false light of his reason, he took Paul for a fool, and said: "Much learning doth make thee mad." He was, therefore, having regard only to the equity of Roman law in giving his protection to a stranger for whom he had no esteem.
Thus the Holy Spirit, in inspiring Acts, testifies that the Romans were just, and did not persecute. It was not the Romans who fell upon Paul, but the Jews. St. James, the brother of Jesus, was stoned by the order of a Jewish Sadducee, not of a Roman. The Jews alone stoned St. Stephen; and St. Paul, in holding the cloaks of the executioners, certainly did not act as a Roman citizen.[1]
The first Christians had, no doubt, no cause of quarrel with the Romans; their only enemies were the Jews, from whom they were beginning to separate. We know the fierce hatred that sectarians always have for those who leave the sect. There were probably disturbances in the synagogues at Rome. Suetonius says, in his life of Claudius: "Judæos impulsore Christo assidue tumultuantes Roma expulit."[2] He was wrong in saying that they were instigated by Christ, and was not likely to be well informed in detail about a people so
- ↑ The Jews had no right to inflict death after Judæa had become a Roman province, but the authorities at times overlooked these punishments of blasphemy.
- ↑ Ch. 25. Voltaire has in this followed ecclesiastical custom. The word in Suetonius is not "Christo," but "Chresto," and therefore the passage reads, in English: "Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome for their constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus." As Chrestus was not an uncommon name at Rome, there is no need to apply the passage to Christ in any way.—J. M.
