BT 303 .S55 1923 Simkhovitch, Vladimir Grigorievitch, 1874- Toward the understanding of T .«rv a < Toward the Understanding of Jesus e THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALITS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN Sc CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd„ TORONTO Toward the Understanding of Jesus / . / - / \ ..^23 BY Vladimir G. Simkhovitch j0eto gorfe THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1923 All rights reserved FSINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA Copyright, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY, Reprinted July, Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A, TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE «oo*o*«oeoooo Toward the Understanding of Jesus o o c c i Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/towardunderstandOOsimk_0 PREFACE The present study was first published with two other historical essays in 1921 under the title, “Toward the Understanding of Jesus and Other Historical Studies.” The background of the teachings of Christ are naturally of greater interest to the reading public than researches on the fall of Rome or the agrarian condi¬ tions of medieval Europe. It is therefore deemed ad¬ visable by the publishers to issue “Toward the Under¬ standing of Jesus” separately and thus meet the de¬ mand of a wider public. In the preface of the original edition I tried to make it quite clear that this study is not a contribution to so-called higher criticism but rather to historical understanding. To explain the purpose of this little book therefore I venture to quote from the preface of the original edition—“The first study deals with the historical problem presented by the teachings of Jesus. The problem is—why such unprecedented teachings at that particular time? This study, therefore, deals, if you please, with the ‘fullness of time.’ To the scien¬ tific historian everything that has happened happened in the ‘fullness of time’ and to understand intimately and realistically that ‘fullness’ is the task of history. In this particular study, therefore, we are endeavoring VI PREFACE to understand the particular circumstances and condi¬ tions that make so great an historical event as the insight of Jesus historically intelligible to us. “In dealing with the gospel texts I have not at¬ tempted to utilize critical literature. Text-criticism to my way of thinking already presupposes a clear-cut understanding of the controlling factors in the his¬ torical situation.” To this former preface I have nothing to add except thanks to my readers for a far greater measure of appreciation and interest In my work than I had ven¬ tured to expect. Vladimir G. Simkhovitch. Columbia University, April, 1923. Toward the Understanding of Jesus TOWARD THE UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS CHAPTER I The teachings of Christ are an historical event. Let us try to understand them historically. Without an historical understanding we have before us not teachings but texts. There is hardly a text in the four gospels that is not apparently conflicting with other texts. Yet an insight is won when the teachings of Jesus are viewed and understood historically. The test of true understanding is to see in seeming contradictions but differing aspects of the same funda¬ mental forces, to perceive in the endless expressions of life but one flow of life and to trace that flow to its sources. The test of true understanding is an under¬ standing free from contradictions. So long as we find contradictions it is certain that what we hold in our hands are fragments; and though we may try to ar¬ range them logically, the complete sphere of Jesus’ own life and the life he preached we do not understand. The gospels themselves contain practically nothing that throws light on Jesus’ life as a whole. Little is I 2 TOWARD THE UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS to be found about his life and development before his ministry. Yet it is clear that when he entered upon his ministry he felt called to do so, and it is clear that such a mission develops slowly. What do we know of the long years while Jesus was thinking and feeling and praying, the years while the life was ripening which he afterwards preached and finally sacrificed? Under what circumstances he was developing, what he was doing, what influences impressed themselves upon his life and thought before he was thirty—what do we know about it? Nothing! The episode from Jesus’ childhood, when he remained in the temple listening and asking questions of the learned men there, only emphasizes our lack of knowledge. For if Jesus in his childhood was so eager and mentally so keen, what was his mind doing during the eighteen or twenty years which followed that episode ? Luke tells us “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” ^ That is all we know about the growth and development of Jesus’ life and mind. Was his inner life dormant or non-existent all these years? Did he not grow at all? Had his ideas no sources whatsoever, no development of any kind; were they utterly uncorrelated with the lives of his fel¬ low men? What was Jesus, a phantom abstractly ex¬ isting in a vacuum, or a historical personality really living and suffering in a given time and place ? There can be but one relevant answer to the ques¬ tion: Jesus was a historical personality. We all live and die and most of us are forgotten. Personalities ‘Luke 2: 52. TOWARD THE UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS 3 who are remembered, whom written records of human existence cannot overlook and our memory cannot for¬ get, are personalities whose individual lives greatly af¬ fected many lives. A personality in other words ac¬ quires historical importance when it deals with the many, when its ideas, actions, words are understood by the many, affect the many. If a multitude gathers around one, it means that what the one is teaching is of interest to so many individuals that they form a multi¬ tude around him. The more limited is our knowledge of the one, the more important is the light that may be shed by the many. The many seldom present difficult problems, for it is never very difficult to find out what in a given situation they had in common. What were their com¬ mon conditions of existence, what were their common hopes, what were their fears, interests, purposes? Once we find that out, the reactions of the many are not difficult to understand. The particular historical conditions under which Jesus developed, lived, min¬ istered and died are bound to help us understand his life and hence his teachings more intimately. How the Greeks or the Romans, the Gauls, the Goths or the Slavs at various times conceived and pictured to themselves Jesus and his teachings is an interesting problem in itself. It is the history of Christianity, it is the story of Jesus in the course of human history. The history of these interpretations of Jesus is a his¬ tory of assimilations, in a sense a history of mankind. But it is not the history of mankind that interests us here. These interpretations can only confuse us. Nor 4 TOWARD THE UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS are we interested in a composite picture of Jesus in history throughout the ages of faith. What we are searching for is that definite, concrete, historical Jesus who can give coherence to his teachings. Our quest is the historical truth. Let us therefore go to the docu¬ ments; but let us be clear in our mind as to their value. For historical truth is not a bundle of documents. Documents are the raw material, but not the struc¬ ture. Historical truth is such a constructive insight into a given situation as to carry with it conviction of real life. Social life is then moving within its condi¬ tions of existence; and personalities, in their words and deeds, are correlated with their fellow men and appear in their historical, that is, their representative capacity. CHAPTER II In the year seventy after Christ the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, Jerusalem was sacked, and the population either slain, crucified or sold into slavery. It is estimated that over a million and two hundred thousand perished. Josephus tells us about the destruction of Jerusalem that “the multitude of those that therein perished exceeded all the destruc¬ tions that either men or God ever brought upon the world.” ^ The conventional history usually begins this war on August sixth of the year 66, when the Romans and other Gentiles were massacred by the Jews of Jeru¬ salem. This date is so artificial that Mommsen for instance suggests A. D. 44 as the year from which the Jewish-Roman war might better be dated. It has been customary to put the outbreak of the war in the year 66; with equal and perhaps better warrant we might name for it the year 44. Since the death of Agrippa, warfare in Judea had never ceased, and alongside of the local feuds, which Jews fought with Jews, there went on constantly the war of Roman troops against the seceders in the mountains, the Zealots, as the Jews named them, or, according to Roman designation, the Robbers.2 ^Josephus: Jewish Wars, VI, 9, 4. ^Mommsen; The Provinces of the Roman Empire, v. 2, p. 221-222. (New York, 1887.) 5 6 TOWARD THE UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS But to date the beginning of the revolt against Rome with the death of Agrippa in the year 44 is also quite arbitrary. For the revolt had been brewing and re¬ peatedly breaking out here and there long before that. If we should follow the opinion of a contemporary historian, Josephus, we should have to date the be¬ ginnings back to the revolt of Judas, the Galilean, or Judas, the Gaulonite, to whose revolutionary activities and doctrines Josephus attributes all the ensuing mis¬ fortunes of the Jewish nation, which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. The occasion of that uprising was the census of Quirinius for tax¬ ation purposes in the year 6 A. D. Josephus tells us that one Judas, the Gaulonite, with a Pharisee named Saddouk, urged the Jews to revolt, both preaching that “this taxation was no better than an introduction of slavery, and exhorting the nation to assert its liberty.” Josephus proceeds to inform us about these men and their doctrine: All sorts of misfortunes sprung from these men, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree; one violent war came upon us after another .... the sedition at last so in¬ creased that the very temple of God was burnt down by their enemies’ fire.^ Toward the end of the same chapter he gives us some information about the so-called philosophy of Judas, the Gaulonite or the Galilean, as well as of his follow¬ ers. These men agree in all other things with the Pharisaic notions; but they have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that ‘Josephus: Antiquities, XVIII, i, 1. TOWARD THE UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS ^ God is to be their only Lord and Master. They also do not mind dying any death, nor indeed do they heed the deaths of their relations and friends, nor could the fear of death make them call any man their master. And since this immutable resolution of theirs is well known to a great many, I shall speak no further about that matter; nor am I afraid that anything I have said of them should be disbelieved, rather do I fear that what I have said does not adequately express the determination that they show when they undergo pain.^ As a matter of fact the Jewish struggle for inde¬ pendence and the Zealot movement did not begin even with Judas the Gaulonite. Judas himself only con¬ tinued the work of his father, Ezechias of Galilee,^ who with his very large following was killed by young Herod when the latter was only the captain, sTpax'nyo^, of Galilee under Hyrcanus, the ethnarch of Judea. That was in the year 46 B. C. Even then the San¬ hedrin of Jerusalem must have had strong sympathies with Ezechias, for Herod was accused before that body for killing Ezechias and his followers, and he would have fared badly had not Sextus Caesar, the Roman governor of Syria, requested from Hyrcanus Herod’s acquittal.^ Nor does the rebellion of the Jews begin with Ezechias. The rebellion of the Jews against Rome rather begins with the power of Rome over the Jews; and in the same degree as the Roman power over the Jews increased, did the political reaction against that power, the revolution against Rome, increase and ^Josephus: Antiquities, XVIII, i, 6. ^ Schiirer: Geschichte des Jiidischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, V. I, p. 420. (4th ed., Leipzig, 1901). ® Josephus: Antiq., XIV, 9, 3-5. Jewish Wars, I, 10, 6-9. 8 TOWARD THE UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS Spread. The Jewish revolutionists against Rome were called by the Romans bandits or robbers. Later they were called scitariij “men with knives.” The polite Josephus followed the Romans in calling them robbers; but whenever he tells us about the constant war¬ fare, about either the Romans’ or Herod’s exploits against the robbers, it becomes clear that they are religious patriots who are fighting and dying for their country. So, for instance, Josephus describes one of Herod’s expeditions against some Galilean robbers: Now these men slew the robbers and their families . . . and as Herod was desirous of saving some of them, he issued a proclama¬ tion to them . . . but not one of them came willingly to him, and those that were compelled to come preferred death to captivity. . . . And here a certain old man, the father of seven children . . . slew his children one after another. . . . Herod was near enough to see this sight and compassion moved him, and he stretched out his right hand to the old man and besought him to spare his children; yet did he not relent at all upon what he said, hut reproached Herod on the lowliness of his descent, and slew his wife as well as his children; and when he had thrown their dead bodies down the precipice, he at last threw himself down after them.^ It is obvious here that we are dealing not with mer¬ cenary bandits, but with political and religious devotees who prefer death to submission. The Zealot move¬ ment, judging from Josephus’s narrative, is of much older date than the revolt of Judas the Gaulonite, but that particular Galilean’s uprising must have especially impressed itself upon the memory of men, for it is mentioned by way of illustration or characterization even in the Acts. After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing the enrolment] and drew away much people after him: he ^Josephus: Jewish Wars, I, i6, 4. TOWARD THE UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS 9 also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dis¬ persed.^ Still more Important the outbreak becomes when we consider what happened at the same time. For it^