Some day perhaps I may be privileged to attempt this, and to add my testimony to that of so many others, as to what the Christ was in His proper environment and in the critical age in which He lived. Let me add one word more as to the sources of this book. Some have wondered that I have not included Philo among the authors to be consulted on the Palestine of the first century. The omission was intentional. Philo was undoubtedly a Jew; he was born before Christ and died after Him. At the very time when Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount, the Alexandrine theosophist was writing his most curious treatises. I know that he went up to Jerusalem, and that he spoke of the Temple. But this is all; and it is notorious how antagonistic Alexandria was to Jerusalem at the beginning of the first century. The Alexandrines who lived in the Holy City formed a community apart; and if the Alexandrine philosophy was known to some of the inhabitants of Palestine, I am convinced that the Pharisees, as a body, were hostile to it. The two great Jewish centres-Alexandria and Jerusalem-had not yet entered into alliance, and if the treatises of Philo had been brought to the Holy City during the lifetime of Jesus, or if they had been put into the hands of Gamaliel, they would simply have created a scandal. I still hold then that the writings of Philo are not admissible as authorities on the subject of this book. PARIS, May, 1885. E. S. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. THIS Volume consists of a series of studies on the social and religious life of the Jews in the first century, and is a continuation of the work published by me in 1876.1 My object in offering it to the public is to facilitate the intelligent reading of the Gospels. I am not acquainted with any French book which gives what the Germans call "Die Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte," the contemporary history of the New Testament. This gap in our literature I have endeavoured to fill. It is unnecessary for me to insist on the deep interest of a study of the state of society in the midst of which Jesus was brought up. The first century of our era witnessed the accomplishment of the greatest fact in the history of the world. Christianity, the ultimate and universal religion, was born, and began to take the place of the national and transitory forms of worship which had previously prevailed. In a special sense it became the substitute for Judaism, the essentially national religion which gave it 1 "Les idées religieuses en Palestine à l'époque de Jésus Christ." Paris: Fischbacher, 1878. birth and, so to speak, perished in its birth-throes. The child cost the life of the mother. St. Paul in particular directed against the religion of his fathers mortal blows, from which it could not rally. It succumbed in the first century, but the Pharisees and doctors of the law succeeded in embalming its corpse. Thanks to their herculean labours, Judaism still subsists in the state of a mummy. The Talmudists embalmed it, and after eighteen centuries we have yet before our eyes the strange spectacle of this mummy of a religion. It is dead, like all other mummies, but it is marvellously preserved. It was in the time of Christ that the religious life of decaying Judaism began to take those forms which it has ever since retained. The Jewish nation has disappeared, but its nationality has survived the most terrible cataclysms. The Mosaic ritual has ceased, but the synagogue perpetuates its memory. The Pharisees are extinct, but the Jews of our day are their lineal descendants. This is a unique fact in the annals of mankind, and it makes us feel the truth of the words of the chaplain of Frederic II. thinking king asked him to give him a single word of the hand of God in history. "Sire, the Jews." The freeproof in a He replied: E. S. CHAP. BOOK I.-SOCIAL LIFE. |