13. Moreover, at the birth of Messiah, the Roman empire was freer from commotion that it had been for many years. Though it cannot be said that the whole world was in profound peace, yet there can be no doubt that the period when the Savior was born, if compared with the preceding times, was peculiarly peaceful—a condition quite essential to the introduction of the gospel and the extensive preaching of it. Nor is it too much to say that the Lord raised up the great Roman empire that under its beneficent yet powerful sway, the glad tidings of great joy, the gospel of Jesus Christ, might be widely preached among men.
14. Of the state of those nations which lay beyond the boundaries of the Roman empire we may not learn so much as of Rome. It is sufficient to know, however, that the Oriental nations were pressed down by a stern despotism, which their effeminacy of mind and body, and even their religion, led them to bear with patience; while the northern nations enjoyed much greater liberty, which was protected by the rigor of their climate and the consequent energy of their constitutions, aided by their mode of life.
15. Political and Religious State of the Jews.—The condition of the Jewish people among whom the Savior was born was scarcely any better than that of other nations. Herod, called the Great, then governed, or rather, oppressed the Jewish nation, though only a tributary king under the Romans. He drew upon himself universal hatred by his cruelties, jealousies and wars; and he exhausted the wealth of the unhappy nation by his mad luxury, his excessive magnificence, and his immoderate largesses. Under his administration Roman luxury and licentiousness spread over Palestine. In religion he was professedly a Jew, but he copied the manners of those who despise all religion.
16. The Romans did not wholly prohibit the Jews from retaining their national laws, and the religion established by Moses.
They had their high priests, council or senate (Sanhedrim)[13], and inflicted lesser punishments. They could apprehend men and bring them before the council; and if a guard of soldiers was needful, could be assisted by them upon asking the governor for them; they could bind men and keep them in custody; the council could summon witnesses, take examinations, and when they had any capital offenders, carry them before the governor. This governor usually paid a regard to what they offered, and if they brought evidence of the fact, pronounced sentence according to their laws. He was the proper judge in all capital causes.[14]
17. The measure of liberty and comfort allowed to the Jews by the Romans was well nigh wholly dissipated, first by the cruelty and avarice of the governors, and by the frauds and rapacity of the publicans; and second, by the profligacy and crimes of those who pretended to be patriots and guardians of the nation. Their principal men, their high priests, were abandoned wretches, who had purchased their places by bribes or by deeds of iniquity, and who maintained their ill-acquired authority by every species of dishonest acts. The other priests and all who held any considerable office, were not much better. The multitude, excited by such examples, ran headlong into every sort of iniquity, and by their unceasing robberies and seditions they excited against themselves both the justice of God and the vengeance of man.
18. Religious Divisions.—Two religions may be said to have flourished in Palestine at the times of which we write; viz., the Jewish and the Samaritan; between the followers of which there was a deadly hatred. The nature of the former is set forth in the Old Testament. But in the age of the Savior it had been corrupted by the traditions of the people, who were divided into sects filled with bitterness against each other. Chief among these sects were the Pharisees [Fa-ri-sees,] and Sadducees [Sad-du-seez.]
19. Pharisees and Sadducees.—While these two sects agreed as to a number of fundamental principles of the Jewish religion, they differed on questions of the highest importance, and such as related to the salvation of the soul. First, they disagreed respecting the law which God had given them. The Pharisees superadded to the written law an oral or unwritten law, handed down by tradition, which the Sadducees rejected, adhering alone to the written law. They differed, too, as to the import of the law. The Pharisees held to a double sense of the scripture, the one literal, the other figurative; while the Sadducees held only to the literal sense of the Bible. To these contests concerning the laws were added others on subjects of the highest moment; particularly in respect to the rewards and punishments announced in the sacred writings. The Pharisees supposed them to affect both body and spirit—in whose pre-existence and eternal existence they believed—and that punishments and rewards extended beyond the present life. The Sadducees believed in no future retributions. They were sceptical of the miraculous; and denied the existence of spiritual beings, the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body. They were deists, in fact; viewing the Supreme Being as a quiescent Providence calmly surveying and ruling the regular working of natural laws. They gave themselves up to ease, luxury, self-indulgence, and were not indisposed to view with indifferent liberality the laxity of heathen morals and the profanity of idol worship. They included in their numbers the leading men of the nation, were the aristocracy in fact, while the Pharisees, on the other hand, were the common people; proud of their unblemished descent from Abraham, exclusive, formal, self-righteous, strict observers of external rites and ceremonies, even beyond the requirements of the law.
20. Such were the chief sects among the Jews. There were others but they were of minor importance. Both Sadducees and Pharisees looked for a deliverer; not, however, such a one as God had promised; but a powerful warrior and a vindicator of their national liberties, a king, a ruler. All placed the sum of religion in an observance of the Mosaic ritual, and in certain duties toward their countrymen. All excluded the rest of mankind from the hope of salvation, and, of course whenever they dared, treated them with hatred and inhumanity. To these fruitful sources of vice, must be added the various absurd and superstitious opinions concerning the Divine Nature, genii, magic, etc., which they had imbibed from surrounding nations.
21. Samaritans.—The Samaritans [Sa-mar-i-tans] were colonists sent by the king of Assyria [As-syr-rya], Shalmaneser [Shal-ma-ne-zer,] to people the land after he had carried captive the Israelites, in the latter part of the eighth century, BC They were a mixed people from various eastern nations, conquered by this same king—and they brought with them their various forms of national idolatry. A plague breaking out among them, however, led them to petition for a priest of the god of the country, to teach them the old form of worship. He was stationed at Bethel [Beth-el,] and the Samaritans endeavored to combine a formal reverence of God with the practice of their own idolatrous rites. After the captivity of Judah, they sought an alliance with the returned Jews (536 BC,) with whom they intermarried. On Ezra enforcing the Mosaic law against mixed marriages—three-quarters of a century later—Manasses [Ma-nas-ses,] a Jewish priest, who had married the daughter of Sanballat [San-bal-lat,] chief of the Samaritans, headed a secession at Shechem [Shek-em.] The Samaritans taught the Mosaic ritual and erected a rival temple to that at Jerusalem, on Mount Gerizim [Ger-i-zim]. This mixed community before the time of the Savior began to claim descent from the patriarchs and a share in the promises. Their religion was less pure than that of the Jews, as they adulterated the doctrines of the Old Testament with the profane rites of the pagan religion.
22. Such was the state of the world—such the condition of the Jews at the time of Messiah's birth; and surely that condition justified the pity and also the stern reproofs—nay, the severe rebukes administered, as we shall see, by the Son of God in the course of his ministry.
NOTES.
1. State of the World at Messiah's Birth.—The world had grown old, and the dotage of its paganism was marked by hideous excesses. Atheism in belief was followed, as among all nations it has always been, by degradation of morals, iniquity seemed to have run its course to the very farthest goal. Philosophy