662 JESUS that of the oral law. At this age Joseph and Mary took Jesus for the first time to Jerusalem, and there occurred the memorable incident of the temporary loss of Him by His mother and Joseph, and their discovery of Him in the Temple seated among the doctors, " both hearing, and asking them questions." His answer to the astonished inquiry "Why .dost thou treat us thus?" was, "Why is it that ye looked for me 1 " ; " Did ye not know that I must be in my Father s house 1 ?" 1 These are His first recorded words, and their beauty and simplicity give them such a stamp of truthfulness as no art could imitate. They are the first gleam of that character and personality which has transcended anything of which the world has had any experience during all the former or subsequent ages. The evangelists record no further particulars of these early years. Of the remaining life of Jesus during the period be tween this visit to Jerusalem and His baptism one word alone remains to us. It is in the question, " Is not this the carpenter 1 ?" 2 in Mark. vi. 3. It shows us that these eighteen years of youth and opening manhood were spent, not only in the obscurity of a despised provincial village, but also in the manual toils of a humble trade. 3 It shows us that Jesus worked with His hands for His own support, and that of His mother and brethren. The fact is so entirely unlike anything which we should a priori have expected in the life of Him whom Christians adore as the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, that we once more see the faithfulness of the narrators, who do not attempt to break by unauthorized inventions the deep silence of those long unknown years in which He conse crated the common lot of toil and poverty, and thereby showed the inherent dignity of manhood and the intrinsic sacredness of human life. 3. Before entering on the third epoch of the life of Jesus, the baptism and public ministry, we must pause for a moment to touch on the political and religious aspect of the world during the brief period of His Messianic activity. Politically the world was passing through a bad epoch. Rome under the emperors, as she attained the zenith of her apparent power and splendour, sank almost to the nadir of her real degradation. The genius of Julius Caesar, the astute policy of Augustus, could not delay the ever- deepening degeneracy which revealed itself in its worst colours in the reign of Tiberius. The condition of the Roman world during the later years of Tiberius, when he was hiding at Capreae, the infamies of his sanguinary lust, was that condition of terror and despair which Tacitus has portrayed with such unequalled power. The words in which he describes the characteristics of a somewhat later period apply also to this ; it was " rich in disasters, terrible in battles, rent by seditions, savage even in its peace." 4 The murder of princes, the outbreaks of rebellion and civil war, the prevalence of alarming rumours, the decimation of the noblest families by means of spies and informers, the con flagrations of temples and cities, the oppression of provinces by the greed and cruelty of legates and procurators, the horrible degradation of private morals, the awful tragedies of impurity and bloodshed which were enacted in various courts, the multiplications of banishments, even the terror of famines, storms, and earthquakes, combined to render 1 Luke ii. 49. This and not "about my Father s business " is the correct rendering of tv TO?S rov trtnpos fiov, as has been conclusively proved in an unpublished paper of Dr Field. See the present writer s St Luke (in Cambr. Bibl. for schools) ad loc. 2 This is the true reading, though a false feeling of reverence and a wrong dogmatic bias have led the copyists of the later MSS. to alter it into "the son of the carpenter."
- Justin, C, Try ph., 88, says that He specially made "ploughs and
yokes." 4 Tac., Hist., i. 2. the early years of the Christian era a period of gloom and anguish throughout large portions of the Roman empire. Judaea was the scene of special miseries, because it groaned under the ruthless and hypocritic tyranny of IduniDoan usurpers. Meanwhile the religious condition of the world and of the nation was no less unsatisfactory. Throughout the Roman empire the belief in the popular mythology had died away, and, while a few of the noblest spirits took refuge in the hard and despairing dogmas of Stoicism, the mass of the people was plunged in practical atheism or abject superstition. Such religion as there was among the people usually took the form of Egyptian and Phrygian worships, which were often connected with the vilest immorality. In Judaea the dominant religion consisted in scrupulous devotion to the petty external ordinances of the oral law. Thus at the epoch of Christ s birth the heathen world had sunk into practical atheism, and the Jewish world was deeply corroded by formalism and hypocrisy. In the heathen world religion had almost ceased to exist ; in the Jewish world it was tainted at its source. It was no doubt due to the darkness of the religious and political horizon, and to the sense of despair and weariness which was prevalent in the hearts alike of Jews and Gentiles, that the Messianic hope, fostered by generations of prophets, gained a powerful hold on the hearts of all sincere Israelites, and even found its expression in secular literature. Virgil, Tacitus, and Suetonius, no less than Joseph us, show that the thoughts of the civilized world were turned to the East in expectation of some great deliverer. But the character of their hope was utterly mistaken. Overlooking the prophetic passages which told of a suffering Messiah, a servant of Jehovah, who should bear the sorrows of His people, the Jews were anticipating the advent of some temporal sovereign who would rule their enemies with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter s vessel, while He raised Israel to the summit of earthly prosperity and luxury. 5 The Messiah, the son of David, was to be a conquering warrior, which accounts for the grossly unspiritual conceptions which induced one party to represent Herod as the promised Messiah, and which enabled Josephus to pretend that he found a ful filment of the Messianic prophecies in the elevation to the empire of Vespasian, the bourgeois soldier who had crushed his country under the iron heel of the Roman legionaries. At this time of extreme trouble and expectation the Baptist began his preaching. It was confessedly prepara tory. The coming of the Messiah was always declared to depend on the " righteousness " of the nation, that is in ordinary Jewish phraseology their rigid observance of the Mosaic law. But John saw that what was needful was morality, not legalism, and his cry " Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," was explained to each of the great classes which applied to him for advice by practical directions as to their daily duties. John created an intense though transitory impression by his dress and appearance, which recalled the memory of ancient prophets, and specially of Elijah, and still more by the burning sincerity and reality of a style of teaching which presented so strong a contrast to the ordinary teaching of the scribes. He adopted the rigid seclusion and asceticism of the Essenes, and his language rang with denunciations clothed in the imagery of the desert. Refusing all the titles which the people wished to force upon him, he described himself as " a voice of one crying in the wilderness," and announced the coming of one greater than himself, who would found 5 See Bartolncci, Bibl. Rabbin., . 511-514 ; Lightfoot, Ilor. Heb., p. 552; Buxtorf, Synag. J/id., p. 52.
