passed to other cities, until its final settlement in Tiberias (1). : The Jewish war, the final desolation of the national polity; the destruction of the city, and the demolition of the Temple, were events which could not but influence the progress of Christianity to a far greater extent, than by merely depriving the Jews of the Probable power to persecute under a legal form. While the Christian beheld effect of in all these unexampled horrors the accomplishment of predicJerusalem tions uttered by his Lord, the less infatuated among the Jews could tianity. not be ignorant, that such predictions prevailed among the Chris the fall of on Chris tians. However the prudence of the latter might shrink from exasperating the more violent party, by the open promulgation of such dispiriting and ill-omened auguries, they must have transpired among those who were hesitating between the two parties, and powerfully tended to throw that fluctuating mass into the preponderating scale of Christianity. With some of the Jews, no doubt, the hope in the coming of the Messiah must have expired with the fall of the Temple. Not merely was the period of time, assigned, according to the general interpretation of the prophecies, for the appearance of the Deliverer, gone by, but their less stern and obsti (1) Hist. of Jews, iii. 95. the Jews. nate Judaism must have begun to entertain apprehensions, that the visible rejection of the people intimated, not obscurely, the withdrawal of the Divine favour. They would thus be thrown back, as it were, upon Jesus of Nazareth as the only possible Messiah, and listen to his claims with greater inclination to believe. The alternative might seem to be between him and the desperate abandonment, or the adjournment to an indefinite period, of all their hopes of redemption. The hearts of many would be softened by the experience of personal suffering, or the sight of so many cases of individual misery. Christianity, with its consolatory promises, must Effect on have appeared the only refuge to those with whom the wretchedness of their temporal condition seemed to invalidate their hopes of an hereditary claim to everlasting life as children of Abraham; where they despaired of a temporal, they would be more inclined te accept a spiritual, and moral deliverance. At the same time the temporary advantage of the few converts, gained from such motives, would be counterbalanced by the more complete alienation of the Jewish mind from a race, who not only apostatised from the religion of their fathers, but by no means repudiated the most intimate connection with the race of Esau, for thus the dark hostility of the Jews began to denominate the Romans. By the absorption of this intermediate class, who had wavered between Christianity and Judaism, who either melted into the mass of the Christian party, or yielded themselves to the desperate infatuation of Judaism, the breach between the Jew and the Christian became more wide and irreparable. The prouder and more obstinate Jew sternly wrapped himself up in his sullen isolation; his aversion from the rest of mankind, under the sense of galling oppression, and of disappointed pride, settled into hard hostility. That which those of less fanatic Judaism found in Christianity, he sought in a stronger attachment to his own distinctive ceremonial; in a more passionate and deeprooted conviction of his own prerogative, as the elect people of God. He surrendered himself, a willing captive, to the new priestly dominion, that of the Rabbins, which enslaved his whole life to a system of minute ordinances; he rejoiced in the rivetting and multiplying those bonds, which had been burst by Christianity, but which he wore as the badge of hopes still to be fulfilled, of glories which were at length to compensate for his present humiliation. This more complete alienation between the Jew and the Chrislian tended to weaken that internal spirit of Judaism, which, nevertheless, was eradicated with the utmost difficulty, and indeed has perpetually revived within the bosom of Christianity under another name. Down to the destruction of Jerusalem, Palestine, or rather Jerusalem itself, was at once the centre and the source of this predominant influence. In foreign countries, as we shall presently explain, the irrepealable and eternal sanctity of the Mosaic Jewish at to the Law. Law, was the repressive power which was continually struggling against the expansive force of Christianity. In Jerusalem this power was the holiness of the Temple, and therefore, with the fall of the Temple, this strongest bond, with which the heart of the Jewish Christian was rivetted to his old religion, at once burst asunder. To him the practice of his Lord and the Apostles had seemed to confirm the inalienable local sanctity of this "chosen dwelling" of God; and while it yet stood in all its undegraded splendour, to the Christian of Jerusalem it was almost impossible fully to admit the first principle of Christianity, that the Universal Father is worshipped in any part of his created universe with equal advantage. One mark by which the Jewish race was designated as the great religious caste of mankind, was thus for ever abolished. The synagogue had no reverential dignity, no old and sacred majesty to the mind of the convert, beyond his own equally humble and unimposing place of devotion. Hence even before the destruction of the Temple, this feeling depended upon the peculiar circumstances of the individual convert. Though even among the foreign Jews the respect for the Temple was maintained by traditionary reverence, though the impost for its maintenance was regularly levied and willingly paid by the race of Israel in every part of the Roman empire, and occasional visits to the capital at the periods of the great festivals, revived in many the old sacred impressions, still, according to the universal principles of human nature, the more remote the residence, and the less frequent the impression of the Temple services upon the senses, the weaker became this first conservative principle of Jewish feeling. But there remained another element of that exclusiveness, which tachment was the primary principle of the existing Judaism; that exclusiveness, which limiting the Divine favour to a certain race, would scarcely believe that foreign branches could be engrafted into the parent stock, even though incorporated with it; and still obstinately resisted the notion that Gentiles, without becoming Jews, could share in the blessings of the promised Messiah; or, in their state of uncircumcision, or at least of insubordination to the Mosaic ordinances, become heirs of the kingdom of Heaven. What the Temple was to the inhabitant of Jerusalem, was the The Law. Law to the worshipper in the synagogue. As early, no doubt, as the present time, the book of the Law was the one great sacred object in every religious edifice of the Jews in all parts of the world. It was deposited in a kind of ark; it was placed in that part of the synagogue which represented the Holy of Holies; it was brought forth with solemn reverence by the "angel" of the assembly; it was heard as an 66 oracle of God" from the sanctuary. The whole rabbinical supremacy rested on their privilege as interpreters of the law; and tradition, though, in fact, it assumed a co-ordinate authority, yet veiled its pretensions under the humbler character, of an exposition, a supplementary comment, on the heaven-enacted code. If we reascend, in our history, towards the period in which Christianity first opened its pale to the Gentiles, we shall find that this was the prevailing power by which the internal Judaism maintained its conflict with purer and more liberal Christianity within its own sphere. Even at Antioch, the Christian community had been in danger from this principle of separation; the Jewish converts, jealous of all encroachment upon the law, had drawn off and insulated themselves from those of the Gentiles (1). Peler withdrew within the narrower and more exclusive party; Barnabas alone, the companion and supporter of Paul, did not incline to the same course (2). It required all the energy and resolution of Paul to resist the example and influence of the older Apostles. His public expostulation had the effect of allaying the discord at Antioch; and the temperate and conciliatory measures adopted in Jerusalem, to a certain degree reunited the conflicting parties. Still, in most places where Paul established a new community, immediately after his departure this same spirit of Judaism seems to have rallied, and attempted to re-establish the great exclusive principle, that Christianity was no more than Judaism, completed by the reception of Jesus as the Messiah. The universal religion of Christ was thus in perpetual danger of being contracted into a national and ritual worship. The eternal law of Moses was still to maintain its authority with all its cumbrous framework of observances; and the Gentile proselytes who were ready to submit to the faith of Christ, with its simple and exquisite morality, were likewise to submit to all the countless provisions, and, now in many respects, unmeaning and unintelligible regulations, of diet, dress, manners, and conduct. This conflict may be traced most clearly in the Epistles of St. Paul, particularly in those to the remote communities in Galatia and in Rome. The former, written probably during the residence of the Apostle at Ephesus, was addressed to the Christians of Galatia, a district in the northern part of Asia Minor, occupied by a mingled population (3). The descendants of the Gaulish invaders, from whom the region derived its name, retained to a late period vestiges of their original race, in the Celtic dialect, and probably great numbers of Jews had settled in these quarters. Paul had twice visited the country, and his Epistle (1) It is difficult to decide whether this dis pute took place before or after the decree of the assembly in Jerusalem. Plank, in his Geschichte des Christenthums, places it before the decree, and on the whole this appears the most probable opinion, The event is noticed here as exemplifying the Judaising spirit rather than in strict chronological order. Acts, xv. (3) We decline the controversy concerning the place and time at which the different epistles were written; we shail give only the result, not the process of our investigations. This to the Galatians we suppose to have been written du ring St. Paul's first visit to Ephesus. (Acts, xix.) The strength daism was written at no long period after his second visit. But even in of the in- that short interval, Judaism had revived its pretensions. The adternal Ju- versaries of Paul had even gone so far as to disclaim him as an within the Apostle of Christianity; and before he vindicates the essential indechurch pendence of the new faith, and declares the Jewish law to have opposed been only a temporary institution (1), designed during a dark and Paul. barbarous period of human society, to keep alive the first principles of true religion, he has to assert his own divine appointment as a delegated teacher of Christianity (2). by St. The Epistle to the Romans (3) enters with more full and elaborate argument into the same momentous question. The History of the Roman community is most remarkable. It grew up in silence, founded by some unknown teachers (4), probably of those who were present in Jerusalem, at the first publication of Christianity by the Apostles. During the reign of Claudius it had made so much progress, as to excite open tumults and dissensions among the Jewish population of Rome; these animosities rose to such a height, that the attention of the government was aroused, and both parties expelled from the city. With some of these exiles, Aquila and Priscilla, St. Paul, as we have seen, formed an intimate connection during his first visit to Corinth from them he received information of the extraordinary progress of the faith in Rome. The Jews seem quietly to have crept back to their old quarters, when the rigour with which the Imperial Edict was at first executed, had insensibly relaxed; and from these persons on their return to the capital, and most likely from other Roman Christians, who may have taken refuge in Corinth (5), or in other cities where Paul had founded Christian communities, the first, or at least the more perfect knowledge of the higher Christianity, taught by the Apostle of the Gentiles, would be conveyed to Rome. So complete indeed does he appear to consider the first establishment of Christianity in Rome, that he merely proposes to take that city in his way to a remote region, that of Spain (6). The manner in which he recounts, in the last chapter, the names of the more distinguished Roman (1) Galat. iii. 19. (4) The foundation of the church of Rome by that the foundation of the church in Rome was long.previous to his visit to the western metropolis of the world. (5) It would appear probable that the greater part of the Christian community took refuge, with Aquila and Priscilla, in Corinth, and the neighbouring port of Cenchrea. (6) The views of Paul on so remote a province as Spain, at so early a period of his journey, appear to justify the notion, that there was a considerable Jewish population in that country. It is not impossible that many of the "Libertines" may have made their way from Sardinia. There is a curious tradition among the Spanish Jews, that they were resident in that country before the birth of our Saviour, and consequently had no concern in his death. See Hist. of Jews, iii. p. 142. |