“Τόπον οὔκ εστι ῥᾳδίως εὑρεῖν τῆς οἰκουμένης ὅς οὐ παραδέδεκται τοῦτο τὸ φῦλον, μήδʼ (sic) ἐπικρατεῖται ὑπʼ αὐτοῦ.—STRABO, ap.Jos.Antt.xiv. 7, § 2. (Cf. Philo, Leg.ad Gaium, xxxvi.)
THE gradual change of relation between the Jews and the Christians was an inevitable result of the widening boundaries of the Church. Among the early converts were “Grecians,” as well as “Hebrews” and this fact naturally led to most important consequences, on which hinged the historic future of the Christian Faith.
It is not too much to say that any real comprehension of the work of St. Paul, and of the course of events in the days after Christ must depend entirely on our insight into the difference between these two classes of Jews. And this is a point which has been so cursorily treated that we must here pause while we endeavour to see it in its proper light.
When the successive judgments, first of the Assyrian, then of the Babylonian captivity, had broken all hopes of secular power and all thoughts of secular pride in the hearts of the Jews, a wholly different impulse was given to the current of their life. Settled in the countries to which they had been transplanted, allowed the full rights of citizenship, finding free scope for their individual energies, they rapidly developed that remarkable genius for commerce by which they have been characterised in all succeeding ages. It was only a wretched handful of the nation—compared by the Jewish writers to the chaff of the wheat—who availed themselves of the free permission of Cyrus, and subsequent kings of Persia, to return to their native land.1 The remainder, although they jealously preserved their nationality and their traditions, made their homes in every land to which they had been drifted by the wave of conquest, and gradually multiplying until, as Josephus tells us,2 they crowded every corner of the habitable globe, formed that great and remarkable body which continues to be known to this day as “the Jews of the Dispersion.”3
This Dispersion of the Chosen People was one of those three vast and world–wide events in which a Christian cannot but see the hand of God so ordering the course of history as to prepare the world for the Revelation of His Son. (i.) The immense field covered by the conquests of Alexander gave to the civilised world a Unity of Language, without which it would have been, humanly speaking, impossible for the earliest preachers to have made known the good tidings in every land which they traversed. (ii.) The rise of the Roman Empire created a Political Unity which reflected in every direction the doctrines of the new faith, (iii.) The dispersion of the Jews prepared vast multitudes of Greeks and Romans for the Unity of a pure Morality and a monotheistic Faith. The Gospel emanated from the capital of Judæa; it was preached in the tongue of Athens; it was diffused through the empire of Rome: the feet of its earliest missionaries traversed, from the Euphrates to the Pillars of Hercules, the solid structure of undeviating roads by which the Roman legionaries—“those massive hammers of the whole earth”4—had made straight in the desert a highway for our God. Semite and Aryan had been unconscious instruments in the hands of God for the spread of a religion which, in its first beginnings, both alike detested and despised. The letters of Hebrew and Greek and Latin inscribed above the cross were the prophetic and unconscious testimony of three of the world’s noblest languages to the undying claims of Him who suffered to obliterate the animosities of the nations which spoke them, and to unite them all together in the one great Family of God.
This contact of Jew with Greek was fruitful of momentous consequences both to the Aryan and the Semitic race. It is true that the enormous differences between the morals, the habits, the tendencies, the religious systems, the whole tone of mind and view of life in these two great human families, inspired them with feelings of mutual aversion and almost detestation. Out of the chaos of struggling interests which followed the death of Alexander, there gradually emerged two great kingdoms, the Egyptian and the Syrian, ruled respectively by the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. These dynasties had inherited the political conceptions of the great Macedonian conqueror, and desired to produce a fusion of the heterogeneous elements included in their government. Both alike turned their eyes to Palestine, which became the theatre of their incessant contentions, and which passed alternately under the sway of each. The Ptolemies continuing the policy of Alexander, did their utmost to promote the immigration of Jews into Egypt. The Seleucids, both by force and by various political inducements, settled them as largely as they could in their western cities. Alike the Lagidæ and the Seleucidæ knew the value of the Jews as quiet and order–loving citizens. To the shores of the Mediterranean flocked an ever–increasing multitude of Greek merchants and Greek colonists. “The torrent of Greek immigration soon met the torrent of Jewish emigration. Like two rivers which poured their differently coloured waves into the same basin without mixing with one another, these two peoples cast themselves on the young Macedonian cities, and there simultaneously established themselves without intermixture, continually separated by the irreconcilable diversity of their beliefs and customs, though continually flung into connexion by community of business and by the uniform legislation which protected their interests.”5
The effect of this on the Greek was less marked and less memorable than its effect on the Jew. Judaism was more Hellenised by the contact than Hellenism was Judaised. There can be no more striking proof of this fact than the total loss by the “Sons of the Dispersion” of their own mother tongue. That the effects on the Pagan world were less beneficial than might have been anticipated was, in great measure, the fault of the Jews themselves. That sort of obtrusive humility which so often marks a race which has nothing to live on but its memories, was mingled with an invincible prejudice, a rooted self–esteem, an unconcealed antipathy to those of alien race and religion, which, combined as it was with commercial habits by no means always scrupulous, and a success by no means always considerate, alienated into disgust the very sympathies which it should have striven to win. The language in which the Jews are spoken of by the writers of the Empire—a language expressive of detestation mingled with curiosity— sufficiently accounts for the outbreaks of mob violence, from which in so many ages they have been liable to suffer. These outbreaks, if not connived at by the governing authorities, were too often condoned. Yet, in spite of this, the influence insensibly exercised by the Jews over the heathen among whom they lived was full of important consequences for Christianity. “Victi,” says Seneca, “victoribus leges dederunt.” The old Paganism was, in intellectual circles, to a great extent effete. Great Pan was dead. Except in remote country districts, the gods of Olympus were idle names. In Rome the terrors of Tartarus were themes for a schoolboy’s laughter. Religion had sunk into a state machinery.6 The natural consequences followed. Those minds which were too degraded to feel the need of a religion were content to wallow, like natural brute beasts, in the Stygian pool of a hideous immorality. Others became the votaries of low foreign superstitions,7 or the dupes of every variety of designing charlatans. But not a few were attracted into the shadow of the synagogue, and the majority of these were women,8 who, restricted as was their influence, yet could not fail to draw the attention of their domestic circles to the belief which they had embraced. In every considerable city of the Roman Empire the service of the synagogue was held in Greek, and these services were perfectly open to any one who liked to be present at them. Greek, too, became emphatically the language of Christianity. Multitudes of early converts had been Jewish proselytes before they became Christian disciples. They passed from the synagogue of Hellenists into the Church of Christ.
The influences exercised by the Dispersion on the Jews themselves were, of course, too varied and multitudinous to be summed up under one head; yet we may trace two consequences which, century after century worked in opposite directions, but each of which was deeply marked. On the one hand they became more faithful to their religion; on the other more cosmopolitan in their views. Although they made their home in the heathen countries to which they had been removed by conquest, or had wandered in pursuit of commerce, it must not be supposed that they were at all ready to forfeit their nationality or abandon their traditions. On the contrary, the great majority of them clung to both with a more desperate tenacity. In the destruction of their independence they had recognised the retribution threatened in that long–neglected series of prophecies which had rebuked them for their idolatries. Of all polytheistic tendencies the Jew was cured for ever, and as though to repair past centuries of rebellion and indifference—as though to earn the fulfilment of that great promise of an Anointed Deliverer which was the centre of all their hopes—they devoted themselves with all the ardour of their self–conscious pride to keep the minutest observances of their Law and ritual. Their faithfulness—a complete contrast to their old apostasies—was due to the work of the Sopherîm, or Scribes. It was towards Jerusalem that they worshipped; it was to the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem that they looked for legal decisions; it was from the Amoraîm and Tanaîm of Jerusalem that they accepted all solutions of casuistical difficulties; it was from Jerusalem that were flashed the fire–signals which announced over many lands the true date of the new moons; it was into the treasury of Jerusalem that they poured, not only the stated Temple–tribute of half a shekel, but gifts far more costly, which told of their unshaken devotion to the church of their fathers. It was in Jerusalem that they maintained a special synagogue, and to Jerusalem that they made incessant pilgrimages.9 The hatred, the suspicion, the contempt created in many countries by the exclusiveness of their prejudices, the peculiarity of their institutions, the jealousy of their successes, only wedded them more fanatically to the observance of their Levitical rules by giving a tinge of martyrdom to the fulfilment of obligations. It became with them a point of conscience to maintain the institutions which their heathen neighbours attacked with every weapon of raillery and scorn. But these very circumstances tended to produce a marked degeneracy of the religious spirit. The idolatry, which in old days had fastened on the visible symbols of alien deities, only assumed another form when concentrated on the dead–letter of documents, and the minute ritualism of service. Gradually, among vast masses of the Jewish people, religion sank almost into fetichism. It lost all power over the heart and conscience, all its tender love, all its inspiring warmth, all its illuminating light. It bound the nation hand and foot to the corpse of meaningless traditions. Even the ethics of the Mosaic legislation were perverted by a casuistry which was at once timid in violating the letter, and audacious in superseding the spirit. In the place of moral nobleness and genial benevolence, Judaism in its decadence bred only an incapacity for spiritual insight, a self–satisfied orthodoxy, and an offensive pride. It enlisted murder and falsity in defence of ignorant Shibboleths and useless forms. The difference between the ideal Jew of earlier and later times can only be measured by the difference between the moral principles of the Law and the dry precedents of the Mishna—by the difference which separates the Pentateuch from the Talmud, the Book of Exodus from the Abhoda Zara.10
But while it produced these results in many of the Jewish communities, there were others, and there were special individuals in all communities, in whom the influence of heathen surroundings worked very differently. There were many great and beautiful lessons to be learnt from the better aspects of the heathen world. If there was a grace that radiated from Jerusalem, there were also gifts which brightened Athens. The sense of beauty—the exquisiteness of art—the largeness and clearness of insight—the perfection of literary form which characterised the Greek of the age of Pericles, had left the world an immortal heritage; and Rome had her own lessons to teach of dignity, and law, and endurance, and colonisation, and justice. Commerce is eminently cosmopolitan. The Jewish Captivity, with the events which followed it, made the Jews a commercial people. This innate tendency of the race had been curbed, first by the Mosaic legislation,11 then by the influence of the prophets. But when these restrictions had been providentially removed, the Jew flung himself with ardour into a career from which he had been hitherto restrained. So far from regarding as identical the notions of “merchant” and “Canaanite,”12 the Rabbis soon began to sing the praises of trade. “There can be no worse occupation than agriculture!” said R. Eleazar. “All the fanning in the world will not make you so remunerative as commerce,” said Rabh13 as he saw a cornfield bowing its golden ears under the summer breeze.14 So easy is it for a people to get over an archaic legislation if it stands in the way of their interests or inclinations! The Mosaic restrictions upon commerce were, of course, impracticable in dealing with Gentiles, and in material successes the Jews found something, at any rate, to make up to them for the loss of political independence. The busy intercourse of cities wrought a further change in their opinions. They began to see that God never meant the nations of the world to stand to each other in the position of frantic antagonism or jealous isolation. A Jerusalem Rabbi, ignorant of everything in heaven and earth and under the earth, except his own Halacha, might talk of all the rest of the world promiscuously as an “elsewhere” of no importance;15 but an educated Alexandrian Jew would be well aware that the children of heathen lands had received from their Father’s tenderness a share in the distribution of His gifts. The silent and imperceptible influences of life are often the most permanent, and no amount of exclusiveness could entirely blind the more intelligent sons of the Dispersion to the merits of a richer civilisation. No Jewish boy familiar with the sights and sounds of Tarsus or Antioch could remain unaware that all wisdom was not exhausted in the trivial discussions of the Rabbis; that there was something valuable to the human race in the Greek science which Jewish nescience denounced as thaumaturgy; that there might be a better practice for the reasoning powers than an interminable application of the Middôthof Hillel; in short, that the development of humanity involves larger and diviner duties than a virulent championship of the exclusive privileges of the Jew.16
We might naturally have conjectured that these wider sympathies would specially be awakened among those Jews who were for the first time brought into close contact with the great peoples of the Aryan race. That contact was first effected by the conquests of Alexander. He settled 8,000 Jews in the Thebais, and the Jews formed a third of the population of his new city of Alexandria. Large numbers were brought from Palestine by Ptolemy I., and they gradually spread from Egypt, not only over “the parts of Libya about Cyrene,” but along the whole Mediterranean coast of Africa.17 Seleucus Nicator, after the battle of Ipsus, removed them by thousands from Babylonia, to such cities as Antioch and Seleucia; and, when their progress and prosperity were for a time shaken by the senseless persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes, they scattered themselves in every direction until there was hardly a seaport or a commercial centre in Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece, or the Islands of the Ægean, in which Jewish communities were not to be found. The vast majority of these Jewish settlers adopted the Greek language, and forgot that Aramaic dialect which had been since the Captivity the language of their nation.
It is to these Greek–speaking Jews that the term Hellenist mainly and properly refers. In the New Testament there are two words, Hellen and Hellenistes, of which the first is rendered “Greek,” and the second “Grecian.” The word “Greek” is used as an antithesis either to “barbarians” or to “Jews.” In the first case it means all nations which spoke the Greek language;18 in the second case it is equivalent to “Gentiles.”19 The meaning of the word Hellenist or “Grecian” is wholly different. As far as the form is concerned, it means, in the first instance, one who “Græcises” in language or mode of life, and it points to a difference of training and of circumstances, not to a difference of race.20 It is therefore reserved as the proper antithesis, not to “Jews,”—since vast numbers of the Hellenists were Jews by birth,—but to strict “Hebrews.” The word occurs but twice in the New Testament,21 and in both cases is used of Jews who had embraced Christianity but who spoke Greek and used the Septuagint version of the Bible instead of the original Hebrew or the Chaldaic Targum of any Interpreter.
Now this Hellenism expressed many shades of difference, and therefore the exact meaning of the word Hellenist varies with the circumstances under which it is used. The accident of language might make a man, technically speaking, a Hellenist, when politically and theologically he was a Hebrew; and this must have been the condition of those Hellenist who disputed against the arguments of St. Paul in his first visit to Jerusalem.22 On the other hand, the name might imply that alienation from the system of Judaism, which in some Jews extended into positive apostasy, and into so deep a shame of their Jewish origin, as to induce them, not only in the days of Jason and Menelaus,23 but even under the Herods, to embrace the practices of the Greeks, and even to obliterate the external sign of their nationality.24 Others again, like the astute Herodian princes, were hypocrites, who played fast and loose with their religion, content to be scrupulous Jews at Jerusalem, while they could be shameless heathen at Berytus or Cæsarea. But the vast majority of Hellenists lay between these extremes. Contact with the world had widened their intelligence and enabled them so far to raise their heads out of the heavy fog of Jewish scholasticism as to distinguish between that which was of eternal and that which was but of transient significance. Far away from Jerusalem, where alone it was possible to observe the Levitical law, it was a natural result that they came to regard outward symbols as merely valuable for the sake of inward truths. To this class belonged the wisest members of the Jewish Dispersion. It is to them that we owe the Septuagint translation, the writings of Philo and Josephus, and a large cycle of historical, poetic, and apocryphal literature. Egypt was the main centre of this Græco–Jewish activity, and many of the Jews of Alexandria distinguished themselves in the art, the learning, and the accomplishments of the Greeks.25 It is hardly to be wondered at that these more intellectual Jews were not content with an infructuose Rabbinism. It is not astonishing that they desired to represent the facts of their history, and the institutions of their religion, in such an aspect as should least waken the contempt of the nations among whom they lived.26 But although this might be done with perfect honesty, it tended, no doubt, in some to the adoption of unauthorised additions to their history, and unauthorised explanations of their Scriptures—in one word, to that style of exegesis which, since it deduced anything out of anything, nullified the real significance of the sacred records.27 Nor can we be surprised that this Alexandrian theosophy—these allegoric interpretations—this spirit of toleration for the Pagan systems by which they were surrounded—were regarded by the stricter Jews as an incipient revolt from Mosaism thinly disguised under a hybrid phraseology.28 Hence arose the the antagonism between advanced Hellenists and the Hebrews, whose whole patriotic existence had concentrated itself upon the Mosaic and Oral Law. The severance between the two elements became wider and wider as the Jews watched the manner in which Christianity spread in the Gentile world. The consciousness that the rapidity of that diffusion was due, not only to the offer of a nobler faith, but also to the loosening of an intolerable yoke, only made their exclusiveness more obstinate. It was not long before the fall of Jerusalem that there took place in the school of R. Hananiah Ben Hiskiah Ben Garon, that memorable meeting at which eighteen ordinances were resolved upon, of which it was the exclusive object to widen the rift of difference between Jews and Pagans. These ordinances, to which the Mishna only alludes, are found in a baraıtä (“supplemental addition”) of R. Simeon Ben Johai in the second century, and they consist of prohibitions which render impossible any interchange of social relations between Jews and heathen. It was in vain that R. Joshua and the milder Hillelites protested against so dangerous a bigotry. The quarrel passed from words to blows. The followers of Hillel were attacked with swords and lances, and some of them were killed. “That day,” says the Jerusalem Talmud, “was as disastrous to Israel as the one on which they made the golden calf;” but it seemed to be a general opinion that the eighteen resolutions could not be rescinded even by Elias himself, because the discussion had been closed by bloodshed; and they were justified to the national conscience by the savage massacres which had befallen the Jews at Beth–shan, Cæsarea, and Damascus.29 The feelings of Jews towards Pagans were analogous to the hatred of Hebrews to Hellenists. In later days the Christians absorbed the entire fury of that detestation which had once burned in the Jewish heart against Hellenism. When a question arose as to the permissibility of burning the Gospels and other books of the Christians (Minim), considering how frequently they contained the name of God, “May I lose my son,” exclaimed Rabbi Tarphon, “if I do not fling these books into the fire when they come into my hands, name of God and all. A man chased by a murderer, or threatened by a serpent’s bite, ought rather to take refuge in an idol’s temple than in the houses of the Minim, for these latter know the truth and deny it, whereas idolaters deny God because they know Him not.”30
Such, then, being the feelings of the Palestinian Jews with regard to every approach towards idolatry, the antagonism between them and the more liberal Hellenists rose from the very nature of things, and was so deeply rooted that we are not surprised to find a trace of it even in the history of the Church;—for the earliest Christians—the Apostles and disciples of Jesus—were almost exclusively Hebrews and Israelites,31 the former being a general, and the latter a religious designation. Their feelings towards those who were Hellenists in principles as well as in language would be similar to that of other Jews, however much it might be softened by Christian love. But the jealousies of two sections so widely diverse in their sympathies would be easily kindled; and it is entirely in accordance with the independent records of that period that, “when the number of the disciples was being multiplied,” there should have arisen, as a natural consequence, “a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews.”
The special ground of complaint was a real or fancied neglect of the widows of Hellenists in the daily ministration of food and assistance. There might be some jealousy because all the offices of the little Church were administered by Hebrews, who would naturally have been more cognisant of the claims of their immediate compatriots. Widows, however, were a class who specially required support. We know how full a discussion St. Paul applies to their general position even at Corinth, and we have already mentioned that some of the wisest regulations attributed to Gamaliel were devoted to ameliorating the sufferings to which they were exposed. In the seclusion to which centuries of custom had devoted the Oriental woman, the lot of a widow, with none to plead her cause, might indeed be bitter. Any inequalities in the treatment of the class would awaken a natural resentment, and the more so because previous to their conversion these widows would have had a claim on the Corban, or Temple treasury.32
But the Apostles met these complaints in that spirit of candour and generosity which is the best proof how little they were responsible for any partiality which may have been shown to the widows of the Hebrews. Summoning a meeting of the disciples, they pointed out to them that the day had now come in which it was inconvenient for the Apostles to have anything further to do with the apportionment of charity33—a routine task which diverted them from more serious and important duties. They therefore bade the meeting elect seven men of blameless character, high spiritual gifts, and practical wisdom, to form what we should call a committee of management, and relieve the Apostles from the burden, in order that they might devote their energies to prayer and pastoral work. The advice was followed, and seven were presented to the Apostles as suitable persons. They were admitted to the duties of their position with prayer and the laying on of hands, which have been thenceforth naturally adopted in every ordination to the office of a deacon.
The seven elected were Stephen, Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolas, a proselyte of Antioch. The fact that every one of them bears a Greek name has often been appealed to as a proof of the conciliatoriness of the Apostles, as though they had elected every one of their committee from the very body which had found some reason to complain. This, however, would have been hardly just. It would have been to fly into an opposite extreme. The frequency with which the Jews of this time adopted Greek names prevents us from drawing any conclusion as to their nationality. But although we cannot be certain about the conjecture of Gieseler that three of them were Hebrews, three of them Hellenists, and one a proselyte, it is only natural to suppose that the choice of them from different sections of the Church would be adopted as a matter of fairness and common sense. And the fact that a Gentile like Nicolas should thus have been selected to fill an office so honourable and so responsible is one of the many indications which mark the gradual dawn of a new conception respecting the Kingdom of God.
Though two alone34 of the seven are in any way known to us, yet this election was a crisis in the history of the Church. At the work of Philip we shall glance hereafter, but we must now follow the career of Stephen, which, brief as it was, marked the beginning of a memorable epoch. For St. Stephen must be regarded as the immediate predecessor of him who took the most prominent part in bringing about his martyrdom; he must be regarded as having been, in a far truer sense than Gamaliel himself, the Teacher of St. Paul. St. Paul has, indeed, been called a “colossal St. Stephen;” but had the life of St. Stephen been prolonged—had he not been summoned, it may be, to yet loftier spheres of activity—we know not to what further heights of moral grandeur he might have attained. We possess but a single speech to show his intellect and inspiration, and we are suffered to catch but one glimpse of his life. His speech influenced the whole career of the greatest of the Apostles, and his death is the earliest martyrdom.