CHAPTER VIII. FIRST PERSECUTION.--DEATH OF STEPHEN.--DESTRUCTION OF THE FIRST CHURCH OF JERUSALEM.
It was inevitable that the preachings of the new sect, even while they were disseminated with much reserve, should revive the animosities which had accumulated against its Founder, and had ultimately resulted in His death. The Sadducee family of Hanan, which had caused the death of Jesus, was still reigning. Joseph Caiaphas occupied, up to the year 36, the sovereign Pontificate, the effective power of which he left to his father-in-law Hanan, and to his relations, John and Alexander.[8.1] These arrogant and pitiless personages saw with impatience a troop of good holy men, without any official position, gaining the favor of the crowd.[8.2] Once or twice Peter, John, and the principal members of the apostolical college, were thrust into prison and condemned to be beaten. This was the punishment inflicted on heretics.[8.3] The authorization of the Romans was not necessary for its infliction. As may well be supposed, these brutalities did but excite the ardor of the apostles. They came forth from the Sanhedrim, where they had just undergone flagellation, full of joy at having been deemed worthy to undergo contumely for Him whom they loved.[8.4] Eternal puerility of penal repressions, applied to things of the soul! They passed, no doubt, for men of order, for models of prudence and wisdom, these blunderers, who seriously believed in the year 36 they could put down Christianity with a few whippings!
These outrages were perpetrated principally by the Sadducees,[8.5] that is to say by the upper clergy, who surrounded the temple, and derived thence immense profits.[8.6] It does not seem that the Pharisees displayed towards the sect the animosity they showed to Jesus. The new believers were people pious and strict in their manner of life, not a little like the Pharisees themselves. The rage which the latter felt against the Founder sprang from the superiority of Jesus—a superiority which He took no pains to disguise. His delicate sarcasms, His intellect, the charm there was about Him, His hatred to hypocrites, had enkindled a savage ire. The apostles, on the contrary, were destitute of wit; they never employed irony. The Pharisees were at certain moments favorable to them; many Pharisees even became Christians.[8.7] The terrible anathemas of Jesus against Pharisaism had not yet been written, and tradition of the words of the Master was neither general nor uniform.[8.8]
These first Christians were, moreover, people so inoffensive, that many persons of the Jewish aristocracy, without exactly forming part of the sect, were well disposed towards them. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who had known Jesus, remained, no doubt, linked in bonds of brotherhood with the Church. The most celebrated Jewish Doctor of the times, Rabbi Gamaliel the Elder, grandson of Hillel, a man of broad and very tolerant ideas, gave his opinion, it is said, in the Sanhedrim in favor of the freedom of Gospel preaching.[8.9] The author of The Acts puts into his mouth some excellent reasoning, which ought to be the rule of conduct for Governments whenever they find themselves confronted with novelties in the intellectual or moral order. “If this work is frivolous, leave it alone, it will fall of itself; if it is serious, how dare you resist the work of God? In any case you will not succeed in stopping it.” Gamaliel was but little heeded. Liberal minds in the midst of opposing fanaticisms have no chance of success.
A terrible excitement was provoked by the Deacon Stephen.[8.10] His preaching had, as it seems, great success. The crowd flocked around him, and these gatherings resulted in some lively disputes. It was mostly Hellenists, or proselytes, attendants at the synagogue of the Libertini,[8.11] as it was called—people of Cyrene, of Alexandria, of Cilicia, of Ephesus, who were active in these disputes. Stephen passionately maintained that Jesus was the Messiah; that the priests had committed a crime in putting him to death; that the Jews were rebels, sons of rebels, people that denied evidence. The authorities resolved to destroy this audacious preacher; witnesses were suborned to watch for some word in his discourses against Moses. Naturally they found what they sought for. Stephen was arrested and taken before the Sanhedrim. The word with which he was reproached was nearly the same as that which led to the condemnation of Jesus.[8.12] He was accused of saying that Jesus of Nazareth would destroy the temple, and change the traditions attributed to Moses. It is very possible, in fact, that Stephen had used such language. A Christian of this epoch would not have had any idea of speaking directly against the law, since all still observed it; but as to traditions, Stephen might combat them as Jesus himself had done. Now these traditions were foolishly ascribed to Moses by the orthodox, and an equal value was attributed to them as to the written law.[8.13]
Stephen defended himself by expounding the Christian thesis, with copious citations from the law, from the Psalms, from the prophets, and terminated by reproaching the members of the Sanhedrim with the homicide of Jesus. “O blockheads! and uncircumcised in heart,” said he to them, “you will then ever resist the Holy Ghost, as your fathers also have done. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? They have slain those who announced the coming of the Just One, whom you have betrayed, and of whom you have been the murderers. This law that you had received from the mouth of angels[8.14] you have not kept.” At these words a cry of rage interrupted him. Stephen, becoming more and more exalted, fell into one of those paroxysms of enthusiasm that are called the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. His eyes were fixed on high; he saw the glory of God and Jesus beside his Father, and cried out: “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of God.” All the listeners stopped their ears and threw themselves upon him, gnashing their teeth. They dragged him outside the city and stoned him. The witnesses who, according to the law,[8.15] had to cast the first stones, took off their garments and laid them at the feet of a young fanatic named Saul, or Paul, who was thinking with secret joy of the merits which he was acquiring in participating in the death of a blasphemer.[8.16]
In all this there was a literal observance of the prescriptions of Deuteronomy, Chap. 13. But looked at from the point of view of the civil law, this tumultuous execution, accomplished without the concurrence of the Romans, was not regular.[8.17] In the case of Jesus, we have seen that the ratification of the Procurator was needed. Perhaps his ratification was obtained in Stephens' case, and his execution may not have followed quite so closely upon his sentence as the narrator of the Acts would have it. Possibly, however, the Roman authority was then somewhat relaxed in Judea. Pilate had just been suspended from his functions, or was on the point of being so. The cause of this disgrace was simply the too great firmness he had shown in his administration.{8.18} Jewish fanaticism had rendered life unbearable to him. Very likely he was tired of refusing these madmen the violence they demanded of him, and the proud family of Hanan had come to have no longer any need of permission in order to pronounce sentence of death. Lucius Vitellius (the father of him who was emperor) was then imperial legate of Syria. He sought to win the good graces of the population; and he had the pontifical vestments which, since the time of Herod the Great, had been deposited in the town of Antonia, returned to the Jews.[8.19] Far from sustaining Pilate in his acts of rigor, he gave ear to the complaints of the native citizens, and sent Pilate back to Rome to reply to the accusations of his subordinates (beginning of the year 36). The principal grievance of the latter was that the Procurator would not lend himself with sufficient complaisance to their desires—intolerant desires.[8.20] Vitellius replaced him provisionally by his friend Marcellus, who was no doubt more careful not to displease the Jews, and consequently more ready to indulge them with religious murders. The death of Tiberius (16th March in the year 37) only encouraged Vitellius in his policy. The two first years of the reign of Caligula were an epoch of general enfeeblement of the Roman authority in Syria. The policy of this prince, before he lost his wife, was to restore to the people of the East their autonomy and native chiefs. Thus he established the kingdoms or principalities of Antiochus, of Comagene, of Herod Agrippa, of Soheym, of Cotys, of Polemon II., and allowed that of HÂreth to aggrandize itself.[8.21] When Pilate arrived at Rome, he found the new reign already begun. It is probable that Caligula decided against him, since he confided the government of Jerusalem to a new functionary, Marcellus, who appears not to have excited on the part of the Jews the violent recriminations which overwhelmed the unfortunate Pilate with embarrassment and filled him with chagrin.{8.22}
At any rate, the important remark is this: that at the epoch of which we are treating the persecutors of Christianity were not Romans; they were orthodox Jews. The Romans preserved, in the midst of this fanaticism, a principle of tolerance and of reason. If there is anything for which the imperial authority is to be reproached, it is for having been too weak, and not having cut short at the outset the civil consequences of a sanguinary law pronouncing the pain of death for religious offences. But the Roman domination had not yet become a complete power, as it was at a later day; it was a sort of protectorate or suzerainty. Its complaisance was carried even to the extent of withholding the effigy of the Emperor from the coins struck under the procurators, in order not to shock Jewish ideas.[8.23] Rome did not yet seek, at least not in the East, to impose on conquered peoples her laws, her gods, her manners; she left them in their local practices outside the Roman law. Their semi-independence was but another sign of their inferiority. The Imperial power in the East at this epoch pretty closely resembled the Turkish authority, and the government of the native populations that of the Rajahs. The idea of equal rights and equal guarantees for all did not exist. Each provincial group had its own jurisdiction, as at this day the various Christian churches and the Jews in the Ottoman Empire. A few years ago, in Turkey, the patriarchs of the various communities of Rajahs, provided they were on good terms with the Porte, were sovereign in regard to their subordinates, and could pronounce against them the most cruel punishments.
As the period of the death of Stephen may fluctuate between the years 36, 37, and 38, we do not know whether Caiphas ought to bear the responsibility of it. Caiphas was deposed by Lucius Vitellius in the year 36, shortly after Pilate;[8.24] but the change was slight. He was succeeded by his brother-in-law, Jonathan, son of Hanan. The latter in his turn was succeeded by his brother Theophilus, son of Hanan,[8.25] who kept the Pontificate in the house of Hanan till the year 42. Hanan was still alive, and possessor of the real power maintained in his family—the principles of pride, of severity, of hatred to innovators, which were in a manner hereditary in it.
The death of Stephen produced a great impression. The converts solemnized his funeral in the midst of tears and groans.[8.26] The separation between the new sectaries and Judaism was not yet absolute. The proselytes and the Hellenists, less strict in the matter of orthodoxy than the pure Jews, felt that they ought to render public homage to a man who had been an honor to their body, and whose peculiar opinions had not shut him out from the pale of the law.
Thus dawned the era of Christian martyrs. Martyrdom was not a thing entirely new. To say nothing of John Baptist and of Jesus, Judaism, at the epoch of Antiochus Epiphanus, had had its witnesses faithful unto the death. But the series of brave victims which opens with St. Stephen has exercised a peculiar influence upon the history of the human mind. It introduced into the western world an element which was wanting to it, absolute and exclusive Faith—this idea, that there is but one good and true religion. In this sense, the martyrs began the era of intolerance. It may be said, with great probability, that any one who gives his life for his faith would be intolerant if he were master. Christianity, after it had passed through three centuries of persecutions and became in its turn dominant, was more persecuting than any religion had ever been. When we have poured out our own blood for a cause, we are but too strongly led to shed the blood of others for the conservation of the treasure we have won.
The murder of Stephen was not, moreover, an isolated fact. Taking advantage of the weakness of the Roman functionaries, the Jews brought a real persecution[8.27] to bear down upon the Church. It seems that the vexations pressed hardest upon the Hellenists and the proselytes whose free tendencies enraged the orthodox. The Church of Jerusalem, already so strongly organized, was obliged to disperse. The apostles, according to a principle which seems to have taken strong hold of their minds,[8.28] did not leave the city. It was probably so with all the purely Jewish group, with those who were called the “Hebrews.”[8.29] But the great community, with its meals in common, its diaconal services, its varied exercises, ceased thenceforth, and was never again reconstructed upon its first model. It had lasted three or four years. It was for nascent Christianity an unequalled good fortune that its first attempts at association, essentially communist, were so soon broken up. Attempts of this kind engender abuses so shocking, that communist establishments are condemned to crumble away in a very short time,[8.30] or very soon to ignore the principle on which they are created.[8.31] Thanks to the persecution of the year 37, the cenobitic Church of Jerusalem was saved from the test of time. It fell in its flower, before interior difficulties had undermined it. It remained like a splendid dream, the memory of which animated in their life of trial all those who had formed part of it, like an ideal to which Christianity will incessantly aspire to return, without ever succeeding.[8.32] Those who know what an inestimable treasure for the members still existing of the St. Simonian Church is the memory of MÉnilmontant, what friendship it creates between them, what joy gleams from their eyes as they speak of it, will comprehend the powerful link established between the new brethren by the fact of having loved and then suffered together. Great lives have nearly always to remember a few months during which they felt God—months which, though existing only in memory, delight all the after years of their lives.The leading part, in the persecution we have just recounted, was played by that young Saul whom we have already found contributing, as far as in him lay, to the murder of Stephen. This furious man, furnished with a permission from the priests, entered into houses suspected of concealing Christians, took violent hold of men and women, and dragged them into prison or before the tribunals.[8.33] Saul prided himself on there being no one of his generation so zealous as himself for the traditions.[8.34] Often, it is true, the mildness, the resignation of his victims astonished him; he experienced a sort of remorse; he imagined hearing these pious women, hoping for the Kingdom of God, whom he had thrown into prison, say to him during the night, with a gentle voice: “Why persecutest thou us?” The blood of Stephen, by which he was almost literally stained, sometimes disturbed his vision. Many things he had heard said of Jesus went to his heart. This superhuman being, in his ethereal life, whence he sometimes issued to reveal himself in short apparitions, haunted him like a spectre. But Saul repulsed such thoughts with horror; he confirmed himself with a sort of frenzy in the faith of his traditions, and he was dreaming of new cruelties against those who attacked them. His name had become the terror of the faithful; the fiercest outrages, the most sanguinary perfidies, were dreaded at his hands.[8.35]
