JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
A SKETCH
OF
THE PROGRESS OF THOUGHT FROM OLD
TESTAMENT TO NEW TESTAMENT
BY
CRAWFORD HOWELL TOY
PBOFESSOR IX HARVARD UNIVERSITY
LONDON
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON
(LIMITED)
1890
UNIVERSITY PRESS:
JOHX WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S A.
'T^HE present volume was begun as a continuation
of my " Quotations in the New Testament,"
with the purpose of giving an orderly view of the
development of religious thought apparent in the
way in which Old Testament passages are inter-
preted and used by New Testament writers. On
further consideration of the subject, however, I
came to the conclusion that this end would be
better gained by a general historical survey of the
period reaching from the distinct legal organiza-
tion of the Jewish people to the close of the New
Testament Canon. In so large a field I have been
obliged to confine myself to the discussion of gen-
eral ethical-religious ideas, omitting many details
which might properly have been introduced but for
lack of space ; and this condensation will not be
without advantage if it helps to secure clearness of
outline without the sacrifice of anything essential to
the discussion. For the same reason namely, lack
of space I have not gone into full critical exami-
nation of the Biblical and Apocryphal books which
vi PREFACE.
have furnished the material for my discussion, but
have contented myself with brief indications of
the grounds of my chronological classification. For
details on this point I refer to the well-known
works of Reuss, Kuenen, Stade, Weiss, Meyer, and
others. I felt doubtful about inserting so meagre
an outline as I have given of the subject of the
Introduction, a subject that richly deserves a
separate treatise ; but on the whole it seemed
better to treat it even very briefly than to
omit it altogether. Among works bearing on
this subject may be mentioned Bagehot's " Physics
and Politics," Kuenen's " National Religions and
Universal Religions, " and W. Robertson Smith's
" Religion of the Semites."
I need hardly sny that I do not claim absolute
correctness for my results. In the treatment of so
long a period of history, for the construction of
which the data are sometimes lacking and often
uncertain, one can hope only for an approximation
to the truth, and I shall be grateful for any criti-
cisms which may lead to a correcter or completer
interpretation of the facts.
C. II. T.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.,
October, 1890.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION.
PAGE
ON THE GENERAL LAWS OF THE ADVANCE FROM NATIONAL TO
UNIVERSAL RELIGIONS 1-46
I. THE SOCIAL BASIS OF RELIGION 1-6
1. SOCIAL CHARACTER OF RELIGION 1, 2
1. Religion a product of human thought, 1. 2. Con-
tent of the religious consciousness, 2.
2. GROWTH OF SOCIETY 2-6
1. General laws of growth, arrest, retrogression, and
decay, 2, 3. 2. Application of these laws to
society, 3, 4. 3. Relation of size of commu-
nity to law of growth, 4, 5. 4. Religion sub-
ject to the laws of social growth, 5, 6.
II. GENERAL CONDITIONS OF RELIGIOUS PROGRESS 6-39
1. FORMATION OF COMMUNITIES . 7-11
1. Organized social life the condition of the devel-
opment of a religion, ?-9. 2. Nations formed
by combinations of smaller communities, and na-
tional religions by aggregation of tribal faiths,
9-11.
2. INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS 11-21
1. Constant refashioning of religious ideas in a grow-
ing community, 11, 12. 2. Interaction between
the different elements of social thought ; influ-
ence of art and politics on religion,"l2, 13.
3. Religion modified and developed by science,
14-16. 4. Religion and ethics, their indepen-
dent developments and mutual influence, 16-20.
5. Content of the religious sentiment deter-
mined by science and ethics, 20, 21.
3. GREAT MEN 21-26
1. Great men a necessity in social progress, 21, 22.
2. They are the product of their times, 22, 23.
3. There is something inexplicable in them, 23,
viii CONTENTS.
PAGE
24. 4. They give a new unity to thought and
society, 24, 25. 5. The part they have played
in the establishment of religious, 23, 20.
4. EXTERNAL CONDITIONS 20-30
1. The extent of the religious influence exerted by one
nation on another depends in part on closeness of
intercourse, 20, 27. 2. Such influence recipro-
cal, and the more developed the religious culture
the greater its influence, 27, 28. 3. Effect of ex-
citement of thought, 28. 4. Borrowing of ideas
is direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious,
28, 29. 5. It is determined by a nation's ca-
pacity for assimilation, 29, 30.
5. THE GENERAL LINES OF PROGRESS 30-30
1. Abandonment of local usages, 30-32. 2. Broaden-
ing of ideas, 32. 3. Selection of a new idea as
basis of organization, 32-34. 4. Response to
the demands of the times, 34, 35. 5. An abso-
lutely universal religion has not yet appeared,
35, 30.
6. EXTRA-NATIONAL EXTENSION 30-39
1. There is necessary an idea broader than national
areas, "30, 37. 2. There must be a wide social
unity, 37. 3. And religious emptiness in the
areas conquered, 37, 3S. 4. The conquering
religion must offer what is needed, 38, 39.
III. THE ACTUAL HISTORICAL RESULTS 39-46
1. THE UNIVERSAL RELIGIONS 39, 40
Conditions to be fulfilled numerous. Number of uni-
versal religions small. Rise of Buddhism, Chris-
tianity, and Islam.
2. STUNTED AND ARRESTED GROWTHS 40-41
1. Stoicism and other philosophical systems, their lack
of theological framework, 41, 42. 2. Confu-
cianism. 3. The old Egyptian religion, bound
to the soil. Mazdeism, its lack of clearness,
42, 43. 4. National and international churches,
43, 44.
3. NATIONAL AND TRIBAL RELIGIONS 44
Inertness of the great mass of the religions of the
world.
4. THE OUTLOOK 44-46
1. Signs that a few great religions will in time control
the world, 44, 45. 2. Superiority of Christian-
ity, 45. 3. Improbable that other religions will
survive as systems, 45. 4. Probable modifica-
tion of Christianity in the future, 45, 46.
CONTENTS.
JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY.
PAGE
RESULTS OF ISRAELITISH THOUGHT UP TO EZRA'S TIME . . . 47-51
Practical Monotheism. Sound system of practical social ethics.
Organization of public worship. Messianic hope.
CHAPTER I.
THE LITERATURE .............. 52-76
1. THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT ......... 52-68
1. Prophetic writings. Decline of prophecy, 53. Malachi
ritualistic, 53. Zechariah and Joel predict the revi-
val of nationality, 54.
2. Rewriting of history from the ritualistic point of view :
Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, 55.
3. Chronicles; its embellishments. The romances: Jonah,
Esther, Judith, Tobit. 55-58.
4. Wisdom-books ; their practical character. Proverbs.
Ecclesiastes ; its philosophical scepticism. Wisdom
of Solomon ; its Platonic and Stoic elements. Wisdom
of the Son of Sirach ; its Jewish tone. 58-60.
5. Liturgical literature. The book of Psalms. Enig-
matical character of the Song of Songs. 61, 62.
6. Apocalypses; their origin and form. Daniel. Enoch.
Sibylline Oracles. Baruch. Assumption of Moses.
Psalter of Solomon. Book of Jubilees. Second
Esdras. 62-67.
7. Historical and theological works. Maccabees. Jo-
sephus. Philo. 67, 68.
2. THE CANONS ............... 68-76
1. Origin of the canonical idea. 68, 69.
2. Beginning of canonization. The Tora or Law, its his-
torical development. 69-71.
3. The second or prophetic canon. 71-73.
4. The third or non-prophetic canon, the grounds of choice
of its content. Palestinian and Alexandrian canons.
Uncanonized books. 73-76.
CHAPTER II.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD ........... 77-140
The monotheistic idea firmly established in fifth century B. c.,
but not theoretically complete. Elements of the theistic
conception. 77, 78.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
1. Governmental side: supremacy of God, his providential
care for men, and for inanimate and brute nature ; his
special relation to Israel ; his justice, how defined by theo-
logical theories in O. T. and N. T. 78-83.
2. Love as a divine attribute, historical growth of the con-
ception ; Greek influence. 83-86.
3. Spiritual relation of God to the individual man ; conception
of God as pure spirit. 86-89.
4. Hypostatic differences in the divine nature. 89-121.
Hypostatizing tendency in 0. T. : angel of the pres-
ence ; angel of the name ; angel of Yahwe. 90, 91.
Hypostatical development of spirit, 92-96 ; of wisdom,
96-103 ; of word : Philo, N. T., 103-121.
5. Relation of God's self-manifestation to natural law; N. T.
miracles. 121-127-
6. Authority of the Scriptures : inspiration ; attitude of N. T.
writers toward 0. T. ; Jewish critical methods ; use of
0. T. in N. T. ; quotations. 127-140.
CHAPTER III.
SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS . . ; . . 141-172
1. Survivals from early animistic beliefs : teraphirn ; demons ;
magic; Azazel. 141-144.
2. Spirits, their origin; their subordination to God. 144-
146.
3. Angels, their origin ; historical development ; Persian in-
fluence; position in N. T. 146-154.
4. Evil spirits : Satan ; his appearance in O. T. and apocryphal
books ; his role as tempter. Fallen angels. Leviathan,
Behemoth, Rahab. The Satan of N. T. Origin of the
figure of Satan ; later Persian influence. Historical devel-
opment of evil spirits ; demoniacal possession. 154-172.
CHAPTER IV.
MAN. 173-290
1. Constitution of man: body and soul. O. T. use of terms
body, soul, spirit, heart, reins. N. T. use of body, flesh,
heart, spirit, mind. Not a trichotomy. 173-182.
2. Nature and origin of sin. 183-220.
O. T. conception of sin ; general development of the
idea. Two elements of consciousness of sin. Historical
development: period of Judges and David; of pre-exilian
CONTENTS. XI
PAGE
prophets ; of Jeremiah ; of the Levitical law ; of the Book
of Psalms. Consciousness of righteousness. Gradual deep-
ening of the sense of sin. 183-193.
O. T. view of origin of sin. Its reticence. Narrative
in Gen. iii., its date; its design; assumes human incli-
nation to sin. The serpent in the narrative, a rational
beast ; probably mythical in origin ; identified with Satan,
not iii O. T., but in Wisdom of Solomon. The narrative
iii Genesis not an allegory. Its representation of death.
193-205.
Conception of sin in apocryphal books and Philo. 205,
206.
N. T. representation of sin; its practical interest pro-
duces reticence as to questions of origin of sin and of con-
sequences of Adam's transgression ; Paul's treatment of
this last point ; role assigned to the woman. 206-211.
N. T. view of corruption of human nature : Synoptic
Gospels, James, Pastoral Epistles, Paul, Ephesians and Co-
lossians, Fourth Gospel. No gnostic asceticism. 211-220.
3. Removal of sin. 220-233.
Prophetic view of expiation. Sin atoned for by the sin-
ner's suffering. Vicarious human suffering : origin of the
idea; its treatment by the exilian Isaiah. 220-225.
Formulation of idea of ceremonial atonement in the
Law ; its restricted character. 225-227-
Appeal to the mercy of God. Human mediation for
sin. Negative attitude of prophets toward sacrificial ritual.
227-231.
Teaching of the extra-canonical books. 231.
Point of view of Jesus that of the pre-exilian prophets
spiritualized. The early disciples. Paul's conception of
the sacrificial nature of the Messiah's death. 231-233.
4. 0. T. conception of righteousness. 233-246.
0. T. conception of moral goodness : prophetic standard ;
Deuteronomy ; the " new heart ; " two tendencies ; idea of
inward purity in the Psalms. Twofold view of the source
of righteousness : man's will and God's help. 233-237.
Nomism. Introduction of the complete Law. Inter-
nal and external causes of the Jewish nomistic organiza-
tion. Strength and weakness of nomism : precision of
religious life ; pride ; externalism ; casuistry ; depression
of spirituality. General moral influence of the nomistic
system in Judaism and in Christianity. 237-246.
5. Succeeding development of the idea of righteousness. 246-
266.
Synagogues; their origin and influence. 246-248.
Parties. Tendencies formulated in the Greek period.
xii CONTENTS.
PAGI
The Pharisees, their origin; representatives of broader
nationalism; acceptance of new doctrines; possible Greek
influence. The Sadducees ; their origin, beliefs, and influ-
ence. The Essenes, their peculiarities ; their effect on
the general Jewish life ; traces of the party in the N. T.
The Zealots. 243-258.
The Sanhedriii. The legal schools ; greatness of their
influence. Sayings of Simon and Antigonus ; Stoic influ-
ence. Rivalry between Pharisees and Sadducees repre-
sents in one aspect the struggle between progressive
uomism and conservative nationalism, in another aspect
the conflict between Jewish and foreign ideas. Hellenism,
though it could not crush the Jewish religion, impressed
itself on Jewish thought. Illustrations from the teaching
of the lawyers, especially Hillel and Shammai. Religious
breadth of Hillel. 238-266.
6. N. T. conception of righteousness. 266-290.
Teaching of Jesns : he recognized the Law ; spiritual
character of his nomism ; source of righteousness in the
soul itself. The early Church, stress laid on sincerity
rather than on spirituality; relation of Jesus to man's
righteousness scarcely touched on. 266-271.
Paul's doctrine of imputed righteousness, recom-
mended to him by his own experience ; not alien to the
thought of the time. O. T. basis of the doctrine ; applica-
tion to Jesus suggested by Paul's high conception of the
functions of the Messiah. Paul's doctrine of faith. 271-
275.
Opposition to Paul's apparent antinomianism. His re-
ply brings out the spiritual side of his idea : disappearance
of desire to sin ; faith not merely intellectual belief ; appeal
to the power of an ideal ; indwelling of God in the soul ;
the deatli of Christ the condition of salvation. Summing
up of Paul's doctrine. 275-281.
Subsequent history of the idea of righteousness in the
N. T.: Ephesians, Colossians, and First Peter substantially
Pauline ; 0. T. point of view in Hebrews ; universality of
First Timothy ; Pauline tone of Second Timothy and Titus ;
in the Fourth Gospel and First John righteousness is a
divinely created light-nature. Three conceptions in N. T.
idea of righteousness : personal goodness, imputed good-
ness, transformation of soul. 2S1-285.
The insufficiency of the Jewish national nomism. Effect
of the teaching of Jesus, and of the systems of Paul and the
Fourth Gospel. Later history of Jewish nomism. Min-
gling of nomistic and antinomistic elements in Judaism and
in Christianity. 286-289.
CONTENTS. xiii
PAGE
Contrast between the outward method of attaining
righteousness through a vicarious sacrifice, and the in-
ward method of transformation of soul. 290.
CHAPTER V.
ETHICS . 291-302
Ethical discussion in the Bible practical, not philosophical. 291,
292.
1. Jewish moral coda of 5th century B. c. purely national.
292, 293.
2. Greek period. Broader ethical tone of Wisdom-books.
293, 294.
3. Ethics of Jesus; its religious sanctions. The golden rule.
294-297.
4. Ethics of the Epistles. Attitude toward unbelievers. Cos-
mopolitan tendency. 297, 298.
5. Biblical view of the aim of life. Egoism. Ethical defect of
N. T. speculative rather than practical. 298-300.
6. Distinctive spirit of N. T. ethics. Ethical power of the
Church. Influence of Christianity on the ethical life of
the world. 300-302.
CHAPTER VI.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD . 303-371
The conception of the kingdom of God a characteristic of
Jewish thought ; its four stadia, The Jewish national hope ;
its origin in Jewish power of persistence and of religious
organization. The idea of a national covenant with God ;
its growth and its consequences. The history of the na-
tional hope is the history of the national thought. SOS-
SOS.
1. The pre-prophetic, non-ethical period ; its preparatory char-
acter. 308, 309.
2. The pre-exilian and exilian prophetic period. Hope of
political and moral-religious prosperity in Amos, Hosea,
Isaiah, Micah, Nairn m, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, the exilian Isaiah, Mic. vii., Dent, xxvhi.-xxx., 1
Kings viii. 309-312.
3. The post-exilian prophetic period. Ritual tinge in Haggai,
Zechariah, Malachi. Cosmopolitan spirit of Isa. ii. 2-4,
xix. 18-25. 312-314.
4. Legal period. Joel, the second Zechariah. The king as
national deliverer, in Ezekiel, Jer. xxxiii., 2 Sam. vii.,
xiv CONTENTS.
PAGE
Zech. vi., Mic. v. 2-6, Isa. xi. 1-9, ix. 6, 7, Zech. ix. 9.
This prophetic national hope traceable in the later litera-
ture down to the beginning of our era. 314-319.
5. Greek and Roman period. Desire for deliverance intensi-
fied by national suffering. Apocalyptic works : the national
future in the early Maccabean period (Daniel, Sibylline
Oracles, Enoch); in the Roman period (Psalter of Solo-
mon, Sibylline Oracles, Enoch-Parables) ; in later literature
(Assumption of Moses, Jubilees, Philo). Moral progress
visible in non-apocalyptic writings. Summing up of Mes-
sianic material in pre-Christian literature. Condition of
membership in the new community. Other points of
popular belief mentioned in N. T. Deep Messianic feeling
. in Palestine at beginning of first century of our era.
319-331.
6. Profounder view of the political-religious situation at be-
ginning of first century, weakening of desire for politi-
cal sovereignty ; recognition of necessity for moral re-
form. Appearance of John the Baptist, his prophetic
character ; nature of his reform. Desire for reform felt
throughout the Graeco-Roman world. Peculiarity and
advantage of the Jewish reform-movement of this period.
331-339.
Work of Jesus. He begins apparently as disciple of John.
Moral-spiritual character of his movement, it was the
summing-up of O. T. and N. T. His teaching stands
apart from the current political and ecclesiastical Messi-
anic ideas of the time : stress laid by him on moral-
spiritual side of the kingdom of God ; the public entry
into Jerusalem ; he was looked on as politically unimpor-
tant by Roman and Jewish authorities ; doubtful whether
he intended his teaching to be limited to the Jews ; con-
flicting nature of the testimony ; he attempted no separate
organization of his disciples. 339-350.
His conception of the outcome of his movement. First,
did lie regard himself as the promised Messiah ? The
incident at Caesarca Philippi. How he looked on his own
death. Conception of his mission suggested by the title
" Son of Man." 350-355.
His idea of the destiny of the world. Representation in
the Synoptics that he would come in person to hold a
final judgment. Facts going to show that he held such
a view. Facts opposed to such a supposition. His moral
power independent of his opinions on this point. The es-
cliatological discourses in the Synoptics. 355-302.
Christian conception of the kingdom of God in the first
century : James, 2 Thessalouiaus, 1 Corinthians. Gradual
CONTENTS. XV
PAGE
disappearance of the old Israelitisk conception. Attempts
to define the time of the second coining of Christ. De-
struction of Jerusalem looked on as turning-point. Over-
throw of the Roman empire regarded as necessary. Repre-
sentation in the N. T. Apocalypse; in 2 Thessalonians.
362-366.
Outward organization of the Church ; change ill the
principle of membership introduced by Paul. Paul's
creative dogmatic work. Dogma inevitable ; its unspirit-
ual influence. Christianity the fusion of two great masses
of human thought ; how far it achieved unity in the world.
366-371.
CHAPTER VII.
ESCHATOLOGY 372-414
Value and interest of eschatological ideas. 372.
1. Final form of earthly kingdom of God in N. T. Apocalypse.
Its sources: Ezekiel, Isaiah, Enoch. Origin of the con-
ception of two judgments. Whether Persian influence is
recognizable. The details belong to the thought of the
times ; the Jewish idea adopted by Christianity, but grad-
ually modified. Its moral influence. The Church's con-
ception of the reign of Christ. 373-377.
2. The doctrine of immortality. O. T. idea of the future life.
Decline of necromancy ; indifference of the shades. O. T.
passages supposed to teach immortality. O. T. idea of
the other life belongs to the old-Semitic conception ; this
perhaps explicable from the character of the Semitic mind.
Whether the rise of the Jewish belief in immortality can
be referred to the growth of spiritual feeling ; first dis-
tinct statement of the belief is found in Wisdom of Solo-
mon ; contrast between this book and Ecclesiastes and
Ecclesiasticus ; probable Alexandrian Jewish-Greek origin
'of the doctrine. 377-388.
3. The doctrine of resurrection. Examination of O. T. pas-
sages supposed to teach it. Egyptian and Hindu ideas.
Persian doctrine; probably adopted in modified form by
the Jews ; they held at first to a partial, afterward to a
general resurrection. How far the belief in a general resur-
rection prevailed in the Church of the first century. 388-
395.
4. The doctrine of a final judgment. Idea of divine retribution
universal. Its progress along three lines : (1) ethical ;
(2) from individualism to nationalism ; (3) from conception
of earthly to that of extra-earthly judgment : the Jewish
xvi CONTENTS.
PAGE
idea of an earthly judgment of all nations by Yahwe modi-
fied by the introduction of two articles of faith, the expec-
tation of ft personal Messiah and the belief in immortality.
Assignment of office of judge to Messiah in Enoch-Para-
bles and N. T. ; origin of this idealization, whether
Christian. Immortality in connection with judgment in
Enoch-Parables and N. T. ; double sense of the expres-
sions "this age" and "the age to come." Christianity,
in accepting the doctrine of judgment from Judaism, sub-
stituted the Church for the nation. 395-404.
5. Reconstruction of the doctrine of the future life. Rep-
resentation in O. T. and Enoch. Origin of Jewish
conception of rewards and punishments after death. Rep-
resentation of future punishment in N. T. Duration of
punishment in N. T. The future abode of the righteous :
the earth and the new Jerusalem ; the Eden garden of
Genesis ; paradise ; heaven. Condition of men between
death and judgment, in Enoch and N. T. ; annihilation ;
future probation. Idea of moral probation in the Bible
modified by that of final judgment. 404-413.
Christian idea of the kingdom of God drawn from
diverse parts of the Western world. The triumph of the
Church was the essence of Christian eschatology. Strenu-
ous ethical basis of the Jewish-Christian conception of the
kingdom of God. 413-414.
CHAPTER VIII.
RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY .... 415-435
Outline of the preceding sketch of the transformation of Juda-
ism into Christianity. What is the relation of Jesus to
this movement ? 415,416.
1. He announced the germinal principles of Chris! ianity. The
spiritual basis of his teaching. Significance of his silence :
he added nothing to the existing idea of immortality ;
whether he represented himself as a sacrifice for sin ;
whether he taught the dogma of imputed righteousness ;
whether he regarded himself as superhuman. 416-423.
2. The result of his teaching. Did it alone create the Church,
or was it modified by his followers ? And if it was so
modified, what was his relation to the new ideas ? The
creed of the infant Church was belief in Jesus as the Mes-
siah. Whether there is sign of dogmatic reconstruction
in the earliest Christian records. Concurrence of favor-
able conditions at the birth of Christianity. The early
Church the creation of Jesus. 423-427.
CONTENTS. xvii
PAGE
3. Paul ; his dogmatic system 1 he result of his conception of
Jesus. How the Church came to interpret the death of
Christ as sacrificial. The exaltation of Jesus ; distin-
guished from deification. The conception of Christ's right-
eousness as legally justifying. 427-431.
4. The logos-doctrine, in Hebrews, Ephesians, Colossians,
Fourth Gospel. 431-433.
The variety of the portraitures of Jesus an indication of
his power ; he is always the centre of life and belief ; the
Church his creation directly or indirectly ; his place in the
succeeding history of the Church. 433-435.
INDEX or CITATIONS 437
INDEX OF SUBJECTS . . . 445
INTRODUCTION.
ON THE GENERAL LAWS OF THE ADVANCE FROM
NATIONAL TO UNIVERSAL RELIGIONS.
I.
THE rise of Christianity out of Judaism is a fact which,
though of enormous significance, is yet in conformity
with a well-defined law of human progress. The recognition
of this law is so important for the proper understanding of
these two religions that it will be not out of place to attempt
a brief sketch of its working before entering on our main
subject. We may begin by pointing out the social basis
of religion, and then go on to examine the conditions which
determine its advance from lower to higher stages.
1. SOCIAL CHARACTER OF EELIGION.
1. Eeligion must be treated as a product of human
thought. For supposing a supernatural intervention for
the communication of truth, it must, in order to be success-
ful, conform to human conditions, and have a real genesis in
man's mind. And as human thought is developed only in
and through society, religion (like language and ethics) may
be regarded as a branch of sociology, subject to all the laws
that control general human progress.
2. A religious consciousness may be spoken of as we
may speak of a moral, a literary, or a scientific conscious-
ness ; these expressions imply not separate faculties of the
mind, but merely the ordinary mental activity applied to
1
2 INTRODUCTION.
particular classes of objects. The content of what we call
the religious consciousness is twofold, the idea of God ; and
the conviction that man needs and may obtain the help of
God. Each of these elements is the product of reflection.
The belief in God rests on the recognition of a non-human,
super-human power in the phenomena of outward nature and
human life. The desire to secure God's help springs from
man's feeling that he is in the midst of an environment
which is beyond his control, at the mercy of elements and
beasts, disease and circumstances. How he construes these
two facts, what comes out of them for his weal or woe,
this is a part of his social history. His thought, which keeps
pace, or rather is identical, with his social organization,
occupies itself with all the problems of life ; and none of
these is more important for him than the question of his
relation to the mysterious, invisible power which he believes
to stand behind all phenomena. Eeligion must grow as
society grows.
2. THE GROWTH OF SOCIETY.
1. The general law of natural growth is modified by other
laws of arrest, retrogression, and decay. Plants and animals
have their laws of increase against which they seem to be
powerless. The human body, as a whole and in all its parts,
reaches, after a time, a point beyond which it cannot advance,
and the human soul appears to have equally definite boun-
daries marked out for it. Nature seems to have stamped
on all living things this tendency toward a condition of
equilibrium in which the supply of force is just equal to the
waste, the powers of the organism just suffice to make head
against external retarding and destructive influences. Does
this law hold of communities as well as of individuals ?
Certainly there are a number of cases in which it seems
to show itself, savage tribes, for example, which appear
THE GROWTH OF SOCIETY. 3
not to have made any social advance from time immemorial ;
and of the greater communities, China is often cited as an
example of stagnation. But it need hardly be said that
great caution is necessary in such affirmations. It is very
doubtful whether the term " arrest of growth " can be used
of China in any proper sense ; and as for the savage tribes
of the world, we are in a state of dense ignorance of their
history. Social stagnation is perfectly conceivable : a com-
munity like the Fuegans, for instance, may reach a point
of content where there is not sufficient inducement to make
inroads upon the natural environment ; but whether this is
actually the case we do not know. We may leave the ques-
tion undecided whether there is any community which has
reached the state of social equilibrium.
2. The same thing must be said of the natural law of
retrogression or decay as applied to the inward life of
societies. We may admit its possibility, but whether it is
to be recognized in any particular case is matter of special
examination. Certainly many historical examples are im-
properly cited to prove its existence. The great empires of
the Old World Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece,
Eome, and in later times the Califate and the Byzantine
Empire perished, not through internal moral-intellectual
decay, but by outward pressure. They fell apart through in-
sufficient political organization, and succumbed to the vio-
lence of stronger powers. In our own times the case of
Spain is instructive. She has fallen back from the relative
position she occupied in Europe in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries ; she has made less advance than her neigh-
bors ; but she has really grown in all the elements of the best
national life. Christianity did not undergo a decay or retro-
gression in the Middle Age; its ethical-religious principles
passed over from civilized Greeks and Eomans to groups of
barbarian tribes which, at first incapable of grasping them,
4 INTRODUCTION.
nevertheless entered on a career of steady growth. Seeming
decay is sometimes only a form of growth. An organism
rids itself of some part in order to substitute for it a higher
form. A growing society is constantly changing its institu-
tions; the institutions decay, the society lives. Medieval
chivalry and monarchy, though no doubt admirable in their
day, have given way to something better. The transition
from the old to the new may be attended with evil : steam
takes the place of human labor, and thousands of people
suffer till society has accommodated itself to the new arrange-
ment ; the rule of the few is succeeded by that of the many,
which brings with it a host of inconveniences and corrup-
tions till the community has been trained to use its powers
aright. In all these cases we have to await the result before
deciding whether the new scheme means growth or decay.
3. Other things being equal, the larger the community, the
more assured is its continuity and duration of growth. This
results from the fact that the larger social life calls into
being a greater moral- intellectual force ; and it is this which
furnishes the best safeguard against disintegrating influences.
In a large community the elements of life are more numer-
ous, their interactions more frequent, each is developed with
more completeness, and is more thoroughly and beneficially
affected by the others ; just as the more thoroughly devel-
oped a man's nature, the broader his sympathies, the com-
pleter the activity of each of his powers, the less likely he
is to succumb to hostile agencies, physical, intellectual, or
moral. The individual and the nation may perish by vio-
lence, but of the two the nation is less exposed to decay. It
renews its life by a succession of individuals, and if these
retain and increase the moral-intellectual power which comes
from high social organization, and if there intervene no phy-
sical attack from without or within, then we can hardly put
a limit to the duration of national life. In a modern nation
THE GROWTH OF SOCIETY. 5
like England, we may be slow to predict dissolution from
internal decay ; her resources of physical food may disappear,
or her national existence may be crushed by wars, but so far
as her higher life is concerned, we may reasonably expect
that it will grow stronger rather than weaker.
4. Religion, as an element of social life, will be subject
to all these laws of social development. It will grow or
decline with the community in which it exists. The possi-
bility of religious stagnation, retrogression, and decay must
be allowed. Whether these have ever actually occurred,
must be decided by the examination of the facts in any
alleged case. Here, also, seeming decay may be a form of
growth. Judaism did not suffer by the destruction of the
temple, though it lost its apparatus of sacrifice. The Chris-
tianity of to-day is not inferior in vigor and purity to that
of the fourth century, though it has discarded many opinions
and practices of that period. Religion must be distinguished
from any particular organized form of religion. In the
bosom of a national church there may arise an impulse
which shall ultimately change its outward and inward con-
stitution ; and the new form may represent a truer and more
beneficent religion than the old. Ideas which seem to many
persons fundamental may vanish, and their adherents may
believe that an era of impiety has begun ; yet out of the
ruins of a shattered faith may spring another faith filled
with a higher spirit.
The larger the community, the more persistent and vigor-
ous the religion is likely to be. The recognition of religion
as a necessary element of life will not become feebler with
the intellectual and ethical growth, but the form of the
conception of it will be modified. The stress will be laid
on the rational spiritual side. So long as the community
exists, danger to religion can come only from its failure to
respond to man's deepest needs and highest desires. But
6 INTRODUCTION.
there is no reason why it should fail to do this ; the natural
supposition is that religion will advance with the intellectual
life of the community, and come into possession of all its
elements of strength. The free individual life, with its di-
versities and complexities, will preserve religious thought
from onesidedness ; and the higher social organization which
always attends unfettered individuality will guard it against
unfruitful shapelessness and license. A small religious sect
is in danger of sinking into a useless narrowness from the
lack of broad intellectual excitement, and of perishing by
the gradual loss of individuals. Such a sect, by withdraw-
ing itself from the community, in so far diminishes the mass
of productive thought, and is obstructive and retardative.
This is an altogether different thing from the position of a
minority, like the Israelitish prophetic circle or that of
Luther and his friends, which really represents and ex-
pounds the deeper-lying thought of the community, and
thus paves the way to a higher and truer unity of thought.
It is in this way that all religious revolutions have been ac-
complished. The realness and the success of such move-
ments depend on the fidelity with which the profounder
thinkers interpret the instincts of the mass. The firmer
the organization of the community, the freer the intercourse
among its parts, the truer will be its feeling, and the more
certain the expression of it. A sect is injurious as rep-
resenting not simply individuality, but individuality cut
off from real intellectual communication with the mass of
the community.
II.
We come now to inquire into the general conditions under
which religious progress, so far as we can trace it in the
world, has been made. These conditions may be divided
into those which control the formation of nations, and those
FORMATION OF COMMUNITIES. 7
which determine progress within the nation ; and these last
are either inward, springing naturally out of the community
itself, or outward, coming from foreign communities. Only
the more general laws can be touched on here, but the prin-
ciples on which they rest will apply as well to the smaller
religious bodies as to those great movements which have
issued in the formation of national and universal religions.
1. FORMATION OF COMMUNITIES.
1. A few words on this head will suffice. A large social
life, as has already been pointed out, is an essential condition
of the development of a great religion. It is only out of a
national organization that those large experiences spring
without which religious systems are narrow and unfruitful.
A religion in the better sense of the term is the organized
product of a national thought concerning man's relation to
the divine. The more mixed the nation, provided it has
reached true social-political unity, the broader and more
genial the religion is likely to be, and the greater its power
of commending itself to other communities. In general, the
religion is coextensive with the nation, or rather with the
people; if the latter is extinguished, the former perishes.
It is a misfortune, for example, for the comparative history
of the Semitic religions that the Assyrian and Babylonian
empires were destroyed by violence in so early a stage of
their career ; for with them perished their religion, and we
have no means of deciding, among other things, the ques-
tion whether it would have advanced sensibly toward prac-
tical monotheism. Similarly, the religions of the Hittites,
the Lydians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, have perished
with the nations to which they belonged ; while in Japan,
China, and India the maintenance of the national life has
preserved very ancient forms of religion.
8 INTRODUCTION.
The continuance of a national-political organization is
not always necessary to the maintenance of its system of
religion. The essential thing is social organization, a real
unity of thought in a large mass of individuals; if this
exists, political independence may be destroyed, the people
may be driven from their land and become wanderers in the
world, and yet preserve their religion substantially intact.
Whether this can be effected will depend on the vigor of
character of the people, on the moral-intellectual elevation
of the religion as compared with that of other religious
systems with which the banished people are brought into
contact, and on the isolation in which they live. The most
striking case in point is that of the Jews. Driven from
their own land, and living in the midst of alien communi-
ties in Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, they have held
to the religion of their fathers with a very remarkable per-
tinacity, but only in so far as they have been socially iso-
lated. In the Middle Age, as inheritors of a religion which
represented centuries of thought and culture, they were de-
cidedly superior to their Moslem and Christian neighbors,
and above the temptation of being influenced by them ; and,
further, they were hated and persecuted, and forced into
social isolation. But so soon as they came into relation
with other communities and felt the influence of a thought
higher than their own, they yielded and modified their re-
ligion accordingly. Another though less striking example
is that of the Parsees, who have preserved the Mazdean
faith through twelve centuries of bondage and persecution.
Their position, however, differs from that of the Jews. A
foreign faith was forced on Persia ; Islam expelled Zoroas-
trianism, and the Persians are Mohammedans. The small
body which remained faithful to the old national religion
was compelled to leave its native land, and in India the
Parsees, isolated by their beliefs and practices, have main-
FOKMATION OF COMMUNITIES. 9
tained their religion intact, but have at the same time held
themselves aloof from outside thought, and as a consequence
have sunk into almost complete stagnation. Neither me-
dieval Judaism nor Parseeism has had any real inward de-
velopment out of its own resources. Neither has impressed
itself sensibly on other communities ; both have held sub-
stantially (except under impulses from without) to the old
traditional faiths which they have worked up more or less
mechanically.
A community without national political organization is
thus exposed to the double danger of extinction and assimi-
lation. Its members perish and are with difficulty replaced ;
or under the influence of alien thought its religion is gradu-
ally, often insensibly, transformed till it ceases to have any-
thing but the name in common with its old self. And so,
while admitting a certain vitality in some politically unor-
ganized communities, we may recognize in history the gen-
eral rule that fruitful religions have arisen in societies
characterized by a true national life. And it is always pos-
sible that from such a national religion an idea may spring
so simple and broad that it shall commend itself to other
communities, and clothe itself with an organization which
ignores and transcends national lines.
2. In what has been said above, it is assumed that in any
regularly organized society there is a natural law of progress.
This is no doubt true of the society after it has received
definite shape ; but it must be borne in mind that its final
shape is usually the result of a process of aggregation. The
old genealogical scheme in which one ancestor, by natural
increase through a number of generations, becomes the father
of a great nation, is not in accordance with the testimony of
history. The composite character of the Hindu, Greek,
Latin, French, English, and other peoples is well known ;
and the Old Testament, which is concerned to derive the
10 INTRODUCTION.
Israelitish nation from Jacob, yet gives us hints here and
there of the entrance of alien tribes and of a mixed nation-
ality. As far as we can trace the process, nations have
come into existence by successive combinations of small
communities, and national religions are aggregations of
tribal faiths.
Let us suppose that in several small communities dwelling
near one another, different though similar religious creeds have
grown up. Each community will have its scheme of deities
and worship, its vague conception of the relation between the
human and the divine. In process of time it may come to
pass that these communities shall be united by conquest or
otherwise. When a real social-political unity shall have
been established, a new faith will have come into existence,
comprising all the substantial elements of the old faiths, but
probably broader and truer than any one of them. Ideas
and customs will have been sifted and massed, the merely
local, the comparatively unimportant, rejected, and what re-
mains will be the religious material that commends itself to
the intelligence and feeling of the whole body of the result-
ant large community. This process may be repeated until
a nation arises whose thought-material will be the outcome
of a long process of experience and reflection, in which only
that will be retained which appeals to the presumably higher
intelligence and more serious needs of the larger community.
A well-known example of this process of religious aggrega-
tion is furnished by the pantheons of Egypt, Babylonia, and
Greece ; the number of parallel and duplicated deities is most
naturally explained as the result of the welding together of
different communities, and the combination of their religious
schemes into one system, in which, of course, divergencies
and discrepancies often show themselves. There are traces
of the same sort of syncretism in the Old Testament, in the
divine names, and perhaps elsewhere.
THE INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS. 11
The same process has been repeated on a larger scale in
the greater religious movements of the world. In Islam we
have a mixture of ideas from three sources, the Old Arabian
religion, the Jewish, and the Christian. Christianity has
blended with the religious and moral ideas of the New Testa-
ment much un-Jewish European thought. The Judaism of
the two or three centuries just preceding the beginning of
our era combined Hebrew and Greek conceptions. Wherever
there is intimate intellectual intercourse between nations,
this larger religious syncretism must follow. The stage of
unity of religious thought which modern Europe has reached
is the result of social assimilation ; and if the process of
assimilation goes on, we may hope for a constant progress
toward complete religious unity. We may go farther and
discern increasing points of contact in the more cultivated
religious thought of Europe and Asia. The early stages of
social-religious aggregation are thus the first step in a much
wider movement, which, under favorable conditions, may
issue in a religious unity that shall embrace the whole world,
and shall be broad and high in proportion to the mass of
thought which enters into it.
2. THE INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS.
1. The nation being formed, and the conditions of its life
being such as to permit social progress, there will be first
within its own limits a constant elaboration and perfecting
of religious conceptions. Eeligion is so prominent and defi-
nite an element of social life that it will be the object of
constant reflection on the part of the community. Its funda-
mental ideas and its practices will shape themselves in ac-
cordance with the intellectual-moral status of the nation.
The religious system of the people will express its attempt
to construe the world in accordance with its highest in-
stincts ; the national thought will be forever reaching out
12 INTRODUCTION.
after some better definition of the relation between "the
human and the divine. Old customs and ideas which have
become unsatisfactory will be modified or abandoned, and
new customs and ideas adopted. Each generation will re-
model in its own interests the material of its predecessors,
retaining what it can use, and fashioning the whole after
its highest ideal. If it retains and reverences old forms, it
will nevertheless interpret them in a new fashion. No com-
munity can really occupy a religious position which is in-
ferior to that of its intellectual-moral thought; inferior
religious ideas, even if they be nominally embraced, will
be practically dead. There will be an overlapping of the
new by the old, and temporary anachronisms and inconsis-
tencies, but these will be constantly yielding to the pressure
of thought, and the moulding power of the religious system
will reside in those general ideas of life which meet the needs
of the age. There will always be more or less of intellectual
confusion and disingenuousness ; at any particular moment
there will be a conflict in most men's minds between the con-
servative reverence for the past and the demands of the
present. At any given moment also, decided progress will
be visible only in the few ; the many will seem to be inert
and stationary. Nevertheless, a process of leavening goes on,
ideas make themselves felt ; and after a time it is seen that
a change has come over the spirit of the community, there
is a chasm between the men of the time and their fathers.
Whether this change will be for the better will depend on
the character of the general social progress, as to which we
must in each particular case decide in accordance with
historical fact.
2. In so far as the community is a unit, it will advance
as a whole, all its elements moving together, though not
necessarily developing to the same extent. Men's thoughts
are constantly occupied with all that concerns life ; they
THE INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS. 13
devote themselves with greatest assiduity and intensity to
what they think most important, but no phase of Life can
be judged to be altogether unimportant. Eeligion, social and
political organization, morals, art, and science must move
hand in hand. They all issue out of the same social life.
Each in a sort goes its independent way, yet each influences
and is influenced by the others. Examples of such influ-
ence readily occur to us, as the way in which art has been
affected by religion and by science. We are not here con-
cerned with the full discussion of these interactions, but
only with the question how far religion is affected by other
lines of social thought. What does it owe to politics, ethics,
art, and science ?
Besides its general quickening and developing effect on
thought, art has aided, by training the constructive imagi-
nation, in the formation of all systems of religion ; it has
played the part of instructor by embodying moral-religious
ideals in pictures, statues, and buildings, and thus holding
up to men's constant contemplation those ethical and reli-
gious conceptions which artistic imagination has adopted
or created from current thought ; and by its appeal to the
emotional nature it has stimulated and intensified the whole
of man's religious side.
The social-political constitution of a community usually
serves as model for its theistic system. The organization of
the clan, the family, the nation, in the relations of husband
and wife, parent and child, ruler and subject, is reproduced in
the construction of the supernatural powers. In savage tribes
the deity is father or husband or chief of the clan ; in more
advanced communities he becomes king, tyrant, or archon, his
powers and qualities being those of his human model. In
the Christian Church a resemblance may be traced between
forms of church government and the social-political ideas of
the periods or communities in which they have arisen.
14 INTRODUCTION.
The influence of science and ethics on religion may be
examined somewhat more at length.
3. Keligion and science have this in common, that they
both attempt to explain the phenomena of the world and of
life. They differ in that this explanation is a secondary object
for religion, a primary object for science. Beligion, recognizing
the divine, seeks to enter into relation with it, gain its favor,
and secure its aid. It sees intimations of the divine in man
and in the world. Men began with assuming that all phe-
nomena were the direct acts of the deity ; that they had a
direct relation with the existing human life, and were con-
trolled by motives such as men felt in themselves. Eain,
drought, sunshine and cloud, wind, thunder and lightning,
earthquake and eclipse, were conceived to be expressions of
the divine pleasure or displeasure; all the fortunes of life
were supposed to be the direct product of the intervention
of the deity. Life was thought of as a system of rewards
and punishments from without, fashioned by the good-will
or anger of the superhuman power, according as man was
obedient or disobedient. From the creation of the world to
the growth of a blade of grass, from the extinction of a
nation to the most trivial bodily pain, all was looked on as
the immediate act of a god, friendly or unfriendly, standing
outside of and above human thought and effort.
The scientific impulse that is, the desire to understand
phenomena was coeval with the religious ; but as it de-
manded more exact observation, its development was slower.
Little by little, facts were observed in their connections,
sequences were established, and the belief in an orderly ar-
rangement of things came into existence. This belief laid
the foundations at once of civilization and of spiritual reli-
gion. As long as men were ignorant of the natural order of
things, on which all effective industry depends, they were
at the mercy of superstition and of chance ; they began to
THE INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS. 15
make progress as soon as they accepted natural law, and
yielded themselves to its guidance. As a matter of course,
the domain of natural law was subtracted from that of direct
divine intervention. The effect on religion of such a view
was not to diminish the conception of divine power, but only
to modify the interpretation of phenomena as expressions
of the will of the deity. Freer play was given to human
thought and activity when it was seen that man's inner life
sprang from himself, and that outward events, whether in
the domain of physical nature or in that of human action,
could be in some degree foreseen and controlled in the inter-
ests of the individual. More and more it came to be felt
that God, though omniscient and omnipotent, had so ordered
things that the immediate, practical direction of affairs was
in man's hands ; the whole might be directed by the divine
power for ends beyond man's ken, but the visible nexus of
events was committed to the human mind ; the world was
given over to man to be studied and subdued, and he was
intrusted with the care of his own heart, to fashion and train
it according to the demands of conscience. But-here, in the
domain of conscience and spiritual life, he was felt not to
stand alone ; gradually the conviction gained strength that
the divine influence manifested itself in the spiritual sphere,
bringing the heart of man into harmony with the divine
spirit, and disciplining it into purity. During this period of
scientific training, the idea of God was constantly advancing,
rising from the warrior or demon of earliest times to the
spirit of justice and love.
Science has been the handmaid and friend of religion, re-
lieving it of the burden of superstitions, of false relations
between phenomena, and pushing it to the conception of the
spiritual relation between man and God. This long-con-
tinued process (still going on) might be called a conflict
between the two, but it is better to regard it as a single
16 INTRODUCTION.
process, in which one element in human life has been con-
stantly influenced by another. There have indeed been
sharp conflicts. Religion has identified itself with certain
physical beliefs, invested them with divine sacredness, and
mercilessly trampled on all who opposed them, the Galileo
episodes of history are not few. Even to-day the purely
scientific theories of the evolutionary origin of man and of
the Pentateuch seem to some persons anti-religious and de-
structive, things to be opposed as warmly as if they denied
man's moral nature. But on the other hand, there is a con-
stantly widening religious circle which holds that science,
being simply the observation of phenomena, can never be
hostile to religion properly conceived ; can be only beneficial
in helping to define the religious sphere ; cannot limit the
power of God, who stands above or beneath phenomena, but
may better our conception of him ; can, in a word, result only
in the purification of religion, and therefore in its exaltation
and strengthening as an element of human life.
4. Ethics, like science, has worked out its results inde-
pendently of religion, to which, however, it is nearer in its
material, and from which it has generally derived its highest
motives and sanctions.
We are here dealing with practical ethics, the moral or-
dering of human life, men's ideas of right and wrong, and
the way in which they were arrived at. Our moral codes
arise out of the necessity that is laid upon man to live in
society. 1 The individual starts with certain instincts (the
1 In some cases social or governmental usages and quasi-ethical rules
issue out of religious ideas, notably under the operation of tabu. Such
usages are felt in primitive societies to be distinctly religious, for example,
the prohibition of the use of the name of the chief or king, who is regarded
as a divine person ; the laws relating to food among the Persians, Arabs,
Jews, and other peoples (treated in the Levitical codes as religious usages) ;
customs connected with childbirth (these also retain their religious character
in the Old Testament law), and special disabilities as to food imposed on
women ; the stringent prescriptions controlling sacerdotal persons in all
THE INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS. 17
origin of which we need not stop here to ask) which direct
his conduct ; these instincts are self-assertion and sympathy.
How these shall manifest themselves in actual life, how each
shall modify and control the other, this is determined only
by the needs of social life, by the conclusions which men
reach respecting the well-being of the whole society, or what
practically amounts to the same thing, by the individual's
opinion of what will secure the best good of himself consid-
ered as a member of society, himself including any circle
whose interests he regards as identical with his own. Moral
rules relating to respect for property and life, and to utter-
ance of truth, spring naturally from experience, which shows
that without them society could not exist. Social progress
is attended by the formulation of constantly broadening
rules of conduct, as men's relations with their fellows be-
come wider and more intimate ; as the recognition of the
power and value of each human personality becomes more
ancient nations, as, for example, the Roman Flamen Dialis and vestal
virgins, and the Jewish priesthood. Such of these customs as concern the
general daily life probably rest finally on social conditions ; the sacredness
or (what is the same thing) the " uucleanness " of the cow, the swine, and
other animals (whether totemistic in origin or not) may be supposed to de-
pend on their relation to the life of early man. When the strictly tabu or
religious character of these usages begins to fade away, they are brought
more and more under the control of ethical principles and judged accord-
ingly ; when they cease to be religious they are maintained or set aside by
considerations derived, n&t from religion, but from social life. The canon law
against marrying the sister of a deceased wife (based, apparently, on a mis-
interpretation of Lev. xviii. 18) is now discussed on purely ethical grounds.
In some cases religion adopts and enforces social conditions, as in the Hindu
caste system, which seems to have arisen from the amalgamation of various
tribes. More generally, it may be said to be probable that in most instances of
religious-ethical usage, religion makes a special application of an ethical prin-
ciple already wrought out by society. Thus, if a field is made tabu by a
private man, the respect which other men show for his rights rests finally on
their recognition of the rights of property. It is, however, often difficult to
decide where the religious feeling ends and the ethical begins. It is sufficient
for our purposes to accept the fact that the general ethical system of men
has arisen from social relations.
2
18 INTRODUCTION.
distinct ; and as the sense of union among all men empha-
sizes the feeling that the good of one is inseparably con-
nected with the good of all. The final result of the process
is the formation of ethical ideals which are always in ad-
vance of the actual practice, which become more exalted
with each age of progress, are more and more loved for
their own sake, and take their place as a definite and pow-
ertul ethical impulse. They are naturally appropriated by
the individual, and form the material on which the instinct
of self-assertion or self-perfecting acts. These two lines of
ethical growth, the perfecting of self and the perfecting of
society, inseparably connected from the beginning, and
brought into an ever-growing closeness of alliance, act and
react on each other, and tend to form the absolute subjective
ethical unity, in which the whole nature of man shall be
consecrated to the highest ethical ideals.
Ethics thus belongs essentially to human relations, and is
in itself independent of that sense of the divine which con-
stitutes religion. The instances are well known of deep or
high religious feeling existing along with low ethical ideas :
Socrates, with his pure conception of the deity and his ap-
proval of practices now looked on as monstrous ; the lofty
theistic creed of the exilian Isaiah, and the unhappy inter-
national sentiment of Psalm cxxxvii. ; the intense piety and
the relentless cruelty of the Spanish Inquisition ; the Ge-
neva of the sixteenth century, religiously serious and strenu-
ous, yet thinking it a desirable thing to put a man to death
for denial of a theological dogma ; the piety and pitilessness
of the English Puritans of the seventeenth century , Sanchez
and Xavier in the same religious community ; devotion to
the Church and disregard of honesty and truthfulness in
many individuals in all parts of the world to-day. There
are as many examples of the coexistence of little or no reli-
gious feeling and pure ethical ideas and practice: Stoics,
THE INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS. 19
Epicureans, Confucianists, Buddhists, Comtists, Agnostics,
in the ranks of these and other bodies which practically dis-
pense with God are found men inferior to none in strictness
of moral code and practice, in the exhibition of the finest
and most genial ethical feeling. The sense of the divine
may be high, while the feeling of sympathy with one's fellow-
men is low ; or, conversely, the first may be feeble and the
second strong. In like manner a scientific or unscientific
conception of God may coexist with great or small religious
or ethical feeling.
Yet there is a very important relation between religion
and ethics ; they tend constantly to coalesce. God, who is
the religious ideal, naturally becomes the ethical ideal, and
comes to embody the best ethical thought of each period,
this thought having been developed, however, not by reli-
gion, but out of social conditions. It is a familiar fact that
in a growing community for example, among the Hebrews
of the Old Testament time the conception of the deity be-
comes ethically higher and higher ; theology appropriates
the results of moral experience. There is then a reaction on
human life ; man shapes his conduct so as to please the
deity, and the greater the ethical purity of the divine char-
acter, the greater the stimulus to man's moral life. In ad-
dition to this purely ethical relation, there is the sanction
conceived to be affixed to the moral law by the Supreme
Euler ; the rewards and punishments in this world and the
next, bestowed by the deity, constitute to some extent a bar-
rier against wrong-doing and an encouragement of right-
doing ; though as a matter of fact it would seem that men's
social conduct is usually determined more by their relations
to their fellows than by their relations to God, rather by
the visible and immediate than by the invisible and remote.
Scientific thought also modifies this conception ; it discards
anthropomorphic divine intervention, and represents ethical
20 INTRODUCTION.
good and evil as bringing their reward and punishment
solely in the way of natural law.
Practical religion is the attempt to propitiate the deity
and live in union with him ; practical ethics is the attempt
to recognize man and live in harmony with him. But out
of the idea of ethical obligation naturally arises the con-
ception of absolute right, which must be identified with the
idea of God. Eight, truth, goodness, these are the will of
God ; they are the moral order of the universe, the mani-
festation of the infinite spirit. From this point of view
religion and ethics are one ; to know God is to know his
ethical self-manifestation in the world. This is the highest
single conception of the divine ; but the complete knowledge
of God includes, as far as human thought can comprehend
it, the whole of the divine self-manifestation. And this, as
is intimated above, has been the underlying idea in all reli-
gious history. Men have put their best science and ethics
into their conception of the divine, ethics and science both
imperfect in varying degrees, and the conception of God con-
sequently exhibiting what seems to us to be contradiction.
5. Religion is thus primarily a sentiment, the recognition
of the relation between God and man, the effort to found
life on something higher than man ; and its content is deter-
mined by science and ethics. To the former is due man's
conception of the nature of the divine and the mode of its
self-manifestation ; from the latter comes the moral ideal of
life from which religion can never withdraw itself. Dogma
and conduct are the necessary complements of the religious
sentiment, the material which the religious consciousness
assimilates, and by which it grows ; and the history of re-
ligion consists in the development of these two elements.
Ritual is merely a form of expression of dogma, 1 The ab-
1 This is true even in those early systems in which ritual may be said to
form the whole of religion.
GREAT MEN. 21
solute power of any given religion will be in proportion to
the purity that is, the spirituality of its dogma, and
the elevation of its moral ideal; its practical power at a
given moment and in a given community will depend on
its capacity to commend relatively high dogmatic and ethi-
cal conceptions to men's minds and hearts.
3. GREAT MEN.
We have spoken of social-religious progress as continuous,
and this it doubtless is when long periods are taken into
consideration. But within these longer periods progress is
marked by flows and ebbs, elevations and depressions, in-
tervals of calm followed by apparent sudden outbursts of
energy. We are not called on here to attempt the explana-
tion of this fact ; it is sufficient to note its existence. But
there is one feature of the development so important as to
call for special mention, the part, namely, played by indi-
viduals in the extension and elevation of human thought.
History proceeds by crises, and a crisis implies a great man.
1. We may say in the first place that great men are a
necessity in social progress. At intervals of greater or less
extent the ideas and institutions of a growing society have
to be recast in accordance with advancing thought. For a
time men may be able and willing to live under a set of in-
stitutions with which they are more or less consciously out
of sympathy ; there will be a general uneasiness, which for
a while, however, will not be sufficient to interfere with the
orderly course of life. But there comes a time when a
change is imperatively demanded. Conscience, the moral
and religious ideal, protests against the existing order ; there
is an increasingly oppressive feeling that the present is out
of relation with the past and the future, a sense of rnoral-
religious uncomfortableness, which drives men to define
their ideals and to shape life in accordance therewith. This
22 INTRODUCTION.
sense of the need of social and individual renewal naturally
becomes distinct and effective first in the minds of the cho-
sen few, the leaders of thought, those whose souls are aglow
with moral-religious excitement and inspiration, the true
practical idealists. But even a small body of men find it
hard to attain the definiteness and unity which are essential
to action ; individual divergencies lame practical energy.
Some one man must, as a rule, put himself at the head of
the movement, called to that position by his gifts, and en-
forcing recognition by his eminence ; and as a matter of
fact such an one usually appears so soon as the time is ripe
for action. Such crises are continually occurring in life ;
they are of different degrees of importance, relating to all
affairs from the smallest to the largest, from the opening of
a new street in a city to a change of the organization of a
college, from the introduction of a new fashion in dress to a
revolution in science or government, or the restatement of
the religious beliefs of a nation or a continent. But great
or small, each will have its representative man, who is the
embodiment of the current ideas and the mouthpiece of
opinion, the concentration of the energy of the circle of
interests involved. He is always the great man of the oc-
casion ; and when the body of thought which he represents
is large and effective, he is one of the great men of the
world.
2. It is involved in what is said above that such a man
is born out of the thought of his time ; he is essentially the
child of his age. The material of his thought must come
from his own present and past; an absolute break is un-
thinkable. Thought itself is impossible without material
already furnished to the mind. Usually it is possible to
discover a man's relation to his past and to his present ;
this is what we demand from the biographer, arid this is
what he undertakes to do, whether his subject be Calvin or
GREAT MEN. 23
Confucius, Zoroaster or Swedenborg. We feel that an idea
born out of nothing would be unintelligible and dead.
3. Yet in this process, which we must recognize as or-
derly, there is always something inexplicable in the achieve-
ment of the guiding mind. We may demonstrate the man's
relation to his past, exhibit the circle of ideas in which he
grows up, and perceive the connection between his thought
and that of his times ; but in the last analysis, when we
reach the creative moment, it is impossible to give the his-
tory of the process. There is a mystery in his mental ex-
periences, in the way in which he seizes on the problem,
combines its elements, and reaches his result. He himself
can commonly give no logical account of his procedure, he
can only say that he sees and knows the solution ; out of
many possible ways of dealing with the questions of life,
he has chosen one which proves to be the right one, inas-
much as it commends itself to men and introduces harmony
and peace in place of discord and unrest. The larger the
problem, the more numerous do the possible solutions seem
to men to be, the greater the difficulty of seizing on the one
simple thought which shall convert the chaos into a cosmos,
and the harder to represent the mental spiritual process by
which the transforming discovery is made. It is a mystery
that meets us in every department of human life ; when we
have called it genius, intuition, or inspiration, so far from
defining it, we have only labelled it with a name which defies
definition. Great artists, statesmen, discoverers of natural
law, social and religious reformers, move in a sphere beyond
the reach of other men ; they are linked with the world by
all natural ties, but their thought seems to be born in a
sphere above the world. Their fellow-men have naturally
thought of them as seized on by a higher power, especially
when they had to do with the religious life ; the word " inspira-
tion ;> has been almost exclusively set apart to denote the deep
24 INTRODUCTION.
spiritual knowledge and the transforming religious energy
which, it has seemed to men, could issue only from a super-
human source. It is the word which expresses for our or-
dinary conception the mysteriousness of the human soul in
contrast with its orderly obedience to law. These two ele-
ments of human thought are harmonized when we conceive
of it as the creation of the divine spirit working according
to natural law.
4. Such an eminently endowed leader of men gives so-
ciety in a real sense something new; he converts into an
established principle and rule of life what was before only
a vague conception or desire. The undefined sense of need
which for generations had stirred men into an unrecognized
uneasiness, and had manifested itself in inarticulate cries
rather than in intelligible words, rather by gropings than
by organized action, this he clearly recognizes and formu-
lates, and then offers something which shall satisfy the need,
and make rational and happy activity possible. Thencefor-
ward the life of society is changed ; there has entered into it
an element which did not exist before. The difference be-
tween the new and the old is the difference between vision
and blindness ; there has come the discovery of the disease
and the application of the remedy. Men's view of life has
changed ; their attitude toward the facts of religious experi-
ence is different. The proper centre is established ; things
group themselves more naturally, and are estimated more
nearly according to their real nature and importance. The
discovery that the Hebrew vowel-points were not given to
Moses from the mouth of God on Mount Sinai was a veri-
table liberation of thought. The declaration of Jeremiah
and Ezekiel, that the true divine law was written on men's
hearts, must have been revolutionary for the circle of men
who believed it ; they could not afterward look on religious
life in the same way as before. A wider liberation was
GREAT MEN. 25
effected by the moral-religious principle announced by Paul
and adopted from him by Luther, that righteousness is a
transformation of soul instead of a string of legal perform-
ances. It is a still loftier and more potent principle which
is contained in the word of Jesus, that all moral-religious
life is summed up in love to God and man. When such
principles as these have been announced and accepted, so-
ciety assumes a new form. What was before shapeless be-
comes organized and regulated ; that which was a dim longing
becomes a definite impulse. Life approaches nearer to unity ;
there is less disharmony between mind and soul, between
what tradition and custom sanctify and what reflection ap-
proves, there is the sense of the removal of a weight, a
fuller freedom of activity in thought and feeling. The con-
nection with the past is not destroyed, but past and present
are renewed into a higher life.
5. The part played by individual men in the establish-
ment of great universal religions is well known. There is
no doubt as to the process of origination of Christianity and
Islam ; and while in regard to Buddhism scholars are divided
in opinion, there is a strong disposition to trace it to some one
man. In China a great role, no doubt, is to be assigned to
Confucius ; on the other hand, the personality of the Israeli-
tish Moses is dim, and the Persian Zoroaster is probably to
be abandoned to the region of legend and myth. Socrates,
Luther, and Wesley embody in themselves great religious
movements. These men are all the prophets, the spokes-
men, of the religious consciousness of their times, and they
are no less independent and creative thinkers. It is neces-
sary, therefore, in tracing the history of any religious move-
ment to take into account these two elements, the religious
attitude of the epoch and the personality of the founder. It
is only by combining and harmonizing the two that we can
reach a clear idea of the evolution of the new religious
26 INTRODUCTION.
principle. It is a misfortune for the history of Buddhism
that the person of Gautama is so enshrouded in legend ; Mo-
hammed is better known, and the beginnings of Islam far
clearer. For Christianity we have records of its founder
which, though embarrassed by legendary additions and re-
constructions, still enable us to form a tolerably distinct
picture of his person and life ; and this is the first task of
the historian of Christianity.
4. EXTERNAL CONDITIONS.
Up to this time we have been occupied with those con-
ditions and agencies which within the community itself
initiate and direct religious progress. But it is possible that
a community may be affected by its neighbors. Such in-
ternational influence is probably the rule in the history
of religions ; the better acquainted we become with the old
religious faiths of the world, the more clearly we see that
they are not simple products each of one national con-
sciousness, but have all more or less freely given and re-
ceived. We cannot, of course, assume in any particular
case that such international action and reaction have oc-
curred ; the question is to be decided by an examination of
the facts.
1. The religious influence exerted by one nation on an-
other depends for its extent in part on the closeness of the
intercourse between the two. The relations must be such
that there is an exchange of individual opinions by conver-
sation or by books. A very favorable condition for inter-
change of ideas is contiguity of social groups, when one
community, by its local relations to another, is compelled to
become acquainted with the customs and opinions of its
neighbor ; a good example of this is furnished in the early
history of the Jews when they had partly conquered Canaan,
and Israelitish and Canaanitish communities dwelt side by
EXTERNAL CONDITIONS. 27
side, intermarrying and coming to share one another's ideas
in- a very definite manner. More general social relations
may be maintained by commercial intercourse, such as ex-
isted among all the national groups in Canaan and Syria in
David's time, or between the Tigris-Euphrates valley and
the Greek and other residents in Asia Minor from an early
period ; or political relations may induce an exchange of
ideas, as when King Ahaz of Judah, going to Damascus to
meet the Assyrian king, Tiglathpileser, saw there a Syrian
altar the pattern of which he sent to his priest Urijah at
Jerusalem with orders to make one like it ; or as when Ma-
nasseh, as it would appear, adopted the Assyrian astral wor-
ship ; or exile, like that of the Jews in Babylonia, may bring
about intimate social relations. After the rise of the Persian
empire the Jews in Babylonia and elsewhere must have been
constantly in contact with Persian opinions and customs.
The Greek conquest of Asia in the fourth century B. c. in-
troduced Greek settlements and ideas into all the Western
Asiatic communities, and promoted a contact of mind which
was eminently favorable to the adoption of new ideas. Tor
some centuries before Mohammed's time communities of
Jews and Christians had been living in Arabia in the closest
personal intercourse with the natives. In India, on the
other hand, in the period when Buddhism arose, there seem
to be no traces of such foreign influence.
2. In such social intercourse we may commonly assume
reciprocal influence, each community will be more or less
affected by the other. In which direction the greater effect
will be produced, will be determined by the relative impres-
sibility of the two communities; and this will depend on
their relative religious development, the less will be di-
rected by the greater. A higher general social culture, more
definite opinions, better elaborated institutions, will impress
themselves on that community which stands lower in these
28 INTRODUCTION.
respects. Impressibility will come from the natural desire
to know and adopt what is pleasing. 1 The Jews were in-
ferior in general culture and in certain points of religious
development to the early Canaan ites, the Assyrians and Baby-
lonians, the Persians and the Greeks ; the Arabians of the
sixth century of our era felt the religious superiority of the
Jews and Christians ; the direction of the influence was in
accordance with these relations.
3. Another favorable condition of international influence
(closely connected with the first-mentioned) is the excite-
ment of thought arising from lively social movement. The
older civilization was made comparatively stagnant by the
fixedness of national lines. At that stage of growth it was
instinctively felt that national isolation was a necessity ;
there could be no brotherhood of nations, no rapid and
stirring interchange of thought. But all this was changed
by the Greek conquest. The mixture and close contact of
different nationalities forced men to recognize one another,
partly obliterated the old stiff national lines, and called out
a hospitality for new ideas which had never before been seen
in the world. Greeks, Jews, and Romans came into close
relation with one another, and the result of their interchange
of ideas may be traced in the religious history of the time.
The interesting point for our discussion is whether the Jews
were materially affected by the Greeks.
4. The borrowing of ideas which results from social inter-
course may be direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious.
There are cases in which a religious reformer has deliberately
borrowed institutions and ideas from the books of foreign
religious communities ; so Mohammed did from the Hebrew
1 It is of course essential that a religion, in order that it may be influ-
enced, should not have reached the point of petrifaction, that some of its
material should be in a fluid state ; and in point of fact, a living community
never hardens into this insensibility, but always reserves a certain power of
self-modification.
EXTERNAL CONDITIONS. 29
and Christian Scriptures. 1 Princes and priests may intro-
duce new forms of worship ; the Eomans adopted Syrian
deities and cults, and the Greeks appropriated Egyptian
symbols and ceremonies ; possibly in this way it was that
the feast of Purim came to the Jews from the Persians.
Perhaps, however, it is the unconscious influence of one
community on another that is the more deep and lasting.
Ideas represented by the customs and expressions of one
people insensibly make their way to others, and commend
themselves by their naturalness and utility, by their capacity
to satisfy an existing feeling of need. They may at first be
adopted by advanced thinkers, and be gradually propagated
in the lower strata of society ; or they may receive for a long
time no definite expression, they may be simply in the air.
Silently they make themselves felt ; more and more, genera-
tion after generation, they color and control ideas, opinions,
and usages. Finally they find expression in books or customs ;
the community accepts them as something quite natural, and
wakes up to find itself in possession of thoughts which were
unknown to the fathers, the genesis and authority of which
no one is able to trace. After a while comes a period of re-
flection which seeks to bring the present into logical relation
with the past; the new ideas are held to have existed in
ancient customs and writings, back to which they are fol-
lowed in an unbroken line, and the silent influences which
produced them pass out of memory and rest unrecorded.
Effects of this sort could doubtless be traced in the history
of all religions if the data were sufficiently numerous ; in
later Jewish history the important periods in this regard
are the Persian and the Greek.
5. It is obvious that the choice which a community makes
in borrowing will be determined largely by the relation of
1 The contents of these writings were known to him, not by his own read-
ing, but through garbled oral communications.
30 INTRODUCTION.
the new ideas to the existing system of thought. A nation
does not readily abandon its conception of life and religion ;
there is a definitely fashioned skeleton, which, however, may
be clothed anew and so modify its form ; there is a persistent
idea, which maintains itself against all assaults from with-
out, yet is capable of assimilating new material, of extending
and defining itself by modifications which do not touch its
essential nature. A borrowed idea will attach itself to some
recognized thought of a community ; the borrowing, to be
healthy and beneficent, must be a free assimilation, not a
mechanical addition, and fulness of life may be measured by
the capacity for natural appropriation. We cannot say be-
forehand how far this process of assimilation may go ; forms
of religion, like forms of organic life, seem to be capable of
indefinite variation without abandoning the type. The
question what constitutes the essence of a religion can be
answered only after a survey of its complete historical de-
velopment ; it is only then that we can perceive what has
remained fixed amid all the modifications of idea and usage.
5. THE GENERAL LINES OF PROGRESS.
The advance which a religion makes under the favorable
conditions above described will be in accordance with the
general character of social progress. It is a growth from
youth to manhood ; it signifies a more serious view of life,
a deeper conception of fundamentals, a sharper analysis
which separates the higher from the lower. The progress
may be greater or less, but in so far as it exists at all we
can hardly think of it as not involving a change from the
less to the more general.
1. One natural result is the abandonment of local usages.
This takes place in a nation in proportion as its religion is
centralized, and as a civilized unity comes into existence. A
national church of to-day imposes its customs on all parts
THE GENERAL LINES OF PROGRESS. 31
of the land; and these are broader and more human than
those of any particular district. It was a true instinct that
led the Jews of the seventh century B. c. to insist that Je-
rusalem should be the only lawful place of worship ; it was
the only way to wipe out the unseemlinesses of the local
cults. The effect is wider when a nation is forced to judge
its customs by the standard of other national usages. The
broader international feeling leads men to dispense with
those things which are likely to offend the common feeling.
At the same time the conviction naturally grows that such
things are relatively unimportant. Yet it is impossible to
say beforehand how far the outward form will be retained.
In all organized systems of religion up to the present time
some framework of form has been found to be necessary;
and experience only can demonstrate how much of it will
prove to be compatible with the life of larger societies.
Buddhism began as a mendicant order, a constitution which
would have excluded the majority of men; but in time it
modified this arrangement, introducing grades which recog-
nized the ordinary social relations, yet always giving greatest
honor to the original form. Judaism took the same course
with respect to circumcision, not always insisting on it, but
still making it the badge of highest religious citizenship ;
Paul, with the instinct of genius, took the bold step of prac-
tically abolishing it. Mohammed showed his wisdom in the
simplicity of the forms which he imposed on his followers ;
the most oppressive of them the pilgrimage to Mecca
was afterward dispensed with in various simple ways. The
Catholic Church has means of lightening its ceremonial
burdens under certain circumstances. It is the instinct
of the religion which guides it in such matters. The first
and most important step is its extension beyond its origi-
nal national bounds ; having passed out into a wider world,
it will know how to change its form according to circum-
32 INTRODUCTION.
stances, and its capacity to do this will be a measure of its
success.
2. The more important element of progress is the general-
ization of ideas, the excision of the local and sensuous, and
the emphasizing of the broadly spiritual. The agencies by
which this is effected are pointed out above. The growth
of national self-consciousness, the development of thought
which naturally attends the widening of social relations, ad-
vance in ethical feeling, the rise of scientific thought, contact
with foreign ideas, these occasion a constant revision and
reformulation of religious ideas in the light of broader
knowledge, and the abandonment of such things as offend
the finer religious sense. The Jews after a while gave up
the national proper name Yahwe, substituting for it the
general term God, or some such paraphrase as The Lord, or
The Holy One. Islam contented itself with a statement of
the divine character and government so simple that it could
be understood by all the world. Similar processes might be
traced in all the great religions. Here, again, it is impossible
to say beforehand what direction the simplification and gen-
eralization will take. This will depend on the character and
needs of the communities involved, and will always be ten-
tative ; that is, the generalization will proceed as far as it is
forced by the public thought to go, and will advance only in
those societies in which it proves to be an element of success.
Although force has been often used in the propagation of
religions, yet to explain their success we have always to con-
sider finally their capacity to adapt themselves to the social-
religious conditions of human life. Islam, for example, has
kept itself pure only in Semitic communities.
3. National advance in breadth and elevation of thought
does not, however, account for the rise of the great universal
religions. In a national religious system most diverse ele-
ments are mingled, broad and narrow, high and low,
THE GENERAL LINES OF PROGRESS. 33
attractive and repulsive. These, according to their charac-
ters, commend themselves to different circles. The victory
of new ideas is gradual; at a given moment, while the
farthest advanced line of thinkers have reached pure con-
ceptions of man's relation to God, a large mass of the people
may be buried in superstition, formalism, or indifference.
The religious books and creeds will show the same diversi-
ties, masses of noble thought embedded in low, mechanical
conceptions. Or, at the best, the national development may
be seeking to purify and elaborate some religious element
of life which, though not without virtue and potency, is not
the highest, and not of a sort to commend itself outside the
limits of the nation. In point of fact this is what seems to
have occurred in the case of Brahmanism and Judaism ;
Islam does not here come under consideration, for it was
invented at a blow, we may say, out of almost entirely
foreign ' materials. In this mixture of national religious
opinions, what is needed, in order to secure a new vitalizing
impulse, is just that which happened to the Jews at the
conclusion of the Babylonian exile. They went to Babylonia
as a motley mixture of good and bad, a comparatively small
prophetic circle which shared the opinions of Jeremiah and
Ezekiel, and a large majority whose views and usages are set
forth in the naive speech made by the men and women in
Pathros in reply to the prophet Jeremiah's indignant re-
proof : " As long as we worshipped the queen [or host] of
heaven we were happy ; since we have left off this worship
all this evil has come upon us." The exile sifted this mixed
community ; only those returned to Palestine who were in sym-
pathy with the prophetic ideas and could begin the national
life on a new basis. And in the same way, in Babylonia the
idolatrous portion was absorbed in the alien population, and
those who were in sympathy with the higher national con-
ceptions formed a separate circle and lived a new life. The
3
34 INTRODUCTION.
starting-point of the new Jewish life was the selection of a
new idea as the basis of organization ; purified from alien
elements, this idea colored and controlled the whole subse-
quent national development. Some such process is neces-
sary for the transformation of a national into a universal
religion. The choice of a central idea will be made by the
whole community, under the leadership of individuals. In
the exilian and post-exilian history of the Jews, we have
glimpses of controlling minds, Ezekiel, Zerubbabel, Joshua,
Ezra, Nehemiah ; and if we were better acquainted with the
history of the Babylonian Jews of that period, we should no
doubt find there also men whose personal influence guided
the thought of the community. In the larger religious
movements, as is remarked above, the presence of a con-
trolling individual mind seems to be necessary to give unity
and effectiveness to the new development, though the leader
will naturally gather about him a body of coadjutors.'
4. And this leads to the mention of another condition
of the transition to a universal religious form which is
involved in what has just been said. The revolution must
be a product of the times, a response to the demand for
change, the outcome of generations of thought. The man
or the men who appear as leaders put into shape (as is ob-
served above) what many of their contemporaries had indef-
initely thought ; they give vitality to the unorganized mass
of vague conceptions. They themselves would be impossible
without the background of the community, without the
accumulation of thought which they inherit from the past.
This is obvious in so many cases that we are warranted in
assuming it to be probable even when definite facts cannot
be adduced in proof. There is evidence that Mohammed
arose out of a circle of thinkers who represented a tendency
of the times ; there are reasons for believing that the founder
of Buddhism did not occupy an isolated religious position.
THE GENERAL LINES OF PROGRESS. 35
It is clear that Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Ezra were true
prophets of their times, the spokesmen of select groups who
were in sympathy with the deeper and more spiritual thought
of their periods. There is no reason to suppose that Chris-
tianity is an exception to this general principle.
It is true in one sense that the success of a religious revo-
lution depends on the completeness with which its creator
responds to the needs of the age. Men will take only what
seems to them to be useful ; popular approbation is the meas-
ure of practical wisdom. But this is a local and temporary
criterion ; it does not follow that the tendency of an age
is the best possible, or its satisfaction the absolute right.
A reformer may go far beyond the conceptions of his times,
and be unsuccessful because not understood. To be imme-
diately effective he must stand in close relation with his
contemporaries, and it is not conceivable that he should be
entirely out of relation with them. But it is possible that
while one side of his thought is apprehended and accepted,
another and higher side may be ignored. In that case, his
highest influence will vanish unless it happen that he find
a prophet, an interpreter who shall know how to link his
person to the life of the times, and thus preserve the sub-
stance of his uncomprehended thought. The interpreter will
have his own conception of the person and work of the mas-
ter, and may initiate a new direction of religious thought, as
the Apostle Paul substantially did. It may then happen that
succeeding times shall throw off what is local in the thought
of the interpreter, and return to the idea of the master, of
which the interpreter's system is only the framework.
5. We are here, of course, employing the term " universal "
loosely to mean what is endowed with practically indefinite
capacity of extension. We know of no religion which experi-
ence has shown to be really universal. No religion has yet
been accepted by all nations ; and we should hardly be war-
36 INTRODUCTION.
ranted in going beyond the bounds of experience and affirm-
ing that this or that religion has elements which must
commend it to all peoples. It is indeed difficult to see why-
Christianity in its simplest New Testament form should not
prove thus universally acceptable, though on the other hand,
it is impossible to say how far this simple faith, in order to
commend itself, must be supported by a more elaborate sys-
tem. And further, even when a religion is accepted in gen-
eral by a nation, it may be rejected by a considerable circle.
In the purest and highest historical religion there must re-
main something local and temporary ; and the question to be
decided by time will be how far it can dispense with this
local part without losing its essential nature. The abso-
lutely universal religion will be that which satisfies univer-
sal human needs, spiritual and intellectual, lacking nothing
which is necessary for the practical guidance of human life,
containing nothing which offends the most advanced thought,
offering and claiming nothing. which is not capable of uni-
versally acceptable demonstration.
6. EXTRA-NATIONAL EXTENSION.
In any social group of nations, as has already been pointed
out, there will be a mutual influence of their religions, ac-
cording to the nature and extent of their social intercourse.
In general, the stronger will coerce the weaker. The ele-
ments of strength and weakness are various, issuing from all
the social phenomena, and these latter change with every age
and clime. There are, however, a few conditions of interna-
tional influence which from the testimony of history we may
assume to be common to all those great movements in which
a religion extends itself beyond its national lines.
1. The principal condition of this sort of conquest is the
fact already mentioned, the possession of an idea broader
than national areas. There must be something that com-
EXTRA-NATIONAL EXTENSION. 37
mends itself to the human soul apart from national feelings
and customs. Further than this, there must be something
that appeals to the age, that satisfies a need felt over a wide
space at that particular time.
2. This condition presupposes a certain unity in a section
of the world. It assumes that men in different nations,
starting from different points and proceeding along different
lines, have yet reached the same goal of religious feeling and
desire. It is the teaching of history that some such unifica-
tion as this is essential to the rise of a religion that shall
embrace various nationalities. This procedure is most ob-
vious in the history of the rise of Christianity ; the Greek
and Eoman conquests, by their political and intellectual re-
sults, had impressed a visible unity on the Western world.
The fact is less clear in the histories of Islam and Buddhism ;
but here also we can see that natural processes of culture
had brought a number of peoples or communities to about
the same stage of intellectual-religious growth, or it may be
better to say, to a point where real sympathy among them
in the religious life was possible. The Arabs of the first cen-
tury of Islam were capable of appreciating the moral and
religious ideas of the Christians and Mazdeans with whom
they came in contact ; of India and the neighboring lands
we have less information, but such indications as exist point
to a similarity in the social-religious structure of the various
nationalities affected by Buddhism.
3. The progress of a religion implies a sense of need in
the communities to which it commends itself. It signifies a
failure of existing religious systems, especially in peoples
alien to the home of the new religion. The people in whose
midst a new creed has sprung up have at least the training
of the ideas which produced it. This training has not been
so fully enjoyed by foreign peoples ; their sense of need and
emptiness will be all the more pronounced. Such a social-
38 INTRODUCTION.
religious emptiness is distinctly visible in the areas first con-
quered by Christianity and Islam ; the Roman world was
tired of Greek and Latin divinities, and hopeless of anything
better ; the Christianity and the Mazdeism of the seventh
century, when Islam appeared, had dwindled into shapeless
masses of shrunken, lifeless dogmas ; l for the beginnings of
Buddhism we have no such full details, but we may perhaps
infer from the enthusiasm and vitality of Asoka's edicts that
the Brahmanism of the preceding centuries had left a vacuum
in the popular feeling. The national mind, thus emptied of
distinct convictions and hopes, is prepared to accept a well-
defined system of religious thought.
4. The conquering religion offers what is needed in the
way of precision and organization. It will possess not only
a general fundamental religious idea, but also the framework
necessary to give it popular acceptation. A simple ethical-
religious conception, however broad and pure, is usually
neither intelligible nor acceptable to the masses of men;
they demand in addition a drapery of processes and forms,
a certain quantity of machinery, a routine by which life
may be ordered. There is no instance on record of wide
popular acceptance of a religious system whose essence was
merely a principle of the inward life ; there is no reason to
suppose that a reformer who should confine himself to this
subjective ethical-religious sphere would be successful unless
his work were supplemented. Mohammed devised a system
remarkable not only for the purity and simplicity of its
dogma, but also for the mingled simplicity and complete-
ness of its ritual ; Buddhism initiated a set of forms which
satisfied the demand for guidance ; Paul supplied a dogmatic
framework for the ethical-religious ideas of Jesus.
It is from this non-ethical dogma and form that spring the
1 Islam appropriated and infused life into high moKfl and religious ideas
which were held lifelessly by the neighboring peoples.
THE UNIVERSAL RELIGIONS. 39
organization and the enthusiasm necessary to a career of
victory. It is not hard to understand why a purely ethical
idea does not lead to organization ; it is too individual, has
too few points of contact, common to all men, with the ex-
ternal world. A conquering religion must be a church if it
is to have a visible organized victory. Purely ethical ideas
may spread and get control of men, but their influence is
silent, showing itself in the way of coloring thought and
deed ; they do not clothe themselves with that bodily form
which we call " a religion."
III.
We may conclude this sketch of the principles of the pro-
gress of religions by a brief mention of the actual results as
far as we can trace them. It is on these results that what
is said in the preceding pages has been based. Even a
bare mention of the facts will suffice to show how largely
these laws of progress have obtained, and what different
degrees of effect they have had in different nations and
under different circumstances.
1. THE UNIVERSAL KELIGIOXS.
It may at first be surprising that of all the religions of
the world only three have grown into universal form,
Brahmanism into Buddhism, Judaism into Christianity, and
the old Arabian faith into Islam. It would be more accu-
rate to say that only these three have developed into effec-
tive organizations. There may be universal ideas which
from their nature are not capable of giving rise to eccle-
siastical organizations. It has happened in the case of these
three religions that the circumstances of the times supplied
both the living ideas and the necessary framework of sec-
ondary conceptions. Nothing is more remarkable in the
40 INTRODUCTION.
history of the establishment of Islam than the way in which
Mohammed fitted his transforming ideas into the existing
social system, with what sagacity he recognized popular cus-
toms and opinions, and thus made the popular life the recep-
tacle for higher conceptions which were destined to transform
it ; in a word, he combined an idea and its dogmatic ritual
clothing into a unity which answered the demands of his
time. So it was with Christianity and Buddhism. The
other outward conditions of progress also were fulfilled
in the rise of these three religions, religious vagueness
and emptiness around them, distinctness, organization, and
enthusiasm within them. We can see, as a matter of fact,
that the world was prepared for them. And considering the
complexity of the relations, the mass of conditions to be
fulfilled, it cannot be surprising that the number of great
international religions has been small. The failure of a
single condition may be fatal. A lack of completeness in
one direction may confine a religion to the bounds of its
own nation, though it might seem otherwise to have all the
requisite conditions for general extension. That this has
been the case will appear from a brief examination of some
of the failures.
2. STUNTED AND ARRESTED GROWTHS.
It may be said from one point of view that all religions
tend to become universal ; that is, natural growth is in the
direction of the excision of the local and the retention of that
only which satisfies more highly cultivated thought and feel-
ing. In fact, however, the conditions of success are so
numerous that the probabilities of failure are great. We
find a gradation in the history of religions, cases of more
or less serious effort to transcend national bounds, with
varying degrees of success or failure.
STUNTED AND ARRESTED GROWTHS. 41
1. The nearest approach to speculative universality was
achieved by the Greek philosophy which followed Plato and
Aristotle, especially by the Stoics. The conception of the
unity of the world was practically established in Greek
philosophic thought at the close of the fifth century B. c.,
about the time when the Jews were beginning to formulate
their practical monotheism. The Stoics affirmed the unity
of the world in a more thorough manner than the Jews, and
rather speculatively than practically. They worked out a
system of morals in some respects so complete that it com-
manded the admiration of the world, and for centuries satis-
fied the ethical craving of the best minds of Greece and
Rome. Here was apparently the foundation for a universal
religion, ideas of life almost completely divorced from local-
national conceptions. In fact, Stoicism had a great career.
Its ideas penetrated into all parts of the Roman empire,
leaving no cultivated community or circle untouched or
uncolored by their influence, not even Jewish Palestine,
so much disposed to hold itself aloof from heathen thought.
They were in the air, and could not be excluded.
Nevertheless, Stoicism did not become a popular religion ;
as a system it remained the possession of the cultivated few,
and for obvious reasons. It lacked the theologic framework
which was essential for wide popular effect. In its thorough-
going speculative unification of the world and its determined
recognition of rigid natural law, it reduced the deity to a
minimum, and it took no practical account of the future life.
These were fatal lacks. And further, in its endeavor to real-
ize what it regarded as the absolute good, it undertook to
obliterate the emotional side of man and transform him into
a machine for the production of right will. This will was
made dependent on right thinking ; thus resulted an admi-
rable ideal of the perfect man, whose reflections were always
just and his decisions rational. But it was an ideal beyond
42 INTRODUCTION.
the conception of the people, practically no God, no life
to come, no full flow of passionate human desire. Stoicism
remained an idea capable of coloring the world's thought, but
incapable of creating an organized religion. It began in
speculation, and never as a system advanced beyond specu-
lative circles. Judaism, on the other hand, felt its way
cautiously, constantly keeping in touch with human needs
and fashioning itself so as to satisfy them.
The same thing is to be said of other Greek and Roman
systems of philosophy. They had their universal side, but
failed to take account of all the elements of life of their
time.
2. Confucianism has labored under a similar onesideness.
With a carefully wrought-out ethical system, the object of
which is to make the man a beneficent member of society,
it has scant recognition of the theological or purely religious
side of human nature, it is silent or non-committal with
respect to the future life. It is the religion of the learned,
but not of the masses in China. Its ethical universality has
enabled it to pass the bounds of its own nation and find some
footing in Japan and other neighboring countries where
Chinese influence has been predominant, but further than
this it has not gone and is not likely to go. Not only does
it lack universal-religious ideas, so that in fact it can hardly
be called a religion at all ; its ethical system also is largely
colored by national peculiarities. The State-religion, as dis-
tinct from Confucius's special teaching, has a defined wor-
ship which is not without a monotheistic tinge ; but the
cult is decidedly national, and the Emperor is the sole
ministrant.
3. In the old Egyptian religion we have an example of a
steady advance in the direction of both religious and ethical
universality, a pronounced monotheism in higher circles of
thought, and a very noble moral code. But this broader
STUNTED AND ARRESTED GROWTHS. 43
religious movement seems not to have become national ; there
was no such sifting process as took place among the exiled
Jews ; the people remained polytheists. Egyptian ideas
penetrated to some extent into the Greek and Roman em-
pires ; in Alexandria they were doubtless amalgamated with
Greek and Jewish conceptions ; but they were too much bound
to the soil by their theologic and ritual clothing, and could
offer the world nothing so distinct and satisfactory as that
which was brought by Judaism and Christianity. The Isis-
cult, though it made its way into Syria, Greece, and Rome,
was forced to yield to a more powerful rival.
The Persian religion a remarkable and noble attempt to
embody in religious creed the everlasting conflict of human
life suffered under the double burden of a somewhat
complicated theology and a local ritual. That which was
universal in its religious conception never found distinct
expression, or if it did finally struggle into utterance, this
was not till after Christianity had got possession of the field.
Manichseism was an attempt to combine the two rival sys-
tems, but it had the power of neither, and proved an utter
failure. Mazdeisrn was never able to subordinate, as Juda-
ism did, the evil principle absolutely to the good; it was
half-hearted, and therefore without power over foreign peo-
ples. This is a part of the explanation of the inglorious
way in which it succumbed to Islam.
4. The tendency to universality is visible, not only in
national religions, but also in certain great Christian com-
munities, as the national churches of England and Germany.
These churches have for centuries embodied the religious
thought of the national mind, and have reflected the national
progress. It is always a comparatively small body of think-
ers that in any generation represents the advance ; but if we
take the Church of England, for example, it is evident that
it represents to-day, as compared with the Church of the
44 INTRODUCTION.
sixteenth century, an avoidance of the local and particularis-
tic, and an emphasizing of those elements of religion which
appeal to all men. The same thing may be said of the
Church of Home, which is becoming more catholic, not only
in the extent of its territory, but also in the hospitality it
offers to broader religious ideas. A similar progress may be
perceived in other great Christian bodies which have no
connection with the State.
3. NATIONAL AND TRIBAL RELIGIONS.
The great mass of the religions of the world have failed to
pass beyond the communities in which they originated. This
remark must be understood, however, as applying to them
only in the comparatively advanced stage in which we
actually find them. The hundreds of tribes dwelling in
Asia, Africa, America, and Oceanica, each with its apparently
petrified and motionless religion, have all had their histories ;
what inward development and outward extension may have
taken place in remote times through amalgamations and con-
quests, we cannot tell. Nor is it possible to say with cer-
tainty what changes are now in progress, since we are so
slightly acquainted with the condition of the barbarian
peoples of the world. Some of them, it is known, have
elaborate cosmogonies and mythologies and a great mass of
folk-lore, implying a long development in some past pe-
riod. But granting the possibility of small movements and
growths, it is no doubt true that the barbarous religions of
to-day are confined within the limits of their own commu-
nities, and there is no sign among them of the intellectual
activity which is necessary to progress.
4. THE OUTLOOK.
1. The present indications are that a few great religions
will in time control the whole world. Buddhism, Christian-
THE OUTLOOK. 45
ity, and Islam now occupy a great part of the globe, and the
last two are advancing in various directions. The majority
of barbarous religions have shown themselves unable to hold
their ground against the inroads of intellectually and eth-
ically superior faiths. Of the old national religions, those
of India, China, and Japan alone show anything like solidity
of organization and capacity of resistance, and of these the
Japanese seems to be not disinclined to accept European
ideas.
2. As between the three great universal religions there
can be little doubt as to where the prospect of victory lies.
Religion follows in the wake of social progress, and it is this
last that determines the relations among nations. Chris-
tianity (to say nothing of its moral and spiritual superiority)
is the religion of the great civilized and civilizing nations of
the world, in whose hands are science and philosophy, litera-
ture and art, political and social progress. European and
American civilization, in its gradual encroachment on the
other peoples of the world, necessarily carries along and
plants Christianity.
3. This implies that the other great religions of the world
will not be able to adapt themselves as systems to the new
social order of things. Some parts of their apparatus of
creed may survive, some view of life may commend itself to
the new civilization and enter into and color the established
European creed ; but if we may judge from the present con-
dition of the Asiatic peoples, their religions must as systems
pass away with the civilizations to which they belong.
4 Nor is it probable that Christianity, if it should be the
sole survivor of the world's religious creeds, would retain its
present form unmodified. It is more likely that it will from
generation to generation feel the double influence of territo-
rial expansion and inward development of thought. Having
the whole world for its heritage, it will adapt itself to the
46 INTRODUCTION.
world's needs ; and standing always in close contact with the
world's highest thought, it will throw off from time to time
what it feels to be opposed to the purest ethical-religious
conception of life, and retain only that which the best
thought of the time demands.
The preceding sketch attempts to give the principles of
religious progress in general outline. That there will be ex-
ceptions to or modifications of such general rules is to be
expected. The almost infinitely diversified local conditions
will give peculiar turns and colorings to the various develop-
ments, and these form the material of special histories. But
amid all differences, it is important to recognize the working
of those general laws which both explain individual peculiar-
ities, and stamp unity on human religious history.
THE
DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
FKOM OLD TESTAMENT TO NEW TESTAMENT.
IN tracing the history of Jewish religious ideas into the New
Testament times, it is proper to begin with the period
represented by the name of Ezra. The introduction of the
complete Levitical legislation is a most important turning-
point in Jewish religious history ; it transformed the nation
into a church, and gave a new coloring to the whole national
life, or to state the fact in more general terms, it was
coincident with the beginning of what may be called mod-
ern Judaism, the Israelitish life as it appears in the New
Testament.
The results attained by Israelitish thought up to Ezra's
time may be summed up in a few particulars, which appear
with sufficient distinctness in the literature.
First, the nation had reached the point of practical mono-
theism, the conviction that in general the affairs, not only
of Israel, but also of the whole world, were controlled by the
God of Israel. This belief appears in the prophetic writings
from Amos to Zechariah. The prophets, as the great reli-
gious thinkers of the period, are its formulators and ex-
pounders. They were not its creators ; it grew out of the
necessities of the national life, but naturally took distinctest
shape and received best expression from the most advanced
minds. The approach, to monotheism was a gradual one;
48 DEVELOPMENT OF KELIGIOUS THOUGHT.
idolatry was rife among the people down to and during the
Babylonian exile. The captivity sifted the mass of the
people ; the adherents of the monotheistic tendency in Baby-
lonia were drawn into close relations with one another (this
we may infer from the subsequent developments), and those
who returned to Canaan shared the same views. It was
by no means a theoretical and thorough-going monotheism
which was held ; \ve shall see that alongside of the belief
in the practical aloneness of Yahwe, the existence of other
deities was admitted, and the power of Yahwe therefore rep-
resented as limited. But happily this logical inconsistency
seems to have had no practical results, and after a time
vanished before the increasing firmness of the monotheistic
faith.
In the next place the nation had worked out a reasonably
sound and satisfactory system of practical social ethics.
The moral principles which we find in the prophets and the
law books show a high state of ethical culture, culminating
in the precept, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"
(Lev. xix. 18). Only it has to be observed that the " neigh-
bor " here is one's fellow-countryman ; it was not supposed
that the obligation of love extended beyond the bounds of
Israel ; international ethics was no more recognized by the
Jews than by any other people of that day.
The organization of public worship in the temple was
completed by the end of the fifth century ; some modifica-
tions were afterward introduced, but the sacerdotal system
of the New Testament is substantially that of the time of
Ezra. The effect of this rigid organization was first to iso-
late the people from their neighbors, and secondly to confirm
and develop the legal conception of life, the idea that ev-
ery act is prescribed or regulated by special divine command,
and that the perfect man is he who knows and obeys these
prescriptions. The system was the essence of national par-
DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. 49
ticularism, favorable to intensity in one direction, unfavor-
able to breadth and catholicity ; fortunately it was afterward
to some extent modified by the conditions of the national
life. We are of course not to look on the Tora (as the Law
now came to be called) as something forcibly injected into
the national life from without, and intrusively moulding it.
The divine instruction (tora) had been gathering volume for
centuries, and the national feeling had been moving toward
the conviction that this instruction was its organic law ; but
when this function had been distinctly recognized, and the
law embodied in a complete code, it entered into the national
life as one of its main factors. It was by no means the only
factor other elements, religious and ethical, were potent
but this determined the form of life and the constitution of
the State.
One other fact must be mentioned, the form which the
Jewish Messianic hope had assumed in Ezra's time. The
term " Messianic " does not properly belong to this period ;
it was the product of the ideas of a later time. But the
hope which it implies had been long in existence ; it was a
natural product of the conviction of Yahwe's care for Israel,
a sort of belief and hope that have no doubt existed among
all nations, but received among the Jews peculiarly definite
expression and exerted a peculiarly lasting and profound in-
fluence. It had already passed through various phases in
Israel. Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah looked simply for
deliverance from Assyrian attacks and the happy ethical-
religious maintenance of the existing political organization ;
Jeremiah and Ezekiel, with the same hope of deliverance
from political enemies, perceived also the need of spiritual
transformation, and made a new heart the condition of the
era ; the later exilian prophets (whom we may group under
the name of Deutero-Isaiah) were absorbed in the prospect
of restoration to Canaan and the vision of the triumph of
4
50 DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.
Israel's worship over all the nations ; the prophets of the
return, Haggai and Zech. i.-viii., sinking down from these
pictures of glory to the hard realities of their present, con-
fined themselves to the task that lay before them, of rebuild-
ing the temple and securing a feeble foot-hold in the promised
land. The form of the expectation of national triumph had
varied from time to time according to the condition of the
national fortunes. 1 In the fifth century came a lull: the
temple had been built, but nothing more had been accom-
plished ; bare existence was all that the colony had achieved.
The advent of Ezra and Nehemiah fixed attention on the
legal-religious organization of the nation, and for the moment
there was neither time nor inducement to follow the glowing
pictures which the old prophets had given of the future.
The little community was undergoing a transformation, and
had to await further developments before it could resume
its outlook into the future.
It is at this point that we begin our study. We are to
trace the history of the Jewish religious ideas from the fifth
century on (going farther back when it seems desirable), and
to follow them into the New Testament times. While Pales-
tine is the centre of the movement, we shall have to include
also those phases of thought which we find among the Egyp-
tian Jews, and other Israelitish communities, and those Per-
sian and Greek influences which seem to have left their trace
on Jewish theology. Instead of taking the history by peri-
ods, we may trace the development of each common line of
1 See, for example, the political and religions constitution of the future.
Generally the nation as a whole is alone spoken of; Jeremiah (xxiii. 5) and
Ezekiel (xxxiv. 23, etc.) include the royal dynasty as a part of the established
order. An individual king as leader is mentioned in four passages, Isa. 5x. 6,
7 (Heb. ix. 5. 6) ; xi. 1-9 ; Mic. v. 2 (Heb. v. 1 ) ; Zech. ix. 9, all of which seem
to be post-exilian. The priesthood does not receive special mention till the
time of Ezekiel (xliv. 15); nearly contemporary is Jer. xxxiii. 14-26, which
is an expanded recension of Jer. xxiii. 5-8. The order is prominent in Zecha-
riah, Malachi, and Joel.
DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. 51
religious thought continuously into the New Testament.
This plan has the advantage of presenting each doctrine
as a unit, and of bringing out under each head more distinctly
the continuity of progress.
Before beginning the discussion it will be proper to give
a brief survey of the non-Christian Jewish sources of the
history.
CHAPTER I.
THE LITERATURE.
1. THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT.
THE period on which we now enter, from Ezra to the
beginning of the second Christian century, was one
of great mental activity and varied literary productiveness.
It offers no such sustained compositions as the second Isaiah
and Job, at least nothing that rivals these in imaginative
flight and literary skill; we have instead a multitude of
larger and smaller writings representing various tendencies
of thought, among them one at least, the Wisdom of Solo-
mon, which deserves a place among the Jewish classics.
The old isolated life of the nation, with its self-centred
calmness, was at an end ; the era of closer international
relations had begun, and this for the politically unstable
little Jewish community meant constant contact with novel-
ties, new intellectual and religious excitements and literary
ventures. There are few of the literary products of the
period that are not interesting in themselves, but we shall
consider them only in so far as they bear on the history of
religious thought.
The literary history is by no means formless. We recog-
nize the passage from prophecy through ritual history and
romances to philosophy, lyrical poetry, and apocalypse, the
return to history especially for the portraiture of the great
Maccabean era, and then apocalypse again, with history and
theology. A brief sketch of this development will suffice
here ; the material of the books will be used in the course of
the discussion.
THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT. 53
1. Prophetic Writings. The old prophecy had spent its
strength; after the exile it was no longer what it had
been, and in our period it is only the shadow of its former
self. It had successfully carried through the first great
movement of Israelitism, it had crushed idolatry and
established monotheism; and, this foundation laid, the na-
tional thought had turned to other things. The great legal
movement the ritual organization of the nation had su-
perseded the old spontaneous utterance of prophetic men.
Eeligion was becoming more an affair of rule and reasoning ;
the divine word, instead of issuing in burning words from
the souls of seers, was fixed in a book. This was not neces-
sarily a religious retrogression, it was rather a natural and
necessary progress in reflection, but it gave a new turn and
tone to the literature. Yet there still came occasionally the
breath of the prophetic impulse, though in comparatively
feeble form.
After the building of the temple the maintenance of the
worship was naturally the pressing question. About 460
B. c., 1 the prophet who is known by the name of Malachi
was moved to reprove the people for their negligence in
bringing offerings to the temple. Seeing in the priests and
Levites the hope of the nation, he predicted a coming day
of Yahwe which should purify them and usher in an era of
complete religious-moral unity for Israel. It is an interest-
ing point in his short prophecy that he records the existence
of practical religious scepticism and the beginning of the
closer social-religious life (Mai. iii. 14-16).
It is after a considerable interval that we meet with two
productions which have the clear stamp of the legal period,
1 A date before the reform of Ezra and Nehemiah is to be preferred on
the grounds that the Levites are not definitely distinguished from the priests
(Mai. ii. 4 ; iii. 3), and that the strict marriage-regulations of Ezra (Ezra x.)
seem not to be in force (Mai. ii. 11).
54 THE LITERATURE.
and probably fall after the Greek conquest of Palestine. 1
Zech. ix.-xiv. is occupied with various local relations, the petty
States around Jerusalem, the conflict between the people of
the city and the people of the country districts, and looks
forward to a great catastrophe, the result of which shall be
that Judah shall be ceremonially sacred to Yahwe, and that
all the nations of the earth shall come up to Jerusalem to
worship. The course of events is marked by the fact that
the existing prophetic institution is expected to fall into dis-
repute (Zech. xiii. 3-9) ; the writer feels himself to be apart
from the prophetic herd, whose inspiration he connects with
an unclean spirit. The political and religious condition of
the people was lamentable (Zech. x. 12-14 ; xi. ; xiii. 2), but
our prophet, recalling the old form of government, has the
vision of a coming king, righteous and devoid of pride, saved
by God, and extending the dominion of Judah over all the
nations (Zech. ix. 9, 10). Joel also expects a catastrophe
from which Judah shall issue in safety to abide forever. It
is noteworthy that he mentions, as characteristic of the com-
ing time of blessedness, the universal diffusion of the spirit
of prophecy among all classes, young and old, bond and free,
male and female (Joel ii. 28-32 [Heb. Hi.], cf. Num. xi.
29) ; the prophesying seems to be defined as dreaming
dreams and seeing visions, and is introduced as a mark
of Yahwe's specific and intimate presence among his people.
Zechariah looks at the corruptness of present prophecy ; Joel
hopes for a revival of the true spirit. In both writers we
observe more glow than is found in the prophets of the
return. With the firmer organization of the Palestinian
colony came a revival of the old hopes and a more strenuous
assertion of political nationality. It is sufficient to mention
the short polemic against idolatry, entitled the " Epistle of
1 See the references to the Greeks, Zech. ix. 13, Joel iii. 6, and to the de-
veloped ritual, Zech. xiv. 12-21, Joel ii. 15-17.
THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT. 55
Jeremiah," belonging perhaps to the latter part of the third
century.
2. The complete reconstruction of the national life under
the control of the Law naturally led to the desire to rewrite
the old history from a new point of view. The books of
Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah recount the national fortunes
from the accession of David to near the end of the fourth
century, Chronicles representing the full Levitical ritual
as having been in existence from the first, and describing
in a multitude of unhistorical details the constant and vis-
ible intervention of Yahwe in the nation's affairs ; Ezra and
Nehemiah, on the other hand, are sober in their statements.
These books belong not far from the year 300 B. c., 1 and give
the first complete historical view of the Israelitish constitu-
tion as a theocracy. The Greek I Esdras adds no important
particulars.
3. Chronicles marks a new tendency in historical compo-
sition. The older books, Judges, Samuel, Kings, com-
posed in or near the exile, had indeed interpreted the past
in the light of their present, and regarded it as an illustra-
tion of the truth that national success was dependent on
obedience to the nation's God. Chronicles conceives of the
history more distinctly as the embodiment of an idea, the
illustration of which is the main function of the facts. The
chronicler's idea was one which entered into the very essence
of the Israelitish thought of his time, and represented in
general the outcome of the history. It was Yahwe's guid-
ance of Israel under the government of the Law and the
temple-ritual. But it was natural that the idea should
coerce the facts. Legendary material there is in abundance
1 The close connection between the three books is generally recognized ;
see, especially, the genealogical lists in 1 Chron. i.-ix., Ezraii.. Neh. vii. The
list of high-priests is brought down, in Neh. xii. 11, to Jaddna, who, accord-
ing to Josephus (Ant. xi. 8, 4), held the office when Alexander came to
Jerusalem, B. c. 332.
56 THE LITERATURE.
in the earlier histories ; but it is a natural growth which
has incorporated itself organically into the real history,
while a large part of the embellishment of Chronicles has
the air of an artificial addition. It may be to some extent
a .real traditional coloring, but seems in many cases to be
due to the imagination of the writer, who could conceive of
the past only under the form of the present, and writes the
story accordingly. The result at any rate is thorough-going
ritual reconstruction, a new nicely rounded history in which
the well-known characters of the books of Samuel and Kings
play roles foreign to the prophetic conception. The Chroni-
cler gained his end, his work is a literary success ; but it is
a religious romance rather than a sober history. Such remod-
elling of the old material under the control of an idea, with
free handling of the facts, was made possible by the literary
conditions of the time : there was no scientific conception of
the value of facts as the only embodiment of human history ;
there was no critical public ; manuscripts were few and little
read ; they were written for sympathetic circles, and having
obtained the approval of the literary minority, might pass on
to the general public unchallenged and uncontrolled. The
inducement was great to use the past freely as a mere vehicle
of moral teaching. Already in the historical parts of the
Pentateuch the old stories had been lavishly employed to
this end. There was a natural conservative desire to estab-
lish the present in and by the past ; and the Jewish mind
(it is a Semitic trait) preferred objective historical portrait-
ure to abstract discussion. A century after the production
of Chronicles this tendency manifested itself in a group of
works of which four have come down to us ; a larger group
there probably was, it is not likely that these four are all
that were produced, and we have perhaps a trace of one
such story in the episode of Darius and the three young men
in 1 Esdras iii., iv. The romances which have been preserved
THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT. 57
are Jonah, Esther, Judith, and Tobit ; they seem all to be-
long in the period from 250 to 150 B. c.
The book of Jonah embodies a religious sentiment strik-
ingly broad and lofty in comparison with the reigning Jewish
particularism of the time; it represents God as caring for
heathen peoples not less tenderly and completely than for
Israel. How far this embodies the thought of a wider circle
it is hard to say ; we find scarcely the trace of such a con-
ception elsewhere in this period.
The sentiment of Esther is precisely the opposite of this.
It is fierce, intolerant nationalism. Its principal design
seems to be to commend to Palestinian Jews the feast of
Purim (cf. "the day of Mardochseus" in 2 Mac. xv. 36),
which it represents as having been established in commemo-
ration of a great national deliverance. The author of the
Hebrew work is so absorbed in his picture of the prowess
and triumph of the Jews that he makes no mention of God
and shows no consciousness of religion ; this defect is reme-
died in the Greek recension, which inserts among other things
prayers offered by Mordecai and Esther, and a vision with
theocratic interpretation.
The motive in Judith seems to be merely to comfort and
inspire the people in a time of distress by the picture of a
remarkable divine intervention, by the hand of a woman
the God of Israel discomfits mighty enemies. The de-
tails of the narrative may rest on some obscure tradition,
but can be brought into relation with no known facts of
history.
In Tobit we have a charming picture of family life, re-
flecting the political conditions and religious ideas of the
author's time. It is the first example of a novel proper, a
tale in which the interest lies chiefly or largely in incidents
of every-day life. The moral lesson, however, is not lacking;
the religious faithfulness of Tobit is rewarded with family
58 THE LITERATURE.
prosperity, and by the victory which his son gains over the
fiend Asmodaeus.
4. The more definitely reflective tendency of the time
appears in the group of philosophical works, hooks of Wis-
dom, which seem to have heen composed a little later than
the romances, about from 230 B. c. to 130 B. c., comprising
Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, The Wisdom of Solomon, and The
Wisdom of the Son of Sirach. The Jews had no meta-
physics, no attempts at organized systems of thought; their
philosophy consists of detached, practical reflections on life.
The beginning of this species of composition is referred by
the tradition to Solomon. Popular proverbs, embodying ob-
servation of simple facts of experience, doubtless existed at
an early time ; and there may have been wise men who ut-
tered pithy, practical sayings as early as Solomon, or earlier.
But the form of the books which have come down to us is
late; their religious ideas, at least, are those of the legal
period. The composition of such works implies a reflective
spirit which belongs, in the course of the national develop-
ment of thought, naturally after the prophetic period.
The book of Proverbs is no doubt the result of numerous
collections made at different times. Much of the material
in the middle portion of the book, consisting of maxims of
experience in common life, may be old, but it has all been
worked over under the influence of the late religious thought.
Chapters i.-ix., by their broad, rounded style, and by the
personification of Wisdom in chapter viii., belong to the
latest period of the collections ; and the hints of social and
political conditions in the concluding chapters suggest the
times of Greek control.
The social framework of Ecclesiastes is that of the city-
civilization of the Greek period, complicated social relations,
political instability, organized social-religious life. The au-
thor's negative and indifferentistic conception of life suggests
THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT. 59
an influence of the Greek Cynical philosophy which was
firmly established on the north coast of Africa in the third
century B. c. The way in which he combines a distinct the-
istic faith with a practical scepticism is not entirely satisfac-
tory. One would suppose that his belief in the absolute
divine control of things would enable him to look on life
with something like cheerfulness and hope ; but he sees noth-
ing in the world worth the devotion of the soul ; he has no
enthusiasm ; his highest effort is to enjoy what exists, and
refrain from useless longings and hopes. All things, he
says, come alike to all ; time and chance happen to all ; man
knows not his time, and is taken like birds caught in a snare.
When he does counsel energy and intensity in living, it is
from the reflection that there is nothing beyond this life :
" Whatever thy hand finds to do, do it with thy might ; for
there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in
Sheol, whither thou goest " (Eccl. ix. 10). Certain variations
in the thought might suggest that the book is not a unit ;
the epilogue, xii. 9-14, is the work of a later hand, but in
the body of the book the seeming discrepancies may be sat-
isfactorily explained as the oscillations of thought of a Jew
tinged with Greek sceptical philosophy, holding to his faith
in God and to his veneration for righteousness and wisdom,
but convinced of the emptiness of things, the futility of am-
bition, and the folly of enthusiasm. The result is that he
holds himself aloof from the great world, looking on its
feeble struggles and passions with pitying but not unfriendly
eye, and reserving to himself a quiet enjoyment of the pres-
ent, without disturbing thought of the future. The moral
tone of the book is high, and its general effect is to give
us a large view of life. It seems to have been written in
Egypt about the year 200 B. c., and doubtless represented the
opinions of a certain circle. It stands, however, outside
the general Jewish development; the views expressed by
60 THE LITERATURE.
its author can only have colored Jewish thought in a general
way.
We find an equally pronounced but entirely different Greek
influence in the Wisdom of Solomon, orthodox Judaism
lighted up by Platonic and Stoic philosophy, or Platonism
and Stoicism interpreted by Jewish theology. In contrast
with Ecclesiastes, the author has warm faith in God and in
human life, conviction that all things are ordered by the
Divine Providence, that God is the Saviour of all, that there
remains for all men life beyond the grave, and in the present
life the universal divine love : " Thou lovest all the things
that are, and abhorrest nothing that thou hast made ; for if
thou hadst hated anything, thou wouldst not have made it ;
. . . thou sparest all because they are thine, Lord, lover of
souls " (Wisd. xi. 24-2 G). The gist of the book is the praise
of wisdom, divine wisdom, of course, the insight into
life which belongs to God and comes to man through com-
munion with God. Its personification of Wisdom amounts
almost to a hypostatic conception ; and there are few pas-
sages in ancient philosophy more eloquent than those in
which the author describes her being and functions. The
use of the book is visible in the New Testament (vii. 22,
cf. James iii. 17; vii. 26, cf. Heb. i. 2).
The Wisdom of the Son of Sirach is cast in a purely
Jewish mould and stands in close relation with the middle
part of the Old Testament book of Proverbs, with which it
agrees in general in its theology. It seems to have been
written in Palestine (or possibly in Egypt), in Hebrew, and
to have been translated into Greek in Egypt about B. c. 132. 1
Much of its ethical material is found in the New Testament.
1 The second Prologue gives the thirty-eighth year of Euergetes as the
date of translation. The king meant is probably the second of the name,
called Physcon, whose thirty-eighth year, reckoning from the time when he
first ascended the throne, falls in 132.
THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT. 61
5. In the romances and books of Wisdom we can trace
the general moral-religious thought of the Jews in the first
half of the Greek period. During the same period there
had been slowly growing a literature which arose out of the
needs of the temple-service, religious hymns, giving expres-
sion to national feeling on various occasions, and constituting
our present book of Psalms. The meagreness of the data
makes it difficult to trace in detail the history of Hebrew lyri-
cal poetry. There are one or two odes (Isa. xii., Hab. iii.) which
may belong to the pre-exilian time, and the book of Job is
placed by many critics in the Babylonian exile (though it is
probably later). There are some of the Psalms also as Ps.
cxxxvii. which seem to have been composed at that time.
But the theology and the historical conditions of the great
body of the songs of our Psalter indicate the Greek period
as the time of their composition. In them the ritual is well
established ; the nation is a church ; the wicked are mostly
foreign oppressors; the righteous and meek are Israelites;
prophecy no longer exists, but the nation is righteous as a
whole. Such odes must have come into existence not only
after the establishment of the full temple- ritual, but also
after the politically annihilated nation had begun to feel the
weight of the oppressor's arm. Some of the Psalms (xliv.,
Ixxiv., Ixxix., and others) belong to the Maccabean period ; and
while in many cases there are no certain signs of date, the
probabilities are that the body of the Psalter came into ex-
istence after the year 350 B. c. The book is a most precious
mine of religious thought; out of it the theology of the
Greek period may be constructed with considerable fulness
and certainty.
It will suffice to mention the Song of Songs as an isolated
production of the Jewish literature of the period. All that
can be certainly said of it is that it is a poem in praise of love.
As it is totally devoid of religious feeling, it throws no light
62 THE LITERATURE.
on the history of Jewish religious development. Its claim to
our interest lies in its literary charm and in the indication it
gives of the cultivation of nou -religious literature among
the Jews.
6. The preceding sketch has brought the history of the
literature down to about the first part of the second century
B. c. We come now to a group of works which, beginning
about the middle of this century and going on two or three
hundred years, embody a remarkable and significant phase of
the Jewish national feeling. The apocalypse was a natural
product of the times of Greek and Eoman oppression, and of
Maccabean triumph. It was born of the old prophetic hopes
and the present needs ; it was the interpretation which the
hard reality forced on the glowing promises of the past.
The prophets had predicted the glorious establishment of
Israel in its own land, under its own rulers, and the triumph
of the religion of Yahwe over all the nations of the earth.
The prophetic spirit died out ; no seers arose to kindle new
hope by the free prophetic portraiture of the future on the
basis of the present. The old prophetic liberty of thought
had vanished ; its inward and outward conditions no longer
existed. Inwardly there had come hard and unelastic social-
religious organization ; outwardly the political conditions
pressed on the people with relentless reality, the Egyptian
and Syrian Greek kingdoms and the Roman empire were
hard facts, not to be dealt with as the old prophets had
dealt with Edom, Damascus, Assyria, and Babylon. But
the popular imagination necessarily turned to the future;
the promised deliverance must speedily come. The feeling
naturally arose that the best way to comfort and inspire
the people in the present suffering was to paint the glorious
future in glowing colors. No doubt it seemed to many that
the set time had come; prophets had in many places de-
clared that the final day of triumph was to be preceded by
THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT. 63
a night of oppression, and surely there could be no sorrow
greater than this sorrow of Israel in the hands of heathen
enemies, its law, its religion, its life, scoffed at and trampled
under foot.
The form which these consolatory writings assumed was a
development of the old vision. To the pre-exilian prophets
the divine revelation came mostly as a clear, intelligible word
of rebuke or promise ; occasionally there was a brief vision,
as in Amos, Isaiah, Habakkuk. In Ezekiel we have a sud-
don expansion of the revealing picture, he sees in a vision
the whole religious-political constitution of the restored
Israelitish State. In the first Zechariah this form of reve-
lation occupies a still greater space ; it is in this way that
he presents aH that he has to say of the future (when a pres-
ent question is to be solved, chapter viii., he falls into straight-
forward discourse). The content of the prophetic visions is
small, and limited to the immediate future. But when, un-
der the Greek dominion, the Jews came into closer contact
with great kingdoms, and became acquainted with the suc-
cession of empires, it was natural that the function of the
vision should be enlarged ; it came to present a philosophy
of history, a sketch of the progress of the world-kingdoms
under the government of the God of Israel in the interests
of his people. Since the exile the history of the world had
been wonderful : empire after empire had arisen only to fall
before a stronger successor ; it was well, so thought the Jew,
to point out that this was only God's preparation for bring-
ing on the appointed day of judgment and deliverance. The
fashion arose of putting reviews of history into the mouths
of seers. It was necessary that the assumed seer should
live at the beginning of the period embraced in the vision ;
according to the starting-point, whether in the patriarchal
time, or during the exodus, or in the exile, or later, Enoch or
Moses or Daniel or Ezra or some other was selected as the
64 THE LITERATURE.
organ of the revelation. This procedure was in accordance
also with the taste of the times, which delighted to find
authority for its own opinions in the person of some ancient
sage or saint. The symbolic form of these writings often
makes them obscure ; but the author's date may frequently
be determined from his historical allusions, and from the
general fact that his description down to his own time is apt
to be full and vivid, and after that to become meagre and
vague.
The book of Daniel, the first in order of the apoca-
lypses, traverses the period from the Babylonian kingdom of
Nebuchadnezzar to about the death of Antiochus Epiphanes,
B. c. 164. The seer is a Jewish prince, brought a captive to
Babylon, educated in Chaldean astrological science, and ele-
vated to posts of trust under Nebuchadnezzar and Darius ;
he is probably an old legendary figure (see Ezek. xiv. 14).
In different visions he portrays the four world-kingdoms of
Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece, coming in the last to a
detailed description of Antiochus. His chronology (which
irreconcilably contradicts history) is based on the seventy
years of Jeremiah (Jer. xxv. 12) which he converts into
seventy year-weeks, four hundred and ninety years, for the
period from Cyrus's decree of restoration to the deliverance ;
that is, practically to his own day (Dan. ix. 24, 25). The
oppression is to end (xi. 45) with the death of Antiochus ;
the angel Michael, the guardian prince of Israel, will then
intervene, and the wise and pure shall be blessed and the
wicked punished. At this point the author, with noteworthy
soberness, abruptly closes his description. The book is valu-
able for its picture of the religious life and thought of the
time of Judas Maccabseus. It presents not an individual
Messiah, but only a triumphant people (vii. 21-27) ; it teaches
the resurrection of Israelites, some to glory, some (the
apostates) to contempt (xii. 2).
THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT. 65
The book of Enoch was composed somewhat later than
Daniel, to which it is greatly inferior in literary charm and
religious iuipressiveness. It consists of several distinct
parts, belonging to different periods. The original work,
which has the form of a revelation to Enoch, describes
the sin of the angels (Gen. vi.), their subsequent evil
doings and punishment, the places of reward for the chosen
and punishment for the wicked (with much astronomical
lore), and finally the history of the world from the crea-
tion to the Messianic time. A long interpolation, consist-
ing of three Parables, deals with the last judgment of right-
eous and wicked, which is conducted by the Messiah ; in
this section is inserted from another hand a revelation to
Noah respecting the flood and the evil angels. The book
is a rich storehouse of material in the subjects with which
it has to do, and not a few of its angelological and eschat-
ological ideas appear in the New Testament (Jude and the
Revelation). Its fondness for superhuman machinery comes
in part from its subject-matter, and is an evidence of the
activity in this direction that prevailed in the second and
following centuries, though how much of its contents be-
longs to the thought of the age, and how much is peculiar
to the authors, it is hard to say. In the original portion the
Messiah is a man (xc. 37), and appears after the chosen peo-
ple have returned to the Lord ; he is preceded by a great
deliverer (xc. 9), who is to be identified either with Judas
Maccaboeus (B. c. 168-161) or with John Hyrcanus I. (B. c.
135-107). The Parables give a different representation : not
only does the Messiah (called the Chosen One and the Son
of Man) conduct the judgment and usher in the state of
blessedness (xlv. 3, 4), but he is said to have been chosen
before the world was created (xlviii. 6). Such conceptions,
foreign to all other Jewish pre-Christian thought, suggest
66 THE LITERATURE.
a Christian author or editor. The Parables draw largely
from Ezekiel and Daniel. 1
The work which has come down to us under the name
of the Sibylline Oracles is a congeries of many fragments
of various dates. In imitation of the heathen sibyls, it
details the various parts of the history of the world for the
purpose of introducing the glorious future of the chosen
people. The pictures of this future vary little from those
already described ; at a given moment, when the oppression
has become intolerable, God intervenes, destroys the enemies,
and saves his people. In some cases, a personal Messiah is
introduced. The more important pieces are found in -the
third book, vs. 97-210, which are probably to be assigned
to the middle of the second century B. c. 2
The book of Baruch is of uncertain date (hardly earlier, in
its present form, than the second century B. c.) and of indef-
inite content, containing only the prediction that Jerusalem
shall be restored. The thought is a reproduction of the older
literature, the second part (chs. iii.-v.) following especially
Job and Isaiah.
The Assumption of Moses is a prediction of the establish-
ment of the kingdom of God ; it was probably composed not
far from the beginning of our era.
A more interesting work is the Psalter of Solomon, a
collection of eighteen psalms written apparently not long after
the death of Pompey (B. c. 48), in a period of great depres-
1 The book of Enoch was probably originally written in Hebrew or
Aramaic, and thence translated into Greek ; it now exists only in an Ethiopic
translation made from the Greek; the best Ethiopic text is that of Dillmann,
Leipzig, 1851. An excellent English translation (with introduction and
notes) is that of G. H. Schodde, Andover, 1882. For the critical literature,
see James Prummond, "The Jewish Messiah," London, 1877, Schodde's
above-mentioned translation, and Schurcr's '* Hist, of the N. T. Times."
2 See the editions of Friedlieb, Leipzig, 1852, and Alexandre, Paris, 1869.
THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT. 67
sion (ii. 30, 31). Modelled after the older psalms, it is full
of cries for help, and beseeches God to raise up the righteous
king who shall rule over Israel, crush wicked rulers, and
purify Jerusalem from the heathen who are trampling it
down to destruction. The author's view is clearly limited
to the immediate future, and he seems to expect nothing
more than the re-establishment of the old royal regime in
righteousness and truth.
The book of Jubilees, which describes the primeval times
by periods of fifty years, hardly deserves mention here ex-
cept as an illustration of the delight which the Jews of the
first century of our era took in expanding and commenting
on the old history. The natural growth of embellishment
is clearly seen when we compare the book of Jubilees with
the text of Genesis and Exodus, on which it is based.
Second Esdras belongs probably toward the close of the
first century of our era, and is of interest as testifying to the
existence at that time of the expectation of the kingdom of
God. In its present form it appears to have been, if not
written by a Jewish Christian, at any rate retouched by a
Christian hand. 1
It will suffice to mention the Testaments of the Twelve
Patriarchs and the Ascension of Isaiah, works which be-
long in the beginning of the second century of our era, and
are of small importance for the history of the genesis of our
Christian ideas.
7. The works which go under the name of Maccabees
furnish, along with the history, a number of details of the
opinions of the times. First Maccabees covers the space
1 The date is doubtful. See a good discussion of this point in Drnm-
mond's "Jewish Messiah." The writer (xii. 10-32) identifies his final world-
period with Daniel's fourth kingdom (Dan. vii.), which, according to Josephus
(x. 11, 7), was the Roman, and his twelve kings are most naturally explained
as Roman emperors. A Christian coloring seems probable in the title " Son
of God " applied to the Messiah (vii. 28, 29 ; xiii. 32, 37 j xiv. 9).
68 THE LITERATURE.
B. c. 175-135 ; Second Maccabees B. c. 176-162 ; Third Mac-
cabees B. c. 221-204 ; Fifth Maccabees extends from B. c. 176
to the beginning of our era ; Fourth Maccabees is a philo-
sophical tract on the Autocracy of Reason, founded on the
story of the martyrdom of Eleazar and of the seven brothers
and their mother (2 Mac. vi. vii.).
Two other writers remain to be mentioned. The works
of Josephus contain a great mass of matter respecting the
religious history and opinions of the Jews during the period
beginning with the Maccabean struggle and ending with the
destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, A. D. 70. It is hardly
necessary to say that his statements on these points have
to be received, certainly not with scepticism, but with critical
examination.
The influence of Philo (first half of the first century of our
era) on Christian thought was deep and lasting, though it at
first affected a small circle of thinkers.
2. THE CANONS.
1. During the development of the literature above de-
scribed a parallel movement of great importance had been
going on among the Jews. They selected certain books, which
they believed to have been imparted by divine inspiration,
collected them into a sacred canon, and invested them with
absolute authority. The effect on Jewish thought was, as in
all such cases, both limiting and inspiring : it established a
fixed rule of life and offered a body of admirable writings for
study ; but it tended also to exclude all other literature and
to enfeeble thought by the pressure of an absolute body of
truth beyond which the mind could not permit itself to go.
Embryonic canons have existed among other peoples, as the
Greeks, Eomans, and Chinese ; Buddhism, Zoroastrianism,
and Islam went further and established definite collections
of sacred writings ; but no people laid hold of the idea of
THE CANONS. 69
canonization with so much precision and carried it out with
so much vigor and definiteness as the Jews. The process
was a gradual one : those books were first chosen which
satisfied the first and most pressing needs of the post-exilian
Jews ; and gradually, as literary and religious interest widened,
other works were included according to the appeal which
they made to the national religious consciousness. We have
only meagre details of the principles according to which the
selection of the canonical books was made. We may gather
that the tests were both external and internal : a book to be
chosen must come supported by some recognized high author-
ity, prophetic or other ; and at the same time it was neces-
sary that its contents should commend themselves to the
religious feeling of the best men. A book might be valued
for its legal material, for its ethical exhortation, for its edify-
ing emotion, for its historical information, or for its consoling
view of the future. Doubtless over many books there were
long discussions ; such discussions, in the case of Ecclesiastes
and the Song of Songs, and one or two other books, the
Talmud speaks of as having been carried on up to the end
of the first century of our era.
2. The root of the idea of a canon goes back, no doubt,
to very early times. Its basis is the conviction that Yahwe
announced his will directly to Israel through chosen men,
prophets, and priests. The Tora was originally the divine
word which came to the prophets respecting the moral, re-
ligious, and political condition of the nation (Isa. viii. 16).
As society became better organized, the need was. more
strongly felt for a definite system of regulations of life.
No distinction was made between the ethical, religious, and
political codes ; the nation was conceived of as a unity under
the guidance of the national deity, whose will was the norm
of conduct in all phases of activity. For the king on the
throne, the priest at the shrine, and the common man in
70 THE LITERATURE.
every-day life there could be but one rule, namely, to do
those things, ethical and ritual, which the God of Israel had
declared to be well-pleasing in his sight. At the end of the
seventh century came a great outburst of nationalism, one
result of which was the compilation of the Deuteronomic
code, a collection of laws (developed out of earlier material)
intended to be a complete manual of life. The code was
naturally ascribed to Moses as its author. He was the
greatest name in the tradition of the olden time, he had
led the people from Egypt to Canaan ; he had been at once
captain, judge, and priest. The line of legal .traditions went
back to him, and the fact that there had been constant
accretions was forgotten or neglected ; according to the
historical ideas of the time, it was he who should have
announced the organic law of the nation. Such a law in
the nature of the case would tend to become finally regula-
tive ; the Deuteronomic code was the inception of the canon.
Yet that the canonical idea was not then completely estab-
lished is shown by the freedom with which the prophet
Ezekiel (Ezek. xl.-xlviii ) deals with the material, advancing
beyond Deuteronomy, modifying its prescriptions, and sug-
gesting or announcing new regulations as if he were quite un-
conscious that there existed a code of final authority. The
beginning had been made, but the end was not reached till
the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Then the little church-
nation in Babylonia and Palestine, isolated and helpless,
feeling more definitely that its national life was bound up
with a divinely given code, accepted the fuller Levitical
legislation of the time as God's final word to the people.
The feeling of need and the law which responded to it had
grown up together ; and when Ezra and Nehemiah announced
to the congregation the new and complete set of regulations,
there was no question of forcing an unacceptable law on a
reluctant people, the proposed code seemed natural and
THE CANONS. 71
necessary, and was accepted with joyful acclamation. It
also was of course ascribed to Moses ; doubtless to the
masses of that time the idea of a break in the continuity
of tradition never occurred. Issuing from the mouth of
God, having its root in the beginnings of the national
life, the Tora, based on and sustained by everything that
was most sacred in human thought, was an eternal rule
on which no profane hand could be laid with impunity.
From this time on, the possession of this divinely given code
was the source of perpetual joy and exultation to the Jews,
who believed that they were thereby forever separated from,
and lifted above, all the other nations of the earth.
3. The canonical idea, once introduced, was capable of
extension. During the remainder of the Persian period,
and especially afterward under the Greek rule, the na-
tional consciousness of separateness and sanctity steadily
grew, and all that bore on the history and development
of the people became constantly more interesting. There
were extant writings which narrated the fortunes of the
nation from the settlement in Canaan down to the exile,
setting forth how the people had prospered in proportion as
they had been obedient to Yahwe, and how he had sent his
prophets to instruct them and to guide them ; and there
had also been preserved the discourses of certain of these
prophets, in which Israel was rebuked for its sins and threat-
ened with punishment if it did not repent, but also prom-
ised a glorious future if it would turn to its God with
wholeness of heart. In process of time canonical sanctity
came to attach to some of these writings. 1 We have no in-
formation as to the grounds which controlled the selection,
but we may be reasonably sure that the main consideration
was their true national character ; those books were chosen
1 The second canon contains Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and the
prophets (including Jonah and excluding Daniel).
72 THE LITERATURE.
for canonization which depicted the national life in ac-
cordance with the ethical -religious point of view of the
fourth and third centuries B. c. ; the prophets who survived
were those whose thought was justified hy the result. The
standard of election was high, in accordance with the lofty
view held of the ethical-religious enlightenment, obligation,
and mission of the nation ; possibly literary considerations
also entered. In regard to such men as Amos, Hosea, Isaiah,
Micah, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the exilian
Isaiah and the post-exilian Haggai, Zechariah I., Zechariah
II., and Joel, there could be no ground of hesitation, their
general thought was in accord with the true ethical-religious
instinct of the nation. Nahum and Obadiah must have com-
mended themselves purely by their nationalism, since they
contain no real ethical or religious thought ; the little book
of Jonah, not properly prophecy at all, though it embodies
a noble religious conception, probably owed its place in the
new collection to its religious excellence and its supposed
connection with the old prophet of that name in the time
of Jeroboam II.
This body of writings was gradually brought into shape
during the two centuries that followed the canonization of
o
the Law. The conditions were not entirely favorable to the
preservation of the original prophetic words. Manuscripts
were copied and recopied by scribes who not only sometimes
made errors in letters and words, but permitted themselves
to introduce new material into the text, or to combine in one
manuscript, without mark of division, writings composed by
different men ; instances of these sorts of procedure are
found especially in Micah and Jeremiah, and the groups of
prophecies which go under the name of Isaiah and Zecha-
riah. Scribes and collectors were often, perhaps generally,
ignorant of the dates of the writings with which they had
to do ; they seem, indeed, to have attached little importance
THE CANONS. 73
to author or time, being more concerned with the thought
and its bearing on the edification of the nation.
We have no external testimony as to the time when the
prophetic writings were gathered into a canon, except the
obscure statement in 2 Mac. ii. 13 (a book of small author-
ity), where it is said that Nehemiah founded a library and
gathered together the books concerning the kings (perhaps
our Judges, Samuel, and Kings), and the prophets and the
things of David (possibly an historical book or some collec-
tion of psalms), and the epistles of the kings concerning the
holy gifts (the letters of Persian monarchs). This statement
is valuable only as proving the existence of a tradition re-
specting the collection of the prophetical books ; one might
surmise from it that there were various attempts to gather
these books before the collection assumed the form of our
second canon. From the second prologue to Ecclesiasticus it
may be inferred that this canon was in existence before the
year 200 B. c., and we may assign it the approximate date
of 250.
4. Meantime, writings of a different order were coming
into existence, ethical-religious discussions, proverbs, his-
tories, stories, temple-songs, and apocalypses. As these were
not composed by prophetic men, and were not immediately
connected with the organic law of the nation, they were
relatively slow in acquiring authority. A certain literary
training was necessary, and a certain broadening of the na-
tional religious consciousness, in order that speculative and
emotional works which bore a distinct impress of the person-
ality of the writers should be accepted as part of God's reve-
lation to the nation. It is probable, however, that the national
feeling here also entered largely into the decision of the ques-
tion. The book of Job might be looked on as describing not
only the trials of a pious soul, but also the sufferings of the
nation ; Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther portrayed
74 THE LITERATURE.
various aspects of the national fortunes, and Euth chronicled
the beginnings of the royal house of Judah ; Lamentations
and Psalms expressed the national feeling and uttered the na-
tional prayer in various seasons of joy or grief ; Proverbs gave
rules of life which might be regarded as a supplement to the
law ; Daniel offered much-needed consolation in the shape of
a glowing picture of glorious triumph. In respect to Ecclesi-
astes and the Song of Songs there might be doubt ; neither of
them is national ; the first is gravely and reservedly sceptical
and indifferent, and the second is secular and sensuous. In
fact, the opinion as to these books was not unanimous ; up to
the end of the first century of our era the question was dis-
cussed whether they were edifying and entitled to a place in
the canon. The favorable opinion finally arrived at probably
resulted from the allegorizing of the Song into a history of
Israel, and from an appendix to Ecclesiastes which gave it
an air of orthodoxy. Difficulties arose also with respect to
other books. 1
Such was the course of thought in Palestine. It is evi-
dent that the choice of books for the third canon was con-
trolled by a somewhat stringent ethical-religious and perhaps
literary feeling. But other considerations, sometimes purely
local, probably entered into the decision of the question.
In Egypt the conditions were different. The Greek transla-
tion made in Alexandria in the third and second centuries
includes in the third canon not only the books above men-
tioned, but a number of others : additions to Ezra, Daniel,
and Esther ; the Prayer of Manasseh, Baruch, and the
Epistle of Jeremiah ; Judith and Tobit ; the Wisdom of
Solomon, and the Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach ; and
the first and second books of Maccabees. The reasons for
the acceptance of these works into the Alexandrian canon
1 The books whose canonical character was called in question were Eze-
kiel, Proverbs, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs.
THE CANONS. 75
are obvious : some of them are merely expansions or theo-
cratic interpretations of recognized canonical books ; some
are imitations of the prophets ; some depict the life of the
people, national or individual, as guided by the God of
Israel ; some give maxims for the direction of life. That
these works were not accepted by the Palestinian Jews as
canonical was probably due to their stricter standard ; the
legal-ecclesiastical organization in Palestine was far more
definite and effective than that in Egypt, and excluded, on
literary and auctorial grounds, much that might commend
itself to the freer and looser judgment of the Alexandrians.
And it may be added that while the term " canonical " (more
precisely " deutero-canonical ") may properly be applied to
these books (as we may infer from the consideration ac-
corded them by the Christian world), we must suppose that
it was understood in general in a looser way in Egypt than
in Palestine. The Alexandrian collection was probably
closed in the first century before the beginning of our era. 1
The remaining books, though they enjoyed considerable
respect and authority, were never canonized. Some of them,
as the Jubilees, the Apocalypse of Baruch, Second Esdras, the
Ascension of Isaiah, and the Testimony of the Twelve Patri-
archs, were composed too late, and were lacking in definite-
ness of thought and in literary excellence ; of those which
fall earlier, the Assumption of Moses and the Psalms of
Solomon are destitute of impressive or inspiring qualities,
and the Sibylline Oracles, though intensely national in feel-
ing, were perhaps too un-Jewish in form to satisfy the de-
mands of the time. Why the book of Enoch was rejected
1 Second Maccabees, which seems to be the latest book in the collection,
closes its narrative with the fall of Nicanor, B. c. 161, and the first prefatory
letter bears the date (i. 9) 188 of the Seleucidan era, that is, B. c. 124. As
the work is an abridgment of another history (li 23), we may allow fifty or
seventy-five years for the interval between its appearance and the events it
describes.
76 THE LITERATURE.
is not clear. It is quoted in one New Testament book
(Jude), abundantly used in another (the Eevelation), and is
modelled in part after Daniel. Perhaps it was felt that the
book really added nothing to the existing apocalyptic ma-
terial; perhaps its loose and exuberant demonology and
astronomy made it unacceptable ; and the interpolations
show that it circulated for some time uncontrolled by the
learned colleges of Palestine.
All these works, canonical and uncanonical, are signs of
the times, and must be taken into account in the description
of the thought of the period. Perhaps the greater authority
in this respect is to be accorded in general to the canonical
books on the ground that they received wider and completer
recognition. Yet this distinction cannot be absolutely main-
tained, since other than purely religious or theological reasons
helped to determine the fact of canonization, and since it ap-
pears that some of the uncanonical books were very generally
and highly esteemed.
CHAPTER II.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
A FTER this brief survey of the literature we may enter
1A. on the special study of the development of the Jewish
religious thought, the conditions that determined it, the
phases it assumed, and the forms it presented at the
moment when Christianity made its appearance.
As we have seen, the decisive step in the construction of
the theistic doctrine had already been taken when the com-
plete Levitical law was introduced in the fifth century B. c.
Monotheism was practically established, and the more spirit-
ual elaboration of the theistic conception was only a matter
of time. Yet the oneness of the divine person and rule was
not held in perfect purity. There were remnants of idolatry
among the people down to a comparatively late period ; in
the coming day of regeneration, says Zechariah (xiii. 2), the
names of the idols shall be cut off out of the land. This,
however, was apparently only a feeble survival of the old
practice ; it soon passed away, coerced by the ruling mono-
theistic spirit, and after the middle of the second century
B. c., we hear no more of it. 1 Perhaps the same thing is true
of the belief in the existence of heathen deities. In at least
1 See the curious statement in 2 Mac. xii. 40, that after the defeat of
Gorgias there were found on all the slain Jews things consecrated to idols,
and the author adds that this is the reason why they were slain. But this
devotion to idols, whatever it may mean, was apparently quite isolated.
And it is said further that Judas, mindful of the resurrection, sent a sin-
offering to Jerusalem and had prayers offered for the dead. There is no
other mention of such defection from Israelitish worship except under the
political and social pressure brought to bear by Antiochus Epiphanes.
78 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
two of the psalms which seem to be late, a part of the govern-
ment of the world is ascribed to the gods of the nations
(Ps. Iviii. 2; Ixxxii.), and this is of course a curtailment
of the power of the one God. So in the book of Daniel,
the functions ascribed to the guardian angels of the various
nations cannot be quite harmonized with the absolute rule
of the God of Israel. The same thing must be said of the
power witli which Satan was credited. Not only does he
lead David astray (1 Chron. xxi. 1) and induce God to heap
sufferings on Job, but he is represented (Wisdom of Solomon
ii. 24) as having brought death into the world. But the
Jews, like other men, were capable of happy logical incon-
sistency ; in spite of heathen deities, guardian angels, and
powerful demons, they believed substantially in the alone-
ness of God. He was held to permit the existence and suffer
the activity of subordinate supernatural beings, yet always
to stand apart and control them for his own purposes. This
is also the theistic conception of the New Testament, where
God is clearly supreme, while yet very great power is ascribed
to Satan and the demons.
This idea made a great gulf between the Jews and their
neighbors, and by means of this sundering, helped to de-
velop nationalism and the whole national life. It imparted
to the consciousness of the people a sense of superiority
which produced both religious vigor and religious pride.
On the national thought monotheism produced its natu-
ral effect, it gave unity to the conception of the govern-
ment of the world, though it was held in a narrow way
so as to exclude all peoples but the Jews from the sym-
pathy and guidance of the deity. We may now proceed
to state the elements of the theistic conception a little
more in detail.
1. The governmental side of the idea of God was firmly
established from a comparatively early period ; there is little
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 79
difference between Paul's conception of the divine control of
things and Jeremiah's. In the literature from Ezra down
God is conceived of as practically omnipresent, omniscient,
and omnipotent. This doctrine is not held in a speculative
or metaphysical way ; it was simply believed that God was
capable of doing whatever was to be done. He controls all
individuals and nations : the Assyrians in Judith, the Greeks
in Maccabees, all the races of mankind in Enoch and the
Sibyl, all men, good and bad, in the books of Wisdom and
the Psalms. This conception is held almost unconsciously
throughout the whole period which ends with the close of
the first century of our era. There is no attempt at demon-
stration ; there is no sign of doubt ; and this shows that the
conception had become part of the religious furniture of the
time.
There was of course involved in this the general idea of
God's providential care for men. The conception of a uni-
versal, divine providence in the form which it is now held
is not found in the earlier books of the Old Testament. In
them it is only for Israel that God really cares ; the rest of
the world is treated as a mere appendage to the chosen
people, to be dealt with solely in its interest. But traces
of a broader view are perceptible, for example, in Ps. civ. and
cvii., and in Wisdom of Solomon xiv. 3 : " Thy providence
governs it [a ship at sea] ; . . . thou canst save from all
danger;" still there is little or no warmth in the picture
of God's care for men. In the book of Ecclesiastes, he is
sometimes represented as half indifferent to human affairs ;
he controls, but he feels small interest : " I have seen the
labor that God has imposed on the sons of men ; . . . man
cannot find out God's work from beginning to end ; . . . God
proves men that they may see that they are beasts ; . . . God
is in heaven and thou upon earth, therefore let thy words
be few ; . . . when thou vowest a vow to God defer not to pay
80 THE DOCTKINE OF GOD.
it, for he has no pleasure in fools. . . . God gives a man
riches and honor, but not the power to enjoy it." But this
is the thought of a half-Hellenized Jew of Egypt, who had
probably only a small circle of followers. Of theoretical
atheism there is no trace ; practical doubt of the advantage
of serving God is referred to in Mai. iii. 14, Ps. x. 14, 36, -
an ethical-religious, not a speculative-theological view. The
apparently most general pre-Christian affirmation of divine
providence is found in Wisdom xvi. 7, where God is called the
Saviour of all (as in 1 Tim. iv. 10) ; yet from the connection,
where the author is speaking of God's care of Israel, it is doubt-
ful whether the phrase can be taken in a universal way.
In the later literature, God's close connection with inani-
mate and brute nature is brought out in a marked man-
ner ; see Pss. xix., xxix., Ixv., xciii., xcvi., cii., civ., cxlviii. He
watches over and controls the sustenance and life of all plants
and animals, and directs immediately all natural phenomena.
There is a certain warmth of coloring in the representation
of God's relation to nature : " Thou makest the outgoings of
the morning and evening to rejoice ; . . . thou dost visit the
land, making it soft with showers ; . . . the hills are girt with
joy ; . . . the valleys shout for joy and sing (Ps. Ixv.) ; . . .
he sends springs into the valleys which give drink to every
beast of the field ; . . . among the branches sing the birds of
the heaven ; ... he causes grass to grow for the cattle, and
wine that it may make glad the heart of man ; . . . the young
lions roar after their prey and seek their food from God ; . . .
all wait on thee that their food may be given them in due
season " (Ps. civ.). It is in the same tone that Jesus speaks
of birds and flowers (Matt, vi.), in contrast with the way in
which Paul rejects the idea that God takes care for cattle
(1 Cor. ix. 9). This ascription of tenderness to the divine
feeling for nature was the result of belief in the universal
divine providence, unchecked by narrow national feeling.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 81
The Jews (clinging to the old tribal feeling) found it hard
to conceive of the God of Israel as thinking kindly of Israel's
enemies ; but there was no such feeling of hostility toward
beasts and birds, mountains and seas, trees and flowers.
Doubtless we have here an advance along the two lines,
the unitary conception of the universe and the broadening of
ethical feeling in the direction of kindness and love ; the
supreme God must embrace the world in that sentiment of
love which more and more approved itself as an ethical ideal,
the only disturbing element in the Jewish conception
being that all other men existed only for the sake of Israel.
This narrowing conception of God's relation to Israel, in-
herited from the prophets and ingrained in the national con-
stitution, clung pertinaciously to the Jews throughout this
period and in all their succeeding history ; it is an idea of
which they have rarely rid themselves. Even Paul could
not shake it off. In spite of his grand theorem (in which he
doubtless heartily believed) that the true Israel was charac-
terized not by bodily descent from Abraham, but by ethical-
religious faith in God, he returns with natural patriotic
illogicalness to the position (Bom. x. xi.) that the prom-
ises are to the national Israel ; his higher religious instinct
leads him to one interpretation of the Old Testament, his
patriotic feeling to another. It is only in the Gospels that
the highest point of view is attained.
The whole conception of God in the later Jewish litera-
ture assumes his justice. This idea was held in a practi-
cal, general, and imperfect form. The epithets " just " and
" righteous " are freely applied to the divine being, and the
doctrine is formulated in Gen. xviii. 25, " Shall not the Judge
of all the earth do right ? " This quality was assumed to be
part of the divine perfectness, but its content is not care-
fully examined or definitely fixed ; or, to speak more accurate-
ly, its content was determined by the ethical ideas of the age.
6
82 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
The wicked and the enemies of Israel (terms which are often
synonymous) are hardly thought of as having rights. A care-
ful estimate of each human being, with precise apportionment
of reward and punishment according to his merits and de-
merits, entered only in small degree into the mode of thought
of the time. Yet, though the ethical details were not defi-
nitely fixed, the idea existed. The important point is that
the conception of the deity was truly ethical ; the devout
man could not think that God would ever violate the laws
of justice ; the fuller elaboration of the content of justice
had to be left to the better developed ethical conceptions of
succeeding times. Substantially the same representation is
found in the New Testament, the divine justice is taken
for granted without being formally defined. The Old Testa-
ment division of men into the two classes of " righteous "
and " wicked " is retained. The doctrine is summed up by
Paul in Eom. ii. 6-11 : God, with whom is no respect of
persons, renders to every man according to his works. The
apostle seems in this discussion to take the broadest ethical
point of view, Jews and Gentiles alike, he says, shall be
judged, not by their historical relation to the Jewish law,
but by their conformity to right-doing ; elsewhere, however
(Rom. v. viii.), he makes right-doing dependent on faith in
Jesus Christ, and practically divides the world into Chris-
tians and non-Christians, the first being necessarily favored
and the second necessarily condemned by the divine justice.
In this conception, great prominence is given to the ethical
element, the life of the believer, says Paul, must and will
be holy ; but on the other hand, there is a confusion of the
ethical and theological factors of life, and the attitude of
the just God toward men is made to depend practically
on their acceptance or non-acceptance of the historical
fact of the Messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth. In the
New Testament Apocalypse the question is treated more
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 83
brusquely: all men who do not belong to the Church of
Christ are regarded as enemies of God to be mercilessly
trampled out of existence. The Fourth Gospel conceives
of human life more philosophically and ideally as a conflict
between light and darkness ; but the source of light is the
historical person of the Christ, and he makes the line of de-
marcation between the two classes of men : " This is the
judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men
loved the darkness rather than the light, for their works
were evil" (John iii. 19). The discourses of Jesus in the
Synoptics give the purely ethical conception of the divine
justice; that is, if we assume the Sermon on the Mount to
represent his mature idea. There are passages in which
God's judgment of men seems to be represented as deter-
mined by theological dogma (Matt. xii. 31), or a peculiar
view of the historical kingdom of God (Matt. xvi. 27 ;
xix. 28 ; Mark x. 23-31), or where the old division of the
world into Jews and Gentiles is maintained (Matt. xv. 24).
"Without undertaking to decide on the genuineness or chro-
nological order of all these passages, it is sufficient to
observe that the pure ethical conception is expressed in
the Sermon on the Mount : the divine justice in estimat-
ing men takes into account only their conformity to the
law of right.
2. The conception of God as a being of love was of course
later than that which emphasized his governmental attri-
butes ; it was possible only at a stage of social development
when it was felt that love to man is one of the highest
qualities of the human soul. The old Israelitish idea of
the divine love was, so far as we can gather from the litera-
ture, a purely national one. Yahwe was the father (Hos.
xi. 1) or the husband (Jer. ii. 1 ; iii. 4 ; Isa. Ixii. 5) of Israel.
In the later psalms more individual relation is expressed,
Yahwe is said to pity them that fear him as a father pities
84 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
his children (Ps. ciii. 13). Gradually the paternal relation,
as expressing most completely the combination of guidance
and tenderness, came to be employed as the representative
of God's relation to man : " He is our father forever '" (Tob.
xiii. 4); the righteous man is "numbered among the sons of
God " (Wisd. v. 5) ; " that thy sons, Lord, whom thou
lovest might learn that ... it is thy word which preserves
them that put their trust in thee " (Wisd. xvi. 26) ; "
Lord, father and ruler of my life" (Ecclus. xxiii. 1). The
conception of God's fatherly relation to individuals existed
therefore a couple of hundred years before the beginning of
our era, and we may suppose that it gathered force and ful-
ness as the increasing purity and elevation of ethical ideas
was transferred to the divine character. Still, it does not
seem to have been a favorite conception ; the Jewish na-
tional feeling was strong enough to depress it. It was proba-
bly held by a select circle of thinkers, but it was kept out
of general view by the circumstances of the time, the politi-
cal excitements, and the religious-ethical tendencies thence
resulting. In the Sermon on the Mount, the conception of
God as universal father is stated with perfect distinctness
and fulness. God's fatherly care is represented as extending
equally over the just and the unjust ; he feels for men in all
conditions of life and phases of experience the sympathy of
a tender father. Men may go to him with the assurance that
he comprehends and loves them ; and he, so far from stand-
ing apart and separate from human life, is the model of hu-
man action ; his perfectness is the goal toward which men
must strive ; and the completion of human character and life
is the attainment of perfect harmony between man and God.
This highest conception of the relation of the personal God
to men Jesus distinctly formulated as a practical element
in human life. How far it entered into the current Jewish
thought of the time when he began his public career we
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 85
cannot say. The religious literature of that period is jejune
and uninspiring, mostly occupied with unspiritual national
questions ; but on the other hand, the ethical thought, as is
remarked above, had attained considerable purity.
We must also ask how far the Jewish thought at this
time had been influenced by Greek conceptions. That Paul,
some years later (Acts xvii. 28: "We are his offspring"),
should quote the Cilician Stoic poet Aratus, seems natu-
ral from the apostle's surroundings ; it may appear more
doubtful whether the Galilean community in which Jesus
grew up could be acquainted with the thought of a Greek
who spent the greater part of his life at the court of Mace-
don in the third century B. c. It is not probable that
Aratus was known in Galilee; but doubtless he did not
stand alone in the affirmation of the fatherhood of God.
The Stoic Cleanthes had expressed the same conception
about the same time; it is hardly doubtful that it was
adopted by many followers of the Stoic philosophy, adhe-
rents of which we may suppose were found among the
Greeks and Romans who lived in Palestine during the two
centuries preceding the beginning of our era. Such an idea,
once announced, would naturally harmonize with Jewish
thought and find acceptance in the more deeply spiritual
circles of Palestinian Jews. Galilee was not cut off from
the intellectual life of the land ; in its numerous cities there
were to be found educated men of all the nationalities then
represented in Palestine ; and the intercourse with Jerusa-
lem was easy and large enough to allow the Galileans to ap-
propriate the best thought of the capital. A profound
thinker, master of the religious ideas of his own people,
keenly sensitive to all religious impressions, would inevi-
tably recognize what was lofty in the current ideas of his
surroundings. There are hints in the Gospels that Jesus
came into contact not only with the Jewish schoolmen,
86 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
but also with educated Greeks and Romans (Matt. viii. 5 ff. ;
John xii. 20). The influence of Hellenists, of proselytes,
and of the Alexandrian Jewish thought, must also be con-
sidered ; every year there came to Palestine from all parts
of the Roman Empire men who brought with them a breath
from the outer world, and presumably left their traces in the
religious ideas which they expressed. We have no direct
information as to how far this was the case. But Galilee
must have been sharply isolated if it remained unaffected
by the lines of religious thought then existing in the world.
Taking into account all the circumstances, it seems probable
that the idea of the fatherhood of God was, in the beginning
of the first century of our era, not unfamiliar to advanced
religious circles. It had been slowly developing by in-
dependent ways among Jews and Gentiles; the former
reached it through the conception of the nation as the son
of God, the latter through the unitary view of the world,
and the conception of God as the ethical ideal. But how-
ever widely it may have been recognized in religiously cul-
tivated circles, it had not become the possession of the
world. It was the profound spiritual instinct of Jesus
which led him to make it the central point of his theistic
teaching. He discerned its dominant relation to other sides
of the conception of God ; he infused into it the warmth
and coloring of human feeling and the practicalness of
every-day life, and therefore he is to be regarded in a
true sense as its author.
3. While the conception of God as governor and father
was thus taking shape, there was a parallel development
of the idea of his personal spiritual relation to the individual
man. This is expressed abundantly in the later lyrical lit-
erature, the Psalms, and the Wisdom books: God bestows
on his servant a clean heart (Ps. li. 10) ; delivers him from
sin (Ps. xxxix. 8, 11 ; li. 1, 2) ; sets him apart for himself
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 87
(Ps. iv. 2) ; watches over him (Ps. xxxiv. 20 ; xL 11) ; teaches
him his ways (Ps. xxv. 4) ; chastens him (Ps. vi. 1 ; xxxviii.
1) ; is his salvation (Ps. xxvii. 1 ; xxxv. 3) ; manifests to
him loving-kindness and mercy (Ps. Ixix. 16 ; ciii. 12-14 ;
cviii. 4 ; cxi. 4 ; cxii. 4 ; cxvi. 5 ; cxxxix. 17 ; cxlv. 8, 9 ;
"Wisd. i. 2 ; xv. 1 ; Jud. ix. 11). The righteous man on his
part feels joy in the presence of God (Ps. xvi. 11). The re-
lation of the divine being to the wicked is equally personal
(Ps. 1. 16-21 ; Ixxiii. 18-20). In the same direction is the
saying attributed to the first great Eabbinical teacher, Antig-
onus of Socho : " Be not like servants who wait on the mas-
ter in the hope of receiving reward." This was the natural
growth of the feeling of human individuality. In the earlier
Old Testament literature the individual exists wholly or
mainly as a member of the nation, and the divine procedures
are almost exclusively national. A distincter individual tone
appears in the book of Nehemiah, and with continually in-
creasing prominence, until in the New Testament we find
each individual man expected to recognize his personal rela-
tions with God.
There was a corresponding advance in the conception of
God as pure spirit, the abandonment of the old anthropo-
morphic representations of his nature and activity. In a
great part of the Old Testament he is bound by conditions
of time and space ; he is attached in an especial manner to
the Jerusalem temple or some other shrine, and his favor is
gained by definite modes of sacrifice. The Babylonian exile
no doubt greatly helped to throw off this local conception by
forcing the Jews to adopt a worship which was independent
of the temple. The general religious growth led to the
establishment of synagogues about the beginning of the
second century B.C.; here was the minimum of form; the
sacerdotal element was excluded ; the essence of the worship
was the individual appropriation of the divine word. The
88 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
temple furnished the framework of the traditional, collective,
national divine service ; but for his own edification, day by
day, the pious man looked to the synagogal worship, where
the visible machinery was of the slightest, and he was
brought face to face with God. Reverence for the temple
continued; but the sentiment of ethical-religious indepen-
dence had established itself at the beginning of our era. The
Law had become a rival of the temple. The great Eabbini-
cal teachers exerted an influence second to none in the land ;
the conception of the national life was no longer chiefly that
of devotion to the temple ritual, but rather that of conformity
to divine law.
No doubt the progress in this line of thought was gradual,
the purer view was for a long time tainted with the old
local conception ; in fact, the mass of men have never got rid
of the lower earthly way of regarding God. Nationalism
clung to the Jews almost like the essence of their religious
life. The earliest Christians Jews who accepted Jesus of
Nazareth as their Messiah shared this nationalism (Acts
i.-v.), and appear not to have separated the divine being
perfectly from the old traditional limitations of time and
space. The entrance of the Gentiles into the Church neces-
sarily brought about a change in this regard ; Palestine and
the Jerusalem temple lost their peculiar sanctity ; Christian
worship was performed without respect to outward condi-
tions, and the feeling came into existence that the supreme
God entered immediately into communion with the heart
of man. This is the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and
of the New Testament epistles, and is formulated in John iv.
24 : " God is a spirit, and they that worship him must wor-
ship him in spirit and in truth." This idea may be found
in substance in Stoic writings, but in connection with a
theistic conception not definite and personal enough to com-
mend itself to the mass of men. Stoicism reached this view
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 89
by philosophical reflection, Christianity by the influence of
social-religious conditions on the Jewish national thought.
The national Judaism found it next to impossible to discard
national localism; Christianity, starting from the national
Judaism, found itself forced by the influx of other nationali-
ties to abandon the merely national point of view and to
regard divine worship and the divine presence as divorced
from human limitations. This divorcement was best ex-
pressed, in the language of the time, by the declaration that
God was a spirit, a designation which ascribed to him the
sum-total of the highest side of existence. The idea, once
announced, became a possession for mankind destined to be
fruitful of best results. It has not always retained its
purity, but it has never completely faded from men's
minds ; and it is to early Christianity that we owe its defi-
nite formulation and its establishment as an element of
human life.
4. We come now to follow in the pre-Christian Jewish
thought the tendencies toward the establishment of hypo-
static differences in the divine nature. In all religions
the complexity of the phenomena of the world and of life
has led to the differentiation of the supernatural power into
a variety of persons or agencies, the creation of a more or
less distinct and developed Pantheon. Such was the natural
conception reached in polytheistic societies. 1 But where
polytheism had been discarded and a substantially unitary
view of the supernatural power adopted, this tendency to-
ward differentiation of function could show itself only in
1 In the Semitic religions the feebleness of differentiation makes many
of the deities appear as undefined hypostases of the Supreme Power. It is
doubtful, however, whether we are to attach any such meaning to the Phoe-
nician titles " name of Baal " (given to Ashtoreth in the inscription of Esh-
munazar) and " face of Baal " (an epithet of Tanit frequent in the Carthage
inscriptions). They seem to signify some sort of identification or connection
of these goddesses with Baal, but their precise force is not clear.
90 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
a more or less complete personification of the parts and func-
tions of the divine being.
Add to this the natural disposition to introduce a mediat-
ing power between the deity and the world. In polytheis-
tic systems certain subordinate deities subserved this end, and
the Jews gained the same result in part by the ministration
of angels. But as the supreme God became grander and
farther removed from visible things, there remained the feel-
ing that an intermediate power was necessary to account for
his relations with the universe, to explain its creation and
maintenance. Greek philosophical systems felt the same ne-
cessity, and whether theistic or pantheistic, constantly strove
to bring the processes of cosmal production nearer to man.
The later Judaism absolutely excluded polytheism from
its own conception of God, but nevertheless recognized this
necessity of differentiating his functions, and bringing him
into closer contact with man's life.
We have first to notice in the Old Testament certain ex-
pressions which may be considered to indicate an hypostatiz-
ing tendency, but never develop into anything definite. The
.face or presence of God is a natural representation of his
power and being, and in the Old Testament is embodied in
the form of an angel (Ex. xxxiii. 14 ; Isa. Ixiii. 9) ; but this
angel, though invested with divine authority, is regarded as
a subordinate being distinct from God. The conception did
not become very prominent in the Old Testament, and did
not find a place in Christian thought. 1 The same thing may
1 It attained greater prominence in the Targums and the Talmud under
the name of the Shekina, the glorious divine presence. In the earlier Tar-
gumic literature it does not denote an activity (see, for example, Targ. of
Jonathan, Hab. iii. 4), and may be considered to be throughout impersonal.
In the Talmud it stands sometimes more definitely for God, hut this is the
free, poetical representation of the schools, and can hardly he regarded as a
theological dogma. Here, as elsewhere, the movement toward an hypostasis
did not assume definite shape in pure Jewish thought
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 91
be said of the expression " the name," which is so generally
employed in the Old Testament as equivalent to the sum-
total of the divine attributes or to the divine essence and
glory. The later Jewish thought made the " Name " a syn-
onym of God, a hint of which view is found in Lev. xxiv.
11. The angel who is charged with the task of guiding
Israel from Sinai to Canaan (Ex. xxiii. 21) is the bearer
of the divine name and authority ; but he appears nowhere
else in the Old Testament, and was not adopted in succeed-
ing theological systems. As little can we ascribe a hypo-
static character to the angel of Yahwe, who in so many
places seems to speak and act as if he were God (Gen. xvi.
7, 13 ; xxxii. 24, 30 ; Judg. xiii. 13, 18 ; Zech. iii. 1, 2) ; the
name " angel " distinguishes this being from God, and his ap-
parent separateness from other angels was not maintained
in Jewish thought. The Old Testament angel is a de-
velopment out of the Elohim-beings of the polytheistic
period ; inferior divinities, put into a distinctly subordinate
position under the influence of monotheism, became mes-
sengers of God. It is not surprising that in some instances
the messenger retained a part of the old polytheistic coloring
and acted as if he were an independent deity. 1
These three representations may be regarded as cases of
arrested growth ; they were efforts at differentiation which
did not commend themselves to the general feeling, mainly
because they were rendered unnecessary by other more fortu-
nate attempts. We may examine a little more fully the
1 It is only necessary to mention the Metatron of the Kabbinical literature,
apparently an exaggeration of the biblical " angel of Yahwe." He stands
nearest to God's presence and will, is his supreme agent and interpreter,
sometimes almost his other self, yet never ceases to be a creature, absolutely
dependent, like other creatures, on the Creator. He may be regarded as a
scholastic effort to establish an intermediary between God and the world ; but
the conception did not definitely affect Jewish theology, and came too late to
influence the doctrine of Christianity. See Weber, " System der palastinis-
chen Theologie," p. 172.
92 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
expressions, " spirit," " wisdom," and " word," which made a
much deeper impression on Jewish and Christian thought.
In the Old Testament the term " spirit " is employed,
often in a vague and general way, to set forth the seat of
the inward divine energy. It is a perfectly simple anthro-
pomorphic conception : as in man the spirit was the place
and source of life, thought, courage, energy, so these same
qualities in the essence of God were ascribed to the divine
spirit. It was this that entered especially into relation with
the soul of man ; bodily affairs, such as the guidance of a
nation or an individual, the infliction of a plague, or the
overthrow of an army, were committed to angels, while the
infusion of courage into the breast of a hero, or of the word
of truth into the mind of a prophet, was the work of the
divine spirit. 1 It was natural that the spirit should tend to
stand forth as an independent power ; but in the Old Testa-
ment it never attains the form of a distinct personality,
it is always explicable as the simple representation of the
divine influence. In the pre-Christian Jewish literature
outside of the Old Testament, there is an advance in the
direction of personality. In the Wisdom of Solomon (i. 7),
it is said that the spirit of the Lord fills the world, and
is in all things (xii. 1), and it is substantially identified with
wisdom. Philo thinks of the divine spirit as the image of
God (i. 207), 2 and as the indivisible source of understand-
ing and knowledge (i. 255, 256). The precise force of these
expressions will appear more clearly when we come to speak
of Philo's doctrine of the Logos ; but it seems evident that
1 In the earlier literature these effects are produced by a spirit (Hebrew,
ruach) sent from Yahwe (Judg. xiv. 6; 1 Sam. xvi. 13, 14; xix. 20), and it
is sometimes hard to decide whether the term means such a spiritual agent
or the inward being of God. The latter sense it seems to have in some
exilian and post-exilian passages, as Isa. xxxii. 16 ; xlviii. 16; Job xxvi. 13 ;
Ps. li. 19 (14) ; civ. 30; Dan. iv. 8.
2 The references to Philo follow Mangey's edition.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 93
he is inclined to treat it as something more than a mere
name for divine power. 1
This is about the stage at which we find the expres-
sion iii the earliest New Testament writings. For Paul
the spirit is more than mere divine energy, yet not quite
a definite, separate personality. In the eighth chapter
of Eomans, for example, there is a certain vacillation in
his use of the term ; it is sometimes hard to say whether
he means hy it a definite person or a personification or
a mere influence. Thus in verses 48 the spirit, repre-
sented as the opponent of the flesh, seems to be man's
higher as opposed to his lower nature ; but in the next
verse, believers are said to be in the spirit if the spirit of
God dwell in them, where the signification of the first "spirit"
is doubtful. On the other hand, the divine spirit is said to
bear witness with the believer's spirit that he is a child of
God (v. 16), and to make intercession for men (v. 27), and it
is added that God, who searches hearts, knows the mind of
the spirit. Here there is a clear distinction between God
and the spirit. In another passage (1 Cor. ii. 10-13) there
seems to be a blending of the Old Testament conception and
a more developed view : God reveals his mystery to his
servants by his spirit, for the spirit searches into and com-
prehends God's deepest thoughts. In explanation of this
fact, Paul goes on to say : " Who of men knows the things
of a man save the spirit of a man, which is in him ? So the
1 In the Targums the expression " spirit of God " is avoided, and " a spirit
from God " substituted for it, the purpose being to eliminate the anthropo-
morphic representation of the divine being as possessing a spirit. The spirit,
thus separated from God, takes on a certain personality. In the Talmud it
is described as the source of all human enlightenment (as in the Old Testa-
ment), as the guide of Israel, an advance on the Old Testament in distinct-
ness of conception, yet not necessarily an hypqstasis. The development
appears to be almost identical with that in the New Testament. If the later
Jews had hypostatized the Memra (the Word), they would probably have
hypostatized the spirit also. Compare Weber, " System der pal. Theol." 40.
94 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
things of God none knows save the spirit of God," where
the divine spirit is represented as bearing the same relation
to the divine being as the human spirit to the nature
of man ; yet the spirit as the investigator of the divine
thoughts seems to stand apart from God. In 2 Cor. iii. 17,
18, the spirit is represented both as a part of the Lord and
as identical with him. The most natural explanation of this
variation of thought is found in the supposition of an- in-
complete hypostasis of the spirit. The strong disposition,
inherited from the Old Testament thought, to isolate, per-
sonify, and hypostatize the divine spiritual energy in the
heart of man leads Paul sometimes to speak of the spirit
as almost a distinct divine entity ; at other times, the origi-
nal conception of the spirit as simply a part of the divine
constitution, thought of as analogous to that of man, sug-
gests expressions which make the spirit little more than a
divine influence. In other passages (as Gal. iii. 14 ; iv. 6)
there may be the survival of the Old Testament conception
of a spiritual agent sent by God. We find a similar differ-
ence of conception in the Synoptic Gospels. The Sermon on
the Mount does not mention the spirit, and such statements
as that of Matt. x. 20, " It is not ye that speak, but the
spirit of your father that speaketh in you," leave the signifi-
cance of the term undecided. The same thing may be said
of the Epistle to the Hebrews : God endows the disciples of
Jesus with gifts of the holy spirit (ii. 4) ; it is the voice of
this spirit that is heard in the words of the Old Testament
(iii. 7) ; believers are made partakers of the holy spirit (vi.
4) ; Christ offered himself to God through the eternal spirit
(ix. 14); an apostate from Christianity does despite to the
spirit of grace (x. 29). All these expressions may be under-
stood of a simple divine influence, but they more naturally
suggest a hypostatical conception not fully developed. On
the other hand, the representation in Matt. iii. 16, Luke iii.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 95
22, where the spirit is described as descending in the shape of
a dove, involves a distinct idea of personality. The incident
mentioned in Matt. xii. 24-32 contrasts the spirit of God on
the one side with Beelzebub, and on the other with the Son
of Man, and appears therefore to ascribe to it as distinctive
a personality as belonged to them. This is also the natural
interpretation of the baptismal formula (Matt, xxviii. 19)
where the spirit is mentioned along with the Father and the
Son, and apparently as a separate person ; though we cannot
certainly infer the equality of the three, we must understand
the writer as ascribing distinct personal existence to the
spirit. The passages last cited all belong to a later stratum
of the Gospel narrative, and represent a hypostatic conception
more definite than that which is found in the utterances of
Jesus himself. In the Fourth Gospel, in which we have, not
only a later, but a more speculative " theological system, the
spirit appears as a distinct person, but in a relation of sub-
ordination to the Father and the Son : " I will ask the Father
and he shall give you another paraclete ; . . . the spirit of
truth whom the cosmos cannot receive" (xiv. 16, 17) ; "if I
go not away the paraclete will not come to you. . . . When
he, the spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all the
truth, for he shall not speak from himself, but what he hears
he shall speak" (xvi. 7-15).
There is thus an evident advance of the hypostatic con-
ception of the spirit within the New Testament itself. This
is to be referred mainly to the natural growth of the ten-
dency, but we must also take into consideration the influ-
ence of the distincter hypostasis of the Messiah. Paul's
idealized, exalted Jesus was necessarily a distinct person,
resting on and identical with the historical Jesus ; and later
the author of the Fourth Gospel gave distinct form to the
logos by making it one with the historical Jesus. The hypo-
static conception thus established might be the more easily
96 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
transferred to the spirit. Yet a difference continued to ex-
ist between the two, there was no historical person with
whom the spirit could be identified; and it is perhaps largely
for this reason that the third person of the Christian Trinity
has never in the history of Christianity assumed so definite
a shape as the second person, nor played so prominent a part.
In the Christian consciousness the spirit has commonly been
a somewhat undefined, divine influence, which it was almost
impossible to distinguish from the workings of the human
soul. And this is the general effect which the New Testa-
ment representation makes upon us, a mighty, divine in-
fluence, tending to take shape in a person, yet for the most
part standing undecidedly between the two conceptions.
The hypostatizing process seems to have come mostly from
Gentile Christianity. It is feeble in the purely Jewish books
of the New Testament, such as Hebrews, James, and the
Apocalypse ; it is most completely elaborated in the Fourth
Gospel, the ideas of which are controlled by Greek thought.
Paul, on whom a Gentile influence must be recognized, stands
midway between these two extremes. In the more devel-
oped statements of the Synoptic Gospels, we may recognize
the influence of the church-thought which had grown up out
of these conditions of the times. We may sum up by say-
ing that the hypostatical conception of the spirit of God,
having its roots in Old Testament thought, took more definite
shape in the Christianity of the first century, partly by natu-
ral growth and partly urged on by the more complete hy-
postatization of the glorified Messiah and the Word of God.
The most striking and distinct of the personifications of the
Old Testament is found in the representation of wisdom,
which approaches the very verge of hypostasis without, how-
ever, reaching it ; and its relation to the conception of the
divine word is so close that the two should be considered
together. To the philosophical Jewish school of the second
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 97
century B. c., wisdom seemed the crowning attribute of deity.
This view rested on a conception of life entirely distinct from
the sacerdotal and the legal ; the former of these looked on
God as a power to be placated by sacrifice and ritual, and
the latter construed human life as a mass of actions to
be controlled by divinely given rules. Jewish philosophy,
always holding more or less firmly to the national life, yet
overstepping national bounds, preferred to conceive of the
world as a gracious, beautiful unit, the product of the divine
mind, bearing the impress of God's perfect wisdom. Human
life, in its ideal shape as a rounded, orderly scheme, was
viewed as an element of the divinely ordered cosmos, par-
taking of its constitution and governed by its laws. The
same spirit of perfect knowledge that filled the universe had
its abode in man's soul and fashioned it into the likeness of
the supreme goodness. For the explanation of this new di-
rection of Jewish thought we must look to the widening of
general culture under the influence of the new social condi-
tions. Through contact with the great Egyptian-Greek
world the Jews had come to a better knowledge of the
physical and moral sciences of the time. A certain portion
of the nation (probably not a large one) came into closer
sympathy with these broader ideas and were charmed by
the conception of the world as a unit pervaded by a divine
fashioning spirit. It was the orderliness of the universe and
its obedience to law that most impressed the imagination of
these thinkers ; and since such conceptions are not found in
pure Jewish literature and were foreign to Jewish modes of
thought, we must recognize in them the influence of the
reigning Greek philosophies of the day, especially the Pla-
tonic and the Stoic. In Jewish hands the Platonic idealism
and the Stoic rule of law suffered a certain transformation ;
they had to be brought into direct connection with the God
of Israel, whose thought had produced the wondrous uni-
7
98 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
verse ; and this highest thought was naturally conceived un-
der the form of wisdom, as the highest intellectual, moral,
and spiritual attribute of being. Wisdom being thus con-
ceived as the all-potent factor in the physical and moral
world, it needed only one step further to personify it as an
individual and universal energy, to ascribe to it functions of
physical and spiritual creation and maintenance, the guid-
ance of the worlds and the purification and perfecting of the
human soul. Similar functions were ascribed also to the
divine spirit and word ; the three conceptions, standing in
so close relation one to another, were interwoven one with
another and sometimes apparently identified and confounded.
We are not to expect here sharp psychological and cosmo-
logical analysis and hypostatic differentiation. The new con-
ception of a divine energy filling and fashioning the world
took hold of these men with power ; and whether it were
spirit or wisdom or word that most appealed to the imagina-
tion of the thinker, each of these ideas would for the mo-
ment dominate his thought, and assume the proportions of
a universal energy. We shall not be surprised, therefore, to
find word and wisdom playing the same part in the world,
the functions of each being ascribed to the other ; and we
shall have to ask how it was that one of these conceptions
faded away, while the other advanced steadily in Christianity
to the fulness of hypostatic form.
We may perhaps regard the description in Job xxviii. as
the earliest example in the Old Testament of a philosophical
conception of wisdom. 1 The writer confines himself to de-
1 The body of the book of Job cannot be put earlier than the Babylonian
exile, and there are strong grounds for giving it a later date. Its elaborate
discussion of facts of human experience, its developed doctrine of Satan, and
its Aramaisms, would suggest rather the fifth century than the sixth, if indeed
we must not come still further down to find its true place. The book is not a
unit ; the Elihu episode, chs. xxxii.-xxxvii., is manifestly an interpolation,
and chapter xxviii. is clearly out of place where it stands. It interrupts
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 99
claring the mysteriousness of it, it cannot be found, he
says, in earth or sky or deep, and only God knows its place ;
finally, it is identified with the fear of the Lord (Adonai).
Here is elaborate description, which shows that the writer
was impressed by the idea ; but there is only a feeble per-
sonification, and no attempt at representing it as an energy.
Only it is to be noted that that which in the divine mind
is connected with creation and government is conceived as
the ethical-religious directive principle in the life of man.
In Prov. iii. 13-20 we have a similar personification, only in
verse 19 a closer connection with God's work of creation :
" Yahwe by wisdom founded the earth." The fuller descrip-
tion, viii. 1-ix. 6 introduces a far distincter personification
and an ascription of personal energy which shows a consider-
able advance toward hypostatizing. The most striking pas-
sage is viii. 22-31: wisdom, it is said, was brought forth
before the world was made, and was present during the
work of creation ; she stood by the side of God as architect
or master-workman, being daily his delight, and sporting
continually in his presence. The epithet " master- workman "
seems almost to ascribe to wisdom the direction or perform-
ance of the work of creation. The foundation of the repre-
sentation is of course the idea of the divine wisdom ; but
this attribute is so boldly isolated and personified as almost
to take the form of an independent energy. Its moral func-
tion is indicated by the statement that its delight is with the
sons of men. We can scarcely avoid regarding this as a dis-
Job's argument, introducing a line of thought quite foreign to the subject of
his discourse in a style different from that of the remainder of the book. It
is an addition by a writer of a different school, but we have only the most
general considerations for determining the date. There seems to be nothing
in the history of Jewish literature to prevent our putting it in the third cen-
tury B.C.; this would bring it into intelligible connection with other Old
Testament passages. If we may be guided by the nature of the thought, we
should place it in the same category with the canonical and apocryphal
Wisdom-books.
100 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
tinct effort at hypostatization, not completely successful, but
a very clear indication of a tendency of thought; and the
passage on general critical grounds is to be placed not earlier
than the third century. 1
The point of view of the Son of Sirach (xi. 1-20 ; xxiv.)
does not differ substantially from that of Proverbs ; he gives
a vivid personification which does not quite reach the form
of an hypostasis. Wisdom is said to have been created
before all things (i. 4, cf. Prov. viii. 22) ; she was poured out
on all the works of the Lord (i. 9). and covered the earth as
a cloud (xxiv. 3) ; she dwelt in high places, her throne being
in the cloudy pillar (xxiv. 4) ; her habitation was with the
sons of men (i. 15, cf. Prov. viii. 31) ; she was commanded
by the Creator to make her dwelling in Israel (xxiv. 8). The
resemblance to Proverbs is obvious ; the son of Sirach probably
imitated the biblical book, on whose ideas he makes no ad-
vance. A bolder conception is found in the Wisdom of
Solomon. Wisdom is almost identified with God : " Wisdom
is a philanthropic spirit, and will not acquit the blasphemer
of his words, for God is a witness of his reins ; ... for the
spirit of the Lord fills the world " (i. 6, 7). She is a source
of immortality : " Obedience to her laws is assurance of in-
corruption, and incorruption brings us near to God " (vi. 18,
19). In the magnificent description contained in chapters
vii. and viii. the author, inspired with fervid enthusiasm for
his grand conception, seems to be on the verge of a real hy-
postasis ; he ascribes to wisdom all conceivable lovely quali-
ties and beneficent activities, so that in certain passages it
might be doubtful whether he does not conceive of her as an
independent power and being. She is a breath of the power
1 The introduction of the book of Proverbs, chs. i.-ix., is distinguished
from the rest of the book by its continuous discourse and flowing style. The
social evils on which stress is laid (i. 10-14; ii. 16-19; v. vi. 1-5 ; vii. ix.
13-18) point to the later city-life. The prominence given to wisdom sug-
gests a period posterior to that of the prophetic thought.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 101
of God, a pure effluence from the glory of the Almighty, a
reflection of the everlasting light, the image of God's good-
ness ; though only one, she can do all things, and remaining
in herself, makes all things new. There are some striking
points of contact between this description and certain New
Testament passages. There is in her, says the author, a
spirit intelligent, holy, only begotten, manifold, subtle, lively,
clear, undefiled, plain, not subject to hurt, loving what is
good, penetrating, unrestrained, beneficent, philanthropic,
steadfast, trustworthy, free from care, having all power,
overseeing all things, and permeating all intelligent, pure,
and subtlest spirits (cf. Jas. iii. 17). The tone and wording
of Heb. i. 2, 3, resembles that of Wisd. vii. 26, 27, where
wisdom is described as the reflection of the everlasting light,
a mirror and image of God, omnipotent for good. This may
be said indeed to mark the extreme point in the advance
toward the hypostatizing of wisdom. Philo does not appear
to go beyond this. It was natural that wisdom should play
a prominent part in his conception of life, since it is so promi-
nent in the Old Testament, from which he takes the greater
part of his phraseology. He was also doubtless acquainted
with the Alexandrine Wisdom-books, and there is little in
his thought on this point that may not be found substan-
tially in Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon. It has
already been remarked that his conception of a directing
intermediary power between God and the world leads him
in many cases to a practical identification of wisdom, spirit,
and logos ; only he treats the last of these most elaborately,
dwells on it with preference, and pushes its personification
to the farthest point. A few citations may suffice to indi-
cate the way in which he treats the conception of wisdom.
In his discussion of Eden in the Allegories (i. 56) he regards
the four rivers as representing the four cardinal virtues,
prudence, sobriety, courage, and justice, and adds that the
102 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
greatest river whence the four flow is generic virtue, good-
ness in general, which arises from Eden, the wisdom of God.
Wisdom is here the source of human virtue and goodness,
delighting itself in God alone, a representation which is
identical with that of the book of Proverbs. Elsewhere
(ii. 385) he calls wisdom the eldest in the creation of the
whole world, whom it is neither lawful nor possible for any
but God to judge. A distincter personification is given in
the passage (i. 202) in which she is termed the mother of the
world, through which everything was completed, God being
the father. It is evident that wisdom here performs sub-
stantially the function elsewhere ascribed to the logos, it
being natural, indeed, to assume the identity of the divine
reason and the divine wisdom. In fact, the difference be-
tween Philo's representations of the two seems rather to be
one of degree and circumstance than of essence, as will be
pointed out more fully below. The conception of wisdom
lent itself naturally to the process of hypostatizing ; it could be
looked on as the largest and noblest of the divine attributes ;
but it lacked certain conditions which were fulfilled by the
conception of the logos. In the New Testament the concep-
tion of wisdom appears in the form of distinct personifica-
tion, but goes no farther. Wisdom is said to be justified by
her works (Matt. xi. 19) or by her children (Luke vii 35) Of
Christ it is declared not only that in him are hid all the
treasures of wisdom (Col. ii. 3), but also that he is the wis-
dom of God (1 Cor. i. 24), and is made unto believers wisdom
from God (1 Cor. i. 30). Here the apostle, in his polemic
against the worldly wisdom of Greek philosophy, is naturally
led to identify the only true and saving divine wisdom with
the glorified Messiah, through whom God had ordained that
redemption should come to men. But it is still nothing
more than strong personification. Under favorable condi-
tions, we may suppose, the conception would have advanced
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 103
to the form of full hypostasis as it did in some of the Gnostic
systems, but it has played no such part in Christianity.
We come now to the idea of " the word," and must attempt
briefly to trace the process by which it attained a complete
hypostatical form. As the distinctest expression of human
thought, the word naturally represented reason, to which it
owed its being, and was looked on as the intermediary be-
tween man and the world, the instrument by which his
designs were accomplished. This representation was at an
early period transferred to the divine being. His word was
conceived to be the expression of his thought; and thought
and word were easily identified. His word was the embodi-
ment of his purpose and law, and might be regarded as the
agent which called his dispensations into being; it might
even be looked on as identical with the things which itself
produced. So mighty is the effect of the spoken word 1 that
the natural tendency was to personify it more and more dis-
tinctly, and such we find to be the case in the Old Testa-
ment. Throughout the prophetic writings the word of God
is the divine message sent to Israel to keep it in accord with
divine law ; it is the transcript of the divine reason. Though
the prophet might sometimes be conscious that it was the ex-
pression of his own religious feeling, he nevertheless always
looked on it as a powerful, objective, divine utterance. Is
not God's word, says Jeremiah (xxiii. 29), like fire, and like
a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces ? The word here
is merely the expression of the divine thought. In one pro-
phetic passage (Isa. Iv. 11) there is an approach to personi-
fication : " My word shall not return to me void, but it shall
accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the
1 According to primitive ideas the tittered word had an independent, ob-
jective existence and power ; a charm once spoken must work its effect. So
iu Gen. xxvii. the blessing which Isaac bestows by mistake cannot be recalled
(vs. 33-37).
104 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
thing whereto I sent it." Activity and efficiency are ascribed
to the word of God in Deut. viii. 3 : Man does not live by
bread alone, but by everything that proceeds out of the
mouth of God, human life is controlled by the divine
word. Still more distinct is the personification in certain
psalm-passages : he sent his word and healed them (Ps. cvii.
20), where the logos is despatched as a messenger on a mis-
sion of healing ; by the word of the Lord were the heavens
established (Ps. xxxiii. 6), where the logos is the agent of
creation. In none of these passages is there anything more
than personification ; but there is the sign of a disposition to
isolate the spoken word as God's instrument in doing his
work, and as the representative of the divine reason. We
may here mention the development which the idea of the
word received in the later Judaism. In the Targums the
divine activity is habitually referred to the Meinra, especially
where the Old Testament expressions are anthropomorphic,
where the text speaks of God's face, eyes, mouth, voice, hand,
or of his walking, standing, seeing, and speaking. It may
be assumed, therefore, that the expression Word of God was
used in order to avoid what seemed irreverent in the human
representation of the Divine Being. But the choice of the
term was no doubt fixed by the Old Testament usage, espe-
cially from such a passage as Isa. Iv. 11, where, as we have
seen, an almost independent existence and objective activity
are ascribed to the divine word. The usage of the Aramaic
paraphrases may therefore be regarded as a natural growth
out of the Old Testament thought. The personification in
the Targums approaches very near an hypostasis. The
Memra is creator and lord of all things, the guide, punisher,
and re warder of Israel, and the source of the prophetic in-
spiration, not an angel and not the Messiah, but a represen-
tative of the immediate divine activity. The conception did
not keep its hold on Jewish thought ; it was discarded in the
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 105
later literature. Yet it probably helped the formulation of
the Christian doctrine of the word. The oldest of our pres-
ent Targums, indeed, hardly dates farther back than the
third century of our era; but we must suppose that the
germs of their ideas existed some time before, and it will
not be rash to assume that in the first century Jewish
thought had already come to look on the Memra as a sort of
substantial activity, intermediate between God and the world.
For the Jews the conception did not prove to be a fruitful
one ; it was coerced and ejected by their strict monotheism,
but it maintained itself in Christianity for reasons to be
hereafter mentioned.
The Wisdom of Solomon does not advance beyond personi-
fication when it represents the word as the instrument of the
divine creation : " God, who didst make all things by thy
word " (ix. 1). The author may have had in mind the account
of creation in the first chapter of Genesis, where the recur-
rence of " God said " naturally associates creation with the
spoken word (and so in the psalm-passages cited above) ;
but the spoken word necessarily expresses and involves the
divine reason. In xvi. 12 there is an expansion of the idea
of Ps. cvii. 20 :" Thy word heals all things." Here, as the
connection shows, the word is identified with God, who de-
livered his people and tormented their enemies, who leads
down to the gates of Hades and brings up again, from
whose hand escape is not possible. In v. 27 of the same
chapter is an allusion to Deut, viii. 3 : " Thy word preserves
them that trust thee." In the description of the death of
the first-born of Egypt, the author introduces a striking
poetical personification : " While all things were clothed in
deep silence, and night was in the midst of her swift course,
thine almighty word leaped down from heaven from the
royal throne like a fierce warrior into the midst of the
doomed land, bearing as a sharp sword thine unfeigned
106 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
commandment ; it stood and filled all things with death ;
it touched heaven and planted itself on earth." In this
figure there is no advance toward an hypostasis, nor do we
find anything more definite in the succeeding literature up to
Philo, to whom we must now turn.
In the space at our command it will not be possible to give
more than a bare sketch of Philo's many-sided and intricate
doctrine of the logos. That it should involve many different
elements and shades, and that these should in some cases be
hard to reconcile with one another, and sometimes even con-
tradictory, is what we might expect. The Stoic doctrine of
the logos, reason or word, as the formative or directive
power in the world including human life, combined with
the Old Testament and later Jewish representation of the
energy of the divine word, had taken a strong hold on his
imagination. Imbued equally with the love of Greek phi-
losophy and with reverence for the Scriptures of his people,
he felt the necessity of uniting the two in one system of
thought. He had to hold to the rational, orderly unity of
the world, the predominance of law and reason, and at the
same time maintain the supremacy of the one Almighty
God. The cosmos stood out before him as the embodiment
of reason and as its creation, and at the same time as the
work of God alone. This view was supplemented in his
mind by the Platonic theory of ideas, archetypal forms
which existed in the divine mind from all eternity, and
took shape under the directive hand of reason in the visi-
ble world of nature and man. It is easy to see that in
so vast a scheme his attention might be fixed on different
points at different times, and that his representation of
reason or word would vary with the material with which he
was employed, especially as his particular line of thought
was often determined by the P>ible passage which he was
expounding. We have here only to ask whether in his
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 107
various representations of the logos there is one that reaches
an hypostasis.
We need not stop with the passages in which he employs
the term as merely equivalent to abstract reason or to law,
as in ii. 46, i. 456 ; let us turn to those in which there is a
more or less distinct personification. One of the simpler
conceptions is that in which the logos is the primeval type
of things. " It is evident," he says (i. 5), " that the arche-
typal seal also, which we call the intelligible cosmos, is itself
the archetypal pattern, the idea of ideas, the logos of God,"
where the logos is nothing more than the divine thought
ready to express itself in deed. In his comment on Gen.
xv. 10, " the birds he did not divide," the logos occupies the
same position in the universe as the soul in human nature ;
the two intelligible and logical natures that in man and that
in the All he declares are necessarily each an undivided
whole, the logos of God standing alone, apart from the crowd
of created and destructible things (i. 505). This representa-
tion approaches very near an identification of the logos with
God, a step which it would seern impossible for a monothe-
ist to take if the logos were thought of as a personal being.
It is conceivable, however, that the latter might partake of the
divine nature without being equal to God, and something
like this Philo seems to say in his allegorical exposition of
the bite of the serpent (i. 82) : " Those who partook of the
manna were filled with that which was most generic, for
the manna is called ' what ? ' [or ' something ' according to a
possible etymology in Ex. xv. 16] which is the genus of all
things ; and the most generic thing is God, and second is
the logos of God." It is evident that by the term " generic "
he here means universal, and that in ascribing the second
place in this category to the logos, he separates it from all
other things, brings it into a peculiar relation with God, and
confers on it a very definite personality. The same in-
108 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
ference might be drawn from those passages in which he
speaks of the logos as the image of God. In his treatise on
Moses' account of the creation of the world, remarking on
* O
the superiority of the intelligible l world over the visible, he
compares it to the superiority of mind over things of the
senses, and adds : " He [Moses] says that the invisible and
intelligent divine logos is the image of God" (i. 6). And
again : " And if we are not yet worthy to be esteemed sons
of God, we may be children of his invisible image, the most
holy logos, for the eldest logos is the image of God" (i. 427).
A still stronger statement is found in his exposition of the
cities of refuge, 19 : " But the divine logos who is over
these [the cherubim] attained no visible idea, being sim-
ilar to no object of sense, but himself the image of God,
the eldest of all ideal things, the nearest copy, without in-
terval, of the only one " (i. 561). Though such language
might conceivably be used of the abstract divine reason,
the impression made on the mind is rather that the author,
with his intense conception of the logos as the shaping
power of the world, thinks of it as a distinct personality,
not one with God, yet not to be separated from him in na-
ture and essence. The logos is the very stamp and image of
deity, and between the two there is no interval ; if this is
not a true hypostasis, it contains all the elements in solu-
tion, waiting only for the occasion which shall precipitate
them into an objective and concrete form. In other pas-
sages Philo attempts to define the nature of the logos in its
relation to the divine. Speaking of its position midway be-
tween God and man, he describes it as " neither uncreated
like God nor created like you, but midway between the two
extremes, in contact with both" (i. 502). To the same effect
in the treatise on dreams, ii. 28, where he regards the high-
priest as the symbol of the logos : " He, few when reckoned
* That is, the ideal world as it existed in the divine mind before creation.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 109
with others, becomes when he stands alone many, the court,
the whole council, the whole people, the crowd, the whole
race of men, rather, if the truth is to be said, a nature bor-
dering on that of God, less than he and greater than man.
For ' when,' it is said, ' the high-priest enters the Holy of
Holies, there shall not be a man' (Lev. xvi. 17). Who is he,
then, if not a man ? Is he God ? I would not say so ; . . .
nor is he man, but touches both extremes as base and head "
(i. 684). That Philo thinks it necessary here to affirm that the
high-priest as symbol was not man, points to a very definite
personal conception of a power midway between God and
man and partaking of the natures of both. 1 The definite-
ness of the representation in this passage is due in part to
the fact that there was a human personage with which this
intermediary conception could be identified. The priest was
in the form of man as the representative of man, yet, stand-
ing for the whole human race, must be universal, a divine
man ; nothing else than such a being could act as medium
between the two extremes of deity and humanity. It will
be sufficient in this connection to mention the title " first-
born son," which Philo in a number of passages gives to the
logos (i. 308, 415, 427, 502) ; the significance of this name
will depend on the connection in which it occurs. Philo
goes still farther and finds in the Scripture an ascription of
divinity to the logos, though he holds that the word " God "
is in such cases used in an improper (catachrestic), that is,
an accommodated sense. Eemarking on Gen. xxxi. 12, 13,
according to the Septuagint text, he says : " Let us examine
carefully as to whether there are really two Gods, for it is
said ' I am the God who appeared to thee ' not in my place,
but ' in the place of God ' [so the Septuagint renders Bethel],
as if another deity were referred to. How are we to treat
1 That the high-priest here represents the logos appears from such pas-
sages as i. 653, 452, where his symbolic character is definitely expressed.
110 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
this statement? The explanation is that the true God is
one, but those improperly so called are many. The sacred
Scripture, therefore, denotes the true God by the article,
saying, ' I am God ' [6 #eo'<>], and in the other case omits it :
' Who appeared to thee in the place,' not of the God, but
merely ' of God.' Here he calls his oldest logos God, hav-
ing no superstitious feeling about the application of names "
(i. 655, 656). It is significant that in spite of the protest
of Philo's monotheistic feeling he here finds himself able to
apply to the logos a predicate of divinity which is evidently,
in his apprehension, not an empty sound. It is improper,
he says ; yet that he uses it and that he supposes the Scrip-
ture to use it shows that he regarded it as not wholly im-
proper. How can we understand his anxiety to distinguish
the logos from God and guard the supremacy of the latter,
except as an indication that the former was assuming in his
mind some sort of personality which partook of the divine
nature ? We may close this statement of Philo's view of
the nature of the logos by referring to what he says (Life
of Moses, iii. 13) of its twofold character: "The logos is
dual both in the All and in the nature of man ; in the All
it relates to the incorporeal and typical ideas from which
springs the intelligible world, and to the visible things which
are copies and images of those ideas, from which this per-
ceptible world was established. And so in man the logos
is internal and uttered, 1 the former being, as it were, a
spring, the latter that which flows from it" (ii. 154). He
adds that the cosmic logos has the two virtues of manifesta-
tion and truth (the Urim and Thummim of the high-priest) ;
the same qualities belong to the two forms of the human
logos, manifestation to the uttered and truth to the internal.
This old Stoic double conception of the human logos, the in-
ward reason, and the uttered word which is the expression of
1 Endiathetos and prophorikos.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. Ill
this reason, is simple and natural. How are we to under-
stand its application to the divine logos ? The most natural
explanation is that Philo takes it in a perfectly simple way :
the divine reason, in its nature purely reflective, necessarily
utters itself in words or deeds. But so strong is Philo's con-
ception of the unity and divinity of the logos that he cannot
permit himself to divide it into two parts and to assign
to these parts severally the qualities of manifestation and
truth ; these two virtues he represents as belonging to the
whole logos, which is thus the divine reason thinking and
acting, a single conception, the personalization of the divine
energy which mediates between God and the world.
Philo's representation of the function and work of the
logos is in accordance with his conception of its nature.
The universe, he says, is, as it were, a flock, guided by God,
the shepherd and king, who has set over it his right logos,
his first-born son (i. 308). Here the logos is director of the
life of the world ; elsewhere he is presented as its actual
maker : " This oldest son the father of beings brought into
being, whom elsewhere he named the first- begotten, and who,
though begotten, yet imitating the ways of his father, and
looking to his archetypal norms, gave shape to species"
(i. 414, 415). He is further described as putting on the
world as a garment and as the bond which holds all
things together (i. 562), as the driver of the powers which
control the world (i. 560, 561). In a striking passage in the
tract on The Heir of Divine Things, 42, the logos is dis-
tinctly portrayed as mediator between God and man : " On
the archangel and eldest logos the father, who begat all things,
bestowed this choice gift, that he should stand on the border
and separate the created from the Creator. He is a suppliant
in behalf of the mortal for immortality, and the ambassador
of the king for obedience, . . . being neither unbegotten like
God nor begotten like you, but midway between the two ex-
112 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
tremes, bordering on both, appealing to the Creator in faith
that he will never destroy the world, and offering to the
creature the hope that the merciful God will never disregard
his own work " (i. 501, 502). Such representations may no
doubt be understood of the abstract divine reason ; but their
frequency and distinctness rather suggest a desire and effort
after a separate personality.
It must be added that Philo has other representations of
the logos. He declares that God needed no assistant in
creation (i. 5), that in this work he stood alone (i. 66). The
world is said to be founded on the divine word (i. 7, 8), and
indeed to be the word (i. 4, 5, 630). The distinctness of the
logos from God is affirmed in a number of passages (i. 6, 128,
625, 655). Its functions are sometimes nearly identical with
those of the spirit and of wisdom. There may be many
logoi, the laws of God (i. 128). Philo's use of the term
is so various that one may construct from his works any
logos-theory that one pleases. This variety of use, as is
remarked above, is just what we should expect from the
vastness of the conception with which the philosopher's
mind was filled, and the diversity of the sources from which
he drew his material. A Jewish monotheist expounding the
Hebrew Scriptures after Platonic and Stoic principles might
well occasionally differ from himself. Yet in spite of diver-
sities, there is a very serious and persistent unity in his por-
traiture of the logos as the divine shaper and director of all
things, the mediator between God and the world. To this
conception the author ever returns with greatest fondness.
There is a certain pantheistic element in his thought : the
world is the logos, for it is nothing but the utterance of the
divine reason, a view which resulted from the author's deter-
mination to grasp the unity of the universe. Again, the
logos, though all-powerful, is the creature of God and subor-
dinate to him, a Jewish monotheist could take no other
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 113
view. All through these variations of the theme the central
idea of the logos as a substantially diviiie personality makes
itself heard with greater or less distinctness. This is the
idea which is constantly striving to take shape in Philo's
mind, though it is often jostled or excluded by other con-
ceptions held with equal firmness. He was not in position
to conceive a complete hypostatizatiou of the logos. If there
had been any visible historical person to which to attach
the idea, it might have been different ; it was hard to elevate
an abstract conception to the position of a person. 1 The
same difficulty existed in the case of wisdom, and to a less
degree in the efforts at hypostatizing the spirit. Philo seems
to have gone as far as was possible for him under the cir-
cumstances ; his feeling of the necessity of an intermedi-
ate power between God and the world led him to treat the
logos as much more than an abstract conception, though it
is not possible to say that he made it an absolutely dis-
tinct personality.
His preference for this expression for the mediating power
1 It does not appear that Philo identifies the logos with the Messiah, or
even that he mentions a Messiah ; the passages cited as referring to the Mes-
siah (ii. 423, 436) hardly bear this interpretation. The first (which occurs in
a description of the final defeat of evil men) reads : " For a man shall go forth,
says the oracle [Num. xxiv. 7], at the head of an army . . . and shall conquer
great and populous nations." But this " man," as Oehler (quoted by Drum-
mond) remarks, is immediately explained as a symbol of courage and strength,
and in fact is not again mentioned. He does not play the role of a Messiah,
and he is by no word brought into connection with the logos. The second
passage, describing the return of the scattered Jews to their own land, says
that they shall be led "by a certain appearance (5\f/e&s) more divine than
human," which shall be invisible to all but those who are being saved. This
can hardly mean the Messiah, who would certainly not be invisible to his
enemies ; nor is it in this way that Philo speaks of the logos The " appear-
ance " seems to be an allusion to the pillar of cloud and fire (Ex. xiv. 20), a
general guidance by God ; there is no mention of a person, human or divine,
as leader. He goes on to say that the people will have three intercessors with
God, the goodness of God himself, the holiness of their ancestors, and their
own improvement; this assumes the ordinary national life, and does not
favor the supposition of salvation by Messiah or logos.
114 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
was doubtless determined by the usage of the Stoic philos-
ophy. The Old Testament offered other terms which might
have been chosen, such as wisdom, glory, spirit, presence.
But Philo's philosophic studies would naturally fix his atten-
tion on this particular expression, which, besides, best accorded
with the tendencies of the Greco-Jewish philosophy of the
time. That which most appealed to one part of the thought
of the age was not so much the divine power or goodness, or
the spiritual relation between man and God, as the concep-
tion of law and reason in the government of the world.
The term " logos " offered a fulness of meaning which could
not be found in any other expression. It represented the
absolute reason, and at the same time the utterance or ob-
jective expression of this reason. It was anthropomorphic
and in a sort anthropocentric, but in the grandest and purest
way. It glorified reason, but attached it inseparably to the
ideal divine. It gave unity to the world without impairing
the aloneness of God or the independence of man. It was, in
addition, an expression of the Hebrew Scriptures, invested
with peculiar sacredness by prophets, psalmists, and Law.
It would not be a matter of surprise, then, if the idea got a
strong hold on those Jews who were acquainted with Hel-
lenizing philosophical thought. We are not informed how
far Philo's writings were known outside of Egypt, but such
ideas could not easily be kept within the limits of one land ;
in their general outline, indeed, they belonged to a school of
thought, and would be likely to have their representatives all
over Hellenized Asia. But so far as we know, it was he who
fused the Stoic conception with the Old Testament thought
into a theological system which might commend itself to
orthodox monotheists. It was he who made the rational
word the only begotten Son, the image and the agent of the
one only true God and Father, standing midway between the
extremes of the divine and the human, in contact with both.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 115
Within a century after the composition of Philo's works
there appeared a Christian book in which Jesus of Nazareth
was identified with the logos. 1 The resemblances between
the representations of the word in Philo and the Fourth
Gospel lie on the surface. If we leave out the fact of incar-
nation, there is nothing in the latter that is not found in the
former. The Gospel describes the logos as having existed
in the beginning in the presence of God, partaking of the
divine nature, and as having been the sole agent in the divine
creation ; he is declared to be the only begotten Son of God,
the source of life to men. Eeference to the quotations above
given will show that all these elements of the conception are
contained in Philo's representation. The distinction which
the latter makes, by the insertion or omission of the article,
between the absolute divine being and the divine nature
possessed by the logos is made also in the first verse of the
Gospel. The evangelist seems to be concerned, like Philo,
while ascribing the largest divine powers to the logos, yet to
keep intact the substantial aloneness of God himself. He
declares, according to one reading of the text (John i. 18) :
" No one has ever seen God ; the only begotten Son who is
in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him," a state-
1 This is a sufficiently definite statement of the date of the Fourth Gospel
for our purposes. It is impossible here to go into a discussion of the numer-
ous and intricate questions connected with the investigation of the origin of
this Gospel. The church tradition assigns the work to the closing years of
the first century, and Justin Martyr appears to have been acquainted with it.
From these data we might place it between the years 100 and 130, and there
is nothing in the book itself to make such a date improbable ; at the distance
of nearly a century from the death of Jesus, such an idealizing portrait of him
would be not unnatural, and the existence of the Grecizing tendency of
thought among the Jews at that time is vouched for by the works of Philo
We are not here called on to decide how far the author of the Fourth Gospel
used the other gospels, or in general how far an historical tradition lay at the
basis of his work ; we have to accept the book simply as a product of the first
part of the second century, made up of Christian material shaped under the
influence of Jewish-Greek philosophy.
116 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
ment which forms the gist of Philo's description, in which
the logos is the utterance and declaration of the invisible
God. Another reading of the Gospel passage has " the only
begotten God " instead of " the only begotten Son ; " as to
this (which on its face and in the connection is less likely
than the other) we can only say that it still makes a clear
distinction between this only begotten divine person and the
absolute " God," who is invisible, a distinction likewise
found in Philo.
The decisive difference between the Alexandrian philoso-
pher and the Gospel is that for the latter the logos is incar-
nate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We have seen that
Philo did not identify the logos with the Messiah or any
other man. It is no doubt the failure of such an identifica-
tion that gives a wavering and indistinct character to his
conception, and deprives it of the roundness and objective
power which resides in a visible historical form. This was
the great advantage enjoyed by the Christian writer over the
Jewish philosopher, the presence of a man in whom the
logos could be seen ; this was the condition necessary for the
final and complete hypostatization of the conception.
We cannot trace in minute detail the steps by which the
historical Jesus became one in Christian thought with the
divine Word, but we may discern the broad outlines of the
movement. The two elements of the process of identification
are : the gradual idealizing of the person of Jesus, and the
acceptance by a part of the Christian world of the Greek
philosophy as adapted to monotheistic ideas by the Alexan-
drian Jews. The latter of these elements we may consider
to have begun with the establishment of the Philonic system.
As has already been remarked, there is nothing to prevent
our supposing that its central point the conception of a
divine, rational word mediating between God and the world,
had obtained a footing in Asia Minor, where the Fourth
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 117
Gospel is described by the tradition as having originated.
There Philo's works may have been known, or the substance
of them may have been discussed in philosophizing circles.
To a Christian work embodying this conception a certain
definiteness and simplicity would be given by the historical
personage of Jesus. There would be no need of metaphysical
subtlety or indistinctness. The divine word, spoken of in
the Old Testament, and elaborated in Alexandria, out of
Old Testament material, had appeared in visible form. The
author of the Fourth Gospel, after in the beginning of his
work identifying Jesus with the logos, does not return to the
subject ; he contents himself with the portrayal of him as
the principle of light and life in the world, combating dark-
ness and death. The evangelist necessarily treats his subject
with freedom and independence. What especially interests
him is to point out how Jesus, in the midst of the darkened,
unbelieving world, asserts himself as the absolute truth, as
the manifestation of the Father with whom he is one, to
whom, nevertheless, he is subordinate, without whom he
can do nothing, by whom he has been sent on a mission of
eternal life, through whose power and direction they who
have been chosen come to the Son and believe on him unto
eternal life.
But while in the choice of the term " logos " we must recog-
nize the connection between the Fourth Gospel and the
Alexandrian philosophy, it is also true that in other Chris-
tian circles during the first century the person of Jesus had
been steadily growing in dignity. We have no means of
tracing the development of Paul's thought between his con-
version and the first of his epistles ; but from the beginning
he seems to have conceived of Jesus as the glorified Messiah
invested by God with supreme authority for the salvation of
men. On Christ's earthly life Paul laid little stress. A few
times he mentions his birth as a man (Gal. iv. 4 ; Rom. i. 3),
118 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
his sacrificial death (Gal. i. 4 ; 2 Cor. v. 21 ; 1 Cor. v. 7), and
very often his resuneetion from the dead. On this last point
he dwells with preference; it is his real starting-point for
Christ's work. The glorified Jesus is the Son of God, who
dwelt from the beginning with the Father, who laid aside
his riches and glory that he might become the Saviour of
men (2 Cor. ii. 9 ; Phil ii 6-9) ; he is the power of God and
the wisdom of God (1 Cor. i. 24), the Saviour and Lord of
believers. On the other hand, he is distinguished from and
subordinated to God; there is one God, the Father, and one
Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor. viii. 6), and at the end he shall de-
liver up his kingdom to God and be subjected to him who
subjected all things to him, that God may be all in all (1 Cor.
xv. 24-28). Paul's view doubtless arose from the combina-
tion of his Old Testament monotheism with his exalted con-
ception of the spiritual function of the Messiah. Jesus he
believed had been raised from the dead to reconcile men to
God ; such a task demanded the noblest personality and the
largest authority compatible with the aloneness of God.
Jesus is supreme in the Church, but he derives all his au-
thority from the Father. This view may have so leavened
Christian opinion as to prepare the way for the preciser
statement of the Fourth Gospel. It is, in fact, itself a long
step toward a complete hypostatization. Jesus, according
to Paul's view, is far above all other beings except God,
one with him in purpose and act, only less than he in the
universe.
In this connection we must mention the representations of
Jesus given in Hebrews, Ephesians, and Colossians, in which
the influence of the Greek thought seems recognizable.
The expressions in Heb. i. 2, 3, in which the Son is God's
agent in creation, the effulgence of his glory and the image
of his substance, remind us of the Fourth Gospel and Philo ; l
1 And see Wisdom of Solomon, vii. 26.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 119
and here also the Son receives this glory by the appointment
of the Father, that he may become the Saviour of believers.
In Ephesians and Colossiaus Christ, while his function in
the Church is substantially identical with the teaching of the
Pauline epistles, is conceived in a more philosophical and
ideal way ; in him all things in the universe are summed up
(Eph. i. 10) ; he is the image of the invisible God, the first-
born of all creation ; through him all things were made, and
in him they consist ; he possesses all the treasures of wisdom
and knowledge, and in him dwells all the fulness of the God-
head bodily ; he is seated at the right hand of God ; he is the
life of believers, who shall share in the glory of his manifes-
tation. These expressions we are warranted in interpreting
in accordance with the spirit of Paul and of Hebrews : Christ,
being the sum of the universe, and having in him all the ful-
ness of the Godhead, is yet to be distinguished from God,
from whom he derives his authority, and on whose aloneness
he does not impinge. These epistles we may regard as hav-
ing been composed in sympathy with the Pauline doctrine,
but under the influence of the Alexandrine philosophy.
Possibly they form the transition from the earlier to the
later conceptions of the person of Jesus. Indeed, the state-
ment in the proem of the Fourth Gospel, though more suc-
cinct and scientific in form, is not more decided than what
we find in Hebrews and Colossians.
There is no lack of unity in this portrait of Jesus. There
are no inconsistencies and discrepancies in the utterances of
Jesus respecting himself or in the introduction to the Fourth
Gospel, if we look on the evangelical logos as substan-
tially identical with that of Philo, the divine reason and
word, the divine manifestation of God, one with man and
one with God, Maker and Lord of all things, yet always
under the control of the only one God, the Son having
the glory of the only begotten of the Father, the one source
120 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
of life and salvation, the one power able to regenerate the
world.
In contrast with these representations, the picture of the
Word of God in the New Testament Apocalypse (xix. 13-16)
follows the Jewish Old Testament conception. The Word,
who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, smites the nations
with the sharp sword which proceeds out of his mouth,
rules them with a rod of iron (Ps. ii. 9), and treads the
wine-press of the fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God
(Isa. Ixiii. 3). This may be called the purely Jewish-Chris-
tian conception.
Paul's view was determined by his intense and lofty
moral-spiritual earnestness, which led him to construe the
glorified Messiah as the saviour from sin, the creator of
righteousness, and the reconciler of God and humanity. We
have no need to call in the Alexandrian philosophy in order
to understand his position. The case is different with the
other New Testament writings cited above, in which so many
of the expressions are identical with those of systems based
on Greek thought.
We conclude from this survey that there are in the New
Testament two distinct lines of advance in the construction
of the person of Jesus, the one Pauline, the other Alex-
andrian. The first was soteriological, the second philosophi-
cal ; the first magnified the person of the Messiah so as to
bring it into harmony with the great function assigned him,
a function the conception of which Paul seems to have
reached by spiritualizing the Old Testament view of salva-
tion ; the second identified Jesus, the Messiah, with the
grand mediatorial figure which, first presented by the Stoics,
was elaborated in Alexandria, and perhaps elsewhere, in
accordance with Jewish monotheism. The blending of these
two lines of thought is visible in Hebrews, Ephesians, Colos-
sians, and the Fourth Gospel, in which we have the culmina-
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 121
tion of the effort made by the early Christian thought to
idealize the person of the Messiah in the loftiest spiritual
way. Yet, as we have seen, the New Testament, with all
the grandeur of character and function that it ascribes to the
Christ, maintains the unique supremacy of the one God.
The demand for a mediating power between God and human-
ity is pushed to the farthest point which thought can occupy
consistently with the maintenance of the absoluteness of the
one Supreme Deity.
5. In connection with the development of the theistic
idea, we must consider the conception of the relation of God's
self-manifestation to the laws of the natural world. In the
early times of Israelitism, as in all primitive systems of re-
ligion, there was no sharply marked distinction between the
natural and the supernatural. The scientific idea of the orderly
constitution of nature according to law did not exist, or at
least had not been so formulated as to exercise a controlling
influence over human thought ; it was easy and natural to
regard the deity as interposing at will in the affairs of life.
We may distinguish two stadia in the conception of divine
intervention. There was the primitive, naive feeling that
the deity was everywhere, showing himself in all occurrences
of life, but especially recognizable in great calamities and
blessings and other stupendous events. Survivals of this
feeling in the Old Testament may be seen in the familiar
intercourse between God and the patriarchs in Genesis, and
in such occurrences as the appearance of the angels to Gideon
and Manoah (Judg. vi. 11 ; xiii.). The second stage belongs
to the more highly developed theocratic feeling, according to
which the whole life of Israel was under the direct and con-
stant supervision and guidance of its God; and all things,
great and small, simple and involved, were his doing. Whether
it were the appointment of a king, or the overthrow of an
enemy, a message of encouragement or reproof through the
122 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
mouth of a prophet, or the revelation of a law of worship and
conduct, the bestowal of bounteous crops, or the infliction of
pestilence or famine, the decision of a lot between two men,
the overthrow of a nation or its restoration to its own land,
all was the immediate work of Yah we, God of Israel.
From this point of view there was no great distinction be-
tween ordinary and extraordinary divine action ; the latter
only served to call man's attention more sharply to the
divine presence. 1 The Old Testament writings abound in
angelic appearances, prophetic messages, and other indica-
tions of the constant readiness of Yahwe to take part in the
affairs of his people.
At the same time there are indications of another popular
view which looked on life simply as a sequence of events, the
natural progression of which it described without feeling
called on to recognize in it a divine element. The stories of
Micah and Samson in the book of Judges, much of the his-
tory of David in Samuel, and of the annals of the monarchy
in Kings, are mere records of natural occurrences from the
human point of view ; and in the story of Esther, in the form
in which it occurs in the Hebrew Scriptures, the divine
agency is completely lost sight of. This non-religious con-
ception of life was as natural to the Israelites as it is to our
own times, when even persons distinctly or fervidly religious
describe social or political occurrences without ever thinking
of introducing divine agency ; the belief in God exists, but
the attention is absorbed by the events described.
The tendency of social growth is to favor this non-religious
mode of conceiving history ; the presence of law and order
is more and more recognized, and it is felt more and more
strongly that recognition of and obedience to this order in
human life is a prime condition of success. The conviction
1 Cf. the modern popular distinction between general and particular
providence.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 123
of divine supremacy remains ; but the impression of the
natural order of things becomes more and more powerful.
Men learn to depend on themselves ; and self-reliance is har-
monized with dependence on God by the belief that he mani-
fests himself in accordance with natural law. There is
perhaps a hint of this feeling in the story told in Isa. vii.
10-12, where Ahaz, engaged in preparing the defences of
Jerusalem, declines to ask a sign from Yahwe ; the ground
he assigns for his refusal is that he does not wish to tempt
the God of Israel, but his real reason perhaps was that he
relied more on fortifications than on divine signs. Whether
this was the case with Ahaz or not, we find in certain late
post-exilian books, as Ezra and Nehemiah, a very decided
non-miraculous view of life. Toward the close of the exile,
the return to Canaan had been painted in glowing colors by
the second Isaiah ; Yahwe, said the prophet, would prepare
the way for his people, bring them with joy and gladness to
their land, and there establish them in never-ending blessed-
ness as the centre and head of all the nations. The actual
event formed a bitter contrast to the brilliant anticipations
of the prophet. All the energies of the little community of
returned exiles were devoted to wringing a bare subsistence
out of the soil, and painfully building a temple greatly in-
ferior to that of Solomon. Life dragged on slowly till Ezra
and Nehemiah came, and gave a new impulse by restoring
the fortifications of the city and introducing the elaborate
ritual law which had been developed in Babylonia. Still, the
hard reality of the situation forced itself on the consciousness
of the people ; the Persian empire embraced all the territory
of the earth known or accessible to the Jews, and its over-
whelming -power made independence for the smaller nations
impossible. Nehemiah felt himself to be simply a Persian
governor, and trusted for success to the arts of a skilful
politician ; he and Ezra lived in the consciousness of God's
124 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
presence, but they looked for no physical aid from that
source. At least, iii the books which bear their names,
which a century and a half later narrated the history of
their mission, there is no trace of supernatural interven-
tion, nothing but a purely human course of events.
The same characteristic is found in the remaining histori-
cal literature down to the beginning of our era, which records
contemporary events. It is otherwise with Chronicles, the
Apocalyptic books and 2 Maccabees ; 1 but Chronicles deals
with a remote, transfigured past, the Apocalypses with an
ideal, glorified future, and 2 Maccabees was written long
enough after the events it describes for a halo of embellish-
ment to gather about the history.
In the first century of Christianity we coine again on a
period of miracle. We have not, it is true, contemporary
accounts of the lives of Jesus and his disciples ; the Gospels
and Acts were composed a generation or two after the events
with which they are concerned, and tradition would naturally
increase the mass of supernatural material. But the tradi-
tion testifies to the existence of the belief in miracle ; and
we can hardly avoid the conclusion that it had a basis in
fact ; that is, that the apostles and other prominent disciples
did claim to work miracles. Their miraculous activity was
not, as is true in a great part of the Old Testament, and a
great part of the Apocalyptic books, directed to national
ends ; it was individual in its aim. The apostles went about
doing good, and using their deeds of healing as the occasion
of announcing the principles of the new kingdom of God.
For a parallel to this in the Old Testament we must look
to the quiet, beneficent activity of Elisha. The New Testa-
ment miracles are, however, not simply individual or physi-
cally beneficent in their aim ; they look also to shutting the
mouths of opponents, and demonstrating the divine origin
' 1 iii. 24 ; v. 2, 3 ; x. 29, 30 ; xv. 12-16.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 125
of the new religion. The Messianic kingdom of God has
taken the place of the old national Israel. 1
The ground of this outburst of miracle in the New Testa-
ment times must be sought first in the belief that the Mes-
sianic age, as the final era of prosperity for Israel, would be
ushered in and maintained by the direct intervention of di-
vine power. So soon as it was believed that Jesus was the
Messiah, the memory of the disciples, dwelling fondly on
the history of his blessed life, would naturally fill it up with
these special signs of the divine presence ; and in the same
way a later generation would clothe the grand figures of the
apostles with supernatural glory. This feeling continued to
exist in the Church for many centuries ; every great saint
was credited with miraculous power, and this in a perfectly
simple and sincere way. The legends of the saints were not
invented, but grew up out of the conviction that to such
eminent servants of God must be vouchsafed the impartation
of special power from on high. It is in the historical books
of the New Testament that the miraculous element is most
prominent. There is a difference in the portraiture of super-
natural activity between the three first Gospels and the
Fourth : in the former, the work of Jesus is one of simple
beneficence ; in the latter it is the outstreaming of his divine
nature and the manifestation of his glory (John ii. 11) ; in
this respect Acts resembles the Synoptics. The attitude of
the Epistles toward the supernatural is different. Paul
recognizes it almost exclusively in the fundamental facts
of Christianity, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, the
1 Whether Jesus himself claimed to perform miracles, the data, as it seems
to me, do not enable us to decide. The Gospel accounts which ascribe mirac-
ulous powers to him may be explained as the product of reverent tradition.
His lofty spiritual simplicity is against rather than for the supposition that
he assumed such powers. On the other hand, it was the manner of the time
to believe in miracle, and he might have shared this belief without impairing
his ethical and spiritual purity.
126 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
divine origin of the plan of salvation, and in his own special
call to the apostleship and instruction by the divine Spirit
in the principles of Christ. He dwells on his own experience,
his conversion (Gal. i. 11-24), and his visions and revelations
(2 Cor. xii. 1-4) ; but he does not claim the power of work-
ing physical miracles, 1 and describes his own work among
the churches in purely human terms, except that a general
divine guidance in his life is always presupposed.
It appears, therefore, that the New Testament view of mi-
raculous divine intervention in the affairs of men is substan-
tially the same with the second or theocratic stage of the Old
Testament representation. The Church has taken the place
of the nation, and God intervenes in a special way when the
interests of the Church require it. The primitive view which
saw the deity in every fact and act has passed away, a
natural sequence of events is recognized in ordinary occur-
rences ; but the life of the kingdom of God is not only to be
maintained by constant impartation of the divine Spirit,
it is to be guarded from attacks of enemies, human and super-
human, by supernatural intervention. The growing feeling
in favor of natural order is modified by the conviction that
the Church, as a special creation of God, is marked off from
the rest of the world, stands, indeed, in sharp contrast
with the world, and demands the special protection of
God. This conception (which maintained itself many cen-
turies) gave a natural color to miracles within the Church ;
it underlies the whole of the New Testament scheme of
thought. It was the subtraction of a definite segment of life
from the domain of natural law. The subsequent thought
of the Church has constantly tended (though with excep-
tions) to limit the agency of the supernatural to the New
Testament times. The feeling is that while the establish-
1 He mentions, however, the working of miracles as one of the charismata
(1 Cor. xii. 10).
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 127
ment of the Church was an event of such magnitude as to
demand the immediate intervention of God, its maintenance
is left to the working of natural or invisible-spiritual powers.
6. In this connection a word may be said as to the au-
thority accorded to the Scriptures from the time of Ezra to
the end of the first Christian century. The solemn descrip-
tion of the introduction of the Law in Neh. viii. indicates
that it was looked on as the divinely given guide of life. If
this narrative be supposed to be colored by the feeling of
a later time, it still appears from Chronicles that in the
latter part of the fourth century B. c., the Levitical Code
was recognized as an authoritative standard. In a work of
the second century (1 Mac. iii. 48), we find testimony as to
the estimation in which the Law was then held ; the canoni-
cal character of Jeremiah and therefore, as we may infer, of
all the prophets, is involved in Dan. ix. 2, and all three
canons are mentioned in the second prologue to Ecclesiasti-
cus. Numerous quotations from the Old Testament in the
later books show that its contents were familiar to the writers,
though nothing is said of a specifically divine authority, ex-
cept in relation to Moses and the Law (Ecclus. xlv. 17); see
Wisd. xvi.-xix., Ecclus. xliv.-xlix. (a list of Old Testament wor-
thies, but in chapter!., the non-biblical high-priest Simon, the
son of Onias, B. c. 219-199, is also mentioned), 1 Mac. iii.
18, 19 (cf. Ps. xxxiii. 16, 2 Chron. xiv. 11); iv. 9 ; 2 Mac. ii.
8 ; i. 20. The schools of law, which existed from the second
century down, are a proof of the peculiar position held by
the Pentateuch. That this reverence for the Scriptures ex-
isted in Egypt as well as in Palestine is shown by the Alex-
andrian-Greek translation, which was probably begun in the
early part of the third century, and finished about the end
of the second. There was no attempt at this time to define
the precise nature or extent of the authority of the Scripture ;
this subject was first touched on by Philo, who ascribed to
128 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
the Old Testament writers an inward clearness of vision
bestowed by God, and held the prophets to be interpreters
of the divine will, Moses being at their head, the interpreter
of God in the highest sense (i. 511 ; ii. 163). Though he
regards all biblical books as in a peculiar sense authorita-
tive, he makes a marked distinction between the Law and
the others ; and it must be added that he claimed a sort of
inspiration for himself, he sometimes felt his soul suddenly
filled with ideas from above ; he was seized with enthusiasm,
and believed himself to be in direct communication with the
divine spirit (i. 441, 692).
This view of the inspiration and authority of the Old
Testament accords in general with the indications of the
New Testament and the Talmud, and may be accepted as the
prevailing Jewish opinion in the first century of Christianity.
There is no definition in the New Testament of the authority
of the inspired writings ; the most express statement respect-
ing their value is found in 2 Tim. iii. 16: "Every Scripture
which is inspired by God is also profitable for teaching, for
reproof, for correction, for righteous instruction, that the
man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good
work." They are abundantly cited in proof, or illustration,
or as prediction of facts and doctrines, generally without
mention of author or place, with the formulas, " as it is writ-
ten," " which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet,"
" the Scripture says," sometimes " he says to Moses," " Isaiah
cries," " David says," " one has somewhere testified," " the
Holy Ghost says," sometimes without introductory formula.
But we also find citations or insertions from other than Old
Testament books ; as, for example, from the book of Enoch
in Jude and Eevelation, and possibly from 2 Mac. vii. in
Heb. xi. 35 ; and even late Jewish traditions are introduced
in the same way as biblical citations : Paul speaks of the
rock which followed Israel through the wilderness to supply
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 129
them with water (I Cor. x. 4), Acts (vi. 22) represents Moses
as instructed in Egyptian wisdom, and 2 Tim. iii. 8, gives the
names of the Egyptian magicians who withstood Moses. It
is evident from these examples that no such sharp discrimi-
natign between canonical and uncanonical books, and no
such detailed theory of inspiration existed in the first cen-
tury as were afterward elaborated in the Christian Church.
We must suppose a more fluctuating conception of inspired
writings. The Old Testament, in the form in which we now
have it (the Palestinian Canon), was looked on with peculiar
reverence as the fountain of divine truth ; but all the books
of the Greek Canon were also held in high estimation, and
still other books, which never became canonical, were re-
garded not only as historically trustworthy, but as valid
religious guides. It is probable, as is said above, that a
peculiar pre-eminence was assigned to the writings ascribed
to Moses ; but beyond this, we have little to guide us in
determining the reigning opinion respecting the degrees of
authority of inspired works.
When we turn to the Scriptures themselves, we do not
find in the later books of the Old Testament a specific claim
to be regarded as infallible religious standards and guides.
The Law purports to be a direct verbal revelation from God,
and the prophets affirm that they speak what is put into
their mouths by the divine spirit ; but the books of the Third
Canon are conceived in purely human style, as the utterances
of historians, sages, and poets who chronicle facts and ex-
press their reflections and emotions purely out of the natural
impulse of authorship. There is no consciousness in Chron-
icles, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Psalms, of the right to be re-
garded as standards of faith, no expectation of being received
into a third division of inspired Scriptures.
The New Testament writers in like manner (with the
exception of the Apocalyptist) lay no claim directly to
130 THE DOCTKINE OF GOD.
divine inspiration. In the First and Second Gospels, the
writers say nothing of their mode of composition ; the au-
thor of the Third Gospel describes his procedure as that of
the ordinary historian (Luke i. 1-4, and cf. Acts i. 1) ; the
passage at the end of the Fourth Gospel (John xxi. 24), which
speaks of the writer and his composition, says nothing of di-
vine guidance. Paul affirms that he received directly through
revelation of Jesus Christ the gospel which he preached
(Gal. i. 12 ; 1 Cor. i. 23) ; but he does not claim supernatural
guidance in the penning of his epistles, and as a rule relies
for his effect on the appeal to the Old Testament, or to the
religious consciousness or the common-sense of his readers.
In one passage (1 Cor. vii. 25) he declares that on a mooted
point he gives his judgment as one who has obtained mercy
of the Lord to be faithful ; that is, as a pious man using his
common-sense in a question pertaining to the conduct of
life. In none of the other epistles is -there indication of con-
sciousness that the writer is under divine direction, except
that he believes himself to be expounding the truth as it
was revealed through Jesus Christ. All, conscious of the
possession of truth, write out of the fulness of the heart, as
men write to friends, to counsel or comfort them. In what
concerns the fundamental principles of the gospel they ad-
mit no deviations from their teaching, but on other points they
ask only for the respect due to persons of age and experience.
They speak as witnesses to a divine historical fact, rather
than as formulators of a dogma. The consideration accorded
to their words was sometimes dependent on local circum-
stances. A strong party in Corinth showed antagonism to
Paul, admiring his letters as weighty, but declining to obey his
commands and suggestions (2 Cor. x. 10, 11 ; xi. 12 ; xii. 20, 21 ;
xiii. 2, 3). The Apocalypse is in the form of vision, a direct reve-
lation, as is the case with all apocalypses ; and it is precisely
in these books that the elaborate literary form makes the hy-
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 131
pothesis of vision, except in a very general sense, impossible.
It is deaf that Ezekiel, Zechariah, Daniel, the Sibyl, Enoch,
and the author or authors of the New Testament Apocalypse
worked up their material with the greatest care, for the pur-
pose of enforcing a duty or a doctrine, or guiding and inspir-
ing their people in times of doubt and suffering. The author
or final editor of the Apocalypse appends to his book an im-
precation on the man who shall add to or take from its con-
tents, from which we may infer that he wished them to be
regarded as divinely imparted and authoritative ; this is
perhaps a feeling peculiar to the last Christian redactor of
the work. Christianity was in process of organization. The
first century felt the throb of a great, uplifting religious idea ;
the apostles and other church-leaders were conscious (more
deeply and persistently than Philo) of the impulse of a divine
inspiration, which they believed was to change the current
of the world's religious life. But as yet the line of inspira-
tion was not sharply drawn ; there were many teachers, and
they were not always at one among themselves; their au-
thority depended largely on their personal influence ; there
was no collection of Christian sacred books. It was reserved
for later generations to sift the material, gradually to make
a canonical collection of Christian writings, and to invest
it with absolute authority in matters of faith and conduct.
As to the attitude of the New Testament writers to-
ward the Old Testament, it has already been remarked
that they accept it in general as authoritative, without
distinct definition of the character and extent of its
inspiration. As Jews they had been trained from in-
fancy to regard it as the word given from God to Israel,
handed down from the fathers through the generations.
There was no reason why a Jew should question the valid-
ity of this transmission. There was no critical discus-
sion. The Talmud decides on date and authorship of Old
132 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
Testament books in the most mechanical way. Moses was
held to have written the Pentateuch and Job, and Joshua the
book that bears his name ; Judges, Samuel, and Euth were
ascribed to Samuel, and Kings to Jeremiah ; Chronicles, Ezra,
and Nehemiah were referred to Ezra, and Esther to the Great
Synagogue ; the prophets and Daniel were held to have been
written by the men whose names they bear ; Solomon was
regarded as the author of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the
Song of Songs ; in the Psalter, the titles of the psalms were
regarded as authoritative, and certain untitled psalms were
provided with authors, none of whom were later than David. 1
The critical-historical method of investigation did not exist.
It would no more have occurred to a Jew of that time to
doubt the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch than to call
in question the generally accepted opinion that the sun
moved around the earth. We have no reason to suppose
that the Jews of the first century of our era knew any
better than we why any particular psalm, as the 68th or the
110th, was ascribed to David ; they knew only that it so stood
in the titles. It probably occurred to no one that the book
of Isaiah was a collection of writings by different men.
There was little or no curiosity on such points, and so far
as it existed, it was easily satisfied by such simple solutions
as we find in the Talmud. The New Testament shares the
traditional opinion of the time on these points.
If we go back some time to the period when the Old
Testament books were edited and collected, it is not impos-
sible to understand the methods by which they were assigned
to certain authors. It is tolerably clear how Moses came to
be regarded as the composer of the Pentateuch ; he was the
1 See L. Wogue, " Histoire de la Bible," Paris, 1881, pp. 15 ff. The psalm-
authors besides David (who is held to have written the greater part of the
Psalter) are stated to be: Adam, Melkisedek, Abraham, Moses, Heman,
Jeduthun, Asaph, and the three sons of Korah.
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 133
heroic figure of the formative period of the nation, and the
natural traditional author of its legislation and primitive
history. 1 But, it may be asked, supposing the ritual to have
grown up after the exile, how could the men who developed
it ascribe it to Moses ? The answer is, first, that in an un-
critical age a generation or two of use would suffice to create
the opinion that a usage had existed from time imme-
morial; and further, when a book had been written, the
scribes of that day felt no hesitation in making additions
to it, they were innocent of suspicion that they were en-
croaching on the integrity of the book or the rights of the
author, and their additions were accepted without question
by an uncritical public as parts of the original work. In
this way, from a small body of tradition, believed to go back
to Moses, might arise in process of time a great mass of law ;
and there is no need to suppose deliberate deception, it was
a process of traditional expansion, in which the successive
accretions might not unnaturally be regarded as belonging
to the original legislation. 2 We can also see how the titles
of the prophetic books arose. The prophets lived in com-
paratively late times, after the beginning of the literary
period; manuscripts of their writings and traditions of au-
thors' names might be handed down from the regal period
and the exile to the fourth or third century ; to such a tra-
dition a certain historical value has to be allowed, we may
feel tolerably sure that we have writings of Amos, Hosea,
Isaiah, and the other prophets, down to Malachi, Joel, and
the second Zechariah. It does not follow that we have all
1 Compare above, pp. 70, 71.
2 Ezekiel, it is true, says nothing of Moses (Ezek. xl.-xlviii.), but derives
his legislation from an immediate divine revelation. But the orderly devel-
opment of the Deuteronomic code may have gone on during and after the
exile in the way above described ; and it is to be noted that Ezekiel's scheme
is not incorporated into the Pentateuch. The possibility of deliberate decep-
tion in the unknown framers of the Levitical Code may be admitted, but it
does not seem to be necessary.
134 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
of their writings, or that all the material that we have "be-
longs to the men whose names are attached to the books.
The freedom which the scribes of those days allowed them-
selves was great. The preciousness of parchment led to the
custom of writing the compositions of different authors on
the same roll ; the best example of this composite character
of a manuscript is found in our book of Isaiah, which, start-
ing with the discourses of the prophet of Hezekiah's time,
has appropriated material from the seventh century, the
exile, and the early post-exilian time ; handed down through
the generations, it was accepted as wholly the work of the
son of Amos. The same sort of growth is visible in our
books of Micah and Zechariah. The book of Jonah, a late
religious apologue, was placed among the prophetic writ-
ings because it bore the name of a prophetic man, said in
the book of Kings (2 Kings xiv. 25) to have lived in the
days of Jeroboam the Second (toward the middle of tlie
eighth century B.C.); the author made the ancient seer
the hero of his work, possibly on the basis of a tradition
(for in Jeroboam's time the Assyrians and the Israelites had
known each other for a century), but chiefly to give dignity
and authority to his religious lesson, and probably uncon-
scious of literary and historical sin in ascribing to this old
prophet the ideas of a much later time. The historical books
of the Second Canon Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings
bear no authors' names ; they were gradually compiled from
traditions and written documents, and received their final
shape from editors (during the exile and later) who did not
feel their share in the work to be of sufficient importance to
call for the mention of their names. It does not appear that
the pre-Christian Jews felt it necessary to know the authors
by name ; the later rabbis, with greater literary and religious
but quite uncritical curiosity, sought the authors of these
books in prominent men who were supposed to be contem-
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 135
poraneous with the last events described in them. Of the
books of the Third Canon, Job, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther,
Chronicles, Ezra, Neheiniah, are anonymous. Job, from its
appearance of antiquity, was naturally referred to Moses.
Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah were with equal naturalness
assigned to the eminent man who played so prominent a part
in the establishment of the law. To the Great Synagogue 1
or to Mordecai was given the book of Esther, while Euth, by
its subject-matter, went with the earlier historical works.
The Lamentations over the fall of Jerusalem suggested the
sad prophet, Jeremiah ; and no other than Daniel could be
thought of as the writer of the book which bears his name.
As early as the exile, perhaps earlier, the tradition had made
Solomon the ideal of intellectual greatness, not the religious
wisdom of the later conception, but knowledge of men and
things (1 Kings iv. 29-34, Heb. v. 9-14). There existed col-
lections of apothegms ascribed to him (Prov. xxv. 1) ; these
were gradually added to down to a late period, and the whole
of the resulting book of Proverbs was looked on as his work.
It was natural also for the author of Ecclesiastes to select
the wise king as the expounder of his philosophy of life; it
is less clear how his name came to be attached to the Song
of Songs unless it be merely from the statement in 1 Kings
v. 32, that his songs were a thousand and five ; in both these
cases the writer's ascription of his own production to the
ancient king was made possible by the unscientific feeling
of the times to which reference has already been made. The
designation of the writers of the psalms was determined by
similar considerations. The tradition pointed to David as
1 The Great Synagogue, that National Academy of the Tora which Jewish
tradition created for the time of Ezra, is not mentioned in any work earlier
than the Talmud, is foreign to the spirit of the fifth century B. c., and must
be regarded as an attempt of later Jewish thought to bestow a consecrating
antiquity on that official interpretation of the Law which was believed to be
the breath of the national life.
136 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
the writer of religious odes ; in the eighth century he was
thought of as the inventor of instruments of music (Amos
vi. 5), and he was speedily idealized into the sweet singer
of Israel. From time to time collections of hymns were
formed bearing his name ; an allusion was found to some
fact in his history, or, as in the case of Ecclesiastes, a writer
would seek to give dignity to his production by ascribing it
to the ancient and famous king. Other psalms, composed by
Levitical singers, were referred, probably on the basis of a
good tradition, to a late organization known as the sons
of Korah, or, without authority, to supposed ancestors of
similar organizations, as Asaph, Heman, and Ethan ; the
majestic ninetieth psalm was ascribed to the revered law-
giver, of whose wisdom it was doubtless felt to be a worthy
monument. These were doubtless the opinions as to date
and authorship of Old Testament books held by Jews and
Christians in the first century of our era.
The use made of the Old Testament Scriptures by the New
Testament writers is such as might be anticipated from the
state of opinion just described. On the one hand, the na-
tional sacred writings are treated as authoritative; on the
other hand, on account of the absence of historical-exegetical
feeling, the greatest liberty was assumed in the interpretation
and application of Scriptural passages. Small regard was
paid to context. Words were made to mean anything which
they might suggest. Quotations were taken, not from the
Hebrew, but from the Septuagint, or from a current Aramaic
version ; the Hebrew language had long since ceased to be
the spoken tongue of the nation, and had been replaced in
Palestine by Aramaic, in Egypt by Greek, and elsewhere by
Greek or Latin. The feeling which we find afterward so
definite in the Talmud, that the separate words of Scripture
had an independent, objective force, was already in existence.
The Epistle to the Hebrews, for example (ii. 13), illustrates
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 137
the oneness of Jesus and his people from Isa. viii. 18, taking
a clause out of its connection (herein following the punctua-
tion of the Greek), and entirely changing the sense of the
original. The prophet had said : " Behold, I and the chil-
dren whom Yah we has given me [who had symbolical names
pointing to the fortunes of the nation] are for signs and for
wonders in Israel ; " the epistle quotes : " Behold, I and the
children whom God has given me," and makes the Messiah
the speaker, and the " children " those who believe on him.
The central motive of the New Testament quotations is the
kingdom of God set up by Jesus Christ, the good news of
salvation to the world. This grand and inspiring idea filled
and controlled the Christian consciousness of that day. In
the fulness of time, it was held, God had visited his people
and performed the promises made to the fathers. It could
not but be that the prophets, the Psalmist, and Moses in the
Law had looked forward to and spoken of this wondrous
event. For most Jews of that time there was no literature
but the Old Testament, and it was more than a body of an-
cient literature, for them it comprehended all truth. The
Talmud finds in it everywhere allusions to the current events
of the Talmudic period. The Christian reader of the first
century, aglow with the inspiration of God's latest manifes-
tation of himself in the gospel, could not fail to find the
evangelical history, the history of the kingdom of heaven,
in the words of the ancient saints. The life of the Christ,
the doctrines of the new dispensation, the fortunes of the
Church, would stand out clearly to the Christian eye on the
pages of Scripture ; the old congregation of Israel was felt
to be a preparation for and a prediction of the new congre-
gation of Christ ; the chief interest for the Christian lay in
the discovery of references to the gospel times, and in a
thousand Old Testament passages he might find prophecies
and illustrations of what was going on around him. There
138 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
is, however, a difference in different New Testament books
and persons in respect to simplicity and naturalness of citation.
The quotations made by Jesus himself are almost exclusively
of ethical or general religious import, and bear their validity
on their face. The same thing may be said of the Catholic
and the Pastoral epistles. The Apocalypse has few direct
citations, but a large mass of Old Testament material (to-
gether with much from Enoch) interwoven into its text in
a free manner. The predictions of the life of Christ given
by the evangelists themselves are also marked by uncritical
freedom, but are confined to passages whose wording natu-
rally suggests a prediction of the actual experiences of Jesus.
Paul's method of procedure betrays his rabbinical training ;
he not only gives to general Old Testament expressions the
technical senses of his own theology, but he allegorizes inci-
dents and words into meanings remote from their original
intention. Hagar and Sara he represents as signifying re-
spectively the old Israel held in the bondage of the covenant
of Sinai and the Church of Christ freed from the bondage of
the law. In his discussion of the glossolaly (1 Cor. xiv.),
wishing to prove the superiority of prophecy over the speak-
ing with tongues, he declares that the former benefits those
who believe, while the latter is serviceable to those only who
do not believe ; this he proves from Isa. xxviii. 11:" By
men of strange tongues, and by the lips of strangers will I
speak to this people," where all that the prophet says is that
God will teach the Israelites a lesson through the foreign
Assyrians. The height of arbitrary quotation is reached in
the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which the free Alexandrian
method of treating the Old Testament is visible. There are
no bounds to the writer's ability to extract from his Greek
version the sense which he desires ; he goes so far as to
find a demonstration of the necessity of the sacrifice of
Christ (Heb. x. 5-10) in a psalm-passage (Ps. xL 6-8) which
THE DOCTRINE OF GOD. 139
affirms that God desires not sacrifice, but obedience to his
will.
But while we are forced to admit an uncritical and arbi-
trary element in New Testament quotations from the Old
Testament, we must recognize the power of the new spirit
which created this sort of exposition. The circumstances of
the time being what they were, it was a necessity that the
spirituality of the religion of Jesus should stamp itself on
the Jewish Scriptures. The divine revelation to Israel was
a standard of faith for the Church of the first century, but
a new revelation had appeared in Christianity, and it was
essential that the two should be brought into harmony. For
that generation it was more important that a higher spiritual
feeling should be impressed on the Old Testament than that
its meaning should be investigated in a critical, historical
way. With us the case is different ; the ideas of Christianity
have embodied themselves in history, and we can look
quietly at the Old Testament religion as one step in the de-
velopment of Judaism. It was not so in the first century.
Christianity was engaged in a struggle for life, and one of its
most powerful weapons was the demonstration of its harmony
with the book which contained God's revelation to Israel in
the olden time. This was the instinctive feeling which
prompted the scriptural exegesis of the New Testament
writers. And it must not be forgotten that there is a basis
of exegetical truth in their procedure. The Old Testament
thought is controlled by a true spiritual feeling which found
fuller expression in the more developed ideas of Christianity.
From this point of view the mechanical predictive element
is of small importance. No OM Testament writer foresaw
the times of Christianity, though many a prophet and many
a psalmist had in his own soul the germs of the teaching of
Jesus. The early Christians were conscious of this substan-
tial identity between the two revelations. If they carried
140 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD.
the correspondence of form too far, seeing circumstantial
agreements where none existed, this is what is to be expected.
Christianity, by adopting the Old Testament, established the
unity of the whole Jewish development, and thus initiated
a study of the Scriptures which was destined after varied
exegetical fortunes to lead to a separation between the essen-
tial and the unessential, and a recognition of the real spiritu-
ality of Old Testament and New Testament alike.
CHAPTEE III.
SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS.
WE have now to inquire into the Jewish doctrine of
supernatural intelligences inferior to the divine being.
Beginning with the Old Testament, we must then ask whether
the doctrine received accretions in the post-biblical period,
and in what form it is found in the New Testament.
1. It will suffice merely to mention the survivals from early
animistic beliefs which occur in the Old Testament, but do
not maintain themselves in the later religious development.
That oldest system of thought, according to which every
object of nature, animate or inanimate, was inhabited by
a spirit, seems to have vanished. We cannot, indeed, be
sure on this point, our existing Hebrew literature has
been carefully worked over by monotheistic writers, who
have probably omitted or transformed many of the lower
popular beliefs. Such beliefs, as we know from the history
of other peoples, often survive a long time even in the pres-
ence of higher culture. Yet, judging from the few hints
given in the Old Testament, it seems probable that the
Hebrews, as early as the fourteenth century B. c., had already
left behind them, or greatly modified, the old vague fetish-
ism of which traces appear only in a few objects of popular
worship. 1 Among these the teraphim may perhaps be in-
cluded, household protecting spirits, possibly a developed
1 On remains of totemism in the Hebrew folk-religion see J. G. Frazer,
" Totemism," Edinburgh, 1887 ; W. R. Smith, " The Religion of the Semites,"
London and New York, 1889.
142 SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS.
survival of the primitive divine tree or stone or animal. 1
More definite instances of demons 2 are found in the sa'ir and
lilit of Tsa. xxxiv. 14; these creatures (called "satyr," or
" he goat," and " night-monster," in the Kevised English Ver-
sion) seem, like the Arabian jinn, to have been originally wild
animals, thought of as hostile to man. They were probably
Canaanitish objects of worship (Lev. xvii. 7) ; whether they
belonged to the original Hebrew system, or were adopted by
the Hebrews from their neighbors, it is hard to say. 3
Magic art, of which traces appear in the Old Testament,
was no doubt originally connected with demon-worship ; that
is to say, it issues out of that primitive stratum of thought
in which it was believed that man could coerce the extra-
human supernatural powers. This has proved itself to be
one of the most obstinate and persistent of man's primitive
beliefs ; it maintained its place down to the New Testa-
ment times (with ever-changing forms) ; it appears in the
Talmud, and exists to-day all over the world. It is founded
on a vague idea that the supernatural is somehow under the
control of law, and that unlimited power and happiness be-
long to him who can discover this law. It is a curious
example of the survival, in a period of high culture, of the
crude faith of primitive savagery. 4
1 General analogy would suggest a totemistic origin for the teraphim,
though in the Old Testament they have probably passed beyond the primitive
form and seem sometimes to have been human in shape (1 Sam. xix. 13) ; in
any case we must suppose that they represent the old family-cult.
2 The word " demon " is here used not in the later sense of " malignant
spirit," but in the signification (to which the etymology points) of a supernat-
ural being who has not been raised to the rank of a tribal or national god.
8 For the Babylonian demon lilit, cf. Lenormant, " La Magie chez les
Chaldeens," and for the use of the term in the Talmud, see Weber, " System
der pal. Theol.," p. 246. The term shedim is employed in the Old Testament
of foreign deities only (Deut. xxxii. 17, Ps. cxxxvi. 37) ; in Babylonian it sig-
nifies " bull-deity," and seems therefore not to express a class of demons.
4 Necromancy is a well-defined fact in the Old Testament, and was doubt-
less employed abundantly by the Hebrews (Isa. viii. 19). The demon of necro-
SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS. 143
The demon-figure of the Old Testament which is most
clearly defined, and which made the most serious effort to
maintain itself in the national thought is Azazel (Lev. xvi.).
In the solemn rite of the day of atonement he appears as a
wilderness-power to whom pertains the domain of evil ; the
world is, as it were, divided between Yahwe and Azazel. So
distinct is the personality and so great the power of the
demon that some have thought of identifying him with
Satan. But though the two personages are in some regards
identical, their historical developments are so different that
they must be treated as separate conceptions. Of the early
history of Azazel we know nothing; he makes an abrupt
appearance in a late post-exilian document and is never
mentioned elsewhere in the Old Testament ; he plays a great
role in the book of Enoch (viii. ix.), where he is the leader
of the evil spirits, and is condemned to imprisonment till
the day of judgment, when he is to be cast into the fire (x.).
Here certainly he seems to play the part of Satan ; yet in
the succeeding literature it is Satan that keeps the first place,
and Azazel practically vanishes. It is to be noted that in
Leviticus he is spoken of as a well-known person ; he is a
wilderness-demon, somehow connected with the goat. It
seems a natural inference that he was originally a satyr- like
or goat-like figure, a hostile desert-power to be placated by
an offering, and by some means singled out from the mass of
demons and elevated to a controlling position. The similarity
between his role and that of the Persian Ahriman is obvious ;
and it is not impossible that this isolation of Azazel was
due to an impulse derived from Persian thought. Satan and
mantic art is called ob (1 Sam. xxviii., Isa. xxix. 4, cf. Isa. viii. 19), a word of
uncertain origin. Of ancestor- worship there is no direct trace ; the teraphim,
as household deities, may point to such a cult through a fusion of totems and
human ancestors. The plural form of the word may refer to the mass of
tereph-objects in a family or clan. Jer. ii. 26, 27, deals with a late form
of idolatry.
144 SUBORDINATE SUPERNATUEAL BEINGS
Azazel may be looked on as rivals ; of the contest between
them we do not know the details. It appears only that
victory fell to the former on probable general grounds which
will be pointed out below. That the Azazel-cult had no
little hold on the popular feeling is evident from the fact
that it was incorporated into the advanced Levitical ritual. 1
2. Alongside of these demon-forms we find a more ad-
vanced conception in the host of spirits who are represented
as forming Yahwe's heavenly court. The fullest and most
striking description of this court is given in the story of Ahab
and Micaiah (1 Kings xxii. 19-23) : " 1 saw Yahwe sitting on
his throne and . all the . host of heaven standing by him on
his right hand and on his left. And Yahwe said, Who will
entice Ahab that he may go up and fall at Eamoth-Gilead ?
And one said one thing, and another another, and there came
forward a spirit, 2 and stood before Yahwe and said, I will
entice him. And Yahwe said, How ? and he said, I will go
forth and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his
prophets. And he said, Thou shalt entice him, and also
thou shalt succeed ; go forth and do so." Here we have an
apparently homogeneous mass of spirits without distinction
of grade and authority; the whole body forms a sort of
council, whose advice on this important occasion is asked
by Yahwe. There is no question of right or wrong ; the
spirit of falsehood is the agent of Yahwe acting by his direc-
tion and assured of his support. The prophet Micaiah, wish-
ing to account for the predictions of Ahab's prophets, thinks
1 Azazel seems to be a Hebrew word, possibly connected with the stem
azaz, " strong ; " the significations " he from whom one withdraws," or " ho
who withdraws himself [from God] " (from azal) do not accord so well with
the probably primitive character of the demon-figure. But the origin of the
idea and the name is uncertain.
2 Literally, " the spirit ; " namely, the one who had just manifested himself
in Ahab's prophets, not the spirit of prophecy in general, but the inspirer of
this special prediction.
SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS. 145
it necessary to ascribe them to a direct influence from God.
Other examples are found in the evil spirit which, sent by
God, broke up the friendly relations between Abirnelech and
the Shechemites (Judg. ix. 23), and the evil spirit from
Yahwe (or from God), which disturbed the soul of Saul
(1 Sam. xvi. 14-23). 1
These spirits doubtless issue out of old animistic material.
The peculiarity of the conception is that the spirit-being is
completely isolated from the object to which it was attached
in primitive times. The sa'ir (and perhaps also Azazel)
seems to have been thought of as possessing an animal form,
as was probably the case in earliest times with most spirits.
It was, however, a primitive belief that the soul or spirit
could detach itself from the body in which it resided, and go
its independent way. We may suppose that the progress of
reflection gradually led men to isolate the spirit from its
bodily connections, and this is a great advance in the organ-
ization of the supernatural world. In the Old Testament,
further, the spirits appear as completely subordinated to the
supreme God, and this monotheistic constitution points to a
comparatively late period in religious development. 2 From
the non-appearance of this body of spirits in the prophetic
writings it may be inferred, indeed, that they belonged rather
to the popular than to the prophetical religious scheme ; still,
however this may be, and whatever may have been the
looser popular ideas on the subject, the actual spirit-system
of the Old Testament is cast in a monotheistic mould.
1 Cf . also Job iv. 1 5, where in a night-vision the announcement of a great
religious truth is ascribed to a " spirit," for so apparently we must render the
Hebrew, and not " wind," or " breath."
2 Yet here also we find traces of magic, in the exorcism, for example, of
Saul's evil spirit by David's music (1 Sam. xvi. 23), and in the musical invoca-
tion of Elisha's spirit of prophecy (2 Kings iii. 15). This survival of the old
idea seems not to have interfered with the practical supremacy of Yahwe.
At the present day there is found in the Christian world a similar combina-
tion of belief in God and reliance on magic.
10
146 SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS.
The subordination to the supreme God is complete,
there is no independence of action in the spirits. Nor is
there, so far as appears, any differentiation of moral character
among the members of the body. All dwell in the presence
of Yahwe, are his servants, carry out his commands whether
for good or for evil. If the epithet " evil " is applied to one
of them, it is rather from the nature of the work assigned
him than from his moral character. They thus represent
a stadium in religious development in which a substantially
unitary conception of the world has been reached, but the
demand for separation between good and evil moral super-
natural agencies has not yet shown itself. God is absolutely
all, the creator of light and darkness, peace and evil (Isa.
xlv. 7). There came a time when the Israelitish ethical
feeling was offended by the imputation of moral evil to God ;
but apparently down to and during the exile the best think-
ers of the nation were satisfied with the acknowledgment of
his supreme control of all things. The sharp struggle to es-
tablish the monotheistic idea left little time for this sort of
ethical elaboration of the theistic scheme.
3. Still another form of supernatural agency is found in
the angels. They stand alongside of the spirits, resembling
them in some respects, differing from them in others ; no
attempt is made in the Old Testament to define the relations
between the two classes, both are growths out of the old
folk-faith, with different starting-points and paths of develop-
ment. The angels of the older Hebrew literature (down to
the second century B. c.) are like the spirits in having no
functional or ethical differentiation among themselves ; they
are all ministers and messengers of God, executing his designs,
benevolent or harmful, saving or destroying without respect
to circumstance. They differ from the spirits in the nature
of the commissions intrusted to them, appearing often in
bodily shape, and performing bodily actions, such as deliver-
SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS. 147
ing messages to persons and inflicting plagues, while the
spirits act directly on the minds of men.
The ground of this difference between the two categories of
being is to be sought in their origins. Both doubtless go
back to the spiritual essences which were believed to reside
in objects ; but the Old Testament spirits seem to be merely
the isolation of these essences, while the angels appear to be
derived immediately from forms of old deities. For between
angels and " sons of God " or " sons of the Elohim " in the
Old Testament there does not seem to be any difference of
nature. These last occur by name on three occasions : they
intermarry with human beings and become the fathers of old
heroes (Gen. vi. 2) ; they form a heavenly court, and report
their procedures to Yahwe (Job i. ii.) ; they are present at
the creation of the world (Job xxxviii. 7). It is they also with
whom God takes counsel respecting the creation of man, and
in whose image man is created (Gen. i. 26) ; they are con-
sulted by Yahwe as to the coercion of the tower-builders
(Gen. xi. 7) ; they are the Elohim-beings with whom man
is compared by the Psalmist (Ps. viii. 5) ; with two of them
(afterward called " angels " ) Yahwe descends to earth to in-
quire into the alleged iniquities of Sodom (Gen. xviii. 19). 1
They carry us back to a theistic scheme in which Yahwe
was only the first among a host of equals. In time the rest
were subordinated to him, becoming in part the inferior
deities of other nations, in part the ministers and messengers
1 In bhe form of heathen deities, Elohim-beings to whom the nations have
been assigned (Dent, xxxii. 8 in the Greek), they appear in Ps. Ixxxii. (v. 1 :
" Yahwe judges in the midst of gods " [elohim] ; v. 6 : "I have said, ye are gods,
and all of you sons of Elyon " [the most High] ), Ps. xxix. 1 (where the " sons
of gods," elim, are called on to give honor to Yahwe), Ps. Ixxxix. 7 ("sons of
gods," elim), Ps. xcvii. 7 (" Do homage to him, all gods," elohim), and perhaps
Ps. Iviii. 1 (2), by a slight change of text : " Do ye indeed utter justice, O
gods 7 " This conception of heathen gods, which is inconsistent with mono-
theism, seems to have maintained itself after the exile, but does not impair
the practical supremacy of the God of Israel.
148 SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS.
of Yah we. It is in this latter character that they are termed
" angels " in the Old Testament ; the expression " sons of the
Elohini " (that is, memhers of the Elohim-class) or " sons of
God " designates them in the Hebrew theology rather as the
attendants of the supreme deity, while the angels are active
agents, and intermediaries between God and the world.
Their creation is nowhere mentioned ; their existence from
the beginning is assumed.
The oldest angelic representation in the Old Testament
seems to be that of a being who is apparently charged with
the whole divine authority, and acts as if he were an inde-
pendent divinity (the angel of the Lord or of God). Such is
the tone of the being who appears to Hagar (Gen. xvi. 7-13),
to Joshua (Josh. v. 13), and to Manoah (Judg. xiii. 18). This
figure is perhaps a real survival of an ancient deity ; it is thus
that an independent deity, transformed in a monotheistic
faith into a messenger of the supreme God, would act; and
it is to be observed that the title " angel " distinctly and
completely differences .such a being from God himself,
Yahwe could never be called his own messenger. In this way,
also, we are to understand the vision in Zech. iii., where the
titles " the angel of Yahwe " and " Yahwe " are interchanged ;
the divine authority resides in the angel, but he is not identi-
cal with the divine being. Closely allied with this angelic
form are the angels of the face or presence (Isa. Ixiii. 9, cf. Ex.
xxxiii. 15) and of the name (Ex. xxiii. 21), who represent the
divine power in a very special way. From these passages it
may be concluded that this conception of special angelic
intermediaries retained its hold on Jewish thought down to a
comparatively late period ; it appears in an altered form in
the book of Daniel. It arose from the demand for an actual
divine presence among men, coupled with the feeling that
God could not appear in person.
This representation of the intercourse between man and
SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS. 149
God was, however, gradually modified by the monotheistic
feeling. The increasing exaltation of the divine being tended
to reduce all subordinate supernatural intelligences to the
same level ; more and more he was withdrawn into absolute
aloneness, and all his ministers were as one in his sight.
Some time before the exile the angel appears as a simple
messenger and agent of God ; so we may probably understand
the horses and chariots which surrounded Elisha (2 Kings
vi 17), and such is the character of the being who acts as
interpreter to the prophet Zechariah (Zech. i. 9). This is
the view which became more and more prominent in the
post-biblical Judaism, and passed into the New Testament ;
it is found in Daniel, Tobit, and Enoch, and in the Talmud. 1
At this point we have to notice an extraordinary develop-
ment of the scheme of the angelic world which appears in
the Jewish literature a couple of hundred years before the
beginning of our era. In- the body of the Old Testament no
one of the angels receives a special proper name, nor is there
any definite gradation among them. In the books of Tobit,
Daniel, and Enoch, we are suddenly introduced to a well-
organized angelic society, the individuals of which have their
1 Weber, " System der pal. Theol ," 34, 35, and Kohut, " Jiidische Angel-
ologie und Damonologie." Angelic appearances are rare in the later historical
books ; doubtless the apparition which struck down Heliodorus (2 Mac. iii. 24
ff.) was thought of as an angel. In the Old Testament writings down to the
end of the exile, angels occur almost exclusively in folk-stories. About one
fourth of the occurrences are found in the narrative books of the Pentateuch :
(15 in Gen., 6 in Ex., 11 in Numb., of which 10 are in the Balaam-story) ;
Judges has nearly one fifth (22, the story of Manoah, ch. xiii., containing 10) ;
Samuel and Kings show a somewhat smaller number (14), and Chronicles
nearly as many (10); the prophets are almost silent (1 in Hosea, and 1 in
Isaiah). The angel in pre-exilian times thus seems to belong to the popular
rather than to the prophetic religion. Immediately after the exile the
angelic figure becomes very prominent in Zechariah (20 occurrences), but
differs from the earlier form somewhat, in being more intimate and confiden-
tial with the prophet. Later in Job (twice) and in Psalms (8 times) the
conception of angelic agency is loftier. The word " angel " is found only
twice in Daniel, but angelic beings play a very important part.
150 SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS.
own proper names and exercise functions unknown to the
earlier writings. In Tobit, Eafael is the affable companion
and mentor of the young Tobias, occupies himself with
domestic matters in a genial human way, and shows himself
to be a clever man of affairs. Two other names appear in
Daniel: Gabriel is interpreter to the seer (Dan. viii. 16);
Michael is the guardian angel of Israel (Dan. x. 13) ; guar-
dian angels of other nations are spoken of, but not named ;
mention is made of holy " watchers " who are sent down as
agents of God. Enoch details the angelic history at great
length, with long lists of names and much specialization of
function. The question arises, How is this great expansion of
the angelic scheme to be explained ; may it be regarded as a
purely native development ? or must a foreign, especially a
Persian influence be appealed to ? 1 In the first place, it is to
be observed that the existence of a Persian influence on the
Jewish pneurnatology of this time is vouched for by the name
of the evil spirit in Tobit ; Asmodeus is confessedly the Per-
sian Aeshma daeva. It is also to be noted that the Persians
probably had at this time a well-developed system of super-
natural intelligences which was not borrowed by them, since
the greater part of it can be traced back to the old Aryan
material. 2 Alongside of the supreme God, Ahura-Mazda,
stood the six Amesha-gpentas and a host of other deities
and spirits who were invested with various functions in the
government and maintenance of the world. A special posi-
tion as guardians was assigned to certain star-deities (Tistrya
and three others), who presided over the four quarters of the
world, and to the Fravashis, who, whatever their origin, were
charged with the control of various departments of humr n
1 See Kohut, " Angelologie und Damonologie," and C. de Harlez, " DCS
Origines du Zoroastrisme," Paris, 1879 (originally appeared in the "Journal
Asiatique," 1878).
2 Spiegel, " Eranische Altertbumskunde," ii.
SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS. 151
life. It must be borne in mind that the Jews would prob-
ably take such ideas from popular beliefs rather than from
books ; for example, the character of the Asmodeus of Tobit
does not correspond exactly with that of the Aeshma of the
Persian sacred books, and the more natural explanation of
this difference is that the popular mythology diverged a little
from the theological standards, as has been true to a great
extent aniong Christian peoples. It is quite conceivable that
the Persian popular doctrine of guardian spirits was fuller
than that of the books (supposing, as is likely, that books
existed at this time), or differed from it in some details ; or
we may suppose that the idea of angels as guardians of par-
ticular nations originated among the Jews under Persian
influence. 1 Abundant opportunity for borrowing such con-
ceptions was afforded by the long residence of the exiles in
Babylonia after it became a Persian province. Ezekiel and
his successors showed themselves quite ready to adopt certain
Semitic-Babylonian ideas, and there was no reason why there
should not have been a similar willingness to receive sugges-
tions from the Persians. The scenes of the books of Esther,
Tobit, and Daniel lie in the Persian region. A general in-
fluence, therefore, is not at all improbable. All that need be
supposed is an expansion of existing Jewish ideas in the
direction of organization and specialization of function. The
supposition of borrowing is made more probable by the fact
that the angelic system in Daniel is not entirely in the line of
the preceding Old Testament development. Angels do not
appear as national guardians in the later post-biblical books.
In the New Testament there is one apparent reference to the
belief in the angelic guardianship of individuals (Matt, xviii.
1 An Old Testament point of attachment for this idea is found in the
Greek text of Deut. xxxii. 8 : " The Most High set the boundaries of the nations
according to the number of the angels of God," or, as the emended Hebrew
text would read : " The number of the sons of the Elohim," where the refer-
ence would be to the gods of the nations.
152 SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS.
10); the Michael of the New Testament Apocalypse has a
somewhat different coloring from the angel of that name in
Daniel, he is the prince and leader of the people of God,
but his conflict with the dragon connects him rather with
the old Babylonian myth of the fight between Bel and
Tiamat than with the function of guardianship. The names
of the biblical angels are Hebrew, which is what we might
expect on the supposition that the Jews took general sugges-
tions from the Persians, and worked them up in their own
manner.
The position of angels in the New Testament is in general
the same as in the Old Testament, but with noteworthy
modifications in some books. They are immortal (Luke xx-
36), and neither marry nor are given in marriage (Matt. xxii.
30) ; their special ordinary function is to minister to God's
people, particularly in times of doubt or distress, and it is
thought to be not unnatural that they should speak to men
(Acts xxiii. 9, a Pharisaic opinion, shared, no doubt, by Chris-
tians) ; they take a lively interest in men's spiritual expe-
riences (Luke xv. 10) ; they conduct the souls of the righteous
to paradise (Luke xvi. 22) ; they inflict disease on wicked men
(Acts xii. 23) ; they form a sort of heavenly society, before
which Christ will acknowledge his servants, in order that
they may be admitted to the privileges of this blessed com-
panionship (Luke xii. 8 ; Sev. iii. 5) ; they are to be the attend-
ants of the Son of Man when he shall come to judge the
world, it is they who will gather the elect, and remove the
wicked (Matt. xiii. 41 ; xxv. 31 ; 2 Thess. i. 7) ; they are them-
selves called "elect" (1 Tim. v. 21), chosen by God for his
service in distinction from those " angels " who pertain to the
Devil (Matt. xxv. 41 ; Eev.xii. 9), Satan, however, can assume
the form of an angel of light, for the purpose of deceiving
men, just as his ministers, false teachers of religion, present
themselves as apostles of Christ (2 Cor. xi. 14, 15) ; believers
SUBORDINATE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS. 153
are attended by angels, who have special access to God (Matt,
xviii. 10 ; Acts xii. 15) ; the natural inference is that each
believer has a guardian angel, who represents him in the
divine presence and cares for his interests, an extension
of the conception in the book of Tobit.
Some peculiar representations are found in Paul's Epistles.
Believers, it is said (1 Cor. vi. 3) are to judge angels (whether
good or Jmd angels is not clear) to be superior to them in
dignity, doubtless in consequence of their near relation to
Christ, a view which may be compared with that of Luke
xx. 36, where they are thought of as equal to the good
angels ; cf. in 1 Pet. i. 12 the statement that these last
desire to understand the things of the gospel, the inference
being that they are not completely enlightened therein.
More difficult is his opinion that women in the church-
gatherings, or while praying or prophesying, should be veiled
" on account of the angels ( 1 Cor. xi. 10). The veil, as the
sign of subordination, is understood to symbolize man's
authority over woman but what has this to do with
angels ? It cannot be intended simply to express respect for
them ; this would be equally obligatory on men. It cannot
be to teach them, whether they be holy or unholy, a lesson
of subordination , this seems a forced idea. Nor is it nat-
ural to regard the expression as meaning that the angels will
report the conduct of the women to God ; the apostle would
hardly thus refer to a general angelic function in connection
with a particular custom. His intention seems to be to
insist that the woman shall wear the badge of subordination
or ownership in the presence of beings who represent, having
had a part in establishing, that order of creation in which
the woman was made subject to the man. In that case we
infer that he understood the " let us make " of Gen. i. 26 as
including the angels. In Rom. viii. 38 a hierarchical consti-
tution of the angelic world is hinted at in the expressions
154 EVIL SPIRITS.
" angels, principalities, powers," the two last terms being not
further defined. These beings are, however, here presented
as hostile to the Christian life, as in Eph. vi 12, Col. ii 15 j 1
while in Eph. i. 21, iii. 10, Col. i. 16, ii. 10, they are obe-
dient servants of God. It appears, therefore, that these ex-
pressions are used by Paul and the authors of Ephesians
and Colossians in a twofold sense, of both good and bad
supernatural powers.
This later angelic scheme appears thus to be the Old Tes-
tament system, organized under Persian influence into a
double hierarchy (good and bad), and in the Colossian heresy
(Col. ii. 18) tinged with the gnostic thought which repre-
sented the angels as being, both ontologically, and as objects
of worship and instruments of salvation, the connecting link
between God and man. In the Christian scheme proper they
were subordinate to Christ, and probably in general to the
divine spirit, though in one place (Acts viii. 26, 29) the same
act is ascribed at one time to an angel, at another to the
spirit. On this point there was doubtless fluctuation of view,
by reason of the fluctuating conception of the spirit.
4. Coming now to the doctrine of evil spirits, we take for
our starting-point the general Old Testament representation
of the spirit-world which is referred to above. This somewhat
colorless mass of beings seems to have been gradually differ-
entiated in accordance wi*h the advance of Jewish ethical
thought stimulated by outside influences. One might suppose
that the highly developed Babylonian pneumatology would
have measurably affected the Israelitish exiles ; but the liter-
ature hardly favors such a supposition, evil spirits proper
do not appear in the Old Testament. The earliest post-
exilian evil being is Satan ; for the explanation of the later
1 The case is different in Gal. i. 8, where the preaching of another gospel
by an "angel from heaven '' is stated as a mere, and in fact impossible, sup-
position in hyperbolical fashion.
EVIL SPIRITS. 155
demoniacal system we are rather led to look to the contact
of the Jews with Persian (and perhaps with Greek) ideas.
The Mazdean religion had a large machinery of evil spirits,
to which was ascribed the production of evil effects on the
body and the soul of man, though there seems to have been
no well-delined belief in demoniacal possession; the long
residence of the Jews on Persian soil may have given them
familiarity with this spiritual apparatus. Of direct Greek
influence on this doctrine there is no proof ; but that it was
not wholly ineffective may perhaps be inferred from the
usage of the Septuagint translators, who have given us our
word "demon." They employed this familiar Greek term 1 to
render Hebrew expressions for heathen deities, idols, and
wilderness-spirits (Deut. xxxii. 17; Ps. xcv. 5; cvi. 37; Isa.
Ixv. 11 ; xiii. 21 ; xxxiv. 14) ; that is, for supernatural powers
in general hostile to the God of Israel. This sense of the word
maintained itself into the New Testament times ; it is found,
for example, in a passage (1 Cor. x. 20, 21) in which Paul
appears to say that the eating of things offered to Gentile
deities was having communion with demons. 2 The related
sense of evil, indwelling spirit also attached itself to current
Greek usage. But before examining this point, we must look
at earlier Hebrew developments of the world of evil spiritual
agencies.
1 Dalmon, used by Homer (H. i. 222) and the tragic poets in the sense of
" god," " divine being," sometimes also with the idea of hurtfulness, came to
be employed specifically to signify secondary deities, and finally the shades of
the dead. Plato (Apol. i. 5) distinguishes between gods and demons, suggest-
ing that the latter are children of gods. Dalmonlon is likewise equivalent to
"deity ; " the charge against Socrates was (Xen. Mem. i. 1, 1) that he refused
to acknowledge publicly the gods (theous) of the city, and introduced other
new deities (daimonia). Socrates' own daimonion was a genius or guardian
who told him what he ought and ought not to do (Mem. iv. 8, 1). From this
conception in part came the later Jewish nse of the term, on which see below
2 This statement seems to rest on the old idea that sacrifices were acts of
communion between the god and the worshipper, both partaking of the flesh
of the animal offered.
156 EVIL SPIRITS.
We have already seen that before the exile no one figure
stands out prominently from the mass of spirits who do the
bidding of Yahwe ; he is absolutely supreme, and his minis-
ters perform whatever good or bad offices he assigns them.
But just after the return from Babylon, a new spiritual actor
in the affairs of Israel appears in the shape of an "adver-
sary," a Satan, whose function it is to oppose the welfare of
the chosen people. The prophet Zechariah pictures the high
priest Joshua, the representative of the nation, as pleading
his people's cause before the angel of the Lord ; he is opposed
by "the Satan," whose object is to prevent the rebuilding
of Jerusalem ; the Satan is rebuked, and Joshua is promised
that if he will faithfully keep God's commands the nation
shall be established. The figure of the great spiritual adver-
sary of the nation seems here to be in the act of taking
shape. He is the embodiment of all of Israel's difficulties
and enemies. Israelitish thought, constantly grappling with
the problem of the suffering of Yahwe's people, had appar-
ently reached the conviction that the opposition to the na-
tional well-being must come from a spirit hostile to God.
This is a great advance on the pre-exilian conception of the
constitution of the spirit- world ; we can only suppose that
the conditions of Jewish life in Babylonia had induced rapid
progress in this direction. In the book of Job we may recog-
nize further progress in tKe elaboration of the idea of Satan.
In the prophet, his relations are with Israel ; in Job, with
humanity. He traverses the earth with no benevolent in-
tent ; he discusses Job's character with cynical acuteness ; he
induces God to subject his servant to severest tests simply
to try his integrity. He is a malignant and powerful being,
but he is not detached from the person and service of God ;
on the contrary, he is a member of the divine court, presents
himself among the sons of God before the divine throne, is
called on by Yahwe to make report of his doings, arid re-
EVIL SPIRITS. 157
ceives from him his commission to test the character of Job.
Such also is probably his position in Zechariah. 1 The repre-
sentation in Job is an imaginative one ; Satan appears only
in the court of heaven, in the dwelling-place of God and
his ministers. In 1 Chron. xxi. 1 he is introduced in a more
commonplace manner as tempting David to number Israel.
The progress involved in this statement may be seen by a
comparison of 2 Sam. xxiv. 1, where, in the description of
the same incident, it is Yahwe who incites the king to the
act of disobedience. Between the two statements (an inter-
val of probably two or three hundred years) the feeling had
grown up that instigation to evil could not properly be re-
ferred to God ; an evil spirit becomes the agent of temptation
to sin. The advance in this representation consists, as is in-
timated above, in the completer introduction of Satan into
man's every-day life. In Zechariah, he is the adversary of
the nation ; in Job, his r6le is that of slanderer of righteous
men (the nation also being perhaps had in mind) ; in Chron-
icles, while the event in question is a national one, it may
probably be inferred that he is regarded as a general inciter
to evil, entering into the conduct of man's spiritual life.
After 1 Chron. xxi. 1, Satan is mentioned no more in the
Old Testament, and rarely in the extra- biblical books ; the
two works in which he appears treat him in very differ-
ent ways. The first attempt at a spiritual interpretation of
the. serpent of Gen. iii. occurs in the Wisdom of Solomon
1 It is difficult to fix the chronological relation of Job to Zechariah pre-
cisely. Even if we regard the man Job as the representative of Israel, and
the thought of the book as springing out of the exilian suffering, it is not
necessary to place its composition during the exile. The condition and feel-
ing of suffering doubtless continued after the return. The elaborate argu-
mentation of the book rather points to a later period. The portraiture of
Satan in Job seems to be more developed than that in Zechariah, and the
prologue seems to belong to the original scheme of the work. It may be
added that the interpretation of the person of Job as a representative of Israel
does not accord with the evident non-national coloring of the book.
158 EVIL SPIRITS.
(ii. 24). The narrative in Genesis recognizes in the tempter
of Eve only an animal form, endowed with intelligence and
speech. 1 This account, apparently the survival and recon-
struction of an old Semitic myth, 2 stands isolated in Gen-
esis ; it is mentioned nowhere else in the Old Testament.
But after the fifth century B. c. (when the narrative prob-
ably assumed its present shape) the feeling would naturally
arise in some circles that so tremendous an event as the
introduction of sin and death into the world could not be
referred to the agency of beast ; the serpent-form would
come to be regarded as the vehicle chosen by a great spir-
itual adversary to vent on the first man the hate which
according to the earlier books inspired his attempts on Israel
and Job. The name given in Wisdom to this wicked spirit
is Diabolos, the accuser or adversary (the Greek translation
of the Hebrew name Satan). It can hardly be doubted that
in the mind of the writer this being was identical with the
Satan of the Jewish books. " Through envy of the Devil,"
so the passage runs (that is, envy of man's immortality or
happiness), " death came into the world." Here the activity
of the Adversary assumes the largest proportions, he has
succeeded in inflicting the greatest evil on the human race.
The book of Enoch, with its fondness for hierarchical organi-
zation, makes Satan the head and ruler of evil spirits (liii. 3),
and places under him a hsrd of satans who do his bidding in
wicked ministrations.
That the progress of the idea of Satan as tempter was slow
seems probable, not only from the infrequency with which
he is introduced (lie does not appear between Enoch and the
New Testament), but also from the fact that neither Enoch
1 Josephus also, who, as belonging to a priestly family, was probably well
instructed in the orthodox Jewish theology of the time, here recognizes only
the animal serpent (Ant. i. 1, 4).
2 The conflict of the dragon Tiamat with the gods.
EVIL SPIRITS. 159
nor Josephus connects him with the serpent of Genesis. Pos-
sibly this identification began in Egypt in a Jewish circle in-
fluenced by Greek speculation (represented by the Wisdom of
Solomon), and only gradually penetrated into Palestine. The
data are, however, insufficient for determining to what extent
this view was held by Palestinian Jews before the beginning
of our era. It is certain that Satan appears as a well-devel-
oped figure in the earliest parts of the New Testament, and
we may hence conclude that in the preceding two centuries
he had formed a distinct part of the Jewish belief. The
strenuous Jewish monotheism may have been unfavorable to
the easy recognition of so powerful an opponent of God. 1
Alongside of the development of the conception of a great
spiritual adversary, there grew up a history of fallen angels,
the starting-point of which was the account in Gen. vi.
1, 2. The origin and date of this passage are doubtful. The
" sons of the Elohim " are in general angels (this expression
never meaning anything else in the Old Testament), or more
exactly, they are members of the class of Elohim-beings,
the Israelitish representatives of the old divinities. Inter-
marriages between deities and human beings abound in all
mythologies ; such alliances, surviving in a monotheistic sys-
tem, would naturally take the shape of the Genesis-story.
This may be the remnant of a mythical narrative brought
by the Hebrews from Mesopotamia to Canaan, or it may
have come to the Jews from the Babylonians during the
exile, or from the Assyrians before the exile. Eor our pres-
ent purposes, it does not greatly matter which one of these
explanations we adopt. The incident is not elsewhere men-
tioned in the Old Testament, and had no perceptible influ-
ence on the Jewish thought of the Old Testament time. The
story appears to be introduced in Genesis, not to account for
1 The later Jewish Satanology also seems to have been somewhat uncer-
tain in tone. See Weber, " System," 48, 54.
160 EVIL SPIRITS.
the increasing wickedness of man, and thus as a partial ex-
planation of the flood (for the writer does not condemn the
procedure of the angels), but to set forth the origin of the
ancient heroes, the men of renown ; the incident is narrated
with the utmost impersonality, simply as an historical fact.
The book of Enoch, which takes this material and expands
it at great length, adopts an altogether different tone. It
denounces the conduct of the angels as the height of im-
piety, gives the names of their leaders, and ascribes to them
the beginnings of all the wickedness of the world. They
are said to have taught men the science of war, the art of
writing, and other hurtful things (ch. Ixix.). Their leaders
are Azazel and Seinyaza ; their fate is to be bound, hand and
foot, and imprisoned till the day of judgment, when they are
to be cast into the fire (ch. x.). This elaborate narrative is
an attempt at a philosophical history of civilization, following
and expanding the idea of Gen. i.-xi. ; it undertakes to give
the beginnings of the arts of life, which it thinks it necessary
to refer to a supernatural origin, and, curiously enough, to anti-
godly agency. 1 So primitive and malistic a view, one would
suppose, could have bad no wide currency. The whole angel-
ological scheme seems not to have made any great impres-
sion on the Jewish mind ; part of the description in Enoch
is adopted in the New Testament Apocalypse (xx. 1-3) ; the
fate of the angels who-eame down from heaven is briefly
summed up in Jude 6 ; and there is perhaps an allusion in
Luke x. 18 to the same occurrence in the statement that
Satan fell like lightning from heaven ; but the body of the
New Testament thought ignores this episode. It was re-
1 How the author construed the parallel but dissimilar account of the ori-
gins of civilization in Gen. iv. 16-24 is not clear. The descent of the angels
ig put in the days of Jared (Gen. v. 18, cf. Irad, Gen. iv. 18) in the book of
Jubilees (4), and in the Greek text of Enoch (vi. 6), a bit of folk-etymology
(" Jared" means "descending") ; the author of Enoch probably held that the
Cainites learned the arts from the angels.
EVIL SPIRITS. 161
served for post- biblical Christianity to elaborate the fall of
the angels into a dogma. In the Old Testament neither their
fall nor their creation is mentioned ; their existence is sim-
ply assumed, as in Job xxxviii. 7, where it is said that at
the creation of the world the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy. This reticence re-
specting their creation is easily understood if we consider
the angels to be a survival and development out of the old
deities, or Elohim -beings, whose participation in the work of
the creation of the world is involved in the " let us make
man " of Gen. i. 26. The Hebrews, receiving and accepting
these beings as coeval with Yahwe, might naturally not
think of them as included in the created world ; there was
an old Babylonian myth (given in the cuneiform creation
tablet) which derived all the gods from two primitive water-
beings, but there is no clear trace of this in the Old Testa-
ment. 1 Those who insist on seeing the creation of the angels
in the biblical history of creation either prefer to insert it
between the first and second verses of the first chapter of
Genesis, and find in the angelic apostasy and rebellion the
explanation of the chaos which they hold to have supervened
on God's first good creation, 2 or they hold it to be included
in Gen. ii. 1, where, however, the " host of them " refers to
the physical creation (as in Ps. cxlviii. 5). 3
In this connection we may note the curious figures of
Leviathan, Behemoth, and Rahab, which appear in the Old
Testament in several different senses. In Job xli. 1, Levi-
1 The abyss (tekom) of Gen. i. 2 is the primeval earth-covering, out of
which (vs 20, 21) come marine creatures. If there is a faint survival in
verse 2 (the "wind" or "spirit" of God moved or hovered over the waters)
of the old conception of the plastic water, it has been quite transformed by the
monotheistic feeling. On Leviathan, Behemoth, and Rahab, see below.
2 Compare the Talmudic statement that the present successful creation was
only accomplished after several failures, Weber, " System," 43.
3 In Neh. ix. 6, the "host of heaven," which worships God, is different
from the "host " which he is said to have made.
11
162 EVIL SPIRITS.
athan l seems to be the Egyptian crocodile, or else a myth-
ical beast, and in Ps. civ. 26 some huge sea-animal ; it occurs
twice as a symbol of Egypt in Ps. Ixxiv. 21, apparently
under the form of the crocodile, and in Isa. xxvii. 1, where it
is pictured as a winding serpent. The use of the term in
Isaiah connects itself with the mythical reference in Job iii. 8
(cf. xxvL 13), where the Leviathan is apparently the celes-
tial serpent who swallows or otherwise obscures the sun and
the moon, and who may be roused by enchantments ; in this
late form it is a mythical embodiment of the black storm-
cloud or the eclipsing shadow regarded as a hostile demon.
It is probable that the portraiture of the dragon in the New
Testament Apocalypse receives its coloring in part (see Rev.
xii. 4, 13) from this source. An earlier conception is found
in Enoch Ix. (a Noachic fragment), where Leviathan is a
female monster dwelling in the depth of the sea ; in 2 Esdras
vi. 49-52, the creation of this beast is assigned to the fifth
day ; and it is stated that it is to be devoured by them whom
God shall choose. With Leviathan is associated P>ehemoth
(Enoch Ix. 8, where it is masculine), after Job xl. and xli.,
and in the Talmud it is declared that these creatures are
to be the food of Israel in the coming age of blessedness.
There is a singular resemblance between this conception of
two great water-monsters and the Babylonian myth above-
mentioned of the two primitive water principles, Apsu and
Tiamat, male and female, 2 from whom proceeded all other be-
ings. The resemblance between Leviathan and Tiamat can
hardly be accidental ; both are female, and both are marine
and celestial dragons which make war against the good
powers. The Rahab of Job ix. 13, xxvi. 12 (cf. Isa. xxx. 7),
1 The origin of the name is obscure ; it may signify any long beast, and
so be equivalent to "serpent," or "dragon " (Isa. xxvii. 1).
2 Cf. Enoch liv. 8, where the water in the heavens is masculine, and the
water on the earth feminine.
EVIL SPIRITS. 163
is a similar demonic conception. These three figures are in-
teresting as instances of the manner in which the Jewish
religious thought dealt with the old mythical material, grad-
ually humanizing it, and more and more holding it aloof
from the essential spiritual framework of theology. A vin-
dictive dragon, originally the destructive waters of ocean or
sky, becomes finally a beast whose flesh is to furnish food
to the people of God.
The Satan of the New Testament is substantially identical
with the pre-Christian figure, only modified, more sharply
marked off, and more highly elaborated, in accordance with
the characteristic moral-spiritual ideas and intensity of Chris-
tianity. He is the chief of the kingdom of evil spirits and
angels (Matt. xii. 26 ; xxv. 41 ); he has power to inflict disease
on the bodies of men (Luke xiii. 16 ; 1 Cor. v. 5 ; 1 Tim. i. 20) ;
he tempts to sin (Matt. iv. 1-11 ; Eph. vi. 11), and may be re-
sisted (Jas. iv. 7) ; he enters into and controls bad men (Luke xx.
3, 31 ; John viii. 44) ; he is the opponent of the truth (Mark iv.
15 ; Matt. xiii. 39 ; 1 Thess. ii. 18 ; Rev. iii. 9 ; 1 Pet. v. 8); his
hatred is said in one passage (Jude 9) to extend to the dead
body of Moses -, 1 he is identified with the dragon and with the
serpent (Rev. xii. 9 ; xx. 2, 7, cf. John viii. 44 ; 1 Tim. ii. 14),
and the names Satan and the Devil are used interchangeably ;
he is to be cast into hell (Matt. xxv. 41, and cf. Luke x. 18 ;
Rev. xx. 10). He is, in a word, the prince and god of this
world (2 Cor. iv. 4 ; John xiv. 30), the head and embodiment
of all those influences in human life which are hostile to
heavenly godliness. He includes in himself the Satan and
the Azazel of Enoch and the prince of the demons, Beelze-
bub (Matt. xii. 24) ; he unites in his person all morally evil
qualities ; he is the leader of all those spiritual bad powers
whose development has been traced above. In the New
1 On this story see my " Quotations in the New Testament," New York,
Scribner, 1884, pp. 250 f.
164 EVIL SPIRITS.
Testament, as in the pre-Christian literature, his position and
functions, and especially his relation to God, are not clearly
defined. 1 No attempt is made to show how his enormous
power and wicked activity are to be brought into harmony
with the divine omnipotent goodness. He is no mere symbol
or personification of the wicked elements of life ; he is an ob-
jective being, acting apparently without limitations of time
and space. In some cases his power appears to be repre-
sented as co-ordinate with that of God. If God chooses those
who are to believe unto salvation, it is Satan who blinds the
minds of the unbelieving, that the light of the gospel of the
glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn
upon them (2 Cor. iv. 4). The title, "God of this world,"
implies vast power, and reminds us of the Persian rival of
Ahura-Mazda. But on the other hand, the New Testament
has a perfectly distinct conviction of the absolute supremacy
of God. He is the sole fountain of -power in the universe ;
at the end, the kingdom is to be his, death being swallowed
up (1 Cor. xv. 24, 54), and in the Apocalypse (xx. 10),
Satan is to be tormented forever and forever. He represents
the evil of the world, and is to endure till evil shall be
blotted out by the perfecting of the righteous and the im-
prisonment of the wicked. There is no hint of a possible
change in Satan's moral character. The New Testament
leaves him, at the beginning of the new dispensation, as the
embodiment of evil, to abide forever, but in chains and dark-
ness, shorn of his power, impotent any longer to disturb the
moral order of the universe. Its solution of the problem
of evil is practical, not logical or philosophical.
1 There is no distinct chronological development of his person in the New
Testament. His activity is in general more physical in the Apocalypse and
Jude and in the demoniacal representations of the Gospels, more mental and
spiritual in the Epistles and the Fourth Gospel, a difference that seems
to result chiefly from the subject-matter and the religious point of view of
the writers.
EVIL SPIRITS. 165
While we may thus trace the general line of progress of
the figure of Satan, it is less easy to account for its origin.
It appears suddenly in Zechariah and Job, apparently with-
out preparation. The only individualized evil form of which
we read in the earlier literature is the spirit of 1 Kings xxii.
21, and that differs from Satan in two important respects : it
belongs to a different class of beings, and it has no distinct
ethical character; Satan is not a "spirit," but one of the
" sons of the Elohim " (Job i. 6), and he is distinctly malevo-
lent. Both these points have significance in the Israelitish
religious development: the Elohim-beings have their own
history ; and the ascription of moral evil to an Israelitish
supernatural form seems to mark a turning-point in the
national conception of life, it is the beginning of the at-
tempt to separate the domain of evil from that of God.
When the figure of Satan appears abruptly, just after the
close of the exile, we naturally ask whether it is a product of
the unassisted Israelitish religious consciousness or the out-
come in part of foreign influence. But foreign influence
competent to produce such a result in whole or in part, it
does not seem possible to discover. The Jews with whom
the prophet Zechariah returned to Palestine were in contact
with the Persians too short a time to borrow a great religious
idea from them, even if the latter then had the Ahriman of
the A vesta. Among the Babylonians, with whom the Jews
had lived half a century, we know of no great spiritual adver-
sary ; they had evil spirits, as the Jews had, but no such idea
as that of Satan. It is to be noted that the Satan, when we
first meet him, is distinctly incorporated into the well-devel-
oped monotheism of the time ; he is a servant of Yahwe,
though an enemy of Yahwe's friends. Such a conception
presupposes a considerable period of development ; and in
spite of the absence of earlier details, it seems most in accord-
ance with the facts to regard it as a native Jewish growth.
]66 EVIL SPIRITS.
We know that the sons of the Elohim had formed part of the
national-religious material, probably of the folk-religion ; this
element may have been ignored by the pre-exilian and exilian
prophets, as having for them no spiritual significance. But
the national history during the seventh and sixth centuries
called up serious problems and stimulated ethical-religious
thought. In particular, men's minds were occupied with
the question of Israel's suffering, why, it was asked, had
Yahwe permitted hostile hands to bear so heavily on his
people? The prophets had their answer, it was the pun-
ishment of the nation's sin. But after a while this answer
became unsatisfactory to certain thinkers who held that
the nation was not all sinful ; why should the righteous
be involved in the deserved suffering of their unrighteous
fellow-countrymen ? To one man at least it seemed (Isa. liii.)
that the affliction of the righteous Israel was vicarious, that
the end in the divine procedure was to bring not only all
Israel, but also the Gentiles, to himself (Isa. xlix. 1-6). This
exalted view of the situation did not, however, commend it-
self to all the prophet's contemporaries; it was too lofty
and broad, and perhaps too natural. The larger human ques-
tion also why good men in general suffered was pressing
for a solution ; and the idea of individual moral- religious
discipline seems not to have presented itself, or, if considered,
to have been held to be insufficient. The explanation in
both cases was sought in the unfriendly activity of a great
supernatural power, one of those beings who, allied in nature
to Yahwe and associated with him, though in a subordinate
way, in the control of the world, wielded an important influ-
ence over the affairs of men. How such a being came to be
unfriendly is not told in the Old Testament : Zechariah in-
troduces the Satan without a word of comment ; the book of
Job accounts for the possibility of his procedure by the pur-
pose of Yahwe to test and demonstrate the integrity of his
EVIL SPIRITS. . 167
servant. Both books seem to assume that the person of the
Adversary was well known ; how long it had been known it
is impossible to say. We can only hold in general that the
conception of a supernatural being hostile to good men was
forced on the Jewish religious consciousness by the circum-
stances of the time, and that such a being would naturally
be looked for in the ranks of the sons of the Elohim, the
companions and servants of Yahwe from time immemorial ;
alongside of the good "angel, of Yahwe" might stand an
equally powerful being with a tinge of malevolence in his
nature, possibly the dim survival of an old hurtful deity,
more probably the product of a reflective age, which wished
somehow to isolate evil from good. The general parallelism
between this and the Persian scheme is obvious, both arose
out of the same ethical-religious necessity, but there seems
to be no sufficient ground for supposing an historical connec-
tion between the two at this stage.
It is otherwise with the later Jewish development of mor-
ally evil supernatural agencies. After the Jews had been a
hundred years subjects of the Persian empire and resident in
Persian communities, they may easily be supposed to have
adopted ideas from their neighbors. The possibility that the
r6le assigned to Azazel in Lev. xvi. was in part determined
by Persian influence has already been suggested. 1 As to the
times of Tobit and Enoch there can be no doubt. The
Asmodaeus of Tobit is Persian ; and the elaborate angelology
of Enoch is most naturally explained (as in the case of the
book of Daniel) as due to an impulse derived from the Per-
sian system. The description in Enoch is based on the
account in Gen. vi., and the " sons of God " are identified
with angels. The foundation is old-Semitic ; but the organiza-
1 A similar suggestion might be made in regard to the identification of
the serpent of Gen iii. with Satan. For the objection to this view see above,
pp. 158f. It is possible, though hardly probable, that Wisd. of Sol. got its in-
terpretation from a Persian source.
168 EVIL SPIRITS.
tion of the angels, and their individualization by names and
by the assignment of individual functions in the development
of human civilization, is foreign. That the names are He-
brew (in contrast with the Persian name Asmodaeus) results
from the fact that the figures are Hebrew. The book of
Enoch never attained canonical authority ; and its angelic
names seem not to have been adopted by succeeding gener-
ations, its details were too bizarre for the sober Jewish
thought. The idea of the organization of the evil angels
under the leadership of Satan commended itself, and is found
in the New Testament ; but it has little prominence, except
in the Apocalypse ; in the practical religious life the evil
supernatural activity is concentrated in the person of the
chief, and his subordinate angels practically disappear. The
part which they might play in the infliction of evil on men
is assigned to the spirits.
The history of the class of evil intelligences called "spirits"
is no less remarkable than that of Satan and his angels. It
culminates in the idea of demoniacal possession, a concep-
tion which has its roots in the Old Testament, but suddenly
assumes enormous proportions in the first century of Chris-
tianity. According to the old Israelitish belief, as we have
seen, all mental affections (as in the case of Saul, 1 Sam. xvi.)
were ascribed to the agency of spirits sent from God; and
these remain throughout the Old Testament morally unde-
fined, they work good and evil alike. The later differentia-
tion into two classes was effected by Jewish advance in dis-
tinctness of ethical thought, and by the influence of foreign
ideas, Persian, Greek, and other.
It is in the book of Tobit that we find the first mention of
a definite relation between an evil spirit and a human being
(Asmodaeus and Sara) ; in Enoch the fallen angels appear in
human shape, and affect men rather by ordinary human inter-
course than by direct influence on the soul. The Greek idea
EVIL SPIRITS. 169
is visible in the passage of Josephus (" War," vii. 6, 3) which
assumes that sickness is produced by demons who are no
other than the spirits of the wicked. We have no further
details on this point in Jewish literature earlier than the
New Testament ; but that the belief in demonic influence
continued among the Jews is evident from the Talmud,
which makes abundant mention of evil spirits and magical
processes, expanding the Old Testament spiritual material,
and dressing out the old narratives with exuberance of pic-
turesque legend (Weber, " System," 54). The Jews had in
the mean time become members of the Eoman Empire, in
which the belief in magic and exorcism was general. There
was, about the beginning of our era, a sort of revivification of
the primeval faith. The old machinery of gods had almost
disappeared in cultivated circles. Men ridiculed the Olym-
pian deities and even the patron gods of the Eoman State,
and took refuge in those occult powers and processes which
were credible because they were at once visible and unintel-
ligible ; they satisfied the demand for the marvellous without
offending the science and philosophy of the day. 1 Whether
this foreign belief affected the Jews cannot be definitely de-
termined; it seems probable that from so wide-spread an
opinion some influence made itself felt in Palestine. The
Palestinian belief was in its general material old-Israelitish ;
but it had received the important modification of the differ-
entiation of the spirits into good and bad. The good, how-
ever, seem partly to have been merged in the body of the
1 Cicero, in the introduction to his work on divination, declares that there
is no nation that does not believe in the possibility of foretelling the future.
Juvenal (Sat. vi.) testifies to the devotion of the Roman women to Chaldean
and Judean supernatural arts, and Apuleius, in the Golden Ass, speaks of
magic arts (by which, for example, a woman transforms herself into a bird
and the hero into an ass) as a familiar thing in his time (second century of
our era). See on the Greek and Roman doctrine of demons of this period the
remarks of L. Friedlander, " Sittengeschichte Roms," (Leipzig, 1881), pp.
486-488, and on the belief in miracles, pp. 517 ff.
170 EVIL SPIRITS.
good angels as the ministers of God's beneficent dealings with
men, and partly to have been absorbed in the divine spirit,
which came more and more to be regarded as the source of
ethically good spiritual influence on the soul. We read of no
organization of good " spirits " ; in the New Testament the
normally sound life is attributed to the spirit of God, while it
is certain peculiar abnormal evil phenomena, especially those
connected with mental aberration, the explanation of which
is held to lie in the agency of bad powers.
The representation of insanity as demoniacal possession
was not a new one. It is found in the Old Testament
(Saul) ; the ecstasies of prophets, seers, and priestesses were
sometimes akin to madness (1 Sam. xix. 24, Mic. i. 8, and
the Pythia). Such a frightful distortion of the human soul
was not unnaturally looked on as the result of supernatural
influence. The unhappy victims of possession were driven
out from among men and forced to dwell in tombs and
desolate places; it was natural that Jesus, in his mission
of mercy, should meet these unfortunates and try to alle-
viate their misery and restore them to their right minds;
doubtless many of them needed only sympathy and care,
and few of them were without a trace of humanity which
might be successfully appealed to.
In the New Testament, demoniacs form a separate class,
being distinguished from the sick, epileptic, and palsied
(Matt. iv. 24); they appear to abound everywhere, and
their healing forms a prominent part of the work of Jesus
and his disciples. The demons inhabit the bodies and
souls of men, so identifying themselves with human spirits
that the two personalities are not always distinguished.
They are conscious of their subordinate relation to God ;
they believe in him and tremble (James ii. 19), while they
pursue their anti-godly career. They acknowledge the au-
thority of the name of Christ (Matt. viii. 29). They are
EVIL SPIRITS. 171
identified with heathen deities (1 Cor. x. 20, 21 ; Rev. ix. 20 ;
Acts xvi. 16) ; Satan, their prince, receives the name of the
old Philistine god, Beelzebub (Matt, xii 24). Piocesses tf
exorcism are mentioned in Acts xix. 13-16 (cf. passage
cited above from Josephus); but Jesus and his disciples
expelled the spirits by a word. No account of their origin
is given in the New Testament ; they are numerous (Mark
v. 9) ; they belong to the kingdom of Satan, beyond this
nothing is said. They are the evil spirits of the Old Testa-
ment, organized under Persian and other influence, and de-
veloped into sharper antagonism with the kingdom of God
by their contact with Christianity.
The belief in demonic possession long remained in the
Christian world, passing after a while into the theory of
witchcraft, then slowly disappearing. The established be-
lief in the orderly processes of nature makes it impossible
for the present day ; the Christian world no longer holds to
it as an existing phenomenon. It was the product of an
unscientific age, a part of the general attempt to construct
a system of intermediate powers between God and man, and
tJ disjoin the realm of evil from the immediate divine
activity. This latter purpose it did not really accomplish,
since in both Old Testament and New Testament God
either enjoins or permits the activity of the wicked spirits.
But the religious thought of the biblical times found in
this scheme a satisfactory solution of the problem of evil,
confronting the fact of present mal-arrangement with the
hope of future regeneration. The New Testament thus pre-
sents the final shaping of the old animistic material. The
ancient spirits are in part transformed into wicked demons
which, suffered by God for a time, are eventually to be
brought to naught. In the general history of religious
thought they may be looked on as a temporary embodiment
of that evil which in the Christian conception is finally to
172 EVIL SPIRITS.
succumb to the higher ethical power which belongs to the
essential constitution of things.
*A general review of the doctrine of evil spirits in Old
Testament and New Testament exhibits an influence of the
Persian religion on the Jewish, but brings out at the same
time the difference between the two faiths. 1 Both sought to
account for certain forms of evil in the world by the intro-
duction of intermediate agencies in some sort independent
of the righteous and benevolent God. But in one the sense
of evil was so strong as to give birth to what was practically
an evil deity ; in the other the sense of the aloneness of God
was so deep as to keep the evil powers practically subordinate
to him. In both, the natural ethical feeling imposed limi-
tations on the influence assigned to the evil supernatural
agencies ; the conviction of man's moral independence gave
tone, in spite of all other theories, to the ethical-religious
life. This is evident in the prophets and Psalms, in the dis-
courses of Jesus and the Epistles ; it is only in the folk-stories
and apocalypses that evil spirits play a very important
part. It would be fruitless to ask what the Jewish demono-
logical development would have been without foreign influ-
ence. We can hardly doubt that the pre-exilian material
would have maintained itself and suffered the modifications
which growth of ethical feeling would render necessary.
1 Much uncertainty rests on the early history of the Mazdean religion.
The origins are discussed by Spiegel, " Eranische Alterthumskunde " (Leip-
zig, 1871-1878); Darmesteter, " Orrnazd et Ahriman " (Paris, 1877); "The
Zend Avesta," Parts I., II. (Oxford, 1880, 1883); De Harlez, "Des Origines
du Zoroastrisme " (Paris, 1879); "Avesta" (Paris, 1881); Mills, "The Zend
Avesta," Part III. (Oxford, 1887); Meyer, " Geschichte des Alterthums"
(Stuttgart, 1884); Geldner, article "Zend Avesta" in "Encycl. Brit.," and
others. The relation hetween the Persian and Jewish demonologies is treated
by Nicolas, "Des Doctrines Religieuses des Juifs" (Paris, 1860); Kohut,
" Angelologie, etc." (in Vol. IV. of the " Abhandlungen fur die Kunde des
Morgenlandes "), and De Harlez. It seems not rash to infer from the tradi-
tions and from the tone of the materials of the " Avesta " that the leading
ideas of Mazdeism were in existence as early as the fourth century before
the beginning of our era.
CHAPTEE IV.
MAN.
~\\ 7"E have now to inquire into the Jewish and Christian
^ views of the moral-religious history of man, the con-
stitution of his nature, his attitude toward right and wrong
and toward God, and the means by which he is to attain
perfection.
1. The Old Testament idea of the constitution of man is
a perfectly simple and popular one, without scientific analy-
sis and distinctions, and without philosophical or theological
theories. Common observation teaches that man is a crea-
ture composed of a visible bodily frame informed by an
invisible something which is believed to be connected with
thought, feeling, will, with all that makes up life. Such is
the conception given in the second account of creation, Gen.
ii. 7: God "formed man of the dust of the ground and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became
a living soul ; " the same expression for the totality of human
being is found in Isa. x. 18. This duality of being is given
throughout the Old Testament, never demonstrated or com-
mented on, but always assumed as common opinion. In the
first account of creation, Gen. i. 26-28, it is not even men-
tioned ; man is created in the likeness of the Elohim-beings
(" our likeness "), and is invested with dominion over all the
earth, his constitution is taken for granted.
In the Old Testament, the term " body " means only the phy
sical mass of bones and flesh and blood ; it is never employed
in an ethical sense. Nor do we find such a sense given to
the word "flesh;" in Ezek. xi. 19, its physical peculiarity of
174 CONSTITUTION OF MAN.
softness is used to denote figuratively tenderness and im-
pressibility of heart. It is sometimes identical with " body " :
"My heart is glad and my glory rejoices, my flesh also
dwells in security " (Ps. xvi. 9) ; or it is physically distin-
guished from the body, probably as part of it : " When thy
flesh and thy body are consumed" (Prov. v. 11) ; or it means
the human personality: "My flesh trembles for fear of thee"
(Ps. cxix. 120) ; and so in combination with " heart " : " My
heart and my flesh shout to the living God " (Ps. Ixxxiv. 2).
It is used also to express animal nature in contrast with
spiritual: "Their horses are flesh, and not spirit" (Isa. xxxi.
3) ; or human nature in contrast with divine conceived of as
pure spirit: "In God I have put my trust, I fear not what
flesh can do to me " (Ps. Ivi. 4), " The gods whose dwelling
is not with flesh" (Dan. ii. 11); and "all flesh" is an ex-
pression for all mankind: "0 thou that nearest prayer,
to thee shall all flesh come" (Ps. Ixv. 2). To flesh as the
characteristic of the human in distinction from the divine,
attaches the idea of weakness : " With him [the king of
Assyria] is an arm of flesh, but with us is Yahwe, our God "
(2 Chron. xxxii. 8) ; but no ethical element is involved.
Body and flesh were not Qonceived of as impure, for the
flesh 6f animals was used in sacrifices and regarded as holy.
They contained no inherent tendency to sin, though their
weakness and their association with the appetites might
cause them to be thought of as an occasion of temptation.
"Bone" is combined with "flesh" to express the whole phy-
sical structure in Gen. xxix. 14, 2 Sam. v. 1 ; and " bones " is
equivalent to " body " in Ps. vi. 2 (1). Blood, in accordance
with general observation, is everywhere regarded as the seat
of life (Gen. ix. 4; Lev. xvii. 11).
The soul, according to the Old Testament conception, is
primarily that breath which common observation shows to
be the universal and inseparable accompaniment of life with
CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 175
all its functions. It is sometimes, therefore, simply the
animal life, as where Elijah stretches himself on the dead
child and prays that his soul may come into him again
(1 Kings xvii. 21) ; or where it is said of the king that
he saves the souls of the needy (Ps. Ixxii. 13) ; and such
probably is the representation in Gen. ii. 7. In this last
passage we have the more developed view of the soul as
the breath of God breathed into man ; in which, of course
we are not to see a pantheistic idea, but only the simple
belief that the life of man is the immediate creation of God,
a belief perhaps connected with the statement in the first
history of creation that man was made in the image of the
Elohim-beings. The word " soul," as synonymous with life,
naturally comes to mean " person," as in Lev. v. 1, Gen. xii.
5, Ezek. xiii. 19 ; and the expressions, "my soul," "thy soul,"
" his soul," become equivalent to " myself," " thyself," " him-
self" (Gen. xii. 13; Job x. 1; Ps. Ivii 4; 1 Sam. ii. 16; Jer.
xxxviii. 17 ; Ps. Ixxxix. 48 ; Eccles. ii. 24 ; Mic. vi. 7 ; Isa.
liii. 10) ; and it may even be used for a dead body, inasmuch
as this suggested personality (Lev. xxi. 11). The more im-
portant ethical-religious sense of the word is to express the
whole inward nature, as in Deut. xiii. 3, Ps. Ixii. 5, and
many other passages. Whatever man feels, thinks, or wills,
is attributed to the soul. It is the organ of all spiritual-
religious thought ; it is the part of man which comes into
contact with God, which constitutes the essence of the per-
sonality. So completely does it include all human functions
that while it is said to be restored by the perfect law of God
(Ps. xix. 7), it also stands for the inward spirit which may
be discouraged in work (Num. xxi. 4), and for appetite : " As
when a hungry man dreams, and behold, he eats, but he
awakes and his soul is empty ; or as when a thirsty man
dreams, and behold, he drinks, but he awakes, and behold, he
is faint, and his soul has appetite " (Isa. xxix. 8).
176 CONSTITUTION OF MAN.
The use of the word "spirit" in the Old Testament as
part of human nature is very nearly identical with that of
"soul." It signifies life, or the inward, invisible seat of
life : " Who knows the spirit of the sons of men, whether
it goes upward, and the spirit of the beast, whether it goes
downward to the earth?" (Eccles. iii. 21.) It is the intel-
lect: Daniel is said to have had an excellent spirit and
knowledge and understanding (Dan. v. 12); it is courage
(Josh. v. 1). It represents the whole inward nature:
Pharaoh's spirit was troubled by his dream (Gen. xli. 8) ;
Elisha asks that a double portion (the portion of an oldest
son) of Elijah's spirit (that is, of his whole inward power,
intellectual and religious) may rest on him (2 Kings ii. 9) ;
the Psalmist begs for a steadfast spirit, a nature wholly
attached to God (Ps. li. 10); and he that rules his spirit,
that is, himself, the totality of his inward powers, is said to
be better than he who takes a city (Prov. xvi. 2). It is
the seat of ethical-religious life : " Happy is the man to
whom Yahwe does not reckon iniquity, and in whose spirit
there is no guile;" "the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit:
a broken and a crushed heart, God, thou dost not despise "
(Ps. li. 17).
Nor is there any different statement to be made in respect
to the use of the word "heart," which signifies in the Old
Testament not especially the emotional nature, but the
whole inward being : " Hope deferred makes the heart sick "
(Prov. xiii. 12) ; " If I have purposed iniquity in my heart,
the Lord will not hear" (Ps. Ixvi. 18); and God is called
the "tryer of the hearts and reins " (Ps. vii. 10) ; and so the
term comes to signify the personality, as in Gen. viii. 21,
when Yahwe smells the sweet savor of Noah's sacrifice and
says " in his heart " that he will not again curse the ground,
and Ps. x. 6 : " He says in his heart, I shall not be moved,"
that is, says to himself. The phrase " heart and flesh " also,
CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 177
as is remarked above, is used to express the whole being
(Ps. Ixxiii. 26 ; Ixxxiv. 2) ; it is equivalent to " mind (or
soul) and body." 1
The New Testament has all the uses of these terms above
mentioned, and adds others which flowed naturally out of its
higher spiritual conception of human life and its sharper
antithesis between opposing elements. " Body " is the phy-
sical structure of flesh and bones (Matt. x. 28 ; 1 Cor. xii.
14), and so the natural physical life in this world, the taber-
nacle of the soul, the locus and vehicle of earthly activity
(2 Cor. v. 6, 10); and then by a natural transition it is em-
ployed by Paul to represent the unregenerate, sinful nature,
as opposed to the higher life of the spirit : " If by the spirit
you kill the deeds of the body, you shall live" (Eom.
viii. 13).
"Flesh" occurs in the simple physical sense (1 Pet. iv.
1), and then as equivalent to humanity, that is, human na-
ture : Christ was an Israelite "as concerning the flesh " (Eom.
ix. 5) ; the Word became flesh and dwelt in the world (John
i. 14), the combination "flesh and blood" having the same
sense (Matt. xvi. 17 ; Cal. i. 16) ; " all flesh " means the whole
human race (John xvii. 2, and the similar expression "no
flesh " in 1 Cor. i. 29). As the instrument of the appetites,
and distinguished by its grossness from the spirit, it is used
by Paul and his school to signify the animal life as the seat
1 "Reins" is similarly employed (Jer. xi. 20; Ps. Ixxiii. 21 ; and once in
the New Testament, Eev. ii. 23, the expression being quoted from the Old
Testament). The bowels are the seat of love and the desire, compassion, and
sorrow that spring from love (Song of Songs v. 4; Gen. xliii. 30; Jer. iv. 19;
Phil. ii. 1), or even (in the New Testament, 2 Cor. vi. 12) of the affections in
general; they are regarded also as the source whence life issues (Gen. xv. 4),
and so the loins (Gen. xxxv. 11; Heb. vii. 10). "Liver" (in Babylonian-
Assyrian equivalent to "heart") is used once (Lam. ii. 11) for the seat of
the inward life. It was the prominent organs of the trunk that the ancients
connected with life ; the word " brain " does not occur in the Old Testament ;
in Arabic, madmug, "struck on the brain," is "stupid."
12
178 CONSTITUTION OF MAN.
of sin, the unregenerate nature : in Rom. viii., it is termed
"sinful," is contrasted with the spirit as the seat of the
higher life ; the mind of the flesh is said to be enmity against
God, and they who live after the flesh must die ; the " works
of the flesh," all sorts of wrong-doing, are detailed in Gal. v.
19-21; the spirit and the flesh are described as antagonists
one to the other (v. 17), and "they that are of Christ Jesus
have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires" (v.
24) ; all unbelievers live in the desires of the flesh and of
natural human thought (Eph. ii. 3; Col. ii. 11); Paul uses
the word also of an unspiritual religion, especially of the
Jewish reliance on the Law: "Did you receive the Spirit
by the works of the Law or by the hearing of faith ? Are
you so foolish ? Having begun in the spirit, are you now
perfected in the flesh?" (Gal. iii. 2, 3.)
"Heart" is the whole inward nature: the Evil One snatches
away the word of the kingdom, which has been sown in the
heart (Matt. xiii. 19) ; the Devil put into the heart of Judas
to betray Jesus (John xiii. 2) ; men, after their hardness and
impenitent heart treasure up for themselves wrath in the
day of wrath (Rom. ii. 5), and with the heart man believes
unto righteousness (Rom. x. 10), the act of believing involv-
ing all the powers of the mind, thought, feeling, and will.
" Soul " is equivalent to " life " in Matt. x. 39 : " He that
finds his soul shall lose it, and he that loses his soul for my
sake shall find it;" and Matt. xvi. 26 : "What is a man prof-
ited if he gain the whole world and forfeit his soul ? " and
to " person " in Rom. xiii. 1 : " Let every soul be in subjection
to the higher powers." It signifies the whole inward nature
in James i. 21 : the word is able to save men's souls ; and in
John xii. 27 : " Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I
say ? "
"Spirit" is the breath of the natural life (Luke viii. 55),
or a disembodied existence (Luke xxiv. 37-39). It represents
CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 179
the inward nature in Mark viii. 12: "He sighed deeply in
his spirit " (or it may here mean the personality itself), and
1 Cor. v. 3 : " Absent in body but present in spirit ; " in the
eighth chapter of Eonians it is used frequently for the in-
ward spiritual life created by Christ and the Holy Spirit ;
the spirit and its mind are put over against the flesh and
its mind (vs. 4. 5, 6, 9, 10).
The New Testament uses the word " mind " (i>oO<?) in the
same general sense for the reflective faculty, or for the whole
inward being. It is the intellect in Luke xxiv. 45, where
Jesus opens the minds of the disciples to understand the
scriptures ; in 1 Cor. ii. 16, it signifies the thought-content of
the intellect : we, says the apostle, have the mind of Christ ;
that is, we have come into possession of his thought, which
is the expression of his complete comprehension of the divine
purpose. In the quotation from the Septuagint in the same
verse, the " mind " is the rendering of the Hebrew word for
" spirit," the two being here identical in meaning. Paul em-
ploys the term usually in a moral-religious sense for the rea-
son and will, tainted or untainted by sin. Thus in Eom. vii.
23, 25, it is the normal human judgment, which approves the
right, and the normal human will, which desires to obey it,
though both are overpowered by the " flesh," the corrupt na-
ture, in which dwells the love of evil : he delights in the law
of God, but there is another law in his nature warring against
this law of his " mind " and bringing him into captivity to
the law of sin. Elsewhere the mind is described as reprobate
(the heathen, Eom. i. 28), fleshly, that is, reason and will
controlled by the lower nature (Col. ii. 18), defiled (Tit. i
15, where it is combined with " conscience," as if the two
were practically identical).
It is evident from this survey that the terms " body" and
" flesh " are practically synonymous in both Testaments, and
the same thing is true of " heart," " soul," and " spirit." The
180 CONSTITUTION OF MAN.
number of passages in the New Testament in which the ex-
pressions " soul and body," "spirit and body," " spirit and
flesh " are employed to denote the whole of human nature
shows that its constitution was conceived of as dual ; and
further it is evident that " spirit " and " soul " are used inter-
changeably, each as standing for the whole inward nature.
With this usage so clearly denned we can hardly accept the
supposition of a trichotomy of spirit, soul, and body in the
sense that the spirit forms a distinct essence from the soul.
It is true that Paul employs the terms " spirit " and " spirit-
ual " in a peculiar way to express the regenerate nature, the
soul of man after a new life has been breathed into it by the
divine spirit. It is a distinction which seems to be confined
in the New Testament to him and his school. His choice of
the word " spirit " to express the higher life which was in-
formed by Christ may have been suggested by his conception
of its relation to the divine spirit ; it is possible, however,
that some distinction between the terms " spirit " and " soul,"
though not one of essence, had already sprung up and was
adopted and applied by him in this peculiar way. 1 The dis-
tinction in his mind is brought out in 1 Cor. xv. 44, 45 : " It
is sown a psychical body, it is raised a pneumatical body ; if
there is a psychical body, there is also a pneumatical ; so also
it is written, the first man Adam became a living soul
[psyche], the last Adam a life-giving spirit [pneuma]." The
psychical body is that wherein dwells the natural, unregener-
ate soul ; the pneumatical body is that which is prepared to
be the dwelling of the regenerated soul, the spirit which
has been touched by the hand of God. The difference between
Adam and Christ is that the former was created as a soul
endowed with life, the latter was a spirit capable of giving
life. The distinction of soul and spirit is not one between
1 On the use of these and the related terms in the Septuagint and by
Philo, see E. Hatch, " Essays in Biblical Greek " (Oxford, 1889), Essay III.
CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 181
different parts of human nature : Adam's soul was capable of
becoming spirit ; Christ's soul was spirit. It is a moral-
religious, not a substantive distinction that the apostle has in
mind. The same distinction is found in 1 Cor. xiv. 15: " The
psychical man does not receive the things of the Spirit of
God, for they are foolishness to him ; and he cannot know
them because they are pneumatically judged, but the pneu-
matical man judges all things." He has been speaking of the
wisdom of the Gospel as contrasted with human science and
philosophy, declaring that the knowledge of the truth of God
comes to believers not by their own reflection, but by revela-
tion of the divine spirit, and he then adds the words quoted
above; it is evident that he uses "psychical" in the sense of
unbelieving or unregenerate, and " prieumatical " in the oppo-
site sense. The one phase passes into the other through the
influence of the spirit of God ; a transformation is effected in
human nature, but there is no change of essence.
When, therefore, we find the nature of man described as
"spirit and soul and body" (I Thess. v. 23), the natural un-
derstanding is that the distinction between the two first ele-
ments is religious-rhetorical and not one of essence ; the
soul is first thought of as the seat of the inward life, and then
the word " spirit " is added, not as an independent compo-
nent of human nature, but as expressing clearly that trans-
formed state of the soul in which it comes into the higher
relation with God through faith in Jesus Christ. It might
seem, however, that a substantive distinction between the
two is expressed in Heb. iv. 12 : " The word of God is liv-
ing and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and
piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints
and marrow, and a discerner of the thoughts and intents of
the heart." But it is to be observed that this passage is
rhetorical in its tone, and is therefore not to be interpreted
in a strictly scientific way. It is easily supposable that the
182 CONSTITUTION OF MAN.
writer had in mind the idea of Paul, whose theology he so
largely adopts, and thought of the soul and spirit as different
phases and states of mind ; from this point of view, he would
naturally speak of a division made by the divine word of the
Gospel between the natural, unregeuerate life and thought
and that higher perception and feeling which arise from the
transforming power of God. Since these two passages admit
of a natural explanation on the basis of a dual conception of
human nature, it is hardly safe to deduce a trichotomy from
them against all other New Testament usage.
This is, however, a point of secondary importance in the
statement of Christian doctrine. "What is essential and
characteristic in the Christian view is the idea of a new
perceptive power in man, the development of his nature
into a capacity for comprehension of God and fellowship
with him. This idea has its roots in the Old Testament,
but receives its perfect shape only in the Christian literature
of the first century. The completer organization of the
inward nature flowed naturally from the strict Pauline
Christian conception of divine truth -and man's individual
independence. Not only, it was held, had God revealed
himself in a peculiarly definite manner in the person of
his Son, but, in contrast with the national coloring of the
Jewish faith, the divine spirit informed and communed
with each believer's soul and impressed on each its own
personality (Gal. iii. 3 ; 1 Cor. iii. 16 ; Rorn. viii. 2) This
intimate association between the human soul and the divine
demanded in the former an instrument fit to receive the
influence of the latter. 1
1 The immediately preceding Jewish literature offers little material for
tracing the history of this conception. A divine influence on the mind is
fully affirmed in Wisdom viii., but nothing is said distinctly of a higher faculty
of the soul. The classic writers of the Augustan period entploy "spirit" in
the senses of " life, soul, courage ; " the New Testament writers think of a
mental power that apprehends divine things.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 183
2. The question of the constitution of man's nature may
be said to be chiefly a scientific and non-moral one ; the
principle of the division of human nature into its parts is
not in itself ethical. The more important inquiry is, what
is man's natural moral condition, his attitude toward right,
his capacity for right-doing ? What is the Jewish conception
of sin ?
That wrong-doing is natural and universal is matter of
common observation, an opinion that has doubtless been
held among all communities of men with greater or less
distinctness. Wherever a standard of right exists (and we
may assume that it exists among all men, even in the most
undeveloped societies), deviations from it must occur and
be known ; and these deviations constitute sin. In them-
selves, considered as violations of human rule, they are only
ethical wrongs ; but inasmuch as the deity is identified with
the ethical ideal of the community arid becomes the judge
of right and wrong, moral offences are considered to be
committed against him, and in this character are termed
sinful. The offences are at first of the simplest sort, viola-
tion of customs among men, or of ritual duties toward God.
The progress of ethical thought involves a corresponding
progress in the conception of sin. Duties are more clearly
defined, the higher qualities of the soul sympathy, love,
self-sacrifice, inwardness become more and more prominent,
and their absence is more distinctly noted as a lack, an
offence against the command of God. The conception of
the divine perfectness goes hand and hand with that of
human goodness. The purer and more spiritual the idea
of God, the deeper the sense of the violation of his will,
which is one with man's highest conception of right.
The two elements in the content of the feeling of sin
are, first, the ethical standard, and secondly, inwardness or
spiritualness ; that is, the feeling of the necessity of purity
184 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS:
of soul, of the elevation and renewal of the inward nature
so that it shall be in complete sympathy and harmony with
the good, and with God as the ideal and source of the good.
Jewish thought of the period after Ezra shows a great ad-
vance in this direction. The time of the Judges and of
David is one of moral rawness : the ethical standard is low ;
the rules of right conduct are outward and mechanical; and
of a sense of sin, in the higher meaning of the expression,
there is no trace. 1 The prophetic writings, from the eighth
century on, are ethically strict and high, except that they
do not recognize claims of foreigners, but confine the circle
of their moral obligations to Israel, and that little promi-
nence is given to the inward life ; the rebuke of the prophets
is directed against idolatry, neglect of Yahwe, drunkenness,
the oppression of the poor by the rich, and other external
sins. Their point of view is national ; they look on the
individual almost exclusively as a member of the nation,
and are roused to anger by those offences which violate the
compact between God and the people, deprive them of his
favor and protection, and retard their progress toward the
condition of complete, blessed prosperity. A turning-point
is marked by the Deuteronomist, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel,
who announce the principles of individual responsibility and
inwardness of obedience. The incompleteness of the notion
of sin which had prevailed up to this time is exhibited in
the principle of solidarity which so largely controlled men's
moral ideas : children's teeth were set on edge because their
fathers had eaten sour grapes ; Achan's family was involved
in the punishment of his sin (Josh. vii. 24, 25); and the
Decalogue declares that Yahwe is a jealous God, visiting
1 The episode given in 2 Sam. xii. 1-14, the rebuke of Nathan and
David's repentance, is so out of keeping with the tone of the context that
it must be put into the same category with 2 Sam. vii., and regarded as a
production not of David's time, but of a later, perhaps the Deuteronomic
period.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 185
the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and on the
third and fourth generation of them that hate him (Deut. v.
9). And this theory of punishment was held not in the
modern form, according to which children hy the operation
of natural law inherit the consequences of the sins of an-
cestors, but in a mechanical way which represented God in
his capacity of judge as arbitrarily punishing the descend-
ants of evil-doers. It was the survival of a primitive con-
ception of society in which the unit was the tribe or the
family; 1 it was banished by the better development of the
moral sense which recognized the rights and responsibilities
of the individual (Ezek. xviii. 2-4). In the same way, the ex-
ternal and mechanical conception of obedience and sin which
belonged to the national point of view disappeared before the
rise of a higher estimation of the individual soul. It was
just before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans
that this purer conception found expression in Israelitish
literature ; from which we may infer that the ethical pro-
gress since David's time had been continuous, in spite of
the religious oscillations and defections described in the
book of Kings, whose narrative, it must be remembered,
reflects the ideas of the exile rather than the exact his-
torical course of events. The national conception continued
to exist for a long time, but the new ideals had effected
an entrance into Jewish life and held their place.
The principal ethical fact in the post-exilian period is the
introduction of the complete Levitical legislation. In Pales-
1 As all the members of a family or clan were held to he literally of the
same blood, the principle of solidarity was logically conceived in a thorough-
going literal sense ; from this point of view it was natural that all the tribes-
men should share the fortunes of a brother, and especially of a chief. This
idea survived in religion after it had vanished from the legal codes ; an exilian
or post-exilian editor represents the whole Israelitish nation as suffering for
the sin of its king (2 Sam. xxiv.), and in certain systems of Christian theology
the human race is involved in the condemnation of the first man..
186 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
tine the interval between the return from Babylon and the
advent of Ezra and Nehemiah was almost entirely color-
less, so far as our information goes, in regard to the progress
of morals and religion. The Jews in Palestine were ab-
sorbed in other things, struggling for bread, lacking in high
literary and religious stimulus ; the flower of the nation was
in Babylonia, and Palestine was in a state of comparative
stagnation. No doubt there was some progress ; but there
is little or no sign of it. With Ezra and Nehemiah came
a new impulse. It might seem doubtful, however, whether
the introduction of the finished Law was an unmixed good
from the ethical point of view. The code was largely ritual-
istic; it fixed men's minds on ceremonial details which it
in some cases put into the same category and on the same
level with moral duties. Would there not thence result
a dimming of the moral sense, and a confusion of moral
distinctions ? The ethical attitude of a man who could re-
gard a failure in the routine of sacrifice as not less blame-
worthy than an act of theft cannot be called a lofty one.
If such had been the general effect of the ritual law, we
should have to pronounce it an evil. But in point of fact,
the result was different. What may be called the natural
debasing tendency of a ritual was counteracted by other
influences, by the ethical elements of the law itself, and by
the general moral progress of the community. The great
legal schools which grew up in the second century, if we
may judge by the sayings of the teachers which have come
down to us, did not fail to discriminate between the out-
ward and the inward, the ceremonial and the moral ; and
the conception of sin corresponded to the idea of the ethical
standard.
It is in the book of Psalms that we find the fullest picture
of the inward religious experiences of this period from the
exile on. We are not, indeed, to understand every expres-
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 187
sion of suffering and every cry for help in the Psalter as an
indication of a sense of sin. Nor can we always say cer-
tainly what that iniquity is which a psalmist imputes to
himself. The author of Psalm xxxi. regards his misfortunes
apparently as the result of his sin : " My life is consumed
with sorrow and my years with sighing ; my strength fails
because of my iniquity ; and my bones are wasted' away "
(v. 10) ; but at the same time, he can declare that he has
trusted in God (v. 14), that he hates those who regard lying
vanities (v. 6), and that he belongs in the category of the
righteous (v. 18). The same seeming contradiction occurs
in Ps. xxxviii. 3, 20, and Ps. Ixix. 6, 8, 14 ; the psalmist ac-
knowledges his sin, yet claims to follow what is good. In
Ps. xxv. 7, the " sins of youth " are apparently half-uncon-
scious, urimalignant offences, perhaps opposed to the more
conscious and definite " transgressions." In some cases the
external, national point of view is obvious, as in Ixxxv. 1, 2 :
"Thou wast favorable to thy land, didst bring back the
captivity of Jacob, didst forget the iniquity of thy people."
Yet with all these elements of doubt, it is hard to resist
the impression that we have in some of the Psalms a true
spiritual conception of sin as an impurity of soul which
makes a barrier between it and God. In Psalm li. we have
a complete combination and fusion of the religious and
ethical sides of the consciousness of sin : the writer, in
his overwhelming sense of the divine presence and purity,
isolates himself from his human surroundings and looks
to God as the sole being concerned with his sin : " Against
thee, thee only have I sinned, and done that which is evil
in thine eyes, that thou rnightest be justified when thou
speakest and be clear when thou judgest. . . . Hide thy face
from my sins and blot out all my iniquities " (vs. 4, 9) ; 1 at
1 That is, his feeling is not that he is absolutely innocent with respect to
men, but that he is blameworthy with respect to God, such is the suggestion
of the context.
188 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
the same time, he longs for purity and inward truth as the
result of banishment of sin; he desires to be whiter than
snow when his heart shall have been made clean (vs. 2, 6, 7).
The psalm is apparently a cry out of the time of the exile
(or perhaps later), laden with the sense of suffering of that
period; yet the writer, though he may speak as a member
of the downcast nation, has nevertheless an individual sense
of sin, is persuaded that his own affliction has its roots in
his deep-seated transgression ; he is so profoundly conscious
of his moral weakness and his shortcomings before God that
he turns from the outward fact of suffering to fix his atten-
tion exclusively on the impurity of his own heart. This
humble consciousness of imperfection he declares to be the
best sacrifice that can be offered to God (v. 17); but this
fact does not diminish the reality of his sense of personal
sin. The sentiment of Psalm xxxii. is less clear : " I ac-
knowledge my sin to thee, and cover not my iniquity; I
said, I will confess my transgressions to Yah we, and thou
tookest away the guilt of my sin " (v. 5). It is the physical
suffering which follows sin that the psalmist seems to be
thinking of (v. 6), in reference to which he says : " Happy is
he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered ;
happy the man to whom Yahwe does not reckon iniquity"
(v. 1), happy because he escapes the consequences of sin;
but the ethical side is present in his mind, for he describes
this happy man as one in whose spirit there is no guile
(v.l). '
By the side of this consciousness of sin in the Psalms,
there is, curiously enough, a pronounced consciousness of
righteousness. " Continue thy loving kindness to them that
know thee, and thy righteousness to the upright in heart ; let
not the foot of pride come upon me," says a writer who
evidently regards himself as upright in heart (xxxvi. 10).
Another psalmist, assailed by mighty enemies, declares that
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 189
it is for no sin or transgression of his (lix. 3). The author
of Psalm xviii. formulates this view very distinctly : "Yah we
dealt with me according to my righteousness, according to
the purity of my hands he recompensed me ; because I kept
the ways of Yahwe and did not wickedly depart from my
God, for all his ordinances were before me, and his statutes
I did not put away from me ; and I was perfect with him,
and kept myself from iniquity ; and Yahwe recompensed me
according to my righteousness, according to the purity of my
hands in his eyesight" (vs. 2024). This seems to be an
extraordinary assumption of moral perfectness, hard to recon-
cile with any true sense of sin. The difficulty seems to be
increased when the writer proceeds to formulate a general
theory respecting God's relations and dealings with men :
" With the merciful thou showest thyself merciful, with the
perfect, perfect, with the pure, pure, and with the wayward,
wayward" (vs. 25, 26). It is a natural conception that God's
attitude toward man should be determined by man's moral
character ; but this complete assimilation of the divine and
human attributes, unless it be a poetical exaggeration, seems
to be based on a somewhat mechanical conception of the
relation between God and man. But the explanation is
given in the next verse: ''Thou savest lowly people, and
haughty eyes thou dost abase" (v. 27). It is the nation
Israel that the writer has in mind ; it is of it and of himself
as belonging to it that he affirms righteousness. Similarly
in Psalm xliv. 17, 18: "All this is come upon us, yet we
have not forgotten thee nor been disloyal to thy covenant ;
our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps swerved
from thy way." This explanation, however, brings us face
to face with the fact of a national consciousness of innocence.
The Forty-Fourth Psalm belongs to the latter part of the
Greek period, a time when national feeling was at its height.
Syrian oppression had intensified the national sense of reli-
190 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
gious isolation and superiority in contrast with the heathen
cults ; the temple-worship assumed especial prominence and
importance ; the chief duty and mission of the nation seemed
to be the maintenance of the worship of the God of Israel
according to his ordinances, in the face of and as a protest
against heathen beliefs and ceremonies. From this point of
view, it was easy to feel that so long as the temple-ritual
was observed with precision and sincerity, the people might
justly claim to be righteous in the sight of God and to de-
serve his protection and blessing. Such a national sense of
innocence might also become individual; any man, especially
if he stood in close connection with the temple, might hold
himself, as a part of this exemplary nation, to merit the
divine favor. In such cases there may have been also the
sense of individual shortcomings, but it would without great
difficulty be swallowed up in the conviction of national
innocence.
We have thus two especially prominent aspects of the
Jewish consciousness of sin. There was, doubtless, a third,
a superficial, indistinct sense of wrong-doing, which did not
greatly afflict the soul or color the life. The psalmists repre-
sent the intenser, more exalted feeling of the nation; the
masses . of the people were comparatively indifferent, if we
may judge from our general knowledge of human nature
and from hints in the Old Testament. But it is with the
higher and better-formulated feeling that we are here con-
cerned. What was the advanced Jewish view respecting
the nature of sin and its relation to man's inward being?
The literature offers no complete answer to this question.
Sin is taken for granted. In the earlier prophetic writings
it is regarded as a habit, or as a mass of actions. Even
Ezekiel's " new heart " (Ezek. xxxvi. 26) is concerned chiefly
with external things : " I will give you a new heart, and put
a new spirit within you ; I will take away the stony heart
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 191
out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh; and I will
put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my
statutes, and you shall keep my ordinances and do them;
and you shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers,
and you shall be my people, and I will be your God " (vs.
26-28). It is again to the Psalter that we must come for
the deeper conception of sin. But even here we have no
detailed explanation or distinct theory. "I was shapen in
iniquity, born in sin," says the author of the Fifty-First
Psalm (v. 5) ; this is the consciousness of a tendency to
wrong-doing from the beginning of life, and in so far implies
a weakness, a moral taint in human nature. Such is also
the conception in Jer. xvii. 9 : " The heart is deceitful
above all things, and it is desperately sick ; who can know
it ? : ' And yet, in spite of the universality of the expression,
the prophet seems not to have meant to affirm a total de-
pravity incapable in itself of doing right, for he adds imme-
diately (v. 10): "I, Yah we, search the heart, try the reins,
to give every man according to his ways, according to the
fruit of his doings." The possibility of right-doing and of
consequent reward from God is here assumed. This pre-
supposition that man is capable of achieving righteousness,
of attaining perfectness, runs throughout the Old Testament ;
human nature is portrayed as weak, as inclined to evil, but
not as morally impotent. Ezekiel, in his great appeal to
Israel to return to God and to righteousness (ch. xviii.), as-
sumes the ability of the sinner to put away his sin : " If
the wicked turn from all the sins he has committed, and
keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right,
he shall surely live, he shall not die ; none of his transgres-
sions that he has committed shall be remembered against
him. In his righteousness that he has done, he shall live "
(vs. 21, 22). There is no mention of special divine help
here ; it is assumed that the man by his own inward power
192 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
changes his moral status in the sight of God. Such is the
prevailing view in the Old Testament : sin is universal, but
not uncontrollable. Even in the greater part of the Psalter,
the root of man's righteousness is in his own heart ; and the
same thing is true of the reflective literature, Job, Proverbs,
Ecclesiastes. The exception is found in the Fifty-First Psalm.
It is the utterance of a man who felt that sin was ingrained in
his inner nature, that God, who desired truth in the inward
parts, must make him to know wisdom, that he had need of
a clean heart and a steadfast spirit, and that the condition of
his true life was the presence within him of that holy spirit
which God only could bestow. There is still no distinct
affirmation in this psalm of a total depravity of the soul.
There is a deep sense of inward corruption and of depen-
dence on God for righteousness, which might logically lead
to the position that man is incapable of achieving a right-
eousness of his own ; but we cannot assume complete logi-
calness in emotional religious thought, nor suppose that this
psalmist meant to announce a general theory. He stands
alone in the Old Testament in his conception of the sinful-
ness of human nature; no prophet and no other psalmist
has expressed this spiritual view of the inward religious life.
We must here recognize a progress in the Jewish idea of
sin ; the Fifty -First Psalm contains the germ of the New Testa-
ment teaching. But the psalmist appears to have been in
advance of the thought of his age. The conception of sin in
the later Jewish books such as Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of
Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Tobit, Daniel, Enoch, the Sibylline
Oracles, Maccabees is the old one, which may be called, by
comparison, external, 1 and this view is found also in the New
1 Ecclesiastes disapproves of sin as irrational (viii. 12 ; x. 3) ; Wisdom con-
templates the violence of the wicked (ii.) and the wrong-doing condemned in
Ecclesiasticus {passim) is of the outward sort; Tobit and Daniel are mainly
national, or, when individual, ritualistic (Tob.i. 10; Dan. i. 8) ; Enoch and
the following books also deal with sins against the national law and well-
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 193
Testament; for example, in the Epistle of James, though here
it is somewhat modified by Christian teaching. We must,
therefore, regard the Old Testament as teaching not that sin
is a nature, but that it is a tendency. It is described as a
weakness, a failure, a violent outbreak, a perverseness, or as
blindness and folly. It is a disposition or inclination which
constantly impels or allures men to wrong-doing ; it is not
an utter incapacity to do right. It is an enemy ever present,
watchful, alert, but not invincible ; it can be overcome by
man's own effort. Such was the teaching of common expe-
rience. But deeper natures, like the author of Psalm li.,
felt that this perpetual conflict with temptation was unsatis-
factory, and that what man needed was freedom from evil
inclination, a heart in harmony with the right. This was
the view of the minority ; the mass of the people was con-
trolled by the nomistic idea ; sin was conceived of as the in-
fringement of particular laws, and was avoided by obedience
in details.
A careful analysis of the nature of sin would naturally be
attended, one would suppose, by an inquiry as to its origin.
But on this point the greater part of the Old Testament is
profoundly silent. National sin is assumed by the prophets
to have existed from the beginning, and no attempt is made
to account for its introduction ; the necessity for an explana-
tion of so common a fact was not felt by the practical Jew-
ish mind. The traditions of the forefathers preserved in the
Pentateuch tell of wrong-doing in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
but assume it as natural, and show no curiosity as to the
being. It must, however, be borne in mind that these works, by their subject-
matter and aims, would naturally dwell on the outward manifestations of evil,
nnd may have known deeper inward experiences than they express. Further,
the existence of different tendencies and modes of thought in different circles
must be recognized ; the Psalms probably represent the more spiritual thought
of the nation ; wisdom-books and apocalypses were more interested in other
things.
13
194 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
source of the wrong disposition. Abram and Isaac are guilty
of prevarication which amounts to falsehood (Gen. xii. 13 ;
xxvi. 7) ; Jacob and Rebekah deceive the dim-eyed old Isaac
(Gen. xxvii.) ; and Jacob deals fraudulently with his father-
in-law (Gen. xxx.), the stories are told with perfect sim-
plicity ; no explanation is felt by the writer to be needed,
and none is given.
There is, however, one passage which appears to offer a
history of the origin of human sin ; it is the latter half of
the second history of creation (Gen. iii.). The date of this
passage is doubtful. It occurs in the body of traditions
(Gen. i.-xi.), which are sharply distinguished in content and
tone from the remainder of the book of Genesis. They con-
tain material identical with what we know existed in Baby-
lonia and Assyria, notably the history of the flood. Perhaps
the most natural account of the flood-story in Genesis is that
it was borrowed from the Assyrians or Babylonians, during
or shortly before the exile ; on the hypothesis that it was
brought by the Hebrews with them from the Tigris-Euphrates
valley when they migrated to Canaan, it would be hard to
account for the close similarity between the Chaldean and
biblical flood-stories (supposing that the Hebrew account
was not committed to writing till many centuries later),
since in each nation the tradition would go its independent
way, and the two would presumably diverge considerably
from each other ; and it would be equally hard to explain
the absence of all allusion to the great catastrophe in the
pre-exilian literature. 1 In the Assyrian-Babylonian remains
1 There are traces of different recensions in the Babylonian-Assyrian ac-
count, as in the Hebrew. Our Yahwistic and Elohistic components may rep-
resent narratives derived from different districts in Babylonia, or the latter
may be in part or wholly a later Jewish redaction of the material. The in-
terval of a hundred and fifty years between the arrival of the exiles in Baby-
lonia and the final redaction of the Pentateuch would allow a considerable
re-working of the story. The question, however, is not clear ; and it is pos-
SIN AND. RIGHTEOUSNESS. 195
there are fragments of other narratives which are parallel
with parts of the material in Gen. i.-xi. ; for example, with the
cosmogony and the story of the Tower of Babel. It is pos-
sible that in the serpent of Gen. iii. we have a survival of
the dragon of Babylonian myth, who is the antagonist of the
gods, here transformed under the influence of the Jewish
monotheistic faith, and woven into the general body of Jew-
ish beliefs. No distinct reference to the story is found else-
where in the Old Testament ; l the earliest mention of the
beginning of death is found in the Wisdom of- Solomon
(ii. 24). These indications point to a late date for the present
form of the story in Genesis ; and it may be added that the
broad cosmopolitan view of history which it involves belongs
more naturally to the time when the Jews came into con-
tact with other nations.
But though the story of the temptation of man by the serpent
stands thus isolated in the Old Testament, it nevertheless ex-
ists, and was, as we know, accepted by and influential in the
later generations of Jewish thinkers. What is its design and
significance ? The first human pair have their abode in a de-
lightful land which produces no thorns or thistles, where the
beasts are obedient to man, and where human labor is only
sible that the Hebrews brought these stories with them from Chaldea at a
very early period.
1 Ezekiel, who shows elsewhere traces of Babylonian influence, has (xxviii.)
a description of the Garden of Eden, in which the king of Tyre, the anointed
cherub, dwelt till he sinned : " Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day
that thou wast created till unrighteousness was found in thee" (v. 15). It
is an allusion to the story of Adam, but nothing is said of the nature and
origin of the sin there committed (in v. 16 he has in mind the commercial
city). The prophet treats his material poetically, but his imagery shows that
he was acquainted with the outline of the history in Gen. ii. iii. His diver-
gencies in details from the Genesis narrative, and his introduction of the
Babylonian sacred mountain of the gods (v. 14) seem to point to a time
when the story had not yet taken shape among the Jews ; and this fact would
favor the view that the material was borrowed by them during the exile, and
so either was not a part of their original folk-lore, or, if formerly known to
them, was now taken afresh from their neighbors.
196 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
a pleasant activity. There is a tree of life, by eating the
fruit of which man would become immortal. One moral
test is ordained for him : he is forbidden to eat of the fruit
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and death is to
be the penalty of disobedience. The animals are all endowed
with power of speech, and of them the serpent is the subtlest.
For some reason not explained in the text (according to the
Wisdom of Solomon, it was his envy of man's happiness and
possible immortality) he suggested to the woman that she
and the man should eat of the forbidden fruit, offering the
inducement that they should thus be made equal to the
Elohim-beings. They ate, and sentence of death was pro-
nounced on them ; and lest they should eat of the tree of life
and live forever, God drove them out of Eden, at the gate of
which he placed the cherubim to guard the approach to the
tree. What was the effect, in the conception of the writer
of this chapter, of man's act of disobedience ? Was it the
corruption of his moral nature, the entrance of sin as a
power into the world ? On the one hand, the transgression
of the divine command was an act of sin, the first, as far as
Jewish records go, in the history of the race. On the other
hand, the succeeding history in Genesis makes no refer-
ence to this event, and shows no consciousness of a dogma
of universal and total depravity. The priestly document
(L v., and parts of vi.-ix.) seems to ignore the story entirely ;
see, for example, in ch. v. the continuous development from
Adam to Noah (v. 29 is an insertion from another source).
And in the prophetic narrative, Abel and Noah are righteous
men accepted by God and apparently without taint of sin.
In both narratives, indeed, the earth is described as having
after a time become corrupt before God, but this fact is not
brought into connection with the narrative in the third
chapter; it seems rather to be the common Old Testament
view of the universality of sin, which is the result of expe-
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 197
rience. Moreover, it must be observed that in this chapter
the stress is laid on certain phenomena of life, which are
explained by the punishments inflicted : the serpent is to go
on his belly, eat dust, and be worsted in his conflict with
man ; the man and the woman are driven from a delightful
abode ; the earth is to bring forth inedible and hurtful
things ; the woman is to be subject to great bodily suffering,
and is to be subordinated to the man ; the man is to gain
his bread by the sweat of his brow and to return to the dust
out of which he was made. The main object of the writer
seems to be to account for the existence of these great facts
of man's experience, birth, toil, death ; and he appends an
account of the origin of clothing (v. 2 1). 1 Of effect on man's
inward life he says nothing; he is apparently concerned only
with some outward facts. These facts he brings into con-
nection with the initial act of human disobedience to God,
and iii so far his narrative may be regarded as a history of
the origin of sin. But he, like the other Old Testament
writers, really takes the human inclination to sin for granted.
He does not undertake to explain by what inward process
tho woman came to accept the serpent's suggestion, or why
the man decided to follow the woman's example. There is
no hint of inward conflict either in the woman or in the man ;
and it is not true, as is so often said, that Adam and his wife
are represented as in a state of childlike moral weakness or
ignorance. It was only by eating the forbidden fruit, in-
1 The awakening of the consciousness of nakedness may be looked on as
the birth of shame, the natural accompaniment of the sense of sin ; this would
be a fine psychological touch in the narrative. But it is doubtful whether the
writer had in mind anything more than the unseemliness which every tolera-
bly advanced civilization attaches to nakedness. The first pair, as a result
of the knowledge acquired by eating of the fruit of the tree, perceived, he
would say, the indecency of their position ; whence this sense of indecency
comes, he does not say ; and we may suppose that our author attempted in
thought no precise explanation of its origin, but contented himself with re-
garding it, like toil, as a part of the heritage of civilized life.
198 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
deed, that they attained that high perception of good and
evil, that fine power of distinguishing and selecting, which
equalled them with the Elohim-beings (v. 22); but before
this they had been intrusted with the care of the garden,
and are represented as human beings of normal intelligence
and development. Morally, also, they appear to occupy the
normal position of man. Up to the fatal moment of the
woman's colloquy with the serpent, they had not sinned ; but
this was because no occasion of transgression had presented
itself ; at any moment it was possible for them to choose the
wrong rather than the right. In a word, the question of the
origin of sin was remote from the writer's mind ; he chron-
icled the first act of sin, but it did not occur to him that any
psychological explanation of such an occurrence was needed.
It was matter of common experience that there was in the
human soul an inclination to evil ; and in this respect he did
not think of the first man as different from his posterity. 1
A sharp temptation presents itself to Adam and Eve, there
is the prize of equality with the divine beings to be gained by
one act of disobedience ; they chose to risk the consequences
of disobedience. Many questions of psychological interest
present themselves to the modern reader of this story ; but it
is not probable that any of these were in the mind of its
author. Did he regard the godlike knowledge of good and
evil as a misfortune, and the desire for it as a crime ? How
could man incur the penalty of death at the moment that he
became as one of the Elohim ? Is labor, like knowledge, to
be regarded as an evil? But these questions have really
nothing to do with the story. For the explanation of its
present form we have probably to go first to the old mythical
narrative of which it is the monotheistic elaboration, 2 and
1 For a similar rabbinical view see Weber, "System der pal. Theol."
p. 206.
2 The naivete of the narrative points to an early stage of society for its
origin. Man, the serpent, the Elohim-beings and the cherubs associate, as
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 199
then to the writer's special purpose to explain certain uni-
versal phenomena of human life. He no more explains the
origin of sin than do the prophets and psalmists ; he relates
its historical beginning, but he takes for granted its psy-
chological ground, and in this sense it seems to have been
understood by succeeding generations for a considerable time.
The serpent in the narrative is an enigmatical figure.
There is no hint that he is anything but the animal, wise
above other animals, acquainted with the conditions of
man's life and with his relations to the Elohim, but still
simply and wholly the animal ; the punishment inflicted
on him relates solely to the habits of the beast. But there
seems to be a difficulty in supposing that the writer of
Gen. iii. could attribute such a role to a beast. A serpent
endowed with reason, and capable of circumventing the de-
signs of God, is a character which might seem impossible
to Jewish thought. It has therefore appeared to many per-
sons necessary to hold that the writer meant to represent
the animal as merely the vehicle of a malignant spiritual
being. Such was the view taken in later times. But is
there any ground for attributing such a view to our au-
thor? The opinion that the lower animals in primitive
times were endowed with reason makes no difficulty ; it
was widely held in antiquity. 1 The serpent of our chap-
ter must be regarded as going back to a very early time,
the survival and transformation of an old mythical figure,
at first probably a literal snake, then gradually interwoven
into more developed myths. Such a malign figure might,
in the course of generations, take just the shape and play
it were, on equal terms, a characteristic of primitive narratives. The cen-
tral idea is man's loss, not of innocence, but of happy ease.
1 For the evidence that early peoples in all parts of the world made no
difference, in respect of reason and speech, between man and other animals,
see Tylor's " Primitive Culture," Lang's " Myth, Ritual, and Religion," and
similar works.
200 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
just the part of the serpent of Genesis. Given the two
conceptions, a hostile dragon-creature, and the lapse of
man from a state of primitive happiness, there might
not unnaturally result the story of the temptation and fall.
The Jews may have received it, with the two facts com-
bined, during or shortly before the exile, and impressed on
it the monotheistic stamp, the relation of the serpent and
the man to God which we now find in the story. 1 It may
seem strange to us, or impossible, that Jews should have
been willing to accept such a history from their heathen
neighbors. But we must recollect that the Jews of the
exilian period were not the Jews of the New Testament
times, or of the second century B. c., or even of the period
of Ezra and Nehemiah. They were far more receptive ;
their religious dogmas had not been sharply formulated;
their religious life was not petrified. They found themselves
in the midst of a splendid civilization, a people speaking
a kindred tongue to theirs, with stories of the olden times
whose Semitic impress would deprive them of the appear-
ance of strangeness to the Semitic Jew. Such stories, find-
ing their way into the little community of exiles through
their intercourse with their Babylonian neighbors, might
after several generations come to assume a Jewish shape,
so that their foreign origin might be forgotten. The ser-
pent would be accepted as an instrument of God's dealings
1 There is no mention of the temptation in the Babylonian written remains,
only a possible hint of it in the pictures of the tree with two persons, whose
character is not certain. The figure of the hostile dragon (Tiamat) is prom-
inent in Babylonian epic poetry, but in the shape in which we now have it,
is late and complex. It is certainly connected with the sea, as the name indi-
cates ; but how the sea came to be represented as a dragon, and the latter
came to be the enemy of the gods (destroyed in the Babylonian story by Bel-
Marduk), is not clear. Tiamat, for example, is in the first creation-tablet the
mother of the gods and of the world. The figure seems to involve the blend-
ing of several different lines of mythical narrative. The humanized and
reflective form of the story in Genesis indicates a comparatively late period
for its final redaction.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 201
with man in those far-away times when all the conditions
of life were different from ours. The Jew would think it
unnecessary to ask how a beast could do such great things,
or why the serpent rather than any other beast should have
been the actor. The story would be accepted with the same
simplicity with which the prophetic writer of Gen. vi. details
the history of the angels who came down to earth and took
to themselves wives of the daughters of men. These were all
things that lay outside of present experience ; but they were
believed to belong to a unique period of human history.
We should reach the same view of the serpent if we
supposed the story to have been brought by the Jews from
Mesopotamia and gradually worked up into its present
shape. The difficulties in the way of this supposition have
already been stated ; but on the other hand, there are some
features of the narrative that may seem to favor it. The
story abounds in incongruities, as if it were the abridgment
of an originally much longer narrative. The representation
of the divine being is of that highly anthropomorphic char-
acter which we more naturally refer to early times : Yahwe
brings the animals to Adam to see what he will call them,
and only after a detailed examination is it discovered that
there is among them no companion corresponding to man,
no help meet for him, and it then becomes necessary to cre-
ate a special being ; Yahwe walks in the garden in the cool
of the day, that is, the evening, because the heat was
insupportable at other times ; he cannot at first find Adam,
who has hidden himself ; he comes down for the purpose
of finding out the state of things by personal inquiry, and
it is by cross -questioning that the facts are elicited ; he
fears that the man will eat of the tree of life and live
forever, he does not (apparently cannot) withdraw from
the tree its virtue, but drives man from the garden, and
stations cherubim to guard it. Similar anthropomorphisms
202 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
are found in the stories of the flood and of the Tower of
Babel, and indeed elsewhere (Gen. xviii ; Ps. Ixviii.). In
their origin they belong to an undeveloped state of re-
ligious thought ; but, handed down by tradition, they might
in much more advanced times be accepted and retained as
sacred lore. Anthropomorphisms and incongruities do not,
however, settle the question of origin ; they may have been
old-Babylonian as well as old-Hebrew.
The role of the serpent began very soon to cause diffi-
culty in men's minds. The same sort of doubt arose as
now exists among us. What was this serpent ? Whence his
power and malignity ? It would be natural to connect him
with an evil spirit and to identify him with Satan when
the doctrine of a great spiritual adversary of Israel and
of man had been sufficiently developed. This identification
does not occur in the Old Testament. But we know that
the person of Satan was constantly growing in distinct-
ness. In the book of Chronicles (1 Chron. xxi. 1), Satan
tempts David to number Israel, apparently for the purpose
of bringing misfortune on the king and on the people. It
is a procedure parallel with that of Gen. iii. ; in both cases
the tempter suggests an apparently desirable act which he
knows will excite the displeasure of God. We are not able
to trace the development of Satan further in the Old Testa-
ment. The book of Daniel, with its large machinery of
angels, some of whom are unfriendly to Israel, makes no
mention of the great adversary. The Wisdom of Solomon,
however, seems to give a definite interpretation of the ser-
pent of Gen. iii. : " God created man for immortality, and
made him to be an image for his own being [or, his own
eternity], but through envy of the devil came death into
the world" (ii. 23, 24). There can be little doubt that the
author here identifies the serpent with the devil ; and as
he speaks of this act of the Evil One as well known, we
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 203
must suppose that the identification in question had been
made by the Jews some time before, that is, probably as
early as the third century B. c. 1 The thought of the time
favored such a view. There was a growing belief in the
influence of spirits, good and bad, on human life ; and the
literary and scientific culture of the day more and more in-
disposed men to attribute to an animal the part played by
the serpent in the history of the first man's transgression.
But even if, as is pointed out above, the serpent of Gen.
iii. is not to be identified or connected with an evil spirit,
does it follow that the narrative is to be taken literally ?
May it not have been intended as an allegory ? The ser-
pent might represent the lower, animal nature in man, from
which comes so largely the inducement to sin. 2 The author
would then picture life as a struggle between the opposing
tendencies of the human soul, and the experience of the
first man would be presented as typical of all succeeding
human experience. Such a view is in itself quite con-
ceivable, but is open to various objections. It is entirely
without exegetical support. The writer by no word hints
that the serpent is to be taken otherwise than literally; it
is the real animal that is cursed ; it must be the real ani-
mal that tempts. Further, the narrative does not represent
Eve as yielding merely to a solicitation of the lower nature.
Such was the opinion of the rabbis, but it is not borne out
by the text. What the serpent promises is that man shall
be made equal to the Elohim in knowledge of good and
evil, that is, in general moral- intellectual power, surely
1 It has already been suggested that the sharper isolation of Satan and his
identification with the serpent were first effected in Egypt, where Greek and
Egyptian ideas were influential. In the earliest part of the hook of Enoch
(a Palestinian production), i.-xxxvi., lxxii.-cv., it is Azazel who is the chief
representative of evil , in the Parahles (of later date) he is identified with
Satan (liii. 3 ; liv. 5, 6). We have here an indication of the gradual coales-
cence of different lines of development of the principle of moral evil.
2 Philo (i. 79) regards the serpent as a symbol of sensual pleasure.
204 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
not a despicable prize. As to Adam, his reason for eating
the fruit is not given ; it is only said that he took it when
it was offered him by his wife. In the case of Eve, it is
added that she observed the beauty of the fruit ; a sensual
motive thus existed, but it is not represented as predom-
inating over the higher intellectual reason. Such an alle-
gorical narrative might be possible for the time when this
story was put into shape (fifth century B. c.) ; but if that
had been the author's intention, he would certainly have
given an indication of it, as we find in Isa. v., Ezek. xvi.,
Ps. Ixxx. The abstract character of the supposed allegory
would, however, occasion doubt ; such a representation, the
antagonism between the higher and lower elements of the
soul, seems more appropriate to the first century of our
era than to the age of Ezra.
In this connection we may notice our author's representa-
tion of death. Death is regarded in the Old Testament as
the common lot of men (the teaching of experience), 1 and
as the greatest of evils (since existence in Sheol was looked
on as colorless and negative, devoid of pleasurable activity).
It was viewed vaguely as the inevitable outcome of human
weakness, though it might be prematurely inflicted by God
in the way of punishment. 2 Except in Gen. iii., no other
explanation of its presence is offered ; it was accepted as
an ultimate fact. In the history in Gen. iii., man is re-
garded as mortal, yet as capable of earthly immortality.
If he had eaten of the tree of life, he would have lived
forever ; and it does not appear why he did not eat of it
1 Nothing is said of a sentence of death passed on the lower animals ; their
mortality is assumed (Ps. civ. 29). and is not supposed to need explanation.
2 In rare cases (Enoch, Elijah) a man was held to have passed out of
earthly life without suffering death ; he was taken directly to the abode of
the Elohim. Parallel instances among other peoples are numerous. Such
representations appear to issue out of the primitive conception of the essen-
tial identity between gods and men.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 205
while he had opportunity. 1 After his sin the punishment of
death was denounced against him, perhaps not as stamp-
ing mortality on him, but as declaring that he should not
gain immortality by the life-giving tree. The death thus
imposed was physical and temporal : " Dust thou art, and
to dust thou shalt return." There is no hint of a present
spiritual death of the soul, nor of everlasting death here-
after, which did not belong to the writer's circle of ideas.
The addition made to the general Old Testament teaching
by this story is that the first man (and presumably the
whole race) lost the gift or possibility of earthly immor-
tality by an act of transgression. Such is the view given
in the Wisdom of Solomon (ii. 23, 24) : "God created man
to be immortal, . . . but through envy of the devil death
came into the world." The statement in Ecclus. (xvii. 1)
" the Lord created man of the earth and turned him into
it again" is indefinite. According to Ecclus. (xxv. 24) and
Philo (i. 79), it was through the woman that sin and death
came into the world.
The literature between the Old Testament and the New
Testament shows no development in the idea of sin. Differ-
ent tendencies, no doubt, existed among the Jewish people.
The nation as a whole came under the control of nomism ;
sin, conceived as the violation of some precept of the ex-
ternal law, tended to assume a mechanical character. Where
the conduct of life was ordered by minute regulations, the
attention was naturally fixed more on the outward precept
and less on the spiritual constitution and temper of the
soul. This is the conception which we find in the Wisdom
of the Son of Sirach, the Sibylline Oracles, Tobit, and the
Psalter of Solomon. On the other hand, the existence of a
1 I here take the narrative as it stands, passing by, as unimportant for
the present discussion, the question whether the tree of life belongs to the
original form of the story. See Budde, " Biblische Urgeschichte," pp. 46 ff .
206 SIN AND EIGHTEOUSXESS.
more spiritual view is vouched for by Ps. li., and by the
conception of wisdom found in the Wisdom of Solomon and
in Philo. In the last two works, though there is no ex-
plicit statement of the nature of sin, it is assumed to be a
contamination, restriction, and violation of the higher na-
ture. The true life of the soul is identified with that wis-
dom which involves both accurate knowledge and purity
of will; and wrong-doing is therefore thought of as an im-
pairment of inward spiritual life. In accordance with this
view, Philo holds the body to be the seat of evil and the
antagonist of the higher life; it conspires, he says, against
the soul ; it is forever dead (i. 100) ; it cannot aid in the
attainment of virtue, but rather hinders it (i. 64) ; and so
the flesh is put over against the divine spirit, and the two
are represented as opposing principles of life : " Men are of
two classes, those who order their lives by the divine
spirit and reason, and those who live by the blood and the
pleasure of the flesh " (i. 481). 1
The New Testament representation of sin varies with dif-
ferent writers, passing from the simple Old Testament view
to the conception of evil as the corruption of nature. Its
universality is everywhere assumed, as in Luke xiii. 3,
Rom. iii. 9-19 ; 2 the teaching of the Old Testament and
of general human observation and conviction is accepted
without argument. The majority of the New Testament
books show no interest in the question of the historical
origin of sin. Doubtless the narrative in Gen. iii. was ac-
cepted with its later interpretation as given in the Wisdom
1 This is not to be regarded as the ascetic view that the body is in itself
sinful, but only as the representation of the flesh as in general the visible
locus and instrument of the lower pleasures.
2 The passages here cited from the Old Testament are Eccles. vii. 20 ; Ps.
xiv. 2, 3 ; Ps. v. 10 (9) ; Isa. lix. 7, 8 ; Ps. xxxvi. 2(1); Ps. cxliii. 2. None of
these, except the first and last, affirm sinfnlness of all men ; the reference,
with the exception stated, is to the " wicked," who are simply the enemies of
Israel ; their point of view is rather national than moral.
SIN AND KIGHTEOUSNESS. 207
of Solomon (ii. 24) ; the common view must have been that
man fell from purity by the temptation of the devil. But
it seems to have been felt that for the moral-spiritual life,
this historical fact was of small importance ; the practical
thing was to recognize the present relation of sin to the
soul. Jesus lays stress on the fundamental fact that the root
of evil is in the heart, whence proceed evil thoughts and
deeds which defile the man (Matt. xv. 19, 20) and define the
character of his soul, for the tree is known by its fruit, and
out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks (Matt,
xii. 33, 34). So in the Epistle of James, the interest is in
the present psychological history of sin : " Blessed is the man
who endures temptation, for when he has been approved, he
shall receive the crown of life which he has promised to
those that love him. J^et no man when he is tempted say,
I am tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted by evil
things, nor does he himself tempt any one ; but each man
is tempted when he is drawn away and enticed by his own
desire. Then the desire, when it has conceived, bears sin, and
the sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death" (James
i. 1215). In this connection it would have been not unnat-
ural for the writer to refer to the history in Genesis ; but he
is concerned with practical life, with the present struggle of
man's soul. A universal disposition to sin is here assumed,
but the psychological analysis relates to every sinful act.
As to the origin of this tendency to evil, its relation to the
soul, whether it is to be considered a second nature or an
original nature, a divine creation or a human addition and
blot, these are questions that the greater part of the New
Testament, wholly concerned with practical life, does not
touch. The writings of Paul and his school and the Fourth
Gospel contain references to the history in Genesis, but
merely repeat its statements, without undertaking anything
like the spiritual history of the first man ; " By one man
208 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
sin entered into the world and death by sin, and thus
death passed unto all men, for that all sinned" (Rom. v.
12); "Adam was not beguiled, but the woman, being be-
guiled, fell into transgression' (1 Tim. ii. 14); "Ye are of
your father the devil, and you will to do the desires of
your father" (John viii. 44)
To the same practical interest we may ascribe the reti-
cence of the New Testament respecting the external and in-
ternal consequences of Adam's transgression. Did the death
inflicted on him (and on his descendants) extend beyond
this life and assume the form of everlasting punishment
(of annihilation there is no word in either Old Testament
or New Testament) ? Did the sentence affect man's moral
nature, carrying with it a deadness to higher inward im-
pulses and incapacity for holiness ? In the greater part of
the New Testament these questions are ignored ; there is
no consciousness of their existence. The Christian life of
the first century consisted partly in the acceptance of Jesus
of Nazareth as the Messiah and Saviour, and the expecta-
tion of his speedy return to earth, and partly in the ethical
struggle against the hostility and moral evil of the world.
Christianity was eminently a serious, real life, whose prac-
tical concerns absorbed the energies of men. The Gospels
and most of the Epistles are occupied with the present as
a preparation for the future ; of the past they think only
in so far as it is a prediction of the new kingdom of heaven
which has brought peace and moral stability with hope of
a coming unspeakable blessedness. Paul, with his analytic
and dogmatically constructive mind, is the only writer who
feels called on to treat logically the historical beginning
of sin ; and even he does it only indirectly. His argument
in Rom. v. 12-21 has for its main purpose to set forth
the introduction of life-giving righteousness through Jesus
Christ. He assumes the historical fact that sin and death
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 209
entered the world through Adam, but he seems not to think
it necessary to define precisely the nature of this death. It is
first of all physical in his conception : " Death reigned from
Adam till Moses, even over them who had not sinned after
the likeness of Adam's transgression" (v. 14). But at the
same time he takes for granted that it is everlasting, as
appears from the antithesis in v. 21: "That, as sin reigned
in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness
unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." Further,
the contrast running through the paragraph, between the
righteousness achieved by Christ and the sinful condition
established by Adam, doubtless involved in the apostle's feel-
ing the elements of moral corruption and purification. In
his view, deadness to the law, the result of faith in Christ,
was also deadness to sin, a legal status which could not
exist apart from the moral attitude of the soul (ch. vi.).
Thus, though he makes no explicit statement of a connec-
tion between Adam's sin and spiritual and everlasting death,
it may be inferred that the connection existed in his mind.
Traces of this conception of the consequences of sin are
found in pre-Christian books. But Paul gives it a new
prominence ; he was naturally led to this view by his con-
ception of Christ as the centre of salvation and the turning-
point in religious history, the new divine life brought in
by him was to be set over against the preceding period of
dull subjection to external law. His view was no doubt
shared more or less by the body of churches with which
he was in special contact, and by its logical symmetry more
and more commended itself to the Christian world. So far
as regards a connection between universal human sinful-
ness, a fact of experience, and the historical incident de-
scribed in Gen. iii , this is in itself not an ethical element
of life, and Paul uses it, as we have seen, simply to bring
out clearly the inward righteousness created by Christ ; but,
u
210 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
*
raised to the rank of a fundamental dogma and held in a
mechanical way, it is capable of exerting an injurious effect
on the religious consciousness.
The narrative in Genesis represents the woman as the
immediate agent of the introduction of sin into the world, 1
and this side of the history is followed literally in 1 Tim.
ii. 14 : "Adam was not beguiled, but the woman was be-
guiled, and fell into transgression." The lesson which the
writer draws from this fact is the subordination of women :
" Let a woman learn in quietness, in all subjection ; but I
permit not a woman to teach nor to have dominion over a
man, but to be in quietness ; for Adam was first formed,
then Eve, and Adam was not beguiled," etc. (vs. 11-13).
His interest in the narrative is social and practical. Paul,
on the other hand, has nothing to say of Eve, but lays all
the stress on Adam as the effective person in the trans-
action. His is the legal view, which regards the man as
the head and representative of the household, alone qual-
ified to take legal action, the woman not being sui juris.
How far this difference of view existed in Christian circles
of that day, it is impossible to say. As we have already
seen, the Alexandrian Philo makes the woman the intro-
ducer of sin, and the same opinion is expressed in the Wis-
dom of the Son of Sirach. Whether Philo represents the
Alexandrian Jewish view, and Paul the Palestinian, we have
no means of determining ; if the First Epistle to Timothy be
regarded as representing Pauline theological ideas, its usage
would go to show that both views were held among Pales-
tinian Jews. Not improbably Paul was led to select Adam
as the central figure in the history of the first transgression
1 The role thus assigned to woman (and not by the Hebrews alone) is per-
haps merely the expression of the ancient opinion of the moral inferiority of
the sex (Eccles. vii. 28 ; 1 Tim. ii. 14, 15), such histories having been composed
by men. But the origin of the temptation-story is obscure, and it is impos-
sible to say what other elements may have determined its present form.
SIN AND KIGHTEOUSNESS. 211
in order, by contrast with him, to bring out more clearly the
work of Christ ; the whole of the Pauline theology is derived
from the conception of Christ as the centre of salvation.
But though the precise religious significance of Adam's
sin is scantily treated in the New Testament, there is no
doubt as to its affirmation respecting the corruption of
human nature. Here again it is the Pauline school and
the Johannean writings to which we owe the most definite
statements. The synoptic Gospels say nothing of a moral
depravity inherent in man. On the contrary, Jesus every-
where assumes man's moral capability and independence ;
his appeal is to the human conscience and will, which he
takes it for granted can perceive and do what is right ; in
his view the difference between men consists in the differ-
ence of attitude toward God and right. Men are indeed
"evil" (Matt. vii. 11) ; but this does not prevent their recog-
nition and performance of what is morally good : " If ye
then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your chil-
dren, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven
give good things to them that ask him ? . . . Every good
tree brings forth good fruit, and the corrupt tree brings
forth evil fruit ; a good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit,
nor can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. ... By their
fruits ye shall know them" (Matt. vii. 11, 17, 18, 20). The
same view is found in the Epistle to James : " Who is wise
and understanding among you? let him show by his good
life his works in meekness and wisdom. . . . Draw nigh to
God, and he will draw nigh to you ; cleanse your hands, ye
sinners, and purify your hearts, ye double-minded. ... He
who converts a sinner from the error of his way shall save a
soul from death and shall cover a multitude of sins " (James
iii. 13 ; iv. 8 ; v. 20). This is also the conception of the soul
found in the Pastoral Epistles : " We know that the law is
good if a man use it lawfully, as knowing this, that law
212 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and
unruly " (1 Tim. i. 8, 9) ; " The Lord's servant must not strive,
but be gentle towards all, apt to teach, forbearing, in meek-
ness correcting them that oppose themselves, if peradventure
God may give them repentance unto the knowledge of the
truth, and they may recover themselves out of the snare
of the devil " (2 Tim. ii. 24, 25, 26) ; " To the end that those
who have believed God may be careful to maintain good
works " (Titus iii. 8). These passages assume independent
moral capability in man, a view of life which may be held
along with the belief in the renewing grace of God, as
in the Epistle to Titus : " The grace of God has appeared,
bringing salvation to all men, instructing us that, denying
ungodliness and worldly desires, we should live soberly and
righteously in this present age, looking for the appearance
of ... Christ Jesus, who gave himself for us that he might
redeem us from all iniquity" (ii. 1114); "According to his
mercy he saved us, through the washing of regeneration and
renewing of the holy spirit, . . . that being justified by his
grace, we might be made heirs, according to hope, of eternal
life " (iii. 5-7).
This is substantially the Old Testament point of view,
universal moral weakness and natural tendency to sin, with
recognition of man's power to will and to do what is right.
Christianity, however, by emphasizing the sinfulness of sin,
brought out into sharper relief the moral feebleness of human
nature and the necessity for the assisting and sustaining
grace of God. Paul, under the guidance of his dogmatic
system, went a step further, and formulated the doctrine of
the natural man's incapacity to do good. In his view, the
fatal religious error was the belief in obedience to law as
the ground of salvation ; the inability of obedience to save
came to rest in his mind on man's inability to obey, and
this inability involved or was identical with moral impo-
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 213
tency. He represents the flesh that is, normal human na-
ture as absolutely antagonistic in ethical tone and works
to the divine spirit ; each of these elements of life cherishes
desires hostile to the other, they are contrary each to the
other. All wicked deeds he characterizes as the " works
of the flesh " (Gal. v. 17-21). This antagonism between the
natural human soul and the divine spirit of purity assumes
the corruption of man's heart ; for it is only through Christ
that one escapes the dominion of the flesh and comes to walk
and live by the spirit. It is essential that the flesh with all
its affections and desires that is, the whole ethical side of
the natural man be crucified (Gal. v. 24) ; its only hope
is death ; and they who sow to the flesh shall reap cor-
ruption (Gal. vi. 8). Elsewhere, Paul represents the moral
unreceptiveness of unbelievers as the result of blinding by
the god of this age (2 Cor. iv. 4), the result of which must
be absolute inability to see or to do the truth. The doctrine
is expressed definitely in the Epistle to the Romans : " Our
old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might
be done away, that so we should no longer be in bondage
to sin " (vi. 6) ; "I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, there
dwells no good thing " (vii. 18) ; " The mind of the flesh is
enmity against God, for it is not and cannot be subject to
the law of God, and they that are in the flesh cannot please
God " (viii. 7). And yet, with this thorough-going view of
man's inward corruption, the apostle still holds to an in-
dwelling recognition of the good, a will which is capable
of desire, but not of performance : " To will is present with
me, but not the power to do what is right, for the good
which I would I do not, but the evil which I would not,
that I practise " (Kom. vii. 18, 19). Thus he reaches the con-
ception of a schism in the soul, a conflict between the true
self and the sinful self : " If I do what I would not, it is
no longer I that do it, but sin, which dwells in me " (Rom.
214 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
vil 20). 1 This is perhaps an illogical position ; for if no
good can dwell in the soul, it is incapable of willing what
is right. But Paul is the last man to concern himself about
illogicalness. The very intensity of his logical demands nat-
urally leads him into inconsistencies. When he is pointing
out the need of the righteousness of Christ, he describes in
unlimited terms man's natural inability to attain righteous-
ness ; but in the examination of his own experience, he finds
the most striking proof of his moral incapacity in the help-
lessness of his will against the corruption of his nature,
that is, he assumes the existence of a will which is on the
side of right. What this " I " is, this personality which stands
opposed to sin, he does not further explain. Evidently he
was conscious of natural good impulses which were over-
borne by temptations ; but instead of viewing such impulses
as the germ which might be developed into holiness, he
fixes his eye on the weak side of his nature and declares
it to be totally depraved. It is this side of humanity
man's moral debility which the apostle's theological sys-
tem led him to insist on ; the other man's independent
conscience and recognition of and striving after the good
he leaves almost completely out of view. Yet, though he
does not elsewhere formulate it, the recognition of man's
moral capacity may be discerned in the appeals which he
so often makes to the conscience and will ; in his portrait-
ure of the moral condition of the heathen world, for exam-
ple (Rom. i. 18-32), he assumes in the heathen cauacity to
recognize and to obey God. 2 It will be, perhaps, a not un-
1 It is clear, from vs. 10, 14, 24, that Paul is in this chapter describing the
experience, not of the renewed, hut of the natural soul.
2 It was not unnatural that the apostle's picture of the contemporary
Roman world should be a dark one , he was absorbed in the demonstration
of his theme that the only possible righteousness is that which is revealed in
the gospel, the righteousness that rests on faith in Christ. But it is only a
half-view that he gives. In the lives of not a few illustrious men whose biog-
SIN AND -RIGHTEOUSNESS. 215
fair account of Paul's view to say that he recognizes both
those elements of life which force themselves on our atten-
tion, moral weakness and capacity for moral good. It is his
attitude toward the law which leads him to affirm at times
moral deadness, in order to do away with man's pretensions
to achieving his own salvation ; he feels that he can prepare
the way for the righteousness of Christ only by eliminating
the righteousness of the law.
Complete moral incapacity is affirmed in the Epistles to
the Ephesians and to the Colossians, whose theology, who-
ever their author or authors may be, is substantially Paul-
ine : " And you did he quicken, when you were dead through
your trespasses and sins, wherein aforetime you walked ac-
cording to the age of this world, according to the prince of
the power of the air, of the spirit that now works in the
sons of disobedience ; among whom we also all once lived
in the desires of our flesh, doing the wishes of the flesh and
of the thoughts, and were by nature children of wrath even
as others ; but God, being rich in mercy, on account of his
great love with which he loved us, even when we were
dead through our trespasses, quickened us together with
the Christ " (Eph. ii. 1-5, and so Col. ii. 13). Yet here also
we have to note the recognition of man's moral freedom in
the various precepts (Eph. iv. v. ; Col. iii. iv.), obedience to
which is assumed to be within man's power ; the Ephesians
are even exhorted to put away the " old man," that is,
the corrupt nature. The transition from one of these points
of view to another is natural ; at one time the attention is
fixed on man's obvious moral weakness, at another time
raphies have come down to us, and, there is ground to suppose, of many
an unnamed household, there were examples of shining or quiet virtue, of
patience, devotion, and love. An age must not he judged wholly by its exam-
ples of shining wickedness. Nor is this sweeping condemnation necessary to
show the power of a righteousness that has its basis in steadfast loving trust
in a holy God.
216 SIN AND EIGHTEOUSNESS.
on that independence and power of moral action without
which no true ethical life can be conceived.
In the Fourth Gospel, we pass to a conception of life dif-
ferent from those above described. The author looks not
on the individual, but on the mass of humanity. He does
not enter into an analysis of the ethical elements and pow-
ers of the human soul, but regards the world, the cosmos,
as hostile to God, incapable of apprehending the truth, in-
volved in darkness and death. Into this mass of darkness
and death Jesus has brought light and life, whereby a con-
flict between these opposing powers has been introduced.
"In him was life, and the life was the light of men, and
the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not
apprehend it ; ... and this is the judgment, that the light
has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather
than the light, for their deeds were evil. . . . Jesus spake
unto them, saying, I am the light of the world ; he that
follows me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have
the light of life. ... I am come a light into the world,
that whoever believes on me may not abide in the dark-
ness" (i. 4. 5 ; iii. 19; viii. 12 ; xii. 46). In the sixth chap-
ter (vs. 33-63), Jesus describes himself as the bread of life,
the true manna from heaven, of which a man may eat and
never die. Elsewhere it is explained that his words are the
source of truth : " The words that I speak unto you, they
are the spirit and they are the life " (vi. 63). The world is
thus pictured as dead, capable of attaining life only by be-
lieving on Jesus, the Son of God, whose teaching is the
expression of the absolute truth, who is himself, therefore,
the way, the truth, and the life (xiv. 6). And thus the sin
of the world is unbelief : the Spirit convicts the world of
sin because it believes not on Jesus (xvi. 9). Those who
believe are ushered into a new existence and form a sepa-
rate community, which stands over against the world in a
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 217
relation of irreconcilable hostility : " If the world hates you,
know that it hated me before it hated you ; if you were
of the world, the world would love its own, but because
you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world,
therefore the world hates you" (xv. 18,19). So sharp is
this separation, so completely removed is the world from
the sphere of the divine life, that Jesus, according to the
representation of the author, puts it out of the sphere of
his intercession : " I pray not for the world " (xvii. 9). Yet
it is only by God's choice and drawing that men can detach
themselves from the mass of the world and come to Jesus :
" No man can come to me except the Father which sent me
draw him" (vi. 44). The same antithesis of power and im-
potency, however, is here brought out as in the Pauline
writings : " You have not his word abiding in you, for whom
he sent, him you believe not ; you search the Scriptures be-
cause you think that in them you have eternal life, and it
is they that bear witness of me ; and you are not willing to
come to me that you may have life. ... If you believed
Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me ; but if you
believe not his writings, how shall you believe my words ? . . .
All that the Father gives me shall come to me, and him who
comes to me I will in no wise cast out " (v. 38-40, 46, 47 ;
vi. 37). And as God is thus the creator of the new world
of light and truth and life, he stands over against the devil,
the author of falsehood : " I speak the things which I have
seen with my father, and you also do the things which you
have heard from your father. They answered and said unto
him, Our father is Abraham. Jesus said to them, If you are
Abraham's children, do the works of Abraham. But now
you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth,
which I heard from God ; this did not Abraham. You do
the works of your father. They said to him, We have one
father, God. Jesus said to them, If God were your father,
218 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
you would love me, for I came forth and am come from
God ; I have not come of myself, but he sent me. Why do
you not know my speech ? Because you cannot hear my
word. You are of your father, the devil, and the desires of
your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from
the beginning, and stood not in the truth, because there
is no truth in him " (viii. 38-44). The same general view
is given in the First Epistle of John.
The author of the Fourth Gospel, looking at the world
from a philosophical point of view, conceives of life as a
conflict between the divine and the anti-divine elements.
The world is corrupt; but he offers no explanation of the
source of its moral evil. 1 It was created by God through
Jesus Christ, and yet is out of harmony with God : " He
[Jesus] was in the world, and the world was made through
him, and the world knew him not" (i. 10). Of the con-
dition of the world before Christ came, the author says
nothing, yet he assumes that Abraham was in harmony
with God (viii. 39, 40). In his portraiture of the moral
corruption of the world, he substantially agrees with Paul.
But his interest in the question of sin is not an historical
one, he seeks no points of connection with the past ; he
is concerned only with the fact that into this great corrupt
organism, the world, there has streamed a divine life, em-
bodied in the words and thus in the person of Jesus Christ.
1 From his reference to the devil (viii. 44; xvi. 11) it may be inferred that
he accepted the current opinion which connected the " prince of this world "
with the lapse of the parents of the race from innocence. He does not, how-
ever, attempt to bring this fact into relation with the original function of
the Logos. His fondness for the term cosmos (more than one-half the occur-
rences of this word in the New Testament are found in the Fourth Gospel
and the First Epistle of John) suggests the Stoic idea which is adopted by
Philo. It would seem, therefore, that on this Philonian conception (Cosmos
and Logos) he has simply grafted the Jewish idea of the entrance of sin into
the world through an evil supernatural being. But he is so absorbed in the
present mission of the Logos that he does not care to account for the fact
which makes that mission necessary.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 219
His eye is fixed not on man's inward struggle against sin,
but on the transforming power of God, which lays hold of
man and brings him into the sphere of light and life. 1
The idea that sin inheres in the flesh as matter does not
belong to the teaching of the New Testament. We have
already seen that the Old Testament regards the human
body as the instrument of the soul, and therefore as often
the occasion of sin, but not in any wise as in itself impure.
The transition, however, to this latter view of the impurity
of the flesh was natural and easy ; the body, being the occa-
sion of evil, would without difficulty come to be thought
of as its seat. Such seems to be the idea in Wisdom of
Solomon (viii. 19, 20), where the author is describing his own
birth : " I was a child of excellent disposition, and I obtained
a good soul ; yea, being good, I came into an undefiled body."
The thought here is not clear ; but there is in any case
the suggestion that some human bodies are in themselves
impure. So in the passages quoted above from Philo, the
flesh is identified with evil ; but in the New Testament the
term is used in a figurative sense for the corrupt nature,
and there is no indication that the gnostic doctrine of the
impurity of matter is held by any New Testament writer.
It is opposed and condemned in the Epistle to the Colossians
(il 20-23). 2
1 The peculiar representation in John ix. 34, of the blind man as born
in sins, and the idea that the blindness was the punishment of parental sin
(ix. 2), belongs to the Old Testament view; we have here a popular concep-
tion which does not essentially modify the theory of the Fourth Gospel or of
the New Testament generally.
2 Neither gnosticism nor that asceticism which is allied to gnosticism
seems to be a Jewish (or indeed a Semitic) conception. Certainly nothing
of the sort is found in the Old Testament, which is rather marked by an
intense love of this life and conviction of its goodness. The Kechabite absti-
nence from wine was a survival of the old nomad life, and the same thing
is probably true of the Nazarite vow, the Nazarites mentioned in the Old
Testament are anything but ascetics. The Wisdom of Solomon and the
writings of Philo are not of purely Jewish origin, and the same thing may
be suspected of the isolated Essenian community.
220 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
The New Testament conception of human sinfulness, there-
fore, differs little from the result of general observation. Men
are held to be everywhere prone to evil ; and on the other
hand, the ethical independence of the conscience and will
is recognized. Of the historical genesis of sin in the world
almost nothing is said ; the main interest attaches to the
present problem of life, the annihilation of sin as a power
in the soul. Jesus thinks of this destruction of sin as pro-
duced by the voluntary attitude of the soul toward God and
man ; in the Epistle of James we find the Old Testament
conception of the overcoming of sin by effort of will ; the
writings of the Pauline school consider the destruction of
sin in the soul to be the result of the death of Christ and
the new creation thence resulting. In the Fourth Gospel the
celestial light brought into the world by the Son of God dis-
pels the darkness of sin in the hearts of those who believe.
The characteristic of the New Testament teaching is its in-
tense conception of sin as the one great evil in the world,
as the central fact of life, around which range themselves
all the powers of heaven, earth, and hell. All the mani-
festations of God in history look finally to the annihilation
of this malignant power of the human soul.
3. The destruction of sin is the negative side of the divine
process of salvation in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures ;
the positive side is the attainment of righteousness. The
two are inseparably connected ; but it will be convenient to
consider first the methods by which the removal of sin was
supposed to be effected.
The legislation introduced by Ezra and Nehemiah, while
it contained an elaborate new sacrifice for sin, did not dis-
card the older ideas on the subject. Up to the time of the
exile, the theory of expiation corresponded with the general
ethical and religious status of the nation ; for the prophets,
the national sin was the absorbing interest, and they appear
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 221
as protesting against an earlier opinion, which disposed of
sin in an easy, mechanical way by sacrifices. Such was the
primitive view respecting offences against God : if the deity
was angry, he was to be appeased by a gift ; and this gift,
when the sense of the moral guilt of sin was better devel-
oped, assumed the form of a vicarious offering. When the
offence was against man, forgiveness might be obtained, if
it were thought desirable, by repentance and reparation ;
in so far as it was conceived also as an offence against
God, it was to be atoned for by sacrifice. For the old me-
chanical idea that the deity was appeased by a gift tha
prophets desired to substitute the conviction of the neces-
sity for repentance and reformation. This protest of the
prophets represents a most important advance in the eth-
ical conception of sin and the deliverance from sin ; it is
stated with admirable fulness and clearness by the prophet
Isaiah : " Hear the word of Yahwe, ye judges of Sodom ;
give ear to the teaching of our God, ye people of Gomorrah.
To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to me ?
says Yahwe ; I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and
the fat of fed beasts, and I delight not in the blood of bul-
locks and lambs and he-goats. When you present yourselves
before me, who has required this at your hand, to tread my
courts ? Bring no more vain oblations ; incense is an abom-
ination to me ; new moon and Sabbath, the calling of assem-
blies, I cannot endure, it is iniquity. Your new moons and
your appointed feasts I hate ; they are a burden to me ; I
am tired of bearing them. And when you spread forth your
hands, I will hide my eyes from you ; and when you make
many prayers, I will not hear ; your hands are full of blood.
Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil of your
doings from before my eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn to do
well ; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the father-
less, plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason to-
222 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
gether, says Yahwe ; though your sins be as scarlet, they
shall be as white as snow ; though they be red like crim-
son, they shall be as wool" (Isa. i. 10-18). This is the pre-
vailing view in the prophetic writings up to the time of the
return from the Babylonian exile : wrong must be put away
by an act of will ; the right must be done ; the soul must
come into an attitude of willing obedience toward God ; then
he will pardon the sin, whether of the nation or of the indi-
vidual, and bestow the blessings of his favor. This simple
ethical conception of the escape from sin by an act of the
will, corresponding as it does to human experience, main-
tained itself through the Old Testament times and appears
in the New Testament. It is one side of the struggle against
sin, a side that can never be safely ignored, though it may
be conceived in a mechanical way, and lead to a depressed
and unspiritual religious life.
This double view of expiation for sin continued down to
the exile. In the temple and the other sacred places the
traditional sacrifices were maintained, and the ethical ideas
of the prophets no doubt penetrated the mass of the peo-
ple to some extent. Alongside of these there was, however,
another conception of the way in which sinning man might
be reconciled to God. It was a natural feeling that the sin-
ner's suffering atoned for his sin ; suffering was the punish-
ment of sin ; and when the just measure had been reached,
the wrong-doer might hold that the ground of the divine
displeasure had been removed. This natural view of the
subject had no doubt existed all along among the Israelites
(as it has always existed among men) ; but it does not find
definite expression till the latter part of the exile, when
the grievous affliction of the nation and the hope of coming
deliverance led it to take shape in the mind of the second
Isaiah : " Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto
her that her time of service is accomplished, that her pun-
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 223
ish merit is accepted, for she has received at the hand of
Yahwe double for all her sins " (Isa. xl. 2). Traces of this
feeling may be discerned in the later literature, in the
frequent cry, " Lord, how long ? " So just after the re-
turn from Babylon the angel of Yahwe appeals to God :
" Yahwe of hosts, how long wilt thou not have mercy on
Jerusalem and on the cities of Judah, against which thou
hast had indignation these threescore and ten years ? " (Zech.
i. 12.) Such is probably the feeling underlying the laments
of Ps. Ixxix. Ixxx. Ixxxv.
It was but a step from this conception to the idea of vica-
rious human suffering. This idea resides in the theory of
solidarity which has always prevailed in the world, and
maintained itself in Israel, notwithstanding the larger recog-
nition of individual responsibility, which was a concomitant,
or rather an element, of the ethical growth of the nation.
The members of any social unit as the family, the tribe,
or the state were thought of as bound together into a
unit of moral responsibility. The sin of the father im-
perilled the happiness of his children ; the nation suffered
for the faults of its rulers. But on the same grounds, all
the members of the social unit would share the blessings
achieved by its head : if he was good, they prospered ; if
he by suffering wrought out forgiveness of sin, they might
share the pardon and its attendant blessing. The idea must
have existed in germ from early times, but it could receive
full expression only after the moral consciousness had at-
tained a relatively large development. The question of the
relation of suffering to sin, which had always been in men's
minds, came into new prominence during the exile. The old
theory was that all suffering was a punishment for sin : the
good prospered ; the wicked suffered. So the prophets had
explained the destruction of the northern kingdom and the
fall of Jerusalem : the people had sinned ; the nation must
224 . SIN AND KIGHTEOUSNESS.
be destroyed. But at the same time there had been grow-
ing up a consciousness of righteousness. In contrast with
other nations, Israel had been obedient to Yahwe. Under
the new conditions of life in Babylonia, where there was
probably a sifting of the exiles, one section of the nation
had come to feel that it was faithful to the divine law,
and the question arose why it should be involved in the
dreadful suffering of banishment from home and contact
with unsympathizing idolaters. The answer which presented
itself to the great prophet of the latter part of the exile
was that the suffering was vicarious. Through it, he said,
the body of the nation was to be brought back to obedience
and the favor of the God of Israel. The pious, faithful ker-
nel of the nation was the true servant of Yahwe, despised
and rejected of men, esteemed to be stricken, smitten of
God, and afflicted. Yet in truth it was for the iniquities of
the nation that he was bruised ; Yahwe laid on him the
iniquity of them all. He was oppressed ; yet in the land
of exile, in the midst of enemies, he humbled himself and
opened not his mouth. For the transgression of his people
he was cut off from the land of the living, though he had
done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth (Isa.
liii. 1-9). Such is the picture which the prophet gives of
the suffering of pious souls in the midst of alien enemies.
And what was the explanation ? Would Yahwe arbitrarily
involve the faithful in the punishment of the unfaithful ?
Would he be insensible to the claims of his obedient sons ?
Such a supposition was impossible. The prophet rises to a
grand conception of the destiny of the nation. As the bearer
of the divine word, Israel was to become the centre of illu
mination for the nations, the standard-bearer of truth and
purity. But to fulfil this mission, Israel must first itself be
purified, its sin must be punished and removed ; yet it was
not necessary that the needful purifying suffering should be
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 225
borne by the sinners themselves. It might be laid on inno-
cent heads ; and the greater the purity and dignity of the
vicarious sufferer, the greater the efficacy of his suffering,
and the larger the blessing which would issue from the favor
of God thus obtained. The prophet idealizes the faithful of
Israel into a personality of perfect innocence (and it does
not matter, for the development of the doctrine of vicarious-
ness, whether he has in mind the contemporary body of the
faithful, or a contemporary or future individual conceived
as a representative and ideal Israelite). Out of this suffer-
ing was to arise the highest blessing. It pleased Yahwe to
bruise his servant ; but when the sufferer's soul should have
been made an offering for sin, then he should taste the fruit
of his self-sacrifice, he should see of the travail of his
soul and should be satisfied (Isa. liii. 1012). Israel should
become righteous ; and further, the world should share its
righteousness : " It is too light a thing that thou shouldst
be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to re-
store the preserved of Israel ; I will also give thee for a
light to the Gentiles, that my salvation may come unto the
end of the earth" (Isa. xlix. 6); "Strangers shall build up
thy walls and their kings shall minister to thee ; . . . that
nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish"
(Isa. Ix. 10, 12).
It is only an external effect that is here described ; noth-
ing is said of an inward conflict of soul produced by the
contemplation of unmerited suffering. It is only the objec-
tive idea of vicarious human suffering that is brought out in
the exilian prophecy ; and it appears to have been an iso-
lated product of this period, a special flight of the pious
imagination of one great thinker. There is no reference to
it in the post-exilian literature. After the great crisis of the
exile and the introduction of the law, it fell into the back-
ground, not to be revived till the rise of Christianity. The
15
226 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
external, ceremonial idea of atonement for sin was definitely
formulated by the Law in its system of sacrifices. As has
already been remarked, the element of vicariousness enters
into sacrifice as a result of deeper moral consciousness. Sac-
rifice was at first a gift to the deity, which a profounder
sense of moral unworthiness converted into a victim bear-
ing the guilt and punishment of the offerer. The Levitical
law is not to be looked on as a mere extension and organ-
ization of the ritual. It did, indeed, continue and expand
the old sacrificial usage, but it embodied also the profounder
moral feeling of the later period. Its ritual was in great
part the organized expression of the consciousness of sin.
The ancient mind, Jewish and Gentile, saw the most definite
and satisfactory atonement for sin in the blood, that is, in
the life, of a victim. There were, as we have seen, other con-
ceptions of expiation, as through the suffering of the offender,
or of some human being with whom the offender stood in close
social relation ; but the visible surrender of a life answered
most completely to the existing ideas of social-religious order.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Law embodied this
conception as the national form of deliverance from sin.
But the Jewish Law made no attempt to provide an atone-
ment for all sins ; its restriction in this respect is noteworthy.
The offences for which it does provide are, first, sins of igno-
rance (Lev. iv.) ; and secondly, certain slighter ceremonial
offences, failure to testify in a court of justice, and false deal-
ing in money-matters (Lev. v. vi.). To this must be added
the expiation of the great day of atonement (Lev. xvi.), which,
however, was of a purely national character, and could have
had no bearing on individual sins. Offences other than those
above mentioned were regarded by the Jewish Law as com-
mitted against society, and were punished accordingly. So
far as they were regarded also as committed against God,
they were expiated only by the punishment inflicted by the
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 227
state, the whole law, civil and religious, being the enactment
of God. The regulations respecting expiation belonged only
to visible sins ; the Law is in fact substantially a civil code,
the religious ceremonial itself being looked on as part of the
outward, social life. Of inward sins, transgressions of the
law of purity and love, which belong to the heart, nothing is
said ; this was a domain which the national legislation did
not undertake to enter. Yet it recognized the idea of vica-
rious atonement, and this idea had a wider range than the
book of Leviticus would indicate ; it practically included in-
tercession. Job is said to have offered burnt offerings for all
his children, fearing that they might have sinned (Job i. 5) ;
the wrath of Yah we against the three friends is turned aside
by a similar sacrifice (Job xlii. 8). The author of the Epistle
to the Hebrews (ix. 22) declares that according to the Law
there is no remission without shedding of blood; and this
statement, though it is to be taken with the restrictions
above mentioned, yet accurately represents the prevailing
ancient idea of a connection between forgiveness of sin and
the blood of an animal-sacrifice.
But the Law had larger consequences than its mere de-
tails would suggest. It cultivated the moral sense of the
people into results above its mechanical prescriptions. It
developed the sense of sin, as Paul points out (Gal. iii. 19),
and therewith a freer feeling which brought the soul into
more immediate contact with God. Apart from all legal pre-
scriptions, the pious heart cast itself on the mercy of God :
"Yahwe is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and plen-
teous in mercy. He will not always chide, neither will he
keep his anger forever. He hath not dealt with us after our
sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. ... As far
as the East is from the West, so far hath he removed our
transgressions from us" (Ps. ciii. 8-10,12). Sometimes the
appeal to God's mercy was based on the feeling of human
228 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
weakness : " What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him
and set thy heart on him, that thou shouldest visit him every
morning and try him every moment ? ... If I have sinned,
what can I do to thee, thou watcher of men ? . . . Why
dost thou not pardon my transgression and take away mine
iniquity ? for now I shall lie down in the dust, and thou
shalt seek me diligently, but I shall not be" (Job vii. 17-21) ;
" Wilt thou harass a driven leaf ? wilt thou pursue the dry
stubble?" (xiii. 25.) "Man that is born of a woman is of
few days and full of trouble ; he comes forth like a flower
and withers, he flees as a shadow and continues not ; and
dost thou open thine eyes on such an one, and bringest me
into judgment with thee ? " (xiv. 1-3.) " Remember not the
sins of my youth nor my transgressions ; according to thy
lovingkindness remember me for thy goodness' sake " (Ps.
xxv. 7) ; " Like as a father pities his children, so Yah we
pities them that fear him, for he knows our frame, he re-
members that we are dust " (Ps ciii. 13, 14). This direct
appeal to the divine mercy is connected with a deeper con-
sciousness of sin, such as appears in Ps. xxxii. and li : " I
said, I will confess my transgressions to Yahwe, and thou for-
gavest the iniquity of my sin " (Ps. xxxii. 5) ; "I acknowledge
my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me " (Ps. li. 3).
To this broader conception of the relation between God
and man belongs also the idea of human mediation for sin
(the connection of which with the Law is referred to above),
as when Job is directed to pray for his three friends (Job
xlii. 8), or when Samuel says, "Far be it from me to sin
against Yahwe in ceasing to pray for you" (1 Sam. xii. 23);
or the prophet Jeremiah declares that even the intercession
of Moses and Samuel would not avail for Israel ( Jer. xv. 3 ).
Such mediation, however, was not confined to men, if we
may understand Elihu's interpreting angel (Job xxxiii. 23,
24) as interceding with God for the afflicted man. This idea
SIN AND &IGHTEOUSNESS. 229
of mediation for the sinner by men or angels, though a per-
fectly natural one, does not find frequent expression in the
Old Testament 1 or in the Apocryphal books.
We have to note also the negative attitude maintained
toward the system of sacrifice by the great Israelitish teach-
ers. The pre-exilian and exilian prophets, though they in-
sisted on the necessity of the faithful worship of Yahwe,
discerned what was superficial and false in the offerings (in
contrast with true ethical service), and denounced it as hate-
ful to God : " I hate, I despise your feasts, and take no de-
light in your solemn assemblies ; yea, though you offer me
your burnt offerings and meal offerings, I will not accept
them, nor will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts ;
take away from me the noise of your songs, for I will not
hear the melody of thy viols" (Amos v. 21-23); "To what
purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to me ? says
Yahwe. ... I delight not in the blood of bullocks " (Isa. i.
11); "Will Yahwe be pleased with thousands of rams, with
myriads of rivers of oil ? Shall I give my first-born for my
transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? "
(Mic. vi. 7) ; "I spake not to your fathers, nor commanded
them in the day that I brought them out of the land of
Egypt concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices" (,Ter. vii. 22).
A similar antagonism or negative attitude, which in the pro-
phetic writings is based on moral grounds, appears in some
of the Psalms as the result of a like ethical feeling combined
with spirituality of thought : " Sacrifice and offering thou
hast no delight in; . ... burnt offering and sin offering thou
hast not required" (Ps. xl. 6). In Ps. 1., God's indifference
toward sacrifices is based on his exalted position as Lord
of the world and on the pre-eminence of his moral func-
tions : " I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he-
1 We may compare the functions of the guardian angels in the book of
Daniel (x. 20,21).
230 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
goats out of thy folds ; for every beast of the forest is mine,
the cattle on the mountains ; I know all the birds of the
mountains, and the roamers of the plain are in my mind ;
if I were hungry, I would not tell thee, for the world is mine
and the fullness thereof ; will I eat the flesh of bulls or
drink the blood of goats ? " (vs. 9-13). We have here the
germ of a feeling expressed in the Epistle to the Hebrews
(x. 4) that it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats
should take away sin. But while the author of the Epistle
insists on the worthlessness of such sacrifices in order that
he may substitute another better sacrifice (quoting, curiously
enough, Ps. xl. 6, 7, in support of his position), the prophets
and psalmists are only concerned with the insufficiency of
this outward act as contrasted with the inward service of
the soul. The two movements toward elaboration of the rit-
ual of sacrifice, and direct appeal of the soul to God, went
hand in hand, each responding to a need of the human heart.
The body of the nation felt that, in its moral weakness, it
could not dispense with some intermediary between man's
feeble life and the august holiness of God. And on the other
hand, there were moments of exaltation for pious souls when
this same conception of the divine purity made all bodily
intercession seem worthless, and drove the worshipper to cast
himself on the supreme attribute of Israel's God, his pitiful-
ness and lovingkindness. Repentance was indeed demanded
as the condition of forgiveness : " Pardon my iniquity, for it
is great" (Ps. xxv. 11) ; "I said, I will confess my trans-
gressions to Yahwe, and thou forgavest the iniquity of my
sin " (Ps. xxxii. 5) ; " Against thee, thee only have I sinned,
and done that which is evil in thy sight" (Ps. li. 4). Such
was the condition, announced by John the Baptist and Jesus,
of entrance into the kingdom of God (Mark i. 4, 15). These
two elements of the Old Testament thought the inward
preparation of the soul through repentance and the outward
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 231
preparation through intercession the Christian Church en-
deavored, with more or less success, to combine hi its re-
ligious consciousness into a unity.
The extra-canonical books add nothing of importance to
the Old Testament ideas. The scheme of temple sacrifices
continued as before, only with some small additions to the
ceremonial. Still, there are hints that the old mechanical
conception of atonement was undergoing a gradual trans-
formation through all the influences that affected the eth-
ical thought of the nation. The books of this period that
have come down to us are chiefly the products of messianic
or other purely national interest. But the synagogues and
legal schools nourished other ideas, spiritual and ethical.
The conception of sin as an offence against the absolute
right, or against the will of God, held to be identical with
the absolute right, shows itself in sayings attributed to the
great teachers, and in the Wisdom of Solomon. Atonement
for sin was, from this point of view, held to lie in right-
doing. This idea (in which non-Jewish influence is discern-
ible) was not definitely formulated, but colors such works as
Wisdom and the treatises of Philo, and was doubtless not
without effect on portions of the New Testament.
The point of view of Jesus himself was substantially that
of the pre-exilian prophets. He recognized the existing sys-
tem of national sacrifices (Luke xvii. 14 ; John v. 1 ; Matt,
xxiii. 2, 3), and, according to the First Gospel, declared that
he had come not to destroy, but to fulfil, the Law and the
prophets, and that no rnan could without blame ignore one
of the smallest commandments of the Mosaic legislation
(Matt. v. 17, 19). 1 On the other hand, in defence of a larger
1 Some critics regard this last utterance as belonging not to Jesus, but to
a Jurlaizing editor of the Matthew-Gospel, and intended as a protest against
the supposed Pauline hostility to the Law. In any case, it testifies to a pro-
found respect for the Mosaic legislation in a section of the Church of the first
century.
232 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
interpretation of the Law, he adduced the example of the
priests themselves, and cited (Matt. xii. 5, 7) the words of
the prophet Hosea : " I desire mercy and not sacrifice " (Hos.
vi. 6). But, ahove all, the pure ethical-spiritual view which
he taught (as in the Sermon on the Mount) of man's re-
lation to God contained the germs of the destruction of
the mechanical legal-sacrificial system, a work which, not
undertaken by him, was accomplished by the great apostle,
who most truly represented and embodied in deeds the spirit
of the Master.
The early disciples doubtless followed the example of their
Master in maintaining allegiance to the temple-service. This
is the impression made by Acts i.-v., where Peter and John
go to the temple at the hour of prayer (iii. 1), and Gama-
liel's speech (v. 38, 39) does not seem to contemplate a fun-
damental schism ; and later there is even an account (xxL
20-26) of Paul's taking part in a purification-offering. 1 This
feeling would naturally survive longest among the Pales-
tinian Christians ; elsewhere the bonds which united the
Church to the old faith were weakened by distance and by
the incoming of Gentiles. The construction of the death of
Jesus as sacrificial did away with the old system of animal-
offering. This was not a change of the fundamental idea,
but only of the nature of the offering. It was still held
that the removal of sin and guilt was affected by the shed-
ding of blood. But the greater dignity of the victim corre-
sponded to a deeper sense of the evil of sin ; the conception
of atonement was held in a more distinctly ethical way. It
is in the writings of Paul (Gal. i. 4, etc.) that we first meet
with the statement of the sacrificial nature of the Messiah's
1 It is not intended hy this to decide on the general question of the histor-
ical trustworthiness of the book of Acts, but only to infer from the passages
quoted the existence of a belief that the early Church had not completely
broken with the temple-ritual.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 233
death ; and we may suppose that he and others were led
to this view by their conception of the exalted function of
the glorified Messiah in conjunction with their adherence to
the Old Testament idea of atonement. Jesus had departed
from the world and been raised to the right hand of God as
Saviour, whence he would soon return to deliver his people.
What function, in the divine scheme, could be assigned to
his death but that of expiation of sin, which the Scripture
connected with the blood of a victim ? That the old legal
view had a strong hold on a part of the Church appears
from the earnestness with which the Epistle to the Hebrews
endeavors to prove that Christianity really retained the ideas
of the ancient system, only substituting for its forms more
perfect forms, merging the type in the antitype.
4. The positive side of the ethical relation between man
and God is given in the idea of righteousness ; and we have
now to ask wherein righteousness consisted and how it was
acquired.
We need not stop to examine special shades of meaning
of the various terms employed in the Old Testament to ex-
press the idea of moral goodness. They all go back finally
to the conception of some standard of conduct which is re-
ferred to God as its author. Such is the usage of the Old
Testament in the form in which we now have it, as the pro-
duction of men who lived and wrote in a relatively high eth-
ical-religious atmosphere. In the earlier, unreflective time,
a good man was one who conformed to the somewhat rude
ethical ideas of the community. He might be a warrior like
Jephtha, who was relentless toward his enemies and capa-
ble of sacrificing his own daughter in fulfilment of a vow ;
but if he fulfilled the moral demands of the time, he was
accounted righteous. From the beginning, the accepted sys-
tem of ethics was identified in a general way with the will
of the deity, since God could not be conceived of as re-
234 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
quiring anything else than that which the best moral sense
of the community called for. There was a double progress :
the ethical standard was gradually raised, and at the same
time the identification of righteousness with the will of the
deity became more and more systematic and conscious. This
will was at first announced occasionally and fragmentarily
by the priests arid the prophets, and then more definitely em-
bodied in legal codes. The elements of the prophetic preach-
ing of righteousness were two : the worship of Yah we alone,
and obedience to the rules of social ethics. This is the con-
trolling view in the Old Testament ; it is the necessary prod-
uct of experience and reflection, and at the same time the
simplest and broadest theory of life regarded as a mass of
actions. The prophets always treat idolatry in connection
with its moral accompaniments ; for them it was not only
disloyalty to the God of Israel, but also inevitably the occa-
sion of moral offence. It was a sin against the covenant
which God had made with his people ; it was an alliance
with the immoral habits of the surrounding peoples. Their
judgment on this point is to be taken with some degree of
allowance. There was ground for it in the fact that the
Canaanitish worship contained licentious elements ; on the
other hand, their own writings show that the body of Israel-
itish sin sprang out of Israelitish society, out of human
weakness, independently of the particular form of divine
service which was followed. The prophets, however, were
guided by a true instinct in their opposition to idolatry on
moral grounds. The Israelitish religious genius was to de-
velop a moral code more strenuous than that of their neigh-
bors, and national development in this, as in all other points,
was favored by isolation. Idolatry or, to state it more
precisely according to the Old Testament conception, the
acknowledgment of any other god but Yahwe was a con-
fusing and disintegrating fact From our point of view, it
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 235
was in itself morally indifferent, though an occasion of moral
loss ; to the prophets, it was treason against the national
idea and the national deity, itself a heinous sin, and the
source of all impurities. The introduction of a written code
(Ex. xxi-xxiii., ninth or eighth century, and Deuteronomy,
end of seventh century) served to define the moral stand-
ard and to make the moral life more precise. Nor is it
an accident that along with this more definite expression
of ethical-religious law we find the first traces of a more
spiritual conception of righteousness in the "new heart" of
Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Deeper reflection on the inner expe-
riences of man and the recognition of a higher standard of
life led the better religious thinkers to the conviction that
true righteousness could not be defined merely as a series of
acts of obedience ; that it must proceed from a heart whose
impulses were in harmony with the divine standard of right.
Here, then, we have the two tendencies which from this time
on determined the ethical-religious development of Judaism
and then of Christianity. Both are founded in human na-
ture, and represent real and necessary elements of the moral
life. Each had its period of supremacy ; the highest result
was gained when the two were completely harmonized in the
religious consciousness.
The same conception appears in the Psalms, but intenser
and more elaborated. The Psalter is the product of deep na-
tional distress. It was in the Greek period, and especially in
the second century B. c., that the Jews first felt the poignancy
of foreign oppression. They had been contented vassals of
Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians, who recognized and re-
spected their religion. By the end of the third century they
had grown into a church ; their national existence lost, they
clung to their religious faith with a reverence and devotion
all the more intense ; they lived in the midst of aliens, who
oppressed them in person and property and derided their
236 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
religion. Thus driven into religious isolation, they fell back
on God and their own souls; minute outward obedience to
the divine commands came more and more to be recog-
nized as the mark of righteousness, but at the same time the
conviction grew stronger of the need of inward purity, of
the ripeness of the heart toward God. The authors of the
Fifteenth and Twenty-Fourth Psalms define the ethical con-
ditions of alliance with the people of God ; Ps. cxix. is the
Ode of the Law, which is extolled as the perfection of truth
and the infallible guide of life and source of happiness ; the
author of Ps. li., in his deep consciousness of sin and desire
of oneness with God, cries out for a new heart, asking noth-
ing less than that God would re-fashion the very spring and
essence of his moral-religious life.
Corresponding with this double sense of the nature of
righteousness was the twofold view of its source, of the man-
ner in which it was to be achieved. The simpler, earlier
view was that it was gained by man's effort, by the free
determination of his will. Men were held to differ in the
attitude of their will toward right ; the final exposition
of human conduct was that some men loved and others
hated the law of God. The later view, springing from the
conviction of human weakness, was that man needed the
power of God in his soul. The Old Testament utterances on
this point are indeed restricted, being too much controlled
by nationalism. The interest of the prophets was centred
in the nation as a whole, and the relation of God to the
people was one rather of " favor " than of " grace." He was
pledged by his choice and covenant to bless Israel with out-
ward prosperity and the knowledge of his will ; but indi-
vidual morality was taken for granted, and the presence of
the divine spirit as an illumining and regenerating power
in the individual soul was not distinctly thought of. In
the period of storm and stress in the second century B. c.,
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 237
though individualism had been largely developed, the nation
was still the fundamental unit ; righteousness was the con-
dition of citizenship in the Church (Pss. xxiv., ci., cf. Ixxxvii.);
and while, as we have seen, there were individuals who clung
passionately to the divine spirit as the source of life, for the
most the essential point was obedience to law secured by
right disposition of mind.
The introduction of the definitely formulated Law was a
turning-point in the history of Judaism, the ground at
once of its success and of its failure. The Law prepared
the way for Christianity, and at the same time repelled the
Jewish nation from the Christian reconstruction of the idea
of law. Judaism, the Jewish Church, is nomism, the em-
bodiment of devotion to a fixed rule of belief and conduct.
Other communities of that time, and especially the Romans,
had developed systems of life resting on legal standards ; it
was only the Jews who identified law with religion. Jew-
ish nomism has two elements, that which is common to
all legally organized societies, and that which springs from
the religious genius of the nation acting in conjunction with
certain favorable circumstances. The fusion of the civil and
religious codes began at an early period : it appears in the
law-book of Ex. xxi.-xxiii., then in Deuteronomy, then in
the legislation of the middle books of the Pentateuch, and
finally in the Talmud. The civil-religious law sprang out
of the national life, was built up, generation after genera-
tion, according to national needs, and finally, after the time
of Ezra and Nehemiah, effected a social-ecclesiastical organ-
ization, in other words, the nation assumed the form of a
church. There were internal and external grounds for this
movement. The internal ground was the religious instinct
of the nation, that inexplicable necessity which it felt
for realizing and defining its relation to God, an instinct
common indeed to all nations, but assuming among the
238 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Jews proportions which we can no more explain than we
can account for the genius of Plato and Shakespeare. No
other nation produced an order of prophets. The flower
of the Athenian mind devoted itself to literature, art, and
philosophy ; the highest and noblest Jewish thought was
consecrated to religion. The prophets passed away, and
were succeeded by lyric poets, students of practical life and
schools of law ; but all these, no less than their predeces-
sors, were inspired by the idea of religion. From the be-
lief that God was the only law-giver, it was but a step to
the conviction that the national life was to be absolutely
regulated by the divine will. The attainment of this end
was favored in a remarkable manner by the outward con-
ditions of the nation. From the Babylonian exile on, they
were inured to the idea of political dependence, they were
forced more and more to see that their life as a State was
crushed beyond hope of resuscitation, and all the energy
which would otherwise have gone into affairs of civil gov-
ernment was given to ecclesiastical organization. It is a
proof of the intense vitality of the Jewish people that they
did not, like the surrounding communities, succumb to the
oppression of foreign political domination. Their energy
came from, or was in closest union with, their conscious-
ness of possession of highest truth and their hope of a bril-
liant future. Thus their political annihilation was favorable
to their religious growth ; it was an isolation from the great
world, which permitted them to sink themselves in religion,
like a scholar who retreats to a monastery or a cave in order
to give himself up to study. Their freedom from political
complications gave them greater liberty in the elaboration
of their religious-legal material ; they had to consult the in-
terests of no king or noble, the demands of no foreign inter-
course, but worked out their scheme in an ideally rounded
shape which would have been impossible for a community
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 239
standing in lively political intercourse with its neighbors.
Add to all this the smalluess of the territory in which the
Jews found themselves after their return from Babylon. Ee-
ligious centralization was comparatively easy when no inhab-
itant of the land was more than a few hours' journey from
Jerusalem. A rigidity of organization was effected which
would have been impossible in a larger community. This
state of things gradually changed, it is true, but not before
Judea worked out the fundamental principles and methods
of the nomistic life.
The Jewish Law was a mass of prescriptions, civil, moral,
religious, ceremonial, an attempt to define all the beliefs
and acts of life. What we commonly call the Law is the
body of legislation contained in the Pentateuch ; that is,
the form which the code assumed in the time of Ezra and
Nehemiah. In fact, however, the Law came in later times
to include much more than this : as the legislation of Ezra
was a development of earlier material, so it became the basis
for a succeeding development, courts and schools of law
added much by way of interpretation and application, which
became as binding as the words attributed to Moses. A
dividing line was made, it is true, by the canonical books ;
the Pentateuch was the text, all else was commentary. But
in the feeling of teachers and people, the commentary was
no less authoritative than the text. The whole was a lofty
attempt to order the social, religious, and political life of a
nation, to create an absolute external standard of right. In
such an attempt there is nothing necessarily unnatural or
wrong. Law is a necessity for human life. The highest
effort of individuals and nations is found in the discipline
which tends to bring them under the control of a true and
high standard of conduct ; perfection consists in the har-
mony of the human will with the perfect law. But the
attempt to devise and impose an absolutely controlling ex-
240 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
ternal standard is confronted by two difficulties : it is im-
possible for man to construct a perfect law, and even that
which is relatively perfect for one generation is in danger
of losing its pertinency for the next ; and what is more seri-
ous, the law does not in itself supply the motive of con-
duct, tends, indeed, by emphasizing the outward standard,
to attract the will from that inward love and devotion which
is the mainspring of the moral-religious life.
The Jews made the experiment of nomism under most
favorable conditions, and with an unexampled fulness of ex-
perience. The Law got a hold on the affections of the people
of which history furnishes no other instance. Neither Mos-
lems nor Parsees ever exhibited such a thoroughgoing aijd
intelligent devotion to their sacred books and their systems
of life as appears for many centuries in the history of the
Jews. The One Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm embodies
the reverential delight which the pious Jew experienced in
the presence of the perfect instruction granted by the God
of Israel to his chosen people. The nation embodied this
reverence in its heroic resistance to the Greek-Syrian en-
croachments of the second century. The Maccabean strug-
gle was a religious war waged to maintain liberty of belief
and practice, liberty to obey the law given by God to the
fathers. The struggle was successful ; nor in after times
was any combination of circumstances able to alienate the
Jew from his law. Foreign oppression, political annihilation,
dispersion over the world, social contempt and degradation
had the effect only of driving the people to a more passion-
ate love for that which they conceived to constitute their
everlasting glory. If ever a nation was faithful to an idea,
the Jews were faithful to the conception of legally ordered
life ; and they enjoyed the fruits of their devotion, good and
bad. They reached an unequalled fulness and rigidity of
social-religious organization. The sharp-sighted earnestness
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 241
with which they watched over the details of life, the in-
terest they threw into the discussion and determination
of ininutise of faith and practice may be compared with
the metaphysical enthusiasm of the Scottish people. It is
not to be supposed that all the individuals of the Jewish
nation were equally interested in these questions ; it was
the select few who were prominent. The masses may often
have seemed indifferent, and a Pharisee might even de-
nounce the people as accursed through their ignorance of
the' Law (John vii. 49) ; but the leaders gave the tone to
the national feeling, the life of the Jewish nation was
ordered by religious law. Thus the people enjoyed those
benefits which result from habits of organized study,
intelligence, alertness, definiteness of opinion, decision of
conduct ; and this training of life moved on a high moral-
religious level. The ethical and religious ideals of the Jews
were in general superior to those of their neighbors ; their
God was just and righteous. Their ethics not only included
the laws of ordinary social morality, but was moving toward
more spiritual principles of sympathy and love, arid their
religious ideas were growing broader and purer. Such is
the bright side of the Jewish nomistic development, the
creation of a self centred, well-balanced, intelligent, and
strenuous moral-religious life, illustrated by many shining
examples of lofty probity and spiritual piety.
On the other hand, nomism brought its inevitable evils.
The consciousness of superior privileges and enlightenment
called forth a national and individual pride which was hos-
tile to moral-religious growth. The Jews had a far more
definite historical feeling than their neighbors. Their rec-
ords went back to a remote antiquity, and their history was
an embodiment of the fact that the one Supreme God had
chosen them from the beginning to be his own, and had with-
out ceasing guided their fortunes toward a glorious future,
16
242 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
which was not the less sure because the present was dark.
Natural satisfaction in so remarkable a career had grown, by
the beginning of the second century B. c., into overweening
pride. The world was divided into Jews and not-Jews. The
leading minds of the nation cherished a lofty scorn of for-
eign thought and civilization. A part of the people, indeed,
were allured by the splendors of Greek life, and forsook the
faith of their fathers ; but this partial apostasy only served
to intensify the zeal and the unrelenting hate of the faithful.
To the pious of the second century the Greeks were the em-
bodiment of everything sensual and devilish. 1 This hatred
of national enemies was not new: it appears in exilian proph-
ecies (Tsa. xxxiv. 45 ; Jer. 1., li. ), and was to appear later in
the struggles with the Romans and other peoples. It was
in itself a morally injurious attitude, though for the rest one
not confined to the Jews. It had the further effect of tend-
ing to isolate the people from foreign thought, and in so far
of dwarfing their intellectual growth. The isolation was not
and could not be complete. The traces of foreign influence
on Jewish thought cannot fail to be recognized ; but the
isolation, so far as it existed, was an evil thing for the Jews.
It closed their eyes to the defects of their law, and made
them as zealous for the wrong as for the right; and it ex-
cluded them from a share in certain better ideas which they
might have learned from their neighbors.
A more serious defect of the nomistic scheme one that
entered deeper into the moral-religious life was the exter-
nalism which it tended to produce. The natural result of
complete devotion to an external law was the breaking up
of life into minute details, the loss of unity and the loss
of spirituality. The biblical code was comparatively simple
so far as the conduct of daily life was concerned ; but the
1 See First and Second Mnccahees and the Sibylline Oracles, passim. A
similar feeling appears in the first chapter of Romans.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 243
application of the principles of the Law, guided by zealous
consciences, led gradually to the multiplication of partic-
ulars bearing on all the acts of life. The full development
of this scheme is found in the Talmud ; but we may be sure,
on general grounds and from the hints given in the New
Testament, that much of it was already in existence at the
beginning of our era. The frame of mind of the pious Jew
of that period must have been one of frequent anxiety lest
he should omit something that was essential to righteous-
ness ; for the most unhappy result of this developed scheme
of law was the definition which it gave of righteousness as
obedience to a mass of precepts. Power of spiritual discrim-
ination and purity of spiritual life were dimmed and dulled.
The prescriptions of the Law included duties of the most
various kinds, ceremonial, moral, and religious, insignificant
details of ceremonial cleanliness standing side by side with
most important ethical rules and religious principles. Men
became habituated to looking at the Law as a whole. The
principle was established that he who offended in one point
was guilty of all (James ii. 10). It was inevitable also that
the ceremonial side of the Law, because it was visible and
tangible, should assume constantly increasing proportions,
and tend to cramp or expel broader principles. The human
mind is so constituted that, provided an outward show of
duty is maintained, men are content to slur over the inner
life, the thoughts and intents of the heart, which are invis-
ible to their fellows, and which they cannot be summoned
before a human tribunal to account for. It is the history of
all religious organizations, only more patent and developed
in the Jews of this time.
Casuistry came in as the natural accompaniment of this
outward scheme of righteousness. Where there was an in-
tellectual assent to obligation without the full assent of the
heart, the temptation would arise to get rid of oppressive
244 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
duties by an ingenious process of reasoning, by substituting
the pleasant for the unpleasant, and explaining away what
was disagreeable by the pretence of higher obligation. There
is no more sacred duty than care for one's parents ; but a
man might declare that money which should have been so
appropriated was devoted to God, arid so withhold it from
father and mother, while by an ingenious device he enjoyed
the use of it for himself (Mark vii. 10-13). There were sim-
ilar shifts for dispensing with other acknowledged duties.
It was debauching the conscience in the name of religion.
It was a phenomenon of the same sort as that which Pascal
describes in the "Provincial Letters." Such Jews were in
the moral position of school-boys who consider themselves
justified in evading the master's rules by any device which
is likely to escape punishment. It amounted so ,far to a
paralysis of the moral sense. Fortunately, such tendencies
bring their own cure.
Such a scheme tended to depress spirituality. It obscured
the fundamental principle of life, that goodness consists in
the attitude of the soul toward the right. It metamorphosed
God into a list of commands, and life into a chaos of obe-
diences. It was slavery to the letter of the Law. It dwarfed
the liberty of the soul by repressing its instinct of love. It
took away the ideal of righteousness which the mind of man
naturally tends to shape for itself, and substituted in its
place a body of rules which could not command the best
affection of the heart. It stamped failure on religion. Where
there should have been a generous lifting- up of the soul into
a self- forgetting purity and love, there was the self-seeking
devotion to a mechanical scheme of personal righteousness.
The great transforming power of religion, purification from
selfishness, devotion to truth for its own sake, was lost in
the multitude of cramping details which falsely assumed the
name of obedience to God. Eighteousness was not the es-
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 245
seiice of the soul, but a garment which could shift its place
and be put off and on at the pleasure of the wearer.
But while this is a fair description of the logical ten-
dencies of the Jewish Law, it must not be supposed that
its injurious effects were universal in the nation. We must
remember that much of the Law is moral, and that no
one could fail to feel a spiritual significance beneath its let-
ter. The book of Deuteronomy with impressive eloquence
preaches loving obedience as the essence of piety. Along-
side of the Law were the prophets and the Psalms, which
could not have remained without effect on the religious life
of the nation. There is no proof that the excessive insist-
ence on ceremonial details existed in the masses of the
people ; it was probably confined to the few, the bigots
who formed a separate party and held themselves aloof
from the masses. It is the Pharisees that Jesus attacks,
never the people at large. Doubtless the mechanical
side of the nomistic system made itself felt everywhere, but
it was not necessarily always fatal. It made its appear-
ance in the Christian Church also, was predominant at
certain times and in certain places, but in the main suc-
cumbed to the higher principle of liberty announced by
Paul. We may believe that the germ of this principle ex-
isted among the Jews of the two centuries preceding the
beginning of our era. It is found in the Psalms and the
prophets ; it could not have been completely extinguished
by the Law. The later Jewish history presents many noble
figures, from Mattathias and Judas Maccabreus to Hillel,
Gamaliel, Akiba, and Jehuda the Holy. The trouble witli
Judaism was not the absence of spirituality ; it was the
inability sufficiently to isolate this principle and make it
the controlling power. Toward this end the Christianity of
Jesus and Paul took a long step ; the Christianity of later
times, yielding to the constant pressure of the unspiritual
246 SIN AND KIGHTEOUSNESS.
side of human nature, receded toward the mechanical con-
ception of religion. Jesus found a not inconsiderable body
of the people ready to receive his teaching. The common
folk heard him gladly, a sign of spiritual receptivity.
The early Church was composed of Jews, who, if not eman-
cipated from the narrow Jewish idea of law, had yet been
able to accept part, at least, of the more spiritual doctrine
of Christ. The germ of spiritual reconstruction lay in the
people.
5. The progress of the Jews in religion, or, what amounts
practically to the same thing, in devotion to the Law, is
marked by the rise of synagogues, parties, and legal schools.
The beginning of synagogal worship is involved in some
obscurity. 1 It is not unlikely that during the Babylonian
exile the captives would meet together to listen to the
exhortations and consolations of the prophets and to pray
for the peace of Jerusalem. Deprived of the temple, the
centre of the old religious service, they would be forced to
devise non-ritual modes of worship, to dispense with sacri-
fices and address themselves directly to God. There is no
record of such gatherings ; but a hundred years later, in the
prophecy of Malachi, we find a hint that the faithful were
accustomed to meet together and speak one with another
(Mai. iii. 16), doubtless on things pertaining to the worship
of God. Jewish tradition, indeed, places in the time of Ezra
and Nehemiah the Great Synagogue, a body of men who are
said to have pronounced on all questions affecting the na-
tional religion ; but there is positively no evidence for the
existence of this body, there is no trace of its work in
later times, and it is not mentioned, except in the Talmud.
It is an invention of the tradition, after the rise of the legal-
1 See Hausrath, " History of the New Testament Times," Eng. transl.
London, 1878, pp. 84 ff. ; Schiirer, " Geschichte des Judischen Volkes im Zeit-
alter Jesu Christi," ed. 2, Leipzig, 1886, part ii. pp. 356 ff. ; Herzog, " Keal-
Encyclopadie."
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 247
scholastic system, for the purpose of referring the begin-
nings of legal study to the man who is said in the Old
Testament to have brought the Law from Babylon. 1 The
book of Chronicles knows nothing of synagogues ; they are
mentioned in the Old Testament only in a psalm (Ixxiv. 8)
which bears evident marks of the Maccabean period. It is
strange that there is no mention of them in Josephus or
the Maccabean histories. In the New Testament we find
them numerous throughout the Roman Empire, and we may
infer that they had been in existence no little time. In the
absence of any definite information, it seems most probable
that they did not assume their developed form before the
beginning of the second century B. c., though the idea may
have come into existence earlier. Their influence on the
religious development of the Jews must have been enor-
mous. Meeting Sabbath after Sabbath to listen to the read-
ing of the Law and the Prophets, the people became familiar
with the sacred writings, and were trained to reflection on
religious questions ; the synagogues would become the natu-
ral centres of religious movements. In the temple-service
the people took no active part ; the ceremonial was con-
ducted by the priests, the congregation was the passive
recipient of the blessing. But in the weekly meetings of
the synagogue each individual felt that he had a share ;
individual independence and moral-religious strenuousness
were cultivated. The custom arose of having addresses to
the congregation in explanation or application of the scrip-
1 Pirke Aboth, i. 1 " Moses received the Law on Sinai and delivered it
to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, and the elders
delivered it to the men of the Great Synagogue." Berakoth, 33 a : " The
men of the Great Synagogue appointed for Israel the benedictions and the
prayers, the formulas of consecration and distinction." The body consisted
of one hundred and twenty men (Meg. 17 b), and continued to about the time
of Simon the Just, B.C. 219-199 (Pirk. Ab. i 2 ; Ecclus. 1.). The extent of
its alleged activity has already been referred to ; it was held to have edited
various books of the Old Testament, and to have settled the sacred Canon.
248 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
tural reading, and liberty of speech was accorded to every
one. Thus, while attachment to the Law was strengthened,
freedom of discussion was promoted, and it could not fail
to be the case that many serious questions of religion should
come up for consideration.
So active and intellectual a religious life as that of the
Jews of the third and second centuries B. c. naturally pro-
duced different tendencies of thought, and called into exist-
ence parties which embodied them. It was a stirring and
excited time, a formative period, next to that of the pre-
exilian prophets, the most striking epoch in Jewish religious
history. Before the Babylonian exile, the national growth
had been comparatively simple and quiet. The elements of
progress were furnished almost entirely by the nation itself ;
the prophets, as the expounders of the national conscience,
were the preachers and establishes of the fundamental prin-
ciple of ethical monotheism ; the priests, aided by the judges,
and perhaps stimulated by the example of the Assyrians,
were the formulators of the civil and ceremonial law, which
arose out of the needs of Jewish society itself. The exile
was a time of seething and sifting. The Jews accepted ideas
from the Babylonians and worked them up in the spirit of
their own institutions ; but these ideas were Semitic and in
the line of the existing Jewish thought. The result of the
whole process was the Pentateuch and the reconstruction of
the nation as a church. There followed a century of quiet,
during which the new organization was acquiring firmness
and adapting itself to the national life ; then came the Greek
conquest. The Jews, no longer a quiet province of the Per-
sian Empire, found themselves enclosed in a network of
Greek kingdoms, and invaded on every side by Greek cus-
toms and ideas. There was a gradual infiltration of foreign
thought, Persian and Greek ; the doctrines of immortality
and the resurrection received definite shape ; Greek ethical
SIN AND EIGHTEOUSNESS. 249
and theological ideas were in the air, and mingled with and
colored the old Jewish conceptions. The new ideas were dif-
ferently received by different sections of the nation. One
party planted itself firmly on the existing national tradi-
tions and discouraged their further development, while it
showed itself kindly disposed toward foreign manners and
in part toward non-religious foreign thought. Another party,
accepting the Law as the national idea, endeavored to de-
velop it in the spirit of the age. A third party represented
extreme national particularism. In a fourth a tendency to
mystical asceticism showed itself. 1 There was a strife of
warring opinions, full of earnestness and bitterness, for it
was held that the true life of the nation was at stake.
While these tendencies were slowly formulating themselves,
came the series of political events which crystallized them
into parties. The Syrian Greeks attempted religious coercion
of the Jews ; it was necessary to take sides. The Maccabean
War secured the independence of the country. In the quiet
that ensued in the second half of the second century the
great parties assumed definite shape.
When Mattathias retired into the wilderness to make fight
against the Greeks, he was joined by a party of men called
Asideans (1 Mac. ii. 42 ; 2 Mac. iv. 6), distinguished by their
devotion to the national law and customs. They were the
Hasidim of the book of Psalms, the pious, godly men who
stand everywhere in contrast with wicked heathen and apos-
tate Israelites. They seem not to have formed a religious
party in the strict sense of the term ; they were rather men
of exemplary piety, who would make no compromise in faith
and practice. They were a product of the times ; they had
1 On the parties see Wellhausen, "Die Pharisaer und die Sadducaer,"
Greifswald, 1874, the works of Hausrath and Schiirer, the dictionaries of
Winer and Herzog, Kuenen's " Religion of Israel," Lightfoot's Commentary
on Colossians.
250 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
grown; by a natural process of discrimination, out of the con-
flicts of heathen opinion. In the Psalms they are intensely
national, confident in trust in God, bitter against enemies.
The picture given of them in the Psalter corresponds exactly
with the social-political condition of affairs in the first half
of the second century. It was they that furnished the ma-
terial out of which the Pharisaic party was formed.
The Pharisees, as the name imports, 1 were the "sepa-
ratists," the party which was marked off from the rest of
the nation by its rigid adhesion to the moral and cere-
monial requirements of the law. 2 But the essence of their
party-character lay deeper than this, they were the rep-
resentatives of nationalism in the broader sense. They ac-
cepted the Pentateuchal legislation as the fundamental law
of the nation ; but they saw that to make it effective, it
must be defined in a multitude of particulars, it must
enclose the life of the people in a network of prescriptions.
They boldly took the position that this oral, administrative
legislation was no less authoritative and binding than the
Mosaic Law. From their point of view, they were logical
and right. If the true life of the nation depended on its
fidelity to the Pentateuchal law, it was necessary to make
that law intelligible and real. It was no narrow and ill-
considered view that the Pharisees took of the situation.
What the nation was it had become, they believed, through
the Law ; and they held that all prosperity depended on
maintaining this absolute standard of right, which alone
could train the people into moral-religious vigor. The de-
fect and the danger of their view of the national life were
such as have been above described : it lacked spirituality,
it tended to formalism and pride. The Pharisees did not
limit themselves to Old Testament religious conceptions.
1 Aramaic, parish, Hebrew, parush, " separated."
2 Jos. Ant. xviii. 1, 3.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 251
Since the days of Ezra and the prophets, the doctrines of
immortality and the resurrection had taken shape among
the Jews of Egypt and Palestine. These doctrines the Phar-
isees seem to have accepted as part of the existing national
faith ; for we may infer from the literature (Wisdom of Sol-
omon, Daniel, Enoch, Second Maccabees) that they were gen-
erally believed in the second century B. c. 1 Whatever the
shortcomings and the crimes of the Pharisaic party (and
they were great), its function and its mission were broad
and noble. It undertook to develop the nation on the basis
of the absolute divine law. It accepted at home and abroad
whatever it could assimilate, and with singleness of view
and unswerving resoluteness rejected all else. It was hos-
pitable to foreign ideas so far as these could be made ser-
viceable. The attitude of different teachers toward alien
thought might vary ; but this was the predominant consid-
eration. There were rabbis, like Paul's teacher Gamaliel,
who were friendly to Greek study ; there were others who
dreaded it as a source of religious infection. The Phari-
sees by no means formed an intellectually closed commu-
nity. From the notices in the Talmud, we may infer that
there was a good deal of liberty of thought among them,
which manifested itself in various theological and literary
tendencies. Of their contact with Greek ideas we know lit-
tle. The Egyptian Jews were decidedly influenced by Greek
culture ; the proof is found in such books as the Wisdom of
Solomon and Ecclesiastes, and in the writings of Philo. But
Pharisaism is more particularly a Palestinian development,
and in Palestine Greek thought was less prominent and less
known than in Egypt. Still, it can hardly be doubted that
1 On this point see below, Ch. VII. The references to the future life iu
Palestinian works outside of the apocalypses are very few. None are found,
for example, in the sayings ascribed (in Pirke Aboth) to the heads of the
legal schools, though this may be an accident, and the genuineness of these
sayings, moreover, is not beyond suspicion.
252 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
the ethical and religious ideas of the great Greek teachers
had found their way from Egypt, Asia Minor, and Syria to
Galilee and Jerusalem, and had to some extent modified or
directed Palestinian Jewish thought. Josephus describes the
Pharisees as Stoics ; and though this may be only a loose
attempt to designate them by a term familiar to his Koman
public, still it suggests a resemblance. The moral strenuous-
ness, the conception of the world as absolutely ordered in all
its details by a supermundane power (fate or providence),
in general the conception of the absoluteness of law, and the
necessity of ordering the life thereby, these ideas, not un-
known to the old Israelites, were not improbably in some
degree denned and shaped by the better elaborated Greek
thought. Pharisaism (and therefore substantially the whole
later Jewish life) may be conceived as an amalgamation
of Greek and Jewish nomistic conceptions, just as in the
thirteenth century Jewish theology, under the guidance of
Maimonides, reposed on a blending of Talmudic and Arabo-
Grecian philosophy. The two constituents were fused into a
unity in Palestine by the overpowering nationalism, as the
exiles of the sixth century B. c. absorbed and assimilated
Babylonian ideas. Hints are not lacking of the presence
of Greek influence in the Jewish schools. Perhaps we may
thus in part explain the saying attributed to Antigonus of
Socho, that men should serve God without an eye to the
reward. The methodizing, codifying impulse which showed
itself in the time of Hillel may have arisen partly from the
same source, as well as the extraordinary glorification of the
Law in the Talmud, according to which God himself was
determined by its content J Be this as it may, Pharisaism
was practically identical with Judaism.
1 God, when he would create the world, looked into the Law (Bereshith
Rabba, 1), and took counsel with it (Midrash Tanchuma, 1) ; to its study he
devotes three hours every day (Aboda Sara, 3 h), and to its prescriptions he
conforms himself ( Wayikra Rabba, 19, 35). Weber, " System," 4. This ex-
SIX AND KIGHTEOUSNESS. 253
The rival sect of the Sadducees never had any strong hold
on the people. According to Josephus (Ant. xiii. 10, 6), their
adherents were found only among the rich, while the Phar-
isees had the multitude on their side ; and so, he adds, the
former, when they became magistrates, were forced to adopt
Pharisaic notions because the people would listen to noth-
ing else (Ant. xviii. 1, 4). The unpopularity of the Saddu-
cees was no doubt due in part to the character of their
religious ideas. They rejected the authority of the traditional
interpretations of the Law, and held themselves strictly to
the text of the Pentateuch. 1 This is possibly the explana-
tion of their attitude toward the doctrines of immortality
and the resurrection, neither of which they accepted (Ant.
xviii. 1, 4 ; Matt. xxii. 23 ; Acts xxiii. 8) ; that -is, perhaps
they held strictly to the negative position of the Pentateuch. 2
But this was out of harmony with the existing views and feel-
ing of the people ; popular feeling had advanced beyond the
point of view of the Old Testament, and the cold scepticism
of the Sadducees was unacceptable. It seems probable also
that the social position and culture of the party kept them
aloof from the people. Josephus intimates that it was com-
posed of aristocrats, and the history shows that it furnished
many magistrates and high-priests. This fact has suggested
uberantly fanciful representation embodies the feeling that the universe is
determined by an eternal law, of which God is the personal and the Tora
the written expression.
1 Nevertheless, it must be supposed that they recognized judicial interpre-
tations of the Pentateuchal code, which were necessary in order to apply it to
particular cases (Jos, Ant. xx, 9, 1).
2 There is some difficulty in the statements of Josephus that the Saddu-
cees believed that souls die with bodies, and of Acts that they accepted neither
angel nor spirit. This goes beyond the Pentateuch and the Old Testament
generally. Perhaps it is only intended to say that they denied the independent
existence of souls and spirits, holding the dead to be confined as " shades "
m Sheol. and that they rejected the later post-biblical elaboration of the doc-
trine of angels. Otherwise we must ascribe to them a doctrine of annihilation
which is allied to the Stoic view. In the absence of preciser information these
affirmations must be received with caution.
254 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
the view that the germ of the Sadducean party was formed
by the old priestly families, who for a long time enjoyed
political and social supremacy and inherited the religious
traditions of the tern pie-ceremonial. The priests would nat-
urally be a conservative body, holding to the letter of the
law and careless of modern innovations of thought. 1 Their
position did not bring them into close contact with the peo-
ple, and they would have small knowledge of popular needs
and small sympathy with popular ideas. On the other hand,
their social traditions allied them with the rich and aristo-
cratic ; they would easily adopt foreign habits of luxury and
social ideas, while they rejected those new conceptions of the
Law and those doctrinal interpretations which were neces-
sary in order to bring it into living harmony with the new
generation. Thus they stood outside the line of national
progress, and had small effect on the national thought. They
seem to represent a petrified conservatism which is not en-
titled to the name of nationalism. They are of no recog-
nizable interest in the history of Christian thought. Their
activity in Palestine was almost exclusively political up to
the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, when they van-
ished from the scene to appear as a party no more. Traces
of similar negative opinions may be found in later times, but
not of such an organization.
The third Jewish party, the Essenes, presents character-
istics in some respects more remarkable than those of the
other two. When it first took distinct shape we do not
know ; but as the Essene Manahem was a friend of Herod
the Great (Ant. xv. 10, 5), and as the party seems at that
time to have been well established, it may be inferred that
it arose not later than in the early part of the first century
1 The name " Sadducees " is most probably identical with " Zadoldtes "
(Ezek. xliv. 15), the priestly family which came into control of the temple
just before the beginning of the Babylonian exile.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 255
B. c. Its members were found in small numbers in various
parts of Palestine, including the cities (Jos. War, ii. 8, 4) ; a
large community was settled on the northwest coast of the
Dead Sea. 1 They represented in the first place an extreme
legalism so far as ceremonial purity of body was concerned,
and in this point may be regarded as an exaggerated form
of Pharisaism. Singularly enough, however, their attitude
toward the temple-sacrifices was hostile ; they refused to
take part in them. The ground of their repugnance to the
national system of offerings seems to have been not that
of the prophets and psalmists, it was neither ethical nor
spiritual. It perhaps connected itself with their second pecu-
liarity, a pronounced asceticism, which reached the propor-
tions of gnostic dualism. They abstained from wine, animal
food, and oil, and most of them from marriage. They obvi-
ously held that the body, as the seat of evil, was to be
repressed and chastised. Whence this decidedly non-Jewish
view came, it is hard to say ; it has been ascribed to Persian
and other Oriental influence, but the data for determining
its origin are lacking. Un- Jewish it certainly was, since the
nation otherwise never showed any such tendency. The Old
Testament heartily accepts and approves the ordinary social
life of man ; yet a point of departure for such a system may
be found in Old Testament ideas (especially in the concep-
tion of the weakness of the flesh, in the Nazarite vow, and
the Eechabite life), and traces of asceticism appear in the
books of Daniel (i. 8, 12) and Tobit (xii. 8). It is conceiv-
able that the Essenian asceticism may have arisen out of
1 Pliny, Hist. Nat. v. 15. For an account of similar communities in Egypt
known as Therapeutic, see Philo, " On the Contemplative Life." According to
him, the Essenes represented the practical, and the Therapeuta: (the Healers
of Souls) the theoretical side of the deeper, philosophic religious life. Of this
Egyptian sect, which may have sprung out of the Jewish-Alexandrine the-
osophy, we are unable to trace with distinctness any influence on the suc-
ceeding Jewish or Christian development of the first century of our era.
256 SIN AND KIGHTEOUSNESS.
this general idea. The turmoils of the time may have led
certain persons (there were perhaps five or six thousand in
all) to withdraw from the world and seek peace by sup-
pressing the body in order to cultivate the soul ; and it was
possibly this conviction, that happiness was gained through
inward purity, that produced the negative attitude toward
sacrifices. 1 Other peculiarities of the party lead us to sus-
pect Oriental influence : they practised occult arts, were ac-
quainted with medicinal roots and stones, had secret books
and mysteries, and made predictions (Jos. Ant. xv. 10, 5,
where Manahem foretells the greatness of Herod) ; they
practised a sort of sun-worship, and had a special doctrine
of angels. So far as their life was concerned, it was of the
most exemplary sort ; they were everywhere famous for
piety and virtue.
Though the Essenes did not affect the general national
Jewish development, standing as they did outside of its
lines of advance, yet it is not likely that they remained en-
tirely without influence on current thought. In fact, there
are traces in the New Testament of their two distinctive
peculiarities, their communistic morality and their gnostic
conception of life and of the world. While the supposition
that Jesus was an Essene must be pronounced to be base-
less and even bizarre, it is not impossible that he may have
been attracted by that self-abnegation which the party so
strikingly illustrated. The Essenian practices of non-resist-
ance and abandonment of claim to private property were
doubtless well known in Palestine in the first half of the
first century, and may have been sympathized with by many
persons. Such ideas, which were in the air, Jesus may have
in part adopted in the form in which we find them expressed
in the Sermon on the Mount ; but he combined them with
1 Perhaps also the feeling against the shedding of blood, for which reason
probably in part they abstained from animal food.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 257
pure spiritual views and vigorous positive morality in such
a way as practically to take them out of the circle of Esse-
nian doctrine. The only other trace of this party in the New
Testament is found in the gnosticism which is combated in
the Epistle to the Colossians. The similarity between the
Jewish-Christian doctrine there opposed and the Essenian
views is striking : x there is the same asceticism and dual-
ism and the same prominence given to angels. But it is
not certain that the Colossian gnosticism was derived from
the Essenes ; it may have come from similar, but independent,
movements of thought in Asia Minor. The historical origin
of these early forms of gnosticism is not clear ; but it is of
great interest to note that similar developments took place
in Judaism and in Christianity. And when we consider the
wide diffusion of gnostic opinions in the early part of the
second century of our era, we are forced to recognize a deep-
lying tendency in the Jewish world (perhaps non-Jewish
in origin, and numbering comparatively few adherents) to
adopt a mystical-philosophic view of the universe, discard-
ing both Jewish and Christian nomistic, Messianic, and sac-
ficial ideas, undertaking on the one hand to bridge over the
chasm between God and the world by a series of inter-
mediate intelligences, and on the other hand to lift man
into union with God by a process of bodily and spiritual
self -culture. The points of contact between this scheme and
the Mazdean and Buddhistic conceptions of life cannot be
denied ; but in the absence of all proof, it would be rash to
affirm an historical connection between the Jewish and the
Oriental systems. We can only say that gnostic thought has
its basis in human nature, and we need not be surprised at
its appearance in Jewish circles. Christian gnosticism may
have sprung in part from the Jewish thought, but certainly
owed its fullest development to other than Jewish influences.
1 See J. B. Lightfoot's note in his Commentary on Colossians.
17
258 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Josephus (Ant. xviii. 1, 6) mentions a fourth Jewish party,
the Zealots, of which Judas, the Galilean, was the founder,
but it was rather political than religious in character. It
represented a fanatical nationalism, a rejection of all earthly
rulers, an inviolable attachment to liberty, and devotion to
the God of Israel as the only Lord. The part played by
these men in the revolt against the Romans and the siege
of Jerusalem belongs to the civil history.
The Sanhedrin and the great legal schools, though they
were influential in the elaboration of the ethical, civil, and
religious law, had little to do with the development of re-
ligious doctrine. They were the official representatives and
expounders of the national nomism, which they received
from their fathers and transmitted to their descendants.
The earliest mention of the Sanhedrin occurs in Josephus'
account of the reign of John Hyrcanus II. (B. c. 47), where
Herod is summoned before this tribunal to account for cer-
tain murders committed by him (Ant. xiv. 9, 3-5). It is
there spoken of as an established institution, and had doubt-
less been in existence for a considerable period, though the
beginnings of its history are unknown. There is no proof
that it was connected with Ezra ; the form of the name 1
points to the Greek period as the time of its origination.
It was doubtless a gradual development out of older judi-
cial institutions. Its membership consisted of seventy-one
priests and scribes ; it had two secretaries, and was presided
over by the high-priest. It was the supreme judicial and
legislative body, having nominally final jurisdiction in civil
and ecclesiastical affairs ; but its power was practically lim-
ited by the authority of the Jewish kings and the Roman
procurators.
The best activity of the nation during the Greek period
appears in the legal schools. The class of students called
1 It is the Hebrew or Aramaic form of the Greek
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 259
Soferim, or Scribes, had arisen in response to the demand for
the interpretation and application of the Law. The name is
given to Ezra (Ezra vii. 6) ; and there was doubtless, from
his day on, a succession of men who devoted themselves to
the elaboration of legal science. The study seems, however,
not to have been definitely organized until the second cen-
tury B. c. At that time there began a line of teachers, each
of whom gathered around him a body of disciples and ex-
pressed his opinions in the form of apothegms. Most of the
sayings of these masters that have been preserved 1 are eth-
ical and legal, and have little direct bearing on the history
of religious thought. Indirectly, no doubt, their influence
was great. The schools cultivated the habit of independent
thought, and introduced into religion an ethical element
which could not fail to counteract the materializing ten-
dency of nomism. So far as there was a scientific devel-
opment of thought among the Jews of this period, we find
it in the succession of heads of schools.
The saying attributed to Simon the Just expresses the
fundamental idea of Judaism : " On three things the world
rests, on the Law, on divine service, and on good works."
This is the starting-point of Jewish development proper,
absolute obedience to the external divine standard, and along
with this kindly deeds toward mankind. It recognizes both
the outward law of the code and the inward law of the con-
science. Of the same import is the injunction ascribed to
the early teachers to " make a hedge about the Law," that
is, to enact and enforce minute ceremonial and other pre-
scriptions so as to define the Law with precision, and secure
its effectiveness. 2
1 In the tract Pirke Aboth, and in other Talmudic treatises.
' 2 There was probably also in some circles a desire to guard the pnrity of
the nation by surrounding initiation with difficulties that should deter all but
men of serious intention. The horror of heathenism was great, the fear of
its seductive influences ever present, and isolation was a familiar idea. The
260 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
The first of the great teachers whose name has come down
to us, Autigonus of Socho (second century B. c.), is cred-
ited with the remarkable declaration that men should not
serve God for reward, that virtue is to spring from love
of right, and to be accepted as its own sufficient reward,
an utterance which has no parallel in Old Testament or
New Testament. According to the tradition, his teaching
was understood by some of his scholars as a denial of im-
mortality, whence sprung the party of the Sadducees. 1 That
this is not a correct account of the origin of that party, we
have already seen. But the Sadducees were credited with
a leaning to foreigners, and it is possible that we have here
a vague reminiscence of fear of the Greek influence in the
school of Antigonus. The probability is that Stoic thought
was known in Palestine at that time. 2 It is noteworthy
that Antigonus seems to have maintained his position in
spite of a dictum which was contrary to the Jewish ortho-
opposite policy of liberality also found favor, if we may rely on the anecdote
which represents Sbammai as repelling would-be proselytes by the severity of
his demands, while Hillel summed up the legal requirements for candidates
in the golden rule. Shab 31 a, cited by Jost, " Geschichte des Judenthums,"
I 265. Jost remarks (in note) that this conflict between legalism and moral-
ity was afterwards transformed into that between legalism (Peter) and faith
(Paul).
1 The name is said in one tradition to be derived from that of one of these
scholars, Zadok, but this is probably an invented etymology ; already in the
Talmud these early times of legal study have a legendary coloring.
2 Its presence in Palestine is not expressly mentioned, but may be inferred
from the general prevalence of Greek thought. The intimate relations be-
tween Palestine and Egypt, where it is certain that Greek ideas were hos-
pitably received by Jews , the Greek translation of the law and the prophets,
which gradually made its way into Syria ; the adoption of Greek customs
by a part of the Jewish people in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, these
facts point to the presence of Hellenic ideas among the Palestinian Jews as
early as the beginning of the second century B. c. That Antigonus of Socho
bears a Greek name may be not without significance. Greek culture would
naturally bring with it Greek philosophy, Stoic, Platonic, and other sys-
tems prevalent at the time. Whether Greek books were then read by Pales-
tinian Jews, we have no means of determining ; the documents, absorbed in
political and Messianic interests, are unfortunately silent on this point.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 261
doxy of the period ; and while we cannot regard him as the
founder of the Sadducean party, we may suppose that he
represents a direction of opinion which found sympathy and
expression in Sadduceism. The Old Testament everywhere
connects man's conduct in this life with divine reward and
punishment ; but, except in the book of Daniel, it has noth-
ing to say of reward and punishment in the future life. A
thinker, like Antigonus, especially under the influence of
Stoicism, might find the gist of the Old Testament teaching
in the doctrine that reverence toward God was the central
fact of religious life, and that obedience to him brought not
outward prosperity, but that inward satisfaction which con-
stituted the highest happiness. How far such an opinion
was held by the later Sadducees, we have no means of deter-
mining ; our accounts of them come from their enemies. The
O '
Talmudic Pharisees could see no good in men who held aloof
from what had come to be regarded as the vital principle
of the nation, devotion to the ceremonial law. The Talmud
was edited, moreover, long after the Sadducees as a party
had ceased to exist. Time had stamped failure on them ; it
was not likely that they would receive justice at the hands
of their successful opponents. On general grounds, consid-
ering the prominent part played by the Sadducees in the
civil and ecclesiastical government, it is likely that they
numbered in their ranks not a few men of exemplary, moral-
religious character, maintaining the Old Testament standard
of faith and conduct, but standing necessarily in a position
of antagonism toward popular thought. They were probably
neither better nor worse than their adversaries. If the his-
tory of the times had been written by them, we should no
doubt find in their policy and conduct the usual mixture
of good and bad ; it was their misfortune that they were out
of accord with the Jewish spirit of the age, and vanished,
from the scene almost without leaving a trace of influence
262 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
on national opinions. So far as the practical ethics of the
time is concerned, it was not determined by the dicta of
teachers and schools, but sprang out of the social conditions,
to which the Sadducees, no less than the Pharisees, were
subject.
The rivalry between Pharisees and Sadducees is in one
aspect a struggle between progressive noniism and conserv-
ative nationalism. The question was virtually decided in
favor of the party of nomistic advance, in the second cen-
tury B. c. In another aspect this party strife connected
itself with the conflict between Jewish and foreign ideas.
The historical content of the second century has been de-
scribed as the victory of noniism over Hellenism. This,
however, is a partial statement of the case, true from one
point of view, untrue from another. The sharp attack of
the Syrian Greeks on the organized Jewish faith was thor-
oughly crushed by the Maccabean uprising ; the attempt
was not repeated by Greeks or Komans. Yahwe, the Lord,
was not displaced by Jupiter Capitolinus. The Jewish sa-
cred books were not destroyed. The hold of the Jewish
ritual on the national mind was not weakened. Judaism
as a religious system remained firm, and Hellenistic hea-
thenism suffered a decisive defeat. But this is only the
outward aspect of the question. Judaism, while it had an
inward life vigorous enough to repel all such attacks, had
also a depth and breadth of susceptibility which recognized
the value of certain foreign truths. Notably the great be-
lief in immortality came to the Jews through Greek inter-
mediation. In the Egyptian -Jewish literature there is many
a trace of Greek influence in philosophical-religious views
of the world and of life, the conceptions, for example,
of the divine cosmos, the divine mediating logos, the divine
power of human wisdom and virtue. Palestinian nomism
was less affected by such ideas ; but in Palestine also we
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 263
find the doctrine of immortality, and in the legal schools
the idea of moral order and individual strict rectitude and
justice. All these conceptions passed over to Christianity.
From this point of view Hellenism did not suffer a defeat,
but succeeded in impressing itself on Judaism. The con-
tact between these two great systems of thought is to be
looked on rather as an intellectual-religious conference, in
which the more firmly organized religion, while maintaining
its general character, accepted suggestions from its neigh-
bor. Judaism, by virtue of all the elements of its past, had
a vigor of constitution and a common-sense practicalness
which assured it existence and success in the strife of opin-
ions. The strength of Hellenism lay, not in its religious
organization, but in its general conceptions of life. Its pan-
theon and its, priesthood were doomed to extinction ; but
its philosophy was to survive as a permanent element of
civilization. The Jews, however, and especially those of Pal-
estine, did not express Greek philosophical ideas in techni-
cal terms ; the philosophical influence shows itself in the
general coloring of the thought. Nor is more than a gen-
eral coloring to be expected. The Jewish ethics and religion
of the second century B. c. sprang out of old Israelitish soil,
and were developed largely by Israelitish experiences. But
when we compare the utterances of the great lawyers with
the purely national tone of the apocalyptic and historical
books, we are naturally led to attribute the broad humanita-
rian and cosmopolitan elements of the former to that breath
of foreign influence which we have reason to believe was
then found in Palestine. 1 By way of illustration we may
cite some of the sayings which are attributed to the centres
of legal-ethical teaching.
1 For the extent of Hellenic culture during this period in Palestine, in
Judean and non-Judean districts, see Schiirer, " Geschichte des Judischen
Volkes," II. pp. 9-50.
264 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Siinon the Just declared that the world rested on the
Tora, on the divine service, and on deeds of kindness or
mercy (with possible allusion to Hos. vi. 6, cf. Matt. xii. 7),
that is, he puts duty to one's fellow-men on the same level
with the obligation to obey the ritual law. The dictum of
Antigonus is the exaltation of the pure spirit of devotion to
duty : " Be as servants who serve the master without view
to reward." The sayings of the succeeding teachers down
to Hillel deal exclusively with ethical and legal principles.
We cannot conclude from this that they neglected the cere-
monial law, but it may fairly be inferred that they laid very
great stress on the ideas of justice and probity. The most
important of the heads of the legal schools was the Baby-
lonian Hillel, who belongs to the reign of Herod the Great,
the last third of the century before the beginning of our era.
A richly endowed and many-sided man, he left his impress
on the national development in more than one direction. As
a lawyer, he was famous not only for his great learning, but
also for his clearness and analytic power. He arranged the
enormous mass of the traditional interpretations of the Law
into something like a regular code, and thus laid the founda-
tions of the Mishna, and prepared the way for the precise
scientific legal study which was to occupy the Jewish mind
for the next thousand years. In this way he helped to bind
the nation more firmly to the nomistic idea, and to develop
more fully all the good and bad that lay in the nomistic
scheme of life. On the other hand, his ethical conceptions
were characterized by remarkable freedom, breadth, and geni-
alness. He and his colleague, Shammai, stood at opposite
poles in the construction of the Law; the latter was stern
and uncompromising, the former was mild and liberal. It
was to a Gentile candidate for proselytism that he is said
to have declared that the whole Law was comprised in one
word: "What thou wouldst not have another do to thee,
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 265
do not thou to another." A similar idea is contained in his
saying : " Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving and follow-
ing after peace, loving mankind and leading them to the
Law," where it seems that he regards the Law as the em-
bodiment of order informed by kindness and love. Kespect-
ing self-seeking he said : " Who seeks fame loses fame ;
who does not increase [in learning] decreases ; who does not
teach is worthy of death ; who uses the crown [of learn-
ing] for his own ends perishes." In enigmatical fashion
he expresses the idea of unselfish self-culture : "If I am
not for myself, who is for me ? and if I am for myself, what
am I ? and if not now, when ? " Here is both ethical strin-
gency and philosophical subtlety.
In his time the Jewish legal system acquired definite con-
sistency, and after him no important change seems to have
occurred. The great lawyers worked out details, but the
national conception of righteousness remained essentially un-
modified. Eighteousness was obedience to the Law. We
have already noted the vice of this system, mechanical
and external self-confidence. But we are not to suppose
that formality obtained the entire control of the religious
life of the period, that the national conception of life was
wholly vicious. We know that the national instinct de-
manded inwardness and spirituality of life. With so great
a mass of ethical thought as the Jewish nation then pos-
sessed, it was impossible that there should not be some trace
of higher and purer devotion to right for its own sake. In
the person and teaching of Hillel we have the example of
such a nobler conception of religion, and there must have
been many who shared his views. 1 But it is true at the
same time that this better side of the national religious life
was not the controlling one ; it was constantly in danger of
1 On Hillel see Jost, " Geschichte," I. 257 ff ., art. in Herzog, and Delitzsch's
monograph.
266 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
being overborne by the ceremonialism which tended to de-
press or to crush the spiritual independence and freedom
of the souL The Law offered a great religious career to the
Jewish people, but only on the condition that along with
this external guide there should be also the recognition of
the conscience as a divinely enlightened source of truth,
that the impulse to right-living should spring not merely
from a desire to keep the mass of precepts, but also from
an inward perception and love of divine truth. Hillel had
perceived the necessity of a freer element in the religious
life, but he had not been able to lift it into a position of
control. There was needed a more piercing insight and a
more lofty spirituality to convert Jewish nomism into a true
spiritual life.
6. It cannot be considered an accident that Jesus of Naza-
reth and Hillel stand historically so near together. We see
in the latter the germ of the religious feeling to which the
former gave full shape. The peculiarity of the position of
Jesus as religious teacher was not that he rejected the na-
tional nomistic scheme, but that he sought to infuse into
it the vitalizing principle of independent communion with
God.
It appears from the Synoptic narratives that Jesus recog-
nized and accepted the national system of sacrifices and the
national law. Lepers whom he healed he sent to make the
offering prescribed by law (Matt. viii. 4) ; he kept the regu-
lar feasts (Matt. xxvi. 17) ; and according to the First Gos-
pel (Matt, xxiii. 2, 3), he declared that the scribes and the
Pharisees were authorized expounders of the Mosaic law,
and that their prescriptions were to be obeyed. We must
therefore conclude that he accepted in full the Mosaic law,
with the rest of the Old Testament, as the divinely given
guide of life. We need not lay stress on the declaration of
Matt. v. 19 : " Whosoever, therefore, shall break one of these
SIN AND KIGHTEOUSNESS. 267
least commandments and shall teach men so, shall be called
least in the kingdom of heaven, but whosoever shall do
and teach them, he shall be called great in the kingdom
of heaven." From the generally admitted Judaizing char-
acter of this Gospel, it is not impossible that these words
were added by an editor in the time of conflict between the
Pauline and Judaizing parties of the Church, yet there is
nothing in the other Synoptics in contradiction of this decla-
ration ; it is not the Law, but its abuse, that he condemns.
It is quite in accordance with the Synoptic portraiture of
him that he should say : " Think not that I came to de-
stroy the Law or the prophets ; I came not to destroy, but
to fulfil" (v. 17). And if he looked on the Old Testament
as the final divine revelation of truth, he might well add :
" Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall
in no wise pass away from the Law till all things be accom-
plished" (v. 18). He seems, indeed, in the Sermon on the
Mount, to criticise and modify the Law in certain partic-
ulars. The modifications, however, when we examine them
closely, are, with perhaps one exception, not an attack on
the fundamental principles of the Old Testament. When
he declares against the habit of swearing, on the ground that
it is irreverent and unnecessary, this does not impugn the
moral principle of the Old Testament, which required the
performance of oaths made to the Lord ; it is rather the
utterance of a more developed religious feeling, which per-
ceives the inutility of primitive modes of religious service.
So, also, his command not to resist evil is directed against
the legal prescription : " An eye for an eye and a tooth for
a tooth." But in the old legislation this was rather a rule
for the guidance of the judges than an ethical precept ; it
was a survival of the old system of retaliation, which was
no doubt modified by the Jewish judges themselves. He,
however, makes it the occasion for affirming the general eth-
268 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
ical principle intended to strike at the root of a purely self-
ish assertion of one's legal rights. In his injunction to love
one's enemies he no doubt not only advances beyond the Old
Testament point of view, but also distinctly condemns that
hatred of national enemies which is involved in all the Old
Testament ethics and is distinctly avowed in the prophetic
writings and the Psalms. But these criticisms, whatever
their import, are not to be construed as implying a rejec-
tion of the Law as the guide of life. There is no hint in
the Synoptics that he ever called in question its supreme
obligation and authority. He attacked the traditions of the
Pharisees, but never the text on which they were based ;
and his hostility seems to have been directed not against
the serious injunctions of the traditional law (Matt, xxiii. 3),
but against those trifling observances which interfered with
the free moral conduct of life.
It must be held, therefore, that his conception of righteous-
ness was nomistic in so far as it was conceived of by him as
obedience to law. The precepts which he gave were intended,
not to set aside, but to expound and develop, the existing
legal system. He contemplated no fundamental change in
the national life ; of such an idea there is no trace in the
three first Gospels. As far as we can judge, his hope for the
nation was that it should continue under the Law, only with
a higher spirit of obedience, such as that which is not dimly
expressed by the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and comes
out still more clearly in the One Hundred and Nineteenth
Psalm. But it is precisely at this point that his conception
of righteousness assumes a peculiar and revolutionary tone.
His ethical precepts do not express the essence of his idea
of religion. That is found in what he represents as the ideal
attitude of the soul toward God. He speaks, indeed, of a
higher reward for the better spiritual service (Matt. vi. 1, 15
20, 33), a consideration which, though not, strictly speaking,
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 269
of the highest ethical character, is perfectly legitimate. But
he also holds up the divine father of men as the standard
of human conduct, and represents the desire to be in perfect
harmony with him as the highest motive of life : " That ye
may be sons of your father who is in heaven " (Matt. v. 45).
The very conception of God as father implies a tenderness
of sympathy and a spirituality of relation which involved a
new departure in religion. It amounts practically to trans-
ferring the devotion of the soul from the outward objective
standard of law, and making the conscience itself, enlight-
ened, freed, and stimulated by devotion to a perfect ideal,
the arbiter of moral life.
The source of this spiritual righteousness he finds in the
soul itself. His exhortations are all addressed directly to
man's will, for which he assumes complete independence and
responsibility. He speaks of no mediator between God and
man, describes no theological process by which righteous-
ness is to be obtained. He pictures man as standing face to
face with God and dealing with him alone. The necessary
condition of true righteousness is that man should come
into a relation of trust and love with the divine father, but
this relation is attained by man's own effort. The religious
teaching of Jesus may therefore be termed a spiritual no-
mism, a principle which contained the germ of the destruction
of formalism, though the latter has always maintained itself
in the Church from the failure fully to appropriate the real
spirit of Jesus. The early Church, if we may take the Epis-
tle of James to be a fair exposition of its belief, did not
grasp the spirituality of the Master's conception. The right-
eousness described in this Epistle is marked rather by sin-
cerity than by high spirituality. What the writer opposes is
false pretence, disregard of the poor, evil-speaking, jealousy,
pride, luxury. So far as regards the source of righteousness,
it is in general that of the Old Testament and of the Sermon
270 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
on the Mount. A spiritual sonship is recognized : " Of his
own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we
should be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures" (i. 18). On
the other hand, he throughout regards men as the shapers
of their own moral characters, and has nothing to say of a
divine transforming power, or of a mediator between God
and man. For him, true religion consists in deeds of charity
to the afflicted and freedom from worldly impurities (i 27).
One may receive wisdom from God if one ask in faith ; one
is tempted, not by God nor by Satan, but by one's own evil
desire. A sinner may be converted from the error of his
way and thereby saved from death by his fellow-man (v. 20).
It is the conscience that determines moral guilt : " To him
who knows how to do good and does it not, to him it is sin "
(iv. 17). The relation of Jesus Christ to man's righteousness
is scarcely touched on. He was believed in as the Messiah
and the Lord, as the source of wisdom and of health of body
and mind, and his speedy coming was to be waited for as the
consummation of things. This is apparently the essence of
the faith which the believer is to exercise toward Jesus,
acceptance of him as the Messiah with faithful obedience to
all his precepts. Any other kind of faith the writer rejects
with contempt, and indeed appears to make an argument
against Paul's conception of the nature and office of faith
without works. Such a faith, he says, is dead, is nothing
more than what demons possess, is in opposition to the
Old Testament teaching, according to which Abraham was
justified by works. It is obviously the abuse of the Pauline
doctrine against which the writer is here arguing ; but it is
also clear that he himself rejects that doctrine, and looks on
a sincere life of thought and deed as the righteousness which
is acceptable in the sight of God. This conception does not
differ from that of the better Jewish thinkers of the day,
as indeed the Jewish portion of the early Church was little
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 271
more than a section of Judaism which regarded Jesus of
Nazareth as the Messiah.
A radical change in the conception of righteousness was
introduced by the Apostle Paul, a man who combined in
his thought spiritual depth and mystical school-logic in so
remarkable a manner that we are at a loss to estimate the
bearing and influence of his ideas. He was led by his ex-
perience to reject the possibility of obtaining righteousness
through obedience to an outward law. A profoundly re-
ligious nature, passionately devoted to his ideal of perfect-
ness, and at the same time keenly introspective, he became
convinced, soon after (or perhaps before) his acceptance of
Jesus as the Messiah, of the futility of man's efforts to
achieve perfect righteousness. This is a conclusion which
must be reached in a measure by every earnest soul. In
Paul's case, the weariness of human works was intensified
by the Jewish ceremonial system and the huge mass of
scribal ordinances under which he had been brought up.
He describes it as a terrible burden and bondage, a bur-
den imposed by God himself, indeed, for a wise purpose
(namely, to develop man's consciousness of sin), but in itself
inconsistent with liberty of soul and peace of mind (Gal.
iii. iv. ; Eom. vii.). He had struggled long to satisfy the
demands of law, and the only result was that he was over-
whelmed with the bitterest sense of his own moral impo-
tency ; yet righteousness was an absolute necessity. What,
then, was man to do ? How was salvation possible ? It
seemed to Paul that the perfect righteousness was to be
prepared and bestowed by God himself. It could not be
of man's working out ; it must be achieved by a perfect
being to whom God had assigned the task of saving human-
ity, and this perfect saviour could be none other than the
glorified Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. It is precisely at this
point that we wish to know the development in Paul's mind
272 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
of his conception of Jesus ; but unfortunately specific his-
torical data for this purpose are lacking. He speaks much
of his experience in certain points, but his knowledge of
Christ he represents as an immediate revelation, and he
gives us no details of the mental process by which the per-
son of the Messiah was brought into connection with his
consciousness of sin.
Paul's idea, though conceived and developed in an origi-
nal and thorough manner, is not antagonistic or alien to
the thought of the time ; it has connections with both the
preceding and the succeeding Jewish literature. The prin-
ciple of national and social solidarity had never lost its
hold on the people ; some of its cruder features had been
cast away (see above, pp. 184 f.), but the essence of the
thing had remained In the Old Testament, society is con-
ceived of as a unit in such a way that its good element
may set aside the evil, and gain the divine favor for the
whole. In a number of particular instances the merits of
the righteous are spoken of as transferable to others : Job
secures forgiveness for his friends (Job xlii.) ; Abraham, by
his personal interest with Yahwe, gains the promise that
Sodom shall be spared for the sake of ten righteous men, if
so many can be found in the city (Gen. xviii.) ; 1 for his sake
Abimelech is pardoned and Isaac blessed (Gen. xx. xxvi.).
The completest statement of the idea is found in Isaiah liii.,
where the Servant of Yahwe by his suffering and knowl-
edge 2 that is, in general by his merit "justifies many,"
causes the nation to be esteemed righteous by God. Noth-
ing is here said expressly of an imputation of moral char-
acter, but some such transference is involved. It is declared
1 See, on the other hand, Ezek. xiv. 12-20; hut the idea remained (as
appears from the Talmud) in spite of the prophet's protest.
2 The precise construction and meaning of the Hebrew word so rendered
are doubtful ; but this does not affect the general sense.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 273
that a certain person designated as " the righteous one " pro-
cures that other persons shall be pronounced righteous in the
divine court. 1 Virtually, therefore, recreant Israel is justified,
not by its own righteousness, but through the righteousness
of the faithful Servant. The same general idea finds expres-
sion in some Apocryphal books (Ecclus. xliv. 11, 12, 19-21 ;
Song of the Three Children, 12), and in the New Testa-
ment, in the form of intercession, in James v. 16 (cf. Luke
xxii. 32). The Talmud develops the idea of the transference
of merit and imputation of righteousness in a remarkable
manner. A great role in the history of the nation is as-
cribed to that righteousness of Abraham and others which
had procured them favor with God and influence in his coun-
cils, while to the righteous is assigned an almost unlimited
power. In one passage (Succa 39) it is affirmed that "the
merit of the righteous is able to free the whole world from
condemnation," and another (Ber. lOb) ventures the sweep-
ing assertion that in general it is desirable "to rest one's
hopes on the merits of others." 2
It would thus seem probable that the notion of the im-
putation or legal transference of moral character and its
merits or rewards was not strange to Paul's generation, es-
pecially not to that Pharisaic school to which he belonged.
How the Jewish thought harmonized this idea with the
principle of individual moral independence and responsi-
bility does not appear, but it is clear that the harmon-
ization was effected. Paul, we may imagine, could not be
content with a vague theory of the vicarious efficacy of
merely human righteousness ; his sense of sin was too deep.
The peculiarity of his system is his recognition of the
righteousness of the Messiah as the one only moral gar-
1 The verb rendered " justify, make righteous," is a forensic term, mean-
ing " to pronounce righteous."
2 On the doctrine of the Talmud see Weber, " System," chs xix. xx.
18
274 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
merit which by reason of its perfectness could clothe all
humanity with legal purity. In his principle of imputation
he is at one with the Old Testament, and especially with
that later development of Old Testament ideas which is
found in the Talmud ; he differs from both in the depth
and fulness of his moral demands. How he came to his
special view it is impossible to say with definiteness. It
was most likely an intuition, an idea that burst up in
his soul out of the mass of material over which he had
been brooding ; he describes it as a revelation. It brought
him unity, order, light, where before all had been darkness
and chaos. It may have been that profound prophetic vision
of the suffering Servant of the Lord (which he doubtless
interpreted Messianically) that led him to connect salvation
with the Messiah's righteousness ; 1 and it seems to have
been in connection with his acceptance of Jesus as the
Christ that he perfected his exalted conception of the Mes-
siah's nature and function. He seems to have had little
knowledge of the earthly life of Jesus, and for this reason,
perhaps, the more readily idealized him into the absolutely
perfect Servant of the Lord. He had disappeared from
earth, where could he be but at God's right hand ? The
disciples had their hopes, but Paul, convinced that he was
the true Messiah of God, accepting him as the risen and
glorified Lord, was unable to rest in the early Church's lim-
ited and undefined idea of the Messiah's moral-spiritual
functions. He could not restrict the promised salvation
to a political deliverance of the nation, or to a vague hap-
piness to be bestowed at the second coming of the Christ.
He looked for a speedy second coming (Thess., 1 Cor. xv.),
but he demanded a present deliverance. His moral con-
sciousness assured him that the Messiah had achieved abso-
1 His expression for " justify " is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew
forensic verb mentioned above.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 275
lute deliverance from the burden of sin ; for this, he held,
was the only true deliverance which the holy God could
offer to sin-burdened men. Jesus was perfect ; and his per-
fect righteousness offered man that ideal perfectness with-
out which the awakened conscience could not be satisfied.
He found also in the Old Testament the hint of the
instrumentality by which the righteousness of the Messiah
was to be appropriated. It is said (Gen. xv. 6) that Abra-
ham's faith was reckoned to him for righteousness. It is
clear from the connection that this act of belief is here
represented as part of Abraham's personal righteousness,
not an appropriation by him of the righteousness of another.
But Paul applies the words without further explanation,
and out of their proper sense, to the attitude of the be-
liever toward Christ. There is, indeed, a profound spirit-
ual truth in this conception, as will be pointed out below.
But Paul takes it, in the first instance (Gal., Born.), in a lit-
eral and somewhat mechanical way, and develops its conse-
quences with unsparing logic. By faith in Christ, he says
(and this faith must be regarded as having a moral-spiritual
basis, including desire to be freed from sin), the believer is
clothed with his perfect righteousness, stands therefore as
just in the sight of God, and for him there can be no con-
demnation ; he has fulfilled all the divine commands. It
follows that man's personal righteousness has no share in
effecting his salvation. Whatever its purity and sincerity, it
can never be perfect, and is moreover excluded by the very
fact that it is the righteousness of Christ which God accepts
and puts to the credit of those that believe in him. There
is absolutely no place for human goodness in the divine
decision respecting man's justification or condemnation.
This doctrine, which is peculiar to Paul, naturally excited
grave doubts and opposition, a trace of which we find in
the Epistle of James. It was, indeed, theoretically anti-
276 SIN AND EIGHTEOUSNESS.
nomiauism of the most thoroughgoing sort. It was an un-
sparing attack on the Jewish national nomistic scheme of
life. It was said by objectors (Eom. vi.) that it necessarily
led to license, as indeed it may well have done when em-
braced by ignorant, unspiritual, or unconscientious persons.
If obedience to law availed nothing for salvation, why, it
micrht be asked, should one be obedient ?
O '
Paul's reply to this objection gives him occasion to bring
out the profoundly spiritual side of his plan of salvation. It
is true, he says (Rom. vi. vii.) that the believer is absolved
absolutely from obedience to the law, but only under the
condition that in accepting Jesus Christ as Saviour he dies
to sin ; the old sin-enslaved nature is crucified w r ith Jesus on
the cross, the believer is buried with him through baptism
into death, and rises with him in newness of life. In the
act of believing, the man is introduced into a new world,
with transformation of desire and will : he has no longer
any wish to do what is contrary to the divine will ; there
is a living spring of purity and obedience in his heart.
How is it possible that he should continue in sin, which
has become distasteful to him ? There were some who sup-
posed-that reliance on God's grace for salvation would make
men arrogant and defiant, that, having a pledge of sal-
vation from God, they would with devilish ingenuity and
malignity give free rein to their passions, wallow in sin
that they might test the stability of God's word and of his
power to save. But no, cries the Apostle, indignantly ; such
a thing is impossible ; the existence of such a desire would
show the absence of true faith. He who believes not only
has no desire to sin, but has intense desire to do what is
pleasing in the sight of God, and performs from an inward
impulse of love and with gladness of soul what other men
wearily toil over, urged on by a mechanical and commercial
hope of salvation.
SIN AND KIGHTEOUSNESS. 277
Paul does not develop in detail the way in which this
transformation of soul is accomplished, but we may gather
his idea with sufficient distinctness from the Epistles to the
Galatians, the Corinthians, and the Eomans. In the first
place, faith for him is not a mere intellectual belief that
Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah and the Saviour. It is a
confiding, loving attitude of the soul toward God and Christ,
a completely sympathetic acceptance of the divine nature
as the object not only of affectionate reverence, but also of
intimate communion, whence results an appropriation of and
assimilation to this divine nature : " As many of you as have
been baptized into Christ have put on Christ" (Gal. iii. 27);
" If we have become united with him by the likeness of his
death, we shall be also by the likeness of his resurrection "
(Eom. vi. 5). It is here left undetermined how this perfect
assimilation to the perfect character of Jesus is effected,
whether by the experience of the human soul or by an im-
mediate divine intervention, or by both. But it is clear
from the Apostle's description of his own experience (as in
Kom. vii.) that he conceived of it on the human side as a
radical psychological process, the basis of which was desire
to be free from the mastery of sin, and the culmination of
which was the establishment of a hearty and intimate friend-
ship with God. It is here that Paul shows his deep insight
into human nature. Such friendship could not exist while
the heart was full of dread of God as a judge who unsparingly
required complete obedience to his minutest commands ; such
a relation (and this the exaggerated Jewish nomism was) con-
verted man into an anxious, toiling slave. But now through
Christ the fear of failure in obedience was done away with,
and the soul, reconciled to God (2 Cor. v. 19), might lift itself
into a free and frank communion with his goodness.
It was thus the power of an ideal to which Paul appealed.
His experience and his reflection led him to see that the
278 SIN AND EIGHTEOUSNESS.
mightiest instrument for the transformation of character was
the hearty devotion of the soul to a supreme model of truth
and holiness; and so he trusts confidently to the power of
faith to reorganize and perfect man's nature. This is the
highest development of the individual, when he is governed
not by a set of minute rules (as was the case in the extreme
nomistic scheme), but by his love for an object which in-
cluded in itself all good. Thus man might attain to that
sense of freedom in which the Apostle revels (Gal. iv. v.),
full liberty to follow his own impulses, knowing that these
can be nothing but pure, inasmuch as they are called into
being by an absolutely pure object. This view furnished
the necessary complement to the legal scheme. Obedience
to law was indispensable, 1 but it could be secured only by
love of the deeper principles of law and of the law-giver.
This part of Paul's conception is contained gerrninally in
the Old Testament (as in Ps. cxix.), and more definitely in
the Wisdom of Solomon, in which (chs. vii.-ix.) wisdom is
really a divine ideal, the breath of the power of God, the
brightness of the everlasting light, acquainted with the mys-
teries of the knowledge of God, and man's guide into all
things pure and noble. It is contained substantially in the
word of Jesus : " Ye shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father
1 In the Apostle's system the theoretical freedom of the believer is prac-
tically controlled in its judgments by the content of the divinely revealed
ethical law. The truthfulness of the conscience is tested by its conformity
to the existing standard. License is condemned on its face as antigodly.
Christian liberty is deliverance from the dogma that salvation is wrought
out by obedience, that is, from external ecclesiasticism , salvation is not
in the Church, but in Christ. The obligation to keep the moral law remains ;
the obligation of the ceremonial law falls away of itself. Such is the dis-
tinction that runs through Paul's writings. He assumes, he does not dis-
cuss, the eternal significance of ethical principle. This was assumed no less
by the Jews, his opponents. Neither party felt called on to establish this
universally recognized fact. The conflict was over the ritual law; but it
carried with it the deeper question of the relation between spiritual freedom
and the perfection of the soul.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 279
is perfect " (Matt. v. 48). But Paul gave it greater definite-
ness, and it may be said more effectiveness, by identifying
it with the more definite person of Jesus and connecting it
with his position as redeemer of man.
From another point of view he connects this inward trans-
formation with the presence and indwelling of God in the
soul, whereby the spiritual life is called into existence : " God
has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba,
Father " (Gal. iv. 6) ; " Know ye not that ye are a temple
of God, and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you " (1 Cor.
iii. 16); "We all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror
the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image
from glory to glory even as from the Lord, the spirit " (2 Cor.
iii. 18) ; " Ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be
that the spirit of God dwelleth in you" (Rom. viii. 9). Paul
thus seems to regard the whole process of inward salvation
as a supernatural one. Compare the conception in Wisdom
of Solomon ix. 17, 18 : " Thy counsel who has known, except
thou give wisdom and send thy holy spirit from above ? For
so the ways of them which lived on the earth were reformed,
and' men were taught the things that are pleasing to thee,
and were saved through wisdom." The Apostle does not ex-
hibit in a systematic way the relation between the work of
the spirit, the work of the Christ, and the faith of the be-
liever. But his view seems to be that the divine spirit is
imparted when the man believes. It is in fact simply the
Old Testament doctrine of God's universal creative activity
which he here adopts : nothing is done except by the divine
power, and the spirit is the representative and instrument
of the divine influence on the soul. In like manner, Paul
adopts the Old Testament conception of God's predeter-
mination (Rom. viii. 28-30), which in the thought of that
time was merely a necessary part of the idea of God's abso-
lute control of the world.
280 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
The instrument or condition of man's salvation, in Paul's
view, is the death of Christ : men are justified by his blood,
saved from wrath through him, reconciled to God through
his death (Rom. v.). God condemned sin in the flesh by
sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as
an offering for sin (Rom. viii. 3). This representation of the
Messiah as a sacrifice for sin originated, as far as our infor-
mation goes, with Paul ; it is not found in the words of
Jesus, nor in .the speech of Stephen, nor in the Epistle of
James. Its germ may be found perhaps in Isaiah liii., a
passage which was early regarded by the Jews as Messianic
(Targum of Jonathan, cf. Acts viii. 32, 33), though the idea
of an atoning death seems not to have entered into the cur-
rent Jewish theory of the Messiah. 1 Paul doubtless reached
his position by the combination of the two ideas that the
Messiah was to achieve complete salvation, and that there
could be no salvation without offering for sin ; yet it is to
be noted that he lays comparatively little stress on the death
of Christ, and in general on his humanity (Gal. iv. 4). He
accepts the atoning death as a necessary condition of sal-
vation, but looks with preference to the risen Saviour, whose
present glory was both the type and the pledge of the su-
preme blessedness reserved by God for the believer : " If we
died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with
him, knowing that Christ, being raised from the dead, dies
1 Weber, " System," cap. xxii. The Targum of Jonathan does not see in
Isa. liii. the vicarious suffering, but only the intercession of the Messiah.
The later Jewish theology, perhaps under the pressure of Christian doc-
trine, evoked a subsidiaiy Messiah, an Ephraimite, whose death was to have
atoning efficacy. But of such a role for a Messiah there is no trace in the
existing pre-Christian Jewish literature. It is natural to suppose that it was
the deep sense of the sinfulness of sin that forced the idea on the mind of
Paul ; it was for him and for that age the profoundest explanation of the
death of the Messiah. An historical connection might be sought between
this view and the old-Semitic conception of the death of the man-God (as
in the Adonis-cult). If this latter conception was a familiar one in the first
century of our era, it may have helped to shape the Christian doctrine.
SIN AND KIGHTEOUSNESS. 281
no more, death no more has dominion over him. The death
that he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life that he
lives, he lives to God ; even so reckon ye also yourselves to
be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus " (Rom. vi.
8-11, cf. iv. 25, Phil. iii. 10). It was the living Jesus to
whom he looked as the source of spiritual life, and he could
call his preaching the gospel of the resurrection.
We may sum up Paul's doctrine of saving righteousness
as follows : its legal condition is the sacrificial death of Jesus
Christ ; its ethical content is the personal righteousness of
Christ ; its source is the power of the living, glorified Christ
committed to him by God and exercised through the spirit ;
its human condition is the humble and grateful recognition
of Jesus as the perfect ideal, through whose presence the
soul is transformed. Thus we may see the difference be-
tween Paul's teaching and that of Jesus : for the latter, the
ideal is God ; for the former, Jesus as the glorified son of
God. The latter accepts man's personal righteousness, only
purified by spirituality ; the former rejects human righteous-
ness, which seems to him necessarily impure, and substitutes
for it perfect righteousness of the Christ, with the condition
that the soul in the act of believing is quickened into free,
ethical activity. Jesus thinks of an inward transformation
wrought by the communion between man's will and God's ;
Paul demands a new divine creation. Jesus brings the soul
face to face with God ; Paul interposes the person of the
Christ as reconciler.
The subsequent development of the idea of righteousness
in the Pauline school variously combines the elements of
Paul's thought. The Epistle to the Ephesians represents the
sacrificial death of Christ as the cause of the reconciliation
of God and man (ii. 13 ; v. 2 ; ii. 1G) ; believers are raised
with him (ii. 6), and he dwells in their hearts through faith
(iii. 17) ; the new inward nature of man is created by God in
282 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
righteousness and holiness (iv. 24), and Christ is the ethical
standard of growth (iv. 13) ; salvation is not of works, but
the believer is created in Christ Jesus for good works (ii. 9,
10). We here recognize the essential points of Paul's doc-
trine, without the systematic development which he gives.
Faith secures to the believer the benefits of Christ's death,
and there is the Pauline indefiniteness as to the precise re-
lation between the function of this death and the trans-
forming power of God. Substantially the same view is given
in Colossians. Believers die with Christ (ii. 20), are raised
with him (iii. 1), their life is hid with him in God (iii. 3).
A modified view of the effect of Christ's sufferings is given
(i 24) by the statement that believers fill up by their own
afflictions what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ. The
conception is that the earthly life of Jesus, with all its ele-
ments, is the ground of the salvation which he accomplished ;
the significance of his death as a single act becomes thus rel-
atively less important. In the conception of salvation stress
is laid on the inward transformation of soul and union with
Christ, and faith does not play the prominent part which
Paul assigns it. Though Christ is said to blot out the legal
ordinances which are hostile to the soul (ii. 14), yet we find
no trace of Paul's thoroughgoing rejection of law and works.
Very similar is the idea of righteousness given in the First
Epistle of Peter (i. 19 ; ii. 24 ; i. 3 ; iii. 21 ; iv. 1, 13) ; but
in declaring that believers are priests whose sacrifices are
acceptable through Christ (ii. 5), and that they purify their
souls in obedience to the truth (i. 22), the author withdraws
from Paul's technical position, regarding righteousness rather
as the act of the soul, though its possibility is conditioned
on the death and resurrection of Christ.
Still farther removed from the Pauline point of view is
the position of the Epistle to the Hebrews, whose doctrine
is substantially that of the Old Testament with certain
SIN AND EIGHTEOUSNESS. 283
modifications of detail. Christ, as offering and priest, is
the author of salvation (v. 9) ; he is intercessor (vii. 25), the
mediator of the new covenant (viii. 6 ; xii. 24), and attained
his position at the right hand of God by despising the shame
and enduring the suffering of his earthly life (xii. 2, 3).
Faith is not belief in Christ whereby we are freed from
the Law, but confidence toward God (vi. 1 ; x. 23, 36-39 ;
xi.), the Old Testament scheme of righteousness, with
the substitution of Jesus Christ for the old sacrifices and
priesthood.
The First Epistle to Timothy, while it regards Christ as
Saviour (i. 15 ; ii. 5, 6), takes a distinctly un-Pauline view
of the law, which it regards as good and necessary in itself
if it be used lawfully (i. 8), and made not for the righteous,
but for the wicked ; that is, the law furnishes the standard
of moral conduct, being herein identical with the "sound
doctrine" of the Gospel. 1 Its more universalistic view is
shown not only by its ignoring the idea of the imputation
of Christ's righteousness, and laying stress on man's own
moral effort, but also by its representation of God as the
Saviour of all men (ii. 3 ; iv. 10). Second Timothy, an earlier
production, has substantially the same view as First Peter
(i. 10 ; ii. 11; iii. 15), and Titus approaches nearer the Paul-
ine type by the rejection of works as the ground of salvation
(ii. 11, 14; iii. 4-7).
The Fourth Gospel, ignoring the details of human eth-
ical effort, conceives of righteousness as a necessary accom-
paniment of entrance into the world of light. The historical
condition of this entrance is the sacrificial death of Christ
(i. 29) and faith in him and in God (iii. 16 ; v. 24). He
frees from sin (viii. 26) ; life is the abiding in him (xv. 4) ;
1 Paul also regards the moral law as good in itself (Rom. ii. vii.), but treats
it as helpless and obstructive, so far as regards salvation (vii. 9), while for
First Timothy it is a normal and beneficial element of religious life.
284 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
sin is the rejection of him (xvi. 8). At the same time, it
is a new birth of the soul which ushers one into the king-
dom of God (iii. 3, 5). It is the divine interposition which
divides mankind into the two masses of light and darkness ;
and while it is declared that they who do truth come to
the light (iii. 21), yet they only can come whom God leads.
Righteousness means the possession of the light-nature, which
manifests itself by the acceptance of Jesus as the Son of God,
the spiritual food and drink of man, the only way to God,
the absolute truth, the essential life. The same conception
of union with Christ as the source of righteousness is found
in the First Epistle of John (iii. 6). The Epistle, however,
emphasizes the human activity more than the Gospel : for-
giveness is obtained by confession (i 9), and the world is
overcome by the love of God (ii. 12-17).
This conception of righteousness connects itself with that
view of the world which in the prologue to the Fourth Gos-
pel has the Logos for its centre and explanation. The world
had been created through the divine Word ; yet it lay in
darkness, the darkness of sin, the origin of which is not ex-
plained. The world was his own, yet it knew him not. The
reign of the Jewish Law belonged also to the period of dark-
ness ; the darkness was dispelled by the manifestation of
grace and truth through Jesus Christ, in whom was the
manifestation of God himself. The divine influence affects
the individual soul. No process of moral regeneration is
described ; there is a new spiritual creation (iii. 3) parallel
to the physical creation in the beginning. At a moment in
the past God through the Word had called the world into
being ; now, at the appointed time (after ages of unex-
plained darkness and doubt), the Word had appeared in
human form, bringing divine light and eternal life. Every
vestige of nationalism has here disappeared ; the relations
of God are primarily not with the Jews, but with human-
SIN AND KIGHTEOUSNESS. 285
ity. 1 In the moral-spiritual history of the world the author
sees the divine creative activity. He thus expresses sub-
stantially the thought of Jesus, that human perfection lies
in communion with the divine father, only the thought is
clothed in the form of the Jewish- Alexandrian philosophy.
The history of the idea of righteousness in the New Testa-
ment involves the interplay of three conceptions : the Old
Testament idea of personal goodness, Paul's scholastic scheme
of imputed righteousness, and the transformation of the soul
by union with Christ or by the direct power of the Holy
Spirit. The first of these maintained itself throughout, more
or less modified by the conviction (which is found also in
the Old Testament) that true goodness is the gift of God.
The Pauline idea of imputation, devised by a logical mind
to meet a specific Jewish objection, seems to have faded
away with the crisis which gave it birth. It appears in
not very prominent shape in Second Timothy, Titus, and
First Peter, and at a later time virtually withdrew from
the field. The more simple ethical conception of righteous-
ness as personal thought and conduct is found particularly
in Hebrews and First Timothy, and to a greater or less
extent in all the other Epistles ; it is in fact too obvious
and necessary a conception of life to be got rid of except
in transient moments of fanaticism. The profounder con-
ception of inward transformation is especially prominent in
Ephesians and Colossians (union with Christ), and in the
Fourth Gospel and the First Epistle of John (renewal of
heart) ; and whatever the particular scheme of righteous-
ness and salvation, the appeal of all the New Testament
writers is to the consciousness and will of men.
1 The statement in John iv. 22, that salvation is from the Jews, is not,
rightly considered, in opposition to this universality of view. Out of Juda-
ism, indeed, had come the manifestation of salvation ; but the author of the
Fourth Gospel everywhere assumes a hostile attitude toward the Jews, and
286 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Thus Jewish national nomisra, which had successfully
withstood the assaults of Hellenism, succumbed to a spirit-
ual force which sprang from its own bosom. It was supe-
rior, as an organized religion, to the religious thought of
the Greeks ; it had more definiteness and intensity, greater
control over the moral-religious life, and it was in com-
pleter harmony with men's growing unitary conception of
the world. ' While, therefore, it was not averse to accepting
a certain Greek coloring, it maintained its organized exist-
ence over against Hellenism unimpaired. Its own life had,
however, called forth needs which it was powerless as a
system to satisfy. Increasing moral-religious experience and
reflection had awakened in the Jewish consciousness more
definite demands for self centred and complete moral power,
for inward purity and harmony with the divine will. The
Jewish Hellenizing philosophy and the great legal schools
endeavored in one direction and another to realize in life
the higher ideals which became distincter with every gen-
eration. But the national ritual, which had been growing
for centuries, and had interwoven itself inextricably with
the moral-spiritual consciousness of the people, stood griev-
ously in the way of a satisfactory isolation of the higher
ideals. The necessity for getting rid of the mass of cere-
monial and other external details became more and more
evident, and Christianity came forward to achieve this end.
The founder of Christianity responded to the needs of his
times and of humanity by announcing the two universal and
eternal principles of inward truthfulness and harmony with
the divine father of men. He did not attack the national
system as such, but he laid down a scheme of life which
struck at the roots of nationalism and laid the foundations
for a righteousness sufficient for all times and places : the
the antithesis which he presents is not between Judaism and Gentilism, but
between light and darkness, belief and unbelief.
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 287
conscience as subjective standard and guide ; God, the moral
ideal, as objective law and aim ; outward and inward abso-
lute purity and sincerity. To these all-embracing principles
he added nothing; he said nothing further of the details of
moral reconstruction and development. The elaboration of
the details was effected by the great theologians who fol-
lowed him. His person became the centre of a new con-
ception of moral-spiritual life. The secret of salvation was
sought not in his teaching, but in himself, in himself not
as an ideal and inspiration, but as the divinely endowed
creator of spiritual life and happiness. Paul, looking at the
problem from the Jewish national point of view, in despair
at man's moral impotency, cast away human righteousness,
and substituted for it the righteousness of the Christ, made
available by his death, and accompanied by an inward trans-
formation wrought by the divine spirit. The author of the
Fourth Gospel, following Alexandrian Greek-Jewish ideas,
thought of the Master as the divine Word, manifesting the
moral glory of God in the world, bringing an atmosphere
of light and life, in the midst of which dwelt, transformed
and saved, those who were chosen and led by God. Unlike
Paul, he takes no account of the national legal scheme ;
he takes refuge alone in the absolute manifestation of the
divine goodness and power, within which is life, without
which is death. It may be added that an approach to a
purely ethical scheme of righteousness is found in that cir-
cle of Christian thinkers which is represented by the Epistle
of James ; not the Stoic system, but the old Hebrew pro-
phetic conception, wherein, general provision for sin having
been made by a divinely appointed sacrifice, the righteous-
ness acceptable to God is manifested by obedience to his
moral precepts. Later Christianity endeavored, with vary-
ing fortunes, to combine these different points of view into
a single system of theology and life.
288 SIN AND KIGHTEOUSNESS.
Christian antinomism grew out of Judaism, but was not
embraced by the Jewish people. Christianity speedily passed
into the hands of the Gentiles ; the Jews retained their na-
tional system. Nomism included the sacrificial ritual and the
every-day legal-ceremonial prescriptions of personal purity
and obedience. The sacrificial system vanished when the
temple was destroyed, but Judaism clung to the rest of
the ceremonial as the law of its life. It distinctly rejected
the innovations of Christianity, the Messiahship of Jesus
of Nazareth, the atoning efficacy of his death, his exaltation
to the right hand of God, the substitution of his righteous-
ness for the righteousness of obedience, the expectation of
his reappearance on earth to usher in the dispensation of
blessedness. But its severance from Christianity does not
imply that it remained morally and religiously stagnant.
Its ethical code was substantially the same as the Chris-
tian ; its ethical development, like the Christian, was deter-
mined by social conditions. Neither in the early centuries
nor in the Middle Age nor in our own times is it possible
to discover any marked ethical difference between Jews and
Gentiles ; Shy lock and Antonio are on a par in this regard.
In the sphere of religion, also, Judaism, like Christianity,
has taken its tone and coloring from the changing phases
of social growth. The national nomistic idea, to which the
Jews remained faithful, has been modified from time to time,
notably by Maimonides, and then more radically by Moses
Mendelssohn. These modifications have been in the direction
of greater spirituality and ethical distinctness. Christianity
and Judaism may be looked on as parallel developments,
starting from the same general material, seeking the moral-
spiritual ideal by different paths. Their lines of advance have
been determined by the elements of civilization which en-
tered into their lives. It is the intense nationalism of the
Jews which, by isolating them more or less from the gen-
SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. * 289
eral European thought, has rendered their peculiar develop-
ment possible.
In our discussion of the idea of righteousness the distinc-
tion between nomisin and antinomism has been sharply
drawn, in order to bring out more clearly the contrast be-
tween the two conceptions of life. It must, however, be
borne in mind that this distinction has had no such clear
historical embodiment. Judaism has never been all no-
mistic, nor Christianity all antinoinistic. Each of these
systems, while following a definite general path, exhibits
movements in other directions. There is a substantial agree-
ment between the Old Testament, the Jewish Alexandrian
literature, the Palestinian legal teaching, and the New Testa-
ment. These must all be regarded as products of the com-
bination and interplay of two conceptions : inward spiritual
regeneration, and conformity to divinely given external law,
both of which are essential constituents of religious life,
and can never vanish from the human ideal. Judaism, in
maintaining its national law, did not forget the inward
reconstruction which is taught in the Old Testament.
Christianity, in rejecting the Jewish sacrificial ritual arid
traditional ceremonial law, substituted a nomism of its own.
The Church has always had its systems of prescriptions,
obedience to which it regarded as a necessity. What Chris-
tianity did was to deliver to the Gentile world the pure
and lofty Jewish ethical monotheism freed from the burden
of Jewish nationalism. It thus gave freer play to moral-
spiritual forces by divorcing them from the restrictions of
particular nationalities. Christianity represents the great-
est effort of the world to impose the necessary restrictions
on nomism, to combine that inward purity, without which
virtue is mechanical and lifeless, with that obedience to
law apart from which conscience must always be an unsafe
guide.
19
290 SIN AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
The doctrine of the sacrifice of the exalted Christ, the
Son of God, embodies the highest and final conception of
an external satisfaction for sin. It sprang out of the ideas
of the first century, Jewish and perhaps Gentile. Viewed
at first simply as a substitute for the old national sac-
rifices, the death of the Messiah was afterward variously
explained by Christian theologians. By its majestic and
awful character it represents, as has been said, a deeper
sense of the terribleness of offence against the divine law.
All advance in the intensity of plans and methods of sal-
vation depends on increase of the seriousness with which
men look on the moral problems of life. What a contrast
between the simple joyousness of Deuteronomy and the
terrible seriousness of the Epistle to the Komans! The in-
terval between these books is marked by constant ethical
progress ; the idea of righteousness becomes higher and
higher, the sense of sin more and more profound. The cul-
mination of outward method is reached when God is con-
ceived as giving his own Son to achieve forgiveness and
righteousness for man. There is only one thing higher,
that is the method of Jesus, the transformation of the
soul by communion with the absolute ideal of holiness.
CHAPTER V.
ETHICS.
TO the foregoing discussion of what was held to consti-
tute righteousness in the sight of God we may append
a brief account of the historical development of the content
of the ethical code. We need not stop to inquire into the
philosophical grounds of Hebrew ethics. For such an in-
quiry there is little material. Abstract psychological and
social investigations do not belong to the mental habits or
the aims of the biblical writers, who are concerned only
with practical morality. The question of the nature of con-
science and the origin of men's judgments concerning right
and wrong is not discussed in the Bible. There is no spec-
ulation respecting determinism and indeterminisra ; man's
practical freedom is everywhere assumed. There is no co-
ercion of the will by God, demon, or man ; every man is
held responsible for his deeds, and the inner history of his
will is not further investigated. Joseph's brethren " could
not" speak peaceably to him because their malice got the
better of their kindly feeling Yahwe hardened Pharaoh's
heart ; but Pharaoh also hardened his own heart. Evil
spirits enticed prophets ; but the prophets were of their
own motion false. Satan tempted David and Judas, and
the king and the betrayer were none the less held guilty.
The heathen, says Paul, are worthy of death for acting
according to that reprobate mind to which God gave them
up ; and unbelievers, blinded by the god of this world, per-
ish in their unbelief. The wretchedness of the natural life,
292 ETHICS.
exclaims the Apostle, lies in the conflict of impulses, the
passions doing what the better judgment condemns. So
in respect to the rules of good conduct : these are regarded
in the books of the Old and New Testaments, with per-
haps one exception (Ecclesiastes), as resting solely on the
commands of God, and the motive which is urged for
well-doing is the desire to obtain divine rewards or escape
divine punishments. It is a purely practical interest that
controls the ethical thought of the Bible. The question
before it is : What is the conduct that pleases God ? In
point of fact, the Jewish ethical code, like that of other
peoples, changed with the changing social conditions and
the consequent rise of new ideals. To follow this history
in minute detail would require a treatise; all that will be
attempted here is a short outline of the historical progress
of the code and of the circumstances which determined its
line of growth.
1. The Jewish moral code of the fifth century B. c. (con-
tained in the prophets and the Law) was a broad and noble
one, worthy to be compared with the best of the time.
Within the limits of the nation it recognized not only the
administrative duties of honesty and justice but also the
gentler virtues of kindness and love to the poor and dis-
tressed and to all one's brethren. This appears to be the
acme of the purely Jewish national ethical development.
In spite of contact with other peoples, the nation had up
to this time maintained the old social isolation. In the
early days there had been amalgamation with the Canaan-
itish tribes, out of which was formed the Israelitish nation.
Once formed, the people worked out its life substantially in
its own way, down to the Greek conquest. Intercourse with
Babylon and Persia, though influential in the suggestion of
ideas, yet left the old national unity unimpaired. The eth-
ical growth during this period may thus be called national.
ETHICS. 293
There was no outlook beyond home-bounds ; the international
sentiment had not been distinctly cultivated ; there was no
distinct recognition of the full rights of aliens ; the social
conditions had not pressed this conception on the moral con-
sciousness of the people. The later purely national books,
most of the Psalms, for example, while they maintain the
high administrative standard, are full of bitterness toward
enemies. Jewish morality, in a word, like other ethical sys-
tems of the time, bears the impress of national isolation.
2. The new social conditions which the Greek conquest
forced on the Jews are well known. Not only were they
brought into closer contact with individuals of other nation-
alities, they were compelled to enter into a confederation
of peoples, and were thus led more and more to recognize
a bond of brotherhood among all men. Their experience in
this regard was the common experience of the Grseco-Roinan
world ; its results were seen in all the moralists of the time,
whether Greek, Roman, or Jewish. Human nature remained
much the same ; there were good and bad men everywhere,
Hillels and Herods, Johns and Judases ; but the social
code was gradually assuming a new tone. The ethical re-
flection of the new conditions is found in a portion of the
Jewish literature of the two centuries before the beginning
of our era. The Psalms are, by their nature, the expression
of national feeling. Profoundly religious, they do not rise
above the level of the old prophetic morality ; they illus-
trate the law, of which there are so many other expressions,
that the paths of growth and stadia of development of re-
ligion and morality are not always the same in the same
community and the same period. On the other hand, in
Proverbs, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, and in the say-
ings of the great lawyers, we find a distincter recognition
of individual social relations and of the law of kindness ;
exhortation to heal differences between neighbors (Prov.
294 ETHICS.
xxv. 9) ; to admonish in kindness those who offend us
(Ecclus. xix. 13-17) ; to cover transgression by friendly for-
getfulness or guidance (Prov. xvii. 9) ; to be helpful, to lend
and give alms freely (Ecclus. xxix. 2, 12, 20 ; Tobit iv. 7) ;
to forgive injuries in hope of being forgiven (Prov. xv. 1 ;
xxiv. 29 ; Ecclus. xxviii. 2-5) ; to be good to enemies (Prov.
xxiv. 17; xxv. 21, 22). We find also injunctions against
swearing (Ecclus. xxiii. 29), and a description of the blessed-
ness of the persecuted righteous (Wisd. of Sol. iii. 4). In
Tobit (iv. 15), and in a saying of Hillel, we have the golden
rule in negative form.
Most of the works above cited belong to that class of pro-
ductions (the Hokma, the literature of wisdom) which shows
least of the characteristic nationalism of the time, and it
is natural to ascribe their cosmopolitan spirit in part to
the broadening influence of international intercourse. Tobit,
though a national book, shows traces of foreign contact. We
have seen reason to believe that the legal teachers were
not unaffected by the current Greek thought. On the other
hand, the Jewish national feeling was strong, and the na-
tional life and culture issued from that past which was
represented by the prophets and the Law. We are led,
therefore, to conclude that the higher Jewish morality of
the period was a true national growth, only broadened and
deepened by all those conditions that acted favorably on
the life of the people.
3. Such was the ethical system in the midst of which
Christianity arose ; and it is obvious that it does not dif-
fer substantially in details from that of the New Testa-
ment. In both we find as controlling elements self-mastery,
self-sacrifice, justice, and love to others. Nevertheless there
is a difference, which meets us at the outset, a new en-
ergy, vividness, enthusiasm. The Sermon on the Mount and
the other sayings of Jesus in the Gospels contain a cer-
ETHICS. 295
tain higher something, a complete! recognition of the
positive side of individual obligation and of the inward
element of goodness. The ethical falseness of certain cere-
monial practices of the time (Mark vii. 5, 9-13) ; the neces-
sity of sincerity (Matt. vi. 2, 5, 16) and of thoroughgoing
conscientiousness (Matt. v. 33-37) ; the declaration that sin
and goodness lie in the thought and in the soul (Matt. v.
21-32 ; xv. 18) ; exhortation to self-denial for duty's sake
(Matt. xvi. 24) ; the complete identification of ourselves with
the interests of others, and the obligation to sacrifice our-
selves, if need be, for the sake of others (Matt. v. 38-42, 43-
48 ; vii. 12); the exhortation to let one's light shine (v. 16),
that is, not to limit one's self to passive endurance of wrong,
or to occasional bodily help, but to recognize the fact that
each man is set to be a guide to his fellows, and must there-
fore so purify and ennoble himself that he shall lead them
not into error, but into truth : l here are gathered up all
the elements of the highest ethical character, perfect self-
control, enlightened self-development, and complete sym-
pathy with our human surroundings. While the substance
of these precepts is found in preceding Jewish and non-
Jewish literature, they are here given with a fulness and
symmetry which we see nowhere else. The ethical-spiritual
1 The doctrine of non-resistance in the Sermon on the Mount may fairly
be understood simply as a protest against selfish and unreasonable assertion
of one's rights A law of absolute non-resistance may very well have been
the ideal of Jesus, but it cannot be asserted, from the details of his life known
to us, that he did not mean it to be modified or interpreted by a wise regard
for the interests of the individual and of society. An unrestricted rule of sub-
mission must apply as well to nations as to individuals, and perhaps to men
in their relations as well with beasts as with men. It is the law of an ideal
society in which justice and kindness are the ruling principles of a very large
majority. The hostility to the rich expressed in Luke vi. 24 can hardly be
taken in a spiritual sense , but it may be doubted whether Jesus held such
a sentiment which accords neither with the body of his teaching nor with
his conduct. He taught the equality of all men before God, independently of
worldly conditions, and he numbered among his friends rich as well as poor.
296 ETHICS.
insight of Jesus laid hold of what was necessary for the
complete development of man's moral nature.
The purity of the ethical teaching of Jesus has been sup-
posed to be marred by the religious sanctions which he
holds up. It is said that he represents love of one's fel-
lows and denial of one's self as valuable not so much in
themselves or for the maintenance of human rights as for
the future rewards they bring (Matt. vi. 1). Here, however,
we must distinguish between the ethical ideal and the re-
ligious motive. Whatever prominence may be given to the
latter (and it is very prominent in the teaching of Jesus),
this does not impair the realness of the former. The su-
preme obligation of human brotherhood is recognized ; and
this is the essential point for human conduct. Further,
though the Sermon on the Mount does not say in so many
words. " Follow after justice and love, because they are the
eternal right," though it identifies them with the will of
God and thence derives their authority, it yet remains true
that the ultimate ground of the ethical judgment is a social
one: it is the perception of human rights springing out of
the feeling of human needs, and it cannot vitiate an ethical
principle to identify it with the ultimate moral basis and
ground of the world.
Jesus gives no speculative system of morals. The golden
rule is, strictly speaking, inaccurate in expression, since it
makes one's own desire, instead of absolute justice, the guide
of conduct toward others. But it is, in the first place, the
best practical safeguard against selfishness ; and in the sec-
ond place, interpreted largely as the appeal to an enlight-
ened and tender conscience, it is practically the safest guide
in man's dealing with man. New social conditions are con-
stantly creating new moral problems. There are many mod-
ern questions which are not considered in the teaching of
Jesus, the detailed answers to which must be worked out by
ETHICS. 297
modern experience ; but no ethical principle has yet been dis-
covered more satisfactory than the self-forgetting love which
is enjoined in the Sermon on the Mount.
4. The ethics of the Epistles, so far as the content proper
of the code is concerned, offers nothing in addition to what
has already been mentioned. James has the morality of the
Old Testament (and with his description of wisdom, iii. 17,
cf. Wisd. of Sol. vii. 22, 23). The other books are more dis-
tinctively Christian in tone. It is unnecessary to specify
the particular moral duties they enjoin. They emphasize
the gentler qualities, humility, kindness, love. In 1 Cor-
inthians xiii. Paul rises to a pitch of loftiest inspiration.
It is noticeable that the golden rule in the form in which
Jesus gives it is nowhere quoted. James (ii. 8) cites the
" royal law " from the Old Testament : " Thou shalt love
thy neighbor as thyself ; " and the content of Jesus' word
is given substantially by Paul (1 Cor. xiii. ; Eom. xii. 13).
It is possible that Paul and the author of the Epistle of
James were not acquainted with this saying of the Mas-
ter. It is also to be noted that the duty of kindness and
love is generally mentioned in connection with intercourse
between Christian brethren. A negative demeanor is en-
joined toward them that are without, soberness, cautious-
ness, forgiveness ; and a general prohibition of vengeance
is quoted by Paul (Rom. xii. 19, 20) from the Old Testa-
ment (Prov. xxv. 21, 22); but there is little exhortation to
exert positive influence on unbelievers, to seek to win them
by kindness, to practise systematic beneficence toward them
(Gal. vi. 10). The explanation of this omission is probably
to be found in the social conditions of the time, the social
separateness of Christians and others. Paul, indeed, set the
example of wise self-adaptation to other men (1 Cor. x. 33 ;
ix. 19-22).
Broader cosmopolitan points of view may perhaps be
298 ETHICS.
found in the New Testament ; as, for example, the con-
ception of a universal commonwealth (Rom. xii. 5 ; Eph. ii.
14-19). Such an idea might be referred to Gricco-Roman
sources. But it is to be observed that these passages deal
solely with the Church, and are not properly cosmopolitan ;
they speak of a community in Christ, not of a brotherhood
of humanity. They break down the barrier between Jew
and Gentile as such ; and this, was an important step for-
ward. Similarly the barriers between nationalities were
broken down by Roman citizenship. In each case there is
a unity based, not on simple recognition of human fellow-
ship, but on an external religious or political condition ;
yet each represented a step toward the idea of human soli-
darity, each was the product of the social conditions. The
Christian idea may have issued directly and solely from
the Christian doctrine of a universal salvation, or it may
have been in part suggested by Greek philosophy and the
Roman state.
5. It is remarked above that speculative questions re-
specting the origin and nature of man's moral conscious-
ness and judgments are not considered in the Bible. It
is equally true that there is no recognition of a purely
earthly and human end and aim of life. The object every-
where held up is the gaining the favor of God as the
means of securing one's own happiness. The prophets and
the Law enjoin obedience to divine commands as the con-
dition of national prosperity; the Psalms anticipate fulness
of joy in God's presence and unending delights through
his power ; Proverbs commends wisdom as the bestower
of long life, riches, honor, and peace ; the Sermon on the
Mount enjoins the laying up of treasures in heaven, walk-
ing in the narrow way of life, and building one's house
upon a rock ; the Epistles urge the working out of one's
own salvation ; and in Hebrews (xii. 2) the motive of Jesus'
ETHICS. 299
endurance is said to be "the joy that was set before him."
Devotion to the interests of humanity for humanity's sake
is nowhere distinctly announced as the chief aim of life.
The end of life is declared to be one's own eternal hap-
piness, and the condition of happiness to be obedience to
the will of God. So far this scheme of life may be called
religious egoism.
But on this point two remarks must be made. So far
as regards the existence of an egoistic motive, this neither
can nor should be got rid of, for the perfection of humanity
involves the perfection of one's self as a part of humanity ;
obligation to sacrifice or neglect one's moral perfectness is
inconceivable. The real question, therefore, is twofold : first,
what is the nature of the self-perfection (and this must be
identical with the nature of the perfection of humanity)
which is sought ? and secondly, how far are the two aims,
the perfecting of self and the perfecting of humanity, com-
bined into a harmonious unity ? As to the first of these
points, the self-perfection considered in the New Testament
(which in this respect completes the Old Testament thought)
is not merely happiness ; it is moral union with God as the
moral ideal, which is the highest conception of self-culture,
and is therefore a legitimate egoism. As to the second point,
devotion to the interests of others, though not a definitely
formulated maxim, is a practical aim in the higher New
Testament scheme of life (more vaguely hinted at in the pre-
Christian Jewish literature). Jesus spent his life in doing
good, and died rather than surrender a principle which he
believed to be of prime importance for men ; Paul conse-
crated himself unreservedly to what he held to be the high-
est human interests. The New Testament idea of duty
involves doing good to all men, not separating one's own
well-being from the well-being of others.
The ethical defect of the New Testament is therefore
300 ETHICS.
speculative rather than practical. The ethical idea is not
distinguished from the religious ; the perfecting of life is
defined to be an everlasting salvation which is to be se-
cured by certain divinely appointed means. Human duty
involves the attempt to bring this salvation to all men.
The principle of devotion to humanity is not lacking ; but
it is true that attention is fixed less on the present life
with its multifarious social needs, and more on that im-
pending crisis (the new era to be ushered in by the Mes-
siah or else by death) which was to settle the question of
human good. The more definite isolation of the whole of
earthly life as the object of ethical effort was reserved for
a later time.
6. The distinctive characteristic, however, of the New
Testament ethics is not so much its content as its spirit.
In contrast with the philosophic, self-centred calm of Sto-
icism and Epicureanism, and the sober-minded indifference
of Ecclesiastes, it is permeated by warm sympathy, by a
glow of ardent, natural life. Its secret is that it seeks per-
fection not immediately in self-culture (though this it does
not neglect), but in positive self-abandonment to a higher
will. It derives its impulse from the sentiments of duty to
God and gratitude and devotion to Christ as Saviour. It
is free from wearing thought concerning results ; these are
in the hand of God. Man's only care is to ally himself
with God and Christ in sincere, loving beneficence, secure
in the conviction that his present and his future are watched
over and guided to a blessed end by the hand of the divine
father. The elevation of this higher spirit to the distinct
position of guiding principle must be ascribed to Jesus.
His moral consciousness seized on and blended into a vital
unity those great ideas of love and justice which the na-
tional experience (and all human experience) had been
slowly working out for centuries. Eespect your fellow-coun-
ETHICS. 301
tryman's rights and love him as yourself, say the prophets
arid the Law ; extend this rule of reciprocity to all men, say
the Wisdom books and the lawyers ; inform it, says Jesus,
with a glow of tenderness, with the recognition of all men
as sons of one divine father. This he made the central
principle of conduct toward others.
It may be added that the form of faith which took shape
under the hand of Paul was better fitted to stimulate the
ordinary ethical feeling than the moral code given in the
Sermon on the Mount. The latter appealed to human love
of perfection and to the reward which would come from the
favor of God ; all else it left to man's own conscience and
will. The former presented a grand theological scheme in
which the details of salvation were set forth, the central
figure of Jesus at once presenting the idea of redemption
in definite, tangible shape, and offering a model for ethi-
cal imitation. It was the prime defect of Greek systems
of philosophy, so far as regards their effect on the masses,
that they produced no theological organization, no church
in which the warm human life might be appropriated, fos-
tered, stimulated by a definite hope of complete happiness ;
and the same remark applies in less degree to the religious
reform instituted by Jesus, who also contemplated not a
church, but the purification of the national spirit. What
was needed for the people was the embodiment of the best
ethical law and spirit in an organization which by its work
and its sanctions should stimulate human effort to the ut-
most. This result was achieved mainly by the Apostle Paul ;
or, it may be more accurate to say, the work of church-
organization, begun by the first disciples, received a mighty
impulse from him. Certain peculiarities of his scheme were
gradually dropped, but the organization itself was maintained
and developed in succeeding generations, and the Church
took its place as a powerful ethical lever, imposing its moral-
302 ETHICS.
ity on the world, and supporting it by all those motives of
gratitude and hope of reward which are most effective in the
life of man.
This is not the place to attempt to state, even in merest
outline, the actual influence of Christianity in moulding the
ethical life of the world. Such questions are very compli-
cated and difficult. But without undertaking to define the
particular elements of the new moral order of things, and
recognizing the slowness of its growth, it may be said that
the ethical outcome of the Christian teaching was the more
definite isolation and formulation of certain controlling prin-
ciples of conduct, and the implanting of them in the general
life of men as an effective everyday po\ver. They were in-
telligently and vitally accepted only by the higher souls ;
but they secured public recognition as the basis of the eth-
ical code, and thus entered with fresh vigor on their task
of coercing the baser principles of human conduct. The pub-
lic conscience was enlightened, life became ethically simpler,
and the higher maxims more and more demonstrated their
truth by the practical evidence they gave of conformity to
men's noblest instincts and best interests. 1
1 On biblical ethics, see the commentaries, works on the philosophy of
religion (Pfleiderer and others), works on Old Testament theology (Schultz,
Oehler, etc.) and New Testament theology (Immer, Weiss, etc.), articles
in encyclopaedias (Herzog-Plitt, Lichtenberger, etc.), and general remarks
in works on general and Christian ethics (Dorner, Gass, Martensen, Marti-
neau, etc ). On the relation between Greek and Christian ethical ideas,
see O. Pfleiderer, "Moral und Religion," 1872; F. Jodl, "Geschichte der
Ethik," 1882; C. E. Luthardt, "Die antike Ethik in ihrer geschichtlichen
Entwickelung als Einleitung in die Geschichte der christlichen Moral,"
1887, and "Geschichte der christlichen Ethik vor der Reformation," 1888.
On the ethics of the Gospels, see J. R. Seeley, "Ecce Homo," 1886; W. M.
Salter, "Ethical Religion," 1888; J. A. Broadus, "Jesus of Nazareth," 1890;
O. Fliigel, "Die Sittenlehre Jesus," 1888 (which I am sorry to have been
unable to consult). A good bibliography will be found in the " Theologischer
Jahresbericht."
CHAPTER VI.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
THE conception of the kingdom of God is a marked
characteristic of Jewish religious thought, perhaps
its most distinctive peculiarity. It is the idea of a social
organization in which the divine and human shall be per-
fectly blended, the social ideal being complete conformity
to the divine will and complete interpenetration by the
divine guiding and moulding presence. Such a conception
may be said to exist to some extent in all communities,
inasmuch as the supremacy and control of the supernatural
powers is everywhere recognized ; but among no other peo-
ple has the idea been so definitely grasped as among the
Jews. Elsewhere the main stress has been laid on con-
quest, government, literature, philosophy, or art ; and the
theocratic idea, the feeling of the direct and complete de-
pendence of the community on God, when it has been recog-
nized, has played only a secondary r61e. It is only in a few
cases that the attempt to embody it in an historical form
has been at all successful ; and among these it is to the
Hebrew theocracy that the first rank, in precision and prac-
tical efficiency, must be assigned. 1
1 Next to the Jewish, the most successful theocratic system was that of
Islam, especially under Mohammed and the Medina califs, less under the
first century of the Bagdad cahfate. Still less definite were the attempts at
theocratic organization under the Buddhist Asoka (third century B.C.) and
the Sassanian Zoroastrians (from third to seventh century A. D.). Traces of
the conception are recognizable in ancient Egypt, in modern China, and in
a peculiar form in the first century of the New England colonies. It is note-
304 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
The Jewish theocratic idea has a noteworthy history ex-
tending over many centuries. Beginning with a merely
external political form, it grew finally, under Christian in-
fluence, into a predominantly moral-spiritual system, in
which comparatively little of the external remained. It is
this development which we are called on to trace. We are
concerned not so much to mark all the differences of de-
tail of the Jewish ideas on the subject in the Old Testa-
ment and the New Testament as to note the increasing
control which was obtained by the higher elements of the
religious life. 1
Four stadia may be recognized in the history of the Jewish-
Christian theocratic idea : the early unconscious period of
mere non-ethical nationalism, the prophetic or ethical na-
tionalism, the apocalyptic conception of special divine ex-
ternal interposition, and the higher New Testament thought
in which the ethical-spiritual predominates.
Nothing in the history of the Jews is more remarkable
than the hope which they continued for a long period to
cherish of a definite and brilliant future. Other peoples
have been patriotic, have shown themselves capable of he-
roic effort for freedom and of resistance to foreign pressure.
The Persian kingdom of to-day is a striking example of the
maintenance of national life through many centuries of de-
pression and subjugation. Persia has lived through the dom-
ination of the Parthians and of the Arabians, and grown
finally into an organization which, with modifications that
have come in through the centuries, may be regarded as an
worthy that we find little or no trace of a theocracy in any ancient Semitic
people except the Jews, though this may be due in part to the scantiness
of our information.
1 It does not belong to our subject to follow the history below the New
Testament, but it may be noted that the same sort of moral-spiritual growth
has gone on within the bounds of Judaism. There is a large section of mod-
ern Jews which retains only the ethical-spiritual side of the Messianic idea.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 305
historical continuation of the Achsemenian times. History
offers other, though less striking, examples. But the Jewish
experience differs from all these. It is not merely patriot-
ism ; it is the patriotic imagination quickened and organized
by religious feeling ; it is the national sentiment exalted into
glowing fervor and unswerving confidence ; it is the coin-
pletest organization that the world has ever seen of patriotic-
religious hope.
The origin of this hope may be traced, as far as such
things are traceable, to certain elements of the Hebrew char-
acter and development. In the first place, we have to re-
cognize in the Jews an extraordinary power of persistence.
Their whole history shows an uncommonly great develop-
ment of individuality, ability to maintain their own person-
ality against opposing influences, a toughness of fibre, the
like of which may be seen in some other nations, but per-
haps nowhere else so marked as in the Jews, at least, no
other people has had such opportunity to show it. Their
experience during the Middle Age in Europe is sufficient to
prove their enormous power of self-maintenance. Their sur-
vival is no doubt to be attributed to a combination of cir-
cumstances ; but whatever else there may have been, it is
evident that no small part of the result is due to their
innate resisting and persisting power.
In close connection with this quality is the religious side
of their history. As far back as we can trace them, their
attitude toward the national deity was peculiar, a very
pronounced and controlling theological particularism. The
later Babylonians had a decided preference for Marduk above
other gods ; the Moabites seem to have been devoted chiefly
to Kemosh ; but the Israelites, with still greater devotion,
through all their long dallyings with other deities, clung to
their own Yah we, whose sole worship was made by the
prophets (that is to say, by the controlling intellect of the
20
306 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
nation) the central point of religion and politics. At the
same time, the remarkable religious organizing power of the
people showed itself ; a series of religious institutions, des-
tined ultimately to transform the nation into an ecclesi-
astical organization, began before the exile. Religious ideas
were worked up with fulness and roundness. The rela-
tion of the people to their god took very definite shape :
he belonged to them, arid they to him ; they were under
obligation to honor and serve him alone, and he under
corresponding obligation to help them against all their en-
emies. These ideas crystallized in the prophetic thought into
a conception of a covenant between God and the people ; a
covenant was the necessary expression of alliance. It was
held that Yahwe had chosen Israel from among all nations
in the earth, and had promised it his continued blessing on
the condition on its part of obedience and loyalty,
This is only the developed form of a very early set of
ideas, and one not peculiar to the Hebrews. A clan, or tribe,
at a certain stage of growth, enters into a specially close
relation with a deity who is its kinsman and fast friend,
its ally and patron, and entitled to its special devotion ; at
a later stage such a deity may become a national god. With
such an origin agree the first details we have of the relation
between Yahwe and the Israelitish tribes. 1 In the period
of the Judges he is to Israel what Kemosh is to Ammon
(Judg. xi. 24). The relation is here one of external worship
and protection, and so remains substantially down to the
1 Of the origin and meaning of the name " Yahwe," and of the begin-
nings of the Yahwe-cult among the Hebrews, we have no definite informa-
tion. One tradition (Ex. vi. 3) states that it was unknown till after Jacob's
time, and apparently ascribes its introduction to Moses, while another (Gen.
iv. 26) refers it to the earliest times of the human race For discussions of
the name see Friedrich Delitzsch, "Wo lag das Farad ies ? " Leipzig, 1881,
and S. 11. Driver, in "Studia Biblica," Oxford, 1885; and on the origin of
the cult, the histories of Kuenen, Wellhausen, Gratz, Stade, and Renan.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 307
time of Ahab and Jehoshaphat (early part of the ninth cen-
tury B. c.), whose attitude toward Yah we is about the same
as that of the Moabite king Mesha toward Kemosh. 1 The
idea of an agreement or covenant between deity and people
is primitive. The peculiarity of Israel is that, in accordance
with its general power of religious organization, it so clearly
defined and expressed the idea, and wove into it its high-
est religious thought, absolute, justice in God, spirituality
in man. This highly developed idea appears already in the
earliest of the writing prophets (Amos iii. ix.).
Out of this conception of the covenant flows all the suc-
ceeding history. The nation continued its particularistic
development ; it elaborated more and more its ceremonial
law ; it attempted to isolate itself. The thicker its misfor-
tunes, the more it wrapped itself up in its own ideals. All
its experiences were interpreted in the light of the covenant :
prosperity was regarded as a fulfilment of the divine prom-
ise ; adversity was accepted as a chastisement for unfaith-
fulness and a preparation for coming blessing. Whatever
the situation, the leading religious thinkers explained it in
the interests of the nation. The national imagination, em-
bodied in prophets and seers, looked to the near future for
the realization of boundless hopes, and most of all in times
of suffering. The picture of the future was based upon the
present, and changed from age to age with the changing cir-
cumstances of the nation. The Messianic history is a series
of shifting views. The essential thing was the enlivening,
stimulating hope ; the historical shape which it assumed was
an accident of the times.
The history of the national hope is the history of the
national thought ; whatever elements entered into the one
showed themselves in the other. So long as the nation
1 See the inscription of the Moabite Stone in Ginsbnrg's edition, London,
1871, or " The Records of the Past," vol. xi., or Stade's " Geschichte," I. 534.
308 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
preserved its political independence and its comparative iso-
lation in the midst of small nationalities, its conception of
the future was similarly restricted ; when it became a part
of great world-empires (Persia, Greece, and Rome) and en-
tered into closer association with other peoples, the picture
assumed a more cosmopolitan shape. At the same time the
eschatology became more definite ; the doctrines of immor-
tality and resurrection took shape and naturally colored the
view of the future. The modifications in the ethical ideas
of the nation necessarily showed themselves in the forms of
the Messianic hope ; the individual assumed greater promi-
nence in accordance with the general ethical development;
the idea of self-culture and self-denial became more impor-
tant ; the general tendency, especially among the nobler
minds, was to exalt and make prominent the element of eth-
ical spirituality. With all these modifications, however, the
original, central idea remained unchanged, the righteous
nation was to be delivered from enemies and ushered into
an era of prosperity. A brief review of the portraiture of
the national future, beginning with the pre-prophetic period
and coming down through the prophets and the apocalyptic
books into the Jewish and the Christian literature of the first
century, will exhibit both the local coloring of the thought
and the growth of the ethical element.
1. "We find no outlook into the future before the eighth
century. Up to that time the nation was engaged in the
ordinary struggle for existence; its thought centred on the
present. It had not come to political or moral self-con-
sciousness. Gideon, Jephtha, Samuel, David, and Solomon
represent only the ordinary national ambition. There was
a certain religious unity (as in all ancient and modern na-
tions), and there was a certain general hope in God, vague,
non-ethical, not yet advanced to the rank of an article of
the national faith. As far as we can judge from the docu-
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 309
merits, no prophetic voice had, as late as the tenth century-
announced a definite relation between righteousness and
prosperity. 1 Time naturally brought about a change in the
nation's inner life ; political complications and reverses
forced it to think of its future, and the development of
the moral consciousness introduced an ethical element into
its self-analysis. This progress had doubtless been going
on in an unconscious way during the ninth century (Elijah
and Elisha) ; but it did not take shape until the eighth
century, when the Syrian and Assyrian powers began to
be oppressive, and in the Northern kingdom the shadow
of the final catastrophe became visible to the more keen-
sighted of the religious statesmen. The suffering of the
nation, said the prophets, was a chastisement from God
for the national sin ; but there should follow political and
moral regeneration, the maintenance of the existing form
of government with the triumph of the religion of Israel.
2. The pre-exilian prophets looked to the defeat or sub-
jugation of surrounding nations, including the Assyrians,
and the perpetuity of the Davidic dynasty. For their sins,
said Amos (c. B. c. 770), Israel should be carried into cap-
tivity beyond Damascus, the land should tremble, the people
should be sifted among all the nations, yet not the least
grain should fall to the earth, the sinners of the nation
should die by the sword 2 (Am v. 27; vi. 14; viii. 8 ; ix. 9).
Hosea (c. B. c. 750-730) describes the long-suffering, faithful
love of Yahwe : he would betroth the nation to himself in
1 The books of Samuel and Kings are in many passages, notably in the
portraitures of Samuel, David, and Solomon, colored by Deuteronomic ideas ;
examples are 1 Sam. xv,, 2 Sam. xii , 1 K. viii.
2 The genuineness of the references in Amos and Hosea to the establish-
ment of the Davidic dynasty may be doubted. Amos ix. 11-15 appears to
be colored by experience of captivity, and in Hos. iii 5 the words "David
their king" seem out of place, since the prophet is there concerned with
Israel alone.
310 THE KINGDOM OF GOD
righteousness and faithfulness ; the earth should yield its
increase. Israel, after abiding many days without political
and religious organization, should seek Yahwe, their God ;
strange gods should be put away; the divine anger should
be turned into love ; the beauty of Israel should be as the
olive-tree, and his fragrance as Lebanon (Hos. ii., in., xiv. 1-7).
A deeper and sadder conception of the national life appears
in Isaiah (B. c. 740-700), who lived in the midst of the
Assyrian invasions and the fall of the Northern kingdom :
the gross conscience of the people should not respond to his
appeal ; the land should be wasted, but a remnant should
be left, sacred to the God of Israel, governed in righteous-
ness by a Davidic king, when the Assyrian should have been
driven away (vi. 9-13 ; x. 20, 24-27). Here we have merely
an ethical-religious organization of the nation, on the old
political lines, but with a thorough -going demand for right-
eousness. Isaiah's younger contemporary, Micah, has left
us no word of hope, but only a prediction of punishment
(i.-iii). 1 Nahum (c. B. c. 634) utters only an exulting cry
over the approaching fall of Nineveh ; the destruction of
the great world-empire of Assyria was doubtless then a part
of the national hope. Zephaniah, somewhat later, sees in
the coming " day of Yahwe " not only the desolation of Nin-
eveh, but also the chastisement of Jerusalem (i. ii.). 2 In
Habakkuk (c. B. c. 605), who looked to the punishment of
the Chaldeans, there is the larger expectation (Hab ii. 14)
that the whole earth shall be forced to recognize the glory
which belongs to the God of Israel by virtue both of his
moral perfection and of the power which he manifests in
1 The remainder of the hook of Micah (perhaps intended to supplement
the prophet's meagre utterances) is later than the eighth century, and will
he referred to below. Chapt. vi. may belong to the seventh century, but con-
tains no outlook into the future
2 Chapt. iii. differs in tone from the preceding, appearing to have in view
a different condition of things ; its similarity to Mic. iv. 6-13 is obvious.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 311
the deliverance and maintenance of his people. Jeremiah's
attitude toward the Chaldeans is different from that of Hab-
akkuk ; he is decidedly friendly to Nebuchadnezzar, 1 whom
he regards as God's instrument for chastising recreant Israel.
The nation shall go into captivity for its sins, but shall be
restored to its own land and" live prosperously under the
righteous rule of its own princes, with the maintenance of
the complete national organization (Jer. xxv. 811; xxx. ;
xxxi. 1-30) ; and God, says some prophet of this time, will
make a new covenant w r ith his people, writing his law in
their hearts, forgiving their sins, and establishing them in
moral purity (Jer. xxxi. 31-3-i) 2 Ezekiel, who was in Baby-
lonia, and showed no less kindly feeling toward Nebuchad-
nezzar and his people than Jeremiah, looks likewise to a
political restoration in Canaan, a new spirit of hearty obe-
dience, a resuscitation and moral regeneration of the people,
the final victory to be preceded by a combined attack of cer-
tain Northern peoples on Israel ; and he gives in the form of
a vision a complete political-religious constitution for the re-
stored nation (Ezek. xxxvi.-xlviii.). The expectation of the
exilian Isaiah is substantially the same, only he idealizes
Israel into a divinely appointed instrument for the enlight-
enment of all the nations. The restoration to Canaan was
to be marked by a regeneration of all things, the creation of
new heavens and a new earth wherein Jerusalem was to be
the centre of strength and hope and joy, and Israel should
remain forever holy and blessed in the sight of God (Isa,
Ix.-lxvi, especially Ixv. 17-25, Ixvi. 19-24). Here probably
1 The prophet's friendliness toward the Chaldean king is so marked and
persistent that passages asorihed to him which breathe a different tone (such
as xxv. 12, 1., li.) may he set down as coming from another hand.
2 It seems doubtful whether xxxi. 31-40 belongs to Jeremiah ; or rather,
the style and the attitude toward the ritual make it probable that the pas-
sage is from another hand ; but it in any case belongs to the period of Deuter-
onomy, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and illustrates the thought of the time.
312 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
belongs Mic. vii., where the prophet looks to deliverance
from exile and foreign oppression, and the exaltation of the
nation, basing his hope on the incomparable pardoning
mercy of Yahwe. To the exilian or a somewhat later
period we may also perhaps refer Deut. xxviii-xxx., 1
Kings viii., passages in which the perpetuity of the national
life is anticipated, but conditioned on obedience to the
divine law.
3. The exile exalted the hopes of those Israelites who
cherished most ardently the national feeling. After this ter-
rible blow, the God of Israel, they felt sure, would raise his
people to an unexampled height of happiness, of which the
elements were political independence and prosperity, fidel-
ity to the worship of Yahwe, and moral uprightness of life.
Whatever was necessary to secure these ends, that they
believed God would do. When Cyrus, in accordance with
his general policy of restoring the exiled peoples in Baby-
lonia to their homes, gave the Jews permission to return to
Canaan, a portion of the Israelitish colony gave themselves
up to the most unbounded joy and expectation, 1 the ex-
pression of which is found in the exilian Isaiah. This was
the culmination of the prophetic hope, which on the polit-
ical side was never fulfilled, though it was a true instinct
which foresaw the triumph of Israelitish religious thought. 2
The little band of patriots, about forty thousand in all, 3
returned to Canaan and found little or nothing that the
1 It is not a matter of course that all the real patriots returned to Pales-
tine. Opinions probably differed as to the wisest policy ; and it is certain
that at a later period a very decided national feeling showed itself among
the Jews who remained in Babylonia.
2 It was about the same time (second half of the sixth century n. c.) that
the foundations were laid in India, Greece, and Rome for three other great
movements of human progress
8 The number given in Neh. vii. 66 (42,360) is described as that of the
"men" (verse 7), according to which the whole population would have been
about 200,000 ; but the number of servants of both sexes (7,337) and of asses
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 313
great exilian prophet had predicted. Steady toil was neces-
sary to gain their daily bread, and it was with great diffi-
culty that they found means to rebuild the temple. It
was to this last end that the prophets Haggai and Zecha-
riah (Zech. i. viii.) devoted themselves ; yet they also, in all
the pressure of the time, cast a glance into the future.
Zechariah predicted a righteous, political success, and Hag-
gai the exaltation of the temple; the desirable things of all
nations should come and fill the new house with glory (Zech.
viii. 1-15 ; Hag. ii. 6-9). Half a century passed ; Palestine
was a Persian province, and there was no prospect of politi-
cal independence. The ritual-religious organization had been
steadily growing, and the hope of the best men lay in obe-
dience to the Law. The prophet Malachi (c. B. c. 460) pre-
dicted the appearance of a messenger of God, who should
purify the Levites, separate the evil element of the nation
from the good, and unite the hearts of the people in the fear
of Yahwe ; after him should come the great and terrible day
of Yahwe, the divine intervention which was to strike dis-
may into the souls of the evil-doers, and establish Israel in
ethical and Levitical uprightness (Mai. iii. iv.).
Other ideas, however, than the predominantly legal-ritual
existed in the fifth century, if we may here place the pro-
phetic sections, Isa. ii. 2-4 (nearly the same in Mic. iv. 1-5),
xix. The first of these stands out of connection in its pres-
ent position, and has a quiet tone wholly different from the
vigorous, intense polemic of Isaiah. It has a more defined
conception of law than Isa. Ixi. (which it in other respects
strongly resembles), and less ritualism than Zech. xiv. It
is a definite anticipation of the universal acceptance of the
worship of Yahwe, the accompaniment of which shall be
(6,720) suggests not more than 8,000 families, or a total population of 40,000,
and this number agrees with the feeble condition of the colony as described
in Ezra and Nehemiah.
314 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
the prevalence of universal peace. It is the vision of the
ethical-religious triumph of Israel, the national life and inde-
pendence being assumed, but not emphasized. 1 There is a
similar universality of hope in Isa. xix. 18-25, 2 set forth
under the form of the anticipated religious unity of Egypt,
Assyria, and Israel, all of whom Yahwe, it is said, will
regard with equal affection. Here is a cosmopolitan spirit
that reminds us of Ps. Ixxxvii. It seems to have been born
of that ethical-religious largeness of view that came into
existence after the breaking up of the national life. It is
the older conviction of national permanence illuminated by
a distincter moral-religious ideal.
4. Prophecy was now dying out, giving place to the orderly
study of the Law as the national guide of conduct. More
than another century passed before a new prophetic word
was heard (or, to speak more precisely, no prophecy of this
intervening period has been preserved). Joel and the Second
Zechariah (Zech. ix.-xiv.) seem by their historical references
and the pronouncedly legal-ritual character of their religious
thought to belong to the Greek period. Their expectation is
the same as that of the earlier prophets. Joel sees the hos-
tile nations assembled and judged, while Judah and Jeru-
salem abide in their own land forever, free from the presence
of strangers and secure in the protection of Yahwe (Joel ii.
28-iii. 21) ; Zechariah's picture includes victory over Greece
under the lead of a righteous king, the reconciliation of Jeru-
salem and the rural districts (which had been at variance),
the overthrow of hostile nations, and the complete triumph
1 Verse 5 of the Micah-passage (with which compare Isa. ii. 5) introduces
a general national particularism which seems to be at variance with the uni-
versality of verse 2, and may be an addition by another hand.
2 Verse 18, with the reading "the city of the sun," was cited by Jews in
support of the proposal of Onias to build his temple in the Heliopolitan
nome ; and some modern critics have hence been inclined to refer this pas-
sage to that period, but the absence of a distinct reference to a temple seems
to make this view improbable
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 315
of the religion of Yah we, so that all the families of the earth
should go up to Jerusalem to worship (Zech. ix. 9-17 ; xiL-
xiv.). Zechariah's ritualistic conception of holiness (xiv. 20,
21) marks one line of the progress of the national thought :
the perfection of the people is held to be inseparably con-
nected with the strict maintenance of the temple-service. A
somewhat similar view of the future is given in the little
detached section, Isa. iv. 2-6.
The occasional mention of a king who is to be Yahwe's
instrument for the final establishment of the nation does
not add to or modify the essential elements of the pro-
phetic thought. The king is an all but necessary part of the
body politic, the natural head of the nation and leader
of its fortunes. His presence at the final catastrophe, when
the great divine blessing is to come, is assumed, but not
spoken of in the pre-exilian prophecies; 1 it is the nation,
as the chosen of Yahwe, that is the object of interest. This
may be called specially the period of national solidarity.
We have already seen that an era of more defined individ-
ualism and institutionalism began just before the exile, and
the blow which destroyed for the time being the political and
ritual organization aroused a keener interest in the offices by
which it was represented. Thus Ezekiel, when the fate of
Jerusalem was decided, cheered his people with the prom-
ise of the perpetuity of the Davidic dynasty (xxxiv. 23, 24 ;
xxxvii. 24, 25) as well as of the Levitical priesthood (xliv.
1 As pre-exilian maybe regarded Amos (except the last section), Hosea
(omitting a few verses), Isa. i., ii. 6-22, iii., iv. 1, v.-x. (except ix. 6, 7, and
perhaps several of the preceding verses), xiv. 24-32, xv.-xviii., xx., xxii.
15-25, xxviii.-xxxi., xxxvii. 21-35, Mic. i.-iii., vi., Nahum, Zeph. i., ii., Hab-
akkuk, Jeremiah (except x. 1-16, xxiii. 5-8, xxxiii. 14-26, l.-lii., and per-
haps xlix ), Ezek. i.-xxxii. and part of xxxiii. (that is, the utterances of the
prophet up to the time when news came of the fall of Jerusalem, though
all his prophecies were given in the land of captivity). The omitted parts
suggest an exilian or post-exilian origin by their style, historical references,
or ritual tone.
316 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
15 ; xlviii. 11, 35). To the same effect are Jer. xxxiii. 14-26
(cf. xxiii. 5-3), where the Davidic prince is called a " right-
eous scion," 1 and 2 Sam. vil, where it is declared that the
throne of David shall be established forever. A more par-
ticular application of the term " scion " is made just after
the exile by Zechariah (vi. 12), who gives this title to his
contemporary the Davidic prince Zerubbabel, the builder of
the temple, associating him in a sort of dual government
with the priest Joshua. It seems to have been in the suc-
ceeding period, when Palestine was merely a province of the
Persian empire, that the longing for deliverance and na-
tional organized and independent life was embodied in the
portraiture of an ideal king. So long as the regular govern-
ment existed, the king was taken for granted. The time of
political dissolution recalled the glories of David and his suc-
cessors. A people without a head thought of a royal leader
as the natural saviour. Such appears to be the feeling that
prompted the utterance of Mic. v. 2-6 (Heb. 1-5) : Jacob is
scattered among the nations (vs. 7, 8), and the seer hopes for
a military deliverer in the person of a scion of the ancient
royal house of Bethlehem. 2 Elsewhere we find the ethical
element predominating in the description of the king. The
main function of the Davidic scion of Isa. xi. 1-9 is wise
and just care for the interests of the "poor" and "meek"
of the land. These are the epithets by which the book of
Psalms everywhere designates the Israelites who, true to the
law of their God, were oppressed by foreign potentates (Per-
sian or Greek) or by apostate or unscrupulous countrymen.
The seer embodies his idea of perfect national happiness
1 The expression "scion" (or "sprout") is used in Isa. iv. 2, apparently
of the nation, or rather of the righteous remnant as a branch of the original
stock. The close relation between people and king makes it equally appli-
cable to both.
2 The Tigris-Euphrates region is here called by the old name " Assyria."
as in the post-exilian Zech. x. 11.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 317
in the statement that there shall be no hurtful power in
the world, and he connects this blessed condition of things
(apparently following Hab. ii. 14) with the universal recog-
nition of the religion of Yahwe. We have here almost the
germ of an apocalypse, and, as in the pre-exilian predic-
tions, it is the welfare of the nation which the prophet has
in mind ; the prince exists for Israel. The author of Isa.
xxxii. 1-8 describes the future ethically constituted Israel-
itish community, of which king and princes are only a natu-
ral incident. A fuller governmental description, like that
in Isa. xi., is given in Isa. ix. 6, 7 (Heb. v. 6). The preceding
verses speak of a great national affliction to be followed
by a glorious victory like that of Gideon over Midian. The
national saviour is a Davidic king, whose reign is to be
characterized by justice and peace, and whose dynasty is
to continue forever. On this glorious deliverer the seer be^
stows the most exalted epithets. He represents the pres-
ence and power of Yahwe in the midst of the nation (like
the child Immanuel, " God is with us," of Isa. vii. 14), and,
as Israel (Hos. xi. 1) and the king of Israel (2 Sam. vii. 14;
Ps. ii. 7) are called " son of Yahwe," so he receives as sur-
names titles which express the divine presence. He is won-
derful (or divinely mysterious), like the angel of Judg. xiii.
18, wise in counsel, like the king in Isa. xi. 2, a hero, like
the king in Ps. xlv. 3 (Heb. 4), everlasting father or head of
a perpetual dynasty, prince of peace. 1 Finally, we have a
1 The expression el gibbor, commonly rendered " mighty God," is difficult ;
it occurs naturally of Yahwe in Isa. x. 21, but seems inapplicable to a man.
Some attach el to the preceding word, and render " counsellor of God," which
is possible, but not natural ; and there is the same objection to " counsellor of
the miHitv God." Gibbor would then stand separate in the sense of " hero,"
as in Ts. xlv. 3 (4). Some take el as adjective, meaning "mighty;" but we
should then expect the reverse order, gibbor el. No satisfactory emendation
of the text has been suggested. The word el can be employed of men, accord-
ing to Old Testament usage, only in the sense of " mighty." The text may
originally have expressed some relation of the king to the " mighty God."
318 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
simple picture of a peaceful monarch in Zech. ix. 9 ; but it
appears from verse 13 that peace is to be gained by a vic-
tory over Greece. In this prophetic anticipation (the latest
of those that deal with the re-establishment of the kingly
government) the hope is the same as in the others, na-
tional prosperity, secured by divine aid and conditioned on
obedience to divine law.
This prophetic-patriotic hope, ennobled by the demand for
righteousness, may be traced far down in the succeeding
literature : in Ecclesiasticus (xxxvi, 1-17 ; xxxvii. 25 ; xlvii.
11; 1. 23, 24), Wisdom of Solomon (iii. 8; v. 1), Baruch
(ii. 27-35 ; iv. 36 ; v. 5-9), Tobit (xiii. 12-18 ; xiv. 7), 1 Mac-
cabees (ii. 57), 2 Maccabees (ii. 18 ; xiv. 15), Psalms of Solo-
mon. In the prophetic scheme of the future the only definite
trait is the establishment of the nation in peace and pros-
perity in its own land. The hope is distinctively national ;
Israel is the centre, the sole object of the divine care. Other
nations are subordinated to the chosen people, and their
future is variously described, according to the point of view
and feeling of the writer. In the earlier prophecies those
who are hostile are to be destroyed or severely punished ;
at a later time (especially in the Second Isaiah and the
Second Zechariah), they are represented as attaching them-
selves to the religion of Israel. Their happiness is condi-
tioned on their submission ; they are always aliens, and such
blessings as they receive come through the intermediation
of Israel. The object of God's intervention is his own glory
and the exaltation of his own people. But along with this
particularistic national feeling there is the moral earnestness
which demanded righteousness as a necessary element of the
national good. If this righteousness was in part ceremonial
and dogmatic, it also included ethical perfectness according
to the best standards of the time ; and this redeems the pro-
phetic hope from the imputation of mere national narrow-
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 319
ness ; this lifted the national consciousness up to a noble
ideal, and gave it universal significance for men. The proph-
ets did not attempt to fix the details of the great deliver-
ance ; theirs was a free, spontaneous, national feeling. They
speak from time to time of some individual deliverer; but
it is an ideal king, vaguely expected in the near future. No
one actual personage stands out with controlling prominence.
Their picture concerns this world only. The judgment of
God is temporal ; the doctrine of immortality had not been
established in the national consciousness.
5. The Greek oppression (beginning about 200 B. c.) in-
troduced important changes, political and religious. The
national sense of suffering became distincter than ever be-
fore. The iron entered into the soul of the people ; the
hand of the stranger weighed heavily on their most sacred
rights and sentiments. The fulfilment of the divine prom-
ises seemed long delayed ; an intense desire of deliverance
took possession of the Jews. From the time that they had
fallen under Greek control they had been learning more of
the history of the world, and had gained the idea of the
succession of empires. Their thought had passed beyond
this life ; in place of the old Semitic conception of Sheol,
the gloomy abode of life-in-death, had come the hope of
immortality. Scribes and lawyers began to devote them-
selves to a study of the sacred books, to formulate their
doctrines, to search them for indications of the future. Out
of all this material grew up a new literature, different in
tone from the old prophetic writing, called forth by the
needs of the times and expressing the current feeling ; the
prophet was replaced by the apocalyptic seer.
The first apocalyptic work produced by the Maccabean
struggle was the book of Daniel, the only book of this class
which gained entrance into the Canon. It was composed
in the midst of the stirring career of Judas Maccabseus.
320 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
Antiochus Epiphanes, the mighty successor of Alexander
the Great, and the representative to the Jews of the Greek
world-kingdom, had attempted to crush the religious liber-
ties of the people. The little band of the faithful, led by
the heroic Judas, had withstood his efforts, defeated his
armies, and captured and cleansed Jerusalem and the tem-
ple. It seemed to some pious souls that this was God's
time for final intervention for his people. Our author, in
the form of visions ascribed to the seer Daniel, supposed
to be living in Babylon during the whole of the captivity,
describes the fortunes of four empires, Babylon, Media,
Persia, and Greece. That this is the ground over which he
goes is evident from the fact that his four visions, chapters
vii. (with which that of Nebuchadnezzar in chapter ii. is
identical), viii, ix., and xi., xii.,give the same history, and the
terminus ad quern is stated in chapter viii. to be the reign
of one of the successors of Alexander, who can be no other
than Antiochus. The picture of the future is of the most
general character ; it includes only the triumph of Israel
and the establishment of God's everlasting kingdom. The
personage described in vii. 13 as "like a son of man" is
explained in verse 27 to represent the Jewish people, or
more particularly the pious kernel of the nation, the saints
of the Most High. The final victory is to be preceded by
a time of great tribulation (cf. Ezek. xxxviii., xxxix.) ; the
angel Michael will be the patron of the people ; many of
the dead will arise, some to honor and some to shame ; the
wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and
they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever
and ever (xii. 1-4). The future of the nation is thus con-
nected with the doctrine of the resurrection which the Jews
had recently adopted. The resurrection would be confined
to Israelites, but should be a blessing only for the righteous ;
that is, those who remained faithful to the national religion.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 321
The apostates should be overwhelmed with contempt. The
abode of the new congregation was to be on the earth, but
under what local conditions is not said ; it was sufficient
that there should be victory and happiness. It does not
appear whether the writer supposed that all other nations
were to be set aside, so that the earth should be the pos-
session of the Jews alone ; into details on this point he
does not enter. There is a judgment (vii.) which overthrows
all enemies, and gives the kingdom to the saints ; J but the
picture is vague. We do not know the precise nature of
the resulting world-society. The ethical element in the life
of the restored nation is the same as in the prophets. No
earthly leader is named ; there is no Messiah ; the regen-
erating influence is in the body of the pious. One would
expect reference to Judas ; the book was perhaps written
by one of the Hasidim or saints who regarded themselves
as the true life of the national struggle (between 167 and
164 B. c.). The writer expects the consummation in a short
while (xii. 11-13). He is explicit and detailed in his state-
ments up to near the death of Antiochus, after which he
becomes general and vague (xii. 9). The book is therefore
simply the expression of the hope that God was about to en-
dow his people with the happiness promised in the prophets.
Two things are especially noticeable in this picture of na-
tional reconstruction. One is the character and function of
the body of the righteous who are to constitute the new
national life. It is the idea of a remnant which is found
in Isa. vii.-x., but with a more definite and prominent state-
ment of its ethical perfectness ; the righteous are wholly
righteous, altogether approved by God. They suffer ; but
there is no explanation of their suffering. It is not puri-
1 Here apparently (vii. 27 ; ii. 44) is the germ of the expression " kingdom
of heaven," or " kingdom of God," which afterwards came to be the name of
the Messianic era.
21
322 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
fyiug, as in Isa. xl., or vicarious, as in Isa. liii. ; it is accepted
as a fact without inquiry. The writer's eye is fixed simply
on the coming reward, and his conception of righteousness
is the legal-ritual one which had grown up since the fifth
century. The second point is the author's indifference to
the political idea. Of course he says nothing of civil lib-
erty; this was a question into which the Jews never en-
tered. It was left to Greece and Home to develop this
side of social life ; Israel dealt with religion only. Nor
does the author think of the form of government any more
than did prophets, psalmists, and apostles. The one thing
for the nation, in his view, was national independence and
exaltation over other peoples, which should carry with it
the supremacy of the national Law. For the welfare of
other nations he is not concerned ; his is that intense de-
votion to one idea that was so important an element in
the success of the Jews.
It is a little later that we must put the prediction in the
Sibylline Oracles (iii. 652794), in which substantially the
same picture is given as in Daniel : foreign kings attack
the land and the temple ; they are judged and crushed ;
there are signs in heaven ; terror prevails over the whole
earth ; the people, delivered from enemies, dwell in peace ;
other nations adopt the worship of the God of Israel ; the
world shares the blessings of the chosen nation ; there is to
be universal freedom from suffering ; Greece is exhorted to
pray submissively to God, who was about to establish an
everlasting kingdom of peace. The allusion is most prob-
ably to the Maccabean struggle ; but the Sibyl differs from
Daniel in looking for a king who should rule in the fear
and by the help of God, a trait taken from the prophets,
and especially suggested, perhaps, by the existing Macca-
bean rulers and the writers familiarity with Greek king-
doms. The king has no supernatural endowments ; he is
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 323
simply one of the people. He is not the Messiah in the
later significance of the word. There is the same ignoring
w O O
of the political problem proper as in Daniel, but more recog-
nition of the personality of foreign peoples, that is to say,
of the one alien people with which the writer was in con-
tact, a difference that came from the more cosmopolitan
spirit of the Egyptian Jewish colony. As to the hope of
an independent Jewish state, this was made possible and
was doubtless suggested by the innumerable strifes between
the various Greek kingdoms of Asia and Africa. The Mac-
cabean movement had succeeded, and might sustain itself.
Jewish enthusiasm has always ignored seemingly insuper-
able difficulties. It is nevertheless remarkable, when from
our point of view we survey the historical situation, to find
this political vitality in a tiny fragment of the Grseco-Eoman
world, while at the same time the scribes were building up
a compact and powerful ethical-religious organization.
A further step in the elaboration of the picture of the
future is taken in Enoch xc. 16-38, a passage which be-
longs to the same general period as the one above cited.
The author gives a review, couched in symbolical language,
of the history of Israel, and comes finally to the time when
the people were devoured by the Greeks. He describes the
rise of the Hasidim, and the appearance of a great, victo-
rious leader, who is probably Judas Maccabeus (but held by
some to be John Hyrcanus the First ; the difference in time
is not important for the idea). Then comes the final gen-
eral attack of the enemies of Israel, their overthrow by God,
the judgment of the angels and of the unfaithful Israelites,
and the establishment of the new Jerusalem grander and
more beautiful than the old. Then the Messiah appears, one
of the people, not a supernatural personage, yet wielding
authority over all the nations. t The advance in the thought
is the greater prominence given to the person of the Mes-
324 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
siah, who, however, is not the author of the deliverance (that
is effected by God), but comes forward after its completion.
The ethical element is the same as in the Sibyl, but the
greater prominence is given to the political deliverance. It
seemed to the writer that the old glories of the Davidic
kingdom might now be renewed, and other nations might
share the blessing by submitting to Israel.
In addition to this purely national expectation, Enoch
has the representation of a general judgment (i. ; xxii. 11;
Ixxxiv. 4), the result of which shall be the destruction of
evil and the constitution of the just into a blessed congre-
gation for the worship of the one only God. In the chap-
ter quoted above, also (xc.), there is a judgment of evil
angels and renegade Jews (20-27), while the heathen op-
pressors are converted to the worship of the God of Israel
(33). Whether these two judgments are identical is not
clear; the first seems to be held on Sinai (i. 4), the second
in Palestine (xc. 20). Nor is anything said in the second
account of judgment of a punishment to be inflicted on
human enemies. 1 There is the same vagueness here as in
Daniel. But the general result, according to both books,
seems to be that at a certain moment God intervenes, de-
stroys all opposition to his people, and establishes them
(restoring the dead to life) in security in Palestine, making
Jerusalem (a new Jerusalem, according to Enoch) the centre
of religious worship for the world. It was a wave of Mes-
sianic feeling produced by the apparently brilliant outcome
of the Hasmonean uprising.
1 We have here probably nothing more than a repetition of the prophetic
pictures. Isa. Ix. represents kings as coming to pay homage to the glori-
fied Israel ; of a judgment on them nothing is said. Other prophets, as Joel
(followed by Daniel and the Sibyl), think of a sentence of condemnation
and destruction passed on alien nations. The details of the future were dif-
ferently construed by different seer; the main thing was the triumph of
Israel.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 325
The hopes excited by the first Maccabean successes grad-
ually vanished amid the experiences of a petty kingdom.
So long as the Hasrnonean dynasty retained its position, the
dream of independence might seem to be realized, and Sad-
ducees and Pharisees were content to struggle with each
other for the control of affairs. For nearly a century the
Jews were absorbed in internal and external political and
religious dissensions, and we hear nothing of apocalyptic
visions. With the approach of the Romans under Pompey
the cry for deliverance made itself heard again. In the
Psalter of Solomon (c. B. c. 48) we find the prayer that God
would raise up Israel's king, the son of David, Christ, Lord,
to destroy his people's enemies, to reign over all the earth,
to make Jerusalem the centre of worship for the whole
world (Ps. xvii). Here for the first time the deliverer is
called the Anointed, the Messiah, the Christ. It is the old
prophetic hope without apocalyptic details.
A passage in the Sibylline Oracles (iii. 36-62), which
appears to belong to the time of the Second Triumvirate
(B. c. 43 or 42), announces the speedy establishment of the
kingdom of God. A much more developed view is given
in the Parables of the book of Enoch (xxxvii.-lxxi.), espe-
cially in the second Parable (xlv. Ivii., omitting the Noachic
interpolation, liv. 7-lv. 2), which, from the mention of the
Parthians (Ivi. 5), probably a reference to the Parthian in-
vasion of Palestine, may be put near the year B. c. 40.
Here the general judgment is committed by the Lord of
the spirits, the Head of days (Dan. vii. 9), to the Messiah,
who is called, after Daniel, the Sou of Man, but is more
commonly styled the Chosen One. The judgment is directed
against the kings and other potentates who oppressed Israel,
herein following the prophets, and differing from the earlier
part of Enoch. The situation had changed during the past
century. Israel triumphant and hopeful might be magnan-
326 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
imous ; crushed and weary, it would naturally be severe.
There is to be a general resurrection. Glory and honor
are to accrue to the holy and just (that is, faithful Israel-
ites), and they are to dwell on the renovated earth. The
most striking point in the description is the apparent ascrip-
tion of pre-existence to the Messiah. His name was called,
it is said, and he was chosen and hidden before the world
was made ; and he will continue to exist forever. It is not
clear, however, whether this pre-existence was real or ideal.
The idea of prenatal calling is not foreign to the Old Testa-
ment : the prophet Jeremiah was set apart to his work be-
fore he was born (Jer. i. 5, and cf. Isa. xlix. 5) ; and we may
have here the conception of the later Jewish theology, that
the Messiah existed indeed from eternity in the divine pur-
pose, but came into real being only when he was manifested
to the world. 1 With this view would accord the statement
of the Parable (xlviii. 7), that the wisdom of God revealed
the Messiah [in the day of judgment or divine intervention]
to the holy and just, in order that their portion might be
preserved. The epithet "chosen" may have been suggested
by such a passage as Isa. xlii. 1 (as the whole of the section
xlii. 1-17 seems to have furnished material for later Mes-
sianic systems), and represents in general an idea familiar
to the Jews. The conception of pre-existence, thus stated
ideally, prepared the way for the more definite view of Paul
and the Fourth Gospel. 2 In other regards the Messianic
scheme of the Parables agrees substantially with that of the
earlier books. Nothing is said of atonement. There is no
1 For the Targnmic and Talmndic references see Weber, " System,"
78, 79.
2 For the discussion of the question whether this part of the Parables is
of Christian origin see Drummond, Schodde, Schurer. On page 65 I say
that the role assigned the Messiah seems to point to a Christian source ;
but further consideration has led me to change my opinion on this point. A
Christian writer would probably have made his statements more definite.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 327
feeling of international comity. The kingdom of God is
understood in a purely national way ; and while the whole
view of the future involves the ordinary ethical elements,
the Messiah is in himself not specifically an ethical power.
The remaining literature of the pre-Christian period pre-
sents no new elements of the Messianic hope. The Assump-
tion of Moses (x.), written about the beginning of our era,
represents the kingdom of God as about to be established,
heralded by signs in the heavens and on the earth, and
Israel victorious and honored. The Book of Jubilees, half
a century later, has only a very general picture of deliver-
ance (i.). A little earlier, Philo in two passages already
cited (ii. 435, 421-428) describes the political and moral re-
demption of the people under the leadership of an eminent
man who cannot be the logos, but may be the Messiah.
Philo apparently knew nothing of Jesus, whose contempo-
rary he was, and he has very little to say of the fortunes
of his people ; yet it appears that to him also, immersed
as he was in philosophical speculation, the idea of national
deliverance was not wanting.
In estimating the elements of the national hope, we must,
however, not lose sight of the moral progress which is to
be traced in the non-apocalyptic writings, in the Wisdom-
books, and the teachings of the schools. The apocalypses
undertook to define the religious-political future with more
or less distinctness ; and though their specific predictions
were set aside from time to time by the march of events,
their general expectation of national deliverance was doubt-
less shared by the body of the people. Antiochus Epiphanes
died ; the Hasmonean princes ruled ; but there was no real-
ization of the dream of a world-kingdom. Judea remained
a petty province, felt the weight of the Ptoman power, and
passed into the hands of an Idumean king. The people con-
tinued to hope against hope. Meantime the intellectual-
328 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
religious life went on, the moral consciousness of the nation
gathered force, and formed part of the national hope. The
dream of political independence was never abandoned, but
it could not be divorced from that moral ideal which had
arisen out of all the experiences of the past centuries.
To sum up the Messianic material in pre-Christian liter-
ature : the fundamental element is the destruction or coer-
cion of Israel's enemies, and the establishment of the people
in Palestine in political independence and prosperity, some-
times by the immediate act of God, sometimes by means of
a king or other leader, a man sprung from the people, but
raised up by God and endowed with all the qualities neces-
sary to secure success ; at the same time the worship of the
God of Israel receives universal recognition, and Jerusalem
becomes the religious centre of the regenerated world, the
new heavens and earth.
The condition of membership in the new community is
twofold : national and religious. It is, first of all, Israelites
who are entitled to the blessing, but only faithful Israelites.
The stress is laid on devotion to the national faith ; general
obedience to the laws of morality is assumed, but not em-
phasized. Others than Israelites may become sharers in the
advantages of the new dispensation by accepting the na-
tional Jewish religion. To these the same sort of moral
test is applied as to Jews. 1 If, however, they do not sub-
1 Proselytism was an anticipation of this procedure. It seems to have
begun in the latter half of the first century B. c. (John Hyrcanus's forcible
conversion of the Idumeans was a purely political measure, but may be re-
garded as the indication of a tendency). Judaism was one of several Africo-
Asiatic religions that then attracted the Graeco-Roman world. Though it
repelled by its local and oppressive ritual, it attracted by its moral-religious
purity and strennousness, and by the hopes it held out for the future. Juda-
ism thus took one step toward denationalizing itself. Hillel (and probably
one section of the Egyptian Jews) was very liberal in the construction of
the terms of admission. Under favorable circumstances, it seemed, Judaism
might throw off its local character and become a world-religion ; and this
it actually did become in the form of Christianity.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 329
mit they are to be punished. 1 As to whether they will
submit or prove obstinate, this is variously decided ; arid
the question is complicated by the introduction of the con-
ception of a judgment and a future life. This judgment,
represented sometimes as held by God, sometimes as held
by the Messiah, ushers in the Messianic era, and the chosen
people dwell on the earth. But the conception of the future
life was in process of formulation, and the mode in which
the heathen are to be dealt with is not stated precisely.
In one point, however, all shades of opinion agree : there
is to be endless triumph for the people of Israel and their
religion.
In the New Testament we find mention of several points
in the popular belief, which do not appear in the Jewish lit-
erature, such as that the Messiah was to be born in Beth-
lehem (Matt, ii.) ; that when he appeared no one would
know whence he came ; that he would work miracles ; that
he would be preceded by Elijah or Jeremiah or some un-
named prophet (Matt. xi. 3, 10, 11 ; xvi. 13, 14; xvii. 10, 11 ;
John vii. 27, 31, 40-42). It is evident, from Dan. ix. as
well as from the New Testament, that the pious and the
scribes had for some time been searching the sacred books
for predictions of the great deliverance. As soon as the
idea of an individual Messiah was established, ardent men
would see a reference to him, a description of his person
or of the circumstances of his coming, in many a passage
of the Scripture. Doubtless many such Messianic allusions
were current among the people that do not appear in the
New Testament. 2 That Bethlehem was to be the birthplace
1 The same thing in Islam. Mohammedan preachers still continue, in the
Friday mosque-service, to invoke the divine vengeance on the unbelieving
oppressor.
2 The Talmud contains all this material and much more of similar char-
acter, part of which probably goes back to the first century of our era. See
Weber's " System," Edersheim's " Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah,"
330 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
of the deliverer was inferred from Mic. v. 2 (1) ; that his
appearance was to be mysterious, perhaps from Mai. iii. 1 ;
his power of working miracles might be suggested by such
passages as Isa. xxxv. 5, or might be regarded as a neces-
sary accompaniment of his exalted mission, since the proph-
ets Elijah and Elisha and others were endowed with this
power ; Mai. iv. 5 (iii. 23) seems to say that Elijah would
be the forerunner of the grand catastrophe ; the great rule
assigned to Jeremiah appears from 2 Mac. ii. 1-8, 1 xv. 13-
15 ; and the important parts played by him and other proph-
ets (as Isaiah) in the old history may explain the position
given them in the current Messianic theories. 2 It appears
also from the Gospels that the Messianic hope was gen-
erally diffused among the people and excited lively inter-
est. The same thing may be inferred from the local polit-
ical revolts which took place from time to time during the
first century of our era. There must have been an under-
current of deep Messianic feeling in Palestine. The social-
religious life went for the most part quietly on. The people
bought and sold, the scribes worked out the minutiae of
the law, the priests officiated in the temple ; but under
this outward acceptance of the Roman rule there was in
Drummond's " Jewish Messiah," Duschak's " Biblisch-talmudische Glaubens-
lehre "
1 The author refers vaguely to earlier material for the source of his legend
of Jeremiah, a story which, thus accidentally preserved, suggests that there
were others of the same sort which have been lost.
2 Neither in the pre-Christian Jewish literature nor in the earlier Targums
is there any trace of a suffering Messiah. The idea of a non-expiatory suffer-
ing, which appears in the Talmud, and is attributed to the Jews by Justin
Martyr (Trypho, Ixviii. Ixxxix.), may have existed as early as the first cen-
tury or earlier. The conception of an expiatory suffering of the Messiah,
which might naturally be suggested by Isa. liii., is found in later works, but
was foreign to the reigning Jewish thought, and has never taken hold of
Jewish feeling. On the other hand, that the righteous may turn away the
divine wrath from their friends and from the nation is an idea familiar to
the Old Testament as well as to the Talmud. Weber, " System," chs. xx.
xxii., Schiirer, " Geschichte," pp. 464 ff.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 331
the first century, as there had often been before, an eager
hope, a latent expectation that God was about to interpose,
that the man would soon appear who should lead Israel
to glory.
6. But there was more than this. The materials for
tracing the history of Messianic thought during the fifty
years preceding the birth of Jesus are scanty. We have a
few psalms, a few somewhat vague verses in the Sibylline
oracles, the Enoch-Parables, and some detached ethical-legal
sayings of prominent lawyers. The country was in a state
of unrest ; the reign of Herod was marked by conflicts with-
out and disorders within. Quiet was restored by the ban-
ishment of Archelaus, and the final incorporation of Pal-
estine into the Eoman Empire under a procurator; but it
was only an external and partial quiet. The people were
wearied and sore at heart. It was not a time for literary
production ; yet during this period the seeds of a great
religious revolution were germinating. In the absence of
specific historical information, we can only conjecture the
causes which produced in the more serious minds a pro-
founder view of the political-religious situation. One of
these we may judge to be the recognition of the hopeless-
ness of a struggle against the power of the Eoman Empire.
There had been for a long time in the higher circles of
Jewish society a pronounced aversion to political revolt.
The Sadducees were content with their position as aristo-
cratic representatives of the old religious order, especially
as they freely adopted the broader social ideas and habits
of their cultivated neighbors ; the Pharisees were absorbed
in the elaboration of the Law on its ceremonial and eth-
ical sides, holding this to be the real life of the nation,
anxious mainly for the quiet necessary to do their legal
work, willing to accept any government which left them in
peace. One result of this recognition of the existing order
332 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
of things we may suppose to have been an enfeebling of
the desire for political sovereignty, and in so far a modifi-
cation of the old Messianic scheme.
In addition to this, there was the recognition of the neces-
sity of moral reform. It is likely that this feeling of the
ethical shortcomings of the nation, handed down from the
prophets, had never been entirely wanting. There was a
time, indeed (as we see from such writings as Ps. xliv.),
when there existed in certain circles a consciousness of na-
tional righteousness ; but this was mainly the expression
of Israel's devotion to the one true God and his law, in
contrast with the idolatry and lawlessness of neighboring
nations. No serious mind could fail to perceive the eth-
ical defects of Jewish society. We need not suppose that
these exceeded the bounds of ordinary human weakness.
Then, as now, there was enough self-seeking, untruth-
fulness, hypocrisy, oppression, to call forth the severest
condemnation of moral-religious teachers. Perhaps the dis-
orders of the times intensified the feeling of ethical dissat-
isfaction. The assiduous study of the prophets forced on
reflecting minds the conviction that an inward change was
necessary before the people could receive the long-promised
divine blessing. The first condition of God's aid, it might
naturally be felt, was a moral-religious reform. One other
step might have been taken. To a profounder spiritual
soul it might seem that the essence of the divine salvation
would be faithful obedience to the law of God. This was,
indeed, the new covenant of Jeremiah and Ezekiel ; and
this was the characteristic of the ideal Israel, which, accord-
ding to the exilian Isaiah, was to be the bearer of truth
and light to the world. Such a view would not neces-
sarily exclude (as in the prophets it did not exclude) the
conception of a special divine interposition in the future ;
but it would transform the scheme of God's earthly king-
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 333
dom from a political sovereignty to a society organized on
moral-religious principles. Such thoughts as these may have
floated, more or less vaguely, in the more serious and reflec-
tive minds in the century preceding the birth of John the
Baptist. There are hints that such an ethical view of the
situation, though doubtless feeble and indistinct, actually ex-
isted among the people. Of this nature was the expectation,
derived from the conclusion of Malachi's prophecy, that Eli-
jah, in the role of moral reformer, would precede the final
interposition of God ; and according to John iv. 25, there
was a belief that the Messiah when he came would solve
all religious problems. We may point also to the moral
earnestness of Hillel's reported sayings, to the profound de-
sire for personal purity which was embodied in the Essene
organization, and in general to all those moral elements in
the idea of the kingdom of God which are mentioned above.
If such a feeling existed in Palestine at that time, we can-
not be surprised at the appearance of a man like John the
Baptist. Of his antecedents we know nothing; he appears
suddenly in Judea as a preacher of repentance and a herald
of the approach of the kingdom of God. More than this he
did not claim to be. He rebuked the sins of all classes of
society (Mark i., Matt, iii., Luke iii.) ; he met his death by
his denunciation of the immoral conduct of King Herod
(Mark vi. 17-29). His silence is as significant as his utter-
ance. In his reported words he says nothing of a political
kingdom, he draws no detailed picture of the future ; he con-
fines himself to moral exhortation. For him the kingdom of
God seems to be simply the purification of the national life.
How far he shared the prevailing views respecting this king-
dom it is perhaps impossible to say. The sober report of his
preaching in the Synoptics may be due to a process of sifting
by a later generation when Christian ideas prevailed. But it
is still noteworthy that he by no word suggests other than a
334 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
inoral-religious role for the Messiah, and that no record con-
nects him or his followers with any political movement. 1
He was the last of the prophets. He had the thorough-
going, uncompromising decision and fearlessness of Elijah,
whom he seems to have taken as his model in dress and
demeanor. Like Elijah, he worked only for present reforma-
tion within the bounds of the national religious organization.
He hoped for a coming kingdom of God, but he did not cher-
ish the brilliant anticipations of the writing prophets. He
did not think of himself as the person destined to introduce
the new dispensation of things. He felt that while he was
a preacher of righteousness, a stronger arm than his was
needed to establish the perfect divine society. He spoke of
a successor, who should complete what he had begun, who
should baptize 2 not with water but with the Holy Spirit. 3
Who this successor was to be he seems never to have known.
After he was thrown into prison by Herod, he heard of the
new teacher whose fame had spread throughout the land,
and sent messengers to him to ask if it was he that should
come, or whether they were still to expect some other. The
tone of the question implies ignorance on John's part of the
1 What Josephus says of him agrees substantially with the statements in
the Gospels.
2 Schneckenbiirger and others hold that the baptism of John was a new
ceremony, not borrowed from the Jews, and I took the same position in an
article on proselyte-baptism in " The Baptist Quarterly " (1872) ; but it now
seems to me that the facts favor the opposite view.
3 The incident recorded in Acts xix. 1-7 seems to show that a theory of
immediate divine influence did not exist among the disciples of John. If
in verse 3 we are to translate, " We have not even heard whether there is a
Holy Spirit," it must be concluded either that John said nothing about such
a divine power, or, as is more probable, that these particular disciples had
failed to receive the proper information. It seems unlikely, however, that
any disciple of John could be ignorant of the existence of the Spirit of God,
a common Jewish idea of the time, or without the hope of that out-
pouring which was promised by the prophets (Joel iii.). The alternative ren-
dering, " whether the Holy Spirit is " (harsh, but not impossible), would imply
only that these disciples did not know of the pouring out of the Spirit.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 335
person and purpose of the young master, who had indeed
been baptized by him, but had been undistinguished in the
crowd. 1 For answer Jesus simply pointed to what he was
doing (Matt. xi.). It is not said what conclusion John drew
from this response. Jesus expressed his own opinion of John
in a very decided manner. According to the First Gospel, he
declared that John was more than a prophet ; that no greater
man than he had yet appeared in the history of Israel ; and
at a later period, when the Pharisees demanded the source
of his authority, he replied by asking whether they looked
on John's mission as deriving its authority from men or from
God. They were unwilling to commit themselves to a defi-
nite answer, and he therefore declined to answer their ques-
tion ; but he evidently placed himself in the same category
with John so far as the authority of his mission was con-
cerned (Matt. xi. 7-19 ; xxi. 23-32). 2
John died without having witnessed any great forward
movement in the people. His disciples continued to exist
in the form of a sect for a considerable time (Acts xix. 3),
but apparently without exerting any considerable influence
on the community. They had little to affect the popular
imagination, or stir to action. We should suppose that they
all would have taken Jesus for their teacher after the death
of John ; yet they not only retained their separate organ-
ization, but according to Matt. ix. 14, in certain customs, as
fasting, they were nearer to the Pharisees than to the dis-
ciples of Jesus. 3 They seem to have represented little more
than a somewhat dull moral reform. Perhaps they were also
looking for a Messiah ; but if so, their expectation was un-
defined, and stirred no great hopes among the people. John's
1 The incident mentioned in Mark i. 10, 11, is an addition of the later tra-
dition. If John had witnessed it, he would not have sent such a message.
2 Cf. Maurice Vernes, " Histoire des Ide'es Messianiques," Paris, 1874.
3 From this fact it may reasonably be inferred that John had said nothing
of Jesus to his disciples, and was unacquainted with the ideas of his successor.
336 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
movement was completely swallowed up in that of Jesus,
and left no traces, as far as we can perceive, in the develop-
ment of the nation. It was a real response to the demand
of the times, but not strong and deep enough to furnish all
that was needed. It was the last attempt of the old pro-
phetic thought to guide the religious life of the nation, and
it proved a failure. The body of the nation continued its
nomistic development, while the disciples of Jesus threw off
the Law. The Johannites neither attained to any deep spir-
ituality nor affected the growth of the nomism to which they
continued to cling.
John may be called, in a peculiar sense, a Jewish product,
the outcome of the national development. Of pure, unmixed
nationalism, indeed, we cannot speak, for the Jewish thought
of the time, as we have seen, was all colored more or less by
foreign influences. But John seems to represent particularly
a circle which held to the traditional moral-religious ideas.
His was a sturdy, outspoken ethical system. He lashed the
vices of the time ; he denounced the leaders of orthodoxy
as a brood of vipers. He had the moral insight of a true
reformer, and he had further the power of genius or the
skill to separate the local from the general in the prophetic
teaching. He is even reported (Matt. iii. 9) as anticipating
the Apostle Paul in discarding the national and hereditary
claim to the divine favor, and looking, as it seems, in part,
outside of Israel for the membership of the kingdom of God. 1
In so far his work was an attempt to convert Judaism into
a universal religion. He lacked enthusiasm for humanity,
tenderness of sympathy, breadth and depth of ethical prin-
ciple. He seems to have aroused interest in all classes of
1 The partial rejection of Israel is an old prophetic idea (Am. iii. 2 ; Isa
x. 22), and a certain sort of incoming of Gentiles was early looked forward to
(Isa. lx.). Whether the word ascribed to John is simply a repetition of this
old prediction (cf. Mark xii. 9), only in a more definite way, or the reflection
of a later time, it is difficult to say.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 337
Jewish society (Matt. iii. 5-7), but he was overborne by the
current of the times. He is a witness to a definitely Jew-
ish demand for moral reform.
The desire for reform was, however, not confined to the
Jews, but made itself felt throughout the Grseco-Eoman
world. This is not the place to describe in detail the intel-
lectual-moral condition of society in the Eoman empire at
the beginning of the first century of our era. 1 That a nota-
ble current of ethical feeling then existed in the western
world appears from the writings of Cicero, Juvenal, Persius,
Plutarch, Seneca, and others. These men not only attack the
grosser moral evils of their time, but set up a high moral
standard, and embody the striving after an ideal which they
are conscious has not been reached by society. This deeper
moral sentiment was practically the same all over the em-
pire, expressed under different social and religious conditions
and in different ways, yet looking everywhere to the one end
of the purification and ennobling of life. Juvenal is a sort
of Roman John the Baptist ; Seneca has noteworthy points
of ethical agreement with Paul. The Eoman world was in
an important sense a unit, full of diversities, indeed, but
informed by a great common body of moral feeling which
was fed by streams from all the great civilized communities.
The various ethical tendencies had sprung out of the social
conditions of various independent nations, and had come
to form one mass of opinion through the series of events
which, beginning with the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Per-
sian conquests, had finally, through Greece and Eome, im-
pressed political and social unity on a huge congeries of
communities. The essential oneness of human moral expe-
rience had shown itself in the ethical results achieved by
1 It is described in the works of Baur, Schurer, and Hausrath, and in Dul-
linger's " Heidenthum und Judenthum " (Eng. transl. "The Gentile and the
Jew ").
22
338 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
these various peoples, and one of these results was the estab-
lishment of a higher ideal. In order to discern clearly why
a special ethical-religious movement should have set in just
at this time, we should have to make a minute examination
of the moral phenomena of the age, an inquiry too large
for our present purpose. But two great and generally recog-
nized facts present themselves distinctly in the history of
the period, and furnish a not unsatisfactory answer to our
question. One of these is the wide and intimate intercourse
between members of different peoples, which had helped to
break down artificial barriers between men and promote the
sense of human brotherhood ; the other is the rupture which
had taken place between the common-sense of the Grseco-
Roman world and the old mythologies, driving men back
on fundamental principles of religion and morals. AYe must
content ourselves here with the bare mention of these facts,
without attempting to illustrate them by examples or trace
them to their origin.
Reform, it may be said, was in the air. Reform is, in-
deed, a constant element of a healthy community ; but there
are special movements in special directions, as in this case.
Different nations moreover, differ in methods and capacity
of reform. Especially does the power of organization vary
in different communities. The organized force of Greece ex-
pended itself in literature and philosophy, that of Rome in
politics and law, that of Israel in religion. Greece specially
affected ethics through philosophy, Rome through govern-
ment. The Jews had organized religion, and their religion
became constantly more ethical ; Ilillel surpassed Isaiah in
distinctness of moral view. The conception of a society
organized on the basis of ethical religion was peculiar to
Jewish thought. The idea had been developed by prophets
and lawyers continuously from Elijah and Amos to Hillel
and John the Baptist. This was the advantage that Israel
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 339
had over Greece and Rome at the beginning of our era :
it was not that its ethical principles and life were essen-
tially purer, but that its capacity for ethical-religious organ-
ization was greater. It was able to employ in the most
effective way the universal motives of religion as an eth-
ical lever. Having a simple and elevated religion, it could
unite religion and ethics into a harmonious and powerful
principle of life. John the Baptist endeavored to carry out
the prophetic idea of reform under the conditions of his
own time, but the result showed that he was not equal to
the task he assumed. He definitely impressed neither his
own people nor foreigners ; at most he produced in Judea
a moral excitement which prepared the way for his suc-
cessor. A deeper conception of life and a stronger person-
ality were needed to create a new starting-point for the
religious-ethical forces of the world.
Jesus apparently began his career as a disciple of John.
But while he was well acquainted with the Baptist's con-
ception of the kingdom of God, he seems to have had no
intimate personal intercourse with him. He began his own
preaching after John's arrest ; and it was in prison that
John's attention was for the first time directed to the work
of the new teacher. Jesus' idea of the divine kingdom was
substantially the same as that of his predecessor. Both laid
the chief stress on moral reformation within the Jewish
nation ; both contemplated the maintenance of the national
organization and the perfecting of the nation into an in-
strument for the establishment of the kingdom. But if the
two men started together, their paths soon diverged. The
profounder spirituality of Jesus led to an independence of
thought and teaching which overshadowed and obliterated
the work of the older man. Jesus himself retained the deep-
est respect for John, though he came to regard his work as
preparatory and temporary (Matt. xi. 7-19). The defects of
340 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
John's teaching will be apparent from the statement of the
characteristics of the work of Jesus.
The movement which Jesus began was distinctly and pre-
dominatingly a moral-spiritual one. From all his utterances
we may infer that he held the one need of the times to be
ethical regeneration, and that he conceived this regeneration
from a religious point of view as resting on a friendly rela-
tion of the soul with God. From the beginning to the end
of his career, he insisted almost exclusively on sincere love
of goodness with single-minded regard for the approbation
of the heavenly Father. He exposed with a word the moral
sophistries of the scribes ; he made clear the distinction be-
tween the ethical and the ceremonial ; he denounced hy-
pocrisy and time-serving ; he pointed out the weakness of
imperfect moral principle, and he held up to view those
fundamental principles which were capable of deciding all
moral questions over against the perversions of custom and
casuistry and the feebleness of the human heart. His eth-
ical teaching may be regarded as summed up in the Sermon
on the Mount ; and the Sermon consists of ethical -religious
thought pervaded by the sentiment of loyalty toward God,
or rather of perfect trust in him and communion with him.
If a man so live, says Jesus, he shall be cared for by the
heavenly Father in this world and the next : " Seek ye first
his kingdom and his righteousness ; and all these things shall
be added " (Matt. vi. 33). Jesus regarded the essence of the
kingdom of heaven as consisting in the moral-spiritual life.
He differed from John in the emphasis which he laid on
the inner life, on complete oneness of spirit with God, out
of which naturally flowed the outward manifestation of good
works. This combination of the outward life with the in-
ward spirit is ultimately the same with Paul's conjunction
of faith and works, and with the conception in the Fourth
Gospel of regeneration of soul whereby one enters into the
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 341
kingdom of light. Only the idea of Jesus is simpler than
the others. He speaks of no theological or other unusual
revolution, but only of a new attitude of soul into which
the man comes by his own decision.
We are not here concerned, however, with the details of
Jesus' ethical-spiritual teaching. The point of interest is
to note that it is the summing-up of all that we find in
Old Testament and New Testament. The prophets had an-
nounced the moral basis of the true Israel, and the Epistles
portray the high ethical life as the fundamental character-
istic of the Church. In a few words Jesus has comprised
all that is essential in moral principle, and held it up as the
one necessary condition of perfected human society. Even
where he does not offer direct solutions of social-moral ques-
tions which have arisen since his time, he furnishes the prin-
ciples which contain the solution. His teaching stands apart
from the political and ecclesiastical relations which we find
elsewhere in the Bible. This last point, though hardly a fun-
damental one, may be exhibited a little more in detail.
We have already seen that the political element is prom-
inent in all pictures of the kingdom of God in the Jewish
literature from Daniel to the end of the first century of
our era. The nation was conceived of as a political unit,
and nothing but the maintenance of its political life was
dreamed of. The Messiah, it was held, would rule over a
nation happy in freedom and prosperity ; and, according to
one view, it was he who should hold the final judgment
which was to settle the destiny of all things. It is a fair
question whether or how far Jesus sympathized with this
circle of ideas ; and the records of his life, though not free
from the coloring of later generations, seem to yield a prob-
able answer. As a Jew and a man of his times we should
expect him to share the Messianic opinions of his people,
and there are indications that this he did in certain points.
342 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
But, on the other hand, it is evident from his words (taking
only those that are commonly agreed to belong to him) and
from the historical outcome of his work that he stood above
his times in the sense that he recognized and organized the
best elements of the world's current thought. If he did this
in the sphere of pure morals and religion, it is quite possi-
ble that he avoided the grosser part of the Jewish national
Messianic faith, and isolated and gave life to its essential
spiritual core ; and this is the conclusion to which several
sets of facts seem to point. In the first place, as is re-
marked above, his teaching, according to the records, is pre-
dominatingly ethical-spiritual. The impression made on us
is that it was this side of life that most deeply interested
him. He is intensely concerned to stimulate men to moral-
spiritual broadness and strenuousness. Such overweening in-
terest in the higher aspects of the individual and the national
life might be expected to carry with it indifference to the
lower. This is, however, only a presumption, not a conclu-
sive argument. It is conceivable that along with this ex-
alted conception of human capacity and function he might
have held to the current view of the national deliverance.
But we have from him, further, some tolerably specific utter-
ances on this point, especially in a series of sayings con-
tained in Mark x. (and Matt. xix. xx.). These are, indeed,
not entirely accordant one with another, and their precise
meaning is not in all cases plain ; but their general drift
may be recognized. He declares that the kingdom of God
must be received, not with warlike ardor, but with the
docility of a little child. Wealthy adherents are usually
welcomed by a political leader ; but he simply says in an
indifferent tone that it is very hard for a rich man to en-
ter the kingdom of God. Exactly what is meant by the
saying attributed to him, that those who had made sacrifices
in his cause should be amply compensated with friends and
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 343
worldly possessions, it is not easy to decide, especially as
persecution is included in the list of things to be expected,
and the "present time" is distinguished from the "coming
age," in which everlasting life is to be the portion of the
faithful ; but, in any case, it seems to be not a political
reward of which he is speaking. Finally, he declares that
eminence among his followers is to be of a character wholly
distinct from that of ordinary civil lordship, its condition
being humility and service. It is true that there are other
reported sayings of different import, particularly Matt. xix.
28, where it is promised that, when in the new order of
things (the "palingenesis") the Son of Man should be en-
throned as king, 1 the twelve disciples should exercise a quasi-
regal judgeship over the twelve tribes of Israel But this is
so distinctly contradictory in spirit of that other saying, "To
sit on my right hand and on my left is not mine to give"
(Matt. xx. 23 ; Mark x. 40), that it may reasonably be re-
garded as a gloss or interpretation put into the mouth of
Jesus by a writer who did not understand his words. Re-
wards in this life he may have promised ; but they seem to
be not the gifts of a worldly king, but the favors which
(as in Matt. vi. 33, and in the Old Testament) God bestows
on them that trust in him.
The public entry into Jerusalem, though apparently sug-
gested by the word of the prophet Zechariah, "Thy king
comes to thee," etc. (Zech. ix. 9), was obviously not meant
by Jesus to have political significance. It was intended as
an assertion of his Messianic office, and he followed it up
by entering the temple and driving out the money-changers,
1 The same phrase occurs in Enoch xlv. 3, in the description of the judg-
ment which is to usher in the final period of blessedness. The expression
was probably familiar to Jesus and his disciples as part of a current concep-
tion of the Messiah. The question is whether it is likely, from the testimony
of the documents, that Jesus employed it of himself. To the generation that
followed him such employment would seem perfectly natural.
344 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
a procedure in which he acted not as king but as prophet.
It is quite possible that the people had another idea, and
thought of him as a political leader (Mark xi. 810 ; xv.
1-20; cf. John vi. 15). But he gave no encouragement to
such a scheme. To the very end he held aloof from the
employment of physical force. When Judas came to. seize
him, one of Jesus' friends drew a sword and struck the
slave of the high-priest ; but this was his own act, and had
no consequences.
It seems clear, also, that he was looked on by the authori-
ties, both Roman and Jewish, as politically unimportant. It
was a restless, excitable time. There had been several up-
risings (Acts v. 36, 37), and the Eomans would be ready
enough to take note of signs of revolt ; but Pilate, who was
not slow to employ military force, treated Jesus as a harm-
less enthusiast, and with easy indifference ordered his exe-
cution as a convenient means of pleasing the multitude, with
whom he was not in good odor. The Pharisees also appear
to have feared him, not as a political Messiah, but as an
enemy of the Mosaic law (which they believed to be essen-
tial to the true life of the nation) and of the order of things
from which they derived their consideration. An attempt
was made by the Pharisees and the Herodians to entrap him
into an expression of disloyalty to the Roman government.
We know, said they, that you are concerned only for God's
truth. Is it lawful to pay tribute to the Roman government
or not? It was the burning question of the time. Should
the Jews acknowledge this foreign domination, or should
they rise in revolt against it ? Jesus, it is true, knew that
these men were not friendly to him, and only wished an
opportunity to catch him. If he had had political designs
he probably would not have expressed them on this occa-
sion ; but his answer, though entirely non-committal in form,
could only be understood as recognizing the lawfulness of
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 345
obedience to the existing government. He pointed to the
emperor's image on a coin, and declared that it was right
to render to the Eoman government and to God the obe-
dience which was the due of each. This is the tone of a
man who wished to hold himself aloof from political com-
plications. After his death his disciples occupied the same
position. Their presence in Jerusalem gave neither Eomans
nor Jews anxiety on political grounds. There is no sign of
political hopes or schemes among his followers in Jerusalem
or elsewhere. The natural explanation of this is that he
gave no. ground for such hopes in his teaching ; that he
taught only the moral regeneration of society through the
announcement of ethical-spiritual truth.
It is harder to decide whether he intended his teaching
to be limited to the Jews ; that is, whether, in harmony
with the old prophets and the body of the later literature,
lie regarded the Jewish nation as the necessary intermediary
between God and the rest of the world. Something like this
we should naturally infer from the story of the Syrophce-
nician woman (Mark vii. 27), to whom he is reported as
saying that it was not meet to take the children's bread and
cast it to the dogs. In the First Gospel, when the twelve
disciples are sent out to teach, they are charged not to go
to Gentiles or Samaritans, but only to Jews (Matt. x. 5, 6) ;
but this limitation is not found in Mark or Luke, and we
may suspect that it is the addition of a Judaizing editor.
On the other hand, he seems not to have confined himself
to Jewish territory, but went wherever he had opportunity
(Mark vii. 24, 31). The baptismal commission, indeed, con-
taining the command to preach to all the nations, does not
belong to his teaching proper, but represents the idea of the
succeeding generation. Of the same nature, perhaps, is the
saying reported in the First Gospel, that many should come
from the east and the west to sit down with Abraham, Isaac,
346 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
and Jacob, while the sons of the kingdom should be cast
forth (Matt. viii. 11, 12) ; yet this may be interpreted as
meaning, in the sense of the old prophets, that members of
other peoples should accept the instruction of Israel, while
a portion of the chosen nation should be rejected. And
here, probably, we find a suggestion of Jesus' position on
this point. His mind filled with the prophetic thought,
which conceived of Israel as the centre of enlightenment
for the world, it would be natural for him to regard Jewish
territory as the starting-point for the religious reconstruction
of society. Such was the view of the Old Testament and
of the succeeding literature. Salvation was held to be of
the Jews (John iy. 22) , only through the Jewish nation
as intermediary was it thought possible that other nations
could obtain the knowledge of saving truth. Such an opin-
ion all the conditions of his training would lead him tp
hold ; and that this was really his view may with some
probability be inferred from the position of the disciples
just after his death, among whom the idea of preaching
directly to the Gentiles did not easily find entrance. If
he had expressed himself in a universal way, if he had
habitually or often spoken of the immediate appeal to the
non-Jewish world, these men who had been for several
years in intimate association with him would have caught
some of this spirit. Their Jewish prejudice was no doubt
at the beginning intense ; but it would have yielded to re-
peated instructions on the part of the Master whom they
revered as a heaven-sent prophet. At the outset they showed
not the slightest trace of any such idea. It was Paul, the
man who had had no association with Jesus, and in his
writings almost ignores his life and teaching, who com-
pletely idealized the person of Jesus from a theological
point of view, it was this outsider, as he may be called,
who conceived and carried out the idea that the announce-
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 347
ment of the Gospel to the Gentile world was to be made
a direct object of effort. This idea he seeins not to have
got from Jesus.
Yet it is conceivable that the Master chose not to bur-
den his disciples with instructions for the far future, hold-
ing that his immediate mission was to Israel. We must
believe, indeed, that he expected the ultimate complete tri-
umph of the kingdom of God: such is the teaching of the
prophets. But whether he looked to a gradual process of
moral leavening by the proclamation of the truth, or to a
physical divine intervention, which should coerce alien na-
tions, this we have no means of determining with absolute
certainty. We can only say that if he conceived of the uni-
versality of the Gospel in the Pauline sense, it is strange
that they so completely misunderstood him, and that it
afterward required so long and hard a struggle to establish
this idea in the Church. It seems more probable that his
conception of direct reformatory work was limited to the
Jewish nation.
It is in harmony with this statement of his position that
he attempted no separate organization of his disciples. He
preached to the multitudes wherever he had opportunity,
and welcomed all who came to him with serious purpose.
He selected a few of the more receptive and earnest, and
attached them closely to his person. There is no sign of
real distinction between esoteric and exoteric teaching in
his life ; 1 but his intercourse with the inner circle of dis-
1 Such a distinction seems, indeed, to be affirmed in Mark iv. 11, Matt,
xiii. 11 , but the "mystery" which is there subsequently expounded is not
remarkable either morally-religiously or historically. That is, the ethical part
of the explanation of the parables does not differ in spirit and content from
other sayings (as the Sermon on the Mount) which appear to have beeu
addressed to the people at large ; and what relates to the gradual develop-
ment and final establishment of the kingdom of God was neither difficult to
understand nor strange to the current ideas of the time. There is a differ-
ence between the reports of this group of parables in Mark and in Matthew;
348 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
ciples was naturally freer and fuller than with the others,
and to them, we may suppose, he confided more of the con-
tent and spirit of his doctrine. They all remained simply
members of the Jewish people, professing faith in Moses
and practising all the requirements of the Law. He never
spoke of his disciples as forming a sect or party, never estab-
lished separate synagogues nor held separate religious meet-
ings, never appointed officers nor suggested that they be
thereafter appointed. After his death, the disciples were
gradually forced into a separate organization ; but the book
of Acts gives no hint that they derived the details or the
idea itself from him. The word " church '' does indeed occur
twice in the First Gospel, but in passages which appear to
be later additions. The declaration that the Church is to
be founded on Peter (Matt. xvi. 18) is not given in any of
the other Gospels, and appears to be an insertion introduced
for the purpose of exalting the authority of Peter. It is
not quite in accord with Jesus' attitude toward Peter else-
where in the Gospels. The provision made for dealing with
a perverse brother (Matt, xviii. 17), who, if he refuse to lis-
ten to the Church, is to be treated as a heathen and a pub-
lican, stands so completely isolated, and is so much out of
harmony with other teachings of Jesus, that it also may be
regarded as the insertion of a succeeding generation. It is
noteworthy that the Synoptic Gospels have nothing to say
of baptism in the ministry of Jesus. He himself is said to
have been baptized by John ; but there is no mention of
the ceremony's having been performed by himself or by his
disciples, and in the Fourth Gospel (John iv. 2) it is said
that Jesus himself did not baptize, but left this work to his
Mark is simply ethical, Matthew largely eschatological. But even such a
parable as that of the tares (Matt. xiii. 24-30, 37-43, which looks like an
eschatological recension of Mark iv 26-29) finds a parallel in Enoch xlv.-liv.
Jesus appears to have spoken freely to the people on the highest things, and
his parables are said (Mark xii. 12) to have been intelligible to the Pharisees.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 349
disciples. Considering the importance which was afterward
attached to this ceremony as the rite introductory to mem-
bership in a church (the fact embodied in the baptismal
commission, Matt, xxviii. 19), it is strange that it should be
entirely ignored by the Synoptics if Jesus had really thought
of establishing a new ecclesiastical organization, initiation
into which was announced by the ceremony of baptism. We
have to conclude that he looked to a reformation within
the body of Judaism, whence other nations were to be ulti-
mately won over. He had faith, it would seem, in the pos-
sibilities of the Jewish nation. It would be hard to surmise
what the result would have been if his disciples had con-
tinued his work in his spirit. Such was not to be the case.
The increasing prominence given to the spiritual and non-
nomistic elements of his teaching, and the conversion of
Gentiles who had no sympathy with the Jewish national
feeling, forced his disciples to assume an independent posi-
tion. If they had remained simply members of the Jewish
nation, they might have done much in the way of moral-
spiritual reform ; but it is, to say the least, very doubtful
whether Judaism could ever have been fashioned into an
instrument for reconstructing the world. National particu-
larism was too deeply ingrained in the Jewish life to permit
the emergence of a purely religious principle of universal
character. It was necessary that the spiritual should be vio-
lently severed from the national-ceremonial ; and this was
effected, not by Jesus himself, but by the course of events
after his death. He announced the spirit and the ethical
content of a new world-religion ; it was left to later needs,
embodied chiefly in the person of Paul, to isolate this spirit
and this content from local-national life, and so to fix it in
a theological framework and an ecclesiastical organization
that it might commend itself to all the world. But whether
Jesus contemplated a Church is a question of secondary in-
350 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
terest ; the main thing is that he laid hold of the highest
ethical-spiritual thought, extricated it from disturbing for-
malities, and clothed it with a powerful spirit of conse-
cration to God and to humanity. Out of this the Church
naturally sprang.
If, then, Jesus did not contemplate a political kingdom,
and did not attempt to form an ecclesiastical organization,
what was his conception of the final outcome of his move-
ment ? And first, what was his conception of his own posi-
tion ? Did he regard himself as the promised Messiah ? and
if so, what was the function which he assigned himself ?
That the people and the disciples looked on him as the
Messiah may be inferred from a number of incidents given
in the Mark-Gospel (Bartimseus, the public entry, the trial,
x. xi. xiv.), and from the testimony of the two men in
Luke xxiv. He made no protest against this assumption,
and is said (Mark xiv. 62) to have answered with a decided
affirmative when officially asked by the high-priest if he
laid claim to such a character. According to the Synoptics
(Mark viii. 29 ; Matt. xvi. 17 ; Luke ix. 20), he did at a cer-
tain point in his career definitely announce himself to his
disciples as the Christ. He first asked them as to the cur-
rent opinions about him. They replied that some held him
to be John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah
or one of the prophets : whence we may infer that his per-
son and work had produced a great impression on the pop-
ular imagination, so that he was taken to be some important
personage, but not the Messiah. His bearing did not cor-
respond to the popular conception of the great deliverer.
When he turned to the disciples and asked whom they took
him to be, Peter, apparently acting as spokesman for all,
answered that he was the Christ. Jesus accepted the an-
swer, charged them that they should tell no one, and pro-
ceeded to open their eyes to the fate which awaited him.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 351
He was to be rejected, he said, by the leaders of the people,
and finally to be put to death. Such a communication was
naturally surprising to these men, and Peter began a violent
protest against such a Messianic scheme ; but his outbreak
was sternly repressed by Jesus, who pointed out that Peter
spoke from an earthly point of view, and from ignorance of
the true nature and demands of the new dispensation.
There seems to be no reason why we should not accept
this narrative as giving substantially Jesus' final view of his
own career. Whether or not this particular incident hap-
pened just as it is reported, it doubtless presents the gist
of what the Master said at various times. From it we may
conclude that there was a definite moment when he was
formally recognized by his disciples and by himself as the
promised Messiah, and when at the same time he felt that
his construction of the Messianic mission was very differ-
ent from that which prevailed among the Jewish people of
all classes. We should also naturally infer that previous
to the announcement at Csesarea Philippi nothing had been
said of a Messianic claim on his part. Either he had made
no such claim even in his own mind, or, holding himself
to be the Messiah, had remained silent till the disciples
should be able through his instructions to receive the sur-
prising and revolutionary announcement which he had to
make. The former supposition seems the more probable.
He is represented as always speaking very freely to his dis-
ciples ; and it does not appear why he should have kept
back the statement of his claim. It could not have been
in order to wait till they were ready, for when he at last
spoke they were utterly unprepared for the idea of the Mes-
sianic work which he announced. Further, in the accounts
of his ministry preceding the incident at Cassarea Philippi,
he is represented as a teacher and healer ; and there is no
indication that he thought of himself otherwise than as a
352 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
moral-religious reformer. The probability is. then, that he
came gradually to think of himself as the deliverer prom-
ised by the prophets. His meditation on the promises of
the Old Testament and on the existing moral-religious lacks
of the nation, combined with his consciousness of spiritual
insight, with the conviction that he had laid hold of the
great life-giving principles of religion, might lead him to
believe that God had chosen him to initiate the new era
of spiritual purity and salvation. His reflection would also
lead him to see that the role of the deliverer could not be
one of physical force ; and above all, the portraiture of the
servant of Yahwe in Isa. liii., where the path to triumph
leads through suffering and death, might have forced on
him the conviction that such was to be the nature of his
career. After a while, indeed, his own surroundings would
suggest something of this sort. The hostility of the re-
ligious leaders of the people became constantly more pro-
nounced and more bitter, and he knew that if he remained
faithful to his convictions he should antagonize the repre-
sentatives of Mosaic orthodoxy more and more. He would
come to feel that there was a profound and irreconcilable
antagonism between his spirit and the spirit of the times.
Such a feeling he more than once expressed (Mark viii. 31;
ix. 12 ; x. 45).
It is doubtful in what light he looked on his own death,
what significance he attached to it. The fifty-third chap-
ter of Isaiah represents the death of the servant of Yahwe
as vicarious and expiatory in the general sense that God
accepts the life of his pure and perfect servant in lieu of
the punishment which would naturally fall on his erring
people. Such may have been the view of Jesus ; such is
the general meaning of his declaration (Mark x. 45) that
he came to give his life a ransom for many. He had a
lofty consciousness of power ; he may have felt that the
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 353
sacrifice of his life was an essential step toward the estab-
lishment of his doctrine. But it would be only in a gen-
eral sense that he would regard his death as expiatory,
the sense in which suffering in general is looked on in the
Old Testament as an atonement (as in Tsa. xl. 2) ; and from
the meagreness of the data, we must remain in doubt as to
the precise nature of this feeling. The saying quoted above
is the only one given in the Gospel of Mark in which he
refers to this point. In the connection he is speaking only
of service as the mark of greatness for his disciples ; and
he adds, in order to set them an example, that he himself
came not to be ministered to, but to minister. The con-
cluding clause, "and to give his life a ransom for many,"
is not quite in the line of the preceding remarks. It may
have been uttered by him as the expression of the cul-
mination of his ministry, or it may have been added at a
later time, when the belief in the expiatory character of
his death had become fixed. No such view is hinted at
in the Sermon on the Mount. If Jesus really held it, it
did not belong to his earlier teaching, but was reached by
his later reflection called forth by the continually thicken-
ing dangers that surrounded him, and his prevision of his
tragic end.
Another conception of his mission is perhaps given by
the title "Son of Man," by which he preferred to desig-
nate himself. This expression occurs first in the book of
Ezekiel. It is the prophet's standing name for himself.
The Hebrew term means simply " human being ; " and the
prophet's purpose seems to have been to express his con-
viction of his own littleness and weakness in the presence
of the Almighty God. He at the same time thus sets forth
the feebleness of humanity in general ; but his primary feel-
ing apparently was that he himself, called by God to an-
nounce his will, was in himself only dust and nothingness
23
354 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
and entitled to recognition only as the messenger and mouth-
piece of the Most High. In Dan. vii 13 the "Son of Man"
means (as in Ezekiel) merely humanity, and represents the
nation Israel, conceived of as the prophet or human in-
terpreter and representative of God, the favored bearer of
the divine truth, and inheritor of the divine blessing. The
nation, or rather the faithful part of it, is thought of as
morally and religiously pure ; but the ethical side of the
picture is obscured by the eschatological. In the Enoch-
Parables it is a title of the Messiah, doubtless derived from
Ezekiel and Daniel, especially from the latter, of whose
text (Dan. vii.) the description in Enoch xlv. xlviii. is an
interpretation. The Aramaic dialect, which was probably
the language of Jesus and his disciples, employs the same
expression for " human being." Jesus may have used it in
the moral sense which Ezekiel attaches to it, to repre-
sent himself as the envoy and spokesman of God, by whose
authority he acted, without whose aid he was nothing. It
would thus be the expression of the feeling both of weak-
ness and of power : of weakness, inasmuch as humanity in
itself is weak ; of power, inasmuch as humanity inspired
by God is strong. Though primarily the synonym of human
impotency, it embodies also the profound sense of oneness
with God and the appropriation of the divine potency. It is
possible, however, that it had become at this time (through
Daniel and Enoch) a specific and technical title for the Mes-
siah, 1 and that Jesus so uses it of himself. In that case, that
it is put into his mouth (Mark ii. 10, 28) before his declara-
tion of his Messiahship to his disciples (Mark viii. 27-30)
may be explained by the fact that it later became a familiar
name for him, and might be proleptically ascribed to him
1 If so, it would have a peculiar significance in such utterances as Mark ii.
10, 28, viii. 31, which might then be regarded as defining the Messianic func-
tion in general.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 355
even at the beginning. The content of the term, as employed
by him, must of course be defined, not simply or chiefly by
the preceding or current usage, but by his own words.
Thus far we have noticed only the moral-spiritual ele-
ments of Jesus' consciousness and of his construction of
the kingdom of God. That kingdom he conceived to be pri-
marily the sincere righteousness of the soul based on and
identical with loving trust in God and imitation of him.
His mission on earth he believed to be the announcement
and exemplification of the new moral-spiritual order of
things. The forces to which he appealed were ethical and
religious ; the consummation to which he looked was moral
perfection. What, then, was his conception of the historical
unfolding and completion of the new dispensation, or in
other words, his idea of the destiny of the world ? Did
he think merely of a gradual development of society under
the control of moral-religious forces, or was there in his
view an historical culmination which was to set a limit
to the world's moral history ? And if there were such a
culmination, did he think of it as far off or near, and what
position therein did he assign himself? If we are to follow
the Synoptics, we shall have to believe that he looked for a
speedy judgment, whereby he himself, invested with super-
natural power, should usher in the completed and ever-
lasting kingdom of God. According to this view, there were
two stages of this kingdom, the one belonging to the pres-
ent, the other to the future. These are elsewhere in the
New Testament designated as "this or the present age or
world," and " the age or world to come." The work of the
present age would then be considered as merely preparatory,
the period of the growing crop ; the future judgment was
the reaping, when the wheat should be separated from the
tares, and perpetual stability guaranteed to the society of
the elect servants of God. This conception existed in the
356 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
time of Jesus, for it is found in Enoch and the Sibyl, and
more fully in the New Testament Apocalypse. It is given
substantially in the Second Gospel : " Whoever shall be
ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and
sinful generation, the Son of Man also shall be ashamed
of him when he comes in the glory of his Father with the
holy angels. . . . There are some here of those that stand
by who shall in no wise taste of death till they see the
kingdom of God come with power " (Mark viii. 38 ; ix. 1).
The necessary inference from this passage would be that
Jesus expected to come in person, attended by angels, to es-
tablish the new dispensation of things in final form. The
same conclusion would follow from the parable of judgment
(Matt. xxv. 31-46), where a separation is made between the
righteous and the wicked of all nations, the former being
sent away into eternal life, the latter into eternal punish-
ment. The ground of distinction between the two classes is
devotion to the person of the judge, only this devotion is
shown by care for his people in this world. The historical
consummation is definite and permanent ; the fate of men
is decided at once and forever. The present kingdom of
God passes into the everlasting world of the future, and
good and bad moral qualities, with their retributions, are
permanently fixed without possibility of change.
It is difficult to decide whether Jesus taught this doc-
trine in whole or in part. Though it certainly does not be-
long to the same stratum of thought as the ethical teaching
of the Sermon on the Mount and similar passages, it does
not necessarily exclude such ideas. 1 The conception of a
final judicial determination of the fate of men has been held
from the days of the old prophets till now, in conjunction
with the recognition of individual moral development and
responsibility. The belief in a divine judgment which was
1 A judgment is suggested in Matt. vii. 22, 23.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 357
to close the existing order of things and introduce the era
of Israel's blessedness was well established in the first cen-
tury of our era. It is found in Daniel, Enoch, the Sibyl,
Second Maccabees, and the Psalter of Solomon. In some
of these writings, as we have seen, it is God, in others it
is the Messiah, that is to be the judge. 1 There was nothing
in the intellectual conditions or the beliefs of the time to
make such a conception of himself impossible or difficult
for a great ethical teacher. It might be supposed that such
an one would then have to think of himself as more than
human ; but this was neither necessary nor probable. He
might be chosen and his name called by God before the
world was created ; so say the Enoch-Parables (xlviii. 3, 6)
and the Talmud (Ber. Rab. 1). Such an idea was suggested
by such passages as Mic. v. 2 (1), Isa. ix. 6 (5), Ps. Ixxii. 17.
He might be appointed to corne in power and glory to judge
the world (so Enoch and the Talmud). But God, it was
held, could endow a prophet with such powers and func-
tions ; and Jewish monotheistic thought seems always to
have conceived of the Messiah both as completely subor-
dinate to the Supreme Being and as an Israelite in origin
and nature. It is thus in itself neither impossible nor im-
probable that such a statement as that of Mark viii. 38
(that the Son of Man should come in the glory of his Father
with the holy angels) should represent the real idea of Jesus.
Even the declaration of the next verse (Mark ix. 1), that
this glorious coming should take place in that generation,
cannot be said to be impossible for him, however much we
may feel disposed to reject it as out of accord with his moral
1 God himself is judge in Mai. iv. (Heb. in. 19-24), Joel iii. (Heb. iv.),
Ps. xcvi. xcviii., Dan. vii , Enoch xc., Sibyl iii. 669 ff., 56, Psalms of Solo-
mon, passim, 2 Mac. vi. vii. ; the Messiah in the Enoch-parables xlv. li.
Ixix. The latter view seems thus to have come into existence shortly before
the beginning of our era. The Talmud also appears in some passages to
regard God, in others the Messiah, as the judge. Weber, " System," 88.
358 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
elevation ; his ethical purity and greatness are independent
of all such local opinions. The subsequent history of his
disciples does not prevent our attributing such views to him.
The account in Luke xxiv. describes their expectations only
in the most general terms. They hoped that it was he that
should redeem Israel. Their conduct after his death shows
that they were at first grievously disappointed by that event,
and the belief that he would speedily appear as judge seems
to have been general in the first century (1 Thess. iv. 15-17 ;
1 Cor. xv. 51, 52 ; Jas. v. 8 ; 1 Pet. iv. 7). How, it may be
asked, can we account for these statements of the Gospels
and Epistles except on the supposition that they rest on a
true tradition of his sayings ? It may be supposed that
such utterances belong to the latter part of his career. Be-
ginning, like John, simply as a moral-religious reformer and
proclaimer of the coming kingdom of God, he may, as his
conviction of his Messianic character became stronger, have
appropriated the current ideas of a Messianic judicial parou-
sia. In the Gospels the discourses delivered after the an-
nouncement at Csesarea Philippi have a decidedly distincter
eschatological tone than those which precede.
On the other hand, this pronounced tone may be satisfac-
torily accounted for by the supposition that utterances of the
Master of a general character were afterward interpreted, ex-
panded, and colored in the light of subsequent events. The
date at which our present Synoptic Gospels were put into
shape (after the destruction of Jerusalem) was late enough
to allow a considerable growth of legendary material. The
person of Jesus was gradually idealized. At first prophet
and Jewish Messiah (Mark viii. ; Luke xxiv.), he became
the Lord (Jas.), set forth by his resurrection as Son of God
(Kom. i.), soon to come as judge (2 Cor. v. 10), destined to
reign in heaven till all his enemies should be subdued, then
to deliver up his delegated authority to God (1 Cor. xv. 24-
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 3G9
28). If such a conception of Jesus had become general in
the Church by the year 70, it would be natural that it
should appear in the Gospels. The pictures of his royal
and judicial functions in Epistles and Gospels belong to
the same circle of ideas. They differ in certain details, but
not more than we should expect from the diversities of dif-
ferent sections of the Church. In one point they all agree,
that the coming of the Lord would not be delayed. The
details of his coming might have been supplied from cur-
rent Jewish ideas. There may have been a basis in his
words for the later accounts. He may have spoken of a
coming age of blessedness, which he as Messiah should in-
troduce, and of a judgment to be held by God. Out of such
material, the general sense of which would remain distinct
in the memory of the disciples, the later tradition might
then have built up the discourses in the form in which we
now have them.
To many persons it may seem that the atmosphere of the
discourses in question is rather that of the Epistles than that
of the life of the Master in the simplest form in which the
Synoptics give it. If we follow him along the line of his
ethical-religious teaching from the beginning till his death,
we have a picture of lofty moral simplicity and devotion
which may appear to be marred by the introduction of these
details of judgment. The moral-spiritual orderliness and pro-
found sobriety of his ideas would, it might be supposed, put
him out of sympathy with the mechanical side of the cur-
rent conceptions respecting the kingdom of righteousness.
It has already been pointed out that such considerations can-
not be decisive from either the historical or the psychological
point of view. These mechanical conceptions were held by
his contemporaries, and afterward by his disciples, and may
have been held by him. It does not seem possible to de-
termine from our data whether he held them or not. The
360 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
acceptance of such ideas carried along with it the suppo-
sition of something supernatural, not necessarily in the per-
son of the Messiah, but certainly in his history. This also
was in consonance with the beliefs of the age, and need not
have been repugnant to him. In fine, the opinions of that
time concerning the historical setting of the moral-spiritual
kingdom of God must be put into the same category with
the opinions respecting the material of what we call the sci-
ences. Their relation to moral clearness and purity was of
the same sort as that of the current ideas of geography,
astronomy, and biblical exegesis. The power of the founder
of Christianity was in his moral personality and his con-
ception of a thoroughly spiritual society, just as the power
of the prophets lay in the religious purity of their ideas,
in spite of their vain hopes of political sovereignty. The
local setting of the ideas respecting the perfect society has
changed from age to age ; the moral essence remains. The
Church of to-day has given up the special historical hope
of the Church of the first century. The moral spiritual
teaching of Jesus, resting on his past and reflecting the
best thought of his contemporaries, has maintained itself
to the present day without having found its realization in
social life.
A word may be said about the eschatological discourses
in the Synoptics (Matt. xxiv. ; Mark xiii. ; Luke xxi.), which
seem to give a date for the final consummation. That they
were not delivered by Jesus in the form in which we now
have them may probably be inferred from the consideration
already mentioned, that the disciples for some time after
his death show no knowledge of their contents. The occa-
sion of the main discourse is the remark of Jesus that the
temple should be so destroyed that not one stone should
be left on another. His disciples ask when that should be.
Jesus replies by giving the premonitory signs of the catas-
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 361
trophe : there were to be false Christs, wars and rumors
of wars, earthquakes and famines ; his followers were to be
persecuted, and his gospel was to be preached to all the
nations. The sign of the end is the desecration of the tem-
ple ; after which the heavenly bodies should be darkened,
and then the Son of Man would come in clouds. The allu-
sion to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Eomans is evi-
dent ; and this brief apocalyptic discourse seems to have been
written at a time when it was supposed that the coming of
the Lord would not be greatly delayed after the fall of the
holy city. It belongs also, we may infer, to the period when
the principle that the gospel was to be preached to the Gen-
tiles had been widely accepted, a conception foreign to the
thought of the first disciples. It is also to be noted that
the redaction of the discourse in Matthew shows certain dif-
ferences from the accounts in Mark and Luke ; and though
these are not very important, they suggest the work of dif-
ferent hands. 1 It is possible that Jesus said something about
the future, some brief word out of which these discourses
were expanded. This supposition is, indeed, not necessary to
account for their existence. It was a time of apocalypses.
Nothing would be more natural than that some disciple
should set forth his idea of the end, and should put it into
the mouth of the Master, just as similar predictions had
been assigned to Daniel, Enoch, and Moses. It was not lack
of reverence for these men that led writers of that period
1 Verse 20, the " Sabbath " indicates an observance of the Jewish cere-
monial law ; verses 26-28 are minutely descriptive of the manner of the
Messiah's appearance (and at the same time give hints of current opinions
as to the place at which he would show himself) ; verse 30, "All the tribes
of the earth shall mourn " recalls various Old Testament passages, such as
Amos viii. 8 ; ix. 5 ; Hos. iv. 3 ; Jer. iv. 28 ; and cf. Sibyl iii. 558, "All souls
of men shall deeply sigh." The details of verses 37-51 differ considerably
from the corresponding passages in Luke and Mark. The recension of Luke
also has its peculiarities : in general it is marked by more literary finish and
less regard for details.
362 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
to make them mouthpieces of their own reflections. On the
contrary, the desire was to gain the authority attaching to
their names. We have, in all probability, in these Synop-
tical pieces, opinions of a later generation. It must be left
undecided whether and how far the discourses are built up
on real words of Jesus. He may or may not have said some-
thing looking to a temporal definition of his coming. 1 In any
case, the present form of the discourses seems to be late.
Little need be said of the succeeding history, during the
first century, of the Christian conception of the kingdom of
God. It was soon practically absorbed in the general ad-
vance of Christian life, and ceased to have definite influence.
After the death of Jesus, his speedy coming was looked for-
ward to as the relief from present suffering and the in-
troduction to perfect blessedness (James v. 7, 8). A more
developed view of the parousia is given in the Second Epis-
tle to the Thessalonians (i. 6-10), a picture which agrees
almost exactly with that of the Synoptics : the Lord Jesus
is to be revealed from heaven in flaming fire, rendering ven-
geance to unbelievers and rest to the saints. Substantially
the same conception is found in First Corinthians (xv. 23-
28, 51-55). The succeeding Epistles of Paul have less defi-
nite references to the coming of Christ, nor is it elsewhere
prominent in the New Testament except in Second Peter and
Eevelation. Everywhere it is looked forward to as deliv-
erance from the present distress, and is used as the occasion
of ethical exhortation. The coming of the Lord, it was be-
lieved, would end the existing dispensation, and introduce
the reign of the saints. But meantime life went on, and
1 The statement (given in Mark and Matthew, but not in Luke) that the
day of the coming was known neither to angels nor to Messiah, but only to
God, is difficult, since the rest of the discourse shows accurate knowledge
of the time. Such a statement is more suitable for one who, looking con-
fidently for an impending event, is uncertain of the precise day, than for one
who is making a definite prediction a considerable time beforehand.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 363
the expectation of this speedy change in no wise led to a
relaxation of moral rules, but rather incited men so to live
that the Lord at his coming might find them faithful
and worthy to be members of his righteous kingdom. The
coming of the kingdom was something to be hoped for
and prayed for. Every day the petition was to be put up,
" Thy kingdom come ; " and this was synonymous with the
other petition, " Thy will be done." Few details are given
in the New Testament. The old Israelitish conception of
the temporal kingdom of Israel passed gradually away ;
it was swallowed up in the larger idea of the redeemed
people of the kingdom of God of all nations ushered into
a spiritual blessedness which was not bounded by space
or time.
There were attempts in the first century to define with
precision the time of the second coming of Christ. We
have already seen that the great apocalyptic discourse in
the Synoptics looks to the destruction of Jerusalem by the
Eomans as the turning-point in the history of the world.
This discourse must have been composed or finally redacted
about the time of the fall of the holy city. Important
events of this sort have in all ages excited the imagina-
tion of pious men and led to theories of the final consum-
mation of things. Another great fact which before this
had seemed to many to give the clew to the mystery was
the Roman Empire. At first indifferent, the Roman gov-
ernment had come to be a persecutor. The frightful bar-
barities of Nero had lifted him to the bad eminence of an
anti-Christ. The Jews had a similar feeling. In the Tal-
mud, Edom, the bitterest and most hated enemy of the old
Israel, stands for Rome (Weber, " System," 81). In the
New Testament Apocalypse, the Empire is represented by
Babylon, whose haughtiness, cruelty, and appalling destruc-
tion are celebrated in glowing words in the Old Testament.
364 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
The destruction of Rome is the point to which the author
looks forward as the immediate introduction to the estab-
lishment of the kingdom ; the latter event follows imme-
diately on the former (Rev. xviii. xix.). The destruction
of the city is preceded by the appearance of a beast (xiii.),
who blasphemes God, makes war on the saints, and is wor-
shipped by all that dwell on the earth except those whose
names are written in the book of life. This beast is after-
ward explained (xvii.) to be a Roman emperor, the eighth in
the line, yet of the seven first. The reference is most prob-
ably to Nero, the fifth of the series, counting Augustus as
the first ; and the representation proceeds on the supposition
that Nero, though dead, will live again. There is reason to
believe that the reappearance of the dead emperor was ex-
pected. 1 Apparently, therefore, the scheme of the author of
this portion of the book of Revelation is that the Emperor
Nero was to return to power, exalt himself as an object
of worship, and inflict great suffering on the saints; and
then the great city was to be destroyed and the kingdom
of Christ established (xix ). Such seems also to be the con-
ception of the enigmatical passage in Second Thessalonians
(ii.), in which the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ arid the
gathering of his people are spoken of. The Lord's coming
is to be preceded by an apostasy and the revelation of the
man of lawlessness or sin, a mysterious person who exalts
himself against all that is called God or is an object of
worship, and by his signs and lying wonders deceives those
who love not the truth. The portraiture here corresponds
so exactly to that in the Apocalypse that we may with prob-
ability suppose the man of lawlessness to be the Emperor
Nero. But there is something that restrains his appearance
1 For the evidence see Renan, " L'Antechrist." The number <>G6 assigned
to the beast (Rev. xiii. 18) has been variously explained, usually from some
name or epithet of Nero, sometimes as symbolical. See the commentaries.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 365
that must be removed before the son of perdition can be
manifested. What this restraining thing was we do not
know. The author of the Epistle speaks in a mysterious
undertone. He had told it to the brethren when he was
with them, and they, he says, are acquainted with it. It
is of no great importance for our purpose to determine what
this restraining thing or person was; the main point is
that the consummation is connected with the fortunes of
the Eoman Empire, and that it is to be expected speedily.
The Lord Jesus is to slay the lawless one with the breath
of his mouth. It is the opposition of Christ and anti-Christ,
germs of which are found in the Old Testament. It was a
natural feeling that the evil must go on increasing in in-
tensity, and that then, when it reached its highest point and
seemed intolerable, the interposition and deliverance should
come. 1 How far this particular view, which connected the
parousia with the fall of the Koman Empire, was held in
the early Church, it is hardly possible to say. After the
destruction of Jerusalem, when Nero did not appear, and
the Empire showed only increasing strength and prosperity,
other points of view had to be sought. The Church did not
cease to cherish the hope of the Lord's coming, but it was
less anxious to fix a definite date, 2 and rather devoted itself
to the cultivation of social virtues and the perfecting of its
organization. It gradually accepted its mission to dwell in
the world as a life-giving influence. As its membership in-
creased, its energies were absorbed in the care of the numer-
ous interests which it had gathered about itself. It was the
old temporal kingdom of Israel, with an invisible king and
a body of citizens who belonged to all the nations of the
1 So in Ezekiel, Daniel, and Enoch. The Antiochus of Daniel may have
suggested the Nero of the New Testament Apocalypse.
2 So much we may infer from the literature of the first century. Since
that time there have always been chiliastic or millenarian tendencies (nota-
bly A. D. 1000) but they have not been controlling points of view.
366 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
earth. Its conquests were of souls, and its aim was the sal-
vation of the world.
The change in the principle of membership was the most
important characteristic of the outward organization of the
Church. It was the sign of the advance from a national
to a universal form of religion. As we have already seen,
it is hard to say how far Jesus himself contemplated such
a broadening of membership in the earthly kingdom of God.
If we are to judge from the procedure of the disciples for
twenty years after his death, his attention was fixed mainly,
if not exclusively, on his own people. To the parent church
in Jerusalem it seemed a self-evident and fundamental prin-
ciple that entrance into the Christian community was pos-
sible only through Judaism. We read indeed (Acts x.) of
a special vision and revelation by which Peter was taught
that no man was to be called common or unclean, and in
consequence of which certain Gentiles to whom he preached
and who received the Holy Ghost were baptized and recog-
nized as Christians without having been circumcised. But
it is impossible to reconcile this account with subsequent
proceedings. The long fight which preceded the admission
of the right of Gentiles, as such, to membership in the
Church is unintelligible if Peter received so open and de-
cisive a declaration from heaven, and Paul knew of no mis-
sion of Peter to the Gentiles (Gal. ii. 7-9). We must regard
this narrative as the elaboration of a later tradition, which,
after Gentile membership had been fairly established, sought
to gain for it the authority of the name of the greatest
of the strictly Jewish apostles. The ground of the radical
change in the constitution of the Church is to be sought
in the circumstances of the times. A violent persecution
drove a number of the disciples out of Palestine into the
neighboring countries of Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Syria. Here
they preached the new faith, but at first to Jews only. At
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 367
Antioch, however, as it would seem, they were drawn into
addressing themselves to Greeks also, many of whom be-
lieved. How the question of admission into the Church was
at first solved in Antioch we are not informed ; but to this
city Paul was brought by Barnabas, labored there for a
year, and thence went out to proclaim the new faith in
Asia Minor. It was in another Antioch, in Pisidia, that
Paul and Barnabas took the decisive step of turning from
the Jews and addressing themselves directly to the Gen-
tiles ; and it was the entrance of a large body of Gentiles
into the Church which decided the question of the terms
of membership. Should these persons be forced to sub-
mit to the initiatory rite^of Judaism before they could be
esteemed worthy to be baptized into the faith of Jesus
Christ ? Paul faced the problem boldly, and with the prac-
tical judgment and fearless decision which so eminently
characterized him, determined that their faith in Jesus gave
them of itself full claim to the privileges of the Church.
This was the decisive step ; Christianity thus ceased to be
a Jewish sect, and became an independent religion which
offered itself to all men without distinction of nations. The
detailed history of this revolution has unfortunately not been
preserved. That there was a sharp conflict we know from
Paul's letters (Gal. ii. iv. ; 1 Cor. i.) and from hints in the
book of Acts (xv.). By the extreme conservatives, who in-
sisted on circumcision as a necessary preliminary to mem-
bership in the Christian Church, Paul seems to have been
looked on as a traitor to the national faith He persisted,
however, in his more liberal policy, and has himself de-
scribed (Gal. ii.) how he went up to Jerusalem with Bar-
nabas and Titus, met the chief men of the mother-church,
and there in spite of opposition obtained the indorsement
of the great apostles, James, Peter, and John, and the recog-
nition of the right of Gentiles to enter the Church without
368 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
first becoming Jews. And Paul was not content with this
admission ; he employed his sharp dialectic to show that
the insistence on circumcision for the Gentiles was incom-
patible with true faith in Christ, was a practical denial of
the completeness of Christ's redemption and of the suffi-
ciency of the grace of God, was, in a word, the aban-
donment of the spiritual religion of divine grace, and the
advocacy of the dead and deadly idea of salvation by
works. Thus he elevated universality of membership to the
rank of a fundamental principle of spiritual religion.
It has already been remarked that Paul gave to the
new faith that framework of religious dogma which was
essential to its continued existence and efficiency. He con-
nected salvation definitely with the glorified person of Jesus
as the Messiah. In detaching it from Judaism and se-
curing it independent organization, he provided the other
essential for a world-religion. It is in this sense that
Paul may be called the founder of Christianity as the
organized embodiment of the ideal kingdom of God. In
the higher sense that title belongs only to Jesus. Jesus
laid the foundations of a practically universal religious
community ; Paul narrowed the conception in a dogmatic
way. Jesus announced certain fundamental principles which
must always and everywhere determine the attitude of the
soul toward a personal God ; Paul attached these princi-
ples to a mass of dogma which essayed to define and ex-
plain them theologically. From the whole body of religious
thought which the Jewish people had worked out in the
long course of its religious experience Jesus selected that
part which was independent of national relations. He said
little or nothing of the Jewish code. He accepted it as a
fact, not undertaking to abrogate or even modify it, but
casting into its midst a body of spiritual-religious truth
which was independent of all codes, and which, if accepted
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 369
and acted on, would annul the evil of a formal code. Thus,
in one sense, as has already been pointed out, his scheme
of life was nomistic, in so far as it accepted the Mosaic law
as the rule of faith and practice. But on the other hand,
the exclusive prominence which he gave to spiritual doc-
trine might be relied on, if it were sincerely accepted, to
establish a new method of moral-religious life. The diffi-
culty was that men would be slow to accept it. So much
are men creatures of routine, so much under the domination
of mechanical rule, that it is always to be feared that the
outward will coerce and repress the inward. Spiritual truth
is dimmed and enfeebled by the presence of a great mass of
prescriptions. There is indeed no perfect escape from this
danger. Whatever the purity and force of the spiritual truth
which is committed to men, they will always do what they
can to enclose it in a framework of unspiritual dogma, and
in the conflict between the spiritual and the unspiritual
human weakness always gives the advantage to the latter.
The history of Christianity abounds in illustrations of this
tendency. The Church has at various times built up a
structure of beliefs and practices which for intricacy and
crushing power may fairly be compared with the tradi-
tional law of the Jews. Even in the first century, within
two generations after the death of the Master, the Church
had grown into a partially petrified organization. We
are not to regard the transition from Judaism to histori-
cal Christianity as the substitution of a perfect for an
imperfect form of religion, but as an advance from an im-
perfect to a less imperfect form, to one which permitted
that moral -spiritual truth which is the germ of all reli-
gions to assert itself with greater freedom and exert its
true influence more completely. For the Jewish scheme of
obedience to a mass of precepts Paul substituted faith in
Jesus as Redeemer, a vastly higher and freer conception ;
24
370 THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
yet even this, especially in its concomitants, speedily became
mechanicalized.
Christianity was a Jewish development ; but it was much
more. The conception of the earthly kingdom of God, as a
human organization, was, as we have seen, almost peculiar
to the Jews. Elsewhere it is found only in germinal form ;
but its essential elements are universal. It means the due
recognition of all the factors and relations of life, human
and divine, the highest refinement of ethical and religious
feeling and action. It must include the best thought of the
world, and can come truly into existence only by the co-
operation of all peoples and races. It is not exclusively
Jewish or Greek or Roman, but more than all this. The
ultimate aim of the world's life is the fusion of its high-
est ideas into a harmonious practical unity ; and it is the
great merit of Christianity to have taken a decided step in
preparation for this end. In the first century already the
Church showed an intermingling of Semitic and Hellenic
conceptions, both ethical and religious. 1 In the divine there
was majesty, justice, and love ; in the human there was the
recognition of the supremacy of conscience and the power
of sympathy and sweetness. This was in itself a great ad-
vance ; it was the partial fusion of two great masses of
human thought. But this is not all. The service that Chris-
tianity did was so to strip religion of local and anthropo-
morphic elements that all the Western world might in a
substantial way unite in working out the truly religious
life. The Old-World deadly isolation was done away with
(Eph. ii. 11-22), not completely and absolutely, but so
substantially as to mark an epoch in human history. There
remained localisms and anthropomorphisms whose removal
was to be left to the slow-moving moral forces of society ;
1 The Semitism, moreover, had already been affected by Persian thought.
Whether the Hellenism had felt the influence of Hindu ideas is doubtful.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 371
but the path was marked out, and the greatest obstacles
taken out of the way. Political unity had been achieved,
but complete harmony was impossible without religious one-
ness. Christianity offered what all could accept. By fur-
nishing a practical bond between nationalities it effected
what the Hellenic and Roman religions had proved them-
selves unable to effect. It was the fruit of a noble and
powerful eclecticism carried on by lofty spiritual thinkers.
It had its roots in the far past, but its special impulse came
from Jesus of Nazareth.
CHAPTER VII.
ESCHATOLOGY.
THE eschatological ideas of the New Testament offer
very little that can be considered an advance on the
current Jewish conceptions of the period. Such ideas by
their nature belong not to the spiritual kernel of religion,
but to its external dogmatic framework. From the point
of view of pure religion they are among the least influen-
tial and the least interesting of religious facts. They are
of importance, however, as showing how much of the ex-
isting dogma Christianity felt called on to accept in order
that it might become effective for that generation as well
as for many succeeding generations. We have to consider
the beliefs respecting immortality, resurrection, and the new
dispensation. The last of these is closely connected with
the doctrine of the Messiah, and has already been touched
on. Some points not before brought out may be here re-
ferred to. It is probably true of this whole circle of be-
liefs that only certain current phases of faith are mentioned
in the New Testament and in the immediately preceding
literature. It is hardly possible to give a complete history
of the eschatological ideas of the age, nor is this necessary
for our present purpose. They are interesting for us in so
far as they illustrate the moral-religious life of the time ;
that is, in the first place, as contributing an ethical factor,
and then as supplying what was regarded as a necessary
framework for religious life. It will be sufficient to refer
to certain prominent facts in the current belief. 1
1 In spite of a number of excellent works, German, French, and English,
a critical history of Jewish and Christian eschatology is still a desideratum.
ESCHATOLOGY. 373
1. Let us first notice the fuller sketch of the fortunes
of the earthly kingdom of God which is given in the
Apocalypse. The main point of this sketch is the double
judgment. The destruction of the Eoman Empire is fol-
lowed by the imprisonment of Satan for a thousand years
and by the first judgment. Those who had been beheaded
for the testimony of Jesus and had not worshipped the
beast that is, had not acknowledged the religious au-
thority of the Empire are restored to life (the first res-
urrection), and reign with Christ a thousand years. At the
end of this millennium Satan is loosed from prison, and
advances at the head of the innumerable hosts of Gog and
Magog to attack the camp of the saints and the beloved
city. Fire descends from heaven and devours the anti-
godly army ; the devil is cast into the lake of fire along
with the beast and the false prophet (the political and re-
ligious enemies of the faith), and there they are to be tor-
mented for ever and ever. Thereupon follows the general
judgment, where every man is judged according to his
works, and whoever is not found written in the book of
life that is, is not a believer in Jesus is cast into
the lake of fire. Then the first heaven and the first earth
pass away, a new heaven and a new earth come, God makes
his dwelling with men, and from the eyes of his people all
tears are wiped away. There is a city, a new Jerusalem,
which shines with an everlasting divine light, and a life
radiant with everlasting divine blessedness.
It is evident that the body of this description is taken
from the books of Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Enoch. Ezekiel
(xxxviii. xxxix.) describes the great invasion of Gog, the
Prince of Magog (in the Apocalypse Gog becomes a nation),
which precedes the final blessed establishment of Israel in
its own land ; Isaiah portrays the blessedness of the new
heavens and the new earth which God will create for his
374 ESCHATOLOGY.
people, where weeping shall be no more heard, and God will
dwell with them forever (Ixv.) ; Enoch gives a picture of
the general judgment which is substantially the same as
that of the New Testament book (li. Ixii. Ixiii. xci.). How
the conception of two judgments arose it is less easy to say.
Perhaps the author of this passage of the Apocalypse, fol-
lowing Ezekiel, regarded the conflict with Magog as the
final struggle of the enemies of the people of God, 1 while
at the same time he was convinced that the fall of the
Roman Empire was in a decisive way to usher in the king-
dom of God. In order to reconcile these two views he may
then have conceived of an interval between the two events.
The first judgment was to introduce a real reign of the
saints, a period in which peace was secured by the im-
prisonment of the devil, 2 but during which earthly affairs in
general went on as before. Then comes the final judgment,
the destruction of death and Hades, 3 the final imprisonment
of Satan, the removal of all sinful elements from life, and
the establishment of a permanent existence of happiness for
the righteous.
Whether in this scheme and others of similar character
we are to see the coloring of Persian ideas, it is hardly pos-
sible to decide with certainty. The resemblances between
the Jewish and Persian eschatologies are striking, and the
general possibility, of Persian influence is proved by the
Jewish and Christian angelology and demonology ; but the
1 A Messianic interpretation of the invasion of Gog and Magog is given
in the Talmud (Weber, "System," 87). By some it is held to precede, by
others to follow, the reign of the Messiah.
2 The number 1,000 of the years of Satan's imprisonment was perhaps
suggested by Ps xc. 4, or it may be merely a natural expression of a long
space of time (cf. Ezekiel's employment of the same unit, Ezek. xlviii.).
8 So in 1 Cor. xv. 23-28. Here death is the last of the enemies that Christ
is to subdue when he shall come. Paul adds that the Messianic reign will
then come to an end, swallowed up in the reign of God. A similar view seems
to be given in Kev. xx. xxi.
ESCHATOLOGY. 375
late date of the present form of the Persian eschatological
writings (some centuries after the beginning of our era),
though they doubtless rest on earlier beliefs, makes it pre-
carious to assume that these ideas affected the Jews so
early as the second or first pre-Christian century, when
Jewish Messianic systems first make their appearance. Fur-
ther, the Jewish development would seem to be satisfac-
torily accounted for from the native material. On the other
hand, it is possible to suppose an influence in the opposite
direction, of Judaism and Christianity on Mazdeism. The
data seem insufficient to decide the question. If the ex-
istence of the Bundehesh scheme in the second century B. c.
could be made probable, we might suppose that it colored
the Jewish Messianic ideas somewhat as the Mazdean dual-
ism colored the idea of Satan. So far as regards the ma-
chinery of the New Testament Apocalypse, the dragon,
the beast, etc., this may be explained out of Jewish ma-
terial and the historical conditions of the first century. In
any case, the moral-religious ideas involved in the Messianic
eschatology are thoroughly Jewish and Christian. 1
The details of the picture belong to the thought of the
times. As a history of the future blessedness of the saints,
this passage has always awakened the interest and excited
the curiosity of the Church. By the author and many oth-
ers of that generation, doubtless, the fulfilment of the pre-
diction was believed to be imminent; but generation after
generation passed, the Eoman Empire remained as before,
and the time of fulfilment was deferred. So ever since in
every age there have been those who expected the speedy
coming of the Lord and the introduction of the final dis-
1 On the Persian eschatology, besides the works above mentioned, page
172, see the discussions of Roth, and compare works on the Jewish doctrine
of the Messiah. On the supposed composite Jewish and Christian consti-
tution of the Apocalypse, see the treatises of Vischer, Sabatier, and others. A
comparative history of Messianic ideas in all religions has yet to be written.
376 ESCHATOLOGY.
pensation of blessedness. The historical interpretation of
the various characters and events of the apocalyptic visions
has varied with the mutations of history ; but the confidence
as to the issue has not lessened among those who regarded
this book as a divinely revealed picture of the future. The
effect of this faith on the life of the Church has not been
great. It was an inheritance of Christianity from Judaism.
For the Jews it had a national-political significance, and it
was a transfer of the idea of earthly order to the scheme
of the universe. There was to be a final settlement, an en-
forced peace and stability, like that which a conqueror im-
poses on subject lands. In no other way could that age
conceive of the triumph of truth ; and the Christianity of
the first century naturally appropriated this mechanical gov-
ernmental view. The king of the Apocalypse rules with a
rod of iron ; and Paul conceives of the reign of the Mes-
siah as a warfare, he must reign till he has put all ene-
mies under his feet. Still, even in the first century this
aspect of the kingdom of God is gradually modified. The
spiritual gradually replaces the external ; the hope of the
Lord's earthly coming is more and more swallowed up in
the larger hope of heaven, the individual hope, the fulfil-
ment of which death brought to every believer. The expec-
tation of Christ's coming has been mainly a moral element in
Christianity. It has not affected the properly religious dogma
or the organization of the Church. It has sustained men in
adversity ; it has produced enthusiasm or fanaticism. It has
not quickened thought, or promoted real social-religious prog-
ress. For the first century it was probably valuable as an
outward support for the struggling and feebly founded faith
(Jas. v. 7 ; 1 Thess. iv. 13-18 ; v. 1-11 ; 2 Thess. i. 3-12 ; 1 Cor.
xv. 19 ; xvi. 22 ; 1 Pet. iv. 7-19 ; Rev. passim).
Its significance has become less and less ; that is, the
stress laid on the particular outward form has been grad-
ESCHATOLOGY. 377
ually diminishing, and Christian feeling has tended more
and more to emphasize the spiritual content of the idea.
The Church more and more holds itself to be the visible
kingdom of God on earth, its struggle and life to be spirit-
ual, its aim the regeneration of humanity ; and this result,
it holds, is to be effected by the employment of ordinary
ethical-spiritual agencies. The Church feels that its func-
tion is not to sit passively waiting for the Lord, but rather
to conquer the world for him. The germ of this conception
is found in the Old Testament ; it is the prophetic exhorta-
tion that Israel shall make possible the Lord's intervention
by obedience and trust, by the attainment of moral perfect-
ness. This ethical conception was set in the political frame-
work which belonged to the ideas of the age. Christianity
received it from Judaism with certain modifications ; and
the progress of Christian life has consisted in part in cut-
ting away this framework and returning to the simplest con-
ception of moral regeneration. The reign of Christ signifies
the reign of ethical purity and true religion, the establish-
ment of moral order. The Church is more concerned with
the end than with the means ; or rather, it recognizes the
fact that the burden of responsibility rests on itself. And
this, it would seem, was the idea of Jesus : the regeneration
of humanity brought about by individual purity and faith-
fulness, the love of God and the love of man the two fac-
tors which were to raise human life to its full proportions
of purity and majesty, and bring it into intimate union with
the complete and everlasting life of the divine father.
2. Christianity received from Judaism the doctrines of im-
mortality and resurrection. They appear in the earliest of
Paul's Epistles, and it may be assumed that they formed a
part of the material of Christian thought in the middle of
the first century of our era. The history of their genesis
must be sought in the Judaism of the preceding centuries.
378 ESCHATOLOGY.
The first distinct announcement of immortality, in our
sense of the word, is found in the Wisdom of Solomon, a
work which belongs not far from 200 B. c. The Old Testa-
ment, if we except the book of Daniel, takes no hopeful
view of the future life. Everywhere we find the old Semitic
conception of a colorless existence in Sheol : a gloomy under-
world with gates and bars, tenanted by joyless shades, whose
existence runs a gray, uncheckered course, unilluminated by
the ordinary emotions of men, unstimulated by their ordi-
nary aims and hopes, severed from the life of the great world
above, and cut off from living communion with God. In
the early times it was believed that by magic arts the dead
might be brought up to tell the secrets of the living. Sam-
uel rises to crush the unhappy Saul by a prediction of defeat
and death. Necromancy was rife in Isaiah's time (Isa. viii.
19). But the better minds of Israel deplored and opposed
this remnant of paganism. Why, said they, go to the dead
in behalf of the living ? The appeal, they felt, must be to
the divine law as spoken by the prophets (Isa. viii.). If the
people refused this only lawful means of instruction, it was
because they had no true religious light in them. Necro-
mancy was in those times inseparably connected with rude,
debasing beliefs and rites. The struggle of the prophets was
to banish all other worships but that of Yahwe, and to
lead the nation to look to the prophetic word alone for all
guidance in life. Thus opposed to the genius of Israelitism,
the practice of consulting the shades fell gradually into dis-
use. The dead were left in their nether abode, forever iso-
lated from the genuine life of upper earth, and excluded from
the sympathies of the living except in so far as they fur-
nished examples of good or evil, or were the foundations of
divine promises which underlay the development of the na-
tion. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David lived in the mem-
ory of the pious ; were the bearers of divine messages and
ESCHATOLOGY. 379
hopes, but only as denizens of the upper world. They lived
in the past ; their present in Sheol was forgotten or un-
regarded. At least, this is true so far as the records go.
Never is there reference or allusion to them as still truly
alive in Sheol, never a hint that they are supposed to follow
with intelligence and interest the fortunes of their fellow-
countrymen. Jacob shows no interest in the history of his
twelve sons ; David is unconcerned about the political pros-
perity of his realm, and Solomon indifferent to the career of
the temple. Only once in the Old Testament is there any
hint of emotion in the shades of Sheol : when the proud king
of Babylon, overthrown and slain, descends to the realms
below, the inmates greet his arrival with a cry of malignant
satisfaction. Thy glory is departed, they say ; thou art be-
come as one of us (Isa. xiv. 9, 10). It is as if all their life
was compressed into one gloomy consciousness of failure
and nothingness, their only joy coming from the spectacle of
others' misery. It is the only approach in the Old Testa-
ment to the later conception of a future place of torment.
There are some passages in the Old Testament which have
been supposed to contain the hope of immortality ; but these
all, under careful examination, appear to regard the presence
of God only in this life. The declaration of the Sixteenth
Psalm " Thou wilt not abandon me to Sheol nor suffer thy
godly one to see the pit; thou wilt show me the path of
life ; in thy presence is fulness of joy, in thy right hand
there are pleasures forevermore " sets forth the writer's
complete satisfaction and security in the divine presence
and protection. " Yahwe," says he, " is my portion, is at my
right hand ; wherefore I am glad, since he will not give me
over to death, but will keep me in life, his presence securing
all safety and joy." It is the present, the earthly life, of
which he is thinking, and the deliverance from that pre-
mature death which was the portion of the wicked (Ps. ix.
380 ESCHATOLOGY.
17), and was esteemed the greatest misfortune. In like man-
ner we must understand the concluding verse of the Seven-
teenth Psalm. The writer, confident of his own integrity
(verse 3), asks for protection against the prosperous wicked.
They, he says, are filled with treasure ; and then, contrast-
ing his own situation, he adds : " As for me, I behold thy
face in righteousness ; I am satisfied, when I awake, with
thee." He means that over against the present worldly pros-
perity of the wicked he himself is satisfied to have God on
his side, secure by this fact of ultimate success and happi-
ness in this life. The expression, " when I awake," cannot
refer to the resurrection after death ; so important a fact
would not be mentioned in this incidental manner, and the
point under discussion is earthly well-being. The psalm may
be an evening or morning hymn. The writer seems to have
in mind the night (verse 3), or he may mean to say, in
general, that when he awakes every morning, he is perfectly
satisfied to have with him, not the power of his wicked ene-
mies, but the presence of the God of Israel, in whose hand
man's might is as nothing. 1 The strong expression of Ps.
xlix. 15 (Heb. 16), "God will redeem me from the hand of
Sheol," is identical in meaning with the similar expression
in Ps. xvi. The hope expressed in Ps. Ixxi. 20, " Thou who
hast showed us many and sore troubles shalt quicken us
again, and bring us up again from the depths of the earth,"
is shown by the context to relate to the restoration of
earthly comfort and greatness. It seems equally clear that
the striking passage in the Seventy-Third Psalm (verse 24),
1 The expression "awake" is used of resurrection in Dan. xii. 2, and this
psalm might belong to the same period (middle of second century u. c.) ;
but Daniel plainly affirms the rising from the dead, while the thought of
the psalm points in another direction. Further, Daniel contemplates a new
life on earth, while the psalm-expression, if held to refer to the resurrection,
would seem to involve the far more advanced conception of dwelling, prob-
ably in heaven, in the presence of God. .
ESCHATOLOGY. 381
"Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel and afterward re-
ceive me to glory," refers only to the present life. The
author has been deeply moved by the spectacle of the pros-
perity of the wicked. It was too painful for him, he says,
until he went to the sanctuary of God and saw their latter
end, how they were consumed and cast down to destruc-
tion. He deplores his own ignorance and thoughtlessness
in thus misconceiving the problem ; yet, he adds, he is con-
tinually with God, upheld and guided by him, taken by him
into a position of glory and happiness. In the heavens among
the gods and on earth among men, he desires no helper but
the God of Israel. They that are far from God shall perish
(with earthly destruction) ; but as for him, he draws near
to the Lord and makes him his refuge. Here it is still the
present life of which the author is thinking. The precise
meaning of the familiar passage in Job xix. (verses 25-27) is
obscured by the corrupt character of the text. It is almost
impossible to give a satisfactory translation of verse 26,
and difficult to render verses 25 and 27. If we follow the
guidance of the immediate context, we shall be inclined to
hold that Job has in mind here only the earthly life. Why,
oh, my friends, he exclaims, do you persecute me ? Oh, that
my words were written in a book, that the grounds of my
defence against my accusers might be known ; yet I am
sure that my vindicator will at last appear ; and do you,
if you purpose still to persecute me, be afraid of the sword.
There is a judgment for evil-doers!
Regarding these passages, then, as at least not decisive,
it may be said that the Old Testament elsewhere (except
in Daniel) persistently ignores the underworld as a motive
for the present life. It is always with a tone of sadness
that it speaks of Sheol. The dead cannot praise thee, ex-
claims the pious soul, lifting itself in supplication to God ;
the living, they shall praise thee. The psalm of thanks-
382 ESCHATOLOGY.
giving ascribed to King Hezekiah (Isa. xxxviii.) is the ex-
pression of complete hopelessness in regard to the other
life ; similar representations are found in the book of Psalms.
Everywhere a long life is esteemed the greatest of blessings,
and all beyond this world is ignored ; punishment consists
not in pains in Sheol, but in the fact of the termination of
earthly life, which is the cessation of all joyful and produc-
tive activity. The sanctions of the Mosaic law are wholly
temporal. Not once does it urge men to obedience by the
portraiture of future happiness or misery. 1
It is the old Semitic conception of the other life. The
Babylonian-Assyrian literature which we possess is as reti-
cent as the Hebrew respecting the future as a moral
element of the present life. Penitential psalms, where if
anywhere we might expect a reference to the other life, con-
fine themselves altogether to this world. The poem which
describes the descent of the goddess Ishtar to Sheol gives
indeed a striking picture of the underworld and its gates
and bars and its presiding goddess, but has nothing to say
of rewards and punishments for earthly lives. The case is
the same with such fragments as remain of older Phoenician
literature, and with the pre-Islamic Arabian poetry. The
silence is all the more remarkable when we compare it with
the full and varied declarations of the Egyptian ritual. For
the Egyptian the world below was a completely organized
kingdom ; divine judges scrutinized each man's life and
meted out to him his fit portion of reward or punishment.
The future was ever present in men's minds as an incentive
to good living ; there was the hope of entrance into the
blessed abodes and of assimilation to the gods themselves,
and the fear of degradation and suffering. From time im-
memorial this elaborate scheme had existed in Egypt; and
1 An ingenious but unwarranted turn is given to this fact in Warburton's
" Divine Legation of Moses."
ESCHATOLOGY. 383
that the Israelites remained so long strangers to it is proof
that they were never in lively intellectual intercourse with
their Southern neighbors till the Greek conquest established
a Jewish colony in Alexandria. There was in this regard a
great gap between the Egyptian and Semitic races. We may
perhaps refer the silence of the Semites on this point to their
lack of constructive imagination. The divine, indeed, was
ever present to them as a main factor in life. God forced
himself on their notice in all the phenomena of nature.
They felt in extraordinary degree the pressure of the out-
ward powers, powers which determined the actual course of
their daily lives, which shaped their fortunes and demanded
their reverence. As practical men of the world they felt the
necessity of recognizing and propitiating the divine. But
this very practicalness of nature led them to ignore that
unseen world which could not force itself on their attention
by any visible or tangible phenomenon. The result of their
cool judgment was that the nether realm, to which all men
indeed must descend, stood apart from the present life, in-
capable in any perceptible way of influencing its issues.
Their imagination recoiled from the effort of solving its
mysteries. A similar lack of constructive power among the
Semites is visible in other departments of thought. They
have no drama, no metaphysic. With immense power of
dealing with current facts (especially those relating to com-
merce and religion), they have never succeeded in the organi-
zation of conceptions. Imagination they have, but only in
the sphere of the actual and practical. For them the under-
world was too remote to tempt them to the invention of a
nether organized community. This is part of the explana-
tion of the enormous success of the Jews in practical life.
They concentrated their efforts on the present. Here on this
earth in the clash and conflict of this life, they served God
and their age after their fashion, and looked for rewards and
384 ESCHATOLOGY.
punishments. And that high spirituality may go along with
such a negative conception of the future is abundantly proved
by the glowing spiritual utterances of the Old Testament.
We have already observed a general and gradual increase
of spirituality in the pre-Christian Jewish literature, a dis-
tincter sense of the vital ethical relationship between God
and the human soul. This feeling of the dependence of man
on God, the longing of the heart for friendly intercourse,
might very well exist without belief in immortality ; it might
and doubtless often did spring partly from a profound sense
of ethical weakness and desire for ethical perfectness, and
partly from the non-ethical feeling of the need of protec-
tion ; l it might have its roots in sentiments which belonged
wholly to the present life. But it also naturally connected
itself with another human instinct, the desire for continu-
ance and permanence. There is little indication, as has already
been remarked, in tbe Hebrew feeling of the Old Testament
times, of a projection of such hope beyond the grave ; yet we
can hardly doubt that many a man of those times looked
curiously across the gulf that separated the present from the
future and asked himself what it was that the God of Israel
had in store for his people; to many a one there would
come perhaps a glimmer of hope, or a more or less distinct
demand of the soul. This demand and this hope would be
heightened by the increasing spirituality of the conception of
the relation between God and his people. The devout soul,
conscious that its life was in God, would more and more
recoil from the prospect of banishment from him ; intense
desire might lift itself into the form of belief. There had
long been faith in national immortality ; the prophets think
1 These two elements must be carefully distinguished in the Psalms. Not
every appeal to God is spiritual. There is much religiousness that is uneth-
ical, a mere selfish desire for aid, which is a feeling common to man with the
lower animals. It is not sufficient that God he invoked ; there must be the
effort to attain communion of soul with him as the ideal of holiness.
ESCHATOLOGY. 385
of the people as continuing forever. As the sentiment of
individuality became more sharply defined, the pious soul,
one might expect, would be less and less satisfied with this
communal continuance of life, and would assert its rights to
its own individual permanence in and by virtue of its rela-
tion to God. And of this forthreaching of the soul toward
everlasting life, there may be indications in the psalm-
passages quoted above, not distinct declarations nor cer-
tain hopes, but dim surmises and longings. Such feelings
could hardly have been general ; the tone of the Old Testa-
ment respecting immortality is too distinctly negative to
permit such a supposition. Perhaps a few gifted souls
passed beyond the limits of the current thought ; there
was possibly a definite desire which might be the germ of
a doctrine of immortality. But a defined doctrine there
was not. Up to the beginning of the second century B. c.,
there was no such conception of life beyond the grave as
furnished moral support and stimulus for the present life.
Job, Psalms, Proverbs, the books, in which if anywhere
we should expect to find the best outcome of thought in
this direction, still occupy the old Semitic point of view.
It is in a book written under Greek influence that we
find the first distinct declaration of a real doctrine of immor-
tality. About the beginning of the second century B. c.,
three books were composed by Jewish writers, who sought
to set forth a finished conception of wisdom, that wisdom
which was esteemed to be the highest quality of man, the
broad and high conception of life, which was held to lift
man above its ills, to ally him with its highest powers, and
endow him with its greatest blessings. Of these books, that
which is most decidedly negative in tone (reflecting prob-
ably the Greek sceptical philosophy of the time), Eccle-
siastes, was received into the third Jewish canon, on
grounds which are discussed above. It not only completely
25
386 ESCHATOLOGY.
ignores the future life, but treats the present as something
which offers no high hope ; it defines wisdom as a large
and genial economy of resources, a pleasant, forbearing,
sceptical, and catholic moderation. The second work, Eccle-
siasticus, which resembles in form the canonical book of
Proverbs, was apparently composed in Palestine, and cer-
tainly under the control of old Jewish modes of thought.
Though modern and fresh in its material, and full of striking
and suggestive remark, it has no word to say of the future
life. In marked contrast with the other two, the Wisdom
of Solomon, which shows unmistakable signs of the influ-
ence of Platonic and Stoic ideas, treats immortality as an
established fact, as one of the main elements of the present
life. The old question which so troubled and indeed dis-
couraged and staggered many Jewish thinkers he inter-
pretation of the sufferings of the righteous and the prosperity
of the wicked causes our author no anxiety. He does
not even discuss it ; he assumes the solution to lie in the
life beyond the grave, where the inequalities of the present
life shall be equalized, where righteous and wicked shall
receive their just compensations and take their true places
in God's world.
One might then suspect that it was in some Alexandrian
Jewish circle, tinged with Greek thought, that the doctrine
of a true, everlasting life took distinct shape. Yet it is
not easy to find the Greek thought of that period which
might have suggested or determined such a faith. Eccle-
siastes was written by a man who had tasted the Hellenic cul-
ture of his day ; but the point which he reached was as far as
possible from the confident, joyous tone of belief in immor-
tality. It may be surmised that it was from the school
which had established itself at Gyrene that he took the
hue of his conception of life ; he has the cool scepticism
and good-natured indifference of the earlier Cyrenaic philoso-
ESCHATOLOGY. 387
phy, which might often be combined with strict ethical
principle and exemplariness of life. It was not here that
the author of the Wisdom of Solomon got his inspiration.
It was rather, if we are to look to a Greek source, from
some current of the old Platonism which survived the dis-
solution of the original systems of philosophy. In the third
century B. c. men began to grow weary of metaphysical
speculation and to seek for practical schemes of life. 1 Stoi-
cism and Epicureanism split up into various schools, which
all tended toward the same ethical result and toward the
same metaphysical negations. But in Alexandria there was
something which might quicken afresh the hopes concern-
ing the future. The Egyptian people maintained their faith
in the life beyond; their literature and their art, which
could not remain wholly unknown to Jews and Greeks,
kept the reality of this life prominent before men's eyes.
The whole of Egyptian thought was so permeated and col-
ored by a living faith in the tremendous importance of the
future existence that no thoughtful foreigner could fail to
be impressed by it. It was seed which might find favor-
able soil among both Jews and Greeks; for both these
peoples there were lines of hope or belief going back gen-
erations to honored names, which might impel certain minds
to look with intense interest on the spectacle of a nation
which thus realized and honored the life to come. It was,
perhaps, from a fusion of these lines of thought that the
well-defined theory of immortality came into the world. The
Greek, trained in habits of philosophic reflection, might
find himself disposed to adopt the essential ethical content
of the Egyptian scheme, while he rejected the local mytho-
logical machinery. But for him it would still be only a
philosophical opinion. The Jew, seizing on this Egyptian
hope, purified by Greek philosophy, could raise it to the
1 On the history of Greek philosophy after Plato, see Zeller.
388 ESCHATOLOGT.
dignity of a religious dogma. When once it had com-
mended itself to his mind as the solution of the highest
problems of life, he would find hints or demonstrations of
it in his own Scriptures, in the lives of the patriarchs, in
the translation of Enoch and Elijah, in the words of the
prophets, in the spiritual longing of the Psalms. Such
was the method of Philo a couple of centuries later, and
such seems to have been the method of the author of the
Wisdom of Solomon ; at least one would be inclined to
infer that the review which he gives of the Israelitish his-
tory at the close of his book is regarded by him as an illus-
tration of the doctrines of immortality and wisdom with
which he begins. The Jews, like other nations, have always
found in their Scriptures suggestions or proofs of beliefs
which they from time to time adopted.
There is no complete documentary proof of the view above
suggested. But it appears that while the national devel-
opment of the native Jewish thought had not up to the
beginning of the second century led to a belief in immor-
tality, the doctrine is announced by a Jew who, while an
orthodox and fervent adherent of his own national religion,
was yet materially influenced by foreign ideas. We are thus
naturally led to refer the origin of the doctrine to a fusion
of the Jewish and non-Jewish elements.
3. In like manner the closely related idea of a bodily
return from the underworld is probably to be accounted
for by the influence of foreign thought. The doctrine of
the resurrection of the dead appears for the first time toward
the middle of the second century B. c. The germ of such
a belief has been supposed to exist in purely Jewish parts
of the Old Testament, in Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones
(Ezek. xxxvii.), in Isa. xxvi. 19, in Job xix. 25-27, and in some
of the Psalms (Ps. xvi. 10; xvii. 15). One might even be
disposed to say that the dimness of the old Hebrew con-
ESCHATOLOGY. 389
ception of the underworld would naturally lead to the idea
of the resuscitation of the dead. So strong was the hold
which the earth and earthly life had on the Jew, so intense
his conviction that the enjoyment of God, whether bodily
or spiritual, pertained to this present worldly existence, that
if his religious instinct should demand a perpetuation of
happy life, he would, it might be supposed, naturally think
of its sphere as mundane, and its conditions as those which
belong to man's present and visible activity ; it would be the
man of body and soul whom he would naturally imagine as
the bearer of truth and the recipient of blessing from the
divine hand. Yet however natural such an idea might seem
to be, there is no trace of it- in Jewish literature before the
second century B. c. We have already seen how vague was
the conception of the future life in general ; and there is
little reason to suppose a development of the idea of resur-
rection while the Sheol of that day remained unquestioned.
The passages above cited have really nothing to do with the
resurrection ; the prophet Ezekiel himself explains (xxxvii.
11-14) that in the vision of the revivification of the dead
bones he means to give a symbolical prediction of the resto-
ration of Israel to its OWH land. It was not that the in-
dividual should live again after death, but that the nation,
though crushed and shattered and politically dead, should
not perish, but should be lifted into an everlasting political
life. The reference in Isa. xxvi. 19, as appears from the
whole course of thought (see verses 15 and 20), is to a similar
national restoration. The passage in Job, so far as can be
gathered from the corrupt text, declares that the sufferer
shall see God, not in his flesh, but apart from it. The Six-
teenth Psalm is a profession of satisfaction and delight in
Yahwe, not in the future, but in the present life ; and the
" awaking " of Psalm xvii. refers, as the context almost cer-
tainly indicates, to this present life of ethical-religious prob-
390 ESCHATOLOGY.
lems, in which the psalmist purposes to attain to trust and
tranquillity in spite of the rampant prosperity of the wicked.
The translations of Enoch and Elijah are not examples of
resurrection, but exceptional cases of removal from earth
without the ordinary process of death, a survival of the
primitive belief, according to which heroes were elevated to
positions in the abode of the gods.
It is apparently to non-Jewish sources that we must look
for the formulation of the doctrine of the resurrection. The
conception of the bodily re-clothing of man after death had
been in the world a long time before it appears in Jewish
books. It is found in rude forms in primitive faiths, and
had survived, in developed shape, in various religions, though
the Semites, with their unimaginative scepticism, seem to
have rejected it altogether. In the form of transmigration
of souls it was held by the Egyptians and the Hindus.
There is, however, no indication that the Jews of this period
came into contact with the religious thought of India ; and
the Egyptian doctrine seems not to have been distinct or
impressive enough to suggest what we find in the Jewish
belief of the time. It is probably to another point that we
have to look. The book of Daniel, which contains the first
statement of the resurrection in the Old Testament, shows
considerable acquaintance with Babylonian and Old Persian
history, and points to a connection with the Tigris-Euphrates
region. The author writes like a man who, dwelling in what
had formerly been the native land of Cyrus, had there met
with a real though apparently not perfectly correct his-
torical tradition, and had come into contact with the ideas
of the place. Certain traces of Persian influence in the
book have already been referred to ; the angelology has ob-
viously a Persian coloring, and it would seem that we must
seek in the Persian eschatology the origin of the author's
doctrine of resurrection.
ESCHATOLOGY. 391
Our information respecting Persian religious beliefs of
this period is unfortunately very meagre. The inscriptions
of the first Achiemenian princes, the earliest extant Per-
sian documents, are concerned mainly with political affairs,
and their religious utterances are naturally brief and in-
direct. If the date of the Avestan writings, in the form in
which we now possess them, could be definitely fixed, we
should be able to speak more advisedly of the Persian dog-
mas of the fourth and third centuries B. c. ; but the best
Avestan scholars regard the data as insufficient to deter-
mine the chronology with exactness. All that can be said
is that Magism (probably a Median form of faith) obtained
a firm footing in Persia during the fifth century B. a So
much we may infer from the description of Persian customs
given by Herodotus (I. 131140), in which the Magi appear
as the only official priests Herodotus says nothing of the
Magian-Persian doctrine of the future life ; l but the details
given by Theopompus (fourth century B. c.), as quoted by
Plutarch (Isis and Osiris, 47), lead us to suppose that a
doctrine of the resurrection existed in his time. At the
end of the contest between Oromazes and Areimanios, says
Theopompus, Hades will be abandoned, and men will be
happy, neither needing food nor casting a shadow ; that is
to say, they will be endowed with new spiritual bodies. The
supposition that the Magian-Persian religion recognized the
bodily resurrection as early as the fourth century B. c. is
not at all opposed to what we otherwise know of the per-
sistence of the Zoroastrian dogma. If, as seems probable,
the Avestan writings existed substantially in their present
form some centuries before the beginning of our era, it is
likely that this doctrine, connecting itself, as it does, so
naturally with the whole Zoroastrian scheme, had already
assumed definite shape as early as the Greek conquest. It
1 But cf. Herod. III. 62.
392 ESCHATOLOGY.
might have come to the knowledge of Alexandrian Jews
through such Greek writings as those of Theopompus, while
it would linger in the Persian population still found in the
Tigris region, and there, as has already been suggested, find
its way to the Jewish colony which was at that time
marked, as we have good reason to believe, by eager intel-
lectual activity. The Jews have ever been willing borrow-
ers of other nations' opinions ; and such an idea as that of
the resurrection of the body would harmonize with one side
of Jewish thought and be absorbed by Jewish theology.
The idea of the permanence of the national life had always
been cherished by Israelites, and at a time when the hope
of deliverance was keen, and the interposition of God was
looked for, the suggestion that the nation's dead would be
called back to earth to share in the nation's life might
meet with welcome reception from ardent Jewish thinkers
and believers. Its progress might be slow ; a couple of cen-
turies might elapse before it would be generally accepted.
It would naturally be adopted slowly and cautiously by the
leaders of Jewish thought, with such modifications as the
old Jewish national faith suggested. The books of Psalms,
Proverbs, and Ecclesiasticus know nothing of it, and the
Mosaic law is equally silent. The doctrine seems never to
have been received by the Sadducees (Matt. xxii. xxiii.), the
priestly representatives of the old Mosaic orthodoxy. At
first, as might be anticipated, the bodily resuscitation seems
to have been limited to Israel ; such appears to be the idea
in Daniel (xii. 1-3). Israel alone, it was apparently sup-
posed, was worthy of the supreme blessing of the everlast-
ing perpetuation of the earthly life. Other peoples might
be left to endure the inanity of the shadowy existence in
Sheol ; they had no covenant with God ; there was no reason
why they should be lifted again into the struggle of earthly
life. Indeed, it might have appeared necessary for the peace
ESCHATOLOGY. 393
of the chosen people that they alone should possess the
earth, though on this point there was probably indefinite-
ness arid difference of opinion. Daniel recognizes two classes
of Israelites, one of which should awake to everlasting life,
the other to shame and everlasting contempt. Here is the
germ of the conception of a moral distinction among those
who were raised from the dead. In process of time the
doctrine of bodily resuscitation connected itself with that
of final judgment, and with it approached the form of uni-
versality. This development of the doctrine seems to have
been formulated not long before the beginning of our era.
The second book of Maccabees (vii. 9, 14, 23), .a work of
uncertain date, possibly to be put about 100 B. c., apparently
affirms resurrection only of Israel. One of the seven brothers
says to the king : " It is good, being put to death by men,
to look for hope from God to be raised up again by him.
As for thee, thou shalt have no resurrection to life." On
the other hand, the Parables of the book of Enoch appear
to speak of a general resurrection. " In those days," says
the writer, " the earth will return that intrusted to it, and
Sheol will return that intrusted to it, which it has received,
and Hell will return what it owes," apparently a declara-
tion that all men, good and bad, will rise from the dead.
How far the doctrine of a general resurrection prevailed
during the first century of our era is not clear. It is found
in the Fourth Gospel (v. 28, 29), and apparently in the
Apocalypse (xx. 12). These books probably vouch for its
prevalence toward the end of the century. But in the
Synoptics and the writings of Paul and his school, though
there is much about immortality and judgment and the
resurrection of believers, no stress is laid on the rising of
all men ; it is even doubtful whether it is affirmed. Paul,
in his argument for the resurrection (1 Cor. xv.), treats the
rising from the dead as a purely Christian hope belonging
394 ESCHATOLOGY.
to believers by virtue of their union with Christ. 1 Eom. ii.
1-16 and 2 Cor. v, 10 speak only of judgment, and in the lat-
ter passage it is not certain that the " we " includes any but
Christians. He everywhere lays stress on the resurrection
of Jesus in such a way as to show that he regards the raised
body of the Eedeemer as the pledge and the centre of the
future blessed bodily existence of believers, as, therefore,
offering no hope to the world at large. The ground adduced
in the First Gospel (xxii. 31, 32) for the resurrection relates
only to the chosen people : " I am the God of Abraham and
the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob ; God is not the God
of the dead, but of the living." 2 The parables of the tares
and of the net, and the great assize (Matt. xiii. xxv.), affirm
not a general resurrection, but only the separation of the
righteous and the wicked at the end of the age. We might
thus be led to suspect that the doctrine in its general form
did not establish itself till toward the end of the first cen-
tury, when Christianity had with some definiteness separated
from Judaism. Such a view would find support in the fact
(Weber, " System," 88) that the Talmudic-Midrashic litera-
ture recognizes only a resurrection of Israelites, holding it
to be a part of the reward of the righteous. In truth, the
restoration to bodily life is generally treated in the New
Testament as a reward of Christian faith. For unbelievers
there was no risen Eedeemer, no definite centre of activity
in the coming life. It might have been felt that for them
1 Though he introduces two general considerations, one (ethically low),
that without hope of the future there would he no sufficient reason for well-
doing (verse 32), the other based on the analogy of plant-life (verse 36),
he does not make a general application.
2 The argument, as stated, goes to establish not resurrection, but immor-
tality ; but it seems that the former was regarded as included in the latter, a
proof that the idea of resurrection was thoroughly ingrained in the popular
belief. The Old Testament passage cited (Ex. iii. 6) contains, in the inten-
tion of its author, no hint of immortality, but merely the declaration that
God would be faithful to the promises made to the fathers.
ESCHATOLOGY. 395
it was enough that they were abandoned to an endless exist-
ence of suffering. We must then suppose that the broader
idea of the Enoch-Parables (li.) did not for a long time ob-
tain general recognition, 1 and was finally established through
the social intercourse that promoted belief in the equal
moral responsibility of all men. On the other hand, it is
possible that the idea existed, and is only not made promi-
nent or distinctly brought out, because interest was concen-
trated on the Church. In fact, the conception of a general
resurrection seems allied to that of a general judgment. In
any case it appears that resurrection is treated practically
in the New Testament (and this is true largely even in the
Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel) as a reward of be-
lievers. Its psychological basis is the desire for the con-
tinuance of human life, of which the body was regarded
as a necessary element, though this body might be thought
of as perfected into a fit dwelling-place for the regenerated
soul (1 Cor. xv. 44).
4. Hand in hand with the three just mentioned the doc-
trine of a last judgment advanced to its final formulation,
proceeding from a national to a universal form. The gen-
eral notion of a divine decision respecting human conduct,
with appropriate rewards and punishments, belongs to the
essence of the conception of the deity. It is found loosely
expressed in primitive faiths, and in developed religions is
more definitely embodied in persons, in the Egyptian Osiris,
the Hindu Indra, the Persian Ahuramazda, the Babylonian
Shamash, the Greek Zeus, and the Eoman Jupiter. 2 The
1 It is open to the critic to suggest that the Enoch-passage in question
has been touched by a Christian hand. Otherwise it is not easy to account
for its ineffectiveness. The paucity of data, makes the history obscure.
2 It may be left undecided whether or how far the Jewish development of
the idea was affected by foreign influences At Alexandria the Egyptian
elaborate apparatus of underworld-judgment and the Athenian opinion (Plato,
Apology 32) would be well known. But the form in which the Jewish idea
396 ESCHATOLOGY.
progress of the idea was along three Hues : the ethical
elemeiit become more and more prominent ; individualism
took the place of nationalism ; and the judgment, from
being a purely earthly procedure, came to be regarded as
the boundary between this life and the next. The history
of the Jewish-Christian movement may be traced in general
outline, though the data leave much to be desired in fulness
and precision.
The ethical progress is tolerably well indicated in Old
Testament, Apocrypha, and New Testament. There is steady
advance in the standard of individual morality. In the Jew-
ish scheme, however, the moral judgments attributed to God,
though otherwise pure and high, are never quite free from
the taint of nationalism. From the eighth century B. c. on,
Yahwe is a just God within the national limits, punishing
unsparingly the sins of his own people ; but foreign nations
are judged mainly according to their relations of friendliness
or unfriendliness with Israel. 1 To be hostile to Israel was
itself a crime; and this non-ethical standard of judgment
clung to Judaism down to the times of the Talmud. Chris-
tianity did not wholly escape a similar limitation. Though
the Sermon on the Mount declares that God will judge men
simply according to the moral character of their conduct,
the followers of Jesus put the Church into the place of the
national Israel, and made acceptance of Jesus as Messiah
the basis of the divine decision (2 Thess. i. 8 ; 1 Cor. xvi. 22 ;
is worked out (Daniel, Enoch, etc.) does not suggest Greek influence, and
may be accounted for from native materials.
1 See, for example, Amos i. ii., Isa x., Nahum, Obadiah, Joel iii. (Heb.
iv.), and the very different estimates of Babylon given by the prophets of
Nebuchadnezzar's time (Jer. xxv. 9; xxix. 7; xxxviii. 17 ; Ezek. xxix. 17-21)
and those who lived when Cyrus' approach was expected (Isa. xiii. xiv.
xlvi. xlvii. ; Jer. 1. li ). Jeremiah and Ezekiel have not one unkind word to
say of Babylon, because it was, in their opinion, the protector of Israel ; but
the Babylonian kingdom, though its moral character could not have changed
materially in fifty years, is denounced so soon as it is regarded as hostile.
ESCHATOLOGY. 397
1 John v. 10). Men were to be judged by their works (Rev.
xx. 12), but the " works " included belief in the Christ. The
general ethical standard was high, but a controlling non-
ethical condition was introduced.
Nevertheless, there was a gradual recession from the old
nationalistic point of view; that is, the individual came
more and more to be the human unit. The beginning of
this movement is seen, as has already been pointed out, in
such passages as Ezek. xviii., which affirms a moral distinc-
tion in the judgments on Israelites. The progress is clearer
in the Wisdom of Solomon and in the sayings of the law-
yers, which treat character without respect to nationality.
The mingling of peoples during the two centuries preceding
the beginning of our era led, in the better minds, to a par-
tial obliteration of national lines ; the feeling arose that there
was a definite relation between God and every human being.
The individual was no longer swallowed up in the com-
munity. It is doubtful, as is intimated above, whether the
divine judgment was ever in the Jewish and Christian de-
velopments completely sundered from religious dogma. It
was probably held that character acceptable to God could
never be attained apart from certain religious beliefs peculiar
to Judaism or Christianity. But it was a great point gained
when the conviction was established, as a living principle,
that each man must give account of himself, that the divine
judgment would be meted out to each on his own merits.
This principle, on which the New Testament everywhere
insists, existed indeed elsewhere, but was firmly planted in
society by the powerful agency of Christianity.
The conception of a universal judgment was involved in
the developed Hebrew religion. Yahwe was king and guard-
ian of his people ; and in order that he might assign them
their proper position in the world, it was necessary that
other nations should be cited before the divine tribunal and
398 ESCHATOLOGY.
judged for their offences against the chosen people. In the
pre-exilian and exilian prophets God is represented as admin-
istering punishment to the enemies of Israel from time to
time, as occasion demanded. A more formal judicial pro-
cedure is hinted at in Joel, Zechariah (xiv.), and some of the
Psalms (xcvi. xcviii.). The apocalyptic books of the second
century B. c. introduced more definitely the idea of a sum-
ming up of things and the inauguration of Israel's reign
by a general divine judgment (Dan. vii. ; Enoch i.). In
Daniel (xii.) this consummation is not unnaturally con-
nected with the return of dead Israelites to bodily life, the
pious to share in the national triumph, the apostates to
suffer merited punishment. God was the judge ; and the
scene of the judgment and of the succeeding life was on
the earth, probably Palestine (Enoch Ixxxix. 40). 1 It was
a reconstruction of earthly society, with Israel as centre
and lord. This was the simple national and earthly idea
of the final divine judgment that prevailed up to about the
middle of the second century B. c. Two other articles of
faith, recently adopted by the Jews, then took their place
in the scheme and gave rise to some complication of views,
these were the expectation of a personal Messiah, and the
belief in immortality.
It was only gradually that the deliverer, who finally re-
ceived the title of Messiah, was brought into connection
with the judgment. In the prophets he is a Davidic king,
employing the usual means of a political leader to secure
national success ; in Daniel he disappears, and the agent
of salvation is the angel Michael ; in the original Enoch
and the Psalter of Solomon he is a human leader. Up to
this point he has nothing to do with the final authorita-
tive reconstruction of the world. But there soon arose a
1 In Enoch i. the place of judgment seems to be Mount Sinai, though this
is not clear.
ESCHATOLOGY. 399
new conception of his person and function ; he was repre-
sented as being of a very exalted (though not divine)
nature, and the immediate conduct of the final judgment
was assigned to him. Whether this new function was in-
ferred from the new nature, or the nature from the func-
tion, or both arose out of the same conditions, it is not
easy to say. It is in the Enoch-Parables that the higher
idea of the Messiah first appears. Here he is the chosen
one, set apart from all eternity, hidden and then revealed,
who, endowed with all wisdom, sits on his throne, receives
homage, judges powerful kings and all sinners, and dis-
penses rewards and punishments. The same conception of
Messianic judgment is contained in the earliest of Paul's
writings (1 Thess. iv. ; 2 Thess. i.), and perhaps in 2 Cor.
v. 10 ; it is involved in the apocalyptic letters to the
churches (Eev. ii. 23), and is distinctly affirmed in 2 Tim.
iv. 1 and John v. 27. On the other hand, in the apocalyptic
pictures, and especially in the great judicial scene at the
end of the book (Rev. xix. xx.) it is not quite clear whether
it is God or the Messiah who is the judge. The Lamb
opens the sealed book (v.), and all men flee from his
wrath (vi. 16) ; but seals, trumpets, and bowls usher in only
preliminary judgments, and the day of final decision is still
in the future. When that day comes, it is apparently God
before whose throne the dead appear (xx. II). 1 In the
Synoptics the Messiah appears as judge (as in 2 Thess.)
in the apocalyptic discourse (Mark xiii., Matt, xxiv., Luke
xxi.), and in the judgment-scene of Matt. xxv. According
to the later Jewish view (Weber, " System," 88), as it
would seem, the final judgment is conducted by God.
1 The similarity between the royal functions of the Messiah in the Enoch-
Parables and the New Testament Apocalypse is of such sort as to suggest
that the one was taken from the other, or that the two issue out of the same
circle of views. This favors the hypothesis that the Apocalypse contains a
Jewish basis which has been built upon by a Christian hand.
400 ESCHATOLOGY.
The evidence, with the exception of that of the Enoch-
Parables, points to a Christian origin for the conception of
the Messiah as final judge. In any case this function is
closely connected with an idealization of his person, which
lifted him above the ordinary human sphere, an exalta-
tion that is explained more naturally from Christian con-
ditions (following on the disappearance of Jesus from earth),
but cannot be said to be impossible for an earlier Jewish
circle of thought. It is possible that Paul's view was
affected by some current opinion like that of the Parables
(the date of which is probably not long after B. c. 40). A
Jewish idealization of the Messiah, arising from reflec-
tion on the great role assigned him as national deliverer,
may have coalesced with a similar Christian tendency. In
the Old Testament (as in Ps. ii.) the king of Israel is repre-
sented as ruling all the nations, whence to his elevation to
the position of judge at God's right hand (see Ps. ex.) it
would be no great step. It is always as God's vicegerent
that the Messiah exercises his judicial functions (John v. 22 ;
cf. 1 Cor. xv. 24). That the conception of the Messiah as
judge was gradually accepted by the Church of the first cen-
tury may perhaps be inferred from the infrequency of refer-
ence to it in the New Testament. Of the history of the idea
in the period between the Enoch-Parables and the First Epis-
tle to the Thessalonians we have no certain information.
So long as the Jews had no effective and universal doc-
trine of immortality, the divine judgment was necessarily
conceived of as confined to the earth. Daniel, the Sibyl,
the original Enoch, and the Psalms of Solomon picture the
future in a vague way as the destruction or subjugation
of foreign nations and the establishment of Israel in per-
petual peace and prosperity through the protecting presence
of God. The judgment ushers in only a change of earthly
relations ; there is a resurrection, but the abode of the
ESCHATOLOGY. 401
blessed people is still the earth, though the earth trans-
figured (see Isa. Ixv. 17; Enoch xc. 33 ; cf. 2 Pet. iii. 13).
There appears to be no material advance in the ethical
representation in the Enoch-Parables ; the antithesis is in
form a general one, between the just and the evil, but the
evil are the enemies of Israel, and Israel's new place of
abode is the earth (xlv. 5). Throughout the book of Enoch
(x. liv.) judgment is passed on evil angels as well as on
evil men. It is apparently in the Parables that the belief
in immortality first shows itself in connection with the
judgment ; the just enjoy everlasting life (xxxvii., Iviii.) ; sin-
ners dwell in endless shame (xlvi. 6). Here is the germ
of a new signification of the expressions, " age to come " and
"kingdom of God," or "kingdom of heaven." The age to
come is essentially the era of social regeneration, ushered
in by the God-appointed deliverer, to endure forever, and
this is the kingdom of God or of heaven. It was origi-
nally the happy life of the chosen of God on the earth ; the
general effect of the introduction of the full idea of im-
mortality was to transfer it to heaven, and to make the
judgment a formal winding -up of all earthly affairs, with
discontinuance of the present earthly life. But a complete
assimilation of this new element was not effected at once;
the New Testament presents slightly varying views of the
judgment and of the future. Most of the Epistles, absorbed
in the present needs of the struggling Church, content
themselves with looking to the coming of Christ (thought
to be impending) for the judgment which was to introduce
his followers into eternal bliss. Second Peter (iii. 13) re-
gards this earth as the scene of the future life; and the
same expectation is perhaps contained in Eom. viii. 19,
where the outward creation, groaning in the pain of sin, is
represented as looking eagerly for deliverance in the revela-
tion of 'the sons of God, though Paul elsewhere (1 Thess.
26
402 ESCHATOLOGY.
iv. 17) appears to hold a different opinion. In general it
seems to be the larger idea of immortality that the Epis-
tles have in view, a state the conditions of which differ
from those of earthly life (so also Matt. xxii. 30). 1 The
Synoptics give signs of the Messiah's appearance, and de-
scribe a final general judgment (Matt, xxiv., xxv.). The
Fourth Gospel omits all particulars, presenting only the
moral-religious conflict of earthly life and the fact of final
judgment (v.) The Apocalypse has a series of partial judg-
ments, a preliminary imprisonment of Satan during the
millennial reign of the saints, and a final universal judg-
ment (xx.). The kingdom of God is viewed sometimes as
present (1 Cor. iv. 20; Eom. xiv. 17), sometimes as in the
future (Matt. vii. 21 ; viii. 11 ; 2 Tim. iv. 11); that is, it is a
constitution of things beginning now and having its culmi-
nation and completion in the future. " This age " (ren-
dered "this world'' in the English version) is the present
condition of things reaching up to the coming of Christ to
judgment (Gal. i. 4; Matt. xii. 32; Tit. ii. 12); the final
decision is made at the end of the age (Matt. xiii. 40). The
"age to come" is the period following the appearance of
the Messiah. According to the Jewish view it is still in
the future, since the Messiah has not come. In the Chris-
tian conception it has a double meaning; it may be his-
torical Christianity introduced by Jesus (Heb. vi. 5 ; Eph.
ii. 7, "ages to come"), or the period following the final Mes-
sianic judgment (Mark x. 30 ; Matt. xii. 32). In Heb. ix. 26
Christ is said to have been manifested and sacrificed " now
once at the end of the ages," and with this is contrasted
his second coming to judgment (verse 28). The double mean-
ing of the expression was natural; it signified the reign of
1 See 2 Thess. i. ; 1 Cor. i. 8 ; xv. ; 2 Cor v 10, Rom. ii 16; Phil, i 6 ; 2
Tim. iv. 1 ; Heb. vi. 2 ; ix. 27 ; 1 Pet. iv. 5 , v. 10 ; 2 Pet. i. 11 ; Jude 21 ;
1 John iv. 17. James and First Timothy have only the expectation of the
coming of Christ, and Galatians is occupied with salvation and eternal life.
ESCHATOLOGY. 403
truth, the time of adjustment, when the wrongs of the
present should be righted, when the righteous should enjoy
the dignity that was properly theirs in a world governed
by a righteous God, and the wicked should pay the penalty
of their impious defiance and their unnatural worldly pros-
perity. The first fruits of that blessed time appeared under
the Messiah's earthly rule ; the consummation could be
reached only when earthly existence was over and men's
destinies were fixed in an endless existence beyond the
grave. The first phase was introductory to the second;
for the individual and for the nation or Church the future
blessedness was the continuation and completion of the
earthly peace, a conception that could not assume per-
fect shape till immortality, heaven, and hell had become
familiar ideas.
The Church received the doctrine of judgment from Juda-
ism, and introduced the additions mentioned above with-
out always discarding Jewish local views, which should
have been set aside by the spirit of Christianity. This is
true of the old belief that the Jewish nation should be
permanently established in political independence in its
own land. Such in fact is the declaration of the prophets
(Ezek. xxxvii. 25 and many other passages). Christianity
in general substituted the Church for the nation, and in-
terpreted the prophetic promises as signifying the conver-
sion of the Jews to faith in Jesus, 1 an interpretation which
is exegetically unsound, but, if held, completely sets aside
the expectation of political permanence. In spite of this
there have always been Christian circles which held after
1 Paul does not entirely escape confusion of thought on this point. After
making an argument (Rom. iv. , ix. 7, 8 ; x.) from the Old Testament to show
that the promises were not to the bodily descendants of Abraham but to all who
had like faith with him, he cites similar passages (Rom. xi. 25, 26) to prove
that the bodily, national Israel shall all be saved. His exegesis is controlled
at one time by his religious-dogmatic feeling, at another by his patriotism.
404 ESCHATOLOGY.
the dispersion of the Jews to their restoration to Palestine
as part of the final divine settlement of earthly affairs.
5. The formulation of the doctrines of immortality and judg-
ment was accompanied by the reconstruction of the theory of
the future life. The old Hebrew idea of Sheol as the color-
less abode of all the dead gradually gave way to the repre-
sentation of a place of happiness for the righteous and a
place of punishment for the wicked. The growing sense
of ethical individuality demanded the future meting out of
proper reward to earthly moral-religious character, and the
details of existence beyond the grave were gradually worked
out. The Egyptians had a well-developed system of re-
wards and punishments in the underworld, but the idea
remained strange to the Semites. The conception' of " hell "
is not found in the Old Testament ; 1 there is no local
distinction in Sheol between good and bad, 2 no apparatus
of reward and punishment. The reward of the righteous
is long life on earth (Prov. iii. 16); the punishment of the
wicked is premature death (Prov. x. 27). The first departure
from the old conception of the future is found in the book
of Daniel (xii. 2) in connection with the idea of resurrec-
tion ; of those Israelites who are raised to life, it is said,
some will be happy and some wretched. Enoch similarly
describes the punishment of bad Israelites (xxvii. 2 ; xc. 26)
and of evil angels (x. 6, 14 ; xc. 24, 25 ; liv.) at the judgment.
In the Parables (liv., lvi.>, the punishment is not confined
to Jews, but falls on all wicked men. In the early days of
the Maccabean struggle it was only Israelites who were
included in the scheme of resurrection ; later, it was ex-
tended to include all men. In Enoch there is an abyss (x.)
1 Abaddon, "destruction" (Job xxvi. 6 j xxviii 22 , Prov. xv. 11) is sim-
ply a synonym of Sheol.
2 In such passages as Ezek. xxxi. 18; Isa. xiv. 9, the point is the over-
throw of mighty and insolent enemies of Israel.
ESCHATOLOGY. 405
or valley (liv.) of fire prepared for the disobedient angels ;
so in Matt. viii. 29, the demons look forward to a time
when their torment is to begin. In the Parables (liv., Ivi.),
human sinners (that is, enemies of Israel) are cast into the
valley of fire.
How did the Jews reach the practical conception of re-
wards and punishments after death ? Were they driven to
it by moral-religious feeling, by their sense of the in-
equalities and injustices of this life ? In that case we
should expect to find hints of the idea in such books as
Psalms and Proverbs ; but there are no such hints. On
the other hand, its first affirmation in the existing literature
occurs in connection with a doctrine which we have seen
reason to believe was developed under Persian influence,
and in Enoch it stands in close relation with the demon-
ology. Are we to see the influence of Persian thought here
also ? The data hardly warrant an answer to this ques-
tion : we know too little of the Persian dogma of that time.
Nor can we look to Egypt. The idea seems not to have
arisen in the Jewish colony in Egypt, nor is there great
resemblance between the Jewish and the Egyptian schemes.
The details in Enoch, such as the valley and the fire and
the chains, may have been suggested by the Old Testament
or by the ordinary imagination. Of the main idea we can
only say that the Jewish moral consciousness was prepared
for it and that it arose out of the conditions of the time.
It was familiar to the Egyptians and riot unknown to the
Greeks. Once suggested to the Jews, it would supply what
they had probably been conscious of needing. Attached to
the doctrine of resurrection it would accord with funda-
mental Israelitish beliefs. Confined at first to members of
the chosen people, it would come, by the growth of ethical
feeling, to embrace other nations.
Christianity took the conception from Judaism. The rep-
406 ESCHATOLOGY.
reservation of future punishment in the New Testament is
substantially the same as that of Enoch. The specific term
for hell is Gehenna (Matt. v. 22 ; Jas. iii. 6), the " valley of
Hinnom," the spot consecrated to the old Moloch-worship
(2 Kings xxiii. 10 : Isa. xxx. 33 ; Ixvi. 24), an abominable
place of filth which became the symbol of future torment.
Elsewhere " Hades " (in Greek, the dwelling-place of all the
dead) is used in very much the same sense (Matt. xi. 23 ;
Luke xvi. 23 ; Eev. xx. 13, 14). When specific terms had
been devised for the abode of happiness, the general Greek
term was applied to the other division of the life beyond. 1
It was conceived of in general as a subterranean place
of torment. The tormenters, however, are apparently not
Satan and the demons, who are themselves tormented, but
the good angels appointed by God to that office (Enoch liii.
liv. ; Kev. xx. 10). It seems to be intimated by Paul that
the saints, the believers in Jesus, are to take part in the
final judgment of wicked men and disobedient angels (1 Cor.
vi. 2, 3) ; but it is not said in what relation they are after-
ward to stand to the lost. In the parable of the rich man
and Lazarus (Luke xvi. 19-31) it is declared that bodily
communication between the denizens of Paradise and those
of Hades is impossible, there being a great gulf between
them (verse 26) ; yet the sufferer appeals to Abraham, whom
1 Except in the Synoptics and the Apocalypse, almost nothing is said
of hell in the New Testament. James (iii. 6), looking on it as the locus
and representative of all evil, speaks of its setting the tongue on fire ; Jude
(6, 13) and Second Peter (ii. 4, 17) have mention of the bonds in which
the disobedient angels .are held in darkness unto judgment (Second Peter
calls the place of punishment Tartarus) and of the blackness of darkness
reserved for certain false teachers. Elsewhere only general expressions,
such as " destruction " and " condemnation of the devil," are employed.
This reticence may be explained in part from the practical aim of the Epis-
tles, which are mostly occupied in meeting actual emergencies and build-
ing up the life of the Church ; it may also be true that the conception of
the place of punishment became distincter and more familiar after Paul's
time.
ESCHATOLOGY. 407
he supposes to be invested with authority, and begs him to
send Lazarus on a mission of mercy. 1
As to the duration of future punishment, the general doc-
trine of the New Testament is that it is to be without end,
it is to endure as long as the blessed life of the righteous
o o
(Matt. xxv. 46 ; Rev. xx. 10, 15 ; xxi. 4, 8, 27; xxii. 5, 11,
15). Such is the representation of Paul in First Corinth-
ians. The abolition of death (1 Cor. xv. 26, 54) is not the
abolition of the suffering of the wicked, but, as is clear from
Eev. xxi. 14 and 2 Tim. i. 10, the annulment of all suffer-
ing for the righteous and the beginning of the endless tor-
ment of the unrighteous. It is doubtful how we are to
understand the declaration in Colossians (i. 20), that it was
God's purpose to reconcile to himself through Christ all
things on earth and in the heavens. From a comparison
of other statements in the Epistle (as ii. 15, where Christ
triumphs over the principalities and the powers, and iii. 4,
where at the manifestation of Christ only the saints are to
be manifested with him in glory), we might rather conclude
that the writer's intention is to ascribe all reconciliation to
Christ, but not to affirm such a pleroma or fulness in Christ
or such a summing up of things (Eph. i. 10, Anakepha-
laiosis) as would exclude that retribution for evil doing
which everywhere else in the New Testament is assumed
to be an essential part of the divine government of the uni-
verse. If, however, we are to see here the conception of a
final reconciliation between God and his creatures, a blot-
ting out of evil in the sense that it shall be transformed
into good, a complete harmonizing of the universe so that
neither angel nor man shall be found to set himself against
the divine ethical order, then we must hold this view to
spring out of a philosophical thought which does not find
1 This, however, may be merely a part of the framework of the parable, in-
troduced simply to bring out the final character of the doom of the departed.
408 ESCHATOLOGY.
support elsewhere in the New Testament, and which did
not afterward meet with wide approbation in the Church.
So soon as the idea of a future life of compensation
and happiness for the good was established, the question
would arise in men's minds where the abode of the right-
eous should be. This subject has been mentioned above
from time to time. The points may be summed up briefly.
There was not unnaturally fluctuation of opinion. The
history of the future had to be constructed from such
data as w r ere at hand, and the data were indefinite and
to some extent mutually contradictory. The prophets of
course thought of Jerusalem as the centre of the coming
kingdom of bliss (Isa. Ixvi.), and this continued to be the
national Jewish view. A new Jerusalem, as the capital of
the Messianic kingdom, is found in the book of Enoch (xc.
29) ; in the New Testament this representation is given in
the Apocalypse (xxi., xxii.). The earth, according to this
Jewish-Christian conception, was to be the home of the
saved, but the earth reconstructed, purified from all evil,
new heavens and a new earth (2 Pet. iii. 13 ; after Isa.
Ixv. 17 ; Ixvi. 22), the abode of righteousness. It was the
conviction that man's life is tied to this earth, modified
by the feeling that a regeneration of the sin-stricken exter-
nal world was essential (so Paul in Eom. viii. 18-22). It
is doubtful whether the earthly Paradise, the reconstructed
Eden of Genesis, was regarded in the New Testament times
as the future abode of the righteous. Such an opinion would
be not unnatural ; it would be a return to the primitive
blessedness from which man's transgression had expelled
him. The history of the world would then become the rec-
ord of the divine movement for the subjugation of the pow-
ers of evil which had intruded themselves into the first
happy creation of God. There is a hint of such a view in
the Enoch-Parables (Ixi. 12), where the "garden of life" is
ESCHATOLOGY. 409
the dwelling-place of the chosen. The same spot under the
name of the " garden of justice " is described hi an earlier
portion of the book (xxxii.), but without intimation that it
was assigned to the chosen as their habitation. The term
" paradise " 1 is indeed employed several times in the New
Testament to designate the future dwelling-place of the
righteous, but the locality which it is intended to mark is
left uncertain. In the Apocalypse (ii. 7) it is simply men-
tioned as the reward of those who overcome ; in the Third
Gospel (xxiii. 43) it is the abode into which the righteous
enter immediately after death (" To-day," says Jesus to the
malefactor, " shalt thou be with me in Paradise ") ; Paul, with
somewhat more definiteness, seems to identify Paradise with
the third heaven (2 Cor. xii. 2-4). It may be added that
the expression " Abraham's bosom " 2 (Luke xvi. 22), while
it signifies a state of content and happiness, is not definite
as to locality. There is a gulf between the abode of the
saved and that of the lost, but whether on earth or in
Sheol or in some celestial region is not said. But Chris-
tian opinion moved toward the hope of a future dwelling
with Christ in some bright celestial place. " We," says Paul,
"shall be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the
air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord" (1 Thess. iv.
17). " Rejoice and be exceeding glad," we read in the Ser-
1 The word (r-apdHtitros) is generally held to be of Persian origin (ety-
mology uncertain), the original sense being "park" (Xen. Anab. i. 2, 7,
etc.) ; so it is employed in the Hebrew Old Testament (pardes, only in very
late books, Neh. ii. 8 ; Eccl. ii. 5 ; Cant. iv. 13). In the Septuagiut it is the
rendering of the "garden" of Eden (Gen. ii. 15) ; thence it easily passed to
represent the future abode of the righteous. See Smith, " Dictionary of the
Bible," art. Paradise ; Friedrich Delitzsch, " Wo lag das Paradies ? " Weber,
" System," 75.
2 The expression is derived from the Roman habit of reclining at table.
The existence of the saved is pictured as a feast, where Abraham, the father
of the Jewish nation, is head and master, and the righteous man, as hon-
ored guest, reclines with his head on the bosom of the patriarch (cf. Luke
xiii. 29).
410 ESCHATOLOGY.
mon on the Mount (Matt. v. 12), " for great is your reward
in heaven." " When Christ/' says one epistle, " who is now
seated on the right hand of God, shall be manifested, then
believers shall with him be manifested in glory" (Col. iii.
1-4). The person of Christ formed the centre of the Chris-
tian picture of the future ; happiness was the being with
him. But beyond the feeling that there was to be no suf-
fering and no anxiety, the details of the blessed life are
not given. The New Testament writers are concerned with
practical affairs. All that the Church needed was the sup-
port and the stimulus of the transcendent hope of coming
blessedness.
The question of the condition of men between death and
the final judgment is not fully treated in the pre-Christian
literature or in the New Testament. The original Enoch
(xxii.) divides the intermediate abode of souls into several 1
compartments. One is for the righteous who (like Abel)
suffered injustice on earth, another for sinners who were
not punished on earth, another for sinners who were pun-
ished on earth, their fate after death being thereby miti-
gated. The place is described indefinitely as being " in the
west," but is apparently in the underworld. The New Tes-
tament statements or allusions present a simpler scheme.
Paul, at a time when he expected to witness before death
the coming of Christ (1 Cor. xv. 51, 52), naturally thought
of passing from earth directly into the presence of the Lord
(2 Cor. v. 4-8) ; at a later period (Phil. i. 21-23) he speaks
of death as equivalent to union with Christ. 2 The Epistle
to the Hebrews (xii. 23) regards the spirits of the just as
already made perfect ; and in the Apocalypse (vi. 9-11) the
souls of the martyrs (like the soul of Abel in Enoch) cry
1 The text says " four,'' but only three can be clearly made out. The
number is not important ; the fact of punishment and division is clear.
2 Yet in this Epistle also (i 6, 10: iii 20) he seems to expect the parou-
sia in that generation.
ESCHATOLOGY. 411
for vengeance on their slayers. In the Lazarus-parable the
righteous man and the sinner pass immediately to their re-
wards, and so the thief on the cross. The reasonable infer-
ence is that in the main teaching of the New Testament
earthly death ushers men immediately into a new life and
fixes their destinies forever for happiness or misery. Such
nlso is the view in Daniel (xii.) and in Enoch (xxii., cii.,
ciii. ; cf. Wisd. of Sol. iii. 10, 19 ; v.). Neither annihilation
nor future probation can be affirmed to belong to the pre-
vailing doctrine of the first century. Annihilation was a
conception foreign to Jewish thought. It does not appear
in Ecclesiastes, the most sceptical of pre-Christian Jewish
writings ; it is found nowhere in the New Testament. The
terms " destruction " and " death," so often used to describe
the future state of the wicked, are taken from the Old Testa-
ment, and are obviously intended to express not the annul-
ment of existence but the cessation of happy activity. Good
and bad must continue to live after bodily death, and con-
tinuing to live, must accept the conditions which the gov-
ernment of a just God imposes. Nor is there any trace in
pre-Christian Jewish literature or (with one exception) in
the New Testament of a disciplinary and restorative force
iii future suffering, or of the conception of a moral proba-
tion continued after death. The prevailing tone of the Jew-
ish thought on this point is summed up in the word of the
New Testament Apocalypse (Eev. xxii. 11) : "He that is un-
righteous, let him be unrighteous still, and he that is holy,
let him be holy still." Such is the representation in the
parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke xvi.), there is
an impassable gulf between the good and the bad. The only
New Testament passage which seems to teach the possibility
of repentance and salvation after death is the obscure para-
graph in the First Epistle of Peter (iii. 18-20 ; iv. 6), where
Christ is said to have preached, after his death, in the spirit,
412 ESCHATOLOGY.
to the spirits in prison ; that is, as it seems, to those men
who, disobedient to the divine command in the days of Noah,
were now in bonds in the underworld. The intention of the
writer of the Epistle seems to be to represent Christ as
preaching the Gospel to these imprisoned spirits that the
possibility of believing and being saved might be offered
them (a similar view is_ found in the Talmud). But this
passage, if that be its meaning, stands alone ; everywhere
else death seals man's fate. The decisive impetus to preach-
ing came from the conviction that what was to be done for
men must be done in this life. The most dreadful summing
up of destiny is found in the words, " Ye shall die in your
sins" (John viii. 24). l
The idea of moral probation, which runs throughout the
Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, being indeed at the bot-
tom of every scheme of life, is modified or controlled by that
conception of a final judgment which passed over from Juda-
ism into Christianity. The antithesis is distinctly stated in
Acts xvii. 30, 31 : "God commands all men to repent, inas-
much as he has appointed a day in which he will judge the
world." There is nothing in man's view of his own nature
that should lead him to regard death as putting a quietus
on free moral development. Other nations had doctrines of
continuous growth and possibility of moral revolution and
regeneration in the life beyond ; but the Jewish monarchical
scheme of an organized kingdom with God as king, follow-
ing the analogy of human governments, assumed a final judi-
cial sentence passed on enemies with permanent security for
citizens of the kingdom. It was an external, mechanical
conception of human life. The soul of man, with its cease-
less ethical struggle, was lost sight of in the picture (grand
1 On the later Jewish view of the condition of men after death see Weber,
" System," cap. xxi. The Talmudic doctrine of purgatorial suffering in hell
seems to have arisen after the first century.
ESCHATOLOGY. 413
in itself) of a universe forced into submission, to an all-
powerful ruler.
Thus Christian thought, following on a long course of
Jewish growth, reached the conception of a highly organ-
ized kingdom of God beginning on earth and completed in
heaven. This conception, resting on an ethical basis (though
it also contained non ethical elements), satisfied both the
desire for permanent happiness and the demand for moral
perfection ; it included present holiness and future blessed-
ness. For its content it had drawn on all the available
resources of the Western world. It took from Jewish and
Persian theology and eschatology and from Greek ethical
philosophy what it could assimilate, and rejected the rest.
Its guide was the Jewish religious instinct enlightened and
broadened by contact with the other great religious systems
of the time and the region. It was the Israelitish nation
which by all its endowments and training was best fitted
to undertake the organization of a religion for the world.
But the Jews could not alone have provided all that was
required, and but for the social unity created by the Greek
and Eoman empires would neither have felt the need of
foreign help nor been in position to profit by it. Paul, the
creative mind of the first great organizing period of Chris-
tianity, represents Jewish theology constrained and impelled
by non-Jewish surroundings.
The Jewish scheme of national-political supremacy was
soon cast away by the disciples of Jesus, and in its place
was substituted the hope of the future triumph of the
Church. This was the essence of Christian eschatology, and
it was this that furnished the main motive power of Chris-
tian effort. The New Testament throughout holds up the
rewards of the future as the incentive to present holiness.
The eschatology necessarily shaped itself out of the ideas
of the time, and the task of the creators of Christianity
414 ESCHATOLOGY.
was to select these so wisely, with such combined liberality
and sobriety, that the result should offer the world of that
time just what it needed for support and inspiration in the
hard struggle of life. How well they chose, time has shown.
But for this distinct and reasonable hope of the future, it
may safely be said, Christianity would not have imposed
itself on the world ; it would have shared the fate of Greek
ethical systems, which were philosophically lofty but lack-
ing in fulness of life.
On the other hand, it is evident that the Jewish-Christian
conception of the kingdom of God, though encumbered with
mechanical, soteriological, and eschatological elements, re-
posed on an ethically practical and strenuous scheme of the
present earthly life. Prophets and apostles are at one in
holding up a high moral standard and insisting that men
are to suffer or enjoy the consequences of their earthly deeds.
No man, they say, can do wrong with impunity. The pun-
ishment of evil they refer, it is true, not to a divinely con-
stituted course of nature, but to a specific divine decree :
in any case it is just and inevitable. No one can enter the
kingdom of G<5d except by conforming himself to the eth-
ically perfect divine will ; the new man is created in holi-
ness ; the essence of the divine kingdom is righteousness ;
whatever a man sows, that he shall reap, such is the bur-
den of all utterances of Old Testament and New Testament.
This has remained a permanent element of Christianity. The-
ories of atonement, of faith and works, of heaven and hell,
have changed from time to time ; the ethical conception of
life has stood fast. Apart from its framework of dogmatic
apparatus Christianity offered the world of the first century
a simple working theory of God and man, God just and
loving, man free and responsible. By its dogma it was at-
tractive and effective ; on its ethical-religious sicle it was
worthy of its triumph.
CHAPTEK VIII.
RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY.
WE have thus endeavored to trace the process by which
Judaism, the religion of a nation, was transformed
into Christianity, a religion for the world. We have fol-
lowed the progress . of the Israelitish faith in its efforts to
formulate ideas, to organize life, to rise to greater spirit-
uality, to reach the breadth which the advancing thought
of the people demanded. At a certain point in its career
a new faith suddenly sprang into existence, which from a
feeble and undefined beginning soon assumed an assured
and vigorous form. It first showed itself as a new con-
ception of that kingdom of God which in one shape and
another had been the dream of the pious of Israel for
many centuries. This new conception was a startling one.
Whereas prophets, psalmists, and apocalyptists had thought
of the ultimate earthly state of blessedness as a moral and
political reconstruction of the nation, political indepen-
dence and perfection of national obedience to the Law,
Jesus made the essence of the new life to be the purity
of the individual soul. The deliverer, who had always been
conceived of as a temporal king, he held to be a teacher
sent from God to show men the spirit of the divine law.
While he said nothing of an abrogation of the Mosaic law
or of the equality of all nations in the sight of God, he
announced principles which by giving paramount impor-
tance to the spiritual tended to depress the ceremonial, to
416 RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY.
abolish outward distinctions, and to lead to the conclusion
that all men stood in the same relation to God. His disci-
ples, at first only dimly apprehending his spirit, but looking
after his death for his reappearance as the divinely promised
deliverer of Israel, gradually formed themselves into a sep-
arate society, which speedily became a church. Into the
new organization came Gentiles, men who stood outside
the tradition of Jewish national custom, and valued in Chris-
tianity other than its purely Jewish ideas, and in their
interests a further reconstruction became desirable. This
was effected mainly by the Apostle Paul, under whose lead
a large section of the Church threw off circumcision, the
badge of Jewish nationality, dispensed in general with Jew-
ish ceremonial, and made the person of Jesus Christ the
ground of salvation and the centre of the religious life. The
expectation of his speedy reappearance, becoming by degrees
more composed, took its place as part of the Christian hope ;
preparation for heaven was held to consist in religious-ethical
faithfulness. He came to be thought of as the eternal Son
of God, and then, under the influence of Greek philosophy,
as the eternal Word, the reason, utterance, and agent of God
in the physical and spiritual creation and maintenance of
the world. In process of time the Church passed entirely
out of the hands of the Jew r s into the hands of the Gentiles,
entered the circle of Roman and western European thought,
and submitted to those changes which were entailed by the
progress of civilization. What is the relation of Jesus of
Nazareth to this vast movement of human thought ? This
question has been touched on in the preceding pages, but
we may here attempt, at the risk of some repetition, to an-
swer it more directly and fully.
1. In the first place, it seems evident that Jesus announced
those germinal principles of which the succeeding history of
Christianity is only a development. The records of his teach-
RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY. 417
ing leave much to be desired. His words are not always cor-
rectly reported, and there are not a few interpolations from
later tradition ; nevertheless, it seems possible to gather from
the New Testament a fairly faithful idea of the spirit of his
instruction.
"We have recognized in the pre-Christian Jewish literature
the progress which the Jewish mind was making in ethical
breadth and spirituality. Various thinkers had reached very
high conceptions of the principles of moral conduct and of
the nature of religion (Proverbs, Psalms, Wisdom of Solo-
mon, Wisdom of the Son of Sirach, Hillel). There was an
earnest effort to grasp spirituality ; and this must be set over
against the tendency of the extreme Pharisaic party to in-
sist on external details up to the point of forgetting sincerity
and spirituality. It was by no means a religiously torpid
age ; on the contrary, there is reason to believe that there
was a well-defined feeling of discontent in the best minds,
a desire for something purer and higher than had yet been
attained.
It was Jesus of Nazareth who grasped the situation as no
one else did, and in response to the demand of the time
came forward with principles which satisfied men's highest
moral and religious instincts. He faced at once the burning
questions of the day : What is the kingdom of God ? What
is salvation ? Ignoring the ecclesiastical and ritualistic ma-
chinery of the Jews, he declared that salvation was trust in
God and obedience to him. Obedience he defined to be im-
itation of the divine perfection, which he summed up in the
two qualities of justice and love, or in love alone, which in-
cludes justice. Sincerity he assumed as an element of love,
and he felt himself obliged, as has been the case with all
moral teachers, to denounce the insincerity of the religious
leaders and practices of the times. Trust in God he held
to be filial confidence in the divine goodness and wisdom,
27
418 RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY.
hearty sympathy and co-operation with the divine Father in
thought, feeling, word, and deed. In fine, it was oneness
with God in spirit which he announced as the controlling
principle of the religious life. It was the profound con-
viction that this was the essence of salvation which en-
abled him to go his way undisturbed by current practices
and ideas. Whatever his attitude toward the transitory
opinions of his time and people, he never relaxed his hold
on this fundamental and formative principle, a principle
which gave shape to all succeeding phases of Christianity.
It may be that he sympathized with a half -Essen ian quiet-
ism (Matt, v.) ; but this local coloring soon vanished in the
process of development, and the great principle remained.
Perhaps his intention was to restrict his direct teaching to
the Jews as the chosen people of God (Matt. x. 5, 6) ; but
this was a limitation \vhich could not survive in the pres-
ence of the declaration that God's love was bestowed equally
on just and unjust (Matt. v. 45). His conception of the
future of the kingdom of God may have included some of
the outward details of the popular opinion. Something that
he said may have been understood by his disciples as mean-
ing that he himself would return to earth to establish the
kingdom forever (2 Thess. i. 7, 8 ; but against this there is
the apparent hopelessness of the two disciples in Luke xxiv.
17, 21). But this expectation, so long and so anxiously held
by -the Church, did not modify the essential life of Chris-
tianity, serving rather only to quicken its faithfulness and
spirit of obedience.
On the other hand, the silence of Jesus is no less striking
than his utterances. It is not indeed to be considered im-
portant that he added nothing to the existing idea of immor-
tality. The doctrine of the future life was already clearly
formulated, continued existence, with rewards and punish-
ments corresponding to earthly moral character. The asser-
RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY. 419
tion by a comparatively late writer (2 Tim. i. 1 0) that Christ
Jesus " brought life and incorruption [or immortality] to light
through the gospel," refers not to the general doctrine of the
continued existence of all men, but to the promise of a future
life of blessedness for believers in Jesus. In opposing the
Sadducean denial of the resurrection of the body Jesus had
the concurrence of the scribes (Mark xii. 28) ; so Paul (ac-
cording to the account in Acts xxiii. 6-8) on a critical occa-
sion appealed to the Pharisees as the representatives of this
doctrine. On this point the Church coincided with the Syna-
gogue, and the teaching of Jesus was in explicit agreement
with both. His silence in respect to himself is, however,
noticeable. Here we have to rely almost wholly on the
Synoptics and the Epistle of James, the Fourth Gospel being
so deeply colored by later ideas that it must be used with
great caution as a portraiture of the Master. The state-
ments of the Synoptics are not altogether harmonious among
themselves, and must be judged by comparison of one with
another and by the teachings of the succeeding history.
In the first place, it appears probable that Jesus did not
represent himself as a sacrifice for sin. There can be little
doubt that he held in a general way the doctrine of the
necessity of vicarious atonement. It was part of the cur-
rent opinion ; and .he nowhere controverts it, as we may
suppose he would certainly have done if he had thought
the doctrine wrong. It was the teaching of the Law , and
he accepted the Law as a divinely appointed rule of life.
He both himself observed its ritual requirements and ad-
vised others so to do (Mark i. 44 ; xiv. 12-16). In thus
accepting the sacrifices for sin prescribed by the Law, he
virtually declared that no other sacrifice was needed. Paul,
in proclaiming Jesus to be men's propitiation and redemp-
tion (Gal. iii. 13 ; 1 Cor. i. 30 ; Rom. iv. 25), seems distinctly
to set aside the Mosaic scheme of sacrifice (Gal. iii. 13 ; iv.
420 KELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY.
10, 11 ; 1 Cor. i. 23 ; Rom. iii. 19-31 ; v. 12-21), though his
polemic is specially directed against circumcision. The Epis-
tle to the Hebrews makes a detailed argument to show that
the sacrifices of the Law were in themselves impotent and
were formally abrogated by the death of Christ ; but no
such statements are ascribed to Jesus either in the Synop-
tics or in the Fourth Gospel. In Mark (vi 33, 34, 45) he
predicts his death and declares that he came to give his
life as a ransom for many. This last expression, isolated
as it is, cannot in the face of his other teaching be taken
to mean that his death was a substitute for the legal offer-
ings. Vicarious he might have called it in the sense in
which the term is used in Tsa. liii., or as the high-priest
Caiaphas is represented (John xi. 50) as employing it in
reference to Jesus himself ; the rather that in the connec-
tion in Mark (and so in Matt. xx. 28), the giving of his life
as ransom is mentioned along with the ministering which it
is Jesus' special purpose to describe as a part of the humil-
ity that is characteristic of the new kingdom of God. If
the ransoming is not of the nature of ministering (which
is not technically and legally a sacrifice), it is probably an
expression of later tradition. The expression used by Jesus
at the passover-meal, "This is my blood of the covenant,
which is shed for many" (Mark xiv. 24), may be under-
stood in a similar sense ; or it may be that the original form
of the saying was less decided, and that tradition has im-
pressed on it the tone of a later time. Certainly the con-
ception of atonement for sin effected through his blood does
not accord with the tone of the Sermon on the Mount or
with that of his general teaching as given in the Synop-
tical Gospels. There it is individual conduct that deter-
mines men's destiny. Nor can it be said that conduct is
in these passages represented as the outcome of spiritual
power implanted in man in consequence of his atoning
RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY. 421
death ; the silence of the Gospels on this point (omitting
the two passages above quoted) makes such a view practi-
cally impossible. With more reason it might be supposed
that he purposely withheld instruction concerning his death
till the last hour approached, thinking his disciples unfitted
earlier for such teaching, or that he himself did not before
these last days become convinced of the sacrificial nature
of his death. But it would be difficult to reconcile the first
of these suppositions with his distinct statement that who-
ever did the will of God (Mark iii. 35) was nearest to him
in soul ; and both suppositions are rendered improbable by
the attitude of the disciples just after his death.
Still more decidedly alien to his teaching is the dogma
that justification before the divine tribunal was effected by
his righteousness imputed to the believer. In the Synop-
tics faith in Jesus is simply confidence in his ability to
cure bodily ailment, or belief that he is the Messiah ; in
some cases the faith is vicarious (Mark ii. 5 ; v. 36). On
the other hand, Jesus makes man's own righteousness the
human condition of salvation, the divine ground being God's
willingness to forgive (Matt. vi. J4). His scheme of life as
given in his reported teaching contemplates no intermediary
between God and the individual soul. He seems, as has
already been remarked, to have accepted the national sys-
tem of sacrifice ; but from his utterances as they have been
handed down we should infer that he attached little impor-
tance to it. Apparently he looked on it as a time honored
framework of popular religious life, but the essential thing
in his eyes was ethical union with God. He would not
directly combat the existing system ; he would quietly sub-
stitute for it a spiritual principle, not vicarious suffering
or vicarious goodness, but personal obedience. Other great
Jewish moral teachers of the time did not fail, along with
their insistence on ethical purity, to hold up the Law as the
422 KELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY.
essence of the religious life. Jesus substantially put aside
all systems and apparatus and made his appeal simply to
the individual conscience.
Did Jesus regard himself as a divine person or as in any
way lifted above the sphere of humanity ? It may fairly
be said that the general impression left on us by the por-
traiture of him in the Synoptics is that he lived and acted
as other men ; that nothing was further from his mind
than the desire to be looked on as a superhuman being. In
his appeals to the people, in his more familiar intercourse
with his disciples, in his arguments with his opponents, in
his hours of prayer and of struggle he thought and spoke as
a man. He claimed to be only a teacher of righteousness ;
and certainly this was the impression received by some of
his followers, by the two who went to Einmaus (Luke
xxiv. 19-21), and (if we may rely on the account in Acts) by
Peter himself (Acts ii. 22-24, 32-36). If he claimed mirac-
ulous powers, the same claim was made by many others,
prophets and apostles. As to the forgiveness of sins, he him-
self pointed out that this was no more a divine power than
the gift of healing (Mark v. 21-23), and it is represented as
belonging also to the disciples (Matt, xviii. 18 ; cf. Luke x.
16). The titles "Son of Man" and "Son of David" do not
suggest a superhuman nature, nor according to the Fourth
Gospel (John x. 33-36) does a claim to such a nature reside
in the title " Son of God." There Jesus is represented as
making an argument from the Old Testament (Ps. Ixxxii. 6)
to show that men might be so called, and (expressly dis-
claiming divinity) describes himself as one " whom the Father
consecrated and sent into the world." Nothing more than
this seems to be involved in the declaration (Matt. xi. 25-30)
that " no one knows the Son save the Father, nor does any
one know the Father save the Son and he to whom the Son
wills to reveal him " (where the believer is in this respect
RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY. 423
equal with the Son). Other passages, in which the " Son of
Man " is represented as lord of the angels (Matt. xiii. 41 ;
xvi. 27, 28), seem to imply a power not indeed divine yet
more than human. This view of himself, out of harmony
with the utterances above mentioned, might be supposed to
express a later phase of his inward experience, to be a prod-
uct of the time when he had come to look on himself as
the Messiah and destined to reappear in judgment ; but as
his disciples do not seem to have expected such a reappear-
ance (Luke xxiv. ; Mark xvi. 2-5), it is probable that this
announcement was not made by him but expresses the idea
of a later time. In the same way we may understand the
declarations that he would be with his followers everywhere
and always (Matt, xviii. 20 ; xxviii. 19, 20), unless, indeed, a
merely spiritual presence is here intended. With such evi-
dence as lies before us, it seems reasonable to conclude that
Jesus laid no claim, in thought or in word, to other than
human nature and power. He was conscious of profound
sympathy with the divine mind ; the formality and folly of
the prevailing religion pressed on his soul as a heavy bur-
den that he felt called on to bear ; he believed himself to
be a prophet sent by God with a message of salvation to
men, whom he embraced in his deep and yearning love ; yea,
in the intensity of his conscious union with the divine Father
he knew himself to be the Son of God. But beyond this he
did not go. It would indeed be a noteworthy thing that a
Jew of that period, with the profound Jewish sentiment of
the unspeakable distance between God and man, should have
overstepped the boundary, and being in human form, have
equalled himself with the divine. For so remarkable a de-
parture from the national thought we naturally demand clear
evidence, and such evidence we do not find in the existing
records of the life of Jesus.
2. Such was his teaching. What were the fortunes of
424 RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY
the doctrine that he cast forth as seed into the world?
That he made a profound impression on his disciples is
evident from the fact that after his death his name was
the bond of union and basis of organization for them. That
his teaching contained a true response to the demands of
the age is clear from the religious revolution which was
effected by his followers. But was all his teaching accepted
by his disciples, or only a part of it ? and was his doctrine
alone the potent element in the Christianity that subdued
the Roman empire, or did it call to its aid ideas to which
he was a stranger ? And if this last was the case, what
was his relation to the new ideas thus introduced ?
It is commonly said that the disciples just after the
death of Jesus were merely Jews who believed him to
be the Messiah. This is probably true so far as their
religious dogma was concerned. We may infer from the
opening chapters of Acts that they still practised all the
observances of the Law ; and Gamaliel's speech, which may
be regarded as embodying a reliable tradition, seems not
to contemplate the new movement as necessarily inimical
to the national faith. Jesus in fact did not announce any
new dogma, and there was no reason why his followers
should not remain Jews in religious belief. But he did
proclaim and illustrate a new spirit in ethics and religion,
and it was this that was destined to overthrow Mosaism
in the Church. How far in the first years this spirit had
gained possession of the disciples, it is hard to say ; for
information on this point we are wholly dependent on the
account in Acts, which is certainly not free from the ex-
pansions of tradition. Yet so far as we can judge from
the tone of the opening chapters of Acts, there was an
inspiring exaltation of soul in the little company of men
and women who were awaiting the appearance of Jesus.
They had come during his lifetime to look on him as the
RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY. 425
Messiah. This was not strange ; there were not a few Mes-
siahs, who had each his followers. A more noteworthy
thing was that they had retained their faith in him even
after his death. 1 Whether this was due to something which
they understood to be a promise of return on his part or
to the powerful impression made on them by his person-
ality, may be doubtful. It is certain that they believed
him to mark a turning-point in the history of Israel, the
redemption, perhaps in some not clearly defined way, of
the people from all evil. Thus his person naturally became
the central point of their religious faith and hope ; he
would sum up in himself all the promises. This seems to
have been the attitude of the infant Church. Its creed
in other respects had undergone no change. Salvation was
still the reward of obedience to the Law, manifested (as
John and Jesus had taught) by repentance and the out-
ward separation by baptism from that crooked generation ;
but there was the subtle influence of devotion to a pure
and lofty personality ; the memory of his consecration to
his spiritual ideal would leaven more and more the Church's
life and thought.
Thus it is not surprising that we do not find in the
earliest Christian records any clear signs of dogmatic re-
construction. The burden of the discourses and prayers
reported in the twelve first chapters of Acts (up to the
time when Paul began his active work) is simply that
Jesus of Nazareth, who had been put to death, was the
promised Christ, the prophet foretold by Moses and the
prophets, the servant of God sent to turn men from their
iniquities. And if he was all this, it was of course neces-
sary that men should believe on him, that is, should accept
1 This fact also, as is well known, has its counterparts in history and
especially in other religious movements, as, for example, Buddhism, the
Mahdi-form of Mohammedanism, and the Persian Babism.
426 EELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY.
him as the final teacher and deliverer. The belief early
established itself that he had risen from the dead, that he
had been received into heaven, there to dwell till the time
of his coming, a belief which may be regarded as a natural
pendant to the conviction that he, though he had died, was
the Messiah. Such is the doctrine of the Epistle of James,
in which, as in the early chapters of Acts, there is no word
respecting a sacrificial character attaching to the death of
Jesus nor any ascription of divinity to him, nothing but the
exhortation to lead a holy life in expectation of his coming.
It was thus that the early disciples interpreted the teach-
ings of Jesus in the light of their own hopes. From 'their
opinions we may gather what had been the nature of his
instruction. We may infer that he had spoken of himself
only as the servant of God, sent to announce the new order
of things, the essence of which was unfeigned love to God
and man. There was here an extraordinary concurrence
of favorable conditions : a people with a firmly organized
monotheistic faith, and in contact with the best ethical
thought of the time ; a circle within the people conscious
of the lacks of the existing system and anxious to estab-
lish a higher spirituality ; a general belief that God, in ac-
cordance with his ancient promises, was about to introduce
a new order of things ; a man who by his extraordinary
endowments was able to inspire a select circle of followers
with a controlling enthusiasm both for his person as the
final deliverer sent by God, and, in a germinal way, for
those lofty principles of ethical-religious life which he set
forth in his teaching and illustrated in his conduct, these
were the conditions of the birth of Christianity, briefly and
roughly stated. Those subtle influences which we call the
spirit of the age and the spirit of the teacher require for
their detailed comprehension fuller literary data than we
possess ; but from the existing records and from the sue-
RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY. 427
ceeding religious development we may infer their general
character, and it appears that the early Church was the
direct product of the teaching and personality of Jesus.
3. This was the dogmatic position of the Church when
Saul of Tarsus entered it. It is unnecessary here to attempt
to explain his conversion. From the little bit of autobi-
ography in the first chapter of Galatians it may be con-
cluded that the person of Jesus had made a profound
impression on him. We may suspect that to Paul he was
from the first more than the risen Messiah who was to
restore Israel, that the future apostle saw in him even
then the hope of that spiritual regeneration for which he
seems to have been long struggling. Unfortunately Paul
has left us no full account of his early experiences, only
reminiscences which may be colored by his later thought.
We know only the dogmatic system which he worked out
after many years spent in Arabia and Syria. There he
came into contact with Gentiles, whose peculiar position
may well have caused him to reflect on the conditions
of church-membership, and have helped to lead him to the
conclusion that salvation was complete in Christ without
the works of the Law. This was equivalent in his mind
to affirming that Christ had worked out a perfect right-
eousness, since without perfect righteousness there could
be no salvation, and man's own righteousness was neces-
sarily imperfect. But this imputed righteousness was in-
separably connected in his conception with an inward spirit
of obedience, an impulse of love, the gift of God through
Christ. Such an idea may have been present to him from
the moment when the conviction had seized on him that the
true Christ was this suffering crucified man of spotless life.
Paul seems (such is the impression made on us by the
history) to have had a sudden revelation (born of much
preceding struggle of soul) that God's promised salvation
428 RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY.
was a spiritual one, and that it was embodied in Jesus of
Nazareth. Salvation carried with it remission of sins, and
remission of sins implied an offering ; thus the death of
Jesus naturally assumed a sacrificial character. Paul's
whole scheme was not only made possible but was forced
on him by his conception of the person of Jesus.
We may suppose that it was by some such process of
feeling that the Church at large came to interpret as the
foundation of salvation that mysterious death which it had
at first regarded as an interruption of the divine deliver-
ance. The disappearance of the Messiah from the earth
was hard to understand. Surely, said the disciples, he will
come again to complete what he has begun. Then with
the growth of spirituality in a section of the Church (for
one portion of it seems never to have advanced beyond the
Old Testament point of view as given in the Epistle of
James) came the belief that the end of the divine inter-
vention was deliverance from sin, and Jesus was regarded
as the exalted Son of God who had given his life for men.
This conception of the Master is found in the majority of
the books of the New Testament. In his death that age,
looking on sacrifice as an absolute necessity, found a com-
plete solution of the problem of satisfaction for sin. The
Jewish ethical-spiritual thought thus created out of the
person of Jesus a framework (indispensable for that time)
for his higher religious teaching.
The exaltation of Jesus, implied in the title "the Lord
Jesus Christ" and in the frequent coupling of his name
with that of God the Father, was a natural consequence
of the increasing value which was attached to his person
and work. Withdrawn from earth, he was thought of as
in heaven, and charged with the salvation of men, he was
believed to be invested with the universal authority neces-
sary for the fulfilment of his mission. When this feeling
RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY. 429
first found expression it is not easy to say. That it was
not in existence immediately after the death of Jesus may
be inferred from the narratives of the Synoptics ; but the
general impression made on us by Paul's history of his
conversion (Gal. i.) is that it formed a part of the apostle's
experience at an early stage of his Christian career. The
Lord Jesus is thought of as sitting at the right hand of
God and controlling the destinies of men. This concep-
tion, interpreted as a part of the new-born Christian con-
sciousness, signifies the exaltation of righteousness to the
place of honor in the world. In the person of the Re-
deemer it is made glorious and everlasting. Yet on the
dogmatic side this exaltation of Jesus is always in the
Pauline period distinguished from deification. He is
the Lord, the pre-existent Son of God, but he acts accord-
ing to the will of God, who sent him forth (Gal. i. 4 ; iv. 4) ;
he is God's as believers are Christ's ; all spiritual life is
in him because he has been made by God the source of
life (1 Cor. i. 33; iii. 23); all things shall be subjected
to him that he himself may then be subjected to God (1
Cor. xv. 28) ; he is the fulfilment of the promises unto the
glory of God, which shines in his face (2 Cor. i. 20 ; iv. 6) ;
God reconciles men to himself in Christ, and raises them
from the dead as he raised Jesus (2 Cor. v. 19 : iv. 14) ;
Christ was born of the seed of David according to the
flesh and determined to be the Son of God according to
the spirit by the resurrection from the dead (Rom. i. 3, 4) ;
and as final judge of men (2 Cor. v. 10) he is the agent of
God (Rom. ii. 16). 1 An exalted position not thought of by
1 On Rom. ix. 5, see the discussion by Abbot and Dwight in Vol. I. of
" The Journal of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis," (Boston,
1881). The passnge must be interpreted in accordance with Paul's un-
varying usage elsewhere, and it may fairly be said to be highly improbable
that the author of Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans should apply the
epithet "God" to Christ.
430 RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY.
himself was assigned him ; but conceived, as it was, reve-
rently and soberly, it did not impugn the aloneness of
God, and practically served to give impressiveness to the
fundamental religious ideas of the Master. It was, we
may conclude, the natural way in which the age expressed
its estimate of his greatness. 1
To this portraiture of the function of Jesus Paul added
the conception of perfect legal righteousness worked out
by him and reckoned as a legally justifying fact to every
believer. This idea was not embraced by the whole Church
of the first century (it does not appear in the Apocalypse,
the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Fourth Gospel, or the
Pastoral Epistles, or indeed distinctly anywhere except
in the four great Pauline Epistles), nor has it ever suc-
ceeded in establishing itself firmly in the Christian con-
sciousness. Yet, though its scholastic and apparently
mechanical form has often been repellent, it is based, as
has been pointed out above, on a profound ethical-spiritual
feeling, on the conviction that man's spiritual powers can
have full play only when he is relieved from the obliga-
tion of an impossible performance and quickened into
activity by love. Jesus himself did not hold that the
efficacy of the divine love in awakening in man's soul love
of holiness depended on the forensic intermediation of an
imputed righteousness ; but to Paul, with his peculiar train-
ing and experience, such an intermediary appeared to be
necessary. In general the position of mediator assigned
by the Church of the first century to Jesus seems to have
been alien to his thought. This departure from his teach -
1 So far as Paul and the early Church are concerned, such an estimate
might be held to have grown up on purely Jewish soil, though Greek influ-
ence is neither impossible nor improbable. Exaltation of men into the
divine sphere was rather an Hellenic than a Semitic mode of thought, and
may have been insensibly appropriated by a portion of the Jewish world.
Whether this was actually the fact, it is hardly possible to say.
RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY. 431
ing is an evidence of his power. The Jew of that period
(and the New Testament writers were probably all Jews)
could hardly conceive of an immediate friendly relation
between God and man ; all the past religious development,
beginning from primitive times, involved the interposition
of some reconciling or propitiating agency. For the Jew
it had been the national system of sacrifices. That Jesus
took the place of this great mediatorial scheme, which the
wisdom and mercy of God, it was believed, had devised
for the fathers, shows the enormous significance which was
attached to his person, the controlling power of his person-
ality ; he, by the impression he made, coerced and revolu-
tionized the religious apparatus of a nation. It is possible,
it is even probable, that the disciples never asked them-
selves whether the Master had practically ignored medi-
ating agency in his teaching. His silence on this point
would hardly attract their attention ; they would assume
that he taught what the Scriptures enjoined. The graft-
ing of a mediatorial doctrine on his conception of salva-
tion was doubtless an unconscious procedure on their part ;
the doctrine was a part of that framework without which
the age seemed unable to appropriate his higher thought. 1
4. While the Jewish and the Pauline conceptions of
Christianity were thus moving side by side, a new ten-
dency of thought was coming into view. The union of
Greek philosophical speculation with Jewish theology had
produced the Alexandrian doctrine of the logos, the con-
ception of an exalted being nearly allied in nature to God,
1 Here again, in the development of the Christian mediatorial scheme,
the possibility of non-Jewish influence must be admitted. Such influence is
certain so far as regards the logos-doctrine, which involved the idea of
mediation. Whether the Persian conception of intermediation (JMithraJwas
then in position to be effective is doubtful. The groundwork of the Chris-
tian idea was Jewish ; the possibility of its extension, as it appears in the
New Testament, was probably made easier by the diffusion of Greek (and |
perhaps of Persian) modes of thought.
432 KELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY.
the image of the divine glory, the agent in the divine
creation, standing midway between God and the world as
mediator between the two. This conception, originating
in Alexandria (to this conclusion the documentary evidence
points), seems to have made its way to Asia Minor, and
perhaps to other parts of the Jewish world. At any rate
it commended itself to not a few Christians, who recog-
nized its grandeur and relevancy and saw in the descrip-
tion of the mediating image and son of God a portraiture
of the person and work of the Christ of God, Jesus of
Nazareth. This construction of the divine method of
government is expressed in four books of the New Tes-
tament, the Epistles to the Hebrews, the Ephesians,
the Colossians, and the Eourth Gospel, which rnay thus
be considered to form in this respect a separate group.
They agree in ascribing to Jesus the most exalted position
in the universe under God. They differ in the terms which
they apply to him, and in the way in which they repre-
sent his functions in the divine plan of salvation, as well
as in their view of the human conditions of salvation ; they
differ also so far as regards the circumstances of the cir-
cles to which they are addressed. The design of Hebrews
(addressed to Jewish Christians by one who felt called on
to reconcile the Jewish sacrificial idea with his Pauline-
Alexandrian conception of Jesus) is to portray Jesus as
the priest and sacrifice of a new covenant made far more
glorious than the old by his personality. He, says the
Epistle (i. 1-4), appointed heir of all things and agent in
the work of creation, the impress of the divine substance,
made purification of sins and sat down on the right hand
of the Majesty on high, having become by so much better
than the angels as he had inherited a more excellent
name than they. The author's leading idea is the dig-
nity of the priestly Saviour, whom he identifies with the
RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY. 433
Alexandrian creative logos. The Epistle to the Ephesians
sets forth against Jewish exclusiveness the sufficiency of
the salvation of Christ, presenting him as the consumma-
tion of all things (i. 10), lord over the universe and head
of the Churcli. by divine appointment (i. 20-23), the reve-
lation of the divine wisdom to the heavenly principalities
and powers (iii. 10). The author of Colossians is led to
speak more fully of the person of Jesus, his polemic being
directed against a current form of Gnosticism (apparently
Jewish) which laid stress on angelic intermediaries be-
tween God and man and on ascetic observances (ii. 16-19).
In opposition to this belief he represents Christ as the
image of God, the first-born of the creation, the agent in
the creation of the universe, the head of the Church, the
possessor of the fulness [the Gnostic pleroma, the content
of all being], the reconciler of all things to God (i. 15-20),
forms of expression substantially identical with those
of Philo. The relation of the Fourth Gospel (in the same
category with which is the First Epistle of John) to the
Jewish-Alexandrian philosophy has already been pointed
out : here Jesus is the logos, head of the kingdom of
light and life, himself revealer and source of salvation.
The variety and vividness of these portraitures of Jesus,
the activity and enthusiasm of thought they show, is an
indication of his wonderful power. His person assimilated
all the elements of thought of the time. Into whatever
circle his name made its entrance, it there became the
controlling factor. He represented purity and salvation,
and around him as a centre all systems of life and of the
universe arranged themselves. The Church in expanding
and embellishing his theology still made him the essence
of her theology. With all the variations in other points
she held fast to the conception of Jesus as the exalted
Saviour. Salvation was inseparably connected with his per-
28
434 RELATION OF JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY.
son, this was the inspiring idea of Christianity. As to
how the salvation was effected by what acts or expe-
riences of God, of Christ, and of men there were differ-
ences of view. The Pauline theory of imputed righteousness
does not appear outside of Paul's writings. Hebrews and
First Timothy represent faith as exercised toward God
primarily (" God our Saviour," 1 Tim. ii. 3). These, together
with Ephesians, Colossians, Second Timothy, Titus, First
Peter, and the Apocalypse, refer to the death of Christ
as expiatory. The Fourth Gospel and the First of the
Epistles ascribed to John further lay stress on the living
union of the soul with Jesus, who is regarded as mysti-
cally imparting spiritual life or giving entrance into the
kingdom of light. But amid all these variations the per-
son of Jesus remains the centre of the religious life. It
was indeed this personal character of the Christian faith
and hope which both produced or permitted individual
differences, and maintained the substantial unity of the
Church in spite of them. A great inspiring idea, the idea
of salvation, was cast forth into the world, and men held
it in such forms as were suggested by their views of God
and the world. Thus it was possible that a real catholic
church with a catholic faith could exist amid such diver-
sities of national, social, and intellectual relations as the
Church of the early centuries showed. It is further true
that the ethical teaching and example of the Master deter-
mined the ethical creed of the Church. For him salva-
tion was oneness of soul with God, and his followers,
though they developed his religious teaching in a theo-
logical way and departed from the simplicity of his doc-
trine, did not forget the spirit of his life. The sweetness
of patient, self-forgetting love which entered, like a breath
from heaven, into the hardness of the Eoman world, was
the copy of the daily life of Jesus, strengthened by the
EELATION OF JESUS TO CHKISTIANITY. 435
belief that his atoning death made manifest the value of
the individual soul and swept away the artificial barriers
that had hitherto separated men. In a word, the Church
was the creation of Jesus partly by his direct teaching,
partly by the stimulating and organizing power of his
personality.
The formative period of the Church extended over the
first century following the death of Jesus. Then came a
formulating period of about three centuries during which
a number of ideas which in the New Testament books are
more or less fluid were put into the shape of propositions
and received as dogmas. Each of the great races that
embraced Christianity impressed its thought and its per-
sonality on the body of doctrine. The faith passed from
the Greek and Latin to the Celtic and Germanic commu-
nities of Europe. Protestantism threw away part of the
great mass of beliefs which the medieval Catholic Church
had accumulated, and entered on its own career of trans-
formation. Both branches of Christianity, Catholic and
Protestant, have followed the currents of modern thought;
there is not a phase of science, philosophy, or literature
but has left its impress on the body of beliefs that con-
trol Christendom. But in all this freedom of movement
the person of Jesus has maintained its place as the centre
of religious life. Whatever the particular construction of
the theology, whether he be regarded as substantially di-
vine or only as a profoundly inspired man, whether his death
or his life be most emphasized, whether Church or Bible
be accepted as infallible guide, he is ever the leader and
model of religious experience. It becomes more and more
evident that the fundamental truths which he announced
are as new as they were in his time, and that he alone is
in the highest sense the founder of Christianity.
INDEX OF CITATIONS.
Page
en. i.-xi. . . 160, 195
196
OLD TESTAMENT
Page
Ex. iii. 6 . . . 394 n.
vi. 3 . . . . 306 w.
xiv. 20 . . . 113 n.
xv. 16 .... 107
xxi.-xxiii. . 235, 237
xxiii. 21 ... 91, 148
xxxiii. 14 ... 90
xxxiii. 15 ... 148
Lev. iv 226
i
Page
2 Sam. vii. 14 . . 317
xii 309 n.
.2 .... 161 w.
. 20, 21 . . . 161 n.
.26-28 .... 173
. 26 . . 147, 153, 161
i. 1 101
xii. 1-14 . . 184 n.
xxiv 185 n.
xxiv. 1 .... 157
1 Kings iv. 29-34 . 135
v. 32 135
i. 7 . . . 173, 175
i. 15 (Sept.) . 409 .
iii. . . . 157, 167, 194,
195, 199, 204, 209
iii. 21 197
iii. 22 198
viii. . . 309 ., 312
xvii. 21 .... 175
xxii. 19-23 ... 144
xxii. 21 .... 165
2 Kings ii. 9 ... 176
iii. 15 . . . . 145 .
vi. 17 149
v. vi 226
v. 1 175
xvi. . . 143, 167, 226
xvi. 17 .... 109
xvii. 7 .... 142
xvii. 11 . . . . 174
xviii. 18 . . . . 17 .
xxi. 11 .... 175
xxiv. 11 .... 91
Num. xxi. 4 ... 175
xxiv. 7 ... 113 n.
Dent. v. 9 . . . . 185
iv. 16-24 . . 160 n.
iv. 18 . . . . 160 n.
iv. 26 . . . . 306 n.
v 196
xiv. 25 .... 134
xxiii. 10 .... 406
1 Chron. i.-ix. . . 55 n.
xxi. 1 . 78, 157, 202
2 Chron. xiv. 11 . . 127
xxxii. 8 .... 174
Ezra ii 55 n.
v. 18 . . . . 160 n.
v. 29 196
vi.-ix 196
vi. . . . 65, 167, 201
vi. 1, 2 .... 159
vi. 2 147
viii. 3 ... 104, 105
xiii. 3 175
vii. 6 259
Neh. ii. 8 . . . 409 n.
viii. 21 .... 176
ix. 4 174
xxviii.-xxx. . . 312
xxxii. 8 . 147 ., 151 .
xxxii. 17. 142 n., 155
Josh. v. 1 .... 176
vii. 7, 66 . . 312 .
viii 127
xi 7 . . 147
xii. 5 175
ix. 6 . . . . 161 n.
xii. 11 .... 55 n.
Job i. ii 147
xii. 13 . . 175, 194
xv. 4 .... 177 n
v. 13 148
vii. 24, 25 ... 184
Judg. vi. 11 ... 121
ix 23 ... 145
xv. 6 .... 275
i. 5 227
xv. 10 .... 107
xvi. 7, 13 ... 91
xvi. 7-13 ... 148
xviii. . . . 202, 272
xviii. 19 .... 147
xviii. 25 .... 81
xx 272
j. 8 ]65
xi 24 ... 306
iii 8 .... 162
xiii 121
iv. 15 . . . . 145 re.
vii. 17-21 ... 228
ix. 13 162
x. 1 175
xiii. 25 ..... 228
xiv. 1-3 .... 228
xix. 25-27 . 381, 388,
389
xxvi. 6 . . . 404 w.
xxvi. 12 .... 162
xxvi. 13 . .92 n., 162
xxviii. . . 98, 98 .
xxviii. 22 . . 404 n.
xxxii.-xxxvii. . 98 .
xxxiii. 23, 24 . . 228
xxxviii. 7 . . 147, 161
xiii. 13, 18 ... 91
xiii. 18 . . 148, 317
xiv. 6 .... 92 .
1 Sam. ii. 16 ... 175
xii. 23 .... 228
xv .... 309 n.
xxvi 272
xxvi. 7 .... 194
xxvii 194
xxvii. 33-37 . 103 n.
xxix. 14 .... 174
xxx 194
xvi 168
xvi. 13, 14 . . . 92 .
xvi. 14-23 ... 145
xvi. 23 . . . 145 n.
xix. 20 . . . . 92 n.
xix. 24 .... 170
xxviii. . . . 143 n.
2 Sam. v. 1 ... 174
vii. . . .184 ., 316
xxxi. 12, 13 . . 109
xxxii. 24, 30 .. 91
xxxv. 11 . . 177 n.
xii. 8 176
xliii. 30 ... 177 n.
433
INDEX OF CITATIONS.
Paze
. . 162
Ps. Ivi 4 . .
Ivii. 4 . .
Iviii. 1 . .
Iviii. 2 . .
lix. 3 ...
Page
. . 174
. . 175
. 147 n.
. . 78
. . 189
Prov. i. 10-14
ii. 16-19 .
iii. 13-20 .
iii. 16
v. ...
Page
. . 100 n.
. . 100 n.
... 99
... 404
. . . 100
xli. . . .
. . 162
xli 1 .
. . 161
xlii. . .
. . 272
xlii. 8 . .
Ps. ii. . . .
227, 228
. 400
Ixii. 5 . .
Ixv . . .
. . 175
. . 80
v. 11 . .
. . . 174
ii 7
. 317
vi. 1-5 .
vii. . . .
. . 100 n.
. . 100 n
ii. 9 . . .
. 120
l\.v. 2 . .
. . 174
iv 2 . . .
87
Ixvi. 18 . .
Ixviii. . .
. . 176
. . 202
. . 187
viii. i.-ix. 6
viii. 22, 31
ix. 13-18 .
x. 27 . .
... 99
... 100
. . 100 n.
. . . 404
v. 10 . . .
vi 1
206 n.
87
vi. 2 . . .
. 174
Ixix. 16 . .
Ixxi. 20 . .
Ixxii. 13 . .
Ixxii. 17
/ Ixxiii. 18-20
Ixxiii. 21 .
Ixxiii 24
Ixxiii. 26
Ixxiv. . .
Ixxiv. 8 . .
Ixxiv. 21 .
Ixxix. . .
Ixxx. . . .
. . 87
. . 380
. . 175
. . 357
. . 87
. 177 n.
. . 380
. . 177
. . 61
. . 247
. . 162
. 61, 223
204, 223
. . 78
vii. 10 . .
. 176
. 147
xiii. 12 .
XV. 1 . .
. . . 176
. . . 294
ix. 17. . .
. 379
XV. 11 .
xvi. 2 . .
. . 404 n.
. . . 176
x. 6 ...
. 176
x. 14, 36 . .
xiv. 2, 3 . .
XV
xvi. . . 379,
xvi. 9 . . .
xvi. 10 . . .
xvi. 11 . . .
. 80
206 n.
. 236
380, 389
. 174
. 388
. 87
. 389
xvii. 9
xxiv. 17 .
xxiv. 29 .
xxv. 1
xxv. 9
. . . 294
. . . 294
. . . 294
. . . 135
. . . 293
xxv. 21, 22
Eceles. ii. 5
ii. 24 . .
. 294, 297
. . 409 n.
. . . 175
. 380
iii. 21 . .
. . . 176
xvii. 15 . . .
xviii. 20-27 . .
xix
380, 388
. 189
80
Ixxxii. 1, 6 .
Ixxxii 6 .
. 147 .
. . 422
vii. 20
vii. 28 .
viii. 12
ix. 10 . .
. . 206 n.
. . 210 n.
. . 192 n.
. . . 59
Ixxxiv. 2
Ixxxv. . .
Ixxxv. 1, 2 .
Ixxxvii. . .
Ixxxix. 48 .
xc. 4 ...
xciii. ...
174, 177
.. . 223
. . 187
237, 314
. . 175
. 374 n.
. . 80
xix. 7 . . .
xxiv. . . .
xxv. 4 . . .
xxv. 7 . .
xxv. 11 . . .
.xx vii. 1 . . .
xxix
. 175
236, 237
. 87
187, 228
. 230
. 87
. 80
x. 3 . .
xii. 9-14 .
Cant. iv. 13
v. 4 . .
Isa. i. . .
i. 10-18 .
i. 11 . .
. . 192 n.
. . . 59
. . 409 n.
. . 177 n.
. . 315 n.
. . . 222
. . . 229
xcv. 5 . .
xcvi. . 80,
xcvii. 7 . .
xcviii. . .
ci
. . 155
357 n., 398
. 147 n.
. 357 n.
. . 237
. . 80
xxix. 1 . . .
xxxi
147 n.
. 187
ii. 2-4 . .
. . . 313
xxxii. . . .
xxxii. 5 . .
xxxiii. 6 . .
xxxiii. 16 . .
xxxiv. 20 . .
xxxv. 3 . . .
xxx vi. 2 . .
xxxvi. 10 . .
xxxviii. 1 . .
xxxviii. 3, 20 .
xxxix. 8, 11 .
xl. 6 . . . .
. 188
228, 230
. 104
. 127
. 87
. 87
206 n.
. 188
. 87
. 187
. 86
. 229
ii. 5 . .
ii. 6-22 .
iii. .
. . 314 .
. . 315 n.
. . 315 n
ciii. 8-10, 12
ciii. 12-14 .
ciii. 13 . .
ciii. 13, 14 .
civ. . . .
civ. 26 . .
civ. 29 . .
civ. 30 . .
cvi. 37 . .
cvii. . . .
. . 227
. . 87
. . 84
. . 228
. 79, 80
. . 162
. 204 n.
. 92 n.
. . 155
. . 79
iv. 1 . .
iv. 2 . .
iv. 2-6 .
v. ...
. . 315 n.
. . 316 n.
. . . 315
. . . 204
v.-x. . .
vi 9 13 .
. . 315 n.
. . . 310
vii.-x.
vii. 10-12
vii. 14 .
viii
. . . 321
. . . 123
. . . 317
. 378
xl. 6-8 . .
xl. 11 . . .
xliv
xliv. 17, 18 . .
xlv. 3 . . . .
138, 230
. 87
61, 332
. 189
. 317
cvii. 20 . .
cviii. 4 . .
104, 105
. . 87
. . 400
viii. 16 .... 69
viii. 18 .... 137
viii. 19 142 n., 143 n.,
378
ix. 6 . . - - 3r,7
87
xlix. 15 . . .
1. 9-13 . . .
1.16-21 . . .
Ii. . . . 187,
Ii. 1, 2 . . .
Ii. 3 . . . .
. 380
. 230
. 87
206, 236
. 86
. 228
cxvi. 5 .... 87
cxix. . . 236, 240, 278
cxix. 120 ... 174
cxxxvi. 37 . . 142 n.
cxxxvii. ... 18, 61
cxxxix. 17 ... 87
cxliii.2 ... 206 n.
cxlv. 8, 9 ... 7
ix. 6, 7 .
. 315 n., 317
. . 396 n.
x. 18 . .
x. 20, 24-27
x. 21 . .
x. 22 . .
. . . 173
. . . 310
. . 317 n.
. . 336 n.
. . . 317
Ii. 4 . . . .
. 230
Ii. 6 . . . .
. 191
Ii. 10 . . . .
Ii. 12 . . . .
86, 176
.92 n.
cxlviii. . .
. . 80
xi. 2 . .
. . . 317
cxlviii. 5
Prov. i.-ix.
. . 161
58, 100 n.
xi. 1-9 .
xii. .
. . . 316
61
Ii. 17 .
, 176
INDEX OF CITATIONS.
439
Page
Isa. xiii. ... 396 n.
xiii. 21 .... 155
xiv 396 n.
xiv. 9 .... 404 n.
xiv. 9, 10 ... 379
xiv. 24-32 . . 315 .
xv.-xviii. . . 315 M.
Page
Jer. iv. 19 ... 177 n.
iv. 28 .... 361 n.
vii. 22 .... 229
x. 1-16 ... 315 .
xi. 20 . . . . 177 n.
xv. 1 228
Pape
Dan. ix. 24, 25 .. 64
x. 13 150
x. 20, 21 ... 229 n.
xi 320
xi. 45 64
xii. . . 320, 398, 411
xii 1 3 392
xvii. 9, 10 ... 191
xxiii. 5-8 . 315 ., 316
xxiii. 29 .... 103
xxv. 8-11 ... 311
xxv. 9 ... 396 .
xxv. 12 . . 64, 311 w.
xxix. 7 . . . 396 .
xxx 311
xii. 1-4 .... 320
xii. 2 . 64, 380 n., 404
xii. 9 321
xix. 18 ... 314 n.
xix. 18-25 ... 314
xx 315 .
xxii. 15-25 . . 315 .
xxvi. 15, 20 . . 389
xxvi. 19 . . 388. 389
xxvii. 1 . . 162, 162 n.
xxviii.-xxxi. . 315 n.
xxviii. 11 ... 138
xxix. 4 ... 143 n.
xxix. 8 .... 175
xxx 7 .... 162
xii. 11-13 ... 321
Hos. i.-xiv. . . 315 .
ii 310
iii 310
xxxi. 1-30 ... 311
xxxi. 31-34 ... 311
xxxi. 31-40 . . 311 .
xxxiii. 14-26 315.,316
xxxviii. 17 175, 396 n.
xlix 315 n.
iii. 5 .... 309 n.
iv. 3 . . . . 361 n.
vi. 6 ... 232, 2(54
xi 1 . 83 S17
xiv. 1-7 .... 310
Joel i.-iii 31/8
ii. 28-iii. 21 . . 314
iii. 334 n., 357 n., 396 n.
Amosi.-ix. . . 315 n.
i 396 n.
xxx. 33 .... 406
xxxi. 3 .... 174
xxxii. 1-8 ... 317
xxxii. 10 . . 92 n.
xxxiv. 14 . 142, 155
xxxiv. 45 ... 242
xxxv. 5 .... 330
xxxvii. 21-35 . 315 w.
xxxviii 38-2
xl 322
] -III 315 n .
1. . . 242, 311, 396 .
Ii. . 242, 311 n., 396 n.
Lam. ii. 11 . . . 177 n.
Ezek. i. -xxxiii. . 315 n.
xi. 19 173
ji 396 n.
iii 307
xiii. 19 .... 175
xiv. 12-20 . . 272 n.
xiv. 14 .... 64
xvi 204
iii. 2 .... 336 n.
v. 21-23 .... 229
v. 27 309
vi. 14 309
xl. 2 . . . 223, 353
xiii. 1-17 ... 326
xiv. 7 .... 146
xlvi 396 n.
xviii 191
viii. 8 . 309, 361 n.
ix 307
xviii. 2-4 ... 185
xxviii. . . . 195 n.
xxix. 17-21 . 396 .
xxxi. 18 ... 404 w.
xxxiv. 23, 24 . . 315
xxxvi. -xlviii. . .311
xxxvi. 26-28 190, 191
xxxvii 388
ix. 5 . . . . 361 n.
ix. 9 309
xlvii 396 n.
xlviii. 16 . . 92 n.
xlix. 1-6 ... 166
xlix. 5 .... 326
xlix. 6 .... 225
liii. . . 166, 280, 322,
330 n., 352, 420
liii. 1-9 .... 224
liii. 10 .... 175
liii. 10-12 ... 225
Iv. 11 . . . 103, 104
lix. 7, 8 . . . 206 n.
Ix.-lxvi. ... 311
Ix. . . 324 n , 336 n.
Ix. 10, 12 ... 225
Ixi 313
ix. 11-15 . . 309 n.
Obadiah .... 396 n.
Mic. i.-iii. . . 3K*, 315 n.
i. 8 170
iv.-vii. . . . 310 n.
iv. 1-5 .... 313
iv. 2, 5 . . . 314 >/.
iv. 6-13 ... 310 n.
v. 2-8 .... 316
v. 2 ... 330, 357
vi. . . . 310 n., 315 w.
vi. 7 . . . 175, 229
vii. . . . 312
xxxvii. 11-14 . . 389
xxxvii 2, 25 . . 315
xxxvii. 25 ... 403
xxxviii. . . 320, 373
xxxix. . . 320, 373
xl.-xlviii. . 70, 133 .
xliv. 15 .. 254, 315
xlviii. . . . 374 .
xlviii. 11, 35 . . 316
Dan. i. 8 ... 192 n.
I. 8, 12 .... 255
ii 320
ii 11 174
Nahum i.-iii. . 310, 315,
396 n.
Hab. i.-iii. . . 315 n.
ii. 14 ... 310, 317
iii Cl
Ixii. 5 83
Ixiii. 3 .... 120
Ixiii. 9 ... 90, 148
Ixv. . . . , . 37f
ii. 44 . . . . 321 n.
iv. 8 . . . . 92 n.
v 12 . ... 176
jjj 14 90 n.
Zeph. i. 11 . . 310, 315 n.
Hi 310 n.
Ixv. 11 .... 155
Ixv. 17-25 ... 311
Ixv. 17 . . 401, 408
Ixvi . . 408
vii. . 67 ., 320, 321,
354, 357 n., 398
vii. 9 325
Hag. ii. 6-9 ... 313
Zech i -viii. . . . 313
i. 9 149
Ixvi. 19-24 ... 311
Ixvi. 22 .... 408
Ixvi. 24 .... 406
Jer. i. 5 326
ii. 1 83
ii. 26, 27 ... 143 n.
iii. 4 83
vii. 13 .... 354
vii. 21-27 ... 64
vii. 27 ... 321 n.
viii ... . 320
i. 12 223
iii 148
iii. 1,2 .... 91
vi. 12 316
viii. 16 .... 150
ix 320, 329
ix. 2 127
viii. 1-15 ... 313
ix.-xiv 314
440
INDEX OF CITATIONS.
Page
Zech. ix. 9-17 . . 315
ix. 9 . . . 318, 343
ix. 13 318
x. 11 . . . . 316 n.
xii.-xiv 315
Page
Zech. xiii. 2 ... 77
xiv. . . . 313, 398
xiv. 20, 21 ... 315
Mai. iii. iv. ... 313
Page
Mai. iii. 1 .... 330
iii. 14 80
iv 357 n.
iv. 5 330
APOCRYPHA.
1 Esdras iii. iv. . . 51
2 Esdras vi. 49-52 . 162
vii. 28, 29 .. 67 n
Ecclus. xxviii. 2-5 . 29<
xxix. 2, 12, 20 . 294
xxxvi. 1-17 . . 318
Enoch xxxii. . . . 409
xxxvii. -Ixxi. . . 325
xxxvii 401
x. 11, 7 ... 67 n
xii. 10-32 . . 67 n
xiii. 32, 37 . . 67 w
xiv. 9 ... 67 w
xxxvii. 25 ... 311
xliv.-xlix. . . . 127
xliv. 11-21 ... 273
xiv. 17 .... 127
xlv.-lvii. ... 325
xlv.-liv. . . 348 n.
xlv.-xlviii. . . . 354
xiv 357 n
Tob. i. 10 ... 192 n
iv. 7 294
iv. 15 294
xii. 8 255
xiii 4 .... 84
xlvii. 11 .... 318
1 127, 247 n
1. 23, 24 .... 318
Baruch ii. 27-35 . . 318
iii.-v 66
xiv. 3 . . 65, 343 n.
xiv. 4 .... 65
xiv. 5 .... 401
xlvi. 6 .... 401
xlviii. 3 .... 357
xiii 12 18 . . . 318
iv. 36 . . . . 218
xlvii i. 6 ... 65 357
xiv 7 .... 318
v. 5 9 .... 318
xlviii. 7 .... 326
Judith ix. 11 ... 87
\Visd i. 2 ... 87
1 Mac. ii. 42 ... 249
ii. 57 318
Ii. . . 357 n., 374, 395
Ii. 1 393
i 6 .... 100
iii. 18 19 ... 127
liii 406
i 7 92 100
iii 48 127
liii. 3 .... 203 n.
ii .... 192 n.
iv. 9 127
liv. . 401, 404, 405, 406
ii. 23 . 202, 205, 207, 378
ii 24 78 158 195
2 Mac. i. 9 . . . . 75 n.
i 20 . ... 127
liv. 5. 6 . . . 203 n.
liv. 8 .... 162 n
202, 205, 207
iii 4 294
ii. 1-8 .... 330
ii. 8 127
Ivi. . . . 404, 405
Ivi. 5 325
iii 8 . 318
ii. 1.3 73
Iviii 401
iii 16 411
ii 18 318
Ix 162
iii. 19 411
ii. 23 75 n.
Ix. 8 162
v 411
iii. 24 124
Ixi. 12 .... 408
v 1 . 318
iii. 24 ff. . . . 149 n
Ixii 374
v. 5 84
iv. 6 249
Ixiii 374
vi. 18, 19 ... 100
vii.-ix 278
v. 2, 3 .... 124
vi 68, 357 .
Ixix. . . . 160, 357 n.
Ixxii.-cv. . . 203 n.
vii. 22 ... 60, 297
vii. 23 .... 297
vii 26 . 60 118 n.
vii. . 68, 128, 357 n.
vii. 9, 14, 23 . . 393
x. 29, 30. ... 124
Ixxxiv. 4 ... 324
Ixxxix. 40 ... 398
xc 357 n.
vii. 26, 27 ... 101
viii. . . . 182 n.
xii. 40 .... 77 n.
xiv. 15 .... 318
xc. 9, 37 .... 65
xc. 16-38 . . . 323
viii. 19, 20 ... 219
ix. 1 105
xv. 12-16 ... 124
xv. 13-15 ... 330
xc. 20 .... 324
xc. 20-27, 33 . . 324
ix. 17, 18 ... 279
xi. 24-26 ... 60
xii. 1 92
xv. 36 .... 57
Jubilees i 327
iv 160 n.
xc. 24, 25 ... 404
xc. 26 . . . 404
xc. 29 .... 408
xiv. 3 .... 79
xvi.-xix. . . . 127
xvi. 7 .... 80
xvi 12 27 . . 105
As'mpt. of Moses x. 327
Enoch i. -xxxvi. . 203 n.
i. . . 324, 398, 398 n.
i 4 .... 324
xc. 33 .... 401
xci 374
cii 411
ciii 411
xvi. 26 .... 84
Ecclu<< i 4 9 15 . 100
vi. 6 . . . . 160 n.
viii 143
Sib. Or. iii. 36-62 . 325
iii. 56 .... 357 n.
xi. 1-20 .... 100
xvii. 1 .... 205
xix. 13-17 ... 294
xxiii 1 84
ix 143
x. . 143, 160. 401, 404
x. 6, 14 . . . . 404
xxii 411
iii. 558 ... 361 n.
iii. 652-794 ... 322
iii. 669 ff. . . 357 n.
Pss. of Sol. i.-xviii. 357 n.
xxiii. 29 .... 294
xxiv . . 100
xxii. 11 .... 324
xxvii. 2 .... 404
ii. 30, 31 . . . . 67
xvii 325
xxv. 24 .... 205
INDEX OF CITATIONS,
441
NEW TESTAMENT.
Matt ii
Page
. . . 329
Matt xiii. 2430
Page
348 n
Mark vi 33 34
Page
AK 4.01)
... 333
xiii. 37-43 .
. 348 n
vii 5 9 13
295
iii. 5-7 .
iii 9 . .
... 337
. . . 336
xiii. 39 . .
xiii. 40
. . 163
402
vii. 10-13 .
vii 24 31
. . 244
345
iii 16 . .
. . . 94
152
vii 27
345
iv. 1-11 .
... 163
xv. 18 . .
. . 295
viii. . .
. . 358
iv. 24 . .
... 170
xv. 19 20 .
207
viii 12
179
V.
... 418
xv 24
83
viii 27 30
354
v 12
... 410
xvi. 13 14
. . 329
viii 29
3 'SO
v. 16
... 295
xvi 17
177 350
viii 31 i
52 354 n
v. 17-19 .
v. 2L-32 .
v. 22 . .
231, 266, 267
... 295
... 406
xvi. 18 . .
xvi. 24 . .
xvi. 26 . .
. . 348
. . 295
. . 178
viii. 38 . .
ix. 1 . . .
ix 12 . .
356, 357
356. 357
352
v. 33-37 .
v. 38-48 .
v. 45 . .
. . . 295
... 295
. 269, 418
xvi. 27 . .
xvi. 28 . .
xvii. 10, 11 .
. 83, 423
. 423
. . 329
x
x. 23-31 . .
x. 30 . . .
342, 350
. . 83
. . 402
v. 48 . .
. . . 279
xviii. 10 . .
151 153
x 40
343
... 80
xviii. 17 .
. . 348
x. 45 . .
352
vi. 1 . .
. 268, 296
xviii. 18 .
. 422
xi
. . 350
vi 2
. . . 295
423
xi 8 10
^u.
... 295
xix. .
. . 342
xii. 9 ...
. 336 n
vi ] 4 . .
... 421
xix. 28
83 343
xii 12
348 n
vi 15 . .
... 268
342
xii 28
4.1Q
vi. 16 . .
... 295
xx. 23 . .
. 343
xiii. ...
399
vi. 20 . .
... 268
xx. 28 . .
. 420
350
vi. 23 . .
... 268
xxi. 23-32 .
. 335
xiv 12 16 .
419
vi. 33 . .
. 340, 343
xxii. .
. 392
xiv 24 . .
. . 420
vii. 11 .
vii. 12 .
vii. 17, 18,
vii. 21
... 211
... 295
20 . . 211
... 402
xxii. 23 . . .
xxii. 30 . .
xxii. 31, 32 . .
. 253
152, 402
. 394
. 392
xiv. 62 . .
xv. 1-20 .
xvi. 2-5 . .
Luke iii. .
. . 350
. . 344
. . 423
. . 333
vii. 22, 23
. . 356 n.
xxiii. 2, 3 .
231, 266
iii. 22. . .
. -. 94
... 266
xxiii. 3 . . .
. 268
vi. 24 ...
. 295 n
viii. 5 ff.
viii. 11 .
viii 12
... 86
. 346, 402
. . 346
xxiv. . . 360,
xxiv. 20 . . .
xxiv. 26-28
399, 402
361 n.
361 n.
vii. 35 . .
viii. 55 . .
ix. 20 ...
. . 102
. . 178
. . 350
viii 2D
170 405
xxiv. 30 . . .
361 n.
x. 16 . . .
. . 422
ix. 14. .
. . . 335
xxiv. 37-51 .
361 .
x. 18 . . .
160, 163
x 5 6 .
345 418
xxv. . . 394,
399, 402
xii. 8 ...
. . 152
x. 20 . .
. . . 94
xxv. 31-46 . .
. 356
xiii. 3 . .
. . 206
x. 28 . .
. . . 177
xxv. 31 . . .
. 152
xiii. 16 . .
. . 163
x 39 . .
. 178
xxv. 41 ..
152, 163
xiii. 29 . .
. 409 n.
x. 41 . .
. . . 423
xxv. 46 . . .
. 407
xv. 10 . .
. . 152
335
xxvi. 17 . . .
. 266
xvi. . . .
. . 411
xi. 3, 10, 11
xi. 7-19 .
xi 19. .
. . 329
. 335, 339
. . . 102
xxviii. 19 95,
xxviii. 20 . .
349, 423
. 423
. 333
xvi. 19-31 .
xvi. 22 . .
xvi. 23 . .
. . 406
152, 409
. . 406
xi 23
. . . 406
i. 4 15 . . .
. 230
xvii. 14 .
. . 231
xi. 25-30
xii 5 7
. . . 422
232
i. 10, 11 . . .
i. 44 . . . .
335 n.
. 419
xx. 3, 31 .
xx. 36 . .
. . 163
152 153
xii 7
. . . 264
ii. 6 . . . .
. 421
xxi. . . .
360, 399
xii 24-32
xii 24
. . . 95
163 171
ii. 10, 28 ...
iii. 35 . . . .
. 354
. 421
xxii. 32 . .
xxiii. 43 .
. . 273
409
xii. 26 .
xii. 31 .
xii. 32 .
xii. 33 34
. . . 163
. . . 83
. . . 402
. . . 207
iv. 11 . . . .
iv. 15 . . . .
iv. 26-29 . .
v. 9 ....
347 n.
. 163
348 n.
. 17)
xxiv. . 350
xxiv. 17, 21
xxiv. 19-21
xxiv. 37-39
, 358, 423
. . 418
. . 422
. . 178
. . 360, 394
v. 21-23 . . .
. 422
xxiv. 45 . .
. . 179
xiii 11
347 n
v. 36 . . . .
. 421
John i. 4, 5 .
. . 216
xiii. 19 .
. 178
vi. 17-29
. 333
i. 9
. 284
442
INDEX OF CITATIONS.
John i. 10 .
i. 14 . .
Page
... 218
... 177
Page
Acts xii. 15 ... 153
xii. 23 .... 152
xv 367
xvi. 16 .... 171
xvii. 28 .... 85
xvii. 30, 31 ... 412
xix. 1-7 . . . 334 n.
xix. 3 335
1 Cor. i. 23
i. 24 . .
Page
... 420
. . . 118
i. 18 . .
i. 29 . .
ii. 11 . .
... 115
... 283
. . . 125
i. 24, 30 .
i. 29 . .
... 102
... 177
i. 30 . .
ii. 10-13 .
ii. 16 . .
. 419, 429
... 93
. . . 179
ii. 12-17 .
iii. 3 . .
... 284
... 284
iii. 3, 5 .
... 284
iii. 16 . .
iii. 23 . .
iv 20
. 182, 279
... 429
402
iii. 6 . .
. . . 284
xix. 13-16
xxi. 20-26
xxiii. 6-8
xxiii. 8 .
xxiii. 9 .
Rom. i. . .
... 171
... 232
... 419
... 253
... 152
. 242 n 358
iii. 16 . .
. . . 283
iii. 19 . .
. . 83 216
v. 3-10 .
v. 5 . .
... 179
. . 1 63
iii. 21 . .
... 284
iv. 2 . .
... 348
v. 7 . .
. . 118
iv. 22 . .
iv. 24 . .
. 285 w., 346
... 88
vi. 2, 3 .
vi 3
... 406
153
i. 3 . .
117
iv. 25 . .
. . . 333
i. 3, 4 . .
... 429
viii. 6 . .
... 118
v. ...
. . . 402
i. 18-32 .
i. 28 . .
... 214
. . 179
ix 9
80
V. 1 . .
... 231
ix. 19-22
x. 4 . .
x. 20, 21
x. 33 . .
xi. 10 . .
... 297
... 129
. 155, 171
. . . 297
. . . 153
v. 22 . .
. . . 400
ii. . . .
ii. 1-16 .
ii. 5 . .
ii. 6-11 .
ii. 16 . .
iii. 9-19 .
iii. 19-31 .
. . 283 n.
... 394
... 178
. 82
. 402 w , 429
... 206
... 420
. 403 w.
v 24
. 283
v. 27 399
v. 28, 29 . . . . 393
v. 38-40, 46, 47 . 217
vi. 15 344
xii. 10
xii. 14 .
. . 126 .
... 177
. . . 297
vi. 33-63
vi 37 . .
... 216
. . . 2J7
ia
vi. 44 . .
... 217
iv. 25 . .
v. ...
. 281, 419
. . 82 280
xv. . 274, 393, 402 n.
xv. 15 .... 181
xv. 19 .... 376
xv. 23-28 . . 374 n.
xv. 23-28, 51-55 . 362
xv 24 .... 400
xv. 24-28 . 118, 358
xv. 24, 54 ... 164
xv. 20, 54 ... 407
xv. 28 .... 429
xv. 44 .... 395
xv. 44, 45 ... 180
xv. 51, 52 . 358, 410
xvi. 22 . . 376, 396
2 Cor. i. 20 ... 429
ii. 9 118
vi. 63 . .
... 216
vii. 27, 31,
vii. 49
viii. 12 .
viii. 24 .
viii. 26 .
viii. 38-44
viii. 39, 40
viii. 44 .
ix. 2, 34 .
x. 33-36 .
xi. 50 . .
40-42 . 329
... 241
... 216
'. . . 412
. . . 283
... 218
... 218
. 163. 208,
218 n.
. . 219 n.
... 422
... 420
v. 12 . .
v. 12-21 .
vi. . . .
vi 5
. 208, 209
. 208, 420
. 209, 276
. 277
vi. 6 213
vi. 8-11 .... 281
vii. . 271, 276. 283 n.
vii. 9 . . . . 283 n.
vii. 10, 14, 24 . 214 n.
vii. 18 .... 213
vii. 18, 19 ... 213
vii. 20. . . 213,214
vii. 23, 25 ... IT.-t
viii. . . - - - 82
xii. 20 .
xii. 27 .
xii. 46 .
xiii 2
... 86
... 178
... 216
178
... 182
iii. 17, 18
iii. 18. .
... 94
... 279
... 280
xiv. 6 . .
. . . 216
viii. 4-8, 9,
viii. 7
viii. 9 . .
viii. 13 .
viii. 18-22
viii. 19 .
viii. 28-30
viii. 38 .
ix. 5 . .
ix. 7, 8 .
x. ...
x. 10 . .
16, 27 93
. . . 213
... 279
. . . 177
... 408
. . . 401
... 279
... 153
. 177, 429 n.
. . 403 n.
. 87, 403 n.
. . . 178
. . . 87
iv. 4 . .
iv. 6 . .
163, 164, 213
. . . 429
xiv. 16, 17
xiv. 30 .
xv. 4 . .
xv. 18, 19
xvi. 7-15
xvi. 8 . .
... 95
. . . 163
. . . 283
... 217
... 95
. 98-1
iv. 14 .
v. 4-8 .
v. 6, 10 .
v. 10 .
v. 19 . .
v. 21 . .
vi. 12. .
xi. 14, 15
xii. 1-4 .
xii. 2-4 .
Gal. i. . .
i. 4 118,
i. 8 . .
i. 11-24 .
i. 16 . .
... 429
... 410
... 177
358, 394, 399,
402 ., 429
. 277, 429
... 118
. . 177 n.
... 152
... 126
... 409
. 427, 429
232, 402, 429
. . 154 n.
... 126
... 177
xvi. 9 .... 216
xvi. 11 . . . 218 n.
xvii. 2 .... 177
xvii. 9 .... 217
Acts i -v. . . .88, 232
i.-xii 425
ii. 22-24, 32-36 . 422
iii 1 93f >
xi. 25, 26
xii 5
. . 403 n.
... 298
v. 36, 37 .
v. 38. 39 .
vi 22
... 344
... 232
129
xii. 13 .
xii. 19, 20
xiii. 1
xiv. 17 .
1 Cor. i. . .
... 297
. . . 297
. . . 178
... 402
... 367
viii. 26, 29
viii. 32, 33
... 154
... 280
. 366
... 367
ii. 7-9 .
iii. . . .
... 366
... 271
i. 8 . .
. . 402 n.
INDEX OF CITATIONS.
443
Gal. iii. 2, 3
iii. 3 . .
Pa-e
... 178
. . . 182
1 Thess. v.
v. 1 11
2 Thess. i.
Page
23 . . 181
376
James i. v.
Page
. . . 358
i. 12, 15 .
i. 18, 27 .
i 21
.- . . 207
... 270
178
iii. 13 . .
. . . 41!)
. . . 399
iii. 14. .
... 94
. 274
iii. 19. .
iii. 27 . .
. . . 227
... 277
i. 3-12
i. 6-10
i. 7 .
... 376
... 362
. . . 152
ii. 8 . .
. . . 297
ii 10
243
iv.
iv. 4 . .
iv. 6 . .
iv. 10, 11
v. . .
271, 278, 307
117, 28,), 42;)
. . 94, 279
. . . 419
... 278
ii. 19 .
. . . 170
i. 7, 8
i.8 .
ii. . . .
1 Tim. i. 8 .
... 418
... 396
... 364
... 283
iii. 6 . .
iii. 13 . .
. 406, 406 n.
... 211
iii. 17 . .
iv. 7 . .
60, 101, 297
. . . 163
v. 17-21 .
... 213
;. s, 9. .
... 212
iv. 8 . .
... 211
v. 19-21 .
v. 24 . .
vi. 8 . .
vi. 10 .
Eph. i. 10 .
i. 20-23 .
i. 21 . .
... 178
. 178, 213
. . . 213
... 297
119, 407, 433
. . . 433
. . . 154
i. 15 . .
... 283
iv. 17 . .
. . . 270
i. 20 . .
. . . 163
v 7
. . . 376
ii. 3 . .
ii. 5, 6 .
ii. 11-13 .
ii. 14 . .
ii. 14, 15.
iv. 10 . .
v. 21 . .
. 283, 434
... 283
... 210
163, 208, 210
. . 210 n.
. . 80, 283
... 152
v. 7, 8 .
v. 8 . .
. . . 362
... 358
v. 16 . .
... 273
v. 20 . .
1 Pet. i. 3, 19
i. 12 . .
i. 22 . .
. 211, 270
... 282
... 153
. . . 282
ii. 1-5 .
ii. 4 . .
... 215
... 178
ii. 7 . .
. . . 402
2 Tim. i. 10
ii. 11 . .
ii. 24-26 .
iii. 8 . .
283, 407, 419
. . . 283
... 212
. . . 129
ii. 5, 24 .
iii. 13 . .
iii. 18-20
iii. 21 . .
... 282
... 408
... 411
. . . 282
ii. 9, 10 .
ii. 11-22 .
ii. 13, 16 .
ii. 14-19 .
iii. .
... 282
... 370
... 281
. . . 2J8
. . . 215
iii. 15 . .
iii. 16 . .
. . . 283
. . . 128
iv. 1 . .
iv. 1, 13 .
iv. 5 . .
iv 6
. . . 177
... 282
. . 402 w.
411
iii. 10 . .
iii. 17 . .
. 154, 433
. . . 281
iv. 1 . .
iv. 11 . .
399, 402 w.
. . . 402
. . . 215
Tit. i. 15 .
. . . 179
iv. 7 . .
... 358
iv. 13, 24
v. ...
... 282
. . . 215
ii. 11-14 .
ii. 12 . .
. 212, 283
. . . 402
iv. 7-19 .
v 8 . .
. . . 376
. . . 163
v. 2 . .
. . . 281
iii. 4-7 .
iii. 5-7 .
iii. 8 . .
Heb. i. 2 .
i. 1-4 . .
. . . 283
... 212
... 212
... 60
. . . 432
v. 10 . .
2 Pet. i. 11 .
ii. 4, 17 .
iii 13 . .
. . 402 w.
. . 402 n.
. . 406 n.
. . . 401
vi. 11. .
vi. 12. .
Phil. i. 6 .
i. 6, 10 .
i. 21 23 .
. . . 163
... 154
. . 402 n.
. . 410 .
. . . 410
1 John iv. 17
v 10 . .
. . 402 n.
. . . 397
i. 2, 3 . .
ii 4 . .
. 101, 118
. . . 94
ii. 1 . .
ii. 6-9 .
iii. 10. .
. . 177 n.
... 118
... 281
Jude 6 . .
. . . 160
ii 13 .
. 136
6, 13 . .
9 ...
. . 406 n.
... 163
iii. 7 . .
... 94
iii. 20 . .
Col. i. 15-20
i. 16 . .
. . 410 n.
. . . 433
. . . 154
iv. 12
v. 9 . .
vi. 1 .
... 181
. . . 283
. . 283
21 ...
. . 402 n.
Rev. i.-xxii.
ii 7 . .
... 376
. . . 409
i. 20 . .
... 407
vi. 2 . .
vi. 4 . .
. . 402 .
... 94
ii 23 . .
iii. 5 . .
. 177 ., 399
... 152
i. 24 . .
... 282
ii. 3 . .
. . . 102
vi. 5 . .
... 402
. . . 163
ii. 10. 18
ii. 11 . .
... 154
. . . 178
vii 10
. . 177 n.
... 399
vii. 25
viii. 6
ix. 6 . .
. . . 283
. . . 283
... 402
vi, 9-H .
vi. 16 . .
ix. 20 . .
. . . 410
... 399
. . . 171
ii. 13 . .
ii. 14 . .
. . . 215
... 282
ii. 15 . .
. ii. 16-19 .
ii. 18 . .
. 154, 407
. . . 433
. . 179
ix 14 . .
... 94
xii. 4, 13 .
xii. 19 .
... 162
. . 152, 163
... 364
ix. 22 .
ix. 27 . .
ix 28
... 227
. . 402 n.
40Q
ii. 20 . .
. . . 282
xiii. 18 .
xvii. . .
. . 364 n.
... 364
. 3fi4
ii. 20-33 .
iii. 1 3
. . . 219
x. 4 230
x. 5-10 .... 138
x. 23, 36-39 . . 283
x. 29 . . - - 91
iii 1-4 .
iii. 4 . .
. . . 410
. . . 407
xix. . . . 364, 399
xix. 13-16 ... 120
xx. . 374 n., 399, 402
xx. 1-3 . . . . 160
xx. 2, 7 . . . . 163
xx. 10 . 163, 164, 406
xx. 11 .... 399
xx. 12 . . 393, 397
1 Thoss. i v.
... 274
. . . 283
ii. 18 . .
iv. . .
. . . 163
. . . 399
xi. 35 . .
xii. 2 . .
xii. 2, 3 .
xii. 23 .
xii. 24 .
... 128
... 298
. . . 283
... 410
... 283
iv. 13-18
iv. 15-17
iv. 17 . .
... 376
. . . 358
. 401, 409
444
INDEX OF CITATIONS.
Rev. xx. 13, 14
xx. 10, 15 .
xx. 21
406
407
373
Page
Rev. xxi. . . 374 n., 408
xxi. 4, 8, 27 . . 407
xxi. 14 .. . 407
Rev. xxii. . .
xxii. 5, 11, 15
xxii. 11 .
Page
408
407
411
PHILO.
Philo i. 4 .
. . . 112
Philo i. 308
. 109, 111 ( Philo i. 630 .
. . 112
.5 . .
107, 112
. 414 . .
... Ill
. 653 .
109 n
.6 . .
. 108, 112
. 415 . .
. 109, 111
. 655 . . .
110, 112
.7 . .
. . . 112
. 427 . .
108 109
656
110
.8 . .
. . . 112
. 441 . .
128
684
109
. 56 . .
. . . 101
. 452 . .
. . 109 n.
. 692 .
128
. 64 . .
. . . 206
. 456 . .
... 107
ii. 28
108
. 66 . .
. . . 112
. 481 . .
. . . 206
ii 46 . . .
. 107
. 79 . .
. 203 ., 205
. 501 . .
... 112
ii. 154 . .
. . 110
. 82 . .
. . . 107
. 502 .
108 109 112
ii 163
128
. 100 . .
. . . 2u6
. 505
107
ii 385
102
. 128 . .
. . . 112
511 .
128
ii 421-428
327
202 . .
. . . 102
560
111
ii 423
113 n
. 207 . .
. . . 92
561 . .
108 111
ii 435
327
. 255 . .
. . . 92
. 502
. . Ill
ii 436
113 n
. 256 . .
. . . 92
K25 -
119
JOSEPHUS.
Jos. Ant. i. 1,
4 . 158 n. Jos. Ant. xv.
10,5 254,256 Jos. Ant. xviii. 5
2 234 n.
xi. 8, 4 .
. . 55 n.
xviii. 1, 3
. . 250 n.
xx. 9, 1 . .
. 253 n.
xiii. 10, 6
. . . 253
xviii. 1, 4
... 253
Jos. War. ii. 8, 4
. . 255
xiv. 9, 3-5
. . . 258
xviii. 1, 6
... 258
vii. 6, 3 . .
. . 169
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
ABADDON, 404 n.
Abbot, on Rom. ix. 5, 429 n.
Aboda Sara, 252 n.
Abraham, in Talmud, 273; faith of, in
O. T., 275.
Abraham's bosom, 409.
Abyss, of Genesis, 161 n.
Acfuemenian inscriptions, 391.
Acts i.-xii., burden of, 425.
Adam, contrasted with Christ, 18f); fed-
eral headship of, 185 n. ; in Ezekiel,
195; moral status of, 197; transgres-
sion of, in N. T., 208; contrasted with
Christ, 209; introducer of sin, 210.
Aeshma daeva, 150.
Age, the present, in N. T., 343, 355,
402, the coming, in N. T., 343,355,
402; change in meaning of, 401.
Ahriman, 143, 165.
Ahuratnazda, 164; as judge, 395.
Alexandre, Sibyl edited by, 66 n.
Alexandria, religious amalgamation in,
43; Jewish colony in, 383; as reli-
gious centre, 387, 395 n. ; as centre of
logos-doctrine, 432.
Aliens, prophetic treatment of, 318; in
Daniel, 321; in the new dispensation,
328, 329.
Allegorical, exegesis, 138; interpretation
of serpent, 203.
Altruism in N. T., 295.
Amesha-cpentas, 150.
Anachronisms in religious progress, 12.
Anakephalaio>is, 407.
Ancestor-worship, 143 n.
Ancient world. See States, ancient.
Angel of the Lord, perhaps survival of
ancient deity, 148; mediating, 228.
Angel?, origin of, 91; appearances of, in
O. T., 149 n.; guardian, of nations,
150; position of, in N. T., 152-154;
later organization of, 154; fall of, as
dogma, not in O. T., 161 ; names of,
168; rejection of, ascribed to Saddu-
cees, 253 n.; evil, in Enoch, 324;
at final judgment, 356; as ignorant of
day of parousia, 362 .; evil, judg-
ment on, 401; punished, 405; as tor-
mentors, 406; as intermediaries be-
tween God and man, 433.
Animals, lower, mortality of, 204 .
Animistic material, reshaped in N. T.,
171.
Annihilation, 411; ascribed to Saddu-
cees, 253 n.
Anthropomorphism in conception of
God, 87.
Anthropomorphisms in Eden-story, 201.
Anti-Christ, in Paul's writings, 365.
Antigonus of Socho, 87, 260, 264.
Antiiiomiaiiism, alleged, of Paul, 275,
276.
Antinomism, Christian, 288.
Antioch, in Pisidia, 367; in Syria, 367.
Antiochus Epiphanes, 64, 320, 365 n.
Apocalypse, germinal, 317.
Apocalypse, in Svnoptics, 363.
Apocalypse, the &. 1., conception of di-
vine justice in, 82, 83; moral-religious
ideas in, 375; changing interpreta-
tions of, 376 ; resurrection in, 393, 395 ;
final judge in, 399; constitution of,
399 n.; whether imputed righteous-
ness in, 430.
Apocalypses, in N. T. times, 361.
Apocrypha, the, patriotic hope in, 318.
Apostasy, preceding parousia, 364.
Apostate Jews, 249, 321.
Apsu, 162.
Apuleius on magic, 169 n,
Arabia, Paul in, 427.
Aratns, Stoic poet, 85.
Aristocracy, Sadducean, 253.
Arrested development, only apparent, 3.
Asaph, psalm-writer, 136.
Ascetic view of body, 206 n.
Asceticism, whether a Jewish concep-
tion, 219 n.; Essenian, 255; in Daniel
and Tobit, 255.
Asia Minor, logos-doctrine in, 432.
Asideans, the, 249.
Asmodeus, 150, 151, 168.
Asoka, edicts of, 38; theocracy of,
303 n.
Assimilation of ideas, how limited, 30.
Assyria, its religious union with Israel
anticipated, 314; post-exilian use of,
316 n.
Athenian view of future judgment,
395 .
446
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
Atonement, by suffering, 222; day of,
226; later Jewish conception of,
280 n. ; in Enoch-Parables, 326.
Avesta, date of, 391.
Azazel, 145, 160. 163; etymology of,
BABISM, Messianic faith in, 425 n.
Babylon, flood-story in, 194; in N. T.
Apocalypse, 363; king of, his descent
to Shedl, 379.
Babylonian influence on Jews, 248, 292.
Babylonians, evil spirits of, 165.
"Baptist Quarterly," the, 334 n.
Barnabas, 367.
Baiir, works of, 337 .
Beast, in N. T. Apocalypse, 364, 375.
Beelzebub, 171.
Bel, Babylonian, 152.
Berakoth, 247 ., 273.
Bereshith Rabba, 252 n., 357.
Bethlehem, birthplace of Messiah, 329,
330.
Blood, seat of life, 174; atonement by,
226, 420.
Body, representative of sinful nature,
177 ; pneumatical, 180 ; psychical,
180; as seat of evil, 200.
Bone, expression of physical structure^
174.
Bowels, seat of compassion, 177 n.
Brain, not in O. T., 177 n.
Broadus, "Jesus of Nazareth," 302 n.
Brotherhood, human, in N. T., 296; Ro-
man sense of, 338.
Budde, " Bibl. Urgeschichte," 205 n.
Buddhism, foreign influence on, 27;
broadening of its constitution. 31; its
dogma, 38; birth of. out of Brahmnn-
ism, 39; Messianic faitii in, 425 M.
Bundehesh, the, 375.
(LESAREA PHILIPPI, 351.
Calling, prenatal, 326.
Canaan, restoration to, 311.
Canaanitish worship, 234.
Canonization, grounds of, 69, 72.
Canons, non-Jewish, 68.
Catholicism, affected by modern thought,
435.
Centralization, Jewish religious, 239.
Ceremonial. Jewish, moral effect of, 243.
Chaldeans, in Habakkuk, 310; in Jere-
miah and Kzekiel, 311.
Changes in faith. See Religious revo-
lutions.
Chiliasm, in the Church, 365.
China, state-religion of, 42.
Chosen one, the, in Enoch-Parables, 325.
Christ, contrasted with Adam. 20H; hu-
manity of, 280; sufferings of, modified
view of, 282 ; reign of, signification
of, 377.
Christ, the, in Psalms of Solomon, 325.
Christianity, rise of, in conformity with
law, 1 ; not obscured in Middle Age, 3;
influence of, on barbarians, 4; of to-day
not inferior to that of fourth century,
5; whether a universal religion, 36;
birth of, out of Judaism, 39 ; the world
prepared for it, 40; connection of, with
civilization, 45; now spreading, 45;
unifying power of, 370, 371; perma-
nent moral element of, 414; conditions
of birth of, 426.
Church, the, relation of, to religion, 39;
takes place of Israel, 126; the Jewish,
rise of, 237; the Christian, mechanical
nomism in, 245; early Christian, com-
posed of Jews, 246; not source of sal-
vation, 278 n. ; nomism in, 289; how
far cosmopolitan, 298 ; as ethical lever,
301; in First Gospel, 348; diversities
in, 359; its hope of the Lord's coming,
365; partial petrifaction of, 369; in-
termingling of Semitic and Hellenic
conceptions in, 370; spiritual aim of,
377; mission of, 377; in place of Israel,
396; passed from Jews to Gentiles,
416 ; its coincidence with the syna-
gogue, 419; Mosaism in, 424; growth
of spirituality in, 428; ethics of, deter-
mined by Jesus, 434; creation of
Jesus, 435.
Church government, its relation to
social-political ideas, 13.
Church of England, progress of, 43.
Church of Rome, progress of, 44.
Cicero, on divination, 169 n. ; ethical
sentiment of, 337.
Citizenship, Roman, ethical effect of, 298.
Cleanthes, Stoic poet, 85.
Code, Deuteronomic, 70 ; Jewish, not
abrogated by Jesus, 368.
Codification, in time of Hillel, 252.
Colony, the Egyptian-Jewish, 323.
Colossians, conception of Jesus in, 119;
lojros in, 433.
Coining of Jesus, hope of. 359.
Commission, the baptismal, late origin
of, 345.
Communal immortality, 385.
Communism. Essenian, in N. T., 256.
Communities. See Society.
Community, ethically constituted Israel-
itish, 317.
Conduct, biblical basis of, 292.
Conflict, between will and nature, 214;
between light and darkness. 216: be-
tween world and believers, 216-218.
Confucius as founder of a religion, 25.
Conquest of world, O. T. conception of,
377.
Conscience, autocracy of, 15; union with
God, 15; how viewed by Jesus, 269.
Consciousness. See Religious conscious-
ness.
Cosmopolitan spirit, Jewish, 294; pro-
phetic, 314.
Cosmos in Fourth Gospel, 216, 218 n.
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
447
Creation, divine spiritual, 279; spiritual,
284; the, as groaning in sin, 401.
Creation-tablet, Babylonian, 161.
Criticism, biblical, whether practised in
first century, 132.
Cults, foreign, adoption of, 29.
Cyrus, his policy toward exiles, 312.
Cyrenaic philosophy, 386.
DAIMON, 155 n.
Daimonion, 155 n.
Daniel, conception of sin in, 192 n.; no
mention of Satan in, 202 ; political
element in, 341; "son of man " in,
354; judgment in, 357; anti-godly evil
in, 3(55 .; resurrection in, 380 n.-
Persian influence in, 390 ; partial
resurrection in, 392; retribution in,
404; intermediate state in, 411.
Darius and young men, episode of, 56.
Darmesteter, " Ormazd et Ahriman,"
172 n.; "The Zend Avesta," 172 n.
Davidic dynasty, perpetuity of, 315.
Day of Yahwe, in Malachi," 313.
Death, expiatory, in Isaiah, 352; pre-
mature, as punishment, 382, 404 ;
abolition of, in N. T., 407: as end
of probation, 411; of Jesus, in N. T.,
428.
Debility, moral, in man, 214.
Decay of societies, cause of, 3 ; only
relative, 3, 4.
Defect, alleged, of ethics of Jesus, 296;
of ethics of N. T., 299, 300.
Defects, ethical, Jewish, 332.
Deification, of Jesus, Paul's attitude to-
ward, 429; of men, whether Semitic,
430 n.
Deities, heathen, late Jewish recognition
of, 77, 78.
Deity, tribal, 306.
Delifzsch, " Jesus u. Hillel," 205 n.
Delitzsch, " Wo lag d. Paradies V "
306 n., 409 n.
Demon, 142, 155.
Demoniacal possession, 1(58, 170.
Demons, as spirits of the wicked, 169;
tormented, 405.
Dependence on God. ethical ai'd non-
ethical, 384.
Depravity, total, whether in 0. T.,
190 ff.," 196.
Destruction, future, sense of, in N. T.,
406 ., 411.
Determinism, biblical, 291.
Deuterofanonical books, 76.
Deuteronomy, ethicnl effect of, 235;
loving obedience in, 245.
Development, ethical, Jewish, 288.
Devil. See Satan.
Dillmann, Enoch- text of, 66 n.
Disciples of Jesus, their hopes not politi-
cal, 345; Messianic hope of, 358.
Discourses, eschatological, of Jesus,
355-360.
Distress, national, in Psalter, 235.
Divine_ intervention, two stadia in con-
ception of, 121.
Dogma, unspiritual, power of, 369; as
modifying ethics, 397.
Do,. ma and conduct, complements of the
religious sentiment, 20.
Dogmas, Christian, formulation of, 435.
Dollinger, "Gentile and Jew," 337 n.
Dorner, on biblical ethics, 302 n.
Dragon, in N. T. Apocalvpse, 162, 375;
Babylonian, 195, 200 n.
Driver, in "Studia Biblica," 306 n.
Drummond, "Jewish Messiah," 66 .,
326 n., 330 n.
Duality of man's constitution, 173.
Duschak, " Bib.-tal. Glatibenslehre,"
330 n.
Duty, filial, casuistical treatment of, 244.
Dwight, on Rom. ix. 5, 429 n.
EARTH, the, abode of the new Israel,
321; as scene of future life, 401, 402.
Ecclesiastes, date of, 59; doubts as to
canonical character of, 74; provi-
dence in, 79; conception of sin in,
192 n.
Ecclesiasticus, date of, 60; second pro-
logue to, 73; fatherhood of God in,
84; idea of wisdom in, 100; concep-
tion of sin in, 192, 205.
Eden, garden of, 195 n.; whether in
N. T., 408.
Eden-story, central idea of, 198 n. ;
whether borrowed bv Jews, 200.
Edersheim, "Life of Jesus," 329 n.
Egoism, alleged, biblical, 299.
Egypt, its religious union with Israel
anticipated, 314.
Egyptian doctrine of bodily resuscita-
tion, 390.
Eg3 r ptian idea of immortality, 387.
Egyptian influence on Jews, 382, 383,
405.
El, sense of, 317 .
Elijah, child restored to life by, 175;
translation of, 204 n., 390; forerunner
of Messiah, 329, 330; as moral re-
former, 333 ; model of John, 334.
Elohim, sons of, 167.
Elohim-beings, 147, 159, 161, 198.
Enemies, national, hatred of, 242; O. T.
hatred of, opposed by Jesus, 268.
Enoch, translation of, 204 ., 390.
Enoch, book of, date and character of,
65; whv not canonized, 75, 76; quoted
in N. T., 76; Azazel in, 143; angel-
ology of, 149, 150, 160, 167, 168; ethi-
cal element in, 324 ; " son of man " in,
354; earthly consummation in, 356;
judgment in, 357, 374; calling of Mes-
siah by God in, 357; anti-godly evil
in, 365 n.; whether Christian hand in,
395 n.; judgment in, 398; Messiah in,
398; Israel's future in, 400; retribu-
448
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
tion in, 404; new Jerusalem in, 408;
intermediate state in, 410, 411.
Enoch-Parables, judgment in, 325, 401,
404; resurrection in, 393; Messiah in,
399; garden of life in, 408.
Enthusiasm, ethical, in N. T., 294.
Ephesians, conception of Jesus in, 119 ;
logos in, 433.
Epicureanism, 387.
Epistles, the, ethics of, 297, 341 ; expec-
tation of Jesus in, 358; judgment in,
401, 402; immortality in, 402 ; Pastoral,
whether imputed righteousness in, 430.
Eschatology, Jewish, 308; of Gospels,
358.
Essenes, origin of, 219 . ; purity of,
333.
Essenism, whether found in teaching of
Jesus, 418.
Ethan, psaltn-writer, 136.
Ethical element in Enoch, 324.
Ethical feeling, Jewish advance in, 396.
Ethical ideals, formation of, 18.
Ethical ideas, limited power of, 39.
Ethical standard, primitive, 2*3.
Ethic.*, religious sanctions of, 19; Jew-
ish, 48; of John Baptist, 336; modi-
fied by nationalism, 396.
Ethics and religion, examples of une-
qual co-existent developments of, 18,
19.
Eve, prize offered her by the serpent,
203 ; introducer of sin, 210.
Evil, blotting out of, 407.
Exaltation, of Jesus, 428, 429.
Exegesis in N. T , spiritual power of,
139 ; basis of truth in, 139.
Exile, Babylonian, teaching of, 224;
worship during, 246 ; influence of, 248.
Expiation, pre-exilian theory of, 220,
221; double view of, 222.
External ethical standard, difficulties of,
239, 240.
Ezekiel, his description of Eden, 195 n. ;
new covenant of, 332; "son of man "
in, 353; anti-godly evil in, 365 n. ; his
vision of revivification, 389.
Ezra, turning-point in Jewish history,
47 ; and Nehemiah, advent of, 50.
" FACE OF BAAL," title of Tanit, 89 .
Faith, view of, in James, 270; transfor-
mation by, 276; Paul's conception of,
277 ; view of, in Ephesians and Colos-
sians, 282; in Hebrews, 283.
Faith and works, Paul's conjunction of,
340.
Faith in Je<us, after his death, 425.
Fatherhood of God, 83-86, 269 ; Jesus'
treatment of, 86.
Fetishism, Hebrew, 141.
Fir-t Gospel, word " church" in, 348.
Flesh, in O. T., not impure, 174; con-
trasted with spirit, 178; hostile to
spirit, 213; as seat of sin, 219.
Flood-story, different recensions of,
194 n.
Fliigel, " Die Sittenlehre Jesus," 302 n.
Folk-religion, Hebrew, 166.
Foreign thought, how regarded by Jews,
242.
Formulating period of Christianity.
435.
Fourth Gospel, conception of divine
justice in, 83; spirituality of God in,
88; idea of divine spirit in, 95; date
of, 115 n. ; treatment of Eden-story in,
207 ; antithesis of moral power and
impotency in, 217; conflict between
divine and anti-divine in, 218; pro-
logue to, 284; regeneration in, 340;
baptism in, 348; resurrection in, 393,
395; whether imputed righteousness
in, 430.
Fravashis, 150.
Frazer, " Totemism," 141 n.
Freedom, controlled by law, 278 n.
Friedliinder, " Sittengeschichte Roms,"
169 n.
Friedlieb, Sibyl edited by, 66 n.
Fusion of different elements in Chris-
tianity. 370.
Future life, in Palestinian works, 251 n.;
Sadducean view of, 253, 260.
GALILEE, Greek influence in, 85, 86.
Gamaliel, 232, 251; speech of, 424.
Gass on biblical ethics, 302 n.
Gautama, his relation to Buddhism, 26;
to his age, 34.
Gehenna, 406.
Geldner, " Zend Avesta," 172 n.
Gen. iii., object of, 197.
Gentile influence on hypostasis of spirit,
96.
Gentiles, incoming of, 336 n.; accep-
tance of, in prophets, 346 ; attitude of
early Church toward, 346; uncircum-
cised, received into the Church, 366,
367.
Ginsburg, his edition of Moabite Stone,
307 n.
Glossolaly, 138.
Gnosticism, whether Jewish in origin,
219 n. ; Essenian, 255, 256; Jewish,
257, 433; combated in Colossians,
257 ; Christian, 257.
God, help of, need of, 2; identified with
ethical ideal, 19, 183; national life
regulated by, 238.
Gods, heathen, in Psalms, 147 n.
Gog and Magog, 373, 374; in N. T.
Apocalvpse, 373.
Golden Rule, the, 264, 294, 296, 297.
Goodness, personal, in N. T., 285.
Gospel, the, preached to Gentiles, 361.
Government, ideal, 317.
Gratitude, as ethical factor, 300.
Gratz, " Geschichte d. Juden," 306 n.
Greece, victory over, in Zechariah, 314,
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
449
318; in Sibylline Oracles, 322; or-
ganized force of, 338.
Greek influence, on Jews, 108, 248, 262,
263, 395; in Jewish schools, 252; on
Antigonus, 260; on Christianity, 413.
Greek oppression of Jews, 319; in
Enoch, 323.
Greek philosophy, its effect on the
masses, 301.
Greeks, the, how regarded by Jews, 242.
Growth of society, 2; when continu-
ous, 4.
HADES, destruction of, 374; in Theo-
poinpus, 391; equivalent to hell, 406.
Harlez, De, " Des Or'igines du Zoro-
astrisme," 150 n., 172 n.; " A vesta,"
172 n.
Hasidi.n, the, 249, 321, 323.
Hatch, " Essays in Bibl. Greek," 180 n.
Hausrath, "N. T. Times," 246 ., 249 .,
337 n.
Heaven, whether referred to in Ps. xvii.,
380 n. ; as abode of the righteous,
401.
Hebrew language, ceased to be Jewish
vernacular, 136.
Hebrew vowel-points, 24.
Hebrews, conception of Jesus in, 118,
119; its conception of Christianity,
233; whether imputed righteousness
in, 430; logos in, 432; faith in, 434.
Hell, in Enoch-Parables, 393; whether
in O. T., 404; in N. T., 406 n.; in
Talmud, 412 .
Hellenism, alleged defeat of, 262; in-
fluence of on N. T., 286, 287; in the
Church. 370.
Heinan, psalm-writer, 136.
Herod the Great, summoned before
Sanhedrin, 258 ; conflicts in reign of,
331.
Herodians, the, their effort to entrap
Jesus, 344.
Herodotus, on Persian religion, 391.
Heroes, antediluvian, 160.
Herzog, " Heal-Encvclopadie," 246 n.,
249 n., 302m.
Hezekiah, Ps. of, 382.
Hierarchy, angelic, 153.
High-priest, as representative of logos,
109 n ; president of Sanhedrin, 258.
Hillel, liberality of, 259 n., 328 n. ; teach-
ing of, 264-266; moral earnestness of,
333 ; moral distinctness of, 338 ; moral
e'evation of, 417.
History, later Jewish literary, character
of, 52.
Hokma, the, ethical character of, 294.
Holiness, ritualistic, in Zechariah, 315.
Hope in God, Jewish non-ethical, 308.
Host of heaven, 161 n.
Humanity, devotion to, in N. T., 300.
Hypostasis of spirit, incomplete. 94.
Hypostatization, arrested, 90, 91.
IDEAL, religious, of Paul, 277; ethical,
Roman, 337.
Ideas in the air, 29.
Idolatry, Jewish, late, 77 ; how treated
by prophets, 234.
Idumeans, the, conversion of, 328 n.
Imagination, Semitic, detective, 383.
Inimanuel, 317.
Immer, " Theol. des N. T.", 302 n.
Immortality, accepted by Pharisees, 251 ;
Jewish doctrine of, 319; national, 384,
389 ; doctrine of, relation of Jesus to,
418.
Imputation, in 1 Tim., 283; in N. T., 285.
Imputation of righteousness, 272.
Incapacity, man's moral, 215.
Inclination to sin assumed in 0. T., 197.
Indeterminism, biblical, 291.
India, whether Jews influenced by, 390.
Individualism, controlled bv an ideal,
278; Jewish advance in, 3*96, 397.
Individuality, religious, cultivated by
synagogue, 247.
IndVa, as judge, 395.
Inheritance, ethical, natural, 185.
Insanity as demoniacal possession, 170.
Inspiration, its relation to law, 23, 24;
Philo's view of, 127, 128 ; N. T. view
of, 128, 129.
Institutions, effect of change in, 4.
Intercession, human, 273.
Intermediary, Jewish nation as, 345,
346.
Intermediation, between God and man,
Jewish, 421, 431; Persian, 431 .; an-
gelic, 433.
Inward divine law. idea of, 24.
Isaiah, the exilian, Israel in, 332.
Isaiah, his denunciation of necromancy,
378.
Ishtar, her descent to Sheol, 382.
Islam, influenced by Jews and Chris-
tians, 27, 28; simplicity of duties of,
31; simpl city of doctrines of, 32, 38;
birth of, out of old Arabian faith, 39;
now spreading, 45 ; attitude of, toward
unbelievers, 329 n.
Isolation, early national, 28; Jewish,
242; its ethical effect, 293; done away
with by Christianity, 370, 371.
Israel, a mixed nationality, 10; destiny
of, 224 ; prophetic rejection of, 336 n. ;
organized force of, 338; superiority of,
339 ; as prophet of God, 354.
JADDUA, 55 n.
James, its view of faith, 270; opposition
to Paul in, 275; indorses Paul, 367;
view of Jesus in, 426.
Jeremiah, ethical principle of, 184; fore-
runner of Messiah, 329, 330; new
covenant of, 332.
Jerusalem, in Enoch, 323 ; the new, 324,
373 ; destruction of, 361, 363 ; parent
church in, 366.
29
450
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
Jesus, the living, in Paul's system, 281 ;
his relation to Jewish nationalism,
286; his ethical spirit, 300, 301; his
opinion of John Baptist, 335; his faith
in Jewish nation, 349 ; his freedom of
speech, 351; his subordination to God,
358 ; words of, later interpretation
of, 358, 359; his simplicitj-, 359; hope
of his coming, 359; sobriety of his
ideas, 359; source of power "of, 360;
coming of, whether defined by him-
self, 362; founder of Christianity, 368,
369, 435.
Jewish history, noble figures in, 245.
Jewish religion, persistence of, 8; in-
fluenced by Canaanites, Assyrians,
Babylonians, Greeks, 26, 27, 28.
Jewish religious instinct, 237.
Jews, in Egypt, 33; in Babylonia, 33;
religious isolation of, 235. 236; vitality
of, 238 ; faithful to idea of law, 240;
their consciousness of enlightenment,
241; Egyptian, 251; modern, Messi-
anic ideas of, 304 n. ; in Middle Age,
305; as borrowers, 388, 392; conver-
sion of, to Christianity, in N. T., 403;
restoration of, to Palestine, 404.
Jinn, 142.
Job, book of, 61 ; whether national, 73 ;
description of wisdom in, 98-100 ;
date of, 98 ., 157 n.; Satan in, 165;
whether immortality in, 381, 385.
Jodl, "Geschichte d. Ethik,'' 300 n.
Johannites, influence of, 336.
John, npostle, indorses Paul, 367.
John Baptist, disciples of, 334 n., 335;
how esteemed by Jesus, 339.
John, First Epistle of, its agreement with
Fourth Gospel, 433.
John Hyrcanus, I., 65, 323.
John Hyrcanus II.. 258.
Josephus, on John, 334 .
Joshua, priest and governor, 316.
Jost, "Geschichte," 259 n., 265 n.
Jubilees, descent of angels in, 160 n.
Judaism, its dealing with circumcision,
31; how related to Hellenism, 203;
its severance from Christianity, 288;
religious organizing power of, 306;
attraction of, for Grwco-Roman world,
328 n.
Judas Maccabseus, 65, 319, 323.
Judas the Galilean, 258.
Judgment, of nations in prophets, 314;
in Enoch, 324; in Synoptics, 355, 356;
in Sermon on Mount, 356 n. ; by
God, 357; by Messiah, 357; general,
in N. T. Apocalypse, 373; general,
in Enoch, 374; future, Egyptian, 382;
allied to resurrection, 395.
Jupiter, as judge, 395.
Justice, divine, theological factor in, 82;
taught by Jesus, 417.
Justin Martyr, '' Trypho," 330 n.
Juvenal on magic arts, 169 .; ethical
sentiment of, 337.
KEMOSH, Moftbite devotion to, 305
King, Messiah, as, in Synoptics, 343 ;
in Enoch, 343 n.; of Israel, as judge,
400.
"Kingdom of God," germ of, 321 .;
significance of, 370.
Kingdom of heaven in N. T., 208.
Kings, Deuteronomic coloring of, 309 n.
Knowledge of God, by believers, 422.
Kohut, " Jiidische Angelologie,' 149 n.,
150 n., 172 n.
Korah, sons of, as psalm-writers, 136.
Kuenen, " Rel. of Israel," 249 n., 306 n.
LANG, "Mvth, Ritual, and Religion,"
199 n.
Law, the, turning-point, 47; as factor
in Jewish life, 49; its relation to
prophecy, 53 ; its acceptance, 70, 71 ;
ethical power of, 186; moral feeling
in, 226; a civil code, 227; its relation
to Christianity, 237; viewed as a
whole, 243; slavery to, 244; spiritual
element in, 245 ; Pharisaic attitude
toward, 250 ; glorification of, in Tal-
mud, 252: recognized bv Jesus. 266-
268, 419, 421; its great possibilities,
266 ; criticised by Jesus, 267 ; in 1
Timothy, 283; replaces prophecy, 314;
observed by early disciples, 348".
Law, the oral, character of, 239; atti-
tude of Sadducees toward, 253.
Leadership, individual, 21-26, 34.
Legalism, extreme, of Essenes, 255.
Legend, in earlier histories, 55, 56; in
Chronicles, 56; in Pentateuch, 56; in
Synoptics, 358.
Lenprmant, " La Magie," 142 n.
Levitical law. See Law.
Levitical legislation. See Law.
Libertv of thought, Pharisaic, 251 ;
Christian, 278 n.; civil, in O. T., 322.
Lichtenberger, " Encyclopedic," 302 .
Lightfoot, " Colossians," 249 n.
Life, Christian, of first century, 208;
eternal, in Matthew, 356; Christian,
how affected by eschatology, 376 ,
new, on earth, in Daniel, 380 n. ; li-ng,
as blessing in O. T., 382; earthly,
its hold on the Jew, 389; eternal,
on earth, 401; long, as reward, 404;
future, Jewish monarchical scheme
of, 412.
Lilit, 142.
Literature, Babylonian-Assyrian, 382 ;
pre-Islamic Arabian, 382; Phoenician,
382.
Liver, as seat of life, 177 n.
Logos, the, in Philo, 106-114 ; interral
and uttered, 110; in Fourth Gospel,
115-117, 119, 218 n.; in N. T. Apoca-
lypse, 120.
Love, as moral guide, 278; divine,
taught by Jesus, 417.
Luke, eschatology of, 361 .
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
451
Luth rdt, "Die antike Ethik," etc.,
302 n. ; " Geschichte d. christl. Ethik,"
etc., 302 n.
MACCABEAN STATE, 323.
Maccabeari war, 240.
Magic in Roman Empire, 169 ; Essenian,
256.
Magism, in Persia, 391.
Mahdism, Messianic faith in, 425 n.
Maimonides, 252, 288.
Man, psychical, 181; pneumatical, 181;
moral potency of, 191, 213; primitive,
capable of earthly immortality, 204;
corrupt nature of,' 211 if.; nature of,
in O. T., 212; fall of, 218 n.; his need
of power of God, 236; moral autocracy
of, 270.
Man-god, death of, 280 .
Manahem the Essene, 254, 256.
Manichffiism, failure of, 43.
Manuscripts, early, liable to error, 72.
Mardoclueus, day of, 57.
Marduk, Babyl. "preference for, 305.
Mark, Jesus as Messiah in, 350.
Martensen on biblical ethics, 302 n.
Martincau on biblical ethics, 302 n.
Masses, Jewish, not bigoted, 245.
Mazdeism, the later, lifelessness of, 38;
complicated theology of, 43 ; whether
affected by Judaism" and Christianity,
375.
Mediating power between deity and
world, 90.
Mediation, human, 228.
Mediatorial scheme, Jewish, 431.
Meek, the, 0. T. sense of, 316.
Megilloth, 247 n.
Mendelssohn, Moses, 288.
Mercy of God, 227.
Messiah, the, whether mentioned by
Philo, 113 n.; Ephraimic, 280 n.; rule
of, 341 ; popular idea of, 344 ; as sub-
ordinate to God, 357; as judge, in
Talmud, 357 - ; as ignorant of day
of parousia, 362 n. ; end of reign of,
374 n. ; as conqueror, 376 ; as king,
376; God's vicegerent, 400; person of,
idealized, 400.
Messianic hope, in Ezra's time, 49, 50;
ethical development of, 308.
Messianic thought, history of, 331.
Metaphysics, absence of, among ancient
Jews, 58
Metatron, the, 91 n.
Meyer, " Gesch. d. AKerthums," 172 n.
Micaiah, vision of, 144.
Michael, angel, 64, 152; as patron of
the Jews, 320; as agent of salvation,
398.
Midrash Tanchuma, 252 n.
Millennarian tendencies, in the Church,
365 n.
Millennium, the, in N. T. Apocalypse,
373.
Mills, "The Zend A vesta," 172 n.
Mind, equivalent to spirit, 179.
Miracles, ascribed to Jesu* in Synoptics,
125; in Fourth Gospel, 125; post-bib-
lical, 126; of Messiah, 32J, 330.
Mishna, beginning of, 264.
Mission of Piiansees, 251.
Mithra, as mediator, 4-31 n.
Moabite Stone, 307 n.
Mohammed, founder of Islam, 26; rep-
resented his age, 34; fitted his ideas
into the existing system, 40; theoc-
racy of, 303 n.
Monotheism, when established, 47; its
nature, 48; effect of, on national char-
acter, 78; imperfect, 147 .; Jewish,
423.
Muriil agencies, supernatural, not differ-
entiated, 146.
Moral capability in man, 213.
Moral codes, origin of, 16-18.
Moral crises in life, 21, 22.
Moral earnestness, prophetic, 318.
Moral ideal, Jewish, 328.
Moral order, aimed at by the Church,
377.
Morality of Sadducees, 261.
Morals, pre-prophetic, 184; prophetic,
184.
Moses, his relation to Israelitism, 25.
Mystery, in teaching of Jesus, 347 n.
Myth o"f serpent, 198-200.
Mythologies, Graeco-Roman, decline of
338.
NAKEDNESS, ethical aspect of sense of,
197 n.
"Name of Baal," title of Ashtoreth,
saw.
Nathan, parable of, 184 n.
National consciousness of innocence,
189.
Nationalism, shades of, 249; Pharisaic,
250; of Jesus, 268; in Fourth Gos-
pel, 284; in Enoch, 324; stress laid
on, 328; Jewish, as affecting ethics,
396.
Nations, foreign, their relation to Israel,
318.
Natural law, O. T. idea of, 121, 122.
Nature, tenderness tor, ascribed to God,
80, 81.
Naxarites, 219 ., 255.
Nebuchadnezzar, nttitude of prophets
toward, 311.
Necromancy, 142 n. ; opposed by proph-
ets, 378.
Nehemiah, alleged library of, 73.
Nero, as anti-Christ, 363 ff. ; as man of
lawlessness, 364.
New Testament, claim to inspiration in,
129-131.
Nicolas, " Des Doct. Rel. d. Juifs,"
172 n.
Nineveh, in Nahum, 310.
452
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
Nomism, control of conception of sin by,
193; two elements in, 237; alleged
victory of, 262; of Jesus, 266, 268,
269; its need, 266; Jewish, 277; na-
tional, 286; and antinomism, 289.
Non-miraculous view of life in U. T.,
122, 123.
Non-resistance in N. T., 256, 257;
taught bv Jesus, 267; in Sermon on
Mount, 295 .
OB, 142 n.
Obedience, inability of, to save, 212.
Oehler, " O. T. Theology," 302 n.
Old Testament, idea of divine spirit in,
92; whether word hypostatized in,
103, 104; claim to inspiration in, 129;
N. T. view of, 131, 132; authorship
of, how decided bv early critics, 132-
136.
Omnipotence ascribed to God, 79.
Omnipresence ascribed to God, 79.
Omniscience ascribed to God, 79.
Onias, temple of, 314 n.
Oriental religious, whether they affected
Jews, 257.
Organizaiion, Jewish religious, 239,
240, 241 ; social, its ethical effect, 293 ;
ethical-religious, 338.
Orthodoxy, Mosaic, antagonism of Jesus
to, 352 ; its antagonism toward Jesus,
352.
Osiris, as judge, 395.
PALESTINE, as scene of judgment, 398.
Palingenesis, the, 343.
Pantheism, not in O. T., 175.
Parables, of Jesus, resurrection in, 394.
Paradise, 406, 409.
Paralyzing effect of cnsuistry. 244
Parousia, Messianic judicial, 358 ; in
N. T., 362; moral effect of expecta-
tion of, 363 ; moral power of, 376.
Parsee religion, persistence of, 8; stag-
nation of, 9.
Parthian invasion of Palestine, 325.
Particularism, national, 48; national,
Jewish, 349.
Patriots, Jewish exilinn, 312.
Paul, as interpreter of Jesus, 35, 38;
illogical nationalism of, 81: his idea
of divine justice, 82 ; his conception
of divine spirit, 93; his idea of wis-
dom, 102; his conception of Jesus as
glorified Messiah, 117, 118 ; his alle-
gorical interpretation, 138; treatment
of Eden-story by, 207; his doctrine of
moral incapacity, 212; assumes good-
ness in man's will, 214; affirms man's
moral impotency, 214; his picture of
the Roman world, 214; his view of
nature of Messiah's death, 232 ; puri-
fication-offering of, 232; character of
Iris thought, 271 ; his attitude toward
the Messiah, 271, 272; his feeling
toward Jewish ordinances, 271; his
expectation of Christ's second coming,
274; his intuition of the Messiah, 274;
his moral earnestne-s, 274; his view
of Abraham's faith, 275; his attitude
toward ethical principle, 278 .; his
view of Christ's humanity, 280; self-
adaptation of, 297; ethical influence
of, 301; his conjunction of faith and
works, 340; as preacher to Gentiles,
346; his view of the parousia, 302;
his conflict with extreme conserva-
tives, 367; his contribution to Chris-
tianity, 368 ; his view of Messianic
reign, 374 n. ; epistles of, immortality
in, 377 ; his view of resurrection, 393,
394; his conception of Messianic judg-
ment, 399, 400 ; his view of future of
Israel, 403 n. ; his view of abolition of
death, 407 ; his view of regeneration
ot the earth, 408; his view of interme-
diate state, 410; non-Jewish element
in, 413; as Christian leader, 416; his
appeal to Pharisees, 419; his autobi-
ography, 427 ; his attitude toward de-
ification of Jesus, 429.
Perfection, human, in Fourth Gospel,
285.
Persian ideas, influence of, 374, 375.
Persian influence, on Jews, 151, 168,
248, 292, 390, 405, 431 n. ; on Chris-
tianity, 413.
Persian"^ ingdom, permanence of, 304.
Persian religion compared with Jewish,
172.
Persius, ethical sentiment of. 337.
Person of Jesus, two lines in construc-
tion of, 120; idealized, 358.
Peter, church founded on, 348; protest
of, against Messiah's death, 351; re-
proved by Jesus, 351; vision of, 366;
indorses Paul, 367; his view of Jesus,
422.
PfHderer, "Moral u. Religion," 302 n.;
"Religionsphilosophie," 302 n.
Pharisees, attacked by Jesus, 245; recog-
nized by Jesus, 266 ; their doctrine of
imputation, 273; under Hasmoneans,
325; their aversion to revolt, 331; their
fear of Jesus, 344; Jesus intelligible
to, 348 n.
Philo, his conception of divine spirit,
92; his conception of wisdom, 101,
102; his idea of the logos, 106-114;
influence of, on Fourth Gospel, 117;
his view of inspiration, 127, 128;
makes woman author of sin, 210;
" Contemplative Life," 255 n. ; cxeget-
ical method of, 388; his relation to
Colossians 433.
Philosophy, Cynical in F.ccles., 59 ; Pla-
tonic and Stoic in Wisdom, 60; Jewish,
97; Hebrew ethical, 291; Greek scep-
tical, 385, 38'i.
Pilate, his view of Jesus, 344.
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
453
Pirke Abotli, 247 n., 251 n., 259 .
Plato, ' Apology," 395 n.
Platoiiism, influence of, on Jews, 97,
386, 387.
Pleroma, in Christ, 407; gnostic, 433.
Pliny, "Hist. Nat.," 255 n.
Plutarch, ethical sentiment of, 337; on
resurrection, 391.
Political annihilation and religious
growth, 238.
Political idea, the, in Daniel, 322; in the
Sibyl, 323.
Poor, tlie, technical O. T. sense of, 316.
Prayer for the dead, 77 n.
Pre-existence of Messiah in Enoch-Par-
ables, 326.
Prescriptions, as enfeebling spirituality,
369.
Priesthood, of Christ, 283.
Priesthood, Levitical, perpetuity of,
315.
Priests, conservatism of, 254.
Primitive idea of animals, 199.
Prince of this world. 218 n.
Probation, future, 411.
Problem of evil, N. T. solution of, 171.
Prophecies, pre-exilian, 315 n.
Prophecy, view of, in Zechariah and
Joel. 54.
Prophet, the false, in N. T. Apocalypse,
373.
Prophetic writings, conception of sin in,
190.
Prophets, the, formulators of monothe-
ism, 47; their treatment of idolatry,
234; interested in the nation as a
whole, 236; peculiar to Israel, 238;
their conception of covenant, 307;
their interpretation of history, 307 ;
ethical reproofs of, 332: their view of
Jewish nation a-! intermediary, 345;
rejection of Israel in, 346: judgment
in, 356: nationalism in ethics of,
396 n.;. Jerusalem in. 408.
Proselytism, origin of, 328 n.
Protestantism, affected bv modern
thought, 435.
Proverbs, date of, 58, 100 n.; old Se-
mitic eschatology of. 385.
Psalm xliv., date of, 189.
Psalm li., unique conception of sin in,
192.
Psalm cxix., its motive, 240; idea of
righteousness in, 208.
Psalms, liabylonian. penitential, 382.
Psalms, the, date of, 61 ; providence in,
80; conception of sin in, 186 if.;
whether immortality in, 380, 381.
Psalms of Solomon, judgment in, 357;
Messiah in, 398 ; Israel's future in, 400.
Psychological questions suggested by
Eden-story, 198.
Ptolemy Euergetes, 60 n.
Ptolemy Physcon, 60 n.
Public worship of Ezra's time, effect of,
48.
Punishment, eternal, in Matthew, 356.
Purgatorial suffering, 411, 412.
Purification, national, preached by John
Baptist, 333.
Purim, 57.
RABBIS, their attitude toward Greek
study, 251.
Ransom, Jesus as, 352, 353.
Rechabites, the, 219 n., 255.
Reconciliation of man to God, 222, 407.
Records, Jewish, antiquity of, 241.
'Records of the Past," 307 n.
Redemption, national, in Philo, 327;
popular hope of, 327.
Reform of John Baptist, value of, 335,336.
Reformation, moral, of Jesus, 339.
Reformers, not always understood by
contemporaries, 35.
Regeneration, ethical, as held by Jesns,
340; in Fourth Gospel, 340;' of hu-
manity, taught by Jesus, 377; social,
era of, 401: of external world, 408; in
future liie, 412.
Religion, a branch of sociology, 1; so-
cial character of, 1 ; product of national
thought, 7 ; dependent on social or-
ganization, 8 ; tends to coalesce with
ethics, 19 ; and ethics, difference in
their points of view, 20; absolute
power of. on what dependent, 21;
practical power of, on what dependent,
21 ; force in propagation of, 32 ; the ab-
solutely universal, 86 ; how dependent
on organization, 39 ; effect of slavish
nomism on, 244 ; influence of syna-
gogues on, 247; Israelitish, embraced
by aliens, 318.
Religions, barbarous, history of, 44.
Religions that have perished, 7.
Religious cause of failure, 5.
Religious consciousness defined, 1.
Religious decay only seeming, 5.
Religious discoveries, liberating effect
of, 24, 25.
Religious gatherings in Malachi, 246.
Religious ideas, gradual victory of, 33.
Religious influence, international, extent
of, 26.
Religious life, later Jewish, activity of,
248.
Religious necessity of growth, 2, 5, 6.
Religious progress marked by flows and
ebbs, 21; from less to more general,
30.
Religious revolutions, how accom-
plished, 6.
Religious sects, danger of narrowness, 6.
Religious sentiment, its content deter-
mined by science and ethics, 20.
Religious thinkers, when influential, 6.
Religious thought, diverse tendencies of,
192 n.
Religions vigor, relative to size of com-
munity, 5.
454
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
Religiousness, ethical and non-ethical,
384 .
Henan, "History of Israel," 306 n. ;
" L'Antechrist,"" 364 .
Renegades, in Enoch, 324.
Repentance, prophetic doctrine o f , 221.
Restoration, the, religious struggle of,
313.
Resurrection, accepted bv Pharisees,
251; of Jesus, 280, 358; in Daniel,
320 ; as contained in immortality,
394 n.
Retaliation, opposed by Jesus, 267.
Retribution, divine, in N. T., 407.
Retrogression. See Decay.
Revelation, received bv Paul, 427.
Reward, divine, in O.'T., 261.
Rewards, promised by Jesus, 343.
Righteous, the, 82; in Daniel, 321, 322.
Righteousness, consciousness of, in
Psalms, 188; of Christ, 209; prophetic
conception of, 235; twofold source of,
236; later Jewish idea of, 243; nomis-
tic definition of, 244; Jesus' concep-
tion of, 268, 269; transference of, 272;
as held by Jesus and Paul, 281; in
Fourth Gospel, 283-285; ethical, 287;
and prosperity. 309 , prophetic, 318;
national, consciousness of, 332 ; hu-
man, as condition of salvation, 421;
exaltation of, 429.
Ritual, expression of dogma, 20; de-
basing tendency of, 186 ; elaboration
of, 230; organization of, 313 ; Egyp-
tian, 382.
Roman empire, magic in, 169; ethicai
progress in, 337; as persecutor, 363 ;
destruction of, in N. T. Apocalvpse,
364, 373.
Roman religion of first century, iifeless-
ness of, 38.
Roman world, Paul's picture of, 214.
Rome, organized force of, 338.
Roth, on Persian eschatology, 375 n.
Royal law, the, 297.
SABATIER, on N. T. Apocalyps 375 n.
Sabbath, the, observed by Christians,
361 n.
Sacerdotal system of N. T., 48.
Sacrifice, vicarious element in, 226; out-
ward, insufficiency of, 230; Essen ian
hostility to, 255,256 ; Messianic, 280 ;
of Christ, in Fourth Gospel, 283 ; of
Christ, high conception in, 290 ; of
Jesus, in N. T., 428.
Sadducees, failure of, 261; under Has-
monenns, 325; aversion of, to revolt,
331; reject resurrection. 392.
Saints, the, in Daniel, 320, 321; reign
of. 362, 374 ; as judges of the wicked,
406.
Sa'ir, 142, 145.
Salter. "Ethical Religion." 302 n.
Salvation, not in church, 278 .; super-
natural, 279; advance in intensity of,
methods of, 290 ; through king, 316 ff. ;
held to be of Jews, 346 ; how defined
by Jesus, 418; as reward of obedience
to the law, 425.
Samuel, Deuteronomic coloring of, 309 n.
Sassanians, the, theocracy ">f, 303 n.
Satan, as angel of light, 152; identifica-
tion of, with serpent, 158, 202; his fall
from heaven, 160; in Enoch, 163;
identification of, with Azazel, 203 n. ;
blinding power of, 213; in N. T.
Apocalvpse, 373 ; imprisonment of,
374.
Satisfaction in God, earthlv, in 0. T.,
379 ff.
Scepticism, religious, among early Jews,
53; Sadducean, 253; Semitic, 390.
Schneckenbiirger, on baptism of John,
334 n.
Schodde, Enoch, translation of, 66 n.,
326 n.
Schools, legal, 231; Jewish, Greek in-
fluence in. 252.
Schultz, "Alttestamentl. Theol.," 302 n.
Schiirer, " Geschichte," 66 n., 246 .,
249 n., 263 n., 326 n., 330 n., 337 n.
Science, as handmaid of religion, 15.
Scientific views of N. T. times, 360.
Scion, royal, 316.
Scribes, early, qualifications of, 72 ; as
leaders of .legal study, 259; doctrinal
studies of, 319 ; concurrence of Jesus
with, 419.
Scriptures, public reading of, 247.
Second coming of Christ, 274.
Second Maccabees, judgment in, 357.
Sects. See Religious sects.
Seeley, "Ecce Homo," 302 n.
Self-abandonment, as ethical factor, 300.
Self-culture, moral, obligation of, 299.
Semitic and Hellenic ideas, united in
Christianity, 370.
Semitism, in the Church, 370.
Semyaza, 160.
Seneca, ethical sentiment of, 337.
Sensual pleasure, serpent symbol of,
203 n.
Separateness, social, of early Christians,
297.
Sermon on Mount, no mention of divine
spirit in, 94 ; whether Essenism in,
256, 257; ethics of, 294-296; content
of, 340 ; judgment in, 356, 396; heaven
in, 409.
Serpent, the. in Genesis, 158, 195 ; pun-
ishment of, 197: animal nature of,
199 ; allegorically interpreted, 203.
Servant of Yahwe', 225 ; suffering of,
352.
Seven Brothers, storv of, in 2 Maccabees,
393.
Shabbath, 259 .
Shades, the. consultation of, 378.
Shamash, as judge, 395.
Shammai, severity of, 259 n., 264.
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
455
Shekina, the, 90 n.
ttheol, negative character of, 204 ; ex-
istence in, 378 ; as motive for present
life, 381; in O. T., 381; in Enoch-
Parables, 393 ; whether moral dis-
tinctions in, 404 ; whether Paradise
in, 409.
Sibylline Oracles, why not canonized,
75 ; earthly consummation in, 350 ;
judgment in, 357 ; Israel's future in.
400.
Simon the Just, 247 n., 259, 264.
Simplicity of Jesus, 359.
Sin, primitive view of, 183 ; religious
and ethical sides of consciousness of,
187; O. T. view of nature of, 190;
idea of, how controlled by nomism,
193; in O. T. forefathers, 193 ; in O.
T., whether nature or tendency, 193 ;
origin of, in O. T., 193 ft'. ; initial act
of, 196 ; universality of, in N. T., 206;
beginning of, in N. T., 208; N. T.
conception of, 220 ; ethical escape
from, 222 ; relation of suffering to,
223-226 ; inward, 227 : sense of, de-
veloped by the law, 227 ; in Fourth
Gospel, 284.
Sinai, as scene of judgment. 398 n.
Sinfulness, not bodily, 174.
Sins of ignorance, 22*6.
Smith, " Diet, of Bible," 409 n.
Smith, " Religion of the Semites,"
141 n.
Society, see Decay, Growth: apparent
stagnation of, 3; ethical organization
of, 338; perfect, conception of, 300.
Soc. of Bibl. Lit. and Exeg., Journal of,
429 n.
Soferim, the, 259.
Solidarity, ethical principle, 184, 185;
national, 272; national, period of,
315.
Solomon, perhaps author of proverbs.
58.
" Son of God," whether claim to super-
human nature in, 422.
Son of man, in Daniel, 320 ; coming of,
361 ; as Lord of angels, 423.
Son of Yahwe, as epithet of king, 317.
Song of Songs, doubts as to canonical
authority of, 74.
Song of Three Children, 273.
Sonship, spiritual, 270.
Sophistrv, moral, exposed by Jesus,
340.
Soul, the, limits of development, 2 ;
equivalent to person, 175; used for
dead body, 175; equivalent to life,
178 ; and spirit, difference between,
181; of Adam, 181; of Christ, 181;
Christian view of, 182; schism in,
213; direct appeal of, to God. 230;
death of, ascribed to Sadducees, 253 n.
Spiegel, " Eranische Alterthumskunde,"
150 ., 172.
Spirit, whether hypostatized in Bible,
92-96; the divine, Philo's conception
of, 92 ; Paul's conception of, 93 ; Tal-
mudic conception of, 93 n.; use of, by
Augustan writers, 182 n. ; hostile to
flesh, 213; holy, John Baptist's refer-
ence to, 334 n.
Spirits, guardian, Persian, 151 ; evil,
Persian, 155; goud, no organization
of, in Bible, 170.
Spiritualitv in Judaism, 245, 265; of
Paul, 276; of Jesus, 342, 355, 418;
as suggesting immortalrv, 384.
Stade, "Geschichte Israels," 306 .,
307 n.
Stagnation, social, 3.
States, ancient, cause of ruin of, 3.
Stoicism, career of, 41; not a popular re-
ligion, 41; idea of spirituality of God
in, 88, 89; influence of, on Jews, 97,
886; influence of, on Philo, 112, 114;
trace of, in Fourth Gos-pel, 218 n. ;
Pharisaic, 252; in Palestine, 260; ill
Antigonus, 261.
Storm and stress, period of, 236.
Subordination of woman, 210.
Succa, 273.
Suffering, question of, 166; vicarious,
166 ; atonement by, 222, 353 : national,
ethical training of, 309; Jewish, re-
ligious effect of, 319 ; as leading to
triumph, 352.
Suffering Messiah in Talmud, 330 n.
Sun-worship, Essenian, 256.
Supernatural, the, in history of Messiah,
360.
Sympathy, in N. T. ethics, 300.
Synagogue, the, religious effect of, 87, 88.
Synagogue, the great, 135, 246.
Synagogues, 231 .
Syncretism in ancient pantheons, 10; in
Islam, Christianity, Judaism, 11.
Synoptics, the, divine justice in, 83;
fatherhood of God in, 84; idea of di-
vine spirit in, 94 ; idea of wisdom in,
102; baptism in. 348; Messianic an-
nouncement in, 350 ; final judgment
in, 355, 356; judgment by Jesus in,
355, 356; date of, 358; eschatology
of, 360; apocalypse in, 363; resurrec-
tion in, 393, 394; Messiah as judge in,
399; signs of Messiah's appearance in,
402; faith in Jesus in, 421.
Syria, Paul in, 427.
Syrophcenician woman, the, 345.
TABU, its relation to ethics, 16 n.
Talmud, the, hypostalizing tendency in,
90 n., 91 w.,'93 n. ; its use of Ol T.,
137; magic in, 142; angels in. 149;
demons in, 169; fusion of civil ai:d
religious codes in, 237; detailed pre-
scriptions of, 243; imputation in, 273;
pre-existence of Messiah in, 326; suf-
fering Messiah in, 330 .; calling
of Messiah bv God in, 357; Messiah
456
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
as judge in, 357; Gog and Magog in,
374 n.; resurrection in, 394 ; national-
ism in, 396; future probation in, 412.
Tares, parable of, 348 n.
Targum of Jonathan, 280.
Targums, the, suffering Messiah in, 330 .
Tartarus, 406 n.
Teaching of Jesus, whether esoteric,
347.
Temple-service, ethical aspect of, 190.
Temptation in Eden, 195 ff.
Tenderness, ethicnl, of Jesus, 301.
Theocratic idea. non-Jewish, 303.
Theol. Jahresbericht, 302 .
Theopompus, on resurrection, 391.
Therapeutic, the, 255 n.
Tiamat, 152, 158, 162, 200 n.
Tigris-valley, as Persian centre, 392.
Timothy, Jirst Epistle to, faith in, 434.
Tobit, book of, evil spirit in, 168;
conception of sin in, 192 n.
Tora. See Law.
Torment, future, whether in 0. T., 379.
TutemUm, Hebrew, 141 n.
Toy, "Quotations," 163 n.; on prose-
lyte-baptism, 334 n.
Tradition, as interpreter of Jesus, 359.
Transformation, moral, in N. T., 285.
Translation, origin of idea of, 204 n.
Transmigration of souls, 390.
Tree of life, 201, 205 n.
Trichotomy, not in Bible, 180-182.
Tylor, " Primitive Culture," 199 n.
UNBELIEF, the sin of the world, 218-
Underworld, the, in O. T., 381 ; Baby-
lonian, 882.
Unity, geographical, as condition of
spread of a religion, 37 ; earlv Jewish,
308 ; ethical, Roman, 337 ; effected by
Christianity, 371.
Universality," prophetic religious, 313,
314 ; of Jewish national aim, 319; at-
tempted, of John Baptist, 336 ; of
membership, in the Church, 366.
Uprisings, Jewish, 344.
VERNES, " Hist, des Ide"es Mess.,"
335 .
Vicarious righteousness, 273-275.
Vicarious suffering, 223; relation of
Jesus to, 420.
Virtue, Anligonus' view of, 260.
Vischer, on N. T. Apocalypse, 375 n.
Vision, prophetic and apocalyptic, 63.
Visions, apocalyptic, historical interpre-
tations of, 376.
WAKBUKTON, "Divine Leg. cf Moses/'
382 .
Water as male and female, 162 n.
Wayikra Kabba, 252 n.
Weber, " Svstem," 91 ., 93 n., 142 n.,
149 n., 161 n., 169 ., 108 ., 252 n.,
273 n., 280 n., 326 n., 329 n., 330 n.,
357 n., 363 n,. 374 n., 394. 399, 409.
Weiss, " N. T. Theol.," 302 n.
Wellhausen, " Pharisiier u. Sadduciier,"
249 n.; "Hist, of Israel," 308 .
Wicked, the, 82.
Will, human, how viewed by Paul, 214;
ethical power of, 222.
Winer, "Reiil-Woiterbuch," 249 n.
Wisdom, pre-Christian Jewish concep-
tion of, 385, 386.
Wisdom-books, moral position of, 327.
Wisdom of Solomon, classic character
of, 52; religious tone of, 60; provi-
dence in, 79, 80; fatherhood of God
in, 84; man's relation to God in, 87;
idea of divine spirit in, 92; idea of
wisdom in, 100; personification of
word in, 105, 106; conception of sin
in, 192, 205; view of body in, 219;
atonement for sin in, 231; immortality
in, 251; wisdom a divine ideal in,
278; salvation in, 279 ; immortality
in, 378 ; ethical progress in, 397; eth-
ical-religious elevation of, 417.
Witchcraft, 171.
Wogue, "Histoire de la Bible," 132 n.
Woman, subordination of, to man, 153 ;
role assigned to, by Hebrews, 210 n.
World, deadness of, 216; moral corrup-
tion of, 218.
World-religion, announced by Jesus,
349.
XENOPHON, "Anabasis," 409 n.
YAIIWE. name, abandonment of, 32;
Jewish loyalty to, 305 ; his covenant
with Israel, 306, 307; as judge, 397,
398.
Yahwe-cult, origin of, 306 n.
ZADOK, 260 n.
Zadokites, 254 n.
Zechariah, Satan of, 167.
Zeller, on Greek philosophy, 387 n.
Zerubbabel, Davidic prince, 316.
Zeus, as judge, 395.
Zoroaster, his relation to Mazdeism, 25.
Zoroastrian resurrection, 394..
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