Chapter V · ORGANIZATION AND ECONOMICS

§ 1. The Economic Side

It is important to realize in some detail the operation of the economic factor in particular, and of organization in general, before we try to grasp synthetically the total process of documentary and doctrinal construction. The former is somewhat sedulously ignored in ordinary historiography, by reason of a general unwillingness even among rationalists to seem to connect mercenary motives with religious beginnings; and of the general assumption among religionists that “true” or “early” religion operates in spite of, in defiance or in independence of and not by aid of, economic motives. No one will dispute that the history of the Roman Catholic Church is one of economic as well as doctrinal action and reaction, or that Protestantism from the first was in large measure an economic processus. But it is commonly assumed, at least implicitly, that “primitive” religion, religion “in the making,” is not at all an affair of economic motive or reaction.

I have seen, in Egypt, the life of a Moslem “saint” in the making. He fasted much, certainly never eating more than one meal a day, and he was visibly emaciated and feeble as a result of his abstinences. Over his devout neighbours he had an immense influence. To his religious addresses they listened with rapt reverence; and when once in my presence he gave to a young man a religious charm to cure his sick sister, in the shape of a cigarette paper inscribed with a text from the Koran and rolled up to be swallowed, the youth’s face was transfigured with joyous faith, his eyes shining as if he had seen a glorious vision. I have not seen more radiant faith, in or out of “Israel.” And the saint, all the same, took unconcealed satisfaction in showing privately the heavy purse of gold he had recently collected from his faithful. To call him insincere would be puerile. I believe him to have been as sincere as Luther or Loyola. He simply happened, like so many Easterns and Westerns, to combine the love of pelf with the love of God.

Soon the twelve are made to explain (vi, 2–4) to the growing “multitude of the disciples” that “it is not fit that we should forsake the word of God, and serve tables. Look ye out ... seven men of good report, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business. But we will continue stedfastly in prayer, and in the ministry of the word.” From the date of that writing the apostle and his successors could claim to be worthy of their hire, though they had long to squabble for it. In the early Jesuist additions to the Teaching we see how the issue was raised. At first (xi) there is a succession of wandering apostles or “prophets.” Every apostle is to be received “as the Lord; but he shall not remain [except for?] one day; if however there be need, then the next [day]; but if he remain three days, he is a false prophet. But when the apostle departeth, let him take nothing except bread enough till he lodge [again]; but if he ask money, he is a false prophet.” That is the first stage, probably quite Judaic.

The next section (xii) still adheres broadly to the same view. Every entrant must work for his living. “If he will not act according to this, he is a Christmonger (χριστέμπορός).” Evidently there were already Christmongers. But in chapter xiii the primitive stage has been passed, and there is systematic enactment of economic provision for the installed prophet or teacher as such:—

But every true prophet who will settle among you is worthy of his food. Likewise a true teacher, he also is worthy, like the workman, of his food. Every first-fruit, then, of the produce of wine-press and threshing-floor, of oxen and of sheep, thou shalt take and give to the prophets; for they are your high-priests. But if ye have no prophet, give [it] to the poor. If thou makest a baking of bread, take the first [of it] and give according to the commandment. In like manner when thou openest a jar of wine or oil, take the first [of it] and give to the prophets; and of money and clothing and every possession, take the first, as may seem right to thee, and give according to the commandment.

Now elect for yourselves bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord, men meek and not avaricious, and upright and proved; for they too render you the service of the prophets and the teachers. Therefore neglect them not; for they are the ones who are honoured of you, together with the prophets and teachers.

It was for a community thus supporting various classes of teachers and preachers, first poorly and primitively, later in an organized fashion, that the gospels were built up and the epistles composed.

§ 2. Organization

Organization, which in our days has become “a word to conjure with,” is no new factor in human life. It is the secret of survival for communities and institutions; and the survival of Christism in its competition with other cults must be traced mainly to the early process of adaptation. That, however, takes place in terms of three concurrent factors: (1) the appeal made by the cult which is the ground of association; (2) the practice of the community as regards the relations of members; (3) the administration, as regards propaganda, expansion and co-ordination of groups. And it is through primary adaptations in respect of the first and second, with a constant stimulus from the third, that the Christian Church can be seen to have succeeded in the struggle for existence. That is to say, it is in the element in which conscious organization is most prominent as distinct from usage or tradition that the determining influence chiefly lies.

The generalization as to the widening of the interval between classes is hardly borne out by the evidence; and the pessimism of the last sentence partly defeats the argument, by putting the life of the early Christian period on the same general level with that of to-day and of all the time between. The true summary would be that in that age the springs of social life were lamed by the suppression of all national existence; that the rule of Rome tended to general impoverishment in respect of a vicious system of taxation; and that the subject peoples, deprived of the old impulses to collective energy, at once turned more and more to private association and became ready to believe in a coming “end of the world” which in some way was to mean a new life. And as the Church’s doctrine was pre-eminently one of salvation in that new life, it behoved it in every way to resort to propaganda while maintaining the eleemosynary system which gave it a broad basis of membership. Thus the organization which controlled the simple financial system must also have regard to the spread of doctrine. And for the means of spreading doctrine, again, as we have already noted, the cue was obviously given by Judaism, which stood out from all religious systems in the Roman world as a religion of Sacred Books. Sacred Books of its own the Jesuist movement must have if it was to hold its own against the prestige of the Jewish Bible. The production of Sacred Books, then, was a task which devolved upon the organizers of the Christian ecclesiæ throughout the Eastern Empire, equally with the task of co-ordination, of which, in fact, it was a main part. A common religious literature was the basis of Jewish cohesion. Only by means of a common religious literature could Christism cohere.

No literature, indeed, could avert schism. Schism and strife are among the first notes sounded in the epistles; and a religion which aimed at dogmatic teaching, as against the purely liturgical practice of the old pagan cults, was bound to multiply them. Judaism itself was divided into antagonistic groups of Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes, to say nothing of the Zealots, the Essenes, and other diverging groups. But sects do not destroy a religion any more than parties destroy a State; and the way of success for Christism was a way which, while it involved a multiplication of schism so long as the voluntary basis remained, made a growing aggregate which was at least a unity as having a special creed, distinct from all competing with it.

Thus the Christian movement was doubly a copy and competitor of Judaism, upon whose books it primarily founded. As the dispersed Jewish synagogues were co-ordinated from Jerusalem by the High Priest, and later from Tiberias by the Patriarch, by means of Twelve Apostles and possibly by a subordinate grade of seventy-two collectors who brought in the contributions of the faithful scattered among the Gentiles, so the Jesuists, beginning with an organization centred in Jerusalem and likewise aiming at the collection of funds for which almsgiving in Jerusalem was the appealing pretext, were bound after the fall of the Temple to aim at a centralization or centralizations of their own. A literature became more and more necessary if the new faith was to extend. That was the way at once to glorify the new Hero-God and to multiply his devotees. And it would seem to have been from the starting-point of the Jewish Teaching of the Twelve Apostles that the new departure on one line was made.

Who then produced the literature? Once more, there is no evidence. If any of the Epistles might at first sight seem “genuine,” they are those ascribed to James and Jude, essentially Judaic or Judaistic documents, especially the former, in which (ii, 1) the cumbrous formula “the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory” exhibits a Christian interpolation. It is essentially in the spirit of the Teaching, a counsel of right living, calling for works in opposition to the new doctrine that faith is the one thing needful, and sounding the Ebionitic note (v, 1): “Go to now, ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you.” But save for the interpolation and the naming of Jesus Christ in the sentence of preamble, there is no specific Jesuist or Christist teaching whatever. If this document was current among the Jesuists, it was borrowed from a Jewish author who had at most one special item of belief in common with them, that of “the coming [or presence] of the Lord” (v. 7, 8); and here there is no certainty that “the Lord” meant for the writer the Christ.

Once more, then, we turn for our first clue to the Judaic Teaching, which on its face exhibits the gradual accretion of Jesuist elements, beginning with an Ebionitic mention of the “Servant” Jesus, and proceeding step by step from a stage in which wandering “apostles” or “prophets” must subsist from hand to mouth and from day to day, to one in which settled prophets are supported by first fruits, and yet a further one in which bishops and deacons appear to administer while prophets and teachers continue to teach. And as the “prophets” constitute a class which in the third century has disappeared from the church, as if its work were done; and as they bear the name given to the chief producers of the sacred literature of Judaism, it would seem to be the natural surmise that they were the primary producers of special literature for the early Christian churches.