It was in the reign of Hadrian that the final expatriation of the Jews from Jerusalem and its neighborhood took place, under circumstances accompanied with the most awful bloodshed.
The story of the Jews for a hundred years after the tragedy of Golgotha is one of the saddest in history. Three times the passionate hatred of the race flamed out in open revolt against their Roman conquerors and oppressors. The numbers who perished in these Jewish wars are possibly exaggerated, but there is no doubt that they must be counted at least by tens of thousands.
The great and crowning victory of Titus and the destruction of the Temple and part of the city in A. D. 70, with its frightful carnage, did not prove sufficient to break the stubborn spirit of resistance. In the reign of Trajan a grave revolt took place, and spread over Cyprus, part of Egypt, and North Africa. This was got under; but a far more formidable rebellion stained the later years of the comparatively peaceful period of Hadrian with literal torrents of blood. The scene of this last insurrection was Judea, and especially the immediate neighborhood of the desecrated holy city. In this revolt or rebellion the danger to the Empire was considered so grave that Hadrian summoned from distant Britain Julius Severus, who was reputed to be the ablest of his generals, and appointed him as commander of the Roman army of Judea. The fierce war—a war not merely waged for national independence, but further embittered by the burning desire to rescue their holiest Hebrew sanctuary from Pagan desecration—was protracted for a considerable period. In its course, fifty strongholds were stormed, nine hundred and eighty-five cities and villages were razed to the ground, five hundred and eighty thousand persons are said to have perished by the sword, by famine, or by pestilence. So say the chroniclers of this deadly struggle, who have probably somewhat exaggerated the numbers of cities razed and strongholds destroyed. What remained of the holy city, already partially overthrown by Titus, was levelled to the ground. The site of the Temple was symbolically sown with salt, and a new Pagan city arose on the site of the loved Zion, under the new name of Lia, with its Roman theatre, its baths, and its temples; the image of the Emperor being erected side by side with that of Jupiter Capitolinus. The Jew was forbidden ever to enter the new Pagan city; only once a year was he suffered to come near, that he might weep and mourn over the grave of his vanished hopes. In the Jewish liturgies the memory of their last and crushing desolation was preserved by solemn prayers, when on the anniversary of the victory of Hadrian the Lord of Hosts was supplicated to punish this second Nebuchadnezzar, who was said to have destroyed four hundred and eighty synagogues of the chosen people.
The result of this final and complete destruction of Jerusalem, and desolation of the Holy Land, was far-reaching in its effects upon Christianity. The last link in the connection of the Church and the Synagogue was now snapped. The link in question had been the Jewish-Christian community of Jerusalem. Dating from the days of the Apostles, the Church of Jerusalem had ever been presided over by one who was a Jew by birth. The community still exacted circumcision from its members; it observed the Jewish fasts and feasts, while at the same time it taught faithfully the fundamental Christian doctrines. The Church of Jerusalem was respected and venerated throughout Christendom as the Church which not only owed its foundation to the Apostles, but was sanctified by the blood of the first martyr. To the Jewish convert it was especially dear, as it still practised the rites and ceremonies of the chosen race. But after the war of Hadrian, the Jew of Palestine was for ever banished from the scenes of the old Hebrew glories, and the Christian Church of the Circumcision from henceforth virtually ceased to exist; what remained of it was soon incorporated with other foreign Gentile communities, but there was no longer a Jewish center in Christendom.
A strange anomaly, however, here presents itself to the historian of the early Christian Church, and one that must be at all events briefly dwelt upon, as it tells us something of the position of Christians in the second and third centuries in the Pagan world of Rome. It discloses something of the feelings generally entertained towards them by the Roman Government. It helps to explain some of the causes of the repeated persecutions which harassed the Church during the first two hundred and eighty years of its existence.
The Jew was the bitterest, the most stubborn foe the Roman ever encountered. Three formidable revolts against the Roman rule in the times of Titus, Trajan, and Hadrian, had to be put down at an enormous expense of blood and treasure: on a smaller scale—for their powers of resistance had been well-nigh stamped out—the Jews rose again in rebellion in the course of the reigns of both the Antonines and of Septimius Severus; and yet, strangely enough, we never find them prevented from worshipping in accordance with their especial tenets, during or after their repeated and serious insurrections. The Jewish race, after all its unheard-of calamities, still continued to exist, if it did not flourish, and few indeed were the Roman centers of population in the second and third centuries without a Jewish synagogue. Contrary to all the ordinary laws of history its extraordinary vitality preserved it from extinction, apparently even from diminution of its numbers; for after the fearful war of extermination under the lieutenants of Hadrian we still find the Jew in such centers as Rome, Alexandria, or Carthage, living and trading much as before the tremendous calamities. Nor was he persecuted. Unhindered, he went to the synagogue, openly he practised all the observances of his cherished religion. Later we even find the Emperor Severus specially sanctioning the assumption of municipal offices by the Jews, and certainly in their case formally dispensing with the ordinary Roman religious rites which invariably formed part of the ceremonies attached to such offices. We never hear of a Jew being haled before a magistrate on account of the religion which it was well known he professed, never of his being required to swear by the "Genius of Caesar," or to scatter grains of incense on the altar of a Pagan deity.
On the other hand the Christian—against whom no charge of disloyalty to Caesar was ever advanced, who in Rome, as in the most remote provinces, was ever the strict law-abiding citizen, who never shared in any rising or rebellion against the Emperor or the constituted powers of the State—during the two hundred and eighty years which followed the Resurrection of the Master, lived with a sword ever suspended by a very slender strand above his head in a state of perpetual outlawry, with the sentence of condemnation ever ready to be launched against him, with the hideous penalty of a cruel death prepared to be exacted of him; a sentence and a penalty only temporarily suspended at certain periods of careless toleration or of fitful generosity.
What was the secret of this strange contrast between the behavior of the Roman authorities in all the provinces of the great Empire in the case of the turbulent Jew, and their behavior in the case of the patient, law-abiding Christian?
The truth was that the Imperial Government, when once the Hebrew nationality was destroyed, ceased altogether to fear the Jews. They seemed but the poor remnant of a vanquished nation, interesting now rather than formidable, welcome always as traders, money-lenders, and the like, useful especially as the bitter, irreconcilable foes of the Christian, whom the Romans did fear, with, perhaps, an indefinable dread.
There is no doubt whatever that the dominant factor in the strange hatred of the Romans for everything connected with Christianity was fear. The trader, it is true, often disliked the Christian with a sordid antipathy, because he spoiled the various markets open to him in connection with the sacrifices and ritual belonging to the gods of Rome, but the statesman, the serious thinker who in his heart, not always but at times, was too conscious that the religion of the Empire was largely unreal, had an uneasy conviction that in the proscribed and hated faith there was real life and genuine power. Those who were acquainted with something of its wondrous story were well aware how rapidly, in spite of the crushing disabilities under which the members of the proscribed sect ever lived, it had gained ground, and was ever gaining ground, not in Rome only, but in most of the cities and provinces of the vast Empire.
There were many who, with unfeigned dismay, watched its quiet, silent, onward march, and who marked well its marvelous and ever growing influence. Scarcely a family, as the second century waned, but some member in it belonged to the secret powerful community of Christians, and that member—slave or mistress, freedman or master—from the moment of becoming a Christian became also at once the unresting, untiring emissary of the faith. No threat seemed to terrify those Christians, no punishment, however terrible, had any effect on them—torture and death were welcomed rather than shunned. A superhuman energy appeared to live and work in their ranks, an energy which inspired with heroic courage men and women drawn from all classes, ages, sexes; a princess of the Imperial house like Domitilla in Rome, an aged teacher like Polycarp at Smyrna, a slave girl like Blandina at Lyons, a young and cultured lady like Perpetua at Carthage, in different Imperial reigns, were similarly strengthened by this unearthly power which lived in the Christian sect.
Before such a spirit as that which inspired the humblest votaries of the new religion, and which, as time went on, showed no signs of weakness or exhaustion, the gods of Rome, who were after all, as some could not help realizing, but a shadowy unreality, must surely in the end go down. And the long line of the great Roman statesmen who were persuaded that the old State religion, with its immemorial traditions, was the keystone of the Imperial policy, the policy which had built up and was the bulwark of Rome's worldwide Empire, not unnaturally viewed Christianity as the Empire's deadliest foe, an enemy which must be stamped out, destroyed—"delenda est Carthago."
This was the secret reason of the changeless policy which persecuted the Christians whom Home feared, while it spared and even favored the Jews, whom Rome in its heart despised.