John Reid.
OX.— See Animals, vol. i. p. 63^.
PALACE. — In the Gospels the word is used in the text of Mt 27"-" and Jn IS-^- ^^ 19^ and in the margin of Mk 15^^. In all cases it is the repre- sentative of irpaiTwpiov (see PR.ETORirM), which was a term wide enough to include what would now be called a guard-room or the barrack-square adjoining (^It 27-", Mk 15^"), as well as tiie actual place (referred to in the Joiiannine passages) in which a case was tried and the sentence pronounced.
R. W. Moss.
PALESTINE.— The tendency, represented by historians like Buckle and his school, to write history in terms of environment, is one of those remarkable exaggerations of a valuable truth in which the 19th cent, was prolific. Every age which
pro<luces elemental theories and sweeping changes in the most widely accepted and venerable views, is liable to this kind of exaggeration. New ideas first stagger and then captivate men's minds, and the new names whicii tiiese theories mtroduce assume magic jkjwci's for a time. The next genera- tion smiles at tlie omnipotence of the catchwords of the first years of evoiutionarj- doctrine, and remem- l>ers tiiat otiier words — ' sympathy ' and ' perpetual motion ' among the rest — iiad a similar vogue in tiieir day. Most of all ha-s the power of environ- ment received undue emphasis and lieen credited with an influence far in excess of tiie facts, in tiie case of Jesus Ciirist. Tiiere is notiiing wiiich has doomed tiie work of His purelj- naturalistic bio-
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PALESTINE
graphers to premature obsoleteness so much as this. Nowhere was Carlyle's protest in favour of the effect of great personalities so applicable as here. If anything in history is certain, it is that here we have a case in which a unique personality is seen mastering circumstances, rather than one in which circumstances are seen creating a conspicuous per- sonality.
Yet the influence of Palestine on Jesus is equally unquestionable.
' We must not isolate the story," says Dr. Dale, 'from the pre- ceding history of the Jewish race . . . Many people seem to suppose that they may approach the subject as if the Lord Jesus Christ had appeared in Spain or in China, instead of in Judiea and Galilee ' (Living Christ and the Four Gospels, 89). ' If, negatively,' says Hausrath, ' it be self-evident that Jesus' mission would have assumed another character had He grown up under the oaks of Germany instead of under the palms of Nazareth, that the subject of Arminius or Maroboduus would have been different from that of Antipas, that the opponent of the Druids would have differed from the opponent of the Rabbis, so, positively, it is indisputable that for Jesus Himself the facts of His consciousness were given Him under those forms of viewing things in which Jewish thought in general was cast. Only b}- a freak of the imagination can it be supposed that an historical personality becomes conscious of the facts of its own inner life by conceptions other than those in which the thought of the age in general finds expression' (Hist, of NT Times, ii. 225).
Thus we may take it that there is no sentence in the Gospels which can be fairly understood if it be regarded merely as the remark or question of a member of the human race who might have be- longed to any nationality. Every word derives something of its significance from the place and time at which it was spoken. Jesus is the Son of Man, but He is also a Syrian teacher. It is Syrian landscape, Syrian history, and Syrian human nature with which the Incarnation works ; and we of tlie West are confronted at every turn by the need to Orientalize our conceptions as we study these records.
In this article we shall consider the influence on Jesus (1) of Syria as a whole ; (2) of tlie Gentile elements in the land ; (3) of the open field and of Nature as seen in Syria ; (4) of the toM-n and village life with which He was familiar ; (5) of the city of Jerusalem.
1. Syria as a whole.— Syria is an Eastern land, and the relations and differences between East and West are the first aspects of this subject which demand attention. No phenomenon of the kind is so remarkable as the combination of Eastern and Western characteristics in the thought and work of Jesus. Such books as Townsend's Asia and Europe and Fielding Hall's The Soul of a People (to mention two out of many popular accounts of East and West), though their generalizations are not always convincing, are full of suggestive illus- trations of this. 'Though Asiatic in origin,' says the former writer, ' Christianity is the least Orien- tal of the creeds.' To find lives mo.st typically Christian, we have to look chiefly to Western nations, France and Germany, Britain and America. Indeed, the astonishing fact is evident that in certain respects we have in Jesus an Oriental too Western for Asiatics, so that to a certain extent they have to Occidentalize their conceptions in order to be- come Christian. This strange fact has commonly been brought as a charge against the methods of Christian missionaries in the East. But there can be no doubt that in some measure it is due to the mind of Jesus Himself. His doctrine of personal immortahty, e.g., and still more the triumphant and glad spirit in which He proclaimed it, have a far more congenial appeal to the West than to the hast. ^ ' Eternal consciousness ! ' exclaims Towns- end : ' that to the majority of Asiatics is not a promise but a threat.' Similarly, the prominence given in Christianity to the command to love our neighbour as ourself, in the West will always find at least a theoretical assent, for it will be backed