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Early Christians Many writers on many occasions
have perceived and described the important part which intercommunication
between the widely separated congregations of early Christians, whether by
travel or by letter, played in determining the organization and cementing
the unity of the Universal Church. Yet perhaps all has not been said that
ought to be said on the subject. The marvelous skill and mastery, with
which all the resources of the existing civilization were turned to their
own purposes by St. Paul and by the Christians generally, may well detain
our attention for a brief space.
Traveling and correspondence by letter are mutually dependent. Letters are
unnecessary until traveling begins: much of the usefulness and profit of
traveling depends on the possibility of communication between those who
are separated from one another. Except in the simplest forms, commerce and
negotiation between different nations, which are among the chief
incentives to traveling in early times, cannot be carried out without some
method of registering thoughts and information, so as to be understood by
persons at a distance.
Hence communication by letter has been commonly practiced from an
extremely remote antiquity. The knowledge of and readiness in writing
leads to correspondence between friends who are not within speaking
distance of one another, as inevitably as the possession of articulate
speech produces conversation and discussion. In order to fix the period
when epistolary correspondence first began, it would be necessary to
discover at what period the art of writing became common. Now the progress
of discovery in recent years has revolutionized opinion on this subject.
The old views, which we all used to assume as self-evident, that writing
was invented at a comparatively late period in human history, that it was
long known only to a few persons, and that it was practiced even by them
only slowly and with difficulty on some special occasions and for some
peculiarly important purposes, are found to be utterly erroneous. No one
who possesses any knowledge of early history would now venture to make any
positive assertion as to the date when writing was invented, or when it
began to be widely used in the Mediterranean lands. The progress of
discovery reveals the existence of various systems of writing at a remote
period, and shows that they were familiarly used for the ordinary purposes
of life and administration, and were not reserved, as scholars used to
believe, for certain sacred purposes of religion and ritual.
The discovery that writing was familiarly used in early time has an
important bearing on the early literature of the Mediterranean peoples.
For example, no scholar would now employ the argument that the composition
of the Iliad and the Odyssey must belong to a comparatively late day,
because such great continuous poems could not come into existence without
the ready use of writing--an argument which formerly seemed to tell
strongly against the early date assigned by tradition for their origin.
The scholars who championed the traditional date of those great works used
to answer that argument by attempting to prove that they were composed and
preserved by memory alone without the aid of writing. The attempt could
not be successful. The scholar in his study, accustomed to deal with words
and not with realities, might persuade himself that by this ingenious
verbal reasoning he had got rid of the difficulty; but those who could not
blind themselves to the facts of the world felt that the improbability
still remained, and acquiesced in this reasoning only as the least among a
choice of evils. The progress of discovery has placed the problem in an
entirely new light. The difficulty originated in our ignorance. The art of
writing was indeed required as an element in the complex social platform
on which the Homeric poems were built up; but no doubt can now be
entertained that writing was known and familiarly practiced in the East
Mediterranean lands long before the date to which Greek tradition assigned
the composition of the two great poems.
A similar argument was formerly used by older scholars to prove that the
Hebrew literature belonged to a later period than the Hebrew tradition
allowed; but the more recent scholars who advocate the late date of that
literature would no longer allow such reasoning, and frankly admit that
their views must be supported on other grounds; though it may be doubted
whether they have abandoned as thoroughly as they profess the old
prejudice in favor of a late date for any long literary composition, or
have fully realized how readily and familiarly writing was used in
extremely remote time, together with all that is implied by that familiar
use. The prejudice still exists, and it affects the study of both Hebrew
and Christian literature.
In the first place, there is a general feeling that it is more prudent to
bring down the composition of any ancient work to the latest date that
evidence permits. But this feeling rests ultimately on the fixed idea that
people have gradually become more familiar with the art of writing as the
world grows older, and that the composition of a work of literature should
not, without distinct and conclusive proof, be attributed to an early
period.
In the second place, there is also a very strong body of opinion that the
earliest Christians wrote little or nothing. It is supposed that partly
they were either unable to write, or at least unused to the familiar
employment of writing for the purposes of ordinary life; partly they were
so entirely taken up with the idea of the immediate coming of the Lord
that they never thought it necessary to record for future generations the
circumstances of the life and death of Jesus, until lapse of long years on
the one hand had shown that the Lord's coming was not to be expected
immediately, and that for the use of the already large Church some record
was required of those events round which its faith and hope centered,
while on the other hand it had obscured the memory and disturbed the true
tradition of those important facts. This opinion also rests on and derives
all its influence from the same inveterate prejudice that, at the period
in question, writing was still something great and solemn, and that it was
used, not in the ordinary course of human everyday life and experience,
but only for some grave purpose of legislation, government, or religion,
intentionally registering certain weighty principles or important events
for the benefit of future generations. Put aside that prejudice, and the
whole body of opinion which maintains that the Christians at first did not
set anything down in writing about the life and death of Christ--strong
and widely accepted as it is, dominating as a fundamental premise much of
the discussion of this whole subject in recent times--is devoid of any
support.
But most discussions with regard to the origin, force, and spirit of the
New Testament are founded on certain postulates and certain initial
presumptions, which already contain implicit the whole train of reasoning
that follows, and which in fact beg the whole question at starting. If
those postulates are true, or if they are granted by the reader, then the
whole series of conclusions follows with unerring and impressive logical
sequence. All the more necessary, then, is it to examine very carefully
the character of such postulates, and to test whether they are really true
about that distant period, or are only modern fallacies springing from the
mistaken views about ancient history that were widely accepted in the
eighteenth and most part of the nineteenth century.
One of those initial presumptions, plausible in appearance and almost
universally assumed and conceded, is that there was no early registration
of the great events in the beginning of Christian history. This
presumption we must set aside as a mere prejudice, contrary to the whole
character and spirit of that age, and entirely improbable; though, of
course, decisive disproof of it is no longer possible, for the only
definite and complete disproof would be the production of the original
documents in which the facts were recorded at the moment by contemporaries.
But so much may be said at once, summing up in a sentence the result which
arises from what is stated in the following pages. So far as antecedent
probability goes, founded on the general character of preceding and
contemporary Greek or Graeco-Asiatic society, the first Christian account
of the circumstances connected with the death of Jesus must be presumed to
have been written in the year when Jesus died.
But the objection will doubtless be made at once--If that be so, how can
you account for such facts as that Mark says that the Crucifixion was
completed by the third hour of the day (9 a.m., according to our modern
reckoning of time), while John says that the sentence upon Jesus was only
pronounced about the sixth hour, i.e. at noon. The reply is obvious and
unhesitating. The difference dates from the event itself. Had evidence
been collected that night or next morning, the two diverse opinions would
have been observed and recorded, already hopelessly discrepant and
contradictory.
One was the opinion of the ordinary people of that period, unaccustomed to
note the lapse of time or to define it accurately in thought or speech:
such persons loosely indicated the temporal sequence of three great events,
the Crucifixion, the beginning and the end of the darkness, by assigning
them to the three great successive divisions of the day--the only
divisions which they were in the habit of noticing or mentioning--the
third, sixth, and ninth hours. Ordinary witnesses in that age would have
been nonplused, if they had been closely questioned whether full three
hours had elapsed between the Crucifixion and the beginning of the
darkness, and would have regarded such minuteness as unnecessary pedantry,
for they had never been trained by the circumstances of life to accuracy
of thought or language in regard to the lapse of time. Witnesses of that
class are the authority for the account which is preserved in the three
Synoptic Gospels. We observe that throughout the Gospels of Mark and Luke
only the three great divisions of the day--the third, sixth and ninth
hours--are mentioned. Matthew once mentions the eleventh hour (20:9); but
there his expression does not show superior accuracy in observation, for
he is merely using a proverbial expression to indicate that the allotted
season had almost elapsed. A very precise record of time is contained in
the Bezan Text of Acts 19:9; "from the fifth to the tenth hour"; but this
is found only in two MSS, and is out of keeping with Luke's ordinary
looseness in respect of time and chronology; and it must therefore be
regarded as an addition made by a second century editor, who either had
access to a correct source of information, or explained the text in
accordance with the regular customs of Graeco-Roman society.
The other statement, which is contained in the Fourth Gospel, records the
memory of an exceptional man, who through a certain idiosyncrasy was
observant and careful in regard to the lapse of time, who in other cases
noted and recorded accurate divisions of time like the seventh hour and
the tenth hour (John 1:39, 4:16, 4:52). This man, present at the trial of
Jesus, had observed the passage of time, which was unnoticed by others.
The others would have been astonished if any one had pointed out that noon
had almost come before the trial was finished. He alone marked the sun and
estimated the time, with the same accuracy as made him see and remember
that the two disciples came to the house of Jesus about the tenth hour,
that Jesus sat on the well about the sixth hour, that the fever was said
to have left the child about the seventh hour. All those little details,
entirely unimportant in themselves, were remembered by a man naturally
observant of time, and recorded for not other reason than that he had been
present and had seen or heard.
It is a common error to leave too much out of count the change that has
been produced on popular thought and accuracy of conception and expression
by the habitual observation of the lapse of time according to hours and
minutes. The ancients had no means of observing precisely the progress of
time. They could as a rule only make a rough guess as to the hour. There
was not even a name for any shorter division of time than the hour. There
were no watches, and only in the rarest and most exceptional cases were
there any public and generally accessible instruments for noting and
making visible the lapse of time during the day. The sun-dial was
necessarily an inconvenient recorder, not easy to observe. Consequently
looseness in regard to the passage of time is deep-seated in ancient
thought and literature, especially Greek. The Romans, with their superior
endowment for practical facts and ordinary statistics, were more careful,
and the effect can be traced in their literature. The lapse of time hour
by hour was often noted publicly in great Roman households by the sound of
a trumpet or some other device, though the public still regarded this as a
rather overstrained refinement--for why should one be anxious to know how
fast one's life was ebbing away? Such was the usual point of view, as is
evident in Petronius. Occasionally individuals in the Greek-speaking
provinces of the East were more accurate in the observation of time,
either owing to their natural temperament, or because they were more
receptive of the Roman habit of accuracy. On the other hand, the progress
of invention has made almost every one in modern times as careful and
accurate about time as even the exceptionally accurate in ancient times,
because we are all trained from infancy to note the time by minutes, and
we suffer loss or inconvenience occasionally from an error in observation.
The use of the trumpeter after the Roman fashion to proclaim the lapse of
time is said to have been kept up until recently in the old imperial city
of Goslar, where, in accordance with the more minute accuracy
characteristic of modern thought and custom, he sounded every quarter of
an hour.
But it does not follow that, because the ancients were not accustomed to
note the progress of the hours, therefore they were less habituated to use
the art of writing. It is a mere popular fallacy, entirely unworthy of
scholars, to suppose that people became gradually more familiar with
writing and more accustomed to use it habitually in ordinary life as time
progressed and history continued. The contrary is the case; at a certain
period, and to a certain degree, the ancients were accustomed to use the
art familiarly and readily; but at a later time writing passed out of
ordinary use and became restricted to a few who used it only as a lofty
possession for great purposes.
It is worth while to mention one striking example to give emphasis to the
fact that, as the Roman Empire decayed, familiarity with the use of
writing disappeared from society, until it became the almost exclusive
possession of a few persons, who were for the most part connected with
religion. About the beginning of the sixth century before Christ, a body
of mercenary soldiers, Greeks, Carians, etc., marched far away up the Nile
towards Ethiopia and the Sudan in the service of an Egyptian king. Those
hired soldiers of fortune were likely, for the most part, to belong to the
least educated section of Greek society; and, even where they had learned
in childhood to write, the circumstances of their life were not of a kind
likely to make writing a familiar and ordinary matter to them, or to
render its exercise a natural method of whiling away an idle hour. Yet on
the stones and the colossal statues at Abu Simble many of them wrote, not
merely their name and legal designation, but also accounts of the
expedition on which they were engaged, with its objects and its progress.
Such was the state of education in a rather humble stratum of Greek
society six centuries before Christ. Let us come down eleven centuries
after Christ, to the time when great armies of Crusaders were marching
across Asia Minor on their way to Palestine. Those armies were led by the
noblest of their peoples, by statesmen, warriors, and great ecclesiastics.
They contained among them persons of all classes, burning with zeal for a
great idea, pilgrims at once and soldiers, with numerous priests and monks.
Yet, so far as I am aware, not one single written memorial of all those
crusading hosts has been found in the whole country. On a rock beside the
lofty castle of Butrentum, commanding the approach to the great pass of
the Cilician Gates--that narrow gorge which they called the Gate of Judas,
because it was the enemy of their faith and the betrayer of their cause--there
are engraved many memorials of their presence; but none are written; all
are mere marks in the form of crosses.
In that small body of mercenaries who passed by Abu Simbel 600 years
before Christ, there were probably more persons accustomed to use
familiarly the art of writing than in all the hosts of the Crusaders; for,
even to those Crusaders who had learned to write, the art was far from
being familiar, and they were not wont to use it in their ordinary
everyday life, though they might on great occasions. In those 1700 years
the Mediterranean world had passed from light to darkness, from
civilization to barbarism, so far as writing was concerned. Only recently
are we beginning to realize how civilized in some respects was mankind in
that earlier time, and to free ourselves from many unfounded prejudices
and prepossessions about the character of ancient life and society.
The cumbrousness of the materials on which ancient writing was inscribed
may seem unfavorable to its easy or general use. But it must be remembered
that, except in Egypt, no material that was not of the most durable
character has been or could have been preserved. All writing-materials
more ephemeral than stone, bronze, or terra-cotta, have inevitably been
destroyed by natural causes. Only in Egypt the extreme dryness of climate
and soil has enabled paper to survive. Now the question must suggest
itself whether there is any reason to think that more ephemeral materials
for writing were never used by the ancient Mediterranean peoples generally.
Was Egypt the only country in which writers used such perishable materials?
The question can be answered only in one way. There can be no doubt that
the custom, which obtained in the Greek lands in the period best known to
us, had come down from remote antiquity: that custom was to make a
distinction between the material on which documents of national interest
and public character were written and that on which mere private documents
of personal or literary interest were written. The former, such as laws,
decrees and other State documents, which were intended to be made as
widely known as possible, were engraved in one or two copies on tablets of
the most imperishable character and preserved or exposed in some public
place: this was the ancient way of attaining the publicity which in modern
time is got by printing large numbers of copies on ephemeral material. But
those public copies were not the only ones made; there is no doubt that
such documents were first of all written on some perishable material,
usually on paper. In the case of private documents, as a rule, no copies
were made except on perishable materials.
Wills of private persons, indeed, are often found engraved on marble or
other lasting material; these were exposed in the most public manner over
the graves that lined the great highways leading out from the cities; but
wills were quasi-public documents in the classical period, and had been
entirely public documents at an earlier time, according to their original
character as records of a public act affecting the community and
acquiesced in by the whole body.
Similarly, it can hardly be doubted that, in a more ancient period of
Greek society, documents which were only of a private character and of
personal or literary interest were likely to be recorded on more
perishable substances than graver State documents. This view, of course,
can never be definitely and absolutely proved, for the only complete proof
would be the discovery of some of those old private documents, which in
the nature of the case have decayed and disappeared. But the known facts
leave no practical room for doubt.
Paper was in full use in Egypt, as a finished and perfect product, in the
fourth millennium before Christ. In Greece it is incidentally referred to
by Herodotus as in ordinary use during the fifth century BC. At what date
it began to be used there no evidence exists; but there is every
probability that it had been imported from Egypt for a long time; and
Herodotus says that, before paper came into use on the Ionian coast, skins
of animals were used for writing. On these and other perishable materials
the letters and other commonplace documents of private persons were
written. Mr. Arthur J. Evans has found at Cnossos in Crete "ink-written
inscriptions on vases," as early as 1800 or 2000 years BC; and he has
inferred from this "the existence of writings on papyrus or other
perishable materials" in that period, since ink would not be made merely
for writing on terra-cotta vases (though the custom of writing in ink on
pottery, especially on ostraka or fragments of broken vases, as being
cheap, persisted throughout the whole period of ancient civilization).
Accordingly, though few private letters older than the imperial time have
been preserved, it need not and should not be supposed that there were
only a few written. Those that were written have been lost because the
material on which they were written could not last. If we except the
correspondence of Cicero, the great importance of which caused it to be
preserved, hardly any ancient letters not intended for publication by
their writers have come down to us except in Egypt, where the original
paper has in a number of cases survived. But the voluminous correspondence
of Cicero cannot be regarded as a unique fact of Roman life. He and his
correspondents wrote so frequently to one another, because letter-writing
was then common in Roman society. Cicero says that, when he was separated
from his friend Atticus, they exchanged their thought as freely by letter
as they did by conversation when they were in the same place. Such a
sentiment was not peculiar to one individual: it expressed a custom of
contemporary society. The truth is that, just as in human nature thought
and speech are linked together in such a way that (to use the expression
of Plato) word is spoken thought and thought is unspoken word, so also
human beings seek by the law of their nature to express their ideas
permanently in writing as well as momentarily in speech; and ignorance of
writing in any race points rather to a degraded and degenerate than to a
truly primitive condition.
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