The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments RemainBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Apocryphal Gospels
A similar compromise took place at the English Reformation. In deference
to the dictation of foreign reformers, the Anglican divines adopted their
doctrine of Justification by Faith only into the Articles, but took the
wise precaution of inserting as an antidote the Decalogue in the Communion
Office, and of ordering it to be written up, where every one might read,
in the body of the church.
The compromise effected by the influence and authority of St. John was
rejected by extreme partizans on the right and the left. The extreme
Paulines continued to refuse toleration to the Law and the Old Testament.
The Nazarene community had also its impracticable zealots who would not
endure the reading of the Pauline Epistles.
The Church, towards the close of the apostolic age, was made up of a
preponderance of Gentile converts; in numbers and social position they
stood far above the Nazarenes.
Under St. John, the Church assumed a distinctively Gentile character. In
its constitution, religious worship, in its religious views, it differed
widely from the Nazarene community in Palestine.
With the disappearance from its programme of distinction of meats and
circumcision, its connection with Judaism had disappeared. But Nazarenism
was not confined to Palestine. In Rome, in Greece, in Asia Minor, there
were large communities, not of converted Jews only, but of proselytes from
Gentiledom, who regarded themselves as constituting the Church of Christ.
The existence of this fact is made patent by the Clementines and the
Apostolic Constitutions. St. Peter’s successors in the see of Rome have
been a matter of perplexity. It has impressed itself on ecclesiastical
students that Linus and Cletus ruled simultaneously. I have little doubt
it was so. The Judaizing Church was strong in Rome. Probably each of the
two communities had its bishop set over it, one by Paul, the other by
Peter.
Whilst the “Catholic” Church, the Church of the compromise, grew and
prospered, and conquered the world, the narrow Judaizing Church dwindled
till it expired, and with its expiration ceased conversion from Judaism.
This Jewish Church retained to the last its close relationship with
Mosaism. Circumstances, as has been shown, drew the Jewish believer and
the Pharisee together.
When Jerusalem fell, the Gentile Church passed without a shudder under the
Bethlehem Gate, whereon an image of a swine had been set up in mockery;
contemplated the statue of Hadrian on the site of the Temple without
despair, and constituted itself under a Gentile bishop, Mark, in Ælia
Capitolina.
But the old Nazarene community, the Church of James and Symeon, clinging
tightly to its old traditions, crouched in exile at Pella, confounded by
the Romans in common banishment with the Jew. The guards thrust back
Nazarene and Jew alike with their spears, when they ventured to approach
the ruins of their prostrate city, the capital of their nation and of
their faith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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