3

The Es

law, which should be common to all people. senes, who were scarcely Jews, appear also to have been indifferent to the Temple and to the Mosaic observances. But these were only isolated or unavowed instances of boldness. Jesus first dared to say that from his time, or rather from that of John,2 the Law no longer existed. If sometimes he used more guarded terms, it was in order not to shock too violently existing prejudices. When he was driven to extremities he put off all reserve, and declared that the Law had no longer any force. On this subject he used striking comparisons: "No man stitches a piece of new cloth upon an old garment, neither do men put new wine into old skins."4 This step makes him, in practice, the master and originator. The Temple, by scornful placards, excluded all except Jews from its enclosure. Jesus would have none of this. That narrow, hard, and uncharitable Law was made only for the children of Abraham. Jesus maintains that every man of right will, every man who receives and loves him, is a son of Abraham.5 The pride of blood appears to him the chief enemy he has to combat. In other words, Jesus is no longer a Jew. He is in the highest degree revolutionary he calls all men to a worship founded solely on the fact of their being children of God. He pro

1 Sibylline Books, iii. 573 et seq., 715 et seq., 756-758. Compare Targum of Jonathan, Isaiah xii. 3.

2 Luke xvi. 16. The corresponding passage of Matthew, xi. 12, 13, is not so clear, but its meaning is the same.

8 Matt. v. 17, 18 (compare Babylonian Talmud, Schabbath, 116 b). This passage does not conflict with those which imply the abolition of the Law; it merely signifies that all the figures of the Old Testament are fulfilled in Jesus (comp. Luke xvi. 17).

4 Matt. ix. 16, 17; Luke v. 36-39.

5 Luke xix. 9.

claims the rights of man, not the rights of the Jew; the religion of man, not the religion of the Jew; the deliverance of man, not the deliverance of the Jew.1 How far removed was this from a Gaulonite Judas or a Matthias Margaloth, preaching revolution in the name of the Law! The religion of humanity is thus established, not upon blood, but upon the heart. Moses is superseded; the Temple is rendered useless, and is irrevocably condemned.

1 Matt. xxiv. 14; xxviii. 19. Mark xiii. 10; xvi. 15. Luke xxiv. 47.

CHAPTER XIV.

SAMARITANS AND PAGANS.

WITH these views, Jesus disdained all religion which was not of the heart. The vain practices of devotees,1 the outward strictness which trusts to posturing for salvation, had in him a mortal enemy. He cared little for fasting. Pardon of an injury he preferred to sacrifice. The love of God, charity, and mutual forgiveness were his whole law. Nothing could savour less of sacerdotalism. The priest, as such, ever urges public sacrifice, of which he is the appointed minister; he discourages private prayer, which is a means of dispensing with his office. We should seek in vain in the Gospel for one religious rite recommended by Jesus. Baptism to him was only of secondary importance;" and as to prayer, he prescribes nothing, except that it must come from the heart. As is always the case, many thought to substitute the good-will of feeble souls for genuine love of goodness, and imagined they could gain the kingdom of heaven by saying to him, "Rabbi, Rabbi;" but he repelled them, and proclaimed that his religion consists in doing good, quoting to 2 Matt. ix. 14; xi. 19.

1 Matt. XV. 9.

Matt. v. 23-26; ix. 13; xii. 7.

4 Matt. xxii. 37-40; Mark xii. 29, 30; Luke x. 25-37.

5 Matt. xxviii. 19 and Mark xvi. 16 do not represent his real words: compare Acts x. 47 and 1 Cor. i. 47.

Matt. vii. 21; Luke vi. 46.

them the passage in Isaiah, "This people honour me with their lips, but their heart is far from me." 1

4

The Sabbath was the chief point upon which the whole edifice of Pharisaic scruples and subtilties was built up. This ancient and admirable institution had become a pretext for the miserable disputes of casuists, and a source of a thousand superstitious beliefs.2 It was believed that Nature observed it; all intermittent springs were accounted "Sabbatical." This was, moreover, the point upon which Jesus most delighted in defying his adversaries. He openly violated the Sabbath, and only replied by keen raillery to the charges brought against him. Still more strongly he despised a host of modern observances which tradition had added to the Law, and which for that very reason were dearest of all to the devotees. Ablutions, and the too subtile distinctions between things pure and impure, found in him a pitiless opponent. "Can you wash your soul?" he would say; "not what a man eats, but what comes out of his heart defiles him." The Pharisees, who upheld these absurdities, were the continual target of his attacks. He accused them of outbidding the Law, of inventing impracticable precepts, in order to create occasions of sin in man. "Blind leaders of the blind," said he, "take care lest ye also fall into the ditch." "O generation of vipers!" he

1 Matt. xv. 8; Mark vii. 6: compare Isaiah xxix. 13.

2 See, especially, the treatise Schabbath of the Mishna, and the Book of Jubilees (translated from the Ethiopic in Ewald's Jahrbücher, Years 2, 3), chap. 1.

Josephus, Wars, VII. v. 1; Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxxi. 18: compare "The Land and the Book" (Thomson), i. 406.

4 Matt. xii. 1-14. Mark ii. 23-28. xiv. 1-6.

Luke vi. 1-5; xiii. 14-17;

would add in private; "they talk only of goodness, while they are foul within, and so belie the proverb, that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." 1

3

Jesus did not know the Gentiles well enough to think of founding anything solid upon their conversion. Galilee contained a great number of Pagans, but, as it appears, no public and organised worship of false gods. He could see this worship displayed in all its splendour in the country of Tyre and Sidon, at Cæsarea-Philippi, and in the Decapolis, but he paid it little attention. We never find in him the wearisome Jewish pedantry of his time, nor those declamations against idolatry so familiar to his co-religionists from the time of Alexander, which fill, for instance, the Book of Wisdom. What strikes him in the Pagans is not their idolatry, but their servility. The young Jewish democrata brother here of Judas the Gaulonite, admitting no master but God-was offended at the honours with which they surrounded the person of the sovereign, and the lying titles given him. With this exception, when he comes in contact with Pagans he usually shows them great indulgence; sometimes he

1 Matt. xii. 34; xv. 1-9, 12-14; xxiii. Mark vii. 1, 8, 15, 16. Luke vi. 45; xi. 39–44.

2 The Pagans of Galilee were mostly, I think, on the boundaries, Kadesh, for example, while the heart of the country, except the city of Tiberias, was wholly Jewish. The line where ruins of temples end and those of synagogues begin is plainly marked at Lake Hulek (Samachonitis, or Merom). Traces of Pagan sculpture, thought to be found at Tell-Hum, are doubtful. The sea-coast, the town of Acra in particular, made no part of Galilee.

See ante, pp. 184, 185.

Chaps. xiii. xiv.

Matt. xx. 25; Mark x. 42; Luke xxii. 25.