Cardinal characters in the New Testament

Front matter

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Contents

III Peter: From SuHirtinc SAND To SOLID ROCK .( Continged } Geta us eee yal 53

IV Joun: From Son oF THUNDER TO APOSTLE (OF) LOVE Ge heer es 63

V jJoun: From Son oF THUNDER TO APOSTLE OF Love (Continued)....... 80 VI Tuomas: THE Cautious BELIEVER .... 93

Preface

“There is one study, my Christian brethren, which never can lose its interest for us so long as we are men: and that is, the investigation of human character. The deep interest of biography consists in this—that it is in some measure the description to us of our own inner history. You cannot unveil the secrets of another heart without at the same time finding something to correspond with, and perchance explain, the mysteries of your own. Between the wisest and the worst there are ten thousand points of marvelous resemblance ; and so the trials, the frailties, the bitterness of any human soul, faithfully traced out, ever shadow out to us a portraiture of our own experience. Give but the inner heart-history of the most elevated spirit that ever conquered in life’s struggle, place it before the most despicable that ever failed, and you exhibit to him so much of the picture of your own very self that you perchance command his deepest attention. Only let the inarticulate life of the peasant find for itself a distinct voice and a true biographer, let the inward struggles which have agitated that rough frame be given faithfully to the world, and therd is not a monarch whose soul will not be thrilled with those inner details of an existence with which outwardly he has not a single thought in common,”

These words of F. W. Robertson voice a truth which to most minds will appear self-evident. But the task of analyzing and cataloguing human beings, while fascinating, surely, is by no means easy. It is no simple matter adequately to account for the most prosaic and regular souls among us; and if this be true of men in the average, it is yet more bafflingly true of those

10 PREFACE irregular and great ones of our human story. But in order properly to interpret.the observer must, in a real sense, identify himself with the observed. This the author feels he has in great measure been able to do.

“All longings fail save that to understand,” is an apothegm which is truer when applied to personalities, perhaps, than to all other things, and (for a vast company) truer of Biblical persons than of others.

If it is the glory of God to conceal things, as the Bible tells us, it is the glory of men to search them out. These engrossing characters of the New Testament have been the subjects of painstaking and persistent study through the years; many volumes on them have come to light, during the last decade, especially. They have not yet been fully explored, however, and while this book does not claim to be such an achievement, but only an aid thereto, the author feels a measure of satisfaction with the portraits as sketched in these unpretentious pages. To say the least, he has had no little “slory” of the kind above mentioned in his effort to search them out. And if into these great souls some . little windows have been opened, there is sufficient reason for this book, despite the many already published on the subject. |

There is an enchantment about these First Century men—some of them sons of the radiant dawn, others children of the night. Some, it is true, had souls of mud, while others—and by far the larger number of them—had souls of purest crystal. Some came to the sunset of life to find their dreams of youth more than fulfilled, and expired full of hope gazing toward the Elysian Fields: others found that the golden fruit of Hesperides had become Apples of Sodom on their tongues. But, taken together, these first associates of Jesus present in luminous miniature the religious history of mankind.

PRERACE ’. 11

“Know thyself,” is golden advice; but he who would best know himself must know these men: for they accurately mirror and reflect the inner mysteries of ali men. And because of their singular vision, or the ghastly lack of it in some cases, (as for instance, Judas and Pilate), in one way or the other, either as warning or inspiration, they are monitors for all men. They were sprung from the most virile race on earth, and were shaped and polished into instruments of world-enlightenment at the hands of the most virile Teacher earth ever saw. Upon them Christ’s influence was such that they acquired not a taste but a passion to learn and serve. He awakened their latent instincts and guided and shaped each one to the utmost usefulness in his own way. Moreover, the Master took these men—poles apart in their tastes and natures—and welded them into a unity the like of which the world had not seen before; thus revealing affinities of soul hidden in natures otherwise so far apart and diverse.

Time has been unable to dim or diminish these names ; rather it has steadily added new lustre to them. They remain so high that “age and comparison,” to borrow a phrase from Emerson, “has not robbed them of a ray.” They went forth tinged with the mind of Jesus to tinge, in turn, the mind of all succeeding ages. In this school of Christ the rude became gentle; the stupid, intelligent; the wavering, determined; the unsanctified, holy; and in this group, as in no other, heaven and earth met and adorned each other.

The Prodigal Son and the Elder Brother cannot, of course, be classed as historical persons: they are parabolic figures; but are so universally typical of all men, it is felt, as to justify their treatment here.

Taken as a thesis, the object of the book is this: To show, on the one hand, the spiritual progress made by those of the number who responded to the training

12 PREFACE of Jesus; on the other, the moral decline of those who did not.

The author does not lay claim to complete novelty of treatment; he is, of course, under obligation to several works on Biblical characters and others, including various translations of the New Testament, for suggestions and new shades of interpretation, and for accuracy in details, (see Bibliography); and yet he feels that the treatment is fresh and different and new.

Writing as he does for average folk—the breadwinners of our day and their like—he has avoided all technical terms of the scholars for the sake of clarity.

Effort has been made to make due acknowledgement of sources and quotations at the proper places throughout the book. If any have been overlooked (sometimes they were unknown), this is matter for regret to the author.

Let it be said, finally, that some consideration has been given to chronological order, but not too much; significance rather than sequence has taken precedence in the grouping of these characters, and it is felt that as the sequence unfolds their significance increases.

LAWRENCE O. LINEBERGER

Thornville, Ohio March 1, 1930

CARDINAL CHARACTERS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

“Great men stand like solitary towers in the City of God.” —Longfellow.

“There are heroes in evil as well as in good.” —La Rochefoucauld.

Chapter I John The Baptist Soaring And Wavering

“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”—John 1:29.

“Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?”— Matthew 11:3.

I

A. few months before our Lord began His revolutionizing career as teacher, preacher, and Saviour of men, there burst upon the slumbering world a rare spirit. He came fresh from the wilderness solitudes of Judea. From the environs of nature and nature’s God he came with an attractiveness and power seldom displayed by man. He was a fire; he was a flame; he was a conflagration.

This interesting, enthralling character is John the Baptist. The man, at home in all wild and solitary places, is preaching in the wilderness out by the Jordan. For some reason—perhaps the early death of his parents, or, which is more probable, the extreme corruption of the age—he had betaken himself as a young man to the neighboring wilderness, and there had lived the lonely, austere life of a religious ascetic.

Doubtless, while in the desert, John had thought much upon such prophetic spirits as Elijah, Jeremiah and Micah, his predecessors as prophets to a heedless people, all of whom had arisen from that same general locality to bear their message to Israel. At any rate he had meditated upon God and pondered over the problems of the age until he came to feel himself called of God to be a prophet to his people. ‘This stalwart prophet,” says Farrar, “had learnt a language, he had received a revelation, not vouchsafed to ordinary men —attained, not in the schools of the Rabbis, but in the school of solitude, in the school of God.”

It is significant that most of the world’s great teachers of religion have been schooled in the desert; have _ been desert men with desert minds—Moses, Amos, Jeremiah, Buddha, Mohammed, and most significant of all, Jesus Himself; for, from this same Judean wilderness Christ emerged from the days of the Temptation, and went forth full of the might of God to His unique prophethood. It is as Lowell has said,

“If chosen souls could never be alone In deep mid-silence, open-doored to God, No great thing ever had been dreamed or done, The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.” + And so John sprang from the soul-stirring, Godhaunted desert full of a new impetuosity and fire, a fire in whose passionate and purifying flame evils that were deeply entrenched and powerful melted and gave way.

Such teachers are needed for such times. There was full and plenty of those respectable, conventional teachers, “who spake smooth things and prophesied © deceits.”” So out of the weird wilderness onto the banks of the leisurely Jordan, with a ledge of rock for his pulpit, John stood forth to address the expectant, awe-struck throngs.

II

Let us picture in our minds this preacher and his congregation. All of the adjacent towns and villages

1Poems, Houghton, Mifflin Co.

have emptied themselves to wait upon his message. What a passionate, fiery figure he is! Dressed, like Elijah, in a mantle of camel’s hair, the severe garb of the Hebrew prophet, his locks unshorn, his countenance bronzed by the Syrian sun, his lips close-pressed; he is the very image of a new, strange earnestness.

He is doing two things, this terse preacher from the wilds—denouncing and announcing. He is denouncing evil in all its forms. He is announcing the soon-coming of the long-looked-for Deliverer. His words are surcharged with the might of prophetic authority. He is so sure of himself and his message, so original, so enthusiastic, so different—a new type of man with an entirely new type of message for his case-hardened, scribe-ridden, priest-burdened age. His very teaching reflected the imagery of the wilderness—the rock, the serpent, the barren tree, the harvester’s fan, the woodman’s axe—‘‘The whole man was a sermon’. He penetrated beneath the hollow shell of pretentious Pharisee and Scribe, comparing them to the vipers which he had so often seen crawling over the wilderness rocks, threatening them with the woodman’s axe, the smelter’s furnace and the harvester’s winnowing fan. He poured a denunciatory torrent of sulphuric language on the heads of all who thronged his wilderness cathedral to hear—“generations of vipers”, that’s what he called their great ones. His words were pungent and spirit-stirring, replete with startling effects. So compelling was he, so great his powers of persuasion, that proud Pharisees, skeptical Saducees and hardened sinners alike, listened with accusing consciences and stricken hearts, and were all moved with a deep concern to enquire in one voice, “What must we do?”

18 NEW TESTAMENT CHARACTERS Ill

Religiously the age was dry as dust. A bleak hopelessness had settled like a pall over the minds of men. There was a general expectation of “the wrath to come” which would precede the coming Kingdom. Crime was universal; atheism was rife; morals were in a state of decay. But it was the deep darkness before the dawn. Even the pagan world felt that the “fullness of time’ had come. Yesterday’s fires had become today’s ashes ; but John would blow the ashes away and re-kindle the fire. His religious conviction was so intense, his faith so sublime, his enthusiasm so boundless, that, after hearing him, men dared to hope again. He was like a spring suddenly burst forth in a parched and thirsty land. Here was a new voice from God in the midst of the dull, disconsolate years. Here was an unfettered mind, a free and unfaltering spirit. John compelled men to rethink their religion. He was the spiritual son of Elijah, and the spiritual father of Luther, of Savonarola, of Wesley, each of whom, with the magnificent urgency of a new message to the world, revived religion and forced his age to take on a new and spiritual character.

Perhaps no prophet ever enjoyed such boundless success as did John in his early ministry. Men in all stations of life—soldiers, Pharisees, Priests, Publicans —were compelled by his preaching to hearken to conscience until, finding no peace, they cried helplessly: “What shall we do?” Not even King Herod in his voluptuous palace could escape the sinister voice which mercilessly thundered against sin in low places and in high. “It is not lawful for thee to have her,” he shouted in the ears of the king, who was criminally living with the wife of another man, and had sought the prophet’s palliation for his sin.

John was the peerless prophet of his age. He made men think of Elijah, the sturdy and commanding Tishbite. After his death Jesus, reflecting upon his character, said, “I say unto you, among them that are born of women there has not arisen a greater than John the Baptist.”” He recognized John’s moral kinship to the great Tishbite and paid high tribute to both of them: “What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed with soft raiment? Behold, they that wear soft raiment are in king’s houses. But what went ye out to see? A, prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet .. . and if ye will receive it, this is Elijah which was to come.” John was no “‘little round, fat, oily man of God.”

John’s genius, chafing against the smugness of old, effete conventionalities, swung into heroic disregard of their rules and rubrics. Knowing that the Kingdom of God could not be made out of a generation of sinners and pedants, he loosed the lightning of his indignation upon their pride and sterile self-righteousness ; he _ pled passionately for transition, for change. ,

John is one of time’s great sons; the centuries assemble to do him homage; history is redated from his birth. But, like all the prophets, his vision of the Kingdom of God was a strange mingling of gleam and gloom.

The Baptist was like Elijah his forbear in several ways. Like him he rebuked his king. Like him he ~ found his worst foe in his king’s wife. He baptised and preached, it is thought, on the very spot where Elijah did his mighty works in Ahab’s kingdom.

History sometimes repeats itself in striking ways. Does it not seem as if Elijah, the severe ascetic, uncourtley in manners, bold in speech, fearless in denouncing sin; that Ahab, a man not totally destitute of good impulses and amiable feelings, yet weak and wicked, the puppet husband of an unscrupulous wife; that Jezebel, depraved, crafty, resolute, utterly devoid of moral character, not scrupling to use any means, no matter how atrocious, which would accomplish her ends—does it not seem, I say, that Ahab, Jezebel, and Elijah have all reappeared in the persons of Herod, Herodias and John? The similarity was too plain, anyhow, for the contemporaries of the Baptist to miss, and they said John was Elijah over again; not only was he a follower of the formidable Tishbite, but his reincarnation.

John could have stepped, had he chosen, into the priesthood of Israel and into ease; but spiritual inertia had crept over Israel, and the young priest went into the desert to let the solitudes shape him into a prophet mightier than Amos or Jeremiah. He became a desert solitary, a student of God, of the soul, and the signs of the time. He quitted the restless haunts of men that he might the better see the face of God. He disapproved of the foul society in which he found himself. He deplored the senile decay which everywhere abounded. He felt himself called to bring about reforms to match those of Elijah, his celebrated forerunner.

In the wilderness we may be sure that John spent much time brooding over the words, especially the sterner elements, of the ancient prophets. Like Moses and Amos in similar roles, he pondered the problems of his age, came to feel the crying need and to vision the remedy.

When he saw that Israel’s salvation lay in spiritual quickening and cleansing, he began to preach. He had but one sermon: Repentance; and but one text: “FRepent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven ts at hand;” and at the heart of all his preaching there was but one

Person; the King of that Kingdom, or Messiah.

This sermon upon this text centering upon this Person, John preached with such passion and power that the whole Jewish world, as we have seen, was stirred to a frenzy, and became, says Josephus, “ready to do anything he advised.” Israel had seen no such prophet for centuries. His fervor and originality, together with his trumpet-voice calling in hammer-like refrains ‘Repent ye, repent ye,’”’ struck consternation into the complacent souls of the multitudes. They had been saying all their life, ““We are Abraham’s children, no harm can befall us.”” But John said, “Children of Abraham or not, all is not well; repent, make you clean before God.”

John was another Amos reappearing to denounce ceremony and demand repentance, good character, and right conduct toward all men, as essentials to fellowship and favor with God. The age of John in many ways resembled the age of Amos. Both faced a similar set of moral conditions; the import of their preaching was the same, and produced like results. Amos denounced the immoral worship of Jereboam II, and John denounced the immoral living of Herod Antipas, and for their utterances both were arrested and silenced. The utter spiritual barrenness of ceremonialism per se was the theme of both Amos and the Baptist. Amos thundered in the ears of Amaziah the high priest of Bethel, speaking for God, “I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. .. . But let justice run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”’ And John, seeing the priests from Jerusalem in his congregation, cried, “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” As in Amos’ day, so in Tohn’s, the priests had substituted rites for righteousness and legalism for love.

Like all prophets, John was a nonconformist (Emerson says all great men are), his winged spirit rightly could not be confined by the rigid conventions of the day. He was restive under the time-honored restrictions: naively, he set them at naught.

Discontent is the spur to achievement. John was gloriously discontent with things as they were. His sermons !—what edifices of grace and power he erected on Jordan’s banks! His was a spacious intellect, a blazing heart, an unsullied soul that disdained quibble and all subterfuge. He was indomitable, unanswerable, powerful as a hewer-down of oaks.

Throngs stood gaping at him. With what skill did he demolish their theological house of cards! With what ease did he sweep their specious and insubstantial, if plausible, tenets away; His speech, while exuberant and devastating, was yet withal strangely beguiling. He was never blatant or impudent, but vibrant with a glowing earnestness always. He was virile and animated, but no religious fanatic. Faith was an obsession of his. He had a presentiment of a Kingdom to be. :

IV

John had the narrowness and hurry characteristic of youth. He was uncompromising and incapable of waiting. He pictured Christ subverting the whole order of things, ushering in sweeping and Titanic reforms presently. ‘His fan is in his hand’—judgment is here; “Repent ye’”—the Kingdom of God has come; “Behold the Lamb of God’—redemption is near! With this fiery preacher-prophet it was either black or white, midnight or noon, good or bad, heaven or hell. As George Matheson says, he was “‘intolerant of middle courses.””» What moral earnestness in the man! What conviction, what invective, what persuasion, what spiritual grandeur, strength, humility!

The peak of John’s ministry came on the day when Jesus, having heard so much of him, went to see and to be baptized by him in Jordan. With great ecstasy and triumph he introduced Jesus to the wondering throng saying: ‘Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.” It was John’s crowning day.

The way for Christ had been prepared, the work of John was done. Thenceforth the fame of the Baptist waned, while that of Jesus waxed. And this was as the noble Baptist would have it. John was overawed by Jesus. Before Him the fierce prophet of the desert quickly became submissive, like a timid child. He who could rebuke kings, and unmask Pharisees with indignation, in the presence of the majesty of Jesus lost all his lofty bearing. Before that Presence he felt as nothing.

For months a great wave of eS had surged about the Baptist. Universal applause was accorded him, but it had moved him not. It was coming to be generally believed that he was the Messiah. He could have passed for “that Prophet which was to come.” The leaders of the nation came from Jerusalem to ask him: “Art thou the Christ?’ He confessed: “I am not the Christ.” “Art thou Elias?’ He said: “I am not.” “Art thou the Prophet?” He answered: “No.” “Well, who art thou then?” they demanded. He said: “T am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make ready for the coming of the King.” He had no imposing thing to say of himself. That other John, John the beloved disciple, has described him as “a man sent from God,” but he calls himself a “voice.”

John was a voice, not a mere echo. It is true that many are content to be echoes, not John; he was a voice. Being a voice was what cost him his life. He could have saved himself by playing echo. The world still prefers echoes to voices: they are fainter, smoother, and less disquieting. But to play echo is to be like other people, and easily classified; while to come with a voice speaking new, daring things is different and disturbing. It has its price, too. 7

In this self-depreciation John showed his true greatness. This was before he had met Jesus. Now that Jesus has come on the scene, he shows his bigness of soul yet more. It was now plain that his light must recede before the larger light of Christ. Dawn must give way to day. The moon must wane before the shining sun. John is to be eclipsed by Jesus. “I must | decrease, He must increase,’ he said, with a true sense of the supreme fitness of things. It is significant that John the Baptist’s Day in the Church calendar is midsummer, 24th of June, after which there is a steady decrease in the length of the days. It is the fall time. But Christmas is Jesus’ birthday, and after Christmas the days gradually lengthen into springtime and golden summertime. John is a setting star of the night; Jesus the rising Day Star of the Morning.

“TI must decrease,’ he said, and in magnificent unselfishness pointed his followers to Jesus. When some complained that men were leaving him and going to Jesus, John was big enough to say, “Jesus is the Bridegroom, I am but the Bridegroom’s friend; I came to ask for the hand of the bride and arrange for the marriage; my work is done.” He had introduced the Jewish nation to the Messiah. He believed that Israel’s hope had come; that the Kingdom of Heaven was athand. Was not this their long-looked-for King? Not a doubt beclouded the fair sky of this the Baptist’s golden day.

“He visioned afar through the years a dawn of ineffable

splendor,

A day when all wrongs should be righted, and nations should be in accord,

A time when all hands should be kind, when all hearts should be loving and tender.

So he cried through the deserts of life, ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord’.”

His joy was complete. Until Jesus came John and his disciples had fasted as an expression of their sadness. But when John’s disciples joined Jesus He turned their sadness into gladness, their fasting into feasting. Jesus admitted He was the Bridegroom. The marriage has come, and men are not sad, they do not fast at a wedding; they feast and are glad. So John could say, “‘this my joy therefore is fulfilled.”

V

And yet the time comes when this eagle-eyed prophet is harried by doubt and dark misgiving. It is perhaps eighteen months later, and John is in prison. Sorrow and suffering have come. He is like a caged eagle; no longer allowed to enjoy his accustomed freedom, his spirits droop. Environment is altered; and with the alteration of environment John is an altered man. A man’s views are colored by his surroundings. The prophet can no longer revel in the blithesome days of freedom and power. They are gone. Only the memory of them lingers to sicken his soul, The Machaerus days are long and cheerless. The nights are weeks. The prison damp- - ness chills him. The prison darkness fills him. In the solemn solitude of the desert, such as John © was used to, the mind feeds on God. But in the solitude of defeat the mind feeds on itself. John had felt the tingle of popularity; he had felt the tonic of success. Victories, one after the other, had crowded in upon him until he had come to have a kind of achievement complex. He had the victory habit. But defeat has come; hope fades, while doubts spawn and multiply. To this child of freedom, this son of passion, life in the dungeon is worse than death. He is deeply perplexed. A big question is slowly but surely taking shape in his mind there in the prison house, “Is this Jesus the Christ, or is He not?’ His sky is clouding, his optimism fading, his soul is troubled; John doubts, really and deeply doubts.

All his life he had known the boundless freedom of the desert. He not only loved freedom, but free speech; but the world was not yet ready for either: nor was it any more willing then than now to have its evils exposed. But John had talked up to Herod and got into prison for his hated truth-telling. He was as hale in body as in spirit. In God’s out-of-doors he had been toughened and bronzed by the air and sun. But the foul, inhuman Oriental prison undermined his iron physique, and with the sapping of his bodily vigor there came melancholy and misgiving, spiritual decline and unfaith. Paralyzing doubt had its way with him. His faith wavered, and he enquired why?

John was misunderstanding Jesus now. He was possessed of the current Messiah belief. He thought when the Messiah came He would make quick work of sin; thought that with an irresistible power He would hurl down wrong from its seat and enthrone right instead. But Jesus had allowed things to take their usual course. He was not correcting the social evils. He was not altering the face of society. He was not making and unmaking kingdoms in a day. He would effect changes, but after the manner of Nature rather than after the manner of men: He would quietly supplant the old with the new and better. But John, like all men, and reformers in particular, was in a hurry: he made much dust and noise. He was disappointed at Jesus’ lack of success and his apparent lack of energy. To him such small success was ominous of failure. He had preached a Christ of judgment whose axe was ready to hew away the wrongs of society, whose fan was in His hand—language suggestive of gash and destruction.

The man’s conception of Christ’s work, therefore, was as yet physical rather than spiritual. He thought the Kingdom of God was to come with observation; that Christ’s conquests were to be outward and political rather than inward and moral. All his life he had longed for the Kingdom of God to come in and smite the kingdom of sin. Then Christ had appeared as the seeming fulfilment of his fondest hope. Meantime John was imprisoned but continued to look for the coming in of the reign of righteousness. But the Kingdom seemed not to come. Jesus seemed to be interested in everything more than the establishment of an imposing Jewish state.

VI

Then, too, John was more than puzzled at the way Jesus was dealing with him. He kept hearing through his disciples of the miracles which Jesus worked. Why did He not work one in behalf of ~