The Kingdom, it seems, was to consist of various estates, comprising various degrees of initiates. He himself was the destined Sovereign, personally answerable to God the Father and in direct authority over the tribe of Judah. Under him would serve twelve rulers, his twelve gilgal-pillars, each set in authority over one of the remaining twelve tribes. They would consist of the six disciples already named—Judas, Peter, James, John, Andrew, Thomas—and six more whom he chose in the Garden of Galilee after his Nazareth visit—Philip, Bartholomew, Simon of Cana, James the Less, Matthew and Thaddaeus. These twelve, together with three hidden disciples—Nicanor the Essene ; Nicodemon son of Gorion, a member of the Sanhedrin ; and his own half-brother James the Ebionite—were to form his Inner Council, divided into three groups of five, namely, the healers, the prophets and the law-givers. Jesus designated Peter, James, John, Andrew and Thomas as the chosen healers ; Judas, Philip, Bartholomew, Simon of Cana, James the Less as the chosen prophets ; and Matthew, Thaddaeus, Nicanor, Nicodemon and James the Ebionite as the chosen law-givers. All these were Israelites, and they were to be assisted by a Grand Council of seventy-two, also Israelites. Five district synods, representative of the synagogues, would be obedient to this central body of spiritual government.
Women would have no part in government, yet they would be honoured citizens of the Kingdom and permitted to form sacred choirs, as among the Essene Therapeutics of Egypt, and even to prophesy, for according to Pharisaic tradition : “The man is not to be without the woman, nor the woman without the man, nor are both together to be without the Glory of the Lord.” Other nations would be given the status of either allies or subject allies in a world empire dominated by the Kingdom of Israel ; but the function of the Israelites was to be not arrogant overlords of the rest but the world’s moral exemplars, and they would therefore be bound by the strictest observance of the Law. The allies would be bound by a general moral law and the acknowledgement of God’s supreme sovereignty ; and the same demands for holiness would not be immediately made from those whose closest link with the Israelites was a common descent from Noah—among them the Armenians, the Cypriots, the Ionians, the Assyrians and the Cimmerians of Northern Britain—as from those who, like the Arabians, Edomites and Dorians, could claim to be descended from Abraham. But before the thousand years were over, even the savage Moors and cannibalistic Finns would adopt circumcision and the Law and become true Children of Light.
Many men whom Jesus summoned to be his disciples excused themselves on one ground or another. To one who said : “I will come when my old father dies,” he replied : “Let the dead bury their dead, as in the Egyptian fable.”
“Not yet, not yet !”
He was convinced that the Kingdom of God was close at hand, though the hour and day of its coming were known only to God himself, and that multitudes of those to whom he preached would survive the dreadful terrors that were to announce it, and would therefore never experience death. At the end of the thousand years, the physical world would come to an end, and a general Resurrection and Day of Judgement ensue : then the Kingdom of God would merge in the Kingdom of Heaven, a purely spiritual existence in which the souls of righteous men would become radiant elements of God’s glory. In this firm belief he set out to refine religious faith and practice, choosing the best doctrinal elements from all the different sects of Jewry—including the Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and Anavim, or Messianic mystics—and correlating these with the generous, yet scrupulous, Pharisaic system. He would travel the Holy Land from end to end, like a shepherd who rounds up his strayed sheep ; even visiting Samaria, where the peasants belonged to the old Israelite stock, though the priesthood and aristocracy were foreigners who had originally embraced Judaism as a convenience.
In a version of the Acts and Sayings of Jesus current in the Roman Church, an incident of Jesus’s audacious visit to the Samaritans is characteristically presented as having occurred at Jerusalem. And how clumsy the forgery is! Jesus is recorded as saving the life of a woman whom the Pharisees are about to stone for adultery by the simple ruse of saying : “Let the man among you who is sinless cast the first stone !” But for the past hundred years the law for the stoning of a Jewish adulteress had been a dead letter : she must be brought to Jerusalem for trial, even if taken in the act elsewhere. She needed only to plead ignorance of the Law before the Pharisaic High Court and she was acquitted, though liable to be divorced and warned before two witnesses never to meet her paramour again. She did not even lose her rights under the marriage contract. Where adultery was only suspected, not proved, she was given “bitter water” to drink in proof of her innocence ; then if she died she was proved guilty, but since the bitter water was merely a strong purge, she was invariably proved innocent. It was only in Samaria that the penalty against adulteresses and their paramours was exacted with primitive fury.
In the same volume occurs another absurdity. According to the original Aramaic version, Jesus, in dispute with a Sadducee, tells the story of a Samaritan who goes from Jerusalem to Jericho and on the way is robbed, wounded and stripped by bandits. A priest passes by on the other side of the road, so does a Levite, but a simple God-loving Israelite takes him up, dresses his wounds, sets him on his own ass, and conveys him to an inn where he will be cared for. The moral of the story is that the common people of Israel—the common people educated in the Pharisaic synagogues—are more religious-minded than the Temple priesthood, and that when the Kingdom of God is established it will contain very few of the natural religious leaders of Israel : “The first shall be the last ; the last shall be the first.” The Sadducees had, indeed, for centuries refused the Samaritans entry into the Inner Courts of the Temple and regarded them as unclean ; which explains the reluctance of the priest and the Levite to aid the wounded man. Jesus, though aware of the Samaritans’ faults, was declaring that the breach between them and the Jews—which had greatly widened since the defilement of the Court of the Priests twenty years before—must be speedily healed, and could be healed only by generosity. But in the Roman version the text has been amended to emphasize the Gentile Chrestians’ dislike of the Pharisees and of the Jews generally. The occasion of the story is presented as a dispute between Jesus and a Pharisee, while in the story itself the nationality of the victim is not mentioned and the kindly God-fearing Israelite is no longer an Israelite but a Samaritan. Again, what a clumsy forgery! The amended story does not make literary sense. It is as though one were to substitute “Carthaginian” for “Citizen” in a Roman moral tale of how Senator, Knight and Citizen behaved in some social crisis ; for Priest, Levite and Israelite are the three estates of Jewry, as the three estates of Rome are Senator, Knight and Citizen. Moreover, the context in which according to both versions Jesus spoke the parable was his quotation of the text : “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”, to which the Sadducee replied : “But who is my neighbour ?” The answer forced from him : “The man to whom the Israelite showed mercy”, has been illogically changed in the Roman version to “The man who showed mercy to the Israelite”.
On one or two recorded occasions Jesus did criticize individual Pharisees, but never the sect as a whole. His words were directed either against those who failed in their high moral pretensions, or against outsiders who falsely pretended to be Pharisees—especially certain Roman or Herodian agents who, taking advantage of his dialectical method of teaching, tried to entrap him into revolutionary statements.
Jesus belonged to the direct line of the famous teachers of ethics of whom Hillel the Pharisee was the most humane and enlightened, and for this reason refrained from committing his thoughts to paper. The Pharisees well understood the tyranny of the written word. By Jesus’s time the Law of Moses, originally established for the government of a semi-barbarous nation of herdsmen and hill-farmers, resembled a petulant great-grandfather who tries to govern a family business from his sickbed in the chimney-corner, unaware of the changes that have taken place in the world since he was able to get about
: his authority may not be questioned, yet his orders, since no longer relevant, must be reinterpreted in another sense, if the business is not to go bankrupt. When the old man says, for instance : “It is time for the women to grind their lapfuls of millet in the querns”, this is taken to mean : “It is time to send the sacks of wheat to the water-mill.”
Hillel and his fellow-Pharisees insisted on a very close observance of the Law in so far as it was still practicable and inoffensive to their enlightened sense of divine mercy. But their glosses on the Law were oral and thus easily discarded when lapse of years proved them inaccurate or misleading. They recommended the tithing not only of wheat and fruit and other staple products but of garden herbs as well ; at the same time they softened the rigour of the Law wherever to obey the letter would be to dishonour the spirit. For example, the stoning of adulterers and adulteresses. The Pharisees’ view was as follows : “Either women are in general responsible creatures and should take the same part in religion as the men ; or else they are irresponsible and must be limited in their activities. It occasionally happens in small country synagogues that educated and pious women are elected as synagogue officials ; but for the most part women show no aptitude for religious learning and are not encouraged to attempt it. In Deuteronomy the ordinance occurs : ‘You shall teach these laws to your sons’ ; daughters are not specified. An uneducated woman must therefore not be held responsible for any failure in chastity, since the man who has lain with her is likely to know the Law better than she. Moses, indeed, assumed in women a sufficient knowledge of the Law to make unchastity punishable with Death, and issued his regulations accordingly, but women were more responsible in those days than they are now, because the wilderness offered them fewer temptations than the city or the village and they were privileged to hear Moses’s own utterances. Should we then stone the adulterer and let the adulteress go free? No, this would be manifestly unjust, since it would put the life of the weak man at the mercy of the predatory woman ; and even our Father Adam was not proof against a woman’s wanton smiles. Let us therefore leave them both to repentance and God’s mercy ; for he created our Mother Eve and he alone understands the heart of an adulterous woman. Is it not written : ‘Such is the way of an adulteress : she eats, she wipes her mouth, she says : “I have done no wickedness’ ” ?”
The Pharisees’ enlightened point of view is perhaps best exemplified in their attitude to the observance of the Sabbath. They were scrupulous to prohibit on the Sabbath day the performance of any work that might be done on a week day ; yet if the Commandment, attributed to Moses, that a man should love his neighbour as himself, seemed to be invalidated by scruples of Sabbath-breaking—if, for example, a neighbour’s house collapsed on a Sabbath and he was heard shrieking for help from under the ruins—why, then the work must be done, Sabbath or no Sabbath. Hillel’s own life had been saved by the breach of a Sabbath : as a young man he had been found one Sabbath morning standing frozen in four feet of snow outside the window of an Academy lecture-hall where he had been listening to a debate, prevented by extreme poverty from paying the janitor the few coppers which he demanded as entrance fee. The Doctors of the Law worked hard to restore him to life, saying : “This is a man for whom the Sabbath may well be broken !” Jesus similarly was a scrupulous keeper of the Law, but he is recorded to have told a man whom he saw breaking the Sabbath in order to perform some small service to his neighbour : “If you do not know what you are doing, you deserve a reprimand from the President of your synagogue ; if you do know, you deserve his praise !”
Jesus was not only a king and a teacher of ethics : he was a prophet—a healer and miracle-worker in the line of Elijah and Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Amos, Zechariah, Zephaniah, Micah, Enoch and the rest. Throughout his missionary tour of Galilee he carried a pastoral staff and wore a shepherd’s “rough garment” or hair mantle, as habitually worn by these ancient prophets ; and later required his disciples to do the same. Many of his prophetic utterances have been wilfully misunderstood by the Gentile Chrestians. The prophet, as the word implies, regarded himself as the mouthpiece of Jehovah : what he spoke under prophetic influence was not his own utterance, but Jehovah’s. Such an utterance was always prefaced with : “Thus saith the Lord”, or “The word of the Lord came to me, saying” ; and to keep his mouth holy he was bound to abstain from wine—a source of false prophecy—except when a royal marriage gave him dispensation. When Jesus is reported to have said : “I am the Resurrection and the Life”, or “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”, he must be understood as speaking in Jehovah’s name and the prefatory words must be restored to the text. Any other interpretation is historically unthinkable. His usual preface was the twice-repeated Hebrew word Amen, which literally means “He was firm”, and which he used in the sense of “Jehovah has firmly declared”. The Gentile Chrestians, wishing to exalt Jesus into a God, translate the irksome Amen merely as “Verily” and often omit it altogether. They also attribute to him several well-known sayings of Hillel, Shammai, Simeon the Just and other celebrated Jewish moralists, by the simple trick of suppressing his humble acknowledgement to them, as for example : “Have you not heard what Antigonus of Soko received from the lips of Simeon the Just? For Simeon used to say : ‘Be not as slaves who serve their master in hope of reward, but as slaves that serve without hope of reward ; and let the fear of Heaven be upon you.’ ” Or : “Have you not heard what the learned Hillel—his memory be blessed—told the scoffer who asked to be taught the whole Law while standing upon one foot? ‘Do not to your neighbour what you would not have him do to you! This is the whole Law ; the rest is gloss.’ ” “And the converse of his judgement is found in the Letter of Aristeas : ‘Do to others as you would be done by.’ ”
As a courteous king he suited his speech to every class of his subjects. To prophets, such as John the Baptist, he spoke as a poet ; to Doctors of the Law he spoke in their own learned language ; to merchants and tradesmen more familiarly ; to the mass of the people who were not subtle enough to understand either deep poems or complex religious theory, he sang songs and told fables.
Some of his songs survive. Most of them contain simple advice to men and women not to allow social ambition or preoccupation with the routine of daily life to draw their minds away from contemplation of the Kingdom of God. For example :
Consider the ravens
That neither plough nor reap,
Nor build them a store-house
Their stores wherein to keep :
For God tends them well,
As a shepherd his sheep.
Consider the wind-flowers
That neither sew nor spin,
Yet Solomon’s sister,
All glorious within,
Won never such beauty
Of dress as they win.
In the prose-translation offered in this Acts and Sayings of Jesus, “Solomon” is written for “Solomon’s sister”, I suppose because the Queen of Sheba admired Solomon’s magnificence ; but this emendation spoils the poetic balance between the ravens as the men and the flowers as the women. It also obscures the reference to the coronation psalm : “The King’s daughter is all glorious within” ; for the King here is Solomon’s father David and his daughter is Solomon’s “sister and spouse”, the Shunemite of the Canticles. This version unaccountably omits the two explanatory verses of the song :
God remembers the ravens
That lightened the distress
Of Elijah the Tishbite
In the wilderness,
Though the rulers of Israel
Denied him their mess.
God remembers the wind-flowers
That reddened all the sward
When the pure blood of Abel
Was spilt by Cain’s sword—
Every spring-time they greet him,
Renewing their Lord.
It is possible that Jesus’s strange commendation of the unclean ravens conceals a reference to the well-known enmity
between the raven and the owl ; as we say in Greek : “The voice of the owl is one thing, and the raven’s voice another.” For the raven was the bird of Elijah the healer and poet, and though unclean was regarded as of lucky omen, whereas the owl was the bird of Lilith the First Eve whom Jesus was set on destroying.
Simpler even than this raven and lily song is one which begins :
Do not sigh, do not mourn,
I will lighten your cares :
For blessèd are the poor—
God’s Kingdom is theirs.
Blessèd are the merciful—
Merciful is he.
Blessèd are the pure—
His face they shall see.
Blessèd are the meek—
His carpet is spread.
Blessèd are the hungry—
They shall be fed….
and another that concerns divine mercy :
Ask, it shall be given.
Seek, you shall find.
Knock, the door shall open—
God’s heart is kind.
The song, When Your Right Eye Offends You, recommends meek acceptance of external oppression combined with proud resistance to internal oppression. And Judge the Tree lays down a standard of moral judgement :
Judge the tree by the fruit,
Judge not by the leaf….
Jesus put some of his fables into rough ballad form, such as the one about the rich man and the beggar and how they fared in the other world ; and the one beginning :