BUT THE NEW WORDS OF LOVE AND HOPE WHICH HAD BEEN WHISPERED INTO THE EARS OF AN UNHAPPY HUMANITY COULD NOT BE SUPPRESSED BY THE ACTS OF ROMAN GOVERNORS AND ENVIOUS JEWISH PRIESTS.NAY,NOT EVEN THE EMPEROR HIMSELF COULD PREVENT THE DISCIPLES OF JESUS FROM CARRYING THE MESSAGE OF THEIR MASTER TO ALL THOSE WHO CARED TO LISTEN
The teaching of Jesus was the noblest expression of a human soul seeking happiness in the exercise of love and justice.
And this accounts for the survival and the final triumph of an idea which so many people during so many centuries have tried to destroy.
The world in which Jesus lived was very badly balanced.
Those who sat in the seats of the mighty had too much and those who lived in slavery had too little.
But the latter outnumbered the former a thousand to one.
It was among the very poor that the words of Jesus were first heard;that his lessons of kindliness,his assurance that the Mighty Spirit which dominates this universe was a spirit of love,were first discussed and accepted.
Those simple folk had never been touched by the plausible philosophies of the Sceptics and the Epicureans.
They could not read and they did not know how to write.
They had ears,however,with which to hear.
To their masters they were little better than the cows grazing in the fields.
They lived and died and were forgotten and no one mourned their loss.
Then suddenly the door of their bondage was opened wide and they were given a glimpse of the truth that all men are children of One Heavenly Father.
As was to be expected,the first people to accept the new faith were those Jews who lived in the same neighbourhood and who had been able to hear him and feel the charm of his words and see the fearless light in his eyes.
A few centuries later,the Middle Ages,in their nave acceptance of all written tradition,conceived a fierce hatred for the Jews,because certain Jews had been directly responsible for the death of him whom they called God's son.
This attitude was utterly indefensible as we have since come to understand.
Jesus was a Jew.His mother was a Jewess.His friends and his disciples were Jews.
He himself rarely left the Jewish community in which he had grown up.He was quite willing to associate with foreigners,with Greeks and Samaritans and Phoenicians and Syrians and Romans,but he lived and died for his own people and lay buried in Jewish ground.
He was the last and the greatest of the Jewish prophets and a direct descendant of those intrepid spiritual leaders who had stepped forward at every national crisis.
No,those Pharisees and Sadducees who killed Jesus were Jews only in the most narrow and bigoted sense of the word.
They were the selfish defenders of an intolerant creed which had outlived its usefulness by many hundred years.
They were the self-appointed administrators of an outrageous monopoly of outward holiness.
They committed a terrible crime,but they committed it as members of a political and a religious party,and not as Jews,and if they were without rivals in their hatred for the new prophet,others of their race were equally staunch in the love which they bore their murdered Master.
And it was among those faithful pupils living in the land of Galilee and of Judaea that the first Christian community,the first combination of people who believed that Jesus was the Christos,or Anointed,was founded.
It is not quite correct to speak in this connection of a Christian community,for that name was not used until several years later in the city of Antioch in Asia Minor.But the community of disciples existed and prospered and the members met regularly,almost under the shadow of the cross,in that same city of Jerusalem,which had sent Jesus to his terrible death.
Soon,however,there were dissensions and little groups were formed by those who shared the same ideas and could not quite agree with their neighbours.Some,like Stephen,who was familiar with the current Greek philosophies,understood that there must be a definite break between the old and the new and that there was not room in their church for the stern Jehovah of Moses and the loving God whom Jesus had preached.
But when they said this,the others arose in their wrath and killed them,for they seemed to be in favour of letting down all barriers against foreigners,and that was still a horrible thing in the eyes of those whose childhood had been spent within sight of the old Temple.
Presently,however,the breach widened.In less than a dozen years after the death of Jesus,his teachings had been put into a definite shape which forever separated the Christian from the Jew,as it separates him from the Buddhist or the Mohammedan.
From that moment on it was comparatively easy for the new doctrine to spread across western Asia.
The wisdom of the old Jewish law lay buried in the unknown tongue of the forgotten Hebrew language.
But everything connected with the “Christos”was being written down in Greek,and Alexander the Macedonian had made that tongue the international language of antiquity.
The stage was set.
The world of the west was ready for the message from the east.
There was need of a man who could carry Galilee to Rome.
He came.
And his name was Paul.
