Bible Dictionaries
Wandering Stars

　　ἀστέρες πλανῆταιWAR

　　In practice toleration of infidels has been not uncommon, partly owing to political considerations, but in theory the ‘curse and smite’ policy is put forward.

　　). Judaism, before Christianity, abhorred aggressiveness and discouraged military rapacity. The Hebrews warred in later days for the defence of their religion and country rather than for aggrandizement. But even the older conception of a theocracy under arms for the defensive, which had flashed up brilliantly in the Maccabaean wars (cf. 2 Maccabees 15:15‘At great political crises he who opposes the patriots is not so likely to be considered their worst foe, as he who ignores them. It was not that our Lord preached submission to Rome, though no doubt the decision as to the tribute money was capable of being represented in that light-it was that He raised a spirit which moved in another plane than that of resistance or submission to imperial power. He created a weapon (it would seem) and withheld it from the service of the State. It will be found, in genera], that no other treason is felt so deadly as this. To use power against the State is penal;-to hold power, and not use it for the State, is, to the zealot for the State, far more hateful. Christ would neither join the alliance with worldly power, nor the fanaticism of revolt against worldly power.’†

　　), so He withheld His own party from resenting by force any attack or outrage on themselves. When the Jew would retaliate, if he could, and take up arms against any foreign power which violated his religious scruples or profaned his sacred possessions, the disciple of Jesus was to suffer patiently and passively. Neither hot word nor quick blow was to defend His faith. Like the great prototype of their Leader, who was led as a lamb to the slaughter, His followers were to let their throats be cut, unresisting sheep as they were, butchered by the cruel knife (cf. Romans 8:35-36ἀρχὴ ὠδίνων ταῦταWhen the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans was imminent, the local Christians did withdraw to Pella. Whether this was in consequence of the apocalyptic oracle preserved in the Synoptic tradition, or whether this oracle reflects to some extent the course of affairs, it is not easy to say. The main point of interest for us here is the interpretation of the spirit of Jesus upon which the primitive Church acted, and out of which this apocalyptic address arose. The Palestinian Christians disavowed any connexion with the national cause of Judaism. The vultures were gathering over the corpse of Jewish nationalism. Why should they linger beside it? It is possible that this policy was not adopted unanimously; the language of Matthew 24:10-12) to the disciple who impulsively struck with a sword was sufficient: ‘Put your sword back into its place; all who draw the sword shall die by the sword. What! do you think I cannot appeal to my Father to furnish me at this moment with over twelve legions of angels? Only, how could the scriptures be fulfilled then-the scriptures that say this must be so?’ He had already told the disciples that they were being sent out like sheep among wolves, defenceless against any brutal attack; He had censured the Elijah-spirit in the two disciples who were indignant at the churlish behaviour of a Samaritan village; He had bidden His followers face arrest, ill-treatment, and death itself, rather than be untrue to their confession; and the refusal of armed help for Himself was only the climax of the regulations which He had laid down for their conduct.*

　　βία γὰρ οὐ πρόσεστι τῷ θεῷ), but (i.) preserves the tradition that John the Baptist, instead of ordering the soldiers† who consulted him to leave the army, merely told them that it was their duty to abstain from what was called concussio, or the ill-treatment of civilians, i.e. from extorting money by violence‡ and making false charges; they were also to be content with their pay (Luke 3:14) is not quite clear. The ‘violence’ may mean overbearing poor civilians, and soldiers had many opportunities of taking such unfair advantage, not only in war but in the police-duties which they discharged during a peace. If extorting money by threats is pot covered by συκοφαντήσητε). The soldiers bullied the prisoners, in order to get money from them for certain privileges and slight relaxations of the prison regime. The general sense of John’s advice is therefore plain, and the point is that, if John the Baptist was not a Theudas, he was not a ‘pacifist.’ Furthermore, among the special parables, or rather illustration’s, of St. Luke’s gospel, we find (ii.) the only§ military one (Luke 14:31-32, ‘a time is coming for you when your enemies will throw up ramparts round you and encircle you and besiege you on every side and raze you and your children within you to the ground, leaving not one stone upon another’; also Luke 21:20 (where the Roman , etc.), is a water-mark of the date of the gospels. But the outstanding item (iv.) is the puzzling bit of conversation just before Jesus and His disciples left the upper room for Gethsemane, a fragment of tradition preserved by St. Luke (Luke 22:35-38ἀλλὰ νῦνκαὶ γὰρ τὸ περὶ ἐμοῦ τέλος ἔχειἱκανόν ἐστι(a) The least unsatisfactory interpretation is to suppose that Jesus was speaking of the dangers that awaited the disciples in the immediate future, when His arrest and death would alter their circumstances. Formerly, they did not need to provide for themselves. Now, they must look to their livelihood and even their very existence, for neither will be secure. ‘Take your purses and wallets with you now, and equip yourselves with swords.’ We can imagine Jesus uttering these words with a realistic touch of grave suggestiveness. The supreme crisis is at hand. You are going now into an enemy’s country, and you will need to cut your way out of the difficulties created by My death as a so-called criminal. He did not mean literally that they were to use force against force, or to defend themselves against physical attacks; His words were a proverbial and metaphorical expression for alertness in view of the critical situation ahead. But the disciples were too prosaic to catch this meaning. They evidently thought that He intended them to defend Himself and themselves against the Jews; they were armed with a couple of swords or long knives (cf. Luke 22:49 f. seem to refer to the future experiences of the disciples by themselves; it is almost impossible to believe that they were expected to make all these new preparations before they started for the garden of Gethsemane. Yet Luke 22:38(b) The literal interpretation, which assumes not only that Jesus advised the disciples to defend themselves in future by force, if need be, but also that He intended to use force in order to prevent Himself from being assassinated. It was only when He found that He was to be arrested officially by agents of the government, instead of being murdered by the hired ruffians of the hierarchy, that He stopped His disciples from taking active measures in His defence (Luke 22:51 f. to kindle a fierce conflict in which He was destined to perish Himself, but out of which He hoped His disciples would be able to force a passage. His words refer to this exclusively. He is momentarily depressed, and reverses His earlier instructions to His followers. When He says, ‘Enough!’, He resigns Himself to the disciples’ misapprehension of the seriousness of the situation for Himself; there is no thought, in His mind, of offering any resistance to His enemies. Jesus has no illusions about His own fate; ‘but, as to His disciples, He hopes that, they will be able to cut their way out and escape, and He feels that they will be morally free to do so. But even this much He adverts to only for a moment; since, when they offer Him the two swords, and He says “It is enough,” He has already dropped that passing attention to this earthly contingency, and, in a sad, ironical reference to the non-comprehension by the disciples of the magnitude of the coming trouble, and to the obvious inadequacy of these physical defences, if physical force were really to be used, He breaks off the discussion by this short, ambiguous word’ (F. von Hügel, in CQR lxxix. [1915] 262). This is preferable, at least, to the literal interpretation, according to which the closing words are either couched in a vein of sad, ironical resignation, as if Jesus felt how little the disciples realized that their physical preparations were quite inadequate to the crisis, or as if Jesus seriously thought that two swords would be sufficient for the defence which He intended should be made against His captors in the garden. The early Church was divided as to the meaning of the passage. Augustine (c. Faustum, xxii. 77) appears to take the words literally, though he is not clear about what the injunction meant. Peter, he thinks, was told only to carry a sword, not to use it! ‘No doubt the intention of the Lord in ordering them to carry arms and not to make use of them was obscure. But it was for Him to give proper orders and for them to obey without any reserve.’ Origen, as we might expect, spiritualizes the words of Jesus. But by the middle of the 9th cent. Isho dad of Merv reports that ‘in many copies, instead of “Let him buy a sword and take it,” it is written, “Pray for your enemies.” ’ The text evidently was so difficult that early pacifists tampered with it. Isho’dad himself spiritualizes the words of Jesus, as an injunction ‘to teach them figuratively that henceforth they must take care of themselves’ (M. D. Gibson, Horae Semiticae, v. [Cambridge, 1911] 193 f.).

　　). Even the peaceful Essenes carried arms, to defend themselves against robbers (Jos. BJ ii. 125: 2. Militant messianism and the primitive church.-The influence of the militant spirit in some circles of messianic faith presents a more complicated problem. So far as Jesus was concerned, the views of His mission which we have already outlined are enough to prove that He stood aloof from all the current expectations of a national supremacy for Judaism as the dominant power on earth. He compared the spread of His kingdom to the dropping and the sprouting of seed; His emissaries were sent out to teach and to heal, not as an organized force of armed adherents. Even the apocalyptic aspect of His kingdom was non-militant. The conceptions of a book like Enoch were influential; yet, when we read a passage like lvi. 5f., which describes the last onset of the pagan powers upon Israel, stirred up like lions and wolves to attack the holy city but ruined by quarrels and finally annihilated, we feel at once the difference between this apocalyptic outlook of nationalism and the hopes of the primitive church. The Son of Man whose sword is drunk with the blood of the mighty opponents of Israel (lxii. 6f.) is not the Son of Man in the Gospels; Jesus can be stern, but this is not His kind of sternness; and, when a sword is given to the sheep (i.e. the pious Jews) wherewith to rout their brutal enemies (90:19), we instinctively think of the sword or knife by which the early Christians were constantly butchered (Romans 8:36So far as the gospels go, it is again St. Luke’s which suggests that the Apostolic Age had slightly affected the primitive outlook.

　　: ‘a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also’) is of course metaphorical. But the warlike terms of the songs are religious reminiscences of the OT-e.g. of Hannah’s song-and are fundamentally* figurative also. Jesus did not come to ‘put down the mighty from their seats’ in Caesarea Philippi or at Rome; John was arrested by Herod, according to Josephus, because the Jewish ruler feared that his popularity would develop revolutionary tendencies, but John’s mission was not to ‘deliver the Jews from the hand of their’ Roman ‘enemies.’ Oriental symbolism is enough to account for such terms in those hymns of the primitive Palestinian church (cf. J. G. Machen, in Princeton Theol. Review, X. [1912] 1-38). This interpretation is not affected by the song of the angels at the birth of Jesus (Luke 2:14God and sinners reconciled!’

　　!

　　ἐπ, as in Sir 35:22 -the great Quousque of the church-it obliges us to look back upon the course and trend of religious feeling which prompted it.

　　) ‘the sword comes upon the world for the suppression of justice and the perversion of justice, and for those who do not explain the Torah according to rule’ (i.e. for heterodox ways).* Even in the Zadokite document (Charles, Apocrypha and Pscudepigrapha, ii. 816) the militant messiah himself destroys the disloyal by the sword for their disobedience to the new covenant (ix. 9f.). But the last-named prediction is eschatological, and it suggests the three war-scenes in the last act of the drama, as eschatology usually shaped the future course of the world, (a) Wars and bloodshed, the ‘wars and rumours of wars’ of which the Gospels speak, precede the dawn of the messianic age; international strife ushers in the new era here as in the contemporary astrological scheme of Hellenism,† but it is not war waged upon Israel. The people of God may suffer in the conflict, but they are not the objects of the pagan campaign. (b) Then comes a campaign of God or messiah against the opponents of Israel, who are supposed to be instigated by Satan and his agents. This hope, which thrills through one class of apocalypses, including Enoch, Baruch, the Psalter or Solomon, and the early Jewish strata of the Sibylline Oracles, is still maintained in 2 Esdras 13:33The prevalent idea that the crucifixion had been a disastrous strategical error on the part of the supernatural Powers of evil in the universe (1 Corinthians 2:8θριαμβεύσας). Thus it is that Athanasius (de Incarn. xxiv. 4) takes the crucifixion-although he proceeds, in his passion for demonology, to add (xxv. 5f.) that Jesus was lifted up on the cross to ‘clear the air’ from the demons who infested it and beset the human soul with their stratagems. In 1 Corinthians 15:23 (‘each in his own division’) in 1 Corinthians 15:23, the visit of a potentate, certainly is, the following passage definitely depicts a Christian replica of (c) above, and human as well as supernatural foes are included in the rout which brings the messianic reign to a successful conclusion.* The influence of the tradition in the 110th psalm is felt here as elsewhere, even, e.g., in an epistle like Hebrews, where the primitive eschatological idea of the enthroned Christ waiting in heaven until His enemies are humiliated and forced to do homage, or, as the Oriental phrase went, ‘put under his feet’ (1 Corinthians 10:12 f., where the apostle hints that King Jesus must ultimately intervene to defeat the lawless one whom even the restraining power of the Roman empire could not hold in check. The mysterious opponent is a sort of false messiah, issuing from Judaism, and invested with a Satanic authority which produces apostasy on the verge of the end. The delusion sweeps Jews and pagans alike into an infatuated rebellion against God. St. Paul has nothing to say about the fate of Satan, who instigates the outburst. It is the victims and tools of Satan who are destroyed, those who at present persecute Christians and those who dare to engage in the last and imminent struggle to their own doom-‘men who will pay the penalty of being destroyed eternally.’ This apocalyptic prediction draws upon sagas like those in Daniel and in the Ascensio Isaiae; it is from the former especially that the note of self-deification as a trait of the last deceiver is derived.

　　), do not resent the cruelty and injustice of the ordeal.