Lost and Hostile Gospels

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.

III. The Jew Of Celsus

Celsus was one of the four first controversial opponents of Christianity. His book has been lost, with the exception of such portions as have been preserved by Origen.

Nothing for certain is known of Celsus. Origen endeavours to make him out to be an Epicurean, as prejudice existed even among the heathen against this school of philosophy, which denied, or left as open questions, the existence of a God, Providence, and the Eternity of the Soul. He says in his first book that he has heard there had existed two Epicureans of the name of Celsus, one who lived in the reign of Nero († A.D. 68), the other under Hadrian († A.D. 138), and it is with this latter that he has to do. But it is clear from passages of Celsus quoted by Origen, that this antagonist of Christianity was no Epicurean, but belonged to that school of Eclectics which based its teaching on Platonism, but adopted modifications from other schools. Origen himself is obliged to admit in several passages of his controversial treatise that the views of Celsus are not Epicurean, but Platonic; but he pretends that Celsus disguised his Epicureanism under a pretence of Platonism. Controversialists in the first days of Christianity were as prompt to discredit their opponents by ungenerous, false accusation, as in these later days.

We know neither the place nor the date of the birth of Celsus. That he lived later than the times of Hadrian is clear from his mention of the Marcionites, who only arose in A.D. 142, and of the Marcellians, named after the woman Marcella, who, according to the testimony of Irenaeus,⁷⁴ first came to Rome in the time of Pope Anicetus, after A.D. 157. As Celsus in two passages remarks that the Christians spread their doctrines secretly, because they were forbidden under pain of death to assemble together for worship, it would appear that he wrote his book Λόγος ἀληθής during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (between 161-180), who persecuted the Christians. We may therefore put the date of the book approximately at A.D. 176.

The author is certainly the Celsus to whom Lucian dedicated his writing, “Alexander the False Prophet.” Of the religious opinions of Celsus we are able to form a tolerable conception from the work of Origen. “If the Christians only honoured One God,” says he,⁷⁵ “then the weapons of their controversy with others would not be so weak; but they show to a man, who appeared not long ago, an exaggerated honour, and are of opinion that they are not offending the Godhead, when they show to one of His servants the same reverence that they pay to God Himself.” Celsus acknowledges, with the Platonists, One only, eternal, spiritual God, who cannot be brought into union with impure matter, the world. All that concerns the world, he says, God has left to the dispensation of inferior spirits, which are the gods of heathendom. The welfare of mankind is at the disposal of these inferior gods, and men therefore do well to honour them in moderation; but the human soul is called to escape the chains of matter and strain after perfect purity; and this can only be done by meditation on the One, supreme, almighty God. “God,” says he,⁷⁶ “has not made man in His image, as Christians affirm; for God has not either the appearance of a man, nor indeed any visible form.” In the fourth Book he remarks, in opposition to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, “I will appeal to that which has been held as true in all ages, – that God is good, beautiful, blessed, and possesses in Himself all perfections. If He came down among men, He must have altered His nature; from a good God, He must have become bad; from beautiful, ugly; from blessed, unhappy; and His perfect Being would have become one of imperfection. Who can tolerate such a change? Only transitory things alter their conditions; the intransitory remain ever the same. Therefore it is impossible to conceive that God can have been transformed in such a manner.”

It is remarkable that Celsus, living in the middle of the second century, and able to make inquiries of aged Jews whose lives had extended from the first century, should have been able to find out next to nothing about Jesus and his disciples, except what he read in the Gospels. This is proof that no traditions concerning Jesus had been preserved by the Jews, apart from those contained in the Gospels, Canonical and Apocryphal.

Origen's answer to Celsus is composed of eight Books. In the first Book a Jew speaks, who is introduced by Celsus as addressing Jesus himself; in the second Book this Jew addresses those of his fellow-countrymen who have embraced Christianity; in the other six Books Celsus speaks for himself. Origen extracts only short passages from the work of Celsus, and then labours to demolish the force of the argument of the opponent of Christianity as best he can.

The arguments of Celsus and the counter-arguments of Origen do not concern us here. All we have to deal with are those traditions or slanders detailed to Celsus by the Jews, which he reproduces. That Celsus was in communication with Jews when he wrote the two first Books is obvious, and the only circumstances he relates which concern the life of our Lord he derived from his Jewish informants. “The Jew (whom Celsus introduces) addresses Jesus, and finds much fault. In the first place, he charges him with having falsely proclaimed himself to be the Son of a Virgin; afterwards, he says that Jesus was born in a poor Jewish village, and that his mother was a poor woman of the country, who supported herself with spinning and needlework; that she was cast off by her betrothed, a carpenter; and that after she was thus rejected by her husband, she wandered about in disgrace and misery till she secretly gave birth to Jesus. Jesus himself was obliged from poverty and necessity to go down as servant into Egypt, where, he learnt some of the secret sciences which are in high honour among the Egyptians; and he placed such confidence in these sciences, that on his return to his native land he gave himself out to be a God.”

Origen adds: “The carpenter, as the Jew of Celsus declares, who was betrothed to Mary, put the mother of Jesus from him, because she had broken faith with him, in favour of a soldier named Panthera!”

Again: “Celsus relates from the Gospel of Matthew the flight of Christ into Egypt; but he denies all that is marvellous and supernatural in it, especially that an angel should have appeared to Joseph and ordered him to escape. Instead of seeking whether the departure of Jesus from Judaea and his residence in Egypt had not some spiritual meaning, he has made up a fable concerning it. He admits, indeed, that Jesus may have wrought the miracles which attracted such a multitude of people to him, and induced them to follow him as the Messiah; but he pretends that these miracles were wrought, not by virtue of his divine power, but of his magical knowledge. Jesus, says he, had a bad education; later he went into Egypt and passed into service there, and there learnt some wonderful arts. When he came back to his fatherland, on account of these arts, he gave himself out to be a God.”⁷⁷

“The Jew brought forward by Celsus goes on to say, ‘I could relate many things more concerning Jesus, all which are true, but which have quite a different character from what his disciples relate touching him; but, I will not now bring these forward.’ And what are these facts,” answers Origen, “which are not in agreement with the narratives of the Evangelists, and which the Jew refrains from mentioning? Unquestionably, he is using only a rhetorical expression; he pretends that he has in his store abundance of munitions of war to discharge against Jesus and his doctrine, but in fact he knows nothing which can deceive the hearer with the appearance of truth, except those particulars which he has culled from the the Gospels themselves.”⁷⁸

This is most important evidence of the utter ignorance of the Jews in the second century of all that related to the history of our Lord. Justus and Josephus had been silent. There was no written narrative to which the Jew might turn for information; his traditions were silent. The fall of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Jews had broken the thread of their recollections.

It is very necessary to bear this in mind, in order to appreciate the utter worthlessness of the stories told of our Saviour in the Talmud and the Toledoth Jeschu. An attempt has been made to bolster up these late fables, and show that they are deserving of a certain amount of confidence.⁷⁹

But it is clear that the religious movement which our Lord originated in Palestine attracted much less attention at the time than has been usually supposed. The Sanhedrim at first regarded his teaching with the contempt with which, in after times, Leo X. heard of the preaching of Luther. “It is a schoolman's proposition,” said the Pope. “A new rabbinical tradition,” the elders probably said. Only when their interests and fears were alarmed, did they interfere to procure the condemnation of Christ. And then they thought no more of their victim and his history than they did later of the history of James, the Lord's brother. The preaching and death of Jesus led to no tumultuous outbreak against the Roman government, and therefore excited little interest. The position of Christ as the God-man was not forced on them by the Nazarenes. The Jews noticed the virtues of these men, but ignored their peculiar tenets, till traditions were lost; and when the majesty of Christ, incarnate God, shone out on the world which turned to acknowledge him, they found that they had preserved no records, no recollections of the events in the history of Jesus. That he was said by Christians to have been born of a Virgin, driven into Egypt by King Herod – that he wrought miracles, gathered disciples, died on the cross and rose again – they heard from the Christians; and these facts they made use of to pervert them into fantastic fables, to colour them with malignant inventions. The only trace of independent tradition is in the mention made of Panthera by the Jew produced by Celsus.

It is perhaps worthy of remark that St. Epiphanius, who wrote against heresies at the end of the fourth century, gives the genealogy of Jesus thus:⁸⁰

Jacob, called Panther, married to ?

Offspring:

Mary, married to Joseph

Offspring:

Jesus

Cleophas

It shows that in the fourth century the Jewish stories of Panthera had made such an impression on the Christians, that his name was forced into the pedigree of Jesus.

Had any of the stories found in the Toledoth Jeschu existed in the second century, we should certainly have found them in the book of Celsus.

Origen taunts the Jew with knowing nothing of Christ but what he had found out from the Gospels. He would not have uttered that taunt had any anti-Christian apocryphal biographies of Christ existed in his day. The Talmud, indeed, has the tale of Christ having studied magic in Egypt. Whence this legend, as well as that of Panthera, came, we shall see presently.