§ 2 Jewish Orthodoxy
Between the new sect and the normal or established Jewish religion, which had contained within it or was easily adaptable to every element that went to make early Jesuism, the force of separation was not doctrinal or intellectual, but political and economic. Save for the later-evolved concept of an Incarnation—which also, however, was foreshadowed in Jewish thought—there is almost no principle in the Christian system that was not to be found either in the sacred books or in the current rabbinical teaching of the Jews, whose development is to be measured no less by the liberal ethical teaching of such rabbis as Hillel than by the mere traditionalism ascribed to the mass of the scribes and Pharisees. Their sacred books spoke sympathetically of the poor; and their sacred treasury must have fed many, although—as in the days of the prophets and in our own time in Europe—there were many irreconcilables. Even among the Pharisees there were some who proclaimed the “law of the heart” as the highest. As regarded religious thought, the Jews’ system of sacrifice on the one hand, and their higher or supra-ecclesiastical ethic on the other, provided for all the forms of bias appealed to in the gospels and epistles, with the one exception of the kind of sentiment which sought a Demigod rather than a God; a humanly sympathetic divinity, acquainted with griefs, rather than a remote and awful Omnipotence. Even this figure was partly evolved on Jewish lines, in the conception of a Messiah who should suffer and die. But a Messiah who died and did not soon come again in triumph had no easily tenable place in the Jewish system; and when the cult of such a Messiah came into Gentile vogue, especially after the ruin of Jerusalem, it was necessitated either to take a new and substantive status outside of Jewry or disappear altogether. It is true that the so-called Nestorians (properly Nazaræans) of Armenia have reconciled Judaism with Christism by defining the sacrifice of Jesus as the final sin-offering, while maintaining the other sacrifices of the Mosaic law; but that course was impossible to the hierarchy accused of causing the crucifixion; and the Nestorians were as anti-Jewish as other Christians.
Judaism, so to speak, was riveted at once to its national and to its economic basis. Its primary appeals to Gentile proselytes were those of a great historic shrine and a body of sacred literature; and on both grounds the clerical class of Jerusalem claimed a revenue from the faithful, Hebrew or proselyte. Financial interest secured that the converted alien should be treated as the more liberal prophetic literature urged; but it was of the essence of Judaism that the temple or the Patriarchate should be the fiscal headquarters of all the faithful; and herein lay a moral as well as a financial limit. Ordinary racial instinct, and ordinary Gentile self-interest, must tend to clash with such claims in the case of rabbinical Judea as in that of Papal Rome; and the merely moral or ideal character of the Judaic influence, coupled with the effect of the common Gentile disesteem for the Jewish personality, brought it about that the Romanism of Jewry, always the more restricted, collapsed by far the more swiftly. The later collapse of Jewish Jesuism was a phenomenon of the same order.
Early Jesuism, it is clear, flourished as a new means of Jewish proselytism among the Gentiles; and the fact best established by the dubious literature which surrounds the “apostles” is that their Gentile converts were expected to contribute to headquarters, just as did the ordinary Jew. Even after a Gentile differentiation had definitely begun, whether under Paul or at the hands of others who forged in his name, it was Jewish forces that did the work so far as literature went. Throughout the synoptic gospels the notion given of the Messiah’s function is for the most part latter-day Jewish; he is to preside over the approaching day of judgment, and his apostles are to judge the twelve tribes of Israel. The early Jesuists, accordingly, must have held themselves included in the Judaic fold. All sections alike, down to the rise of anti-Jewish Gnosticism, founded on the Jewish sacred books in the Greek translation; a moral manual of the Jewish Twelve Apostles, as we have seen, served as a Jesuist handbook; and the ethic of the gospels is throughout, even in its contradictions, substantially a Jewish product. If John the Baptist could reject the racial pride and prejudice of the Jews as he is alleged to have done, universalism had already begun within the Jewish field. Even on the point of opposition to divorce—an attitude deriving from non-Jewish rather than from Jewish ideals—there were elements in Jewry on which to found as against the looser orthodox practice; and it is quite likely that the absolute as well as the qualified prohibition in the gospels came from Jewish pens. Thus the moral and religious atmosphere of Judaism in general was perfectly compatible with the early Jesuist way of life. It is a sectarian fallacy to assume that the repellent aspects typified by the “Scribes and Pharisees,” or even by the shambles of the Temple, were primary grounds for a moral revolt among Jews and proselytes, or that Jesuism so began. The types of the worse scribes and Pharisees were very speedily developed in the new sect, as in every other; and such Jesuists as are portrayed in the First Epistle to the Corinthians cannot be supposed to have rejected Judaism on the score of its moral crudity. What they were much more likely to resent was its demand for tribute concurrently with its disparagement of the Gentile proselyte; and, last but not least, its barbarous rite of circumcision, for which even the pro-Jewish Jesuists had finally to substitute baptism.
The relation of Judaism to Jesuism, then, was somewhat as that of a mother country to a colony; the latter growing by help of the former, deriving from it speech, lore, ideals, methods, models, and prestige, till in time the new environment elicits special characteristics, and mere geographical division no less than self-interest vetoes the payment of the old tribute. As usual, there was in the colony a loyalist party which bitterly resisted the severance.