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
Acts xv. 29.
Clem. Homil. vii. 8.
Col. ii. 21.
Gal. iv. 10. When it is seen in the Clementines how important the observance of these days was thought, what a fundamental principle it was of Nazarenism, I think it cannot be doubted that it was against this that St. Paul wrote.
Col. ii. 16.
Clement. Homil. xix. 22.
Gal. v. 2-4.
