Читать книгу Lost and Hostile Gospels - Baring-Gould Sabine, Baring-Gould Sabine - Страница 3

It is necessary to inquire, Why this silence of Philo, Josephus and Justus? at first so inexplicable.

It can only be answered by laying before the reader a picture of the Christian Church in the first century. A critical examination of the writings of the first age of the Church reveals unexpected disclosures.

1. It shows us that the Church at Jerusalem, and throughout Palestine and Asia Minor, composed of converted Jews, was to an external observer indistinguishable from a modified Essenism.

2. And that the difference between the Gentile Church founded by St. Paul, and the Nazarene Church under St. James and St. Peter, was greater than that which separated the latter from Judaism externally, so that to a superficial observer their inner connection was unsuspected.

This applies to the period from the Ascension to the close of the first century, – to the period, that is, in which Josephus and Justus lived, and about which they wrote.

1. Our knowledge of the Essenes and their doctrines is, unfortunately, not as full as we could wish. We are confined to the imperfect accounts of them furnished by Philo and Josephus, neither of whom knew them thoroughly, or was initiated into their secret doctrines.

The Essenes arose about two centuries before the birth of Christ, and peopled the quiet deserts on the west of the Dead Sea, a wilderness to which the Christian monks afterwards seceded from the cities of Palestine. They are thus described by the elder Pliny:

“On the western shore of that lake dwell the Essenes, at a sufficient distance from the water's edge to escape its pestilential exhalations – a race entirely unique, and, beyond every other in the world, deserving of wonder; men living among palm-trees, without wives, without money. Every day their number is replenished by a new troop of settlers, for those join them who have been visited by the reverses of fortune, who are tired of the world and its style of living. Thus happens what might seem incredible, that a community in which no one is born continues to subsist through the lapse of centuries.”25

From this first seat of the Essenes colonies detached themselves, and settled in other parts of Palestine; they settled not only in remote and solitary places, but in the midst of villages and towns. In Samaria they flourished.26 According to Josephus, some of the Essenes were willing to act as magistrates, and it is evident that such as lived in the midst of society could not have followed the strict rule imposed on the solitaries. There must therefore have been various degrees of Essenism, some severer, more exclusive than the others; and Josephus distinguishes four such classes in the sect. Some of the Essenes remained celibates, others married. The more exalted and exclusive Essenes would not touch one of the more lax brethren.27

The Essenes had a common treasury, formed by throwing together the property of such as entered into the society, and by the earnings of each man's labour.28

They wore simple habits – only such clothing as was necessary for covering nakedness and giving protection from the cold or heat.29

They forbad oaths, their conversation being “yea, yea, and nay, nay.”30

Their diet was confined to simple nourishing food, and they abstained from delicacies.31

They exhibited the greatest respect for the constituted authorities, and refrained from taking any part in the political intrigues, or sharing in the political jealousies, which were rife among the Jews.32

They fasted, and were incessant at prayer, but without the ostentation that marked the Pharisees.33

They seem to have greatly devoted themselves to the cure of diseases, and, if we may trust the derivation of their name given by Josephus, they were called Essenes from their being the healers of men's minds and bodies.34

If now we look at our blessed Lord's teaching, we find in it much in common with that of the Essenes. The same insisting before the multitude on purity of thought, disengagement of affections from the world, disregard of wealth and clothing and delicate food, pursuit of inward piety instead of ostentatious formalism.

His miracles of healing also, to the ordinary observer, served to identify him with the sect which made healing the great object of their study.

But these were not the only points of connection between him and the Essenes. The Essenes, instead of holding the narrow prejudices of the Jews against Samaritans and Gentiles, extended their philanthropy to all. They considered that all men had been made in the image of God, that all were rational beings, and that therefore God's care was not confined to the Jewish nation, salvation was not limited to the circumcision.35

The Essenes, moreover, exhibited a peculiar veneration for light. It was their daily custom to turn their faces devoutly towards the rising of the sun, and to chant hymns addressed to that luminary, purporting that his beams ought to fall on nothing impure.

If we look at the Gospels, we cannot fail to note how incessantly Christ recurs in his teaching to light as the symbol of the truth he taught,36 as that in which his disciples were to walk, of which they were to be children, which they were to strive to obtain in all its purity and brilliancy.

The Essenes, moreover, had their esoteric doctrine; to the vulgar they had an esoteric teaching on virtue and disregard of the world, whilst among themselves they had a secret lore, of which, unfortunately, we know nothing certain. In like manner, we find our Lord speaking in parables to the multitude, and privately revealing their interpretation to his chosen disciples. “Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.”37

The Clementines, moreover, preserve a saying of our Lord, contained in the Gospel in use among the Ebionites, “Keep the mysteries for me, and for the sons of my house.”38

The Essenes, though showing great veneration for the Mosaic law, distinguished between its precepts, for some they declared were interpolations, and did not belong to the original revelation; all the glosses and traditions of the Rabbis they repudiated, as making the true Word of none effect.39 Amongst other things that they rejected was the sacrificial system of the Law. They regarded this with the utmost horror, and would not be present at any of the sacrifices. They sent gifts to the Temple, but never any beast, that its blood might be shed. To the ordinary worship of the Temple, apart from the sacrifices, they do not seem to have objected. The Clementine Homilies carry us into the very heart of Ebionite Christianity in the second, if not the first century, and show us what was the Church of St. James and St. Peter, the Church of the Circumcision, with its peculiarities and prejudices intensified by isolation and opposition. In that curious book we find the same hostility to the sacrificial system of Moses, the same abhorrence of blood-shedding in the service of God. This temper of mind can only be an echo of primitive Nazarene Christianity, for in the second century the Temple and its sacrifices were no more.

Primitive Jewish Christianity, therefore, reproduced what was an essential feature of Essenism – a rejection of the Mosaic sacrifices.

In another point Nazarene Christianity resembled Essenism, in the poverty of its members, their simplicity in dress and in diet, their community of goods. This we learn from Hegesippus, who represents St. James, Bishop of Jerusalem, as truly an ascetic as any mediaeval monk; and from the Clementines, which make St. Peter feed on olives and bread only, and wear but one coat. The name of Ebionite, which was given to the Nazarenes, signified “the poor.”

There was one point more of resemblance, or possible resemblance, but this was one not likely to be observed by those without. The Therapeutae in Egypt, who were apparently akin to the Essenes in Palestine, at their sacred feasts ate bread and salt. Salt seems to have been regarded by them with religious superstition, as being an antiseptic, and symbolical of purity.40

Perhaps the Essenes of Judaea also thus regarded, and ceremonially used, salt. We have no proof, it is true; but it is not improbable.

Now one of the peculiarities of the Ebionite Church in Palestine, as revealed to us by the Clementines, was the use of salt with the bread in their celebrations of the Holy Communion.41

But if Christ and the early Church, by their teaching and practice, conformed closely in many things to the doctrine and customs of the Essenes, in some points they differed from them. The Essenes were strict Sabbatarians. On the seventh day they would not move a vessel from one place to another, or satisfy any of the wants of nature. Even the sick and dying, rather than break the Sabbath, abstained from meat and drink on that day. Christ's teaching was very different from this; he ate, walked about, taught, and performed miracles on the Sabbath. But though he relaxed the severity of observance, he did not abrogate the institution; and the Nazarene Church, after the Ascension, continued to venerate and observe the Sabbath as of divine appointment. The observance of the Lord's-day was apparently due to St. Paul alone, and sprang up in the Gentile churches42 in Asia Minor and Greece of his founding. When the churches of Peter and Paul were reconciled and fused together at the close of the century, under the influence of St. John, both days were observed side by side; and the Apostolical Constitutions represent St. Peter and St. Paul in concord decreeing, “Let the slaves work five days; but on the Sabbath-day and the Lord's-day let them have leisure to go to church for instruction and piety. We have said that the Sabbath is to be observed on account of the Creation, and the Lord's-day on account of the Resurrection.”43

After the Ascension, the Christian Church in Jerusalem attended the services in the Temple44 daily, as did the devout Jews. There is, however, no proof that they assisted at the sacrifices. They continued to circumcise their children; they observed the Mosaic distinction of meats; they abstained from things strangled and from blood.45

The doctrine of the apostles after the descent of the Holy Ghost was founded on the Resurrection. They went everywhere preaching the Resurrection; they claimed to be witnesses to it, they declared that Jesus had risen, they had seen him after he had risen, that therefore the resurrection of all men was possible.46 The doctrine of the Resurrection was held most zealously by the Pharisees; it was opposed by the Sadducees. This vehement proclamation of the disputed doctrine, this production of evidence which overthrew it, irritated the Sadducees then in power. We are expressly told that they “came upon them (the apostles), being grieved that they taught the people, and preached through Jesus the Resurrection.” This led to persecution of the apostles. But the apostles, in maintaining the doctrine of the Resurrection, were fighting the battles of the Pharisees, who took their parts against the dominant Sadducee faction,47 and many, glad of a proof which would overthrow Sadduceeism, joined the Church.48

We can therefore perfectly understand how the Sadducees hated and persecuted the apostles, and how the orthodox Pharisees were disposed to hail them as auxiliaries against the common enemy. And Sadduceeism was at that time in full power and arrogance, exercising intolerable tyranny.

Herod the Great, having fallen in love with Mariamne, daughter of a certain Simon, son of Boethus of Alexandria, desired to marry her, and saw no other means of ennobling his father-in-law than by elevating him to the office of high-priest (B.C. 28). This intriguing family maintained possession of the high-priesthood for thirty-five years. It was like the Papacy in the house of Tusculum, or the primacy of the Irish Church in that of the princes of Armagh. Closely allied to the reigning family, it lost its hold of the high-priesthood on the deposition of Archelaus, but recovered it in A.D. 42. This family, called Boethusim, formed a sacerdotal nobility, filling all the offices of trust and emolument about the Temple, very worldly, supremely indifferent to their religious duties, and defiantly sceptical. They were Sadducees, denying angel, and devil, and resurrection; living in easy self-indulgence; exasperating the Pharisees by their heresy, grieving the Essenes by their irreligion.

In the face of the secularism of the ecclesiastical rulers, the religious zeal of the people was sure to break out in some form of dissent.

John the Baptist was the St. Francis of Assisi, the Wesley of his time. If the Baptist was not actually an Essene, he was regarded as one by the indiscriminating public eye, never nice in detecting minute dogmatic differences, judging only by external, broad resemblances of practice.

The ruling worldliness took alarm at his bold denunciations of evil, and his head fell.

Jesus of Nazareth seemed to stand forth occupying the same post, to be the mouthpiece of the long-brooding discontent; and the alarmed party holding the high-priesthood and the rulership of the Sanhedrim compassed his death. To the Sadducean Boethusim, who rose into power again in A.D. 42, Christianity was still obnoxious, but more dangerous; for by falling back on the grand doctrine of Resurrection, it united with it the great sect of the Pharisees.

Under these circumstances the Pharisees began to regret the condemnation and death of Christ as a mistake of policy. Under provocation and exclusion from office, they were glad to unite with the Nazarene Church in combating the heretical sect and family which monopolized the power, just as at the present day in Germany Ultramontanism and Radicalism are fraternizing. Jerusalem fell, and Sadduceeism fell with it, but the link which united Pharisaism and Christianity was not broken as yet; if the Jewish believers and the Pharisees had not a common enemy to fight, they had a common loss to deplore; and when they mingled their tears in banishment, they forgot that they were not wholly one in faith. Christianity had been regarded by them as a modified Essenism, an Essenism gravitating towards Pharisaism, which lent to Pharisaism an element of strength and growth in which it was naturally deficient – that zeal and spirituality which alone will attract and quicken the popular mind into enthusiasm.

Whilst the Jewish Pharisees and Jewish Nazarenes were forgetting their differences and approximating, the great and growing company of Gentile believers assumed a position of open, obtrusive indifference at first, and then of antagonism, to the Law, not merely to the Law as accepted by the Pharisee, but to the Law as winnowed by the Essene.

The apostles at Jerusalem were not disposed to force the Gentile converts into compliance with all the requirements of that Law, which they regarded as vitiated by human glosses; but they maintained that the converts must abstain from meats offered to idols, from the flesh of such animals as had been strangled, and from blood.49 If we may trust the Clementines, which represent the exaggerated Judaizing Christianity of the ensuing century, they insisted also on the religious obligation of personal cleanliness, and on abstention from such meats as had been pronounced unclean by Moses.

To these requirements one more was added, affecting the relations of married people; these were subjected to certain restrictions, the observance of new moons and sabbaths.

“This,” says St. Peter, in the Homilies,50 “is the rule of divine appointment. To worship God only, and trust only in the Prophet of Truth, and to be baptized for the remission of sins, to abstain from the table of devils, that is, food offered to idols, from dead carcases, from animals that have been suffocated or mangled by wild beasts, and from blood; not to live impurely; to be careful to wash when unclean; that the women keep the law of purification; that all be sober-minded, given to good works, refrain from wrong-doing, look for eternal life from the all-powerful God, and ask with prayer and continual supplication that they may win it.”

These simple and not very intolerable requirements nearly produced a schism. St. Paul took the lead in rejecting some of the restraints imposed by the apostles at Jerusalem. He had no patience with their minute prescriptions about meats: “Touch not, taste not, handle not, which all are to perish with the using.”51 It was inconvenient for the Christian invited to supper to have to make inquiries if the ox had been knocked down, or the fowl had had its neck wrung, before he could eat. What right had the apostles to impose restrictions on conjugal relations? St. Paul waxed hot over this. “Ye observe days and months and times and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.”52 “Let no man judge you in meat or in drink, or in respect of an holiday, or of the new moons, or of the sabbath-days.”53 It was exactly these sabbaths and new moons on which the Nazarene Church imposed restraint on married persons.54 As for meat offered in sacrifice to idols, St. Paul relaxed the order of the apostles assembled in council. It was no matter of importance whether men ate sacrificial meat or not, for “an idol is nothing in the world.” Yet with tender care for scrupulous souls, he warned his disciples not to flaunt their liberty in the eyes of the sensitive, and offend weak consciences. He may have thus allowed, in opposition to the apostles at Jerusalem, because his common sense got the better of his prudence. But the result was the widening of the breach that had opened at Antioch when he withstood Peter to the face.

The apostles had abolished circumcision as a rite to be imposed on the Gentile proselytes, but the children of Jewish believers were still submitted by their parents, with the consent of the apostles, to the Mosaic institution. This St. Paul would not endure. He made it a matter of vital importance. “Behold, I, Paul, say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing. For I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law. Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace.”55 In a word, to submit to this unpleasant, but otherwise harmless ceremony, was equivalent to renouncing Christ, losing the favour of God and the grace of the Holy Spirit. It was incurring damnation. The blood of Christ, his blessed teaching, his holy example, could “profit nothing” to the unfortunate child which had been submitted to the knife of the circumciser.

The contest was carried on with warmth. St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Galatians, declared his independence of the Jewish-Christian Church; his Gospel was not that of Peter and James. Those who could not symbolize with him he pronounced “accursed.” The pillar apostles, James, Cephas and John, had given, indeed, the right hand of fellowship to the Apostle of the Gentiles, when they imposed on his converts from heathenism the light rule of abstinence from sacrificial meats, blood and fornication; but it was with the understanding that he was to preach to the Gentiles exclusively, and not to interfere with the labours of St. Peter and St. James among the Jews. But St. Paul was impatient of restraint; he would not be bound to confine his teaching to the uncircumcision, nor would he allow his Jewish converts to be deprived of their right to that full and frank liberty which he supposed the Gospel to proclaim.

Paul's followers assumed a distinct name, arrogated to themselves the exclusive right to be entitled “Christians,” whilst they flung on the old apostolic community of Nazarenes the disdainful title of “the Circumcision.”

An attempt was made to maintain a decent, superficial unity, by the rival systems keeping geographically separate. But such a compromise was impossible. Wherever Jews accepted the doctrine that Christ was the Messiah there would be found old-fashioned people clinging to the customs of their childhood respecting Moses, and reverencing the Law; to whom the defiant use of meats they had been taught to regard as unclean would be ever repulsive, and flippant denial of the Law under which, the patriarchs and prophets had served God must ever prove offensive. Such would naturally form a Judaizing party, – a party not disposed to force their modes of life and prejudices on the Gentile converts, but who did not wish to dissociate Christianity from Mosaism, who would view the Gospel as the sweet flower that had blossomed from the stem of the Law, not as an axe laid at its root.

But the attempt to reconcile both parties was impossible at that time, in the heat, intoxication and extravagance of controversy. In the Epistle to the Galatians we see St. Paul writing in a strain of fiery excitement against those who interfered with the liberty of his converts, imposing on them the light rule of the Council of Jerusalem. The followers of St. Peter and St. James are designated as those who “bewitch” his converts, “remove them from the grace of Christ to another Gospel;” who “trouble” his little Church in its easy liberty, “would pervert the gospel of Christ.” To those only who hold with him in complete emancipation of the believer from vexatious restraints, “to as many as walk according to this rule,” will he accord his benediction, “Peace and mercy.”

He assumed a position of hostility to the Law. He placed the Law on one side and the Gospel on the other; here restraint, there liberty; here discipline, there freedom. A choice must be made between them; an election between Moses and Christ. There was no conciliation possible. To be under the Law was not to be under grace; the Law was a “curse,” from which Christ had redeemed man. Paul says he had not known lust but by the Law which said, Thou shalt not covet. Men under the Law were bound by its requirements, as a woman is bound to a husband as long as he lives, but when the husband is dead she is free, – so those who accept the Gospel are free from the Law and all its requirements. The law which said, Thou shalt not covet, is dead. Sin was the infraction of the law. But the law being dead, sin is no more. “Until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed where there is no law.” “Where no law is, there is no transgression.” “Now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held.”

Such an attack upon what was reverenced and observed by the Jewish Christians, and such doctrine which seemed to throw wide the flood-gates of immorality, naturally excited alarm and indignation among those who followed the more temperate teaching of Peter and James and John.

The converts of St. Paul, in their eagerness to manifest their emancipation from the Law, rolled up ceremonial and moral restrictions in one bundle, and flung both clean away.

The Corinthians, to show their freedom under the Gospel, boasted their licence to commit incest “such as was not so much as named among the Gentiles.”56 Nicolas, a hot Pauline, and his followers “rushed headlong into fornication without shame;”57 he had the effrontery to produce his wife and offer her for promiscuous insult before the assembled apostles;58 the later Pauline Christians went further. The law was, it was agreed, utterly bad, but it was promulgated by God; therefore the God of the Law was not the same deity as the God of the Gospel, but another inferior being, the Demiurge, whose province was rule, discipline, restraint, whereas the God of the Gospel was the God of absolute freedom and unrestrained licence.

They refused to acknowledge any Scriptures save the Gospel of St. Luke, or rather the Gospel of the Lord, another recension of that Gospel, drawn up by order of St. Paul, and the Epistles of the Apostle of the Gentiles.

But even in the first age the disorders were terrible. St. Paul's Epistles give glimpses of the wild outbreak of antinomianism that everywhere followed his preaching, – the drunkenness which desecrated the Eucharists, the backbitings, quarrellings, fornication, lasciviousness, which called forth such indignant denunciation from the great apostle.

Yet he was as guiltless of any wish to relax the restraints of morality as was, in later days, his great counterpart Luther. Each rose up against a narrow formalism, and proclaimed the liberty of the Christian from obligation to barren ceremonial; but there were those in the first, as there were those in the sixteenth century, with more zeal than self-control, who found “Justification by Faith only” a very comfortable doctrine, quite capable of accommodating itself to a sensual or careless life.

St. Paul may have seen, and probably did see, that Christianity would never make way if one part of the community was to be fettered by legal restrictions, and the other part was to be free. According to the purpose apparent in the minds of James and Peter, the Jewish converts were to remain Jews, building up Christian faith on the foundation of legal prescriptions, whilst the Gentile converts were to start from a different point. There could be no unity in the Church under this system – all must go under the Law, or all must fling it off. The Church, starting from her cradle with such an element of weakness in her constitution, must die prematurely.

He was right in his view. But it is by no means certain that St. Peter and St. James were as obstinately opposed to the gradual relaxation of legal restrictions, and the final extinction or transformation of the ceremonial Law, as he supposed.

In the heat and noise of controversy, he no doubt used unguarded language, said more than he thought, and his converts were not slow to take him au pied de la lettre.

The tone of Paul's letters shows conclusively that not for one moment would he relax moral obligation. With the unsuspiciousness of a guileless spirit, he never suspected that his words, taken and acted upon as a practical system, were capable of becoming the charter of antinomianism. Yet it was so. No sooner had he begun to denounce the Law, than he was understood to mean the whole Law, not merely its ceremonial part. When he began to expatiate on the freedom of Grace, he was understood to imply that human effort was overridden. When he proclaimed Justification by Faith only, it was held that he swept away for ever obligation to keep the Commandments.

The results were precisely the same in the sixteenth century, when Luther re-affirmed Paulinism, with all his warmth and want of caution. At first he proclaimed his doctrines boldly, without thought of their practical application. When he saw the results, he was staggered, and hasted to provide checks, and qualify his former words:

“Listen to the Papists,” he writes; “the sole argument they use against us is that no good result has come of my doctrine. And, in fact, scarce did I begin to preach my Gospel before the country burst into frightful revolt; schisms and sects tore the Church; everywhere honesty, morality, and good order fell into ruin; every one thought to live independently, and conduct himself after his own fancy and caprices and pleasure, as though the reign of the Gospel drew with it the suppression of all law, right and discipline. Licence and all kinds of vices and turpitudes are carried in all conditions to an extent they never were before. In those days there was some observance of duty, the people especially were decorous; but now, like a wild horse without rein and bridle, without constraint or decency, they rush on the accomplishment of their grossest lusts.”59

Gaspard Schwenkfeld saw the result of this teaching, and withdrew from it into what he considered a more spiritual sect, and was one of the founders of Anabaptism, a reaction against the laxity and licentiousness of Lutheranism. “This doctrine,” said he, “is dangerous and scandalous; it fixes us in impiety, and even encourages us in it.”60

The Epistles of St. Paul exhibit him grappling with this terrible evil, crying out in anguish against the daily growing scandals, insisting that his converts should leave off their “rioting and drunkenness, chambering and wantonness, strife and envying;” that their bodies were temples of the Spirit of God, not to be defiled with impurity; that it was in vain to deceive themselves by boasting their faith and appealing to the freedom of Grace. “Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor coveters, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

And he holds himself up to his Corinthian converts as an example that, though professing liberty, they should walk orderly: “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ.”61 But apparently all his efforts could only control the most exuberant manifestations of antinomianism, like the incest at Corinth.

The grave Petrine Christians at Jerusalem were startled at the tidings that reached them from Asia Minor and Greece. It was necessary that the breach should be closed. The Church at Jerusalem was poor; a collection was ordered by St. Paul to be made for its necessities. He undertook to carry the money himself to Jerusalem, and at the same time, by conforming to an insignificant legal custom, to recover the regard and confidence of the apostles.

This purpose emerges at every point in the history of St. Paul's last visit to Jerusalem. But it was too late. The alienation of parties was too complete to be salved over with a gift of money and appeased by shaven crowns.62

When St. Paul was taken, he made one ineffectual effort to establish his relation to Judaism, by an appeal to the Pharisees. But it failed. He was regarded with undisguised abhorrence by the Jews, with coldness by the Nazarenes. The Jews would have murdered him. We do not hear that a Nazarene visited him.

Further traces of the conflict appear in the Epistles. The authenticity of the Epistle to the Hebrews has been doubted, disputed, and on weighty grounds. It is saturated with Philonism, whole passages of Philo re-appear in the Epistle to the Hebrews, yet I cannot doubt that it is by St. Paul. When the heat of contest was somewhat abated, when he saw how wofully he had been misunderstood by his Jewish and Gentile converts in the matter of the freedom of the Gospel; when he learned how that even the heathen, not very nice about morals, spoke of the scandals that desecrated the assemblies of the Pauline Christians, – then no doubt he saw that it was necessary to lay down a plain, sharp line of demarcation between those portions of the Law which were not binding, and those which were. Following a train of thought suggested by Philo, whose works he had just read, he showed that the ceremonial, sacrificial law was symbolical, and that, as it typified Christ, the coming of the One symbolized abrogated the symbol. But the moral law had no such natural limit, therefore it was permanent. Yet he was anxious not to be thought to abandon his high views of the dignity of Faith; and the Epistle to the Hebrews contains one of the finest passages of his writing, the magnificent eulogy on Faith in the 11th chapter. St. Paul, like Luther, was not a clear thinker, could not follow a thread of argument uninterruptedly to its logical conclusion. Often, when he saw that conclusion looming before him, he hesitated to assert it, and proceeded to weaken the cogency of his former reasoning, or diverged to some collateral or irrelevant topic.

The Epistle to the Hebrews is, I doubt not, a reflex of the mind of Paul under the circumstances indicated.

This Epistle, there can be little question, called forth the counterblast of the Epistle of James, the Lord's brother. But the writer of that Epistle exhibits an unjust appreciation of the character of St. Paul. Paul was urged on by conviction, and not actuated by vanity. Yet the exasperation must have been great which called forth the indignant exclamation, “Wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead!”63

The second of the Canonical Epistles attributed to St. Peter,64 if not the expression of the opinion of the Prince of the Apostles himself, represents the feelings of Nazarene Christians of the first century. It cautions those who read the writings of St. Paul, “which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction.”

The Nicolaitans, taking advantage of the liberty accorded them in one direction, assumed it in another. In the letter to the Church of Pergamos, in the Apocalypse, they are denounced as “eating things sacrificed to idols, and committing fornication.”65 They are referred to as the followers of Balaam, both in that Epistle and in the Epistles of Jude and the 2nd of St. Peter. This is because Balaam has the same significance as Nicolas.66 Jude, the brother of James, writes of them: “Certain men are crept in unawares … ungodly men turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness … who defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities,” i. e. of the apostles; “these speak evil of those things which they know not; but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves. But, beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ; how that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts. These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit.”

And St. Peter wrote in wrath and horror. “It had been better not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them.”67

The extreme Pauline party went on their way; Marcion, Valentine, Mark, were its successive high-priests and prophets. It ran from one extravagance to another, till it sank into the preposterous sect of the Cainites; in their frantic hostility to the Law, canonizing Cain, Esau, Pharaoh, Saul, all who are denounced in the Old Testament as having resisted the God of the Law, and deifying the Serpent, the Deceiver, as the God of the Gospel who had first revealed to Eve the secret of liberty, of emancipation from restraint.

But disorders always are on the surface, patent to every one, and cry out for a remedy. Those into which the advanced Pauline party had fallen were so flagrant, so repugnant to the good sense and right feelings of both Jew and Gentile believers, that they forced on a reaction. The most impracticable antinomians on one side, and obstructive Judaizers on the other, were cut off, or cut themselves off, from the Church; and a temper of mutual concession prevailed among the moderate. At the head of this movement stood St. John.

The work of reconciliation was achieved by the Apostle of Love. A happy compromise was effected. The Sabbath and the Lord's-day were both observed, side by side. Nothing was said on one side about distinction in meats, and the sacred obligation of washing; and on the other, the Gentile Christians adopted the Psalms of David and much of the ceremonial of the Temple into their liturgy. The question of circumcision was not mooted. It had died out of exhaustion, and the doctrine of Justification was accepted as a harmless opinion, to be constantly corrected by the moral law and common sense.

A similar compromise took place at the English Reformation. In deference to the dictation of foreign reformers, the Anglican divines adopted their doctrine of Justification by Faith only into the Articles, but took the wise precaution of inserting as an antidote the Decalogue in the Communion Office, and of ordering it to be written up, where every one might read, in the body of the church.

The compromise effected by the influence and authority of St. John was rejected by extreme partizans on the right and the left. The extreme Paulines continued to refuse toleration to the Law and the Old Testament. The Nazarene community had also its impracticable zealots who would not endure the reading of the Pauline Epistles.

The Church, towards the close of the apostolic age, was made up of a preponderance of Gentile converts; in numbers and social position they stood far above the Nazarenes.

Under St. John, the Church assumed a distinctively Gentile character. In its constitution, religious worship, in its religious views, it differed widely from the Nazarene community in Palestine.

With the disappearance from its programme of distinction of meats and circumcision, its connection with Judaism had disappeared. But Nazarenism was not confined to Palestine. In Rome, in Greece, in Asia Minor, there were large communities, not of converted Jews only, but of proselytes from Gentiledom, who regarded themselves as constituting the Church of Christ. The existence of this fact is made patent by the Clementines and the Apostolic Constitutions. St. Peter's successors in the see of Rome have been a matter of perplexity. It has impressed itself on ecclesiastical students that Linus and Cletus ruled simultaneously. I have little doubt it was so. The Judaizing Church was strong in Rome. Probably each of the two communities had its bishop set over it, one by Paul, the other by Peter.

Whilst the “Catholic” Church, the Church of the compromise, grew and prospered, and conquered the world, the narrow Judaizing Church dwindled till it expired, and with its expiration ceased conversion from Judaism. This Jewish Church retained to the last its close relationship with Mosaism. Circumstances, as has been shown, drew the Jewish believer and the Pharisee together.

When Jerusalem fell, the Gentile Church passed without a shudder under the Bethlehem Gate, whereon an image of a swine had been set up in mockery; contemplated the statue of Hadrian on the site of the Temple without despair, and constituted itself under a Gentile bishop, Mark, in Ælia Capitolina.

But the old Nazarene community, the Church of James and Symeon, clinging tightly to its old traditions, crouched in exile at Pella, confounded by the Romans in common banishment with the Jew. The guards thrust back Nazarene and Jew alike with their spears, when they ventured to approach the ruins of their prostrate city, the capital of their nation and of their faith.

The Church at Jerusalem under Mark was, to the Nazarene, alien; its bishop an intruder. To the Nazarene, the memory of Paul was still hateful. The Clementine Recognitions speak of him with thinly-disguised aversion, and tell of a personal contest between him, when the persecutor Saul, and St. James their bishop, and of his throwing down stairs, and beating till nearly dead, the brother of the Lord. In the very ancient apocryphal letter of St. Peter to St. James, belonging to the same sect, and dating from the second century, Paul is spoken of as the “enemy preaching a doctrine at once foolish and lawless.”68 The Nazarene Christians, as Irenaeus and Theodoret tell us, regarded him as an apostate.69 They would not receive his Epistles or the Gospel of St. Luke drawn up under his auspices.

In the Homilies, St. Peter is made to say:

“Our Lord and Prophet, who hath sent us, declared that the Wicked One, having disputed with him forty days, and having prevailed nothing against him, promised that he would send apostles among his subjects to deceive. Wherefore, above all, remember to shun apostle or teacher or prophet who does not first accurately compare his preaching with [that of] James, who was called the Brother of my Lord, and to whom was entrusted the administration of the Church of the Hebrews at Jerusalem. And that, even though he come to you with credentials; lest the wickedness which prevailed nothing when disputing forty days with our Lord should afterwards, like lightning falling from heaven upon earth, send a preacher to your injury, preaching under pretence of truth, like this Simon [Magus], and sowing error.”70

The reader has but to study the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, and his wonder at the silence of Josephus and Justus will disappear.

Those curious books afford us a precious insight into the feelings of the Nazarenes of the first and second centuries, showing us what was the temper of their minds and the colour of their belief. They represent St. James as the supreme head of the Church. He is addressed by St. Peter, “Peter to James, the Lord and Bishop of the Holy Church, under the Father of all.” St. Clement calls him “the Lord and Bishop of bishops, who rules Jerusalem, the Holy Church of the Hebrews, and the Churches everywhere excellently founded by the providence of God.”

Throughout the curious collection of Homilies, Christianity is one with Judaism. It is a reform of Mosaism. It bears the relation to Judaism, that the Anglican Church of the last three centuries, it is pretended, bears to the Mediaeval Church in England. Everything essential was retained; only the traditions of the elders, the glosses of the lawyers, were rejected.

Christianity is never mentioned by name. A believer is called, not a Christian, but a Jew. Clement describes his own conversion: “I betook myself to the holy God and Law of the Jews, putting my faith in the well-assured conclusion that the Law has been assigned by the righteous judgment of God.”71

Apion the philosopher, is spoken of as hating the Jews; the context informs us that by Jews is meant those whom we should call Christians.

Moses is the first prophet, Jesus the second. Like their spiritual ancestors the Essenes, the Nazarenes protested that the Law was overlaid with inventions of a later date; these Jesus came to efface, that he might re-edit the Law in its ancient integrity. The original Law, as given by God and written by Moses, was lost; it was found again after 300 years, lost again, and then re-written from memory by Ezra. Thus it came to pass that the Old Revelation went through various editions, which altered its meaning, and left it a compound of truths and errors.72 It was the mark of a good and wise Jew, instructed by Jesus, to distinguish between what was true and what was false in the Scriptures.

Thus the Nazarene thought himself a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as an Anglican esteems himself a better Catholic than the Catholics. The Nazarenes would have resented with indignation the imputation that they were a sect alien from the commonwealth of Israel, and, like all communities occupying an uneasy seat between two stools, were doubly, trebly vehement in their denunciation of that sect to which they were thought to bear some relation. They repudiated “Christianity,”73 as a high Anglican repudiates Protestantism; they held aloof from a Pauline believer, as an English Churchman will stand aloof from a Lutheran.

And thus it came to pass that the Jewish historians of the first century said nothing about Christ and the Church he founded.

And yet St. Paul had wrought a work for Christ and the Church which, humanly speaking, none else could have effected.

The Nazarene Church was from its infancy prone to take a low view of the nature of Christ. The Jewish converts were so infected with Messianic notions that they could look on Jesus Christ only as the Messiah, not as incarnate God. They could see in him a prophet, “one like unto Moses,” but not one equal to the Father.

The teaching of the apostles seemed powerless at the time to lift the faith of their Jewish converts to high views of the Lord's nature and mission. Their Judaic prejudice strangled, warped their faith. Directly the presence of the apostles was withdrawn, the restraint on this downward gravitation was removed, and Nazarenism settled into heresy on the fundamental doctrine of Christianity. To Gentiles it was in vain to preach Messianism. Messianism implied an earnest longing for a promised deliverer. Gentiles had no such longing, had never been led to expect a deliverer.

The apostle must take other ground. He took that of the Incarnation, the Godhead revealing the Truth to mankind by manifestation of itself among men, in human flesh.

The apostles to the circumcision naturally appealed to the ruling religious passion in the Jewish heart – the passion of hope for the promised Messiah. The Messiah was come. The teaching of the apostles to the circumcision necessarily consisted of an explanation of this truth, and efforts to dissipate the false notions which coloured Jewish Messianic hopes, and interfered with their reception of the truth that Jesus was the one who had been spoken of by the prophets, and to whose coming their fathers had looked.

To the Gentiles, St. Paul preached Christ as the revealer to a dark and ignorant world of the nature of God, the purpose for which He had made man, and the way in which man might serve and please God. The Jews had their revelation, and were satisfied with it. The Gentiles walked in darkness; they had none; their philosophies were the gropings of earnest souls after light. The craving of the Gentile heart was for a revelation. Paul preached to them the truth manifested to the world through Christ.

Thus Pauline teaching on the Incarnation counteracted the downward drag of Nazarene Messianism, which, when left to itself, ended in denying the Godhead of Christ.

If for a century the churches founded by St. Paul were sick with moral disorders, wherewith they were inoculated, the vitality of orthodox belief in the Godhead of Christ proved stronger than moral heresy, cast it out, and left only the scars to tell what they had gone through in their infancy.

Petrine Christianity upheld the standard of morality, Pauline Christianity bore that of orthodoxy.

St. John, in the cool of his old age, was able to give the Church its permanent form. The Gentile converts had learned to reverence the purity, the uprightness, the truthfulness of the Nazarene, and to be ashamed of their excesses; and the Nazarene had seen that his Messianism supplied him with nothing to satisfy the inner yearning of his nature. Both met under the apostle of love to clasp hands and learn of one another, to confess their mutual errors, to place in the treasury of the Church, the one his faith, the other his ethics, to be the perpetual heritage of Christianity.

Some there were still who remained fixed in their prejudices, self-excommunicated, monuments to the Church of the perils she had gone through, the Scylla and Charybdis through which she had passed with difficulty, guided by her Divine pilot.

I have been obliged at some length to show that the early Christian Church in Palestine bore so close a resemblance to the Essene sect, that to the ordinary superficial observer it was indistinguishable from it. And also, that so broad was the schism separating the Nazarene Church consisting of Hebrews, from the Pauline Church consisting of Gentiles that no external observer who had not examined the doctrines of these communities would suppose them to be two forms of the same faith, two religions sprung from the same loins. Their connection was as imperceptible to a Jew, as would be that between Roman Catholicism and Wesleyanism to-day.

Both Nazarene and Jew worshipped in the same temple, observed the same holy days, practised the same rites, shrank with loathing from the same food, and mingled their anathemas against the same apostate, Paul, who had cast aside at once the law in which he had been brought up, and the Hebrew name by which he had been known.

The silence of Josephus and Justus under these circumstances is explicable. They have described Essenism; that description covers Nazarenism as it appeared to the vulgar eye. If they have omitted to speak of Jesus and his death, it is because both wrote at the time when Nazarene and Pharisee were most closely united in sympathy, sorrow and regret for the past. It was not a time to rip up old wounds, and Justus and Josephus were both Pharisees.

That neither should speak of Pauline Christianity is also not remarkable. It was a Gentile religion, believed in only by Greeks and Romans; it had no open observable connection with Judaism. It was to them but another of those many religions which rose as mushrooms, to fade away again on the soil of the Roman world, with which the Jewish historians had little interest and no concern.

If this explanation which I have offered is unsatisfactory, I know not whither to look for another which can throw light to the strange silence of Philo, Josephus and Justus.

It is thrown in the teeth of Christians, that history, apart from the Gospels, knows nothing of Christ; that the silence of contemporary, and all but contemporary, Jewish chroniclers, invalidates the testimony of the inspired records.

The reasons which I have given seem to me to explain this silence plausibly, and to show that it arose, not from ignorance of the acts of Christ and the existence of the Church, but from a deliberate purpose.