The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

mounted on a donkey was riding towards the

city. A crowd streamed out to meet him, and a crowd followed him

behind. The people cast their mantles on the road before him, and also

covered it with green boughs. He rode through the city gates straight to

the Temple, dismounted, and entered the holy building.

 

In the outer courts there was a kind of bazaar in connection with the

Temple worship. Pure white lambs, pigeons, and other animals of the

requisite age and appearance were there sold, and money merchants,

sitting at their tables, changed the foreign coin with which the pilgrims

were provided. The young man at once proceeded to upset the tables and

to drive their astonished owners from the Temple, while the crowd

shouted and the little gamins, who were not the least active in the riot,

cried out, “Hurrah for the son of David!” Then people suffering from

diseases were brought to him, and he laid his hands upon them and told

them to have faith and they would be healed.

When strangers inquired the meaning of this disturbance they were told

that it was Joshua—or—as the Greek Jews called him, Jesus—the

Prophet of Nazareth. It was believed by the common people that he was

the Messiah. But the Pharisees did not acknowledge his mission. For

Jesus belonged to Galilee, and the natives of that country spoke a vile

patois, and their orthodoxy was in bad repute. “Out of Galilee,” said the

Pharisees with scorn, “out of Galilee there cometh no prophet.”

 

All persons of imaginative minds know what it is to be startled by a

thought; they know how ideas flash into the mind as if from without, and

what physical excitement they can at times produce. They also know

what it is to be possessed by a presentiment, a deep, overpowering

conviction of things to come. They know how often such presentiments

are true, and also how often they are false.

 

The prophet or seer is a man of strong imaginative powers which have

not been calmed by education. The ideas which occur to his mind often

present themselves to his eyes and ears in corresponding sights and

sounds. As one in a dream he hears voices and sees forms; his whole

mien is that of a man who is possessed; his face sometimes becomes

transfigured and appears to glow with light; but usually the symptoms are

of a more painful kind, such as foaming of the mouth, writhing of the

limbs, and a bubbling ebullition of the voice. He is sometimes seized by

these violent ideas against his will. But he can to a certain extent produce

them by long fasting and by long prayer, or in other words by the

continued concentration of the mind upon a single point; by music,

dancing, and fumigations. The disease is contagious, as is shown by the

anecdote of Saul among the prophets, and similar scenes have been

frequently witnessed by travellers in the East.

 

Prophets have existed in all countries and at all times, but the gift

becomes rare in the same proportion as people learn to read and write.

Second sight in the Highlands disappeared before the school, and so it has

been in other lands. Prophets were numerous in ancient Greece. In the

Homeric period they opposed the royal power and constituted another

authority by the grace of God. Herodotus alludes to men who went about

prophesying in hexameters. Thucydides says that while the

Peloponnesians were ravaging the lands of Athens there were prophets

within the city uttering all kinds of oracles, some for going out and some

for remaining in. It was a prophet who obtained the passing of that law

under which Socrates was afterwards condemned to death. In Greece,

Egypt, and in Israel the priests adopted and localised the prophetic power.

The oracles of Amon, Delphi, and Shiloh bore the same relation to

individual prophets as an Established Church to itinerant preachers. Syria

was especially fertile in prophets. Marius kept a Syrian prophetess

named Martha, who attended him in all his campaigns. It matters nothing

what the Syrian religion might be; the same phenomenon again and again

recurs. Balaam was a prophet before Israel was established. Then came

the prophets of the Jews, and they again have been succeeded by the

Christian cave saint and the Moslem dervish, whom the Arabs have

always regarded with equal veneration. But it was among the Jews from

the time of Samuel to the captivity that prophets or dervishes were most

abundant. They were then as plentiful as politicians—and politicians in

fact they were, and prophesied against each other. Some would be for

peace and some would be for war: some were partisans of Egypt, others

were partisans of Babylon. The prophetic ideas differ in no respect from

those of ordinary men except in the sublime or ridiculous effect which

they produce on the prophetic mind and body. Sometimes the predictions

of the Jewish prophets were fulfilled, and sometimes they were not. To

use the Greek phrase, their oracles were often of base metal, and in such a

case the unfortunate dervish was jeered at as a false prophet, and would in

his turn reproach the Lord for having made him a fool before men.

 

The Jewish prophet was an extraordinary being. He was something more

and something less than a man. He spoke like an angel; he acted like a

beast. As soon as he received his mission he ceased to wash. He often

retired to the mountains, where he might be seen skipping from rock to

rock like a goat; or he wandered in the desert with a leather girdle round

his loins, eating roots and wild honey, or sometimes browsing on grass

and flowers. He always adapted his actions to the idea which he desired

to convey. He not only taught in parables but performed them. For

instance, Isaiah walked naked through the streets to show that the Lord

would strip Jerusalem, and make her bare. Ezekiel cut off his hair and

beard and weighed it in the scales: a third part he burnt with fire, a third

part he strewed about with a knife, and a third part he scattered to the

wind. This was also intended to illustrate the calamities which would

befall the Jews. Moreover he wore a rotten girdle as a sign that their city

would decay, and buttered his bread in a manner we would rather not

describe, as a sign that they would eat defiled bread among the Gentiles.

Jeremiah wore a wooden yoke as a sign that they should be taken into

captivity. As a sign that the Jews were guilty of wantonness in

worshipping idols, Hosea cohabited three years with a woman of the

town; and as a sign that they committed adultery in turning from the Lord

their God, he went and lived with another man´s wife.

 

Such is the ludicrous side of Jewish prophecy; yet it has also its serious

and noble side. The prophets were always the tribunes of the people, the

protectors of the poor. As the tyrant revelled in his palace on the taxes

extorted from industrious peasants, a strange figure would descend from

the mountains and, stalking to the throne, would stretch forth a lean and

swarthy arm and denounce him in the name of Jehovah, and bid him

repent, or the Lord´s wrath should fall upon him and dogs should drink

his blood. In the first period of the Jewish life the prophets exercised

these functions of censor and of tribune, and preached loyalty to the god

who had brought them up out of Egypt with a strong hand. They were

also intensely fanatical, and published Jehovah´s wrath not only against

the king who was guilty of idolatry and vice, but also against the king

who took a census, or imported horses, or made treaties of friendship with

his neighbours. In the second period the prophets declared the unity of

God and exposed the folly of idol-worship. They did even more than

this. They opposed the ceremonial law, and preached the religion of the

heart. They declared that God did not care for their Sabbaths and their

festivals, and their new moons, and their prayers and church services and

ablutions, and their sacrifices of meat and oil and of incense from Arabia

and of the sweet cane from a far country. “Cease to do evil,” said they;

“learn to do well; relieve the oppressed; judge the fatherless; plead for the

widow.” It is certain that the doctrines of the great prophets were

heretical. Jeremiah flatly declared that in the day that God brought them

from the land of Egypt he did not command them concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices, and this statement would be of historical value if

prophets always spoke the truth.

 

They were bitter adversaries of the kings and priests, and the consolers of

the oppressed. “The Lord hath appointed me,” says one whose oracles

have been edited with those of Isaiah, but whose period was later and

whose true name is not known, “the Lord hath appointed me to preach

good tidings unto the meek; he that sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to give unto them that mourn

beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for lamentation, the garment of praise for

the spirit of heaviness.”

 

The aristocracy who lived by the altar did not receive these attacks in a

spirit of submission. There was a law ascribed to Moses—like all the

other Jewish laws, but undoubtedly enacted by the priest party under the

kings—that false prophets should be put to death; and though it was

dangerous to touch prophets on account of the people, who were always

on their side, they were frequently subjected to persecution. Urijah fled

from King Jehoiakim to Egypt; armed men were sent after him; he was

arrested, brought back and killed. Zachariah was stoned to death in the

courts of the Temple. Jeremiah was formally tried and was acquitted, but

he had a narrow escape: he was led, as he remarked, like a sheep to the

slaughter. At another time he was imprisoned; at another time he was let

down by ropes into a dry well; and there is a tradition that he was stoned

to death by the Jews in Egypt after all. The nominal Isaiah chants the

requiem of such a martyr in a poem of exquisite beauty and grandeur.

The prophet is described as one of hideous appearance, so that people hid

their faces from him. “His visage was marred more than any man, and

his form more than the sons of men.” The people rejected his mission

and refused to acknowledge him as a prophet. “He was despised and

rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” He was

arraigned on a charge of false prophecy; he made no defence, and he was

put to death. “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he opened not his

mouth: he was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before

her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth. He was taken from the

prison to the judgment; he was cut off from the land of the living.” It was

believed by the Jews that the death of such a man was accepted by God as

a human sacrifice, an atonement for the sins of the people, just as the

priest in the olden time heaped the sins of the people on the scapegoat and

sent him out into the wilderness. “He bare the sins of many, and made

intercession for the transgressors. The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity

of us all. Surely he hath borne our griefs and hath carried our sorrows.

His soul was made an offering for sin. He was wounded for our

transgressions, he was bruised for