SECTION III. THE STATE OF THE JEWISH NATION AT THE TIME OF THE BIRTH OF CHRIST. :-\ THE privileges which the Jews at this time enjoyed, above all other nations, were many and distinguished; but, in enumerating them, the apostle lays the principal stress upon their being favoured with a divine revelation, to guide them in matters of the highest importance to their present and everlasting happiness: they had the oracles of God in their hands; the writings of Moses and the Prophets, those holy men of God who spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Yet, with these incalculable advantages, the condition of the people in general was not much superior to that of the Gentiles. The civil government of Judæa, at the time of Christ's birth, was vested in the hands of a Roman stipendiary, named Herod the Great-a title to which he could have no pretensions, except from the magnitude of his vices. Nature, it is true, had not withheld from him the talents requisite for a lofty and brilliant course of life; but such was his jealous disposition, such the ferocity of his temper, his devotedness to luxury, pomp, and magnificence, so madly extravagant, and so much beyond his means; in short, so extensive and enormous was the catalogue of his vices, that he became an object of utter detestation to the afflicted people over whom he swayed the kingly sceptre. Instead of cherishing and protecting his subjects, he appears to have made them sensible of his authority merely by oppression and violence; so that they complained to the Emperor Augustus, at Rome, of his cruelties, declaring they could not have suffered more had a wild beast reigned over them; and Eusebius affirms that the cruelty of this nefarious despot far surpassed whatever had been represented in tragedy! Herod was not ignorant of the hatred which he had drawn upon himself; but, to soften its asperity, he became a professed devotee to the Jewish religion, + Rom. iii. 2, and 2 Pet. i. 21. AT THE BIRTH OF CHRIST. 41 and at a vast expense restored their Temple, which through age had fallen into decay; yet the effect of all this was destroyed by his still conforming to the manners and habits of those who worshipped a plurality of gods; and so many things were countenanced, in direct opposition to the Jewish religion, that the hypocrisy of the tyrant's professions were too manifest to admit of a doubt. On the death of Herod, the government of Judæa was divided by the Emperor Augustus amongst his three surviving sons. Archelaus, the eldest of the three, was appointed governor of Judæa, Idumæa, and Samaria, under the title of Ethnarch. Antipas presided over Galilee and Peræa; whilst Batanea, Trachonitis, Auranitis, with part of the neighbouring territory, were assigned to Philip. The two latter, from their having a fourth part of the province of Judæa allotted to each, were styled Tetrarchs. Archelaus, who inherited all the vices of his father, with but few of his better qualities, completely exhausted the patience of the Jews; and, by a series of the most injurious and oppressive acts, drove them, in the tenth year of his reign, to lay their complaints before the Emperor Augustus, who, after investigating the merits of the case, deposed the Ethnarch, and banished him to Vienne in Gaul. On the expulsion of Archelaus, the greater part of Palestine, or Judæa, was reduced by the Roman government into the form of a province, and placed under the superintendance of a governor, who was subject to the control of the president of Syria. It is probable that this arrangement at first met with the ready concurrence of the Jews, who, on the death of Herod, had petitioned Augustus that the distinct regal government might no longer be continued to them, but that their country might be received under his own immediate protection, and treated as a part of the Roman Empire. The change, however, instead of producing an alleviation of misery to this unhappy people, brought with it an intolerable increase of their calamities. For, independently of the avarice and injustice of the governors, to which there were no bounds, it proved an intolerable grievance to them, who considered their nation to be God's peculiar people, that they should be obliged to pay tribute to a Heathen, and an enemy of the true God, like Cæsar, and live in subjection to those who worshipped false deities. Add to which, that the extortion of the Publicans, who after the Roman manner were entrusted with the collection of the revenue, and for whose continual and flagrant abuses of authority it was seldom possible to obtain any sort of redress, became a subject of infinite dissatisfaction and complaint. And, to crown the whole, the constant presence of their governors, surrounded as they were by a multitude of foreign attendants of all descriptions, and protected by a Roman military guard, quartered, with their Eagles and various other ensigns of superstition, in the centre of Jerusalem, their holy city, kept the sensibility of the Jews continually on the rack, and excited in their minds a degree of indignation bordering on fury. They naturally considered their religion to be disgraced and insulted by these innovations—their holy places defiled—and in fact themselves, with all that they held sacred, polluted and brought into contempt. To these causes are to be attributed the frequent tumults, factions, seditions, and murders, by which it is well known that these unfortunate people accelerated their own destruction. If any vestige of liberty or happiness could have been possessed by a people thus circumstanced, it was effectually cut off by those who held the second place in the civil government under the Romans and the sons of Herod, and who also had the supreme direction in every thing pertaining to religion, namely, the chief priests and the seventy elders, of whom the Sanhedrim or national council was composed. Josephus tells us that the High Priests were the most abandoned of mortals; that they generally obtained their dignified stations either through the influence of money or court sycophancy; and that they shrank from no species of criminality which might contribute to support them in the possession of an authority thus iniquitously purchased. Under a full conviction of the precarious tenure on which they held their situation, it became a leading object of their concern to accumulate, either by fraud or force, such a quantity of wealth as might enable them to gain the rulers of the state over to their interest, and drive away all competitors, or else yield them, when deprived of their dignity, the means of living at their ease in retirement. The Sanhedrim, or national council, being composed of men AT THE BIRTH OF CHRIST. 43 who differed in opinion respecting some of the most important points of religion, nothing like a general harmony was to be found amongst its members. On the contrary, having adopted the principles of various sects, they allowed themselves to be carried away by all the prejudice and animosity of party, and were too often more intent on the indulgence of private pique than studious of advancing the cause of religion, or promoting the public welfare. A similar depravity prevailed among the ordinary priests and the inferior ministers of religion. The common people, instigated by the shocking examples thus held out to them by those whom they were taught to consider as their guides, precipitated themselves into every species of vicious excess; and, giving themselves up to sedition and rapine, appeared alike to defy the vengeance both of God and man. The There were at that time two prevailing systems of religion in Palestine, the Jewish and the Samaritan; and, what contributed not a little to the calamities of the Hebrew nation, the followers of each of these regarded those of the other persuasion with the most virulent and implacable hatred, mutually venting their rancorous animosity in the direst curses and imprecations. nature of the Jewish religion may be collected from the books of the Old Testament; but, at the time of Christ's appearance, it had lost much of its original beauty and excellence, and was corrupted by errors of the most flagrant kind, which had crept in from various sources. The public worship of God was indeed still continued. in the temple of Jerusalem, with all the rites of the Mosaic institution; and their festivals never failed to draw together an immense concourse of people at the stated seasons: nor did the Romans ever interfere to prevent those observances. In domestic life, also, the ordinances of the Law were in general punctually attended to; but it is manifest, from the evidence adduced by various learned men, that even in the service of the Temple itself numerous ceremonies and observances, drawn from the religious worship of heathen nations, had been introduced and blended with those of divine institution; and that, in addition to superstitions like these of a public nature, many erroneous principles, probably brought from Babylon and Chaldea by the ancestors of the people, at their return from captivity, or adopted by the inconsiderate multitude in conformity to the example of their neighbours, the Greeks, the Syrians, and the Egyptians, were cherished and acted on in private. The opinions and sentiments of the Jews respecting the Deity, the divine nature, the angels, dæmons, the souls of men, their duties, and similar subjects, appear to have been far less extravagant, and formed on more rational grounds, than those of any other nation or people. Indeed, it was scarcely possible that they should wholly lose sight of that truth in the knowledge of which their fathers had been instructed through the medium of revelation; especially as this instruction was rendered habitual to them, even at a tender age, by hearing, reading, and studying the writings of Moses and the prophets. In all their cities, towns, and villages, and indeed throughout the empire, wherever any considerable number of Jews resided, a sacred edifice, which they called a synagogue, was erected, in which it was customary for the people regularly to assemble for the purposes of prayer and praise, and hearing the law publicly read and expounded; but these synagogues had no connexion with the worship or service of the Temple, and ought not to be identified with it. The latter was of positive appointment in all its branches, and regulated by express law, which was not the case with the former. In most of the larger towns, there were also schools established, in which young persons were initiated in the first principles of religion, as well as instructed in the liberal arts. But though the Jews certainly entertained many sentiments more rational and correct than their neighbours-sentiments which they had adopted from their own scriptures; yet they had gradually incorporated with them so large a mixture of what was fabulous and absurd as nearly to deprive the truth of all its force and energy. Hence the many pointed rebukes which Jesus Christ gave to the Scribes and Pharisees, the prime leaders of religion in his day; telling them that they taught for doctrines the commandments of men, and that they had made the divine law void through their traditions.* Their notions of the nature * The Jews acknowledge two laws, which they believe to have been delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai; of which one was immediately committed to writing in the text of the Pentateuch, and the other is said to have been handed down from generation to generation, for many ages, by oral tradition. From the time of Moses to the |