The Life of Jesus. Ernest Renan

can sit to-day without an uneasy, though it may be a frivolous, feeling about his destiny, Jesus sat often untroubled by a doubt. Free from selfishness—that source of our troubles, which makes us seek with eagerness a reward for virtue beyond the tomb—he thought only of his work, of his race, and of humanity. Those mountains, that sea, that azure sky, those high plains in the horizon, were for him not the melancholy vision of a soul which interrogates Nature upon her fate, but the certain symbol, the transparent shadow, of an invisible world, and of a new heaven.

      He never attached much importance to the political events of his time, and he probably knew little about them. The court of the Herods formed a world so different to his, that he doubtless knew it only by name. Herod the Great died about the year in which Jesus was born, leaving imperishable remembrances—monuments which must compel the most malevolent posterity to associate his name with that of Solomon; nevertheless, his work was incomplete, and could not be continued. Profanely ambitious, and lost in a maze of religious controversies, this astute Idumean had the advantage which coolness and judgment, stripped of morality, give over passionate fanatics. But his idea of a secular kingdom of Israel, even if it had not been an anachronism in the state of the world in which it was conceived, would inevitably have miscarried, like the similar project which Solomon formed, owing to the difficulties proceeding from the character of the nation. His three sons were only lieutenants of the Romans, analogous to the rajahs of India under the English dominion. Antipater, or Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and of Peræa, of whom Jesus was a subject all his life, was an idle and useless prince,[1] a favorite and flatterer of Tiberius,[2] and too often misled by the bad influence of his second wife, Herodias.[3] Philip, tetrarch of Gaulonitis and Batanea, into whose dominions Jesus made frequent journeys, was a much better sovereign.[4] As to Archelaus, ethnarch of Jerusalem, Jesus could not know him, for he was about ten years old when this man, who was weak and without character, though sometimes violent, was deposed by Augustus.[5] The last trace of self-government was thus lost to Jerusalem. United to Samaria and Idumea, Judea formed a kind of dependency of the province of Syria, in which the senator Publius Sulpicius Quirinus, well known as consul,[6] was the imperial legate. A series of Roman procurators, subordinate in important matters to the imperial legate of Syria—Coponius, Marcus Ambivius, Annius Rufus, Valerius Gratus, and lastly (in the twenty-sixth year of our era), Pontius Pilate[7]—followed each other, and were constantly occupied in extinguishing the volcano which was seething beneath their feet.

      [Footnote 1: Jos., Ant., VIII. v. 1, vii. 1 and 2; Luke iii. 19.]

      [Footnote 2: Ibid., XVIII. ii. 3, iv. 5, v. 1.]

      [Footnote 3: Ibid., XVIII. vii. 2.]

      [Footnote 4: Ibid., XVIII. iv. 6.]

      [Footnote 5: Ibid., XVII. xii. 2; and B.J., II. vii. 3.]

      [Footnote 6: Orelli, Inscr. Lat., No. 3693; Henzen, Suppl., No. 7041; Fasti prænestini, on the 6th of March, and on the 28th of April (in the Corpus Inscr. Lat., i. 314, 317); Borghesi, Fastes Consulaires (yet unedited), in the year 742; R. Bergmann, De Inscr. Lat. ad. P.S. Quirinium, ut videtur, referenda (Berlin, 1851). Cf. Tac., Ann., ii. 30, iii. 48; Strabo, XII. vi. 5.]

      [Footnote 7: Jos., Ant., l. XVIII.]

      Continual seditions, excited by the zealots of Mosaism, did not cease, in fact, to agitate Jerusalem during all this time.[1] The death of the seditious was certain; but death, when the integrity of the Law was in question, was sought with avidity. To overturn the Roman eagle, to destroy the works of art raised by the Herods, in which the Mosaic regulations were not always respected[2]—to rise up against the votive escutcheons put up by the procurators, the inscriptions of which appeared tainted with idolatry[3]—were perpetual temptations to fanatics, who had reached that degree of exaltation which removes all care for life. Judas, son of Sariphea, Matthias, son of Margaloth, two very celebrated doctors of the law, formed against the established order a boldly aggressive party, which continued after their execution.[4] The Samaritans were agitated by movements of a similar nature.[5] The Law had never counted a greater number of impassioned disciples than at this time, when he already lived who, by the full authority of his genius and of his great soul, was about to abrogate it. The "Zelotes" (Kenaïm), or "Sicarii," pious assassins, who imposed on themselves the task of killing whoever in their estimation broke the Law, began to appear.[6] Representatives of a totally different spirit, the Thaumaturges, considered as in some sort divine, obtained credence in consequence of the imperious want which the age experienced for the supernatural and the divine.[7]

      [Footnote 1: Ibid., the books XVI. and XVIII. entirely, and B.J., books I. and II.]

      [Footnote 2: Jos., Ant., XV. x. 4. Compare Book of Enoch, xcvii. 13, 14.]

      [Footnote 3: Philo, Leg. ad Caium, § 38.]

      [Footnote 4: Jos., Ant., XVII. vi. 2, and following; B.J., I. xxxiii. 3, and following.]

      [Footnote 5: Jos., Ant., XVIII. iv. 1, and following.]

      [Footnote 6: Mishnah, Sanhedrim, ix. 6; John xvi. 2; Jos., B.J., book IV., and following.]

      [Footnote 7: Acts viii. 9. Verse 11 leads us to suppose that Simon the magician was already famous in the time of Jesus.]

      A movement which had much more influence upon Jesus was that of Judas the Gaulonite, or Galilean. Of all the exactions to which the country newly conquered by Rome was subjected, the census was the most unpopular.[1] This measure, which always astonishes people unaccustomed to the requirements of great central administrations, was particularly odious to the Jews. We see that already, under David, a numbering of the people provoked violent recriminations, and the menaces of the prophets.[2] The census, in fact, was the basis of taxation; now taxation, to a pure theocracy, was almost an impiety. God being the sole Master whom man ought to recognize, to pay tithe to a secular sovereign was, in a manner, to put him in the place of God. Completely ignorant of the idea of the State, the Jewish theocracy only acted up to its logical induction—the negation of civil society and of all government. The money of the public treasury was accounted stolen money.[3] The census ordered by Quirinus (in the year 6 of the Christian era) powerfully reawakened these ideas, and caused a great fermentation. An insurrection broke out in the northern provinces. One Judas, of the town of Gamala, upon the eastern shore of the Lake of Tiberias, and a Pharisee named Sadoc, by denying the lawfulness of the tax, created a numerous party, which soon broke out in open revolt.[4] The fundamental maxims of this party were—that they ought to call no man "master," this title belonging to God alone; and that liberty was better than life. Judas had, doubtless, many other principles, which Josephus, always careful not to compromise his co-religionists, designedly suppresses; for it is impossible to understand how, for so simple an idea, the Jewish historian should give him a place among the philosophers of his nation, and should regard him as the founder of a fourth school, equal to those of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. Judas was evidently the chief of a Galilean sect, deeply imbued with the Messianic idea, and which became a political movement. The procurator, Coponius, crushed the sedition of the Gaulonite; but the school remained, and preserved its chiefs. Under the leadership of Menahem, son of the founder, and of a certain Eleazar, his relative, we find them again very active in the last contests of the Jews against the Romans.[5] Perhaps Jesus saw this Judas, whose idea of the Jewish revolution was so different from his own; at all events, he knew his school, and it was probably to avoid his error that he pronounced the axiom upon the penny of Cæsar. Jesus, more wise, and far removed from all sedition, profited by the fault of his predecessor, and dreamed of another kingdom and another deliverance.

      [Footnote 1: Discourse of Claudius at Lyons, Tab. ii. sub fin. De

       Boisseau, Inscr. Ant. de Lyon, p. 136.]

      [Footnote 2: 2 Sam. xxiv.]

      [Footnote 3: Talmud of Babylon, Baba Kama, 113 a; Shabbath, 33 b.]

      [Footnote 4: Jos., Ant., XVIII. i. 1 and 6; B.J., II. viii. 1; Acts v. 37. Previous to Judas the Gaulonite, the Acts place another agitator, Theudas; but this is an anachronism, the movement of Theudas took place in the year 44 of the Christian era (Jos., Ant., XX. v. 1).]

      [Footnote