"and said, 'Except ye be circumcised after the manner of cannot be saved.'”

66 Moses, ye

cision the

of the

In itself this was no more than would probably have been Circummaintained a short time before by the Apostles themselves watchword and by the Church of Jerusalem; even at this moment, as Judaizers. the context implies, it was regarded as an open question. But amongst the thousand instances which are perpetually recurring even in ordinary history, and which are brought before us with peculiar liveliness in the New Testament, of positions or modes of teaching which, according to the point of view from which they are taken up, may be regarded as the holiest truths or the most fatal errors, none is more striking than the maintenance of the necessity of circumcision before and after the conversion of Cornelius. Other points there were no doubt on which the Judaizing Christians may have at different times or places insisted, but this was always their main watchword. In Palestine itself, as we may gather from the accusations against Stephen and from the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Temple and the Temple service was the great bond of union; but, when an appeal had to be made to the feelings of the whole Jewish race throughout the world, it necessarily rallied round that which they all had equally in common-the observances of the Law; and of all these observances, great as might be the stress laid on the festivals and sabbaths, or on the distinction of clean and unclean meats, yet still the one essential, universal, indispensable sign of a Jew was the sign of the covenant which God had made with their father Abraham in circumcision. Foreign armies were not allowed to offer their services in defence of the holy city-foreign kings could not ally themselves with princesses of the house of Herod, unless they submitted to this ceremony was it to be borne that those who claimed to

f Acts vi. 13; Heb. vii. x. g Joseph. Ant. xx. 7. 1, 3.

See Milman's Hist. of Christianity, i. p. 425.

be the servants of the true Messiah should commence their career by breaking through the one bond of national union, and admitting to the closest of human intercourse those who had always been regarded as "cut off from the "people of God?"

66

66

And as this was the one point for which the Judaizers contended, so it was the one point on which the Apostles took their stand against them. Although they taught that the Temple with its worship was henceforth to be sought only in “the spiritual house and royal priesthood" of the whole Christian society, still they neverk scrupled to frequent its services. Although St. Paul spoke of the "holy days and new moons, and sabbath days," the observation "of days and months, and times and years," as merely a shadow of things to come, still he did not hesitate himself to keep the feasts of the Passover and of Pentecostm, and to the Romans he spoke of it as a thing indifferent whether one man esteemed one day above another, or another "esteemed every day alike"." "The kingdom of God," they well knew, "was not meat or drink," but here again St. Paul would not "eat meat whilst the world "standeth lest he should make his brother to offend;" and the assembled Apostles and brethren at Jerusalem enjoined the Christians "to abstain from meats offered to "idols, and blood, and from things strangled P." But on the point of circumcision they were immoveable, in proportion as their opponents were urgent. Both alike saw that all else might be conceded, and the real cause of Christian liberty be left untouched—that, if this were granted, all else must follow with it. And therefore, to their solicitations St. Paul "gave way by subjection, no, not

"for an hour;" and, as if in direct antithesis to their own statement, declared with an emphasis which would be unaccountable but for the vehemence and the importance of the conflict, that "if they were circumcised, Christ profited "them nothing, they were fallen from grace";" and the final decree of the Apostles at Jerusalem, which, as has been said, conceded to Jewish prejudices all that could be conceded, was prefaced by declaring that "to those who "went outs from them saying, 'Ye must be circumcised " and keep the law,' they gave no such commandments.” Such was the position of the Judaizers after the frustra- Their wide tion of the first attempt to impose a yoket on the neck of the disciples which neither the Apostles nor their fathers had been able to bear. The battle had been fought and lost at Jerusalem, but the cause was to them too sacred to be given up without a farther struggle in its behalf, and it is from this time forward that we trace their efforts as a distinct and energetic body in almost every place to which the influence of Christianity extended itself. Palestine of course must still have remained their head-quarters. Every Jewish Jew, wherever he dwelt, must have felt with Philo, "Jeru"salem is the city of my fathers, the mother city not only "of Judæa, but of almost all the countries of the world

66

through the colonies which it has at different times sent "forth"." But he must have felt no less how widely and deeply the ramifications of his race extended, through all the various provinces which Philo proceeds to enumerate. Beginning from the east, there was the vast settlement in Babylonia of those Jews who had remained after the return from the captivity. Of the twenty-four courses of priests, only four had followed Ezra to Palestine. No less than three universities of Jews existed in Mesopotamia alone. It

9 Gal. ii. 5.

s Acts xv. 24.

Gal. v. 2.

t Acts xv. 10.

u Philo Leg. ed. Caium. 1031. Comp. Jos. Ant. xiv. 7. 2.

diffusion.

settlers.

was a well-known saying, "whoever dwells in Babylon is as "though he dwelt in the land of Israel." (Lightfoot, vol. ii. Appendix to Comments on 1 Cor. xiv.) Advancing westward, there is hardly a province of the empire in which they did not form a considerable portion of the population. The great colony at Alexandria is too well known to need any further comment here. In every part of Asia Minor they had possessed numerous settlements from the time that the two thousand families of their countrymen had been transplanted thither by Antiochus the Great, to keep down the unquiet population of Phrygia. (Jos. Ant. xii. 3.) Spreading, probably from thence, to Greece and the adjacent islands, in that of Cyprus alone their force was such that in the insurrection under Hadrian they massacred 240,000 of the Greek inhabitants, and took possession of the island. And in Rome the settlers to whom a large part of the Trans-tiberine district had been assigned by Pompey (Philo, Leg. ad Caium. 1014.) had by the time of Augustus reached such an amount, that Josephus (Ant. xvii. 1. 11.) calculates the number of those who appeared at the trial of Archelaus to have been 8000, and Horace expresses so strongly his sense of their importance, as to imply (hyperbolically of course) that he and his fellow citizens were a minority in comparison. (Sat. i. 70.)

Nor were they at this time, as we see from Juvenal (Sat. iii. 65), and Martial (i. 42), that they were soon after the fall of their city, the contemned and oppressed race that they have been in later times. They were feared, they were hated, but they were not despised. In that era of transition, when the native vigour both of Paganism and of the Roman character began to decline, it was natural that the strong will of the Jewish race, indomitable even in its extravagance, should have made itself

* Most of these references are derived from the second volume of Milman's Hist. of the Jews, p. 134-141.

felt; that the ignorant populace, the sceptical philosopher, Proselytes. the Epicurean statesman, should alike have cowered before the sight of a religion, whose sublimity must have awed if it did not convert them, whose mystery must have excited their curiosity if it did not awaken their conscience. No complaints against the Roman governor gained such a ready hearing at the imperial court as those from Judæa; no portion of the Roman people had such especial privileges granted to them as the Jewish settlers in Egypt and Asia Minor. But it was more than this. The gulf which naturally might have been expected to exist between the Jewish and heathen portions of the empire was bridged over by the vast floating population of the proselytes whether "of "righteousness" or of "the gate," who, Gentiles by birth, became Jews by religion, and, being henceforth known by the name of the "devout"," the "men that feared God," lost the recollection of their own outward descent in the sense of that higher spiritual descent from Abraham which they were held to enjoy by the rite of circumcision; whilst the diffusion of the Greek language by the conquests of Alexander as the medium of communication between the east and west at once introduced them to the study of the Old Testament, not in the form, so difficult to foreigners, of its Hebrew original, but in the well-known version of the Seventy. With what zeal these new citizens, so to speak, were invited to join the ranks of Judaism, may be judged from the woe denounced on those who "compassed sea and

y See the account of the Egyptian Jews in Strabo apud Jos. Ant. xiv. 7, 2, and of the privileges granted to the Galatian Jews in the Inscription of Ancyra.

z Such, as is well known, is the almost invariable usage in the Acts of the words εὐσεβεῖς, εὐλαβεῖς, and φοβούμενοι τὸν θέον, meaning apparently those "who though Gentiles by birth were distinguished from the rest of their race "by devotion and fear of the true God," a usage of which we already find traces in the contrast drawn in the later Psalms between "the house of “Israel” and “those that fear God." (See Ps. cxv. 9—11; cxxxv. 19, 20.) a Matt. xxiii. 15.