The Syrian Churches/The Hebrew-Christian Church of Jerusalem

by John Wesley Etheridge

 

THE HEBREW-CHRISTIAN CHURCH OF JERUSALEM.

 

Although the ecclesiastical bodies which for many centuries have nominally represented (in reality misrepresented) Christianity in the metropolis of Palestine must not be classed among the churches which we proceed to enumerate, yet the Hebrew-Christian society that subsisted in Jerusalem in the apostolic and subsequent age may claim an interest in our retrospections, not indeed as belonging, strictly speaking, to those which have held the Peschito as their standard scripture-text, but in consequence of its affinity to them in language, and some peculiar customs, and as having been, in the phrase of the sacred writer, "the mother of them all."

The history of this community, as a body ecclesiastical, begins at the epoch of the Pentecost; at that memorable day, when (as at the first creation the breath of the Deity gave a soul to the frame of man already organized) the Spirit of God descended to inform with the principle and faculties of spiritual life that mystical body to which the personal ministry of Christ had recently given a being. "And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost: and they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers. And fear came upon every soul; and many wonders and signs were done by the apostles. And all that believed were together, and had all things common, and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all, as every man had need."

This consecration of their property for the common benefit resulted from their desire to obey, to the letter, the counsel of the Saviour, to forsake all and follow him; from their unhesitating faith in his premonitions of the impending ruin of Jerusalem, as well as from that principle of unitive love with which the Divine Spirit imbues the hearts of true believers.

"And they continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily (τους σωζομενους) the saved." "And by the hands of the apostles were many signs and wonders wrought among the people; and believers were the more added to the Lord, multitudes both of men and women; and a great company of the priests -were obedient to the faith; and the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul."^[1]

This early time of Christianity was thus like the sunrise of a morning without clouds; and the minds of men, brought under a benign influence so new to our earth, partook at once of a serene cheerfulness, a God-like love, and a holy joy, which symbolized with the spirit of the first Paradise, and antedated the blessedness of that which is to come.

But oar life-time here, under any circumstances, is a probation. The faith of these first believers was speedily pat to the test; and the holy Stephen, in an agony of compassion for his murderers, and of triumphant joy in the Saviour he confessed and adored, led the van of the martyrs.

Of the varied experiences of this, or of the other churches to be brought under our review, it does not comport with the object of these brief notices to attempt a chronological detail: for these we must refer to the voluminous labours of the ecclesiastical annalists, content to point out here the principal events in the history of these communities, which appear to have acted with the strongest force on their progress, character, and fate.

It is commonly thought, that about the same time as that of the election of the seven deacons at Jerusalem,^[2] St. James was established the first bishop of that church.^[3] He is sometimes called "the brother of our Lord," in accordance with the Jewish, custom of giving the title of brother to a relative or connexion; James being the son of Alphæus and of Maria, the near relative of the blessed Virgin. His long-tried rectitude procured him the title of "the Just;" and his habitual and fervent intercessions for the people, that of Ophlia, or "the fortress of God." He superintended the affairs of the church for nearly thirty years. It was in the early part of his episcopate that the deliberative assembly, sometimes called the council of Jerusalem, was held on the question of a strict uniformity of ceremonial practice between the Hebrew and Gentile believers;^[4] when, under the express teaching of the Holy Spirit, the apostles and presbyters convened pronounced such an uniformity to be unnecessary. In the practice of the church of Jerusalem there obtained for a considerable time a modified Judaism: the rite of circumcision was still retained; the temple hours of prayer were attended, though the sacrifices at the altar were no longer regarded in the same light by the evangelized as they were by their unconverted fellow-citizens; and the minor observances of vows and purifications continued to be devoutly recognised.^[5] Thus there was not a sudden disruption of the old religious habitudes of the converts to the gospel, but, as we may believe, a gradual alienation from their ancestral ceremonies, according to the increase of their Christian knowledge, and the clearness of their perception of the designs of Providence. The accessions made so rapidly to the numbers of the church soon rendered it necessary to distribute it into smaller congregations or bands, each assembling "on the first day of the week" in its own appointed house,—κατ' οικον,—(Acts ii. 46; v. 42,) for instruction, worship, and communion. (Acts ii. 42.)

It was at this early period that the apostle Matthew wrote, primarily for the use of the Hebrew-Christian church, his invaluable Gospel. This holy document embodied the apostolical testimony to the life, doctrine, miracles, atoning death, and resurrection of the Divine Redeemer: these had been the great subjects of St. Matthew's preaching in Palestine itself, which, on the eve of his departure from that land, he delivered in this written form, in their own language, to his believing countrymen.^[6] The other apostles made much use of this Gospel; and St. James is said to have used it as -the text-book of his public preaching at Jerusalem.

St. James closed his career by martyrdom, under the high-priesthood of the ferocious Ananus, during the interval which elapsed between the death of Festus the Roman governor, and the arrival of Albinus his successor. The high veneration in which "the brother of the Lord" was held, not only by his own people, but by many of the Jews themselves, may be inferred from a passage in the works of Josephus, (no longer indeed found in the modern copies, but referred to by Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome,) in which the historian confesses his opinion, that the calamities that subsequently befell Jerusalem were in token of the vengeance of God on account of the murder of this just man.

In accordance with the views of the majority of biblical critics on the character and design of the Epistle to the Hebrews, we may with tolerable accuracy suppose that it would be in this or some not-far-off period of similar trial, that the church in Palestine had the privilege of first receiving that divine discourse, the instructions and exhortations of which were so perfectly suited to the state of a community exposed to the inveterate malice of enemies like theirs. Combined with the sublimest views of the Christian mysteries, they had here inculcated a series of motives to perseverance, the most consolatory and cheering. So far from there being any true ground for doubting the reality of this specific destination of the epistle, it seems scarcely possible to read it with an ordinary degree of intelligence without finding one's self surrounded by the scenery of Jerusalem, and placed amid the local circumstances of a people like that which composed the Christian church in that city. The temple yet stood in solemn grandeur; the altars flamed; the priesthood of the B'ni-Levi ministered; and not only did the secular power, held by the enemies of the cross, place the Christian in jeopardy every hour, but, the long-established habits of the Jewish mind, the necessity for setting himself in a state of schismatical divorce from so much that had hitherto been held sacred, established, and inviolable, among his people and his forefathers, and for going forth without the camp, covered with reproach, to a system of discipline and worship which offered little or nothing that could please the senses, but much that was the reverse,—would doubtless require the exercise of especial faith, and a constantly-sustained patience. Against these numerous temptations St. Paul fortified the Hebrew believers, in a strain of high instruction, that carried them beyond the things that were seen and transient, to those which are celestial and eternal; while he showed the reality and transcendent excellence of the priesthood of the Son of God; the intrinsic, infinite, and unalterable value of his atoning sacrifice, and the glories of the eternal redemption which had been procured by it. The most brilliant characteristics of the Levitical economy waned and were lost before the dawning splendours of the New Covenant; and the mediation of their great legislator, the ministry of angels, the gloomy grandeurs of Sinai, the long successions of the priesthood, and the hecatombs which had fallen around their altars, all vanished into worthless shadows, in the presence of that "better hope," which brought them at once "to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the first born which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better things than that of Abel." (Heb. xii. 22.)

James was succeeded by Simeon, who, as the son of Cleophas, was also a kinsman of our Lord. And now it was that the flock at Jerusalem began to be tried by the introduction of heretical opinions. For even in that early day, the mystery of iniquity, which, in so many forms, has been subsequently employed by Satan for the repression of the Christian cause, became manifest in the conduct of Thebuthis, a presbyter of that church, who, irritated at not having been elected bishop in the room of James, brought in strifes and divisions among the people by the introduction of false or questionable doctrines. Of what kind those were, there is no certain tradition; but they probably soon after formed one of that numerous brood of heresies so rife in the East under the general name of Gnosticism. According to the common attestations of the Fathers, it would also appear that Nicolas and Cerinthus, each the leader of a separate division of that corrupt and extravagant school, had once a connexion with the Hierosolymitan communion.

While Simeon administered the discipline of the church, the time arrived when the wrath foredoomed against Jerusalem was to descend upon it. To this awful consummation there had been several intelligible preludes. The growing aversion to the Jewish people, which had become universal in the Roman provinces, had manifested itself in various forms of cruelty, as in the outrages inflicted on them in Egypt, Parthia, and Babylonia; while, at home, the profanation of the temple by Caligula, the disruption of social order and security by the unrestrained violence of the numerous brigands who held the rural districts at their mercy, and the daily increase of intestine strifes and murders in Jerusalem itself; the prophetic cries of Jesus-bar-Anan, and those other preternatural occurrences so clearly narrated by Josephus; the outbreaks of sedition in the city; the massacres of Cæsarea, Ptolemais, Askelon, Tyre, and other places; and, lastly, the arrival of the iron-clad legions of Rome under Cestius,—all portended the same catastrophe, and warned the Hebrew Christians that the days of Jerusalem were numbered, and that the time for escape, of which their Saviour had premonished them, had fully come.

Divine Providence opened their way in a manner familiar to all readers of history; and, under the conduct of Simeon, this believing remnant found a refuge at Pella, a city in the mountainous part of the Decapolis, on the confines of Syria.

After the destruction of Jerusalem, and when the land had found a transient repose from the horrors of war, great numbers of the Christians, in common with others of their own nation, returned and established themselves on the hallowed (but then desolated) spot, to which the orthodox Jew in all his wanderings continually reverts, as his patrimonial home and only resting-place. The temple was now no more, and the magnificent economy of which it had been regarded as "the pillar and ground" had passed away like a dream; but the waste plains of Zion were again peopled by a remnant of the true Israel, who worshipped the Father in spirit, and her solitudes were made vocal with "hymns to Christ as to God." Simeon continued to hold the episcopate till the year 107, when, in one of the persecutions carried on by Trajan in the East, he was called to seal his long ministry with martyrdom. He had been denounced to Atticus, the governor of Syria, as being not only a Christian, but a Jew of the house of David; (Trajan having continued the inquisition after that lineage, begun by Domitian;) and on the latter account especially he was sentenced to death. The fortitude with which, at the advanced age of a hundred and twenty years, he underwent a complication of torments for several days, impressed the spectators and the proconsul himself with wonder. Having endured much in other forms of torture, his sufferings were terminated by crucifixion, after he had governed the church forty years.

Thus the flock at Jerusalem had only two bishops for the space of seventy years. The successor of Simeon also, Justus by name, lived to the age of a hundred and eleven. But either from the then-harassed state of the Christian cause, or from the circumstance that the bishops were chosen from the most aged of the presbyters, we find that six now followed each other in succession within the term of thirteen years. Their names were Zachæus, Tobias, Benjamin, Juchanan, Matthias, and Benjamin II., otherwise called Philip. The relative duration of their pastorship is, however, unknown. After Philip, we have Seneca, a.d. 125; then, in series, Justus II., Levi, Ephrem, Jose, or Joseph, and Judah, the fifteenth and last of the circumcised. These last filled a period but of twelve years. All these bishops were of Hebrew birth, orthodox and steadfast in the faith; and such also was the character, in the main, of the church which they governed.

Judah, the last of the purely Hebrew succession, died with a multitude of Christians in the massacres attendant upon the revolt of the Jews under Bar-Chochab. The emperor Adrian had now colonized Jerusalem, under the name of Elia,^[7] with Gentiles, and had built a temple to Jupiter on the site of that which had been reared for the worship of the true God. These events, together with the prohibition of the distinctive peculiarities of their religion, (as circumcision,) hurried the Jews to a rebellion, which issued in their more entire ruin. Judea now became almost literally a solitude. For some time it was forbidden to a Jew to enter Jerusalem, or even to look at it from a distance. It was inhabited wholly by Gentiles. Upon the gate that led towards Bethlehem stood the marble image of a sow; and, as the Christians were not less hated than the Jews, Adrian ordered an idol of Jupiter to be set up on the site of the Resurrection of our Lord, and another of Venus upon the hill of Calvary.

The foregoing are the principal authentic facts which have come down to us in relation to the Hebrew-Christian church. Christianity since that day has always had a name in Jerusalem; but that name has not only been unassociated with the reality, but dishonoured by almost all things the reverse. The holy city is still trodden down by the Gentiles, till the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.

That hour comes on apace. The night is far spent, and a day of unparalleled brightness is yet in reserve for "the city which shall be built to the Lord," (Jer. xxxi. 35—40,) when the religion of the Son of God, unfolding within her its highest perfection in time, will render her the joy of the earth, and write upon her walls salvation, and upon her gates praise.

 

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Note 1.—After the extension of the Macedonian empire by Alexander, Greek having become an almost current language, it was used vernacularly not only by Jews residing in Egypt, Asia Minor, &c, but by a large number of families in Jerusalem itself. These were distinguished by the name of Hellenists, from the majority of their fellow-citizens, who continued to use Aramaic in common, and the pure Hebrew in their religious services. "Those," says Jahn "who spoke the Aramean dialect, were thought to possess the pre-eminence over those Jews who spoke the Greek only; and they therefore strove to transmit their vernacular tongue down to posterity." This is probably the distinction intimated by St. Paul, when he calls himself a Hebrew of the Hebrews. Many of the Hellenists had been baptized into Christianity, and appear to have formed a church-section of themselves. (Acts vi. 1.) Note 2.—The people known in the second and third centuries by the name of Nazareans, probably originated in the partialities of these Hebrew Christians for the religious system of their forefathers. According to Epiphanius, as quoted by Tillemont, they were the descendants of some of the families which established themselves at Pella. With an acknowledgment of the Messiahship of Jesus, the divine authority of the gospel-record, and the Christian sacraments, they held a firm adherence to all that could be practised of Judaism, after the ruin of the ceremonial apparatus. However correct may have been their early views of the Saviour, they were not long in falling into low and unworthy errors on the subject of his person. In this they were speedily outstripped by the Ebionites, who, from a rise apparently the same with that of the Nazareans, became distinguished for the gross extravagances both of their opinions and conduct. They are said to have concentrated in these the venom of the other Gnostic sects. Both the Nazareans and Ebionites retained the Jewish vernacular, and held in especial regard the Syriac Gospel of St. Matthew, which they soon rendered worthless by their corrupt treatment of the text. The Nazareans were yet found in the fourth century at Pella, in the Decapolis; at Cocaba, in the country of Basan; and at Berea, a celebrated city of Lower Syria. St. Jerome had intercourse with them at the latter place, where he says he made a transcript of their Gospel.

 

1. Acts i.—vi.
2. Circa Annum 31. Acts vi. Conf. Euseb. Chron. an. 34. Ibid. Eccl. Hist. ii. 1.
3. He must not be confounded with James the apostle, surnamed the Greater, or Elder, who was the son of Zebedee and Salome, and brother of St. John, and who was martyred under Herod in 42 or 44. Conf. Euseb. E. H. ii. 23, et 32. Constit. Apost. ii. c. 55; vi. 12; vii. 47. (Labbei Conc. tom. 1.) Hier. Catal. Vir. Illustr. Epiphan. Hæres. 78.
4. Acts xv.
5. Acts iii. 1; xxi. 21, &c.
6. See Horæ Aramaicæ, p. 92.
7. The Jews call the name of the city Yeruschalaim; the Greeks and Romans, Hierosolyma and Elia; the Arabs, El Kods; and the Turks, Koudsi-Sherif.