If any one of the primitive Christian writers was likely to have been acquainted with the authentic writings of the evangelists, that one was indisputably Justin Martyr. Born in Palestine in the year 89, Justin Martyr lived to the age of seventy-six; he travelled over the Roman world as a missionary; and intellectually he was more than on a level with most educated Oriental Christians. He was the first distinctly controversial writer which the Church produced; and the great facts of the Gospel history were obviously as well known to him as they are to ourselves. There are no traces in his writings of an acquaintance with anything peculiar either to St. John or St. Mark; but there are extracts in abundance often identical with and generally nearly resembling pa.s.sages in St. Matthew and St. Luke. Thus at first sight it would be difficult to doubt that with these two Gospels at least he was intimately familiar. And yet in all his citations there is this peculiarity, that Justin Martyr never speaks of either of the evangelists by name; he quotes or seems to quote invariably from something which he calls [Greek: apomnemoneumata ton Apostolon], or "Memoirs of the Apostles." It is no usual habit of his to describe his authorities vaguely: when he quotes the Apocalypse he names St. John; when he refers to a prophet he specifies Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Daniel.
Why, unless there was some particular reason for it, should he use so singular an expression whenever he alludes to the sacred history of the New Testament? why, if he knew the names of the evangelists, did he never mention them even by accident? Nor is this the only singularity in Justin Martyr"s quotations. There are those slight differences between them and the text of the Gospels which appear between the Gospels themselves. When we compare an extract in Justin with the parallel pa.s.sage in St. Matthew, we find often that it differs from St. Matthew just as St. Matthew differs from St. Luke, or both from St. Mark--great verbal similarity--many paragraphs agreeing word for word--and then other paragraphs where there is an alteration of expression, tense, order, or arrangement.
Again, just as in the midst of the general resemblance between the Synoptical Gospels, each evangelist has something of his own which is not to be found in the others, so in these "Memoirs of the Apostles"
there are facts unknown to either of the evangelists. In the account extracted by Justin from "the Memoirs," of the baptism in the Jordan, the words heard from heaven are not as St. Matthew gives them--"Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased"--but the words of the psalm, "Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee;" a reading which, singularly enough, was to be found in the Gospel of the Ebionites.
Another curious addition to the same scene is in the words [Greek: kai pur anephthe en Iordane], "and a fire was kindled in Jordan."
Again, Justin Martyr speaks of our Lord having promised "to clothe us with garments made ready for us if we keep his commandments"--[Greek: kai aionion basileian p.r.o.noesai]--whatever those words may precisely mean.
These and other peculiarities in Justin may be explained if we suppose him to have been quoting from memory. The evangelical text might not as yet have acquired its verbal sanct.i.ty; and as a native of Palestine he might well have been acquainted with other traditions which lay outside the written word. The silence as to names, however, remains unexplained; and as the facts actually stand there is the same kind of proof, and no more, that Justin Martyr was acquainted with St. Matthew and St. Luke as there is that one of these evangelists made extracts from the other, or both from St. Mark. So long as one set of commentators decline to recognise the truth of this relation between the Gospels, there will be others who with as much justice will dispute the relation of Justin to them. He too might have used another Gospel, which, though like them, was not identical with them.
After Justin Martyr"s death, about the year 170, appeared Tatian"s "Diatessaron," a work which, as its t.i.tle implies, was a harmony of four Gospels, and most likely of _the_ four; yet again not exactly as we have them. Tatian"s harmony, like so many others of the early evangelical histories, was silent on the miraculous birth, and commenced only with the public ministration. The text was in other places different, so much so that Theodoret accuses Tatian of having mutilated the Gospels; but of this Theodoret had probably no better means of judging than we have. The "Diatessaron" has been long lost, and the name is the only clue to its composition.
Of far more importance than either Justin or Tatian are such writings as remain of the immediate successors of the apostles--Barnabas, Clement of Rome, Polycarp, and Ignatius: it is a.s.serted confidently that in these there are quotations from the Gospels so exact that they cannot be mistaken.
We will examine them one by one.
In an epistle of Barnabas there is one pa.s.sage--it is the only one of the kind to be found in him--agreeing word for word with the Synoptical Gospels, "I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance."
It is one of the many pa.s.sages in which the Greek of the three evangelists is exactly the same; it was to be found also in Justin"s "Memoirs;" and there can be no doubt that Barnabas either knew those Gospels or else the common source--if common source there was--from which the evangelists borrowed. More than this such a quotation does not enable us to say; and till some satisfactory explanation has been offered of the agreement between the evangelists, the argument can advance no further. On the other hand, Barnabas like St. Paul had other sources from which he drew his knowledge of our Lord"s words. He too ascribes words to Him which are not recorded by the evangelists, [Greek: houto phesin Iesous; hoi thelontes me idein kai hapsasthai mou tes basileias opheilousi thlibentes kai pathontes labein me]. The thought is everywhere in the Gospels, the words nowhere, nor anything like them.
Both Ignatius and Polycarp appear to quote the Gospels, yet with them also there is the same uncertainty; while Ignatius quotes as genuine an expression which, so far as we know, was peculiar to a translation of the Gospel of the Ebionites--"Handle me and see, for I am not a spirit without body," [Greek: hoti ouk eimi daimonion asomaton].
Clement"s quotations are still more free, for Clement nowhere quotes the text of the evangelists exactly as it at present stands; often he approaches it extremely close; at times the agreement is rather in meaning than words, as if he were translating from another language. But again Clement more noticeably than either of the other apostolic Fathers cites expressions of our Lord of which the evangelists knew nothing.
For instance--
"The Lord saith, "If ye be with me gathered into my bosom, and do not after my commandments, I will cast you off, and I will say unto you, Depart from me, I know you not, ye workers of iniquity.""
And again:--
"The Lord said, "Ye shall be as sheep in the midst of wolves." Peter answered and said unto Him, "Will the wolves then tear the sheep?" Jesus said unto Peter, "The sheep need not fear the wolves after they (the sheep) be dead: and fear not ye those who kill you and can do nothing to you; but fear Him who after you be dead hath power over soul and body to cast them into h.e.l.l-fire.""
In these words we seem to have the lost link in a pa.s.sage which appears in a different connection in St. Matthew and St. Luke. It may be said, as with Justin Martyr, that Clement was quoting from memory in the sense rather than in the letter; although even so it is difficult to suppose that he could have invented an interlocution of St. Peter. Yet no hypothesis will explain the most strange words which follow:--
"The Lord being asked when His kingdom should come, said, "When two shall be one, and that which is without as that which is within, and the male with the female neither male nor female.""
It is needless to say how remote are such expressions as these from any which have come down to us through the evangelists; but they were no inventions of Clement. The pa.s.sage reappears later in Clement of Alexandria, who found it in something which he called the Gospel of the Egyptians.
It will be urged that because Clement quoted other authorities beside the evangelists, it does not follow that he did not know and quote from them. If the citation of a pa.s.sage which appears in almost the same words in another book is not to be accepted as a proof of an acquaintance with that book, we make it impossible, it may be said, to prove from quotations at all the fact of any book"s existence. But this is not the case. If a Father, in relating an event which is told variously in the Synoptical Gospels, had followed one of them minutely in its verbal peculiarities, it would go far to prove that he was acquainted with that one; if the same thing was observed in all his quotations, the proof would amount to demonstration. If he agreed minutely in one place with one Gospel, minutely in a second with another, minutely in a third with another, there would be reason to believe that he was acquainted with them all; but when he merely relates what they also relate in language which approaches theirs and yet differs from it, as they also resemble yet differ from one another, we do not escape from the circle of uncertainty, and we conclude either that the early Fathers made quotations with a looseness irreconcileable with the idea that the language of the Gospels possessed any verbal sacredness to them, or that there were in their times other narratives of our Lord"s life standing in the same relation to the three Gospels as St. Matthew stands to St. Mark and St. Luke.
Thus the problem returns upon us; and it might almost seem as if the explanation was laid purposely beyond our reach. We are driven back upon internal criticism; and we have to ask again what account is to be given of that element common to the Synoptical Gospels, common also to those other Gospels of which we find traces so distinct--those verbal resemblances, too close to be the effect of accident--those differences which forbid the supposition that the evangelists copied one another. So many are those common pa.s.sages, that if all which is peculiar to each evangelist by himself were dropped, if those words and those actions only were retained which either all three or two at least share together, the figure of our Lord from His baptism to His ascension would remain with scarcely impaired majesty.
One hypothesis, and so far as we can see one only, would make the mystery intelligible, that immediately on the close of our Lord"s life some original sketch of it was drawn up by the congregation, which gradually grew and gathered round it whatever His mother, His relations, or His disciples afterwards individually might contribute. This primary history would thus not be the work of any one mind or man; it would be the joint work of the Church, and thus might well be called "Memoirs of the Apostles;" and would naturally be quoted without the name of either one of them being specially attached to it. As Christianity spread over the world, and separate Churches were founded by particular apostles, copies would be multiplied, and copies of those copies; and, unchecked by the presence (before the invention of printing impossible) of any authoritative text, changes would creep in--pa.s.sages would be left out which did not suit the peculiar views of this or that sect; others would be added as this or that apostle recollected something which our Lord had said that bore on questions raised in the development of the creed.
Two great divisions would form themselves between the Jewish and the Gentile Churches; there would be a Hebrew Gospel and a Greek Gospel, and the Hebrew would be translated into Greek, as Papias says St. Matthew"s Gospel was. Eventually the confusion would become intolerable; and among the conflicting stories the Church would have been called on to make its formal choice.
This fact at least is certain from St. Luke"s words, that at the time when he was writing many different narratives did actually exist. The hypothesis of a common origin for them has as yet found little favour with English theologians; yet rather perhaps because it would be inconvenient for certain peculiar forms of English thought than because it has not probability on its side. That the Synoptical Gospels should have been a natural growth rather than the special and independent work of three separate writers, would be unfavourable to a divinity which has built itself up upon particular texts, and has been more concerned with doctrinal polemics than with the broader bas.e.m.e.nts of historic truth.
Yet the text theory suffers equally from the mode in which the first Fathers treated the Gospels, if it were these Gospels indeed which they used. They at least could have attributed no importance to words and phrases; while again, as we said before, a narrative dating from the cradle of Christianity, with the testimony in its favour of such broad and deep reception, would, however wanting in some details, be an evidence of the truth of the main facts of the Gospel history very much stronger than that of three books composed we know not when, and the origin of which it is impossible to trace, which it is impossible to regard as independent, and the writers of which in any other view of them must be a.s.sumed to have borrowed from each other.
But the object of this article is not to press either this or any other theory; it is but to ask from those who are able to give it an answer to the most serious of questions. The truth of the Gospel history is now more widely doubted in Europe than at any time since the conversion of Constantine. Every thinking person who has been brought up a Christian and desires to remain a Christian, yet who knows anything of what is pa.s.sing in the world, is looking to be told on what evidence the New Testament claims to be received. The state of opinion proves of itself that the arguments. .h.i.therto offered produce no conviction. Every other miraculous history is discredited as legend, however exalted the authority on which it seems to be rested. We crave to have good reason shown us for maintaining still the one great exception. Hard worked in other professions, and s.n.a.t.c.hing with difficulty sufficient leisure to learn how complicated is the problem, the laity can but turn to those for a.s.sistance who are set apart and maintained as their theological trustees. We can but hope and pray that some one may be found to give us an edition of the Gospels in which the difficulties will neither be slurred over with convenient neglect or noticed with affected indifference. It may or may not be a road to a bishopric; it may or may not win the favour of the religious world; but it will earn at least the respectful grat.i.tude of those who cannot trifle with holy things, and who believe that true religion is the service of truth.
The last words were scarcely written when an advertis.e.m.e.nt appeared, the importance of which can scarcely be over-estimated. A commentary is announced on the Old and New Testaments, to be composed with a view to what are called the "misrepresentations" of modern criticism. It is to be brought out under the direction of the heads of the Church, and is the nearest approach to an official act in these great matters which they have ventured for two hundred years. It is not for us to antic.i.p.ate the result. The word "misrepresentations" is unfortunate; we should have augured better for the work if instead of it had been written "the sincere perplexities of honest minds." But the execution may be better than the promise. If these perplexities are encountered honourably and successfully, the Church may recover its supremacy over the intellect of the country; if otherwise, the archbishop who has taken the command will have steered the vessel direct upon the rocks.
FOOTNOTES:
[E] _Fraser"s Magazine_, 1864.
[F] I do not speak of individuals; I speak of _tendency_.
THE BOOK OF JOB.[G]
It will be matter some day of curious enquiry to ascertain why, notwithstanding the high reverence with which the English people regard the Bible, they have done so little in comparison with their continental contemporaries towards arriving at a proper understanding of it. The books named below[H] form but a section of a long list which has appeared during the last few years in Germany on the Book of Job alone; and this book has not received any larger share of attention than the others, either of the Old or the New Testament. Whatever be the nature or the origin of these books (and on this point there is much difference of opinion among the Germans as among ourselves) they are all agreed, orthodox and unorthodox, that at least we should endeavour to understand them; and that no efforts can be too great, either of research or criticism, to discover their history, or elucidate their meaning.
We shall a.s.sent, doubtless, eagerly, perhaps noisily and indignantly, to so obvious a truism; but our own efforts in the same direction will not bear us out. Able men in England employ themselves in matters of a more practical character; and while we refuse to avail ourselves of what has been done elsewhere, no book, or books, which we produce on the interpretation of Scripture acquire more than a partial or an ephemeral reputation. The most important contribution to our knowledge on this subject which has been made in these recent years is the translation of the "Library of the Fathers," by which it is about as rational to suppose that the a.n.a.lytical criticism of modern times can be superseded, as that the place of Herman and Dindorf could be supplied by an edition of the old scholiasts.
It is, indeed, reasonable that as long as we are persuaded that our English theory of the Bible, as a whole, is the right one, we should shrink from contact with investigations which, however ingenious in themselves, are based on what we know to be a false foundation. But there are some learned Germans whose orthodoxy would pa.s.s examination at Exeter Hall; and there are many subjects, such, for instance, as the present, on which all their able men are agreed in conclusions that cannot rationally give offence to any one. With the Book of Job, a.n.a.lytical criticism has only served to clear up the uncertainties which have hitherto always hung about it. It is now considered to be, beyond all doubt, a genuine Hebrew original, completed by its writer almost in the form in which it now remains to us. The questions on the authenticity of the Prologue and Epilogue, which once were thought important, have given way before a more sound conception of the dramatic unity of the entire poem; and the volumes before us contain merely an enquiry into its meaning, bringing, at the same time, all the resources of modern scholarship and historical and mythological research to bear upon the obscurity of separate pa.s.sages. It is the most difficult of all the Hebrew compositions--many words occurring in it, and many thoughts, not to be found elsewhere in the Bible. How difficult our translators found it may be seen by the number of words which they were obliged to insert in italics, and the doubtful renderings which they have suggested in the margin. One instance of this, in pa.s.sing, we will notice in this place--it will be familiar to every one as the pa.s.sage quoted at the opening of the English burial service, and adduced as one of the doctrinal proofs of the resurrection of the body:--"I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter _day_ upon the earth; and _though_, after my skin _worms_ destroy this _body_, yet in my flesh I shall see G.o.d." So this pa.s.sage stands in the ordinary version. But the words in italics have nothing answering to them in the original--they were all added by the translators[I] to fill out their interpretation; and for _in my flesh_, they tell us themselves in the margin that we may read (and, in fact, we ought to read, and must read) "_out of_," or _"without" my flesh_. It is but to write out the verses, omitting the conjectural additions, and making that one small but vital correction, to see how frail a support is there for so large a conclusion: "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the latter upon the earth; and after my skin destroy this ; yet without my flesh I shall see G.o.d." If there is any doctrine of a resurrection here, it is a resurrection precisely _not_ of the body, but of the spirit. And now let us only add, that the word translated Redeemer is the technical expression for the "avenger of blood;" and that the second paragraph ought to be rendered--"and one to come after me (my next of kin, to whom the avenging my injuries belongs) shall stand upon my dust," and we shall see how much was to be done towards the mere exegesis of the text. This is an extreme instance, and no one will question the general beauty and majesty of our translation; but there are many mythical and physical allusions scattered over the poem, which, in the sixteenth century, there were positively no means of understanding; and perhaps, too, there were mental tendencies in the translators themselves which prevented them from adequately apprehending even the drift and spirit of the composition. The form of the story was too stringent to allow such tendencies any lat.i.tude; but they appear, from time to time, sufficiently to produce serious confusion. With these recent a.s.sistances, therefore, we propose to say something of the nature of this extraordinary book--a book of which it is to say little to call it unequalled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far away above all the poetry of the world. How it found its way into the canon, smiting as it does through and through the most deeply-seated Jewish prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now; to be explained only by a traditional acceptance among the sacred books, dating back from the old times of the national greatness, when the minds of the people were hewn in a larger type than was to be found among the Pharisees of the great synagogue. But its authorship, its date, and its history, are alike a mystery to us; it existed at the time when the canon was composed; and this is all that we know beyond what we can gather out of the language and contents of the poem itself.
Before going further, however, we must make room for a few remarks of a very general kind. Let it have been written when it would, it marks a period in which the religious convictions of thinking men were pa.s.sing through a vast crisis; and we shall not understand it without having before us clearly something of the conditions which periods of such a kind always and necessarily exhibit.
The history of religious speculation appears in extreme outline to have been of the following character. We may conceive mankind to have been originally launched into the universe with no knowledge either of themselves or of the scene in which they were placed; with no actual knowledge, but distinguished from the rest of the creation by a faculty of gaining knowledge; and first unconsciously, and afterwards consciously and laboriously, to have commenced that long series of experience and observation which has acc.u.mulated in thousands of years to what we now see around us. Limited on all sides by conditions which they must have felt to be none of their own imposing, and finding everywhere forces working, over which they had no control, the fear which they would naturally entertain of these invisible and mighty agents a.s.sumed, under the direction of an idea which we may perhaps call inborn and inherent in human nature, a more generous character of reverence and awe. The laws of the outer world, as they discovered them, they regarded as the decrees, or as the immediate energies of personal beings; and as knowledge grew up among them, they looked upon it, not as knowledge of nature, but of G.o.d, or the G.o.ds. All early paganism appears, on careful examination, to have arisen out of a consecration of the first rudiments of physical or speculative science. The twelve labours of Hercules are the labours of the sun, of which Hercules is an old name, through the twelve signs. Chronos, or _time_, being measured by the apparent motion of the heavens, is figured as their child; Time, the universal parent, devours its own offspring, yet is again itself, in the high faith of a human soul conscious of its power and its endurance, supposed to be baffled and dethroned by Zeus, or _life_; and so on through all the elaborate theogonies of Greece and Egypt. They are no more than real insight into real phenomena, allegorised as time went on, elaborated by fancy, or idealised by imagination, but never losing their original character.
Thus paganism, in its very nature, was expansive, self-developing, and, as Mr. Hume observed, tolerant; a new G.o.d was welcomed to the Pantheon as a new scientific discovery is welcomed by the Royal Society; and the various nations found no difficulty in interchanging their divinities--a new G.o.d either representing a new power not hitherto discovered, or one with which they were already familiar under a new name. With such a power of adaptation and enlargement, if there had been nothing more in it than this, such a system might have gone on accommodating itself to the change of times, and keeping pace with the growth of human character. Already in its later forms, as the unity of nature was more clearly observed, and the ident.i.ty of nature throughout the known world, the separate powers were subordinating themselves to a single supreme king; and, as the poets had originally personified the elemental forces, the thinkers were reversing the earlier process, and discovering the law under the person. Happily or unhappily, however, what they could do for themselves they could not do for the mult.i.tude. Phoebus and Aphrodite had been made too human to be allegorised. Humanised, and yet, we may say, only half-humanised, retaining their purely physical nature, and without any proper moral attribute at all, these G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses remained to the many examples of sensuality made beautiful; and, as soon as right and wrong came to have a meaning, it was impossible to worship any more these idealised despisers of it. The human caprices and pa.s.sions which served at first to deepen the illusion, justly revenged themselves; paganism became a lie, and perished.
In the meantime, the Jews (and perhaps some other nations, but the Jews chiefly and princ.i.p.ally) had been moving forward along a road wholly different. Breaking early away from the G.o.ds of nature, they advanced along the line of their moral consciousness; and leaving the nations to study physics, philosophy, and art, they confined themselves to man and to human life. Their theology grew up round the knowledge of good and evil, and G.o.d, with them, was the supreme Lord of the world, who stood towards man in the relation of a ruler and a judge. Holding such a faith, to them the toleration of paganism was an impossibility; the laws of nature might be many, but the law of conduct was one; there was one law and one king; and the conditions under which he governed the world, as embodied in the Decalogue or other similar code, were looked upon as iron and inflexible certainties, unalterable revelations of the will of an unalterable Being. So far there was little in common between this process and the other; but it was identical with it in this one important feature, that moral knowledge, like physical, admitted of degrees; and the successive steps of it were only purchasable by experience. The dispensation of the law, in the language of modern theology, was not the dispensation of grace, and the nature of good and evil disclosed itself slowly as men were able to comprehend it. Thus, no system of law or articles of belief were or could be complete and exhaustive for all time. Experience acc.u.mulates; new facts are observed, new forces display themselves, and all such formulae must necessarily be from period to period broken up and moulded afresh. And yet the steps already gained are a treasure so sacred, so liable are they at all times to be attacked by those lower and baser elements in our nature which it is their business to hold in check, that the better part of mankind have at all times practically regarded their creed as a sacred total to which nothing may be added, and from which nothing may be taken away; the suggestion of a new idea is resented as an encroachment, punished as an insidious piece of treason, and resisted by the combined forces of all common practical understandings, which know too well the value of what they have, to risk the venture upon untried change. Periods of religious transition, therefore, when the advance has been a real one, always have been violent, and probably will always continue to be so. They to whom the precious gift of fresh light has been given are called upon to exhibit their credentials as teachers in suffering for it. They, and those who oppose them, have alike a sacred cause; and the fearful spectacle arises of earnest, vehement men contending against each other as for their own souls, in fiery struggle. Persecutions come, and martyrdoms, and religions wars; and, at last, the old faith, like the phoenix, expires upon its altar, and the new rises out of the ashes.
Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions, natural and moral; the first, indeed, being in no proper sense a religion at all, as we understand religion; and only a.s.suming the character of it in the minds of great men whose moral sense had raised them beyond their time and country, and who, feeling the necessity of a real creed, with an effort and with indifferent success, endeavoured to express, under the systems which they found, emotions which had no proper place in them.
Of the transition periods which we have described as taking place under the religion which we call moral, the first known to us is marked at its opening by the appearance of the Book of Job, the first fierce collision of the new fact with the formula which will not stretch to cover it.
The earliest phenomenon likely to be observed connected with the moral government of the world is the general one, that on the whole, as things are const.i.tuted, good men prosper and are happy, bad men fail and are miserable. The cause of such a condition is no mystery, and lies very near the surface. As soon as men combine in society, they are forced to obey certain laws under which alone society is possible, and these laws, even in their rudest form, approach the laws of conscience. To a certain extent, every one is obliged to sacrifice his private inclinations; and those who refuse to do so are punished, or are crushed. If society were perfect, the imperfect tendency would carry itself out till the two sets of laws were identical; but perfection so far has been only in Utopia, and, as far as we can judge by experience hitherto, they have approximated most nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern distinction between sins and crimes had no existence. All gross sins were offences against society, as it then was const.i.tuted, and, wherever it was possible, were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple, without open breach of enacted statutes, became only possible under the complications of more artificial polities; and the oppression or injury of man by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily understood. Doubtless, therefore, in such a state of things it would, on the whole, be true to experience that, judging merely by outward prosperity or the reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded and punished as such in this actual world; so far, that is, as the administration of such rewards and punishments was left in the power of mankind. But theology could not content itself with general tendencies.
Theological propositions then, as much as now, were held to be absolute, universal, admitting of no exceptions, and explaining every phenomenon.
Superficial generalisations were construed into immutable decrees; the G.o.d of this world was just and righteous, and temporal prosperity or wretchedness were dealt out by Him immediately by His own will to His subjects according to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too, was found generating the same evils; the half truth rounding itself out with falsehoods. Not only the consequences of ill actions which followed through themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of nature--earthquakes, storms, and pestilences--were the ministers of G.o.d"s justice, and struck sinners only with discriminating accuracy.
That the sun should shine alike on the evil and the good was a creed too high for the early divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were no greater offenders than their neighbours. The conceptions of such men could not pa.s.s beyond the outward temporal consequence; and if G.o.d"s hand was not there it was nowhere. We might have expected that such a theory of things could not long resist the acc.u.mulated contradictions of experience; but the same experience shows also what a marvellous power is in us of thrusting aside phenomena which interfere with our cherished convictions; and when such convictions are consecrated into a creed which it is a sacred duty to believe, experience is but like water dropping upon a rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in thousands of years. This theory was and is the central idea of the Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of which has been the perplexity of Gentiles and Christians from the first dawn of its existence; it lingers among ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name we call ourselves, is still the instant interpreter for us of any unusual calamity, a potato blight, a famine, or an epidemic: such vitality is there in a moral faith, though now, at any rate, contradicted by the experience of all mankind, and at issue even with Christianity itself.
At what period in the world"s history misgivings about it began to show themselves it is now impossible to say; it was at the close, probably, of the patriarchal period, when men who really _thought_ must have found the ground palpably shaking under them. Indications of such misgivings are to be found in the Psalms, those especially pa.s.sing under the name of Asaph; and all through Ecclesiastes there breathes a spirit of deepest and saddest scepticism. But Asaph thrusts his doubts aside, and forces himself back into his old position; and the scepticism of Ecclesiastes is confessedly that of a man who had gone wandering after enjoyment; searching after pleasures--pleasures of sense and pleasures of intellect--and who, at last, bears reluctant testimony that, by such methods, no pleasures can be found which will endure; that he had squandered the power which might have been used for better things, and had only strength remaining to tell his own sad tale as a warning to mankind. There is nothing in Ecclesiastes like the misgivings of a n.o.ble nature. The writer"s own personal happiness had been all for which he had cared; he had failed, as all men gifted as he was gifted are sure to fail, and the lights of heaven were extinguished by the disappointment with which his own spirit had been clouded.
Utterly different from these, both in character and in the lesson which it teaches, is the Book of Job. Of unknown date, as we said, and unknown authorship, the language impregnated with strange idioms and strange allusions, un-Jewish in form, and in fiercest hostility with Judaism, it hovers like a meteor over the old Hebrew literature, in it, but not of it, compelling the acknowledgment of itself by its own internal majesty, yet exerting no influence over the minds of the people, never alluded to, and scarcely ever quoted, till at last the light which it had heralded rose up full over the world in Christianity.
The conjectures which have been formed upon the date of this book are so various, that they show of themselves on how slight a foundation the best of them must rest. The language is no guide, for although unquestionably of Hebrew origin, the poem bears no a.n.a.logy to any of the other books in the Bible; while of its external history nothing is known at all, except that it was received into the canon at the time of the great synagogue. Ewald decides, with some confidence, that it belongs to the great prophetic period, and that the writer was a contemporary of Jeremiah. Ewald is a high authority in these matters, and this opinion is the one which we believe is now commonly received among biblical scholars. In the absence of proof, however (and the reasons which he brings forward are really no more than conjectures), these opposite considerations may be of moment. It is only natural that at first thought we should ascribe the grandest poem in a literature to the time at which the poetry of the nation to which it belongs was generally at its best; but, on reflection, the time when the poetry of prophecy is the richest, is not likely to be favourable to compositions of another kind. The prophets wrote in an era of decrepitude, dissolution, sin, and shame, when the glory of Israel was falling round them into ruin, and their mission, glowing as they were with the ancient spirit, was to rebuke, to warn, to threaten, and to promise. Finding themselves too late to save, and only, like Ca.s.sandra, despised and disregarded, their voices rise up singing the swan song of a dying people, now falling away in the wild wailing of despondency over the shameful and desperate present, now swelling in triumphant hope that G.o.d will not leave them for ever, and in His own time will take His chosen to Himself again. But such a period is an ill occasion for searching into the broad problems of human destiny; the present is all-important and all-absorbing; and such a book as that of Job could have arisen only out of an isolation of mind, and life, and interest, which we cannot conceive of as possible under such conditions.
The more it is studied, the more the conclusion forces itself upon us that, let the writer have lived when he would, in his struggle with the central falsehood of his own people"s creed, he must have divorced himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile.
Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from the narrow littleness of "the peculiar people." The language, as we said, is full of strange words. The hero of the poem is of strange land and parentage--a Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners, the customs are of all varieties and places--Egypt, with its river and its pyramids, is there; the description of mining points to Phoenicia; the settled life in cities, the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the heat of the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people. No mention, or hint of mention, is there throughout the poem of Jewish traditions or Jewish certainties. We look to find the three friends vindicate themselves, as they so well might have done, by appeals to the fertile annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the plain, to the plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai. But of all this there is not a word; they are pa.s.sed by as if they had no existence; and instead of them, when witnesses are required for the power of G.o.d, we have strange un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic mythology, the old wars of the giants, the imprisoned Orion, the wounded dragon, "the sweet influences of the seven stars," and the glittering fragments of the sea-snake Rahab[J] trailing across the northern sky. Again, G.o.d is not the G.o.d of Israel, but the father of mankind; we hear nothing of a chosen people, nothing of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar privileges; and in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the prince of this world and the enemy of G.o.d, but the angel of judgment, the accusing spirit whose mission was to walk to and fro over the earth, and carry up to heaven an account of the sins of mankind. We cannot believe that thoughts of this kind arose out of Jerusalem in the days of Josiah.
In this book, if anywhere, we have the record of some [Greek: aner polutropos] who, like the old hero of Ithaca,
[Greek: pollon anthropon iden astea kai noon egno, polla d" hog" en ponto pathen algea hon kata thumon, arnumenos psuchen.... ]