



Produced by Al Haines









[Illustration: Cover]




THE SYRIAN CHRIST


BY

ABRAHAM MITRIE RIHBANY




BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

1916




COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY ABRAHAM MITRIE RIHBANY


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


_Published October 1916_




{v}

PREFACE

This little volume is sent forth in the confident hope that it may
throw fresh light on the life and teachings of Christ, and facilitate
for the general public the understanding of the Bible.  As may be
readily seen, from its perusal, the present work is not intended to be
a commentary on the Bible, nor even an exhaustive study of the subject
with which it deals.  That it leaves many things to be desired is very
evident to the author, who fears that his book will be remembered by
its readers more by the things it lacks than by the things it contains.

Yet, from the cordial reception with which the opening chapters of this
publication (which made their first appearance in the _Atlantic
Monthly_) met from readers, of various religious affiliations, the
author has been encouraged to believe that his aim has not only been
clearly {vi} discerned, but thoroughly approved.  The books which
undertake the systematic "expounding of the Scriptures" are a host
which no man can number, nor is there any lack of "spiritual lessons
drawn from the Bible."  Therefore, as one of the Master's fellow
countrymen, and one who has enjoyed about twenty years of service in
the American pulpit, I have for several years entertained the growing
conviction that such a book as this was really needed.  Not, however,
as one more commentary, but as an Oriental guide to afford Occidental
readers of the Bible a more intimate view of the original intellectual
and social environment of this sacred literature.  So what I have to
offer here is a series of suggestions, and not of technically wrought
Bible lessons.

The need of the Western readers of the Bible is, in my judgment, to
enter sympathetically and intelligently into the atmosphere in which
the books of the Scriptures first took form: to have real intellectual,
as well as spiritual, fellowship with those Orientals who sought {vii}
earnestly in their own way to give tangible form to those great
spiritual truths which have been, and ever shall be, humanity's most
precious heritage.

My task has not been a light one.  It is comparatively easy to take
isolated Bible texts and explain them, treating each passage as a
detached unit.  But when one undertakes to group a large number of
passages which never were intended to be gathered together and treated
as the kindred thoughts of an essay, the task becomes rather difficult.
How far I have succeeded in my effort to relate the passages I have
treated in this book to one another according to their intellectual and
social affinities, the reader is in a better position to judge than I
am.

It may not be absolutely necessary for me to say that infallibility
cannot justly be ascribed to any author, nor claimed by him, even when
writing of his own experiences, and the social environment in which he
was born and brought up.

However, in Yankee, not in Oriental, {viii} fashion, I will say that
_to the best of my knowledge_ the statements contained in this book are
correct.

Finally, I deem it necessary before I bring this preface to a close to
sound a note of warning.  So I will say that the Orientals' extensive
use of figurative speech should by no means be allowed to carry the
idea that _all_ Oriental speech is figurative.  This manner of speech,
which is common to all races of men, is only _more extensively_ used by
Orientals than by Occidentals.  I could wish, however, that the learned
theologians had suspected more strongly the literal accuracy of
Oriental utterances, and had thus been saved at times from founding a
huge doctrinal structure on a figure of speech.

Notwithstanding all this, the Gospel and the Christian faith still live
and bless and cheer the hearts and minds of men.  As an Oriental by
birth, and as an American from choice, I feel profoundly grateful that
I have been enabled to render this modest service to the Churches of
{ix} America, and to present this book as an offering of love and
homage to my Master, the Syrian Christ.

ABRAHAM MITRIE RIHBANY

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS.




{xi}

CONTENTS


PART I.  THE SYRIAN CHRIST.

  I.  Son of the East
  II.  Birth of a Man Child
  III.  The Star
  IV.  Mystic Tones
  V.  Filial Obedience
  VI.  Feast and Sacrament
  VII.  The Last Scene


PART II.  The Oriental Manner Of Speech.

  I.  Daily Language
  II.  Imprecations
  III.  Love of Enemies
  IV.  "The Unveracious Oriental"
  V.  Impressions _vs._ Literal Accuracy
  VI.  Speaking in Parables
  VII.  Swearing
  VIII.  Four Characteristics


{xii}

PART III.  BREAD AND SALT

  I.  The Sacred 'Aish
  II.  "Our Daily Bread"
  III.  "Compel Them to come in"
  IV.  Delaying the Departing Guest
  V.  Family Feasts


PART IV.  OUT IN THE OPEN

  I.  Shelter and Home
  II.  Resigned Travelers
  III.  The Market Place
  IV.  The Housetop
  V.  The Vineyards and the Fields
  VI.  The Shepherd


PART V.  SISTERS OF MARY AND MARTHA

  I.  Woman East and West
  II.  Paul and Woman
  III.  Jesus and his Mother
  IV.  "A Gracious Woman"


PART VI.

  Here and There in the Bible
  Index




{3}

PART I

THE SYRIAN CHRIST




THE SYRIAN CHRIST

CHAPTER I

SON OF THE EAST

Jesus Christ, the incarnation of the spirit of God, seer, teacher of
the verities of the spiritual life, and preacher of the fatherhood of
God and the brotherhood of man, is, in a higher sense, "a man without a
country."  As a prophet and a seer Jesus belongs to all races and all
ages.  Wherever the minds of men respond to simple truth, wherever the
hearts of men thrill with pure love, wherever a temple of religion is
dedicated to the worship of God and the service of man, there is Jesus'
country and there are his friends.  Therefore, in speaking of Jesus as
the son of a certain country, I do not mean in the least to localize
his Gospel, or to set bounds and limits to the flow of his spirit and
the workings of his love.

Nor is it my aim in these chapters to imitate {4} the astute
theologians by wrestling with the problem of Jesus' personality.  To me
the secret of personality, human and divine, is an impenetrable
mystery.  My more modest purpose in this writing is to remind the
reader that, whatever else Jesus was, as regards his modes of thought
and life and his method of teaching, he was a Syrian of the Syrians.
According to authentic history Jesus never saw any other country than
Palestine.  There he was born; there he grew up to manhood, taught his
Gospel, and died for it.

It is most natural, then, that Gospel truths should have come down to
the succeeding generations--and to the nations of the West--cast in
Oriental moulds of thought, and intimately intermingled with the simple
domestic and social habits of Syria.  The gold of the Gospel carries
with it the sand and dust of its original home.

From the foregoing, therefore, it may be seen that my reason for
undertaking to throw fresh light on the life and teachings of Christ,
and {5} other portions of the Bible whose correct understanding depends
on accurate knowledge of their original environment, is not any claim
on my part to great learning or a profound insight into the spiritual
mysteries of the Gospel.  The real reason is rather an accident of
birth.  From the fact that I was born not far from where the Master was
born, and brought up under almost the identical conditions under which
he lived, I have an "inside view" of the Bible which, by the nature of
things, a Westerner cannot have.  And I know that the conditions of
life in Syria of to-day are essentially as they were in the time of
Christ, not from the study of the mutilated tablets of the archaeologist
and the antiquarian, precious as such discoveries are, but from the
simple fact that, as a sojourner in this Western world, whenever I open
my Bible it reads like a letter from home.

Its unrestrained effusiveness of expression; its vivid, almost flashy
and fantastic imagery; its naive narrations; the rugged unstudied
simplicity of its parables; its unconventional (and {6} to the more
modest West rather unseemly) portrayal of certain human relations; as
well as its all-permeating spiritual mysticism,--so far as these
qualities are concerned, the Bible might all have been written in my
primitive village home, on the western <DW72>s of Mount Lebanon some
thirty years ago.

Nor do I mean to assert or even to imply that the Western world has
never succeeded in knowing the mind of Christ.  Such an assertion would
do violent injustice, not only to the Occidental mind, but to the
Gospel itself as well, by making it an enigma, utterly foreign to the
native spirituality of the majority of mankind.  But what I have
learned from intimate associations with the Western mind, during almost
a score of years in the American pulpit, is that, with the exception of
the few specialists, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for
a people to understand fully a literature which has not sprung from
that people's own racial life.  As a repository of divine revelation
the Bible knows no geographical limits.  Its spiritual truths are {7}
from God to man.  But as a literature the Bible is an imported article
in the Western world, especially in the home of the Anglo-Saxon race.
The language of the Scriptures, the mentality and the habits of life
which form the setting of their spiritual precepts, and the mystic
atmosphere of those precepts themselves, have come forth from the soul
of a people far removed from the races of the West in almost all the
modes of its earthly life.

You cannot study the life of a people successfully from the outside.
You may by so doing succeed in discerning the few fundamental traits of
character in their local colors, and in satisfying your curiosity with
surface observations of the general modes of behavior; but the little
things, the common things, those subtle connectives in the social
vocabulary of a people, those agencies which are born and not made, and
which give a race its rich distinctiveness, are bound to elude your
grasp.  There is so much in the life of a people which a stranger to
that people must receive {8} by way of unconscious absorption.  Like a
little child, he must learn so many things by involuntary imitation.
An outside observer, though wise, is only a photographer.  He deals
with externals.  He can be converted into an artist and portray the
life of a race by working from the soul outward, only through long,
actual, and sympathetic associations with that race.

From the foregoing it may be seen that I deem it rather hazardous for a
six-weeks tourist in that country to publish a book on the _life_ of
Syria.  A first-class camera and "an eye to business" are hardly
sufficient qualifications for the undertaking of such a task.  It is
very easy, indeed, to take a photograph, but not so easy to relate such
a picture to the inner life of a race, and to know what moral and
social forces lie behind such externals.  The hasty traveler may easily
state what certain modes of thought and life in a strange land mean to
_him_, but does that necessarily mean that _his_ understanding of such
things is also the understanding of the _people_ of that land
themselves?

{9}

With the passing of the years, this thought gains in significance with
me, as a Syrian immigrant.  At about the end of my second year of
residence in this country, I felt confident that I could write a book
on America and the Americans whose accuracy no one could challenge.  It
was so easy for me to grasp the significance of certain general aspects
of American life that I felt I was fully competent to state how the
American people lived, what their racial, political, and religious
tendencies were, what their idioms of speech meant, and to interpret
their amorous, martial, dolorous, and joyous moods with perfect
accuracy and ease.  But now, after a residence of about twenty-four
years in America--years which I have spent in most intimate association
with Americans, largely of the "original stock"--I do not feel half so
confident that I am qualified to write such a book.  The more intimate
I become with American thought, the deeper I penetrate the American
spirit, the more enlightened my associations become with American
fathers, mothers, {10} and children in the joys and sorrows of life,
the more fully do I realize how extremely difficult, if not impossible,
it is for one to interpret successfully the life of an alien people
before one has actually _lived it_ himself.

Many Westerners have written very meritorious books on the thought and
life of the East.  But these are not of the "tourist" type.  Such
writers have been those who, first, had the initial wisdom to realize
that the beggars for _bakhsheesh_ in the thoroughfares of Syrian
cities, and those who hitch a woman with an ox to the plough in some
dark recesses of Palestine, did not possibly represent the deep soul of
that ancient East, which gave birth to the Bible and to the glorious
company of prophets, apostles, and saints.  Second, such writers knew,
also, that the fine roots of a people's life do not lie on the surface.
Such feeders of life are both deep and fine; not only long residence
among a people, but intimate association and genuine sympathy with them
are necessary to reveal to a stranger the hidden {11} meaning of their
life.  Social life, like biological life, energizes from within, and
from within it must be studied.

And it is those common things of Syrian life, so indissolubly
interwoven with the spiritual truths of the Bible, which cause the
Western readers of holy writ to stumble, and which rob those truths for
them of much of their richness.  By sheer force of genius, the