Jesus attended little upon the higher schools of the scribes and he did not have any of those titles which confer in the eyes of the common people the privileges of learning. It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that Jesus was what we call illiterate. The education of the schools marks among us a wide distinction, in the relation of personal worth, between those who have received it and those who have been deprived of it. It was not thus in the East, nor generally in the good old ages.
It is not probable that he knew Greek. This language was little known in Judea beyond the classes given by the government in the towns inhabited by pagans, like Cesarea. The native language of Jesus was a Syrian dialect mixed with Hebrew, which was then spoken in Palestine. This culture was proscribed by the Palestinian doctors, who “united in the same malediction he who breeds swine and he who teaches his son the wisdom of the Greeks.” At all events, it had not penetrated into little towns like Nazareth. Notwithstanding the anathema of the doctors, it is true, some Jews had already embraced the Hellenic culture. Not to speak of the Jewish school of Egypt, in which attempts to amalgamate Hellenism and Judaism had been continued for nearly two hundred years. Nicholas of Damascus had become at this very time one of the most distinguished, most learned and most honoured men of his age. It is certain that in Jerusalem, Greek was very little studied, that Greek studies were considered dangerous and even servile; that they were declared good at most as an ornament for women. The study of the Law alone was considered liberal and worthy of a serious man. A learned rabbi, when asked at what time it was proper to teach children “the wisdom of the Greeks,” he answered: “At the hour which is neither day nor night, for it is written of the Law: Thou shalt study it day and night.”
Neither directly nor indirectly, therefore, did any element of Hellenic culture make its way to Jesus. He knew nothing beyond Judaism, his mind preserved this frank simplicity which was always enfeebled by an extensive and varied culture. In the very bosom of Judaism, he was still a stranger to many efforts some of which were parallel to his own. On one hand, the asceticism of the Essenes, or Therapeutes, on the other, the fine essays in religious philosophy, made by the Jewish school of Alexandria, and ingeniously interpreted by Philo, were to him unknown.
The Nativity, detail of The Story of the Youth of Christ, 1140–1145.
Stained glass window.
Ambulatory, Basilica of St. Denis, Saint-Denis.
Virgin of Montserrat, also known as La Moreneta, 12th century.
Wood. Abbey of Santa Maria de Montserrat, Catalonia.
Donatello, Virgin and Child, 1440.
Terracotta, height: 158.2 cm.
Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.
Giotto di Bondone, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels and Saints, also known as the Ognissanti Madonna, c. 1310.
Tempera on wood panel, 325 × 204 cm.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
Luckily for him, he knew no more of the grotesque scholasticism which was taught in Jerusalem, and which was soon to constitute the Talmud. If a few Pharisees had already brought it to Galilee, he did not attend upon them, and when he afterwards came in contact with this silly casuistry, it inspired in him nothing but disgust.
The reading of the books of the Old Testament produced upon him much greater impression. The canon of the sacred books was composed of two principal parts – the Law, that is, the Pentateuch, and the Prophets as we now possess them. A vast allegorical exegesis was applied to all these books, and sought to extract what is not in them, but what responded to the aspirations of the time. The Law, which represented, not the ancient laws of the country, but rather Utopias, the factitious laws and the pious frauds of the time of the pietistic kings, had become, since the nation had ceased to govern itself, an inexhaustible theme of subtle interpretations. As to the prophets and psalms, they were persuaded that nearly all the allusions in these books which were even slightly mysterious were related to the Messiah, and they sought in advance the type of him who was to realize the hopes of the nation. Jesus shared the universal taste for these allegorical interpretations. But the real poetry of the Bible, which was lost to the foolish expositors of Jerusalem, was fully revealed to his exquisite genius. The Law appears to have been of little interest to him; he thought he could do better. But the religious poetry of the psalms was in wonderful harmony with his lyrical soul. All his life they were his sustenance and his support. The prophets, Isaiah in particular, and his continuator of the time of the captivity, with their splendid dreams of the future, their impetuous eloquence and their invectives intermingled with enchanting pictures, were his real teachers. Undoubtedly he read also many modern writings, whose authors, to gain an authority now accorded only to very ancient writing, hid themselves beneath the names of prophets and patriarchs. One of these books made a deep impression upon him, the book of Daniel. This book, composed by an exalted Jew of the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, and placed by him under the shelter of an ancient sage, was the summing up of the spirit of the latter days. Its author, the real creator of the philosophy of history, for the first time dared to see in the movement of the world, and the succession of empires, merely a function subordinate to the destiny of the Jewish people. Jesus was at an early period thrilled by these lofty hopes. Perhaps also, he read the books of Enoch, then revered equally with the sacred books and the other writings of the same kind that upheld so great a movement in the popular imagination. The advent of the Messiah with his glories and his terrors, the nations dashing one against another, the cataclysm of heaven and earth, were the familiar food of his imagination. These revolutions were thought to be at hand, so that a multitude of people were seeking to compute their times, the supernatural order of things into which such visions transport us, appeared to him from the first perfectly simple and natural. That he had no knowledge of the general condition of the world that may be learned from every line of his most authentic discourses. The earth to him appears still to be divided into kingdoms which are at war; he seems to be ignorant of the “Roman peace,” and the new state of society which his century inaugurated. He had no precise idea of the Roman power; the name of “Caesar” alone had reached him. The court of the kings seemed to him a place where people wore fine clothes. The charming impossibilities with which his parables swarmed, when he put kings and mighty men upon the scene it proves that he had no conception of aristocratic society except that of a young villager who sees the world through the prism of his own simplicity.
Still he was less acquainted with the new idea, created by Greek science, which is the basis of all philosophy and which modern science has fully confirmed, the exclusion of the capricious gods to whom the early faith of the ancient ages attributed the government of the universe. The negation of miracle, this idea that everything is produced in the world by laws in which the personal intervention of superior beings had no share, was the common law in the great schools of all countries that had received Greek science. Perhaps even Babylon and Persia were not strangers to it. Jesus knew nothing of this advance. Though born at a time when the principle of positive science had already been proclaimed, he lived in the midst of the supernatural. Never perhaps had the Jews been more devoured by the thirst of the marvellous. Philo, who lived in a great intellectual centre, and who had received a very complete education, has only a false chimerical science, Jesus differed in this point in no wise from his countrymen. He believed in the devil whom he looked upon as a sort of genius of evil, and imagined that nervous diseases were the work of demons who took possession of the patient and tormented him. To him the marvellous was not the exceptional – it was the moral condition. The idea of the supernatural with its impossibilities, was not conceived until the day when the experimental science of nature was discovered. The man who is a stranger to all notion of physics, who believes that by a prayer he changes the course of the clouds, controls disease and even death itself, sees nothing extraordinary in miracle since the whole course of things is to him the result of the free volitions of divinity. This intellectual state was always that of Jesus. But in his great soul such a faith produced effects entirely different from those which it produced upon the multitude. With the majority, faith