Chapter III: Part I: The Holy Land A.d. 30—the Battle Field of the Great Captain

“Phœnicia and Palestine were sometimes annexed to and
sometimes separated from the jurisdiction of Syria. The
former was a narrow and rocky coast; the latter was a
territory scarcely superior to Wales in fertility or extent!
Yet Phœnicia and Palestine will ever live in the memory of
mankind, since America as well as Europe has received
letters from the one and religion from the other.”—GIBBON,
Chap. i.

IN order to approach our subject with any chance of making the central figure clear to ourselves, and getting out of the atmosphere of unreality in which our ordinary religious training is too apt to leave us, we must make an effort to understand the condition and the surroundings of life in Palestine when our Lord appeared in it as a leader and teacher.

Take first the southern portion, the scene of the opening and closing days of His ministry, and of periodical visits during those three years. While He was still a boy under ten years of age, the Romans had deposed Herod Archelaus, and had annexed Judæa, which was from thenceforth ruled as a province of the empire by a Roman procurator. The rebellion of Judas of Gamala, which followed shortly afterwards, was a fierce protest of the Jews against the imperial taxation and the yoke of Rome. It was suppressed in the stern Roman fashion, and from that time till the commencement of Christ’s public ministry, Jerusalem and the surrounding country were on the verge of revolt, a constant source of anxiety to the Roman procurators, and held down with difficulty by the heavy hand of the legions which garrisoned them.

All that was best and worst in the Jewish character and history combined to render the Roman yoke intolerably galling to the nation. The peculiar position of Jerusalem—a sort of Mecca to the tribes acknowledging the Mosaic law—made Syria the most dangerous of all the Roman provinces. To that city enormous crowds of pilgrims, of the most stiff-necked and fanatical of all races, flocked three times at least in every year, bringing with them offerings and tribute for the Temple and its guardians, on a scale which must have made the hierarchy at Jerusalem formidable even to the world’s master, by their mere command of wealth.

But this would be the least of the causes of anxiety to the Roman governor, as he spent year after year face to face with these terrible leaders of a terrible people.

These high priests and rulers of the Jews were indeed quite another kind of adversaries from the leaders, secular or religious, of any of those conquered countries, which the Romans were wont to treat with contemptuous toleration. They still represented living traditions of the glory and sanctity of their nation, and of Jerusalem, and exercised still a power over that nation which the most resolute and ruthless of Roman procurators did not care wantonly to brave.

At the same time the yoke of high priest and scribe and pharisee was even heavier on the necks of their own people than that of the Roman. They had built up a huge superstructure of traditions and ceremonies round the law of Moses, which they held up to the people as more sacred and binding than the law itself. This superstructure was their special charge. This was, according to them, the great national inheritance, the most valuable portion of the covenant which God had made with their fathers. To them, as leaders of their nation—a select, priestly, and learned caste—this precious inheritance had been committed. Outside that caste, the dim multitude, “the people which knoweth not the law,” were despised while they obeyed, accursed as soon as they showed any sign of disobedience. Such being the state of Judæa, it would not be easy to name in all history a less hopeful place for the reforming mission of a young carpenter, a stranger from a despised province, one entirely outside the ruling caste, though of the royal race, and who had no position whatever in any rabbinical school.

In Galilee the surroundings were slightly different, but scarcely more promising. Herod Antipas, the weakest of that tyrant family, the seducer of his brother’s wife, the fawner on Cæsar, the spendthrift oppressor of the people of his tetrarchy, still ruled in name over the country, but with Roman garrisons in the cities and strongholds. Face to face with him, and exercising an _imperium in imperio_ throughout Galilee, was the same priestly caste, though far less formidable to the civil power, and to the people, than in the southern province. Along the western coast of the Sea of Galilee, the chief scene of our Lord’s northern ministry, lay a network of towns densely inhabited, and containing a large admixture of Gentile traders. This infusion of foreign blood, the want of any such religious centre at Jerusalem, and the contempt with which the southern Jews regarded their provincial brethren of Galilee, had no doubt loosened to some extent the yoke of the priests and scribes and lawyers in that province. But even here their traditionary power over the masses of the people was very great, and the consequences of defying their authority as penal, though the penalty might be neither so swift nor so certain, as in Jerusalem itself. Such was the society into which Christ came.

It is not easy to find a parallel case in the modern world, but perhaps the nearest exists in a portion of our own empire. The condition of parts of India in our day resembles in some respects that of Palestine in the year A.D. 30. In the Mahratta country, princes, not of the native dynasty, but the descendants of foreign courtiers (like the Idumæan Herods), are reigning. British residents at their courts, hated and feared, but practically all-powerful as Roman procurators, answer to the officers and garrisons of Rome in Palestine. The people are in bondage to a priestly caste scarcely less heavy than that which weighed on the Judæan and Galilean peasantry. If the Mahrattas were Mohammedans, and Mecca were situate in the territory of Scindiah or Holkar; if the influence of twelve centuries of Christian training could be wiped out of the English character, and the stubborn and fierce nature of the Jew substituted for that of the Mahratta; a village reformer amongst them, whose preaching outraged the Brahmins, threatened the dynasties, and disturbed the English residents, would start under somewhat similar conditions to those which surrounded Christ when He commenced His ministry.

In one respect, and one only, the time seemed propitious. The mind and heart of the nation were full of the expectation of a coming Messiah—a King who should break every yoke from off the necks of His people, and should rule over the nations, sitting on the throne of David. The intensity of this expectation had, in the opening days of His ministry, drawn crowds into the wilderness beyond Jordan from all parts of Judæa and Galilee, at the summons of a preacher who had caught up the last cadence of the song of their last great prophet, and was proclaiming that both the deliverance and the kingdom which they were looking for were at hand. In those crowds who flocked to hear John the Baptist there were doubtless some even amongst the priests and scribes, and many amongst the poor Jewish and Galilean peasantry, who felt that there was a heavier yoke upon them than that of Rome or of Herod Antipas. But the record of the next three years shows too clearly that even these were wholly unprepared for any other than a kingdom of this world, and a temporal throne to be set up in the holy city.

And so, from the first, Christ had to contend not only against the whole of the established powers of Palestine, but against the highest aspirations of the best of His countrymen. These very Messianic hopes, in fact, proved the greatest stumbling-block in His path. Those who entertained them most vividly had the greatest difficulty in accepting the carpenter’s son as the promised Deliverer. A few days only before the end He had sorrowfully to warn the most intimate and loving of His companions and disciples, “Ye know not what spirit ye are of.”

We must endeavour to keep these external conditions and surroundings of the life of a Galilean peasant in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius Cæsar in our minds, if we really wish honestly to understand and appreciate the work done by one of them in those three short years, or the character of the doer of it.

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