The Expositor's Bible: The Acts of the Apostles, Vol. 1Stokes, George Thomas
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Acts of the Apostles, Vol. 1
Stokes, George Thomas
Bible. Acts -- Commentaries; Bible. Acts -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female," the
rapt expression of an inspired and illuminated Apostle, when compared
with this query, "Dost Thou at this time restore the kingdom to
Israel?" the darkened utterance of carnal and uninspired minds groping
after truth, furnishes to the thinking soul the clearest evidence of
the presence of a supernatural power, of a Divine enlightenment,
vouchsafed to the Apostles upon the Day of Pentecost. If this higher
knowledge, this nobler conception, this spiritualised ideal, came not
from God, whence did it come?
[22] The strongest argument, from a mere literary point of view,
for the existence of a supernatural element in Christianity and
primitive Christian literature will be derived from a contrast
between the Jewish literature of the period of the Christian era
and the New Testament. Take, for instance, the book of Jubilees.
It was written about the time of our Lord, and probably in
Galilee. It represents the current tone of Jewish religion, and
shows us, with its narrowness and absurdities, what the New
Testament would have been had it been the product of unassisted
human nature. The book of Jubilees or of Enoch is the strongest
argument for the inspiration of the New Testament. I cannot even
imagine what explanation can be offered of the difference in tone
between the Christian and the Jewish writings save that of the
inspiration of the Christian.
I do not think we can press this point of the catholicity and
universality of the Christian idea and the Christian society too far.
We cannot possibly make too much of it. There were undoubtedly
Christian elements, or elements whence Christian ideas were developed,
prevalent in the current Judaism of the day. Many a clause of the
Lord's Prayer and of the Sermon on the Mount can be paralleled almost
word for word from the Jewish teachers and writings of the times
immediately preceding our Lord. There was nothing in Christ of that
petty vanity of little minds which craves after complete originality,
and which will be nothing if not completely new. He was indeed the
wise and the good householder, who brought forth out of His treasures
things old as well as things new. Many a teacher and thinker, like
Philo, whose ideas had been broadened by the Divine training of
banishment and enforced exile in Alexandria or in Asia Minor, had
risen to nobler and wider views than were current in Palestine. But it
was not among these, or such as these, that the catholic ideas of the
gospel took their rise. Christianity took its rise among men whose
ideas, whose national aspirations, whose religious hopes, were of the
narrowest and most limited kind; and yet, amid such surroundings and
planted in such a soil, Christianity assumed at once a world-wide
mission, rejected at once and peremptorily all mere Judaic
exclusiveness, and claimed for itself the widest scope and
development. The universality of the Gospel message, the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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