The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity — John Shaqi
The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive ChristianityFrothingham, Octavius Brooks
Religion
The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks
Christianity -- Controversial literature
style of earlier Hebrew anticipation. The doctrines of angelic orders
and administrations, of Satan and his legions, of resurrection and the
final judgment, though definitely shaped, perhaps by association with
Persian mythologies, lay concealed in possibility within the original
thought of ultimate supremacy which worked so long and so actively,
though so obscurely, in the mind of the Jewish race.
The books of Maccabees, belonging, according to Ewald, to the last half
century before Christ, contain significant hints of the future beliefs
of Israel. In the second chapter of II. Maccabees, verses 4-9, we read:
"It is also found in the records that Jeremy the prophet, being warned
of God, commanded the tabernacle and the ark to go with him, as he went
forth into the mountain where Moses climbed up and saw the heritage of
God. And when Jeremy came thither he found a hollow cave wherein he laid
the tabernacle and the ark and the altar of incense, and then stopped
the door. And some of those that followed him came to mark the way, but
they could not find it; which, when Jeremy perceived, he blamed them,
saying: As for that place it shall be unknown until the time that God
gather his people again together, and receive them unto mercy. Then
shall the Lord show them these things, and the glory of the Lord shall
appear, and the cloud also, as it was showed unto Moses." Is it a
stretch of conjecture on the tenuous thread of fancy to find this
reappearance described in Revelations XI., 19, in these words: "And the
temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in the temple the
ark of his covenant; and there were lightnings, and voices, and
thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail?" In the twenty-first
chapter the seer describes himself as "carried away in the spirit to a
great and high mountain" and shown "that great city the Holy Jerusalem,
descending out of heaven, from God." And he heard a great voice out of
heaven, saying: "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men; He will
dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God himself shall be
with them, their God." The heavenly Jerusalem that came from the clouds
is the heavenly city, the germ whereof was carried up and hidden in the
cloud by Jeremy, the prophet. The apocryphal books of the Old Testament
lodge the ancient Hebraic idea in the very heart of the New.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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