Lost and Hostile Gospels. Baring-Gould Sabine

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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