James Hope Moulton: This concluding talk of mine might be described as a kind of informal sermon on a great passage of Paul's letter to the Galatians. You will remember how the fourth chapter begins with the parable of the child who is heir to a vast estate, but while he is a child is under stewards until the time fixed beforehand by the father. And we dwell on that word, for we remember that it is the Father who chooses the time that is best, best from the point of view of immortal love.
Paul goes on to tell of the ages before that fixed period arose, and how at last `when the fullness of the time came God sent forth His Son.' My object this morning is to illustrate from certain conditions of the first centuries B.C. and A.D. how that was the one time in all human history when the Birth at Bethlehem could take place, that Jesus came into the world just exactly when everything was made ready for Him.
I want to look at this from three points of view, speaking successively of language conditions, political conditions, and religious conditions. I shall try to prove that in all these respects the date Anno Domini is absolutely ideal.
Firstly, as to language. I need not recapitulate what I have said about the character of Greek as the world language at the time when Jesus came. You realize that Greek was the language of a little country most uniquely dowered, a little country into which there was more intellectuality packed than into any other, large or small, in all the world's history before or since. When we speak of Greece we have to cut down our definition still further; for even in Greece most parts were ordinary. But there was an extraordinary strain of genius concentrated particularly in the people of Athens. Though the writers of Greece outside Attica produced some supreme literature, such as Homer and Pindar and Herodotus, the greatest and most varied literary, artistic, and scientific output has to be credited to that one town.
Now when we look at the Greek of five hundred years before Christ, we find that in a little country, which could be dumped down several times over in most of your States, there were divisions of dialect which made quite near neighbors almost unintelligible. There were Athens and Thebes, between thirty and forty miles apart, as different as towns could be. One was intellectual; one was stupid. One spoke a language which could be understood by anybody who knows any Greek at all; the other spoke a language which I might very safely present to a very decent Greek scholar and be almost certain that unless he happened to have worked on this particular line he would make nothing out of it. So different are the words, the pronunciation, the whole genius of speech, that it seems almost another language.
Nor was it dialect alone that separated Greek from Greek. The country was divided into tiny commonwealths that were constantly at war with each other. The Greek spirit of freedom ran into individualism gone mad, and the result was what you might expect. When one town in a small country hated another town worse than it hated outsiders, when even within one town one party hated the other party far more than anybody outside, the end was inevitable.
Under their powerful and unscrupulous neighbor, Philip of Macedon, the father of the great Alexander, Greece was subjugated and all the little city States forced to come together under one rule. They never had any real independence again. Then Alexander took his Greeks away with him into distant lands. He made those wonderful military expeditions of which we read, when he penetrated as far as India. One of many by-products of Alexander's short lifework was the unification of Greece and the spread of Hellenism far and wide. Greeks from Athens and Sparta and Thebes had to meet in regular intercourse. As always happens when men with different dialects are thrown together for long, uniformity of speech began to arise. The intellectual primacy of Attic Greek, the dialect of Athens, brought it naturally to the top; and Attic, only shorn of marked peculiarities, became the basis of what is virtually a new language.
Classical scholars have been accustomed to talk of Greek as if it came to an end somewhere in the fourth century before Christ. But the Greek language was not dead, she was hardly even sleeping; and after a brief interval we see her as a world power, risen from the dead with the New Testament in her hand.
Greek became the language of commerce, the language of daily intercourse, right over a vast and constantly increasing area. Greek was spoken away in Rome, so much so that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his private meditations in Greek, that Paul wrote his letter to the Romans in Greek, that the satirist Juvenal says Rome had become practically a Greek city. It was needless to learn Latin even if one were going to settle in Rome itself.
As to the extent over which Greek spread, I think one of the most vivid illustrations of it has come to light within the last few months. Last October I was startled by a piece of news which was given to me by Professor E. G. Browne, the great Persian scholar of Cambridge University. He told me that he had just had a very interesting present from one of the remote parts of the world. A Kurdish Christian doctor, named Said Khan, had been called to a place away up in the mountains of Persia, a district called Avroman, in order to treat a sick Kurd chief. He responded at the risk of his life, but happily he was successful in his work. I have a letter from him which is written in very indifferent English, but which betrays the language of the heart that every one who loves Christ can understand. This good man received, apparently as a part of his reward for his services, something which he instantly saw was of great value. It was just a little clay pot, and in that pot there were some documents of parchment. One was in a language which so far no one has been able to interpret. Presumably it was a local dialect; but we cannot be quite sure what sort of dialect it was.
Two were in Greek, and they were exactly dated. One was 88 B.C., and the other was 22 B.C., and they were title-deeds of a vineyard. Evidently this pot was some sort of a safe in which these title-deeds had been deposited for keeping. Here you have an example of an astonishing fact. You have Greek right away among the wild mountains of Persia, and dated in the first century before Christ. It is a vivid illustration of that chapter in Acts [2] where Jews `from every nation under heaven' uttered their amazement as they heard their native languages being spoken by men of Galilee. `Parthians and Medes and Elamites,' coming from the very district where that little pot was found, could talk together in Greek when they met for worship in Jerusalem, just as we see they could write Greek for business purposes far away in the lands where they had made their home. That little stone pot and its parchments tell us how the first Christian missionaries were able so quickly to publish their message everywhere.
We are not dealing here with the language of books, a language which became more and more archaic, as time went on, in its effort to maintain the purity of the Attic of the fourth and fifth centuries before Christ. We are dealing now with the vernacular, which could be spoken and written by half-educated farmers in Egypt, by the illiterate man away in the wilds of Persia, spoken from Spain to Persia, from Rome down to Alexandria and the cataracts of the Nile. How long had that vernacular been in existence? Only at most from about the third century before Christ; and even during this period the wide extension of Greek was only characteristic of the later generations. We might safely say that the period during which Greek was at the height of its power, the period during which it was understood intelligently by the largest number of people, was simply the time just before and just after the coming of Christ, the first century before Christ and perhaps the first two centuries A.D., just exactly the time when it could be used for the great purpose of evangelization.
You must not forget that these people spoke also their own languages. We have evidence from Acts as to that. We remember how when Paul and Barnabas were at Lystra they preached and the people understood them; but you will notice that Paul and Barnabas themselves did not understand the language of Lycaonia. It was into this that the people relapsed when they were talking intimately among themselves. I am always illustrating this from something which is very intelligible to us in our country.
At my own College we have always some Welsh students. They have to do their work in English at Didsbury College; but they are being prepared for work in Wales, and the churches to which they go will be churches in which Welsh will be spoken almost entirely. The Welsh people mostly understand English. But at home and at worship they want to have their own language, for English is always foreign in sound to them. The situation in Wales to-day is almost exactly the situation in Palestine or Lycaonia during the first century A.D. Suppose our Welsh statesman, Mr. Lloyd George, goes down into Wales to make a speech to his constituents. He begins his speech in Welsh, because the people love to hear it. Then in a few minutes he will remark that he believes there are some people outside Wales who are wanting to hear what he has to say, and as a concession to their weakness, he must relapse into English, which he promptly does.
And, of course, the great company gathered together understand English almost as well as they understand Welsh. Now that is exactly what happened to Paul when he was allowed (Acts 21:40) to come forward and speak to the people. We are told that when he spoke in the Aramaic [KJV, `Hebrew'] language they were `the more silent.' That is to say, they were listening to him with the expectation that he would speak in Greek. They would have understood him if he had thus spoken, but when they found he was speaking in their own language they were `the more silent.'
This is a very typical instance of what would happen then in any part of the Roman world. I need say little to show how these providential conditions helped Paul's work. Look at our missionary conditions to-day. There are thousands of our missionaries laboring; in far countries all over the world. Most of them have had to spend the best part of two long years eating their heart out in eagerness to preach to the people, but unable to preach until they have learned enough of the language to be sure that they will not be doing more harm than good.
That was not the case in the first century. When Paul went from Palestine to speak Greek in Cilicia, he found very little difference, only such difference as there is between the English of England and the English of America. He could travel to Rome, he could travel beyond to Spain, he might have travelled to Egypt or to Persia, and everywhere he could talk that same Greek and be understood at once. There was no time wasted in learning the language.
And remember that gaining time was really one of the most important conditions of success for the Christian propaganda in the first century. Why was it that the Church had such amazing success in those first generations? Why, because the missionaries of the Cross lost no time. `Straightway he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same.' Remember the inner history of that first century. Their clear-sighted enemies, the Jews, warned the Roman authorities that the Christian preachers were doing nothing less than setting up `another Emperor, one Jesus' (Acts 17:7).
What they said was perfectly true, but the Romans did not believe them. The Romans looked down from the perfect security of their position. How could they be afraid of a few fanatics from despised Palestine who went about preaching the divinity of a, crucified Galilean carpenter? How could anything of that kind ever disturb their Empire? And so, as the Book of Acts is constantly telling us, Paul was able to go everywhere, depending upon his Roman citizenship and the protection of the Roman governors. When the Jews tried to accuse him before the Proconsul of Achaia, and said, `This man is trying to persuade men to worship God contrary to the law,' Gallio (Acts 18:12) simply told them that the matter did not concern him. He brusquely non-suited the prosecutors and kept to his own business.
But the time came when the Christians had done their work well, when mostly through the statesmanship and passionate zeal of Paul they had covered the Empire with a network of Christian agencies. Passing along the great Roman roads, Paul planted the Cross in one big town after another, and the men whom he had taught there immediately began to preach in all the country round. The Christians became so numerous that the Romans began to be alarmed, and they started persecution.
At first, the pretext of punishment was that the Christians were criminals. All kinds of revolting crimes were charged against them. But this could not last long. The crisis came when the issue of the fight was simplified, and to accept the name of Christian was made a capital crime. So was thrown down the gage of battle, and the struggle of two and a half centuries began.
The First Epistle of Peter helps us to see the transition very clearly. Now if Rome had made `the Name' a capital offence thirty or forty years earlier, she could have crushed Christianity utterly by the simple process of putting to death every man, woman, and child believing in Jesus. The methods of Diocletian in the days of Nero could hardly have failed of their object. But God saved His cause by instilling into the minds of those who went forth to work for Him, prepared to preach Him at the risk of their very lives, the thought that the King's business required haste.
They must go and do the work instantly - `evangelize the world in this generation,' for we can see that they anticipated the glorious motto which the Student Volunteer Movement has brought up again in our own time. And not only did they make that their motto, but they attained it. By the time that generation was over there were too many Christians even for the thorough-going methods of Diocletian to kill them out. Christianity was already an imperial power when that long campaign began in which all the killing was on one side and all the dying on the other. And those who could die, finally and for ever, defeated those who could only kill.
I pass next to a few political conditions which favoured the growth of Christianity. The first century B.C. was one of the most evil centuries in all the history of the world. It was a century of civil war, and its cruelty was utterly unbelievable. I will mention one fact which gets at one's imagination more vividly than anything else I know.
There was one class of slaves in the Roman world who were perhaps more pitiable than any. These were the gladiators, of whom that famous line was written, `Butchered to make a Roman holiday.'
They were brave, strong men, trained to the use of arms, and the only reason for their existence was that on great ceremonial days the bloodthirsty populace expected their officials to give them exhibitions of real fighting. Then the gladiators were thrown into the arena, and there they had to fight, not because they hated one another, or had the slightest grievance against one another, but simply because they were slaves, and as slaves they had to fight. As long as the arena ran red with blood, the thirst of the populace was appeased for the time.
At last there came a time when these gladiators revolted. They had a strong right arm. They could fight. Why should they not fight for themselves instead of simply amusing the savage mob? The only difficulty was to get together. But finally they found a leader, a man of military genius, Spartacus. Presently Italy was in a flame, and the gladiator host was spreading terror everywhere. The Romans were at their very wits' end. At last they succeeded in defeating these desperate men, and they took six thousand of them captive. What did they do with them?
The road from Rome to Capua was one hundred and fifty miles long. Along that road, at intervals of fifty yards or so, they set up crosses, and they crucified these six thousand men along that road. All who travelled from Rome to Capua had to pass down that ghastly avenue.
I do not think one could imagine a more typical example of the fury and blood-lust and panic of those days.
It was out of travail-pains like those that the Gospel came to the birth.
It reminds me of a beautiful parable that came my way a few weeks ago when I went to talk with a friend who worshipped in our College chapel. He was stricken with what proved to be his last illness, but he talked very cheerfully, and told me some interesting things about his profession. He was a scientific florist, who had been many years supplying the market of Manchester with beautiful cut flowers. He told me how he had tried very hard indeed to produce a particular tulip. He wanted to get this tulip double, and he also wanted to get it pink. He tried all his known methods. He succeeded in getting it double, but the double flower was white, and to get it anything but white seemed to be beyond his power. One day a sudden storm came up. He went quickly around his hothouses to see that nothing should be left that could be whisked up by the wind and break the glass. He picked up all the loose boxes he saw, but he overlooked one, and this one was taken up by the wind and a great gap was made in the glass.
The cold, icy blast poured through the greenhouse. When he went to the greenhouse the next morning he found that this new flower upon which he had worked so long was pink. And I recalled what at the time seemed to me only an interesting piece of horticulture when, a few weeks later, I stood in the darkened room where my friend's big family were gathered together talking about their departed father. I told them what he had said to me, and reminded them that God has His own ways of producing His perfect flowers. Sometimes the icy blast of affliction will do what all other methods fail to do.
Even so was it with the world in that first century. Weariness and despair after a hundred years of bloodshed produced the conditions under which it was possible for the Gospel to come. May we wistfully hope that out of briefer but still more appalling slaughter to-day [WWI], may come another preparation for the Gospel Peace?
At last there came one of the most famous me in the history of the world, Julius Caesar. I always grudge him the title of Great, bestowed on him so emphatically by Mommsen, the German historian of Rome. His genius, of course, is beyond question, and his achievements such that the countrymen of Treitschke instinctively bow down and worship his image. When we look into the facts about his campaigns against the Gauls - taking the information from Caesar's own book - we find that their only crime was that of the Belgians to-day. They wanted to keep their country for themselves. For this crime Julius Caesar killed a whole million of them and reduced to slavery two or three million more. A great man! Personally I prefer to keep the adjective great for men who have performed other services to mankind. But we must pass on.
When Julius fell by the daggers of Brutus and Cassius on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., his heir, Octavian - better known as Augustus - pursued his way to the throne of that exhausted Roman world. He used his power well. He put a stop to all the bloodshed. He reduced the whole of the Roman dominions to order; and against the outside world he established the Pax Rommana, [Roman Peace,] the iron peace of overwhelming military power which was so often only the euphemistic name of a desolation, according to the bitter epigram of the British chief in Tacitus.
But, however attained, the Roman Peace brought relief to the world. No one was left to stand up against the government of Rome. At last civilization had its chance. My colleague, Professor Conway, of Manchester, puts the situation in a sentence very well : `Free communication between different parts of the world was made possible by the new roads, the new postal system, and the complete suppression of war by land and by sea.' All of you who have been in England or on the Continent have seen some of those Roman roads. There they are until to-day. We have a network of them throughout our little island. With the splendid roads go the arrangements of the postal service, and those for travel by sea. Though they had no steam engines and lacked our modern means of travel, travel was nevertheless swift and safe to a surprising degree.
But as we study it we observe that these fruits of peace and good government were not destined to last. The decline of the Roman Empire began very soon. Indeed, the seeds of decay were there even from the first. But while these blessings lasted unimpaired they contributed greatly to the spread of the Gospel. Roman roads, Roman ships, Roman administration of justice, all in their prime during that crucial first century - how much they meant to Paul and his comrades in their great work of `turning the world upside down'. So we come to the preparation for the Gospel in the field of religion.
For most people who know even a little Latin the Augustan age is made familiar by the poetry of Virgil [Vergil]. Virgil entirely deserved the unique position allowed him by medieval Christianity, and especially by Dante, his only rival for the primacy among the poets of Italy. Men recognized Virgil as a Christian in soul, a true prophet of Him whom he never knew.
He was one who `uttered nothing base,' a lofty, pure, and beautiful spirit whom even the Middle Ages shrank from calling a heathen. On the very first page of the Eclogues of Virgil we read the words in which the simple shepherd expresses his obligation to the Emperor. `A god,' he cries, `made all this peace for me - for to me he will always be a god, to him my sacrifice shall ever smoke upon the altar.' Professor Conway, whom I quoted just now, comments strikingly on the misreading into which the thoughtless modern reader falls here. He says that Virgil calls Augustus, `God.'
He does not. He calls Him Deus. Are you going to make no allowance for all that has been put into the English word by the associations of Christianity? He goes on to show that this deeply religious poet never called Augustus by this title in the way familiar to us from the mere court flatterer Horace and the rest of them.
With Virgil, Augustus was Deus only when the poet recalled some beneficence. It is always in connection with kindness shown to himself, or some great blessing wrought for his country. So here, as in that wonderful statue of Phidias, these `heathen' men were truly groping for God.
And did they not find Him?
They had attained to the greatest of thoughts about God, that God is good. And their conception of God - even if it was embodied in nothing higher than a man, a man who had enthroned himself in the vacant heaven, when no other gods survived whom the people really cared for - was one that meant not a little for the world. It was a, true preparation for Christianity when the great lesson was taught that a man could be worshipped as divine because of the good that he did to mankind.
Now I might turn here to dwell upon the dark side of pagan religion. You remember Matthew Arnold's poignant stanza:
On that sad pagan world disgust
And secret loathing fell;
Deep weariness and sated lust
Made human life a hell.
Yes; but I do not think we need to dwell upon that so much this morning. We are in no danger of forgetting the shortcomings of religion in the Roman world, which made, men long so earnestly for better things. It is more to our purpose if we look for the other side.
Very much of the old religion was dead. The Greek gods were never much more than mythology, with no heart and no soul behind them. Roman gods were never more than abstractions, and could not arouse the real worship of men. Yet in spite of all these things there was a religion in that world, a groping after God. The way in which the Oriental religions ran like wildfire through the Roman Empire showed that. There was the worship of Serapis from Egypt; there was the cult of Cybele from Phrygia; and beyond all there was Mithraism, the religion which was destined to make a stern fight with Christianity itself. In Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill there is a splendid `Hymn to Mithras,' which helps us to picture to ourselves a religion which became predominant in the Roman army. These religions owed their success to the fact that they met the craving of the human heart for something that had glow and warmth in it, touching the heart and not the head of man.
All this Oriental religion mostly affected the lower classes. Among the educated, religious instinct satisfied itself chiefly through philosophy. The philosophy which came nearest to religion was that of the Stoics, who in the dark days of imperial tyranny showed that they had a faith which taught them how to die. However hard and cold their doctrine seems to us, their splendid fortitude must move our admiration. And when we come to the second century we have the meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the discourses of the slave Epictetus, both Stoics, to show us that truly God did not leave Himself without witness in those days.
Look again at Greece itself in the first century, and remember that serene and pure-minded thinker Plutarch, whose famous Lives live on in the use Shakespeare made of them. There was much indeed that was beautiful in that time, much that was ready to be touched by the finger of Christ and to become the treasure of the Church.
Nor must we forget Seneca, the man who says so many things like Paul. So much is he like Paul that the suggestion was made long ago that Paul taught him. He has given us a number of very beautiful sayings. Let me quote one or two.
`The gods give a hand to men as they climb.'
`Live as if God saw you.'
`He that lives for no man does not live for himself.'
`The gods give many things to the ungrateful.'
`A Holy Spirit dwells within us.'
You can get a great many more samples of that kind out of the famous essay `St. Paul and Seneca' in Bishop Lightfoot's Biblical Essays. Seneca was a very mixed character. You remember that pungent line about our British statesman-philosopher, Francis Bacon, `the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind.' It is not inapplicable to Seneca, who had greater difficulties than Bacon in preserving honesty in public life, in proportion as Nero was worse than James the First.
No Christian should cast stones at a statesman who, unsupported by Christ's direct teaching, found his principles unequal to the terrific strain of doing right when life was at stake and Nero was on the throne. We have at least Seneca's words, and we thank God for them.
But it was not only in the philosopher that we have these lofty thoughts. We have evidence of the appreciation of the common people for teaching of a lofty ethical standard. It comes to us from a curious source, the scoffer Lucian, the great wit of the second century A.D. He described, in what he meant to be scorn, the eagerness of the multitude whenever any religious teacher came around who seemed to have anything of the message they wanted. Then they flocked to hear him. Lucian laughs as he talks of the absurdity of the things these men said, of the self-seeking and unworthiness of the lives of some popular preachers in those days. Well, perhaps they were all this, though I should be sorry to take Lucian's word for it, without other witness. But even if they were all that he says they were, it is very pathetic to see these crowds gathered together, so eagerly asking, `Who will show us any good?'
Was their quest wholly in vain? We are not without scattered proofs of the fact that life had God in it even then. Here, for example, is a `heathen' epitaph that is eloquent to Christian ears: Bene fac, hoc tecum feres - `Do good; you will take this with you.'
That reminds me of an epitaph I came upon the other day. It was
in a book full of inscriptions and papyri from Egypt. I had been
wandering through page after page of unspeakable dullness; it was
only grammar and lexicography that made the task imperative, a task
to which I should have been very sorry to set any one else. But I
did get one grain of gold out of all that sand. After pages and
pages of monotonous formulae, `prematurely died - good man,
farewell' and so on, I came suddenly upon this:
`Taesai lived twenty-eight years. He has gone to the Bright
Land.'
I think the glory of that Bright Land had begun to shed something
of its light even in the darkness of the Graeco-Roman world before
Christ came; for wherever men are eagerly looking for God we have
the authority of our Book to tell us that they do find Him.
In these ways, then, the world was ready. `The fullness of the time had come' (Gal. 4:4). Others could tell you of many more evidences that the world was ready then as at no other time for the preaching of God's Son.
It calls to our thought that glorious passage in Milton's Areopagitica where the great poet applies the old Egyptian fable of Isis gathering the scattered members of the mangled body of Osiris, and tells how men have been seeking all the world over the fragments of the body of Truth.
`We have not found them yet, Lords and Commons, nor shall do till her Master's second coming : He shall bring together every joint and member, and mould them into one immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.'
It was our Master's supreme achievement to gather all the rays of truth into one focus, all words of righteousness into one message, all the sights of beauty into one supremely beautiful Face upon which the world might gaze for evermore. And if that day nineteen centuries ago was `the fullness of the time,' are we to believe that He who reigned then has abdicated now, that some chance governs the world to-day, and that the events of the first century are not rather to be regarded as the glorious parable, the anticipation of events that are coming to pass now?
Christ always comes `in the fullness of the time.' He came thus to you and to me. He can trace the way for Himself in the individual life of each one of us. And as we look back upon those days when first we knew Him we rejoice to think that it was not chance that ordained the first coming of that Light into our soul. He Himself had prepared the way, and He came when everything was ready for Him.
Believe, brethren, let us believe that even now He prepares the world for His coming, and that from East to West, even through scenes of bloodshed and terror [WWI], He is preparing for the coming of His Kingdom. The day will dawn - no one can say how soon - when He shall have the nations for His inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for His possession.
James Hope Moulton: "From Egyptian Rubbish Heaps", Northfield, 1914
I. Egyptian Rubbish-Heaps and the Study of the New Testament
II. A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt
III. Some Sidelights upon Paul
IV. How We Got Our Gospels
V. The Fullness of the Time
VI. The New Song
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