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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 664. One Jesus
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“One Jesus”
He had dismissed the resurrection of “one Jesus” as unimportant: St. Paul asserted it, the Jews denied it. It was not worth while to ask which was right. The man was dead, that was agreed. If St. Paul said He was alive after death, that was only another proof of madness, and a Roman governor had more weighty things to occupy him than investigating such obscure and absurd trifles.
He is a great man who sees great things where others see little things, who sees the extraordinary in the ordinary. Ruskin sees a poem in the rose or the lily, while the hod-carrier would perhaps not go a rod out of his way to see a sunset which Ruskin would feed upon for a year.1 [Note: O. S. Marden, Architects of Fate, 317.]
2. We cannot fail to be struck with the strange contrast between the results which that asserted fact of Christ's resurrection produced in those two men, Festus and Paul. In the Apostle, belief in it had kindled a fire of all-sacrificing devotion, and braced him with a courage which no terrors could quell. By Festus, on the contrary, that asserted fact was received with complete indifference. Had it been a question of political import touching the quietude of his province, or a question of criminal law, that keen judge would have exerted the power of his intellect to detect the truth, avert the danger, or punish the crime. But because it referred to an unseen world, he dismissed it with apparent contempt, without for a moment troubling himself to inquire whether it were false or true.
Then we told them as much as we could in an hour about the great love of Jesus Christ. I was in the middle of it, and thinking only of it and their souls, when an old lady with fluffy white hair leaned forward and gazed at me with a beautiful, earnest gaze. She did not speak; she just listened and gazed, “drinking it all in.” And then she raised a skeleton claw, and grabbed her hair, and pointed to mine. “Are you a widow too,” she asked, “that you have no oil on yours?”2 [Note: A. Wilson-Carmichael, Things as They are in India, 8.]
A nation of men blind from their birth, to whom a solitary traveller should reveal the joys of the light, would deny not only that the latter was possible, but even imaginable.3 [Note: M. Maeterlinck, Life and Flowers, 42.]
3. Did Festus wince a little at the mention of St. Paul's bonds? At all events, the entertainment had taken rather too serious a turn for the taste of any of the three-Festus, Agrippa, or Bernice. If this strange man was going to shake their consciences in that fashion, it was high time to end what was, after all, as far as the rendering of justice was concerned, something like a farce.
So with a rustle, and amid the obeisances of the courtiers, the three rose, and, followed by the principal people, went through the form of deliberation. There was only one conclusion to be come to. St. Paul was perfectly innocent. So Agrippa solemnly pronounced, what had been known before, that he had done nothing worthy of death or bonds, though he had “these bonds” on his arm; and he salved the injustice of keeping an innocent man in custody by throwing all the blame on St. Paul himself for appealing to Cæsar. But the person to blame was Festus, who had forced St. Paul to appeal in order to save his life.
There's folk's 'ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was i' their boots.1 [Note: George Eliot.]
4. The calm secured by the firm action of Festus, on his arrival in his province, was of short duration. In the spring of 62 a.d., Rome suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Parthians. Triumph over Rome seemed to be coming, and the hopes of the turbulent zealots of Judæa were once more kindled. A general rising was indeed impossible, thanks to the measures of Festus, nor would it have been prudent, so long as the legions of Corbulo lay on the north-east borders of the Empire. But it was clear that the first defeat he suffered would see the Jews, and probably the Arabs, in full revolt.
Things might have gone more peacefully had there been a party among the Jews from whom the Romans could have obtained reliable counsel. Instead of this, Agrippa, the Jewish king, who was the official adviser of the procurator, in the distracting intricacies of religious affairs, was himself the source of endless trouble. He rebuilt the old palace of the Maccabees on the western hill of Jerusalem, and thus had a view over the whole city and neighbourhood; the Temple grounds, with their constant crowds, lying, amidst all else, under his eyes, as he rested on his couch. The eminently religious Ishmael and Ananias, however, seeing the opportunity of revenging themselves on him, declared that it was against the law that the courts of the Temple should be overlooked, and forthwith raised a huge wall to shut out the king's view, bending its course so that, in addition, it shut out the view of the courts from the fortress Antonia. Such audacity roused both the king and the procurator. St. Paul had been saved from the fury of the mob at the Pentecost of the year 59 by the Romans overlooking the grounds, and it had often been of equal value in similar disturbances. Festus therefore ordered the wall to be thrown down, but the Jews at once appealed to Rome and, through the influence of Poppæa, who favoured the Jewish faith, obtained the victory. Festus died during or shortly after this settlement.
Many a man knoweth full well what is just or unjust, and yet neither is nor ever will become a just man. For he loveth not justice, and therefore he worketh wickedness and injustice. If he loved justice, he would not do an unjust thing; for he would feel such hatred and indignation towards injustice wherever he saw it, that he would do or suffer anything that injustice might be put an end to, and men might become just. And he would rather die than do an injustice, and all this for nothing but the love of justice. And to him, justice is her own reward, and rewardeth him with herself; and so there liveth a just man, and he would rather die a thousand times over than live as an unjust Man_1:1 [Note: Theologia Germanica, 157.]