“But look at the context. Jesus is upholding the written law of Moses against the teachers of unwritten traditions. These teachers told people that if a particle of this or that came off their hands into their mouths while they were eating, they were defiled4. These traditions also prescribed minute regulations about preparing meat, and about avoiding meat sold in the markets of Greek cities. Look at Paul’s Corinthian letters about this. These regulations must have been very inconvenient5 for the poor Jews in the Greek cities of Galilee. Jesus stood up for the poor, and for the written law, which said nothing about such details. Long after the crucifixion, Peter was told by ‘the Lord’ in a vision (you will find it in the Acts) that he might eat anything he liked, pork included. But Jesus said nothing of the kind before his death. Turn to the Acts and you will find it as I have said.”
I turned, and found, as usual, that Scaurus was right, though there was no special mention of pork in the Acts, but only of “beasts and creeping things,” which Peter calls[194] “unclean.” Scaurus continued, “Now look carefully at what follows in Mark and Matthew. Mark represents the disciples6—but Matthew represents Peter—as questioning Christ privately7 about this startling saying. The questioners are said to have called it a ‘parable.’ There was no ‘parable’ about it at all. But the fact was that, after the resurrection, it was revealed to Peter, or to the disciples, that the meaning of the saying ‘Nothing outside defileth’ went far beyond its original scope; so that it swept away the whole of the Levitical ordinances8 about things ‘unclean.’ If you examine Mark’s words carefully you will see that he inserts a comment of his own (which Matthew omits) namely that Jesus uttered these words ‘purifying all kinds of food.’ If by ‘purifying,’ Mark meant ‘purifying in effect,’ or ‘purifying, as the disciples subsequently understood,’ then he was right. If he meant ‘purifying at once,’ or ‘purifying in such a way as to abrogate9 immediately the Levitical prohibitions,’ then he was wrong; for that was not the meaning.
“What indeed do you suppose would have happened, if Jesus and his disciples had sat down to a dinner of pork on that same day? They would have been stoned by the multitude. The meaning was limited as I have said above. Mark has probably mixed together what occurred before, and what occurred after, the crucifixion. It was very natural. How many of the ‘dark sayings’ or ‘parables’ of Jesus might remain ‘dark’ to the disciples, till they reflected on them after his death! Moreover the evangelists believed that Jesus, after his death, rose again and appeared on several occasions to the disciples, apart from the rest of the world—that is, ‘in private’—and that he explained to them after death what had been dark sayings during his life. How inevitable10 for biographers—writing thirty, forty, or fifty years after the events they narrated—sometimes to confuse explanations, or other words of Christ, uttered ‘in private’ after death, with those uttered before death, whether in private or not! I shall have to mention other instances of such confusion. It is not surprising that Luke omits the narrative11.”
I could not deny the force of this. But, though it derogated[195] from Mark as a witness, it did not seem to me to derogate12 from Christ as a prophet. I felt that no wise teacher could have desired, thus by a side-blow, to sweep away the whole of the national code of purifications. So I was ready to accept Scaurus’s view, at all events provisionally.
“I pass over,” said Scaurus, “the precept, ‘Beware of leaven,’ which was certainly metaphorical14; and two narratives15 of feeding multitudes with ‘loaves,’ which in my opinion are metaphorical; and a mention of ‘crumbs,’ which my reason leads me to interpret in one way, while my desire suggests another. About this I shall say something later on, as also about predictions of being killed and rising again. Now I reach these words, ‘If anyone wishes to come after me, let him disown himself, and take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever desires to save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for the sake of me and the gospel shall save it.’ Note that these words are preceded by a prediction that the Son of man must be ‘killed.’ Also remember that the ‘cross’ is a punishment sanctioned by Roman but not by Jewish law. Bearing these facts in mind, imagine yourself in the crowd, and tell me what you would think Christ meant, if he turned round to you and said, ‘You must take up your cross.’ Do not read on to see what I think; for I doubt whether Christ used these words. But, if he did use them, tell me what you think he meant by them.”
I was taken aback by this. For I perceived that the sense required a metaphorical rendering16, and, at the same time, that such a metaphor13 was almost impossible among any Jews, before Christ’s crucifixion. At first I tried to justify17 it from Paul’s epistles, which declared that, in Christ’s death, “all died”—meaning that all, by sympathy, died to sin and rose again to righteousness. Paul said also “I have been crucified with Christ,” and “our old man”—meaning “our old human nature”—“has been crucified with Him,” and “the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.” But these expressions were all based on the Christian18 belief that the “cross” was the way to “resurrection.” They were quite intelligible19 after the resurrection, but not before it.
Then I tried to imagine myself in the circle of disciples[196] surrounding Socrates in prison, and the Master, with the bowl of poison in his hands, preparing to drink it, and looking up to us and saying, “If you intend to be disciples worthy20 of me, you too must be prepared to take up the hemlock21 bowl.” What, I asked, should I have understood by this? It seemed to me that the words could only mean “You, too, must be prepared to be put to death by your countrymen.”
Now as the hemlock bowl was the regular penalty among the Athenians, so the cross (as Scaurus had said) was the regular penalty among the Romans but not among the Jews. So, when I tried honestly to respond to Scaurus’s appeal, and to imagine myself in the crowd following Jesus, and the Master turning round to us, and saying, “Take up your cross,” I was obliged to admit, “I should have taken the Master to mean, ‘If you are to be worthy followers22 of mine, you must be prepared to be put to death as rebels by the Romans’.”
Scaurus took the same view. “Well,” he continued, “I will anticipate your answer, for it seems to me you can only come to one conclusion. You, in the crowd, would take the words to mean that you must follow your Master to the death against the Romans. But all intelligent readers of the Christian books ought to know that he could not have said that. He was a visionary, and utterly23 averse24 to violence, so averse that he was on one occasion reproached for his inaction by John the Baptist—who once said to him, in effect, ‘Why do you leave me in prison? Why do you not stir a hand to release me?’ Moreover, if Jesus had said this, what would the chief priests have needed more than this, to get Pilate to put him to death: ‘This man said to the rabble25, If you are intending to follow me, you must go with the cross on your shoulders’? ‘Can you prove this?’ would have been Pilate’s reply. They would have proved it. Then sentence would have followed at once as a matter of course. And who can deny that it would have been just?”
I certainly could not deny it. Then Scaurus pointed26 out to me how Luke avoided this dangerous interpretation27, by inserting “daily,” so as to give the words a metaphorical twist, “Let him take up his cross daily.” But this, he said, was manifestly an addition of Luke’s. If Jesus had inserted “daily”[197] why should Mark and Matthew have omitted it? “Daily” would make no sense till a generation had passed away, so that “to be crucified with Christ” had become a metaphorical expression for mortifying28 the flesh. On this point, at all events, Scaurus seemed to me to be right.
He continued as follows, “I am disposed to think that Mark has misunderstood a Jewish phrase as referring to the cross when it really referred to something else. You know that, in Rome, a rascally29 slave, regarded as being on the way to crucifixion, is called ‘yoke30-bearer,’ which means practically ‘cross-bearer.’ Mark, who has a good many Latinisms, might regard ‘take the yoke’ as meaning ‘take the cross’—if the former expression could be proved to have been used by Jesus. Still more easily might ‘take the yoke’ be regarded as equivalent to ‘take the cross’ if it could be proved that the Jews themselves connected ‘taking the yoke’ with martyrdom.
“Both these facts can be proved. In the first place, Christ actually said to the disciples, ‘Take my yoke upon you.’ It is true that this saying is preserved by Matthew alone; but its omission32 by others is easily explained, as I will presently shew. In my judgment33, it is certain that Christ did give this precept, and that it had nothing to do with crucifixion. The context in Matthew declares that the kingdom of heaven is revealed only to ‘babes’—whom Christ elsewhere calls ‘little ones’ or those who make themselves ‘least’ in the kingdom of God—and soon afterwards come the words, ‘Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek34 and lowly in heart.’ This is the fundamental truth of Christ’s teaching, that those who make themselves the humblest of servants to one another are greatest in his ‘kingdom.’ In order to reign35, one must serve, or ‘take the yoke.’
“The next fact is that Jews of the present day—so I am credibly36 informed—would say of a Jewish martyr31 that he ‘took the yoke upon himself,’ when he made a formal profession of obedience37 to the Law just before death. This I must ask you to take for granted. It would be too long to prove and explain.” I suppose Scaurus heard this from the teacher he called “his rabbi.” It was confirmed, to my own knowledge,[198] by something that happened nearly thirty years ago when one of the most famous Jewish teachers, Akiba by name, was put to death under Hadrian. I heard it said by a credible38 eyewitness39 that “they combed his flesh with combs of iron,” and another added “Yes, and Akiba, all the while, kept taking upon himself the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven,” by which he meant repeating the profession of faith.
“A third fact,” said Scaurus, “is that the Christians40, from a very early period, used the word ‘yoke’ in a depreciatory41 sense to mean the ‘bondage42’—as they called it—of the Law of Moses. Paul calls the latter ‘the yoke of bondage.’ The Christians, at their first public council, speak of it as ‘a yoke’; and a Christian writer named Barnabas says that ‘the new law’ is ‘without the yoke of necessity.’ I suspect that among the Greeks and Romans the servile associations of ‘yoke’ have also tended to the disuse of the term among the Christians of the west. You may object that the associations of ‘cross’ are still more disgraceful than those of ‘yoke.’ But I do not think they would be so for Christians, who regarded the disgrace of the cross as a step upward to what they call ‘the crown of life.’ Indeed I am rather surprised that Matthew’s tradition ‘Take my yoke upon you’ has been retained at all, even by a single evangelist.”
Most of this was new to me. But, even if it was true—as seemed to me not unlikely—the same conclusion followed as above. The mistake derogated from Mark, not from Christ. Indeed Scaurus’s interpretation seemed to me to exalt43 Christ. For might not some people, of austere44 and fanatical minds, find it easier to “take up the cross,” that is, to lacerate and torture themselves, than to “take up the yoke,” that is, to make their lives subservient45 to the community in a spirit of willing self-sacrifice? Indeed Scaurus himself said, “If I am right, the Christians have lost by this misunderstanding. When I say ‘lost,’ I mean ‘lost in respect of morality.’ For some may ‘take up the cross’ like the priests of Cybele, finding a pleasure in gashing46 themselves—such is human nature. But it is not so exciting a thing to ‘take up the yoke’ if it implies making oneself a drudge47 for life to commonplace people.”
[199]
This seemed very true. And afterwards I was not surprised to find that the fourth gospel contains no precept to “take up the cross.” But it commands Christians to “love one another”—a precept that nowhere occurs in Mark. Also what Scaurus said about “making oneself a drudge” was, in effect, inculcated by the fourth gospel where it commands the disciples to “wash one another’s feet.” Sometimes I have asked why this gospel did not restore the old tradition about “yoke.” Perhaps the writer avoided it as he avoids “faith,” and “repentance,” and other technical terms that might come between Christians and Christ. Scaurus himself said, “There seems to me more morality in the old rule of Moses, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ than in either ‘Take up the cross’ or ‘Take up the yoke.’ If ever this Christian superstition48 were to overrun the world, I could conceive of a time when half the Christians might fight with the war-cry of ‘the yoke,’ and the other half with the war-cry of ‘the cross,’ cutting one another’s throats for these emblems49. But I could not so easily conceive of a time when men would ever cut one another’s throats with the war-cry, ‘We love one another’.”
These words of Scaurus seemed to me at the time to be quite true. Now, forty-five years afterwards, they seem to me true as to fact, but not quite true as to interpretation. For, since what Scaurus called “the old rule of Moses” included “Love God,” as well as “Love thy neighbour,” it followed that the Lord Jesus, in saying “Take my yoke,” meant “Serve God,” as well as “Serve man.” And, in order to serve God, must not one be prepared to suffer, as God also is called “longsuffering”? And of such “suffering” can there be any better emblem50 than Christ’s cross?
I cannot honestly deny the force of the evidence adduced by Scaurus to prove that the Saviour51 did not really utter the precept of “taking up the cross,” and that He did utter the precept of “taking up the yoke.” But I can honestly accept the former as an interpretation of the latter, an interpretation fit for Greeks and Romans when the gospel was first preached, and likely to be fit for all the races of the world till the time of[200] the coming of the Lord. If Scaurus is right, only the precept of the yoke was inculcated by Christ in word. But all agree that the precept of the cross was inculcated by Christ in act. Both metaphors52 seem needed, and many more, to help the disciples of the Lord to apprehend53 the nature of His Kingdom, or Family.
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1
precept
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| n.戒律；格言 | |
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defile
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| v.弄污，弄脏；n.(山间)小道 | |
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needy
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| adj.贫穷的，贫困的，生活艰苦的 | |
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defiled
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| v.玷污( defile的过去式和过去分词 )；污染；弄脏；纵列行进 | |
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inconvenient
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| adj.不方便的，令人感到麻烦的 | |
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disciples
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| n.信徒( disciple的名词复数 )；门徒；耶稣的信徒；（尤指）耶稣十二门徒之一 | |
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privately
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| adv.以私人的身份，悄悄地，私下地 | |
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ordinances
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| n.条例，法令( ordinance的名词复数 ) | |
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abrogate
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| v.废止，废除 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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narrative
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| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
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derogate
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| v.贬低，诽谤 | |
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metaphor
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| n.隐喻，暗喻 | |
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metaphorical
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| a.隐喻的，比喻的 | |
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narratives
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| 记叙文( narrative的名词复数 )； 故事； 叙述； 叙述部分 | |
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rendering
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| n.表现，描写 | |
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justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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intelligible
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| adj.可理解的，明白易懂的，清楚的 | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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hemlock
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| n.毒胡萝卜，铁杉 | |
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followers
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| 追随者( follower的名词复数 )； 用户； 契据的附面； 从动件 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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averse
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| adj.厌恶的；反对的，不乐意的 | |
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rabble
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| n.乌合之众，暴民；下等人 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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mortifying
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| adj.抑制的，苦修的v.使受辱( mortify的现在分词 )；伤害（人的感情）；克制；抑制（肉体、情感等） | |
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rascally
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| adj. 无赖的，恶棍的 adv. 无赖地，卑鄙地 | |
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yoke
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| n.轭；支配；v.给...上轭，连接，使成配偶 | |
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martyr
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| n.烈士，殉难者；vt.杀害，折磨，牺牲 | |
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omission
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| n.省略，删节；遗漏或省略的事物，冗长 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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meek
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| adj.温顺的，逆来顺受的 | |
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reign
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| n.统治时期，统治，支配，盛行；v.占优势 | |
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credibly
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| ad.可信地；可靠地 | |
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obedience
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| n.服从，顺从 | |
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credible
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| adj.可信任的，可靠的 | |
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eyewitness
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| n.目击者，见证人 | |
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Christians
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| n.基督教徒( Christian的名词复数 ) | |
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depreciatory
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| adj.贬值的，蔑视的 | |
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bondage
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| n.奴役，束缚 | |
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exalt
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| v.赞扬，歌颂，晋升，提升 | |
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austere
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| adj.艰苦的；朴素的，朴实无华的；严峻的 | |
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subservient
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| adj.卑屈的，阿谀的 | |
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gashing
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| v.划伤，割破( gash的现在分词 ) | |
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drudge
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| n.劳碌的人；v.做苦工，操劳 | |
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superstition
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| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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emblems
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| n.象征，标记( emblem的名词复数 ) | |
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emblem
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| n.象征，标志；徽章 | |
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51
saviour
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| n.拯救者，救星 | |
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metaphors
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| 隐喻( metaphor的名词复数 ) | |
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apprehend
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| vt.理解，领悟，逮捕，拘捕，忧虑 | |
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