STOP
Early Journal Content on JSTOR, Free to Anyone in the World
This article is one of nearly 500,000 scholarly works digitized and made freely available to everyone in
the world by JSTOR.
Known as the Early Journal Content, this set of works include research articles, news, letters, and other
writings published in more than 200 of the oldest leading academic journals. The works date from the
mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries.
We encourage people to read and share the Early Journal Content openly and to tell others that this
resource exists. People may post this content online or redistribute in any way for non-commercial
purposes.
Read more about Early Journal Content at http://about.jstor.org/participate-jstor/individuals/early-
journal-content .
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary source objects. JSTOR helps people
discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content through a powerful research and teaching
platform, and preserves this content for future generations. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit
organization that also includes Ithaka S+R and Portico. For more information about JSTOR, please
contact support@jstor.org.
JUDAISM AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY
The evil that men write, as well as the evil that men do, often
lives after them. Calumnies against the Jews seem to have a
peculiarly charmed life : in classical times Manetho, an Egyptian
historian of the third century B. C. E., represented that they were
in origin a pack of Egyptian lepers who were expelled from his
country because of their foul disease. The story was refuted over
and over again ; yet Tacitus writing in the second .century C. E.
solemnly repeats it with a little decoration. In parts of the New
Testament, again, the Pharisees are represented by their enemies as
a class of self-righteous hypocrites. Historical criticism has proved
that the charges come from embittered controversialists; yet writer
after writer repeats them as though they were certain truths, and
pays no account to their refutation and the fuller knowledge which
is now available.
The latest repetition of the story occurs in "The Conflict of
Religions in the Roman Empire", by Mr. Glover, a classical lecturer
of St. John's College, Cambridge, whose book has attracted a con-
siderable amount of attention in England. It is one of the 'Life
and Time Histories' as they have been called; but it differs from
many of the class in that the author is not a pure theologian, but
has a large knowledge of the Greek and Roman literature of the
first three centuries of the Christian era. It does not claim to be
a work of erudite scholarship, but a popular representation of the
religous conditions in which Christianity grew up, based on a
series of lectures which were given at a Theological College. It
may be considered then to embody the current conception of Judaism
which is disseminated among theological students, and it is there-
fore worth while to dissect its statements in some detail; for the
involuntary anti-Judaism of scholars is as dangerous as the de-
liberate anti-Semitism of politicians. Mr. Glover has endeavored,
as he puts it in his preface, "to see the founder of the Christian
131
132 THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW
movement and some of his followers as they appeared among their
contemporaries, to represent Christian and Pagan with equal good-
will and equal honesty and in my perspective to recapture something
of the colour and movement of life, using imagination to interpret
the data, and controlling it by them."
It is perhaps accidental that Mr. Glover omits the Jews among
those he intends "to represent with equal goodwill and equal
honesty;" but it cannot be accidental that in his list of authorities
there is not a single book by a Jew, nor a single standard work
written from the Jewish point of view. Paul is after all not the
only reliable authority for the Judaism of the period. The Talmud
is doubtless a difficult book for the Gentile to study, and the
elaborate works upon it by German scholars may not be attractive:
Mr. Glover might, however, with less difficulty have consulted the
writings of two members of his own University, the Edition of
the Sayings of the Fathers by the late Master of St. John's College,
and Professor Schechter's articles upon Jewish Theology; and had
he done so, he must have regarded the Jews with a little more
truth and a better perspective. As it is we have a rehash of the
old denunciations of Pharisaism and its mechanical soulless concep-
tion of religion, which poses for an account of Judaism at the time.
It is surely a little grotesque that an author who has made a close
study of the Stoics, Plutarch, Justin, Celsus, Apuleius, in fact of
every pagan scribbler who has survived from that epoch, in order
to get a true setting for early Christianity, should know nothing
of contemporary Judaism at first hand; and so long as theologians
and theological historians are unable or unwilling to go to the
Rabbis themselves, and accept the Pauline epistles and Schiirer's
history equally as gospel truth, so long will they give an account
of the Jews which is not history but 'Tendenz-writing'.
Having given an illuminating survey of Roman religion, the
Stoic religious philosophy, and Plutarch's religious eclecticism, Mr.
Glover in his fourth chapter comes to the central figure of his
book, Jesus of Nazareth, and treats him in the manner of Renan:
i. e. he puts aside what is miraculous in the Gospel narrative, accepts
the rest as true, and heightens its effect with some local color
and rhetorical writing. With this we have no special cavil, though
it may be remarked that the rejection of the miraculous elements in
JUDAISM AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY — BENTWICH I33
the life of Jesus makes it more unreasonable to regard him as abso-
lutely unique among his contemporaries. All experience teaches us
that the great men of any age reflect in their highest development
the ideas of that age ; and it is, therefore, unscientific of Mr. Glover
to assume that the humanity and spirituality of Jesus are in con-
trast with the attitude of the Rabbis.
But what we are specially concerned with is not Mr. Glover's
account of Jesus but his attitude to contemporary Judaism, and in
order to appreciate his outlook and method it is necessary to quote
a somewhat long passage. He is dealing with the teaching of
Jesus upon man's relation to God. "Jews and Greeks," he says,
at this period "talked of righteousness and holiness — -'holy' is
one of the great words of the period — and they sought these
things in ritual and abstinence. Modern Jews resent the suggestion
that the thousand and one regulations as to ceremonial purity,
and the casuistries, as many or more, spun out of the law and
the traditions, ranked with the great commandments of neigh-
bourly love and the worship of the One God. No doubt they
are right, but it is noticeable that in practice the common type of
mind is more impressed with minutiae than with principles. The
Southern European to-day will do murder on little provocation, but
to eat meat in Lent is sin. But, without attributing such conspic-
uous sins as theft and adultery and murder to the Pharisees, it is
clear that, in establishing their own righteousness, they laid ex-
cessive stress on the details of the law, on Sabbath-keeping (a con-
stant topic with the Christian Apologists), on tithes, and temple
ritual, on the washing of pots and plates — still rigorously main-
tained by the modern Jews — and all this was supposed to constitute
holiness. Jesus with the clear incisive word of genius dismissed it
all as "acting". The Pharisee was essentially an actor — playing to
himself the most contemptible little comedies of holiness. Listen,
cries Jesus, and he tells the tale of the man fallen among thieves
and left for dead, and how priest and Levite passed by on the
other side, fearing the pollution of a corpse, and how they left
mercy, God's own work — 'I will have mercy and not sacrifice' was
one of his quotations from Hosea, — to be done by one unclean
and damned — the Samaritan. Whited sepulchres! he cries, pretty
to look at, but full of what? Of death, corruption and foulness.
134 THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW
'How can you escape from the judgment of hell?' he asked them,
and no one records what they answered or could answer. It is
clear, however, that outside Palestine, the Jews in the great world
were moving to a more purely moral conception of religion — their
environment made mere Pharisaism impossible, and Greek criticism
compelled them to think more or less in the terms of the funda-
mental. The debt of the Jew to the Gentile is not very generously
acknowledged. None the less, the dinstinctive badge of all his
tribe was and remained what the Greeks called t6 \po<jio5eh.
The Sabbath, circumcision, the blood and butter taboos remained, —
as they still remain in the most liberal of "Liberal Judaisms" —
tribe marks with no religious value, but maintained by patriotism.
And side by side with this lived and lives that hatred of the Gentile
which is attributed to Christian persecution, but which Juvenal
saw and noted before the Christian had ceased to be persecuted by
the Jew. The extravagant nonsense found in Jewish speculation
as to how many Gentile souls were equivalent in God's sight to
that of one Jew is symptomatic. To this day it is confessedly the
weakness of Judaism that it offers no impulse and knows no en-
thusiasm for self-sacrificing love where the interests of the tribe
are not concerned."
In passing we may commiserate with the Liberal Jews who,
despite all their efforts and proclamations, are still accused of main-
taining the Sabbath and the blood and butter taboos, and that too
from motives of Jewish patriotism, and of hating the Gentile from
motives of tribal loyalty. But more seriously the whole passage be-
trays no less ignorance than prejudice. It is what Mr. Glover would
call "symptomatic" that he treats the story of the Good Samaritan
as an example of Pharisaic narrowness, though the Priest and
Levite who passed on the other side of the road would more prob-
ably have belonged to the Sadducee than the Pharisee sect, and
though at least one acute critic has argued that the Samaritan him-
self was substituted in a later gloss to the text for an 'Israelite'.
(See Halevy, RBI., IV, 249.) The 'Israelite' would point the contrast
better with the Priest and Levite, and Samaritans did not live in the
neighborhood of Jericho. It is true that the New Testament has
not recorded the answer of the Pharisees whom Jesus reproached —
the Chronicler was careful about that — but we may be allowed
JUDAISM AND EARI/VT CHRISTIANITY — BENTWICH I35
to answer for them that the Pharisees realized as clearly as Jesus
that holiness depended upon inward purity, (as a perusal of the
Ethics of the Fathers in the Jewish Prayer-book would show), that
it was a Pharisee who enunciated before Jesus the golden rule,
that it was not play-acting but a lofty theory of morals which
led them to lay stress upon daily conduct and to interweave religion
with the common concerns of man, and that, as Josephus put it,
other peoples made religion a part of virtue, but the Jewish teachers
ordained virtue to be a part of religion. (Josephus c. Apionem
II, 17.) The most elementary knowledge of the teaching of the
most distinguished Jewish sage in the time of Jesus would have
convinced Mr. Glover that it is absurd to suppose that the Rabbis
ranked the prescripts about tithes and pot and pans — which were
not in fact determined for hundreds of years after Jesus — on a
level with the great moral principles. Was it not Hillel who said that
the whole law was summed up in the maxim: "Do not unto others
what thou wouldst not that they should do to thee: — all the rest
is commentary thereon", implying that humanity is the object of
the law? And was it not Hillel again who said that it was the
duty of man "to love his fellow-creatures and bring them near to
the Torah," representing the dominant ideal of Judaism which was
to spread Jewish teaching over the world? Mr. Glover rather in-
tensifies than mitigates the injustice of his account in a footnote
to the passage we have quoted. "Of course every general state-
ment," he adds, "requires modification, but the predominantly tribal
character of Judaism implies contempt for the spiritual life of the
Gentile Christian and Pagan. If the knowledge of God was or is
of value to the Jew, he made little effort to share it." To say
the least, it is unkind to bring this reproach against a people who,
when Christianity was established as the religion of the Roman
Empire, were forbidden under penalty of death to make any con-
verts, and who, when the Church became the dominant power in
Europe, were massacred, tortured, and burnt at the stake in thou-
sands for remaining loyal to their religion. The self-sacrificing love,
which the Jew so painfully lacks, meant for the Christian Church,
so far as history teaches, the love of sacrificing others who would
not accept the exact dogmatic teaching which it held at any epoch.
But we protest in the name of truth as well as of justice against
I36 THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW
the charge that before they were repressed by the ruthless legislation
of Christendom, the Jews were tribal and exclusive, or remiss in
preaching their faith among the Gentiles. The New Testament
itself is here evidence against Mr. Glover, when it speaks of these
narrow self-centered Pharisees as scouring earth and sea to make a
proselyte, or when it records that Apollos, an Alexandrian Jew, had
journeyed to Ephesus to preach the word of God to the pagans.
Apart from Philo and Josephus who speak over and over again of
the missionary activity and success of the Jew in all parts of the
world — but who, Mr. Glover may say, are partial historians — the
pagan authorities are as explicit, if less exultant, about the rapid
spread of Judaism. Mr. Glover might, on this point, have consulted
his classical authors, whom he knows so well. "The Jews," says
Strabo, "have penetrated into every state, so that it is difficult to
find a single place in the world in which their tribe has not been
received and become dominant." Horace refers to Sabbath-observ-
ance as a common habit at Rome, which was practised by the man
in the street (unus multorum) : and Seneca, fierce anti-Semite
that he was, writing after Palestine had been placed under a Roman
governor, says: "Nevertheless the practices of this accursed race
have so far prevailed that they have been received over the whole
world : the vanquished have imposed their laws upon the victors."
Indeed the most constant accusation against the Jew is that he will
not keep his religion to himself, but insists on propagating it among
his neighbors.
But what of the passage in which Juvenal notes the Jewish
hatred of the Gentile? Juvenal wrote one hundred years after the
time of Jesus, when hundreds of thousands of Jews had been
massacred by the Gentiles in the terrible wars of extermination that
followed the fall of Jerusalem and the revolt against Trajan. Is
it strange that in the year 100 or 120 C. E., Jews should have felt
some hatred towards the Romans? Or is it disgraceful that they
should have felt some 'contempt for the spiritual life' of the pagan
with its untranslateable abominations that Juvenal has described?
Were not the Christians also charged by pagan writers with 'odium
humani generis?' And against the fancies of a particular Rabbi,
who played with the equation of souls, may not we set, on the
one hand, the saying of another Rabbi who explained the verse
JUDAISM AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY BUNTWICH I37
of Isaiah : "Open ye the gates that the righteous people may enter
in", to mean that one of the Gentiles who fulfils the laws of the
Torah is as good as the High-priest himself : — one might add a
hundred explanations to the same effect — and, on the other hand,
the savagery of one of Mr. Glover's Christian worthies, Tertullian,
quoted in this book, who shows his love of the Gentiles in these
words : "You are fond of spectacles. Expect the greatest of all
spectacles, the last and eternal judgment of the universe. How shall
I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult when I behold so
many proud monarchs and fancied gods groaning in the lower abyss
of darkness, so many magistrates who persecuted the name of the
Lord liquefying in fierce fires that they once kindled against the
Christians, so many sage philosophers blushing in red hot flames with
their deluded scholars!" {De Spectaculis 30). — "Hath not a Jew
hands, organs, senses, affections, passions"? is it that what is
tribal narrowness in him becomes righteous indignation in the
Christian ?
Judaism had the same aspiration as Christianity to be a universal
religion, and the Christians learnt from Jews to be missionaries, and
were at first nothing more than a heretical Jewish sect, professing
to carry out their mission in a special way. Tertullian admits that
the early Church grew up "under the shadow of the Jews", but, to
apply Mr. Glover's words, the debt of the Christian to the Jew
has not been very generously acknowledged. It has been repaid
in blood — of the Jew. As Christianity expanded, it departed more
and more from the teachings of its founder as well as from
Judaism, and its progress pointed to the Rabbis the danger of in-
discriminate conversion and compromise with foreign ideas. In
those mad centuries, when, together with the Roman Empire, the
whole ancient civilization was breaking up and dissolving in the
melting-pot of crude superstitions and hybrid creeds, the Rabbis
were at pains to preserve the integrity and purity of Judaism by
strengthening its outer defences. It was otherwise with the Church
at this period. Mr. Glover claims that Jesus had once for all set
religion free from the servitude of ritual and taboos; yet between
the second and fifth centuries the Church was establishing the worse
and harsher servitude of dogmas and beliefs, which for hundreds
of years was to be, and which still is in some countries, immeasur-
138 THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW
ably more oppressive upon the mind than ever the Pharisaic develop-
ment of the law was upon the body or the spirit. The moment
Christianity emerged out of the region of spirit and began to es-
tablish itself as a world-religion, it was compelled to devise some
bond which would hold its members together; and having rejected
the law of conduct it chose the law of belief. When it became suc-
cessful, as Renan admitted, the Church deteriorated; and brought
into the world a new and awful tyranny, combining the ecclesiastical
bigotry with the temporal powers of the Roman Empire; it
established a merciless domination over conscience, and compelled
Judaism to become, what it had never desired to be, an exclusive
national religion; and had it not been for the stedfastness of the
Jew, it would have stamped out his religion altogether. Perhaps
the Christian world would not be so hard on the Pharisees, even
the Pharisees of its imagination, if it remembered the Church-
synods of history.
The story is told of a girl who, when asked if there were any
wild beasts in Englanti, replied "No, except in the Theological Gar-
dens." Her language was doubtless too strong, but it is in the
theological gardens that the pests of prejudice and misrepresenta-
tion live longest. Mr. Glover speaks of the different attitude of the
Christian world since the Renaissance to the evidences of Christianity
from miracle and prophecy; we may hope that as the historical
criticism of the nineteenth century enters into men's minds, the
attitude of the Christian world may change to the evidences of
Christianity from the narrowness and soullessness of Pharisaic re-
ligion, and that writers upon the time of Jesus may deign to correct
Paul's controversial account of Judaism by at least a superficial
study of the Jewish records of the age.
London Norman Bentwich
