The preaching of a gospel seems to us as natural as the existence of a religion. That is because the religions we know best are universal ones, of which the God is a transcendent being, in whose sight human distinctions are negligible. But for the Mediterranean world that was not the case. The religions were not universal; many of the gods were concretely believed to be the ancestors of certain groups of men, and not always remote ones. Local associations played a determining part. If we find an active propaganda here, it cannot be because the spread of a ritual or faith is an inherent characteristic. On the contrary, in normal circumstances there seems to be no reason why one community should change its gods or forms of worship for those of another.
But, as a matter of fact, they did change them. And the change was often effected consciously by the planned efforts of a group of worshipers, and in all the ways that have been used since—preaching, emotional revivals, and forcible conquest. One such carefully planned effort was that of the Jews, but only one of them. The circumstances in which this propaganda was carried out need close investigation.
149In discussing Greek religion (above, p. 34) it has been suggested that there was in every community a large number of men who found no real satisfaction in the state cult, and that it was chiefly among them that the proselytes of new and foreign religions were to be found. But that does not make us understand why these foreign religions should have sought proselytes, why they should have felt themselves under obligations to assume a mission. The stranger within the gates might reasonably be expected to do honor to the divine lord of the city: if he remained permanently, his inclusion in the civic family in some way is natural. But what was it that impelled Isis to seek worshipers so far from the Nile, where alone she could be properly adored, or the mysterious Cabiri to go so far from the caves where their power was greatest and most direct?[143]
The movement of which these special missions are phases was old and extensive. It covered the entire Eastern Mediterranean, and went perhaps further west and east than we can at present demonstrate. Its beginnings probably antedated the Hellenes. The religious unrest of which Christian missionaries made such excellent use was a phenomenon that goes back very far in the history of Mediterranean civilization. At certain periods of that history and in different places it reached culminating waves, but it is idle to attempt to discover a sufficient cause for it in a limited series of events within a circumscribed area of Greece or of Asia.
The briefest form in which the nature of this unrest can be phrased is the following—the quest for personal salvation.
150We shall do well to remember that the ancient state was a real corporation, based not upon individuals but upon smaller family corporations. The rights of these corporations were paramount. It was only gradually that individuals were recognized at all in law.[144] The desire for personal salvation is a part of the growing consciousness of personality, and must have begun almost as soon as the state corporation itself became fixed.
Within a state only those individuals can have relatively free play who are to a certain extent the organs of the state; that is, those individuals who by conquest, wealth, or chance have secured for themselves political predominance in their respective communities. But these could never be more than a small minority. For the great majority everyday life was hemmed in by conventions that had the force of laws, and was restricted by legal limits drastically enforced. And this narrow and pitifully poor life was bounded by Sheol, or Hades, by a condition eloquently described as worse at its best than the least desirable existence under the face of the insufferable sun.[145]
The warrior caste, for whom and of whom the Homeric poems were written, were firmly convinced that the bloodless and sinewless life in the House of Hades was the goal to which existence tended. But they found their compensation in that existence itself. What of those who lacked these compensations, or had learned to despise them? In them the prospect of becoming lost in the mass of flitting and indistinguishable 151shadows must have produced a profound horror, and their minds must have dwelt upon it with increasing intensity.
It is one of the most ancient beliefs of men in this region that all the dead become disembodied spirits, sometimes with power for good or evil, so that their displeasure is to be deprecated, sometimes without such power, as the Homeric nobles believed, and the mass of the Jews in the times of the monarchy. These spirits or ghosts had of themselves no recognizable personality, and could receive it only exceptionally and in ways that violated the ordinary laws of the universe. Such a belief is not strictly a belief in immortality at all, since the essence of the latter is that the actual person of flesh and blood continues his identity when flesh and blood are dissolved and disappear, and that the characteristics which, except for form and feature, separated him from his fellows in life still do so after death. The only bodiless beings who could be said to have a personality were the gods, and they were directly styled “the Immortals.”
However, the line that separated gods and men was not sharp. The adoration offered to the dead in the Spartan relief[146] is not really different from the worship of the Olympians. From the other side, in Homer, the progeny of Zeus by mortal women are very emphatically men.[147] Whether the Homeric view is a special development, it is demonstrably true that a general belief was current in Greece not long after the Homeric epoch, which saw no impossibility in favored men 152securing the gift of immortality; that is, continuing without interruption the personal life which alone had significance. This was done by the translations—the removal of mortal men in the flesh to kinship with the gods.[148]
This privilege of personal immortality was not connected, in the myths that told of it, with eminent services. It was at all times a matter of grace. In the form of bodily translation it always remained a rare and miraculous exception. But the mere existence of such a belief must have strongly influenced the beliefs and practices that had long been connected with the dead.
We cannot tell where and when it was first suggested to men that the shadow-life of Hades might by the grace of the gods be turned into real life, and a real immortality secured. It may be, as has been supposed, that the incentive came from Egypt. More likely, however, it was an independent growth, and perhaps arose in more than one place. The favor and grace of the gods, which were indispensable, could obviously be gained by intimate association, and in the eighth and perhaps even the ninth pre-Christian century we begin to hear in Greece of means of entering into that association. One of these means was the “mystery,” of which the Eleusinian is the best-known. In these cult-societies, of the origin of which we know nothing, a close and intimate association with the god or gods was offered. The initiated saw with their own eyes the godhead perform certain ceremonial acts; perhaps they sat cheek by jowl with him. It is obvious that such 153familiarity involved the especial favor of the gods, and it is easy to understand that the final and crowning mark of that favor would not be always withheld. The communion with the god begun in this life would be continued after it. To the mystae of Eleusis, and no doubt elsewhere, and to them only, was promised a personal immortality.[149]
It may not have been first at Eleusis. It may have been in the obscure corners of Thrace where what later appeared as Orphic societies was developed. But there were soon many mysteries, and there was no lack of men and women to whom the promise was inexpressibly sweet. The spread of Orphism in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. bears witness to the eagerness with which the evangel was received.
Outside of Greece, in Persia, India, and Egypt, perhaps also in Babylonia, there were hereditary groups of men who claimed to possess an arcanum, whereby the supreme favor of the gods, that of eternal communion with them, was to be obtained. These hereditary castes desired no extension, but jealously guarded their privileges. But among them there constantly arose earnest and warm-hearted men, whose humanity impelled them to spread as widely as possible the boon which they had themselves obtained by accident. Perhaps many attempts in all these countries aborted. Not all Gotamas succeeded in becoming Buddhas.
The Jews seemed to the Greeks to possess just such an arcanum, and whatever interest they originally excited was due to that fact. The initiatory rite of circumcision, 154the exclusiveness of a ritual that did not brook even the proximate presence of an uninitiate, all pointed in that direction, even if we disregard the vigorously asserted claims of the Jews to be in a very special sense the people of God.
The Jews too had as far as the masses were concerned developed the belief in a personal immortality during the centuries that followed the Babylonian exile (comp. p. 70), and as far as we can see it developed among them at the same time and somewhat in the same way as elsewhere. That is to say, among them as among others the future life, the Olam ha-bo, was a privilege and was sought for with especial eagerness by those to whom the Olam ha-zeh was largely desolate. Not reward for some and punishment for others, but complete exclusion from any life but that of Sheol for those who failed to acquire the Olam ha-bo, was the doctrine maintained, just as the Greek mystae knew that for those who were not initiated there was waiting, not the wheel of Ixion or the stone of Sisyphus, but the bleak non-existence of Hades.[150]
But there was a difference, and this difference became vital. Conduct was not disregarded in the Greek mysteries, but the essential thing was the fact of initiation. Those who first preached the doctrine of a personal salvation to the Jews were conscious in so doing that they were preaching to a society of initiates. They were all mystae; all had entered into the covenant: all belonged to the congregation of the Lord, ??? ????. To whom was this boon of immortality, the Olam ha-bo, to 155be given? The first missionaries, whether they did or did not constitute a sect, had a ready answer. To those to whom the covenant was real, who accepted fully the yoke of the Law.
The sects of Pharisees and Sadducees, whose disputes fill later Jewish history, joined issue on a number of points. No doubt there was an economic and social cleavage between them as well. But perhaps the most nearly fundamental difference of doctrine rela............