what it really was. It was itself already the result of a national existence in dispersion. In utter contrast to the old-Jewish texts — which were a carefully preserved treasure, and of which the right interpretation, the Halakha, was reserved by the Rabbis to themselves — the apocalyptic literature was written so that it could reach all the souls to be wakened, and interpreted so that it might strike home in everyone.
It is easy to see which of these conceptions was that of Jesus's oldest friends, for they established themselves as a community of the Last Days in Jerusalem and frequented the Temple. For these simple folk — amongst them his brothers, who erstwhile had openly rejected him, and his mother, who now believed in her executed Son[1] — the power of the Judaic tradition was even stronger than the spirit of Apocalypse. In their object of convincing the Jews they failed (although at first even Pharisees came over to them) and so they remained as one of the numerous sects within Judaism, and their product, the "Confession of Peter," may fairly be characterized as an express assertion that they themselves were the true Jewry and the Synedrion the false.[2]
The final destiny of this circle[3] was to fall into oblivion when, as very soon happened, the whole world of Magian thought and feeling responded to the new apocalyptic teaching. Amongst the later disciples of Jesus were many who were definitely and purely Magian, and wholly free from the Pharisaic spirit. Long before Paul, they had tacitly settled the mission question. Not to preach, for them, was not to live at all, and presently they had assembled, everywhere from the Tigris to the Tiber, small circles in which the figure of Jesus, in every conceivable presentation, merged with the mass of prior visions.[4] Out of this, a new discord arose, as between mission to the heathen and mission to the Jews, and this was far more important than the conflict between Judea and the world on issues already decided. Jesus had lived in Galilee. Was his teaching to look west or east? Was it to be a Jesus-cult or an Order of the Saviour? Was it to seek intimacy with the Persian or with the Syncretic Church, both of which were in process of formation?
This was the question decided by Paul — the first great personality in the new movement, and the first who had the sense not only of truths, but of facts.
- ↑ Acts i, 14; cf. Mark vi.
- ↑ As against Luke, Matthew is the representative of this conception. His is the only Gospel in which the word "Ecclesia" is used, and it denotes the true Jews, in contradistinction to the masses that refuse to listen to Jesus. This is not the missionary idea, any more than Isaiah was a missionary. Community, in this connexion, means an Order within Judaism. The prescriptions of Matt. xviii, 15-20 are wholly incompatible with any general dissemination.
- ↑ It fell apart later into sects, amongst which were the Ebionites and the Elkazites (the latter having a strange sacred book, the Elxai; see Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, p. 154). [See the articles "Ebionites" and "Sabians" in Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.]
- ↑ Such sects were attacked in the Acts of the Apostles and in all Paul's Epistles, and indeed there was hardly a Late Classical or Aramæan religion or philosophy which did not give rise to some sort of Jesus-sect. The danger was indeed real of the Passion story becoming, not the nucleus of a new religion, but an integrating clement of all existing ones.
