The Life of Jesus. Ernest Renan
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the results which will proceed from it will be of a social, and not a political order, that the work at which this people labors is a kingdom of God, not a civil republic; a universal institution, not a nationality or a country.
Notwithstanding numerous failures, Israel admirably sustained this vocation. A series of pious men, Ezra, Nehemiah, Onias, the Maccabees, consumed with zeal for the Law, succeeded each other in the defense of the ancient institutions. The idea that Israel was a holy people, a tribe chosen by God and bound to Him by covenant, took deeper and firmer root. An immense expectation filled their souls. All Indo-European antiquity had placed paradise in the beginning; all its poets had wept a vanished golden age. Israel placed the age of gold in the future. The perennial poesy of religious souls, the Psalms, blossomed from this exalted piety, with their divine and melancholy harmony. Israel became truly and specially the people of God, while around it the pagan religions were more and more reduced, in Persia and Babylonia, to an official charlatanism, in Egypt and Syria to a gross idolatry, and in the Greek and Roman world to mere parade. That which the Christian martyrs did in the first centuries of our era, that which the victims of persecuting orthodoxy have done, even in the bosom of Christianity, up to our time, the Jews did during the two centuries which preceded the Christian era. They were a living protest against superstition and religious materialism. An extraordinary movement of ideas, ending in the most opposite results, made of them, at this epoch, the most striking and original people in the world. Their dispersion along all the coast of the Mediterranean, and the use of the Greek language, which they adopted when out of Palestine, prepared the way for a propagandism, of which ancient societies, divided into small nationalities, had never offered a single example.
Up to the time of the Maccabees, Judaism, in spite of its persistence in announcing that it would one day be the religion of the human race, had had the characteristic of all the other worships of antiquity, it was a worship of the family and the tribe. The Israelite thought, indeed, that his worship was the best, and spoke with contempt of strange gods; but he believed also that the religion of the true God was made for himself alone. Only when a man entered into the Jewish family did he embrace the worship of Jehovah.[1] No Israelite cared to convert the stranger to a worship which was the patrimony of the sons of Abraham. The development of the pietistic spirit, after Ezra and Nehemiah, led to a much firmer and more logical conception. Judaism became the true religion in a more absolute manner; to all who wished, the right of entering it was given;[2] soon it became a work of piety to bring into it the greatest number possible.[3] Doubtless the refined sentiment which elevated John the Baptist, Jesus, and St. Paul above the petty ideas of race, did not yet exist; for, by a strange contradiction, these converts were little respected and were treated with disdain.[4] But the idea of a sovereign religion, the idea that there was something in the world superior to country, to blood, to laws—the idea which makes apostles and martyrs—was founded. Profound pity for the pagans, however brilliant might be their worldly fortune, was henceforth the feeling of every Jew.[5] By a cycle of legends destined to furnish models of immovable firmness, such as the histories of Daniel and his companions, the mother of the Maccabees and her seven sons,[6] the romance of the race-course of Alexandria[7]—the guides of the people sought above all to inculcate the idea, that virtue consists in a fanatical attachment to fixed religious institutions.
[Footnote 1: Ruth i. 16.]
[Footnote 2: Esther ix. 27.]
[Footnote 3: Matt. xxiii. 15; Josephus, Vita, 23; B.J., II. xvii. 10, VII. iii. 3; Ant., XX. ii. 4; Horat., Sat. I., iv., 143; Juv., xiv. 96, and following; Tacitus, Ann., II. 85; Hist., V. 5; Dion Cassius, xxxvii. 17.]
[Footnote 4: Mishnah, Shebiit, X. 9; Talmud of Babylon, Niddah, fol. 13 b; Jebamoth, 47 b, Kiddushim, 70 b; Midrash, Jalkut Ruth, fol. 163 d.]
[Footnote 5: Apocryphal letter of Baruch, in Fabricius, Cod. pseud., V.T., ii., 147, and following.]
[Footnote 6: II. Book of Maccabees, ch. vii. and the De Maccabæis, attributed to Josephus. Cf. Epistle to the Hebrews xi. 33, and following.]
[Footnote 7: III. Book (Apocr.) of Maccabees; Rufin, Suppl. ad Jos., Contra Apionem, ii. 5.]
The persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes made this idea a passion, almost a frenzy. It was something very analogous to that which happened under Nero, two hundred and thirty years later. Rage and despair threw the believers into the world of visions and dreams. The first apocalypse, "The Book of Daniel," appeared. It was like a revival of prophecy, but under a very different form from the ancient one, and with a much larger idea of the destinies of the world. The Book of Daniel gave, in a manner, the last expression to the Messianic hopes. The Messiah was no longer a king, after the manner of David and Solomon, a theocratic and Mosaic Cyrus; he was a "Son of man" appearing in the clouds[1]—a supernatural being, invested with human form, charged to rule the world, and to preside over the golden age. Perhaps the Sosiosh of Persia, the great prophet who was to come, charged with preparing the reign of Ormuzd, gave some features to this new ideal.[2] The unknown author of the Book of Daniel had, in any case, a decisive influence on the religious event which was about to transform the world. He supplied the mise-en-scène, and the technical terms of the new belief in the Messiah; and we might apply to him what Jesus said of John the Baptist: Before him, the prophets; after him, the kingdom of God.
[Footnote 1: Chap. vii. 13, and following.]
[Footnote 2: Vendidad, chap. xix. 18, 19; Minokhired, a passage published in the "Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft," chap. i. 263; Boundehesch, chap. xxxi. The want of certain chronology for the Zend and Pehlvis texts leaves much doubt hovering over the relations between the Jewish and Persian beliefs.]
It must not, however, be supposed that this profoundly religious and soul-stirring movement had particular dogmas for its primary impulse, as was the case in all the conflicts which have disturbed the bosom of Christianity. The Jew of this epoch was as little theological as possible. He did not speculate upon the essence of the Divinity; the beliefs about angels, about the destinies of man, about the Divine personality, of which the first germs might already be perceived, were quite optional—they were meditations, to which each one surrendered himself according to the turn of his mind, but of which a great number of men had never heard. They were the most orthodox even, who did not share in these particular imaginations, and who adhered to the simplicity of the Mosaic law. No dogmatic power analogous to that which orthodox Christianity has given to the Church then existed. It was only at the beginning of the third century, when Christianity had fallen into the hands of reasoning races, mad with dialectics and metaphysics, that that fever for definitions commenced which made the history of the Church but the history of one immense controversy. There were disputes also among the Jews—excited schools brought opposite solutions to almost all the questions which were agitated; but in these contests, of which the Talmud has preserved the principal details, there is not a single word of speculative theology. To observe and maintain the law, because the law was just, and because, when well observed, it gave happiness—such was Judaism. No credo, no theoretical symbol. One of the disciples of the boldest Arabian philosophy, Moses Maimonides, was able to become the oracle of the synagogue, because he was well versed in the canonical law.
The reigns of the last Asmoneans, and that of Herod, saw the excitement grow still stronger. They were filled by an uninterrupted series of religious movements. In the degree that power became secularized, and passed into the hands of unbelievers, the Jewish people lived less and less for the earth, and became more and more absorbed by the strange fermentation which was operating in their midst. The world, distracted by other spectacles, had little knowledge of that which passed in this forgotten corner of the East. The minds abreast of their age were, however, better informed. The tender and clear-sighted Virgil seems to answer, as by a secret echo, to the second Isaiah. The birth of a child throws him into dreams of a universal palingenesis.[1] These dreams were of every-day occurrence, and shaped into a kind of literature which was designated Sibylline. The quite recent formation of the empire exalted the imagination; the great era of peace on which it entered, and that impression of melancholy sensibility which the mind experiences after long periods of revolution, gave birth on all sides to unlimited hopes.