Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

CHAPTER IL

CHILDHOOD.

JESUS was born at Nazareth,1 a small town of Galilee, which until his time had no celebrity. During the whole of his life he was designated by the name of "the Nazarene," and only by a very confused inference is it made out in the legend constructed about him that he was born at Bethlehem. We shall see later on (chap. xv.) the motive for this supposition, and how it was the necessary consequence of the messianic char

1 Matt. xiii. 54-57; Mark vi. 1-4; John i. 45, 46.

2 It is not mentioned in the Old Testament, Josephus, or the Talmud; but the name occurs in the liturgy of Kalir, for the ninth of Ab.

8 Matt. xxvi. 71. Mark i. 24; xiv. 67. Luke xviii. 37; xxiv. 19. John xix. 19. Acts ii. 22; iii. 6; x. 38 (cf. John vii. 41, 42. Acts iv. 10; vi. 14; xxii. 8; xxvi. 9). Hence the name "Nazarenes " (Acts xxiv. 5), long given to the Christians by the Jews, and still denoting them in all Mussulman countries.

[ocr errors]

4 A circumstance invented to correspond with Micah v. i. The "taxing" (enrolment) made by Cyrenius (Quirinius), with which the journey to Bethlehem is connected, was at least ten years later than the date of Jesus' birth according to Matthew and Luke. In fact, these two evangelists place his birth during the reign of Herod (Matt. ii. 1, 19, 22; Luke i. 5). Now, the census of Quirinius did not take place till after the deposal of Archelaus, that is, ten years after Herod's death, and in the thirty-seventh after the battle of Actium (Jos. Antiq. XVII. xiii. 5; XVIII. i. 1, ii. 1). The inscription by which it was formerly thought to be made out that Quirinius made two enrolments is acknowledged to be spurious (see Orelli, Inscr. Lat. No. 623, with Henzen's supplement; Borghesi, Fasti consulares, unedited, under the year 742). Quirinius may have been twice Legatus of Syria; but the registration took place only in his second term (Mommsen, Res gestæ divi Augusti, Berlin, 1865, p. 11

acter attributed to him.1 The precise date of his birth is not known. It took place during the reign of Augustus, probably about the year 750 from the founding of Rome; that is, some years before the first of that era which all civilised nations reckon from the day on which he is believed to have been born.3

2

The name "Jesus," which was given him, is a modification from "Joshua." It was a very common name;

et seq.). The "taxing," at all events, would have applied to the regions made into a Roman province, not to kingdoms and tetrarchies, above all in the lifetime of Herod the Great. The texts by which it is sought to prove that some of the operations of statistics and registry ordered by Augustus extended to the dominion of the Herods, either imply nothing of the sort, or are the work of Christian writers who have taken this item from Luke's Gospel. What further clearly proves that the journey of the family of Joseph to Bethlehem is no way historical, is its assigned motive. Jesus was not of the family of David (see below, pp. 253-255); and even if he were, it could not be supposed that his parents would be compelled, for a mere official formality, to go and register themselves in a place which their ancestors had left a thousand years before. In forcing on them such an obligation, the Roman authority would have fostered pretensions very threatening to itself.

1 Matt. ii. 1-6; Luke ii. 1–5. That this account is lacking in Mark, with the two parallel passages (Matt. xiii. 54; Mark vi. 1) in which Nazareth appears as the "own country" of Jesus, proves that no such legend belonged to the earliest text that gave the outline of the narrative as now found in Matthew and Mark. In view of the oft-repeated objections, there were prefixed to Matthew's Gospel certain qualified statements not so flagrantly contradicting the rest of the story as to compel the alteration of passages composed from quite another point of view. Luke, on the contrary (iv. 16), writing with deliberation, has for consistency's sake softened his expression. The fourth evangelist knows nothing of the journey to Bethlehem for him, Jesus is simply "of Nazareth " (John i. 46), or "from Galilee " (ibid. vii. 41), on two occasions when it would have been of the highest value to recall his birth at Bethlehem. 2 Matt. ii. 1, 19, 22; Luke i. 5. Herod died early in the year of Rome 750, corresponding with B.C. 4.

8 The calculation serving as the basis of the vulgar era (it is well known) was made by Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century. It implies certain data purely hypothetical.

but people naturally sought later on to discover some mystery in it, and an allusion to his character of Saviour.1 Perhaps Jesus himself, like all mystics, was impressed by this signification. More than one great vocation in history has been occasioned by the name given to a child without any such afterthought. Ardent natures never can bring themselves to admit chance in anything that concerns them. For them everything has been divinely ordained; and they see a sign of the supreme will in the most insignificant circumstance.

The population of Galilee, as the name itself indicates, was very mixed. This province reckoned among its inhabitants, in the time of Jesus, many who were not Jews, Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabs, and even Greeks.8 Conversions to Judaism were not rare in mixed countries like this. It is therefore impossible to raise any question of race here, or to investigate what blood flowed in the veins of him who has most of all contributed to efface the distinctions of blood in humanity.

Jesus sprang from the ranks of the people.* His father Joseph and his mother Mary were of humble station, living by their toil,5 workpeople in that condition, so common in the East, which is neither ease nor poverty. The extreme simplicity of life in such countries, by dispensing with the need of modern com

1 Matt. i. 21; Luke i. 31.

2 Gelil haggoyim, "circle of the Gentiles."

* Strabo, xvi. 2, 35. Josephus, Life, 12.

* The source of the genealogies designed to trace his descent from David will be explained below (chap. xv.). The Ebionites consistently suppressed these genealogies (Epiphanius, Adv. hær. xxx. 14).

5 Matt. xiii. 55; Mark vi. 3; John vi. 42.

forts, renders the privileges of the wealthy almost valueless, and makes every one voluntarily poor. On the other hand, the total absence of taste for art and for whatever tends to the elegance of material life gives a naked aspect to the house of one who otherwise wants for nothing. Except for something sordid and repellent which Islamism brought into all parts of the Holy Land, the town of Nazareth in the time of Jesus did not perhaps much differ from what it is to-day. The streets where he played as a child we can see in the stony paths or in the little crossways which separate the cabins. The house of Joseph, no doubt, closely resembled those poor dwellings, lighted by the doorway, which serve at once as workshop, kitchen, and bedroom, having for furniture a mat, a few cushions on the floor, one or two earthen pots, and a painted chest. The family, whether from one or several marriages, was pretty numerous. Jesus had brothers and sisters,2 of whom he seems to have been the eldest. All have remained obscure, for it appears that the four who are given as his brothers- of whom one at least, James,

3

1 The rude aspect of the ruins that cover Palestine proves that the towns not rebuilt after the Roman manner were very ill built. The form of Syrian houses is so simple, and so imperatively required by the climate, that it never can have much changed.

2 Matt. i. 25 (common reading); xii. 46-50; xiii. 55, 56. Mark iii. 31-35; vi. 3. Luke ii. 7; viii. 19–21. John ii. 12; vii. 3, 5, 10. Acts i. 14. Hegesippus (Euseb. H. E. iii. 20). The assertion that ah ("brother") has a wider sense in Hebrew than with us is wholly false: its meaning is identically the same. Abuse and metaphoric or mistaken use prove nothing. When a preacher calls his hearers " my brethren," do we infer that the word "brother" has no well-defined meaning? In the passages just cited, it is clear that the word has no figurative sense. Note especially Matt. xii. 46–50, which equally forbids the loose rendering "cousin.”

8 Matt. i. 25; Luke ii. 7. There are critical doubts on the text in Matthew, but not on that in Luke.

acquired great importance in the early years of the development of Christianity were his first-cousins. Mary, in fact, had a sister also named Mary,1 who married a certain Alpheus or Cleophas (these two names appear to designate the same person), and was the mother of several sons who played a considerable part among the first disciples of Jesus. These cousins, who adhered to the young Master while his own brothers opposed him (John vii. 5), took the title "brothers of the Lord." The real brothers of Jesus, as well as their mother, had no notoriety until after his death (Acts i. 14). Even then they do not appear to have equalled in importance their cousins, whose conversion had been more spontaneous, and whose characters seem to have had

1 It is certainly a singular circumstance that these two sisters have the There is probably some inaccuracy, arising from the habit of almost indiscriminately calling Galilean women Mary."

same name.

66

2 They are not etymologically the same. 'Aλpaíos is a transcription of the Syro-Chaldaic name Halphai; kλwñâs, or kλeóñas, is a shortened form of κλeóπаτрos. But one may have been artificially substituted for the other, - as "Joseph" is made Hegesippus, "Eliakim" Alcimus, etc.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

8 In fact, the four named (Matt. xiii. 55; Mark vi. 3) as "brothers" of Jesus James, Joses (or Joseph), Simon, and Judas - -are all, or nearly all, found as sons of Mary and Cleophas (Matt. xxvii. 56; Mark xv. 40, xvi. 1; Luke xxiv. 10; Gal. i. 19; Jas. i. 1; Jude 1; Euseb. Chron. A.U.C. 810; H. E. iii. 11, 22, 32, after Hegesippus; Const. Apost. vii. 46). The suggestion here proposed is the only relief to the great difficulty of supposing two sisters having each three or four sons with the same names; and of admitting that James and Simon, the first two bishops of Jerusalem, called "brothers of the Lord," were real brothers of Jesus, who began by opposing him, but were afterwards converted. The evangelist, hearing the sons of Cleophas called "brothers of the Lord," wrote their names by mistake in the passage (Matt. xiii. 55 Mark vi. 3) instead of the unknown names of the real brothers. Thus we see how those called "brothers of the Lord " - James, for example - are so different in character from the real brothers of Jesus as indicated in John vii. 3-5. The expression "the Lord's brothers" evidently designated, in the primitive church, a sort of rank similar to the apostolic (see especially Gal. i. 19; 1 Cor. ix. 5).

=

[ocr errors]
« ZurückWeiter »