NOW IT HAPPENED DURING THE REIGN OF ONE OF THOSE KINGS,BY THE NAME OF HEROD,THAT MARY,THE WIFE OF JOSEPH THE CARPENTER FROM NAZARETH,GAVE BIRTH TO A SON WHO WAS CALLED JOSHUA BY HIS OWN PEOPLE AND JESUS BY HIS GREEK NEIGHBOURS
In the year 117,Tacitus,the Roman historian,tried to account for the persecutions of a new sect which had just taken place throughout the Empire.
He was no friend of Nero.
All the same,he did his best to find some excuse for this particular outrage.
“The Emperor,”so he wrote,“has inflicted cruel tortures upon certain men and women who are hated for their crimes and who are called ‘Christians’by the mob.The particular Christ from whom they have taken their name was put to death under the Emperor Tiberius by a certain Pontius Pilate,who happened to be procurator of Judaea a distant province in Asia.Although repressed for a while,this terrible and detestable superstition has broken out again,not only in Judaea,the ground of the evil,but also in Rome,to which city,unfortunately,all the infamies and irregularities of the world tend to gravitate.”
Tacitus mentioned the whole matter in that detached way in which an English journalist of the year 1776might have referred to certain insignificant revolutionary outbreaks which had occurred in a distant colony of the Empire but which were not supposed to be of a very serious nature.
The Roman did not know exactly who those “Christians”of whom he wrote so contemptuously were or who that Christ was from whom “they had taken their name.”
He did not know and he did not care.
There always was trouble of some sort in a state as big and as complicated as the Roman Empire and the Jews who were to be found in most of the larger cities were always quarrelling among each other and invariably exasperated the magistrate to whom they carried their disputes by their faithful tenacity to certain incomprehensible laws.
The Christ in question had probably been a preacher in some obscure little synagogue in Galilee or Judaea.
Of course there was more than a probability that Nero had been a bit too severe.
On the other hand,it was better not to be too lenient in such matters.And there the question rested,as far as Tacitus was concerned.
He never mentioned the offending sect again.
His interest was entirely academic and such as we ourselves might take in the trouble between the Canadian Mounted Police and those strange Russian sects which inhabit the western portion of that vast empire of forests and grain fields.
The information which other writers of that period throw upon the same subject leaves us little wiser.
Josephus,a Jew,who in the year 80of our era published a detailed history of his country,mentions Pontius Pilate and John the Baptist,but we do not find the name of Jesus in the original version of his work.
Justus of Tiberias,who wrote at the same time as Josephus,had apparently never heard of Jesus,although he was thoroughly familiar with the Jewish history of the first two centuries.
There is complete silence on the part of all contemporary historians and we depend for our knowledge entirely upon the first four books of the New Testament,which are called the four “gospels,”an old English word which meant “good tidings.”
Like the book of Daniel and the Psalms of David,and many other Chapters of the Old Testament,the Gospels bear fictitious names.
They are called after the apostles Matthew,Mark,Luke and John,but it seems very unlikely that the original disciples had anything to do with those famous literary compositions.
The subject is still shrouded in deep mystery.For many centuries it has been a favourite subject for scholastic dispute,but as no form of altercation seems more futile and unprofitable than that connected with theological subjects,we shall refrain from giving a definite opinion,but shall in a few words try to explain why this topic has given rise to so much discussion.
Of course,to the people of the modern world,who from childhood on are obliged to wade through a veritable mire of printed wood-pulp (newspapers,books,time-tables,menus,telephone directories,passports,telegrams,letters,income tax blanks,and what not),it seems incredible that we should not possess a single written scrap of contemporary evidence for the life and the death of Jesus.
But historically speaking,there is nothing very unusual or startling in this.
The famous songs of Homer were not written down until centuries after the disappearance of those travelling bards who used to wander from village to village and recite the glories of Hector and Achilles to admiring groups of young Greeks.
In those early days,when people depended for their information upon the spoken word,they developed very accurate memories.Stories were transmitted from father to son just as carefully as they are now handed over to posterity by means of the printed word.
Furthermore,we must not forget that Jesus,once he had refused to assume the rle of a Jewish national leader (a fond hope of many of his own people),was obliged to associate almost exclusively with very poor and simple fisherfolk and inn-keepers,none of whom were expert editors,and most of whom were undoubtedly ignorant of the art of writing.
And finally,once he had been crucified,it seemed a sheer waste of time to give an account of his life or his teaching.
The disciples of Jesus firmly believed that the end of the world was near at hand.While preparing for the final judgment,they did not care to compose books which soon would be destroyed by the fire from Heaven.
As the years went by,however,and it became more and more certain that the world was going to continue upon its tranquil voyage through space for many centuries to come,efforts were made to gather the memoirs of those who had known Jesus personally and who had heard him speak and who had been the companions of his last years.
