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 — John Shaqi
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
The apostle must take other ground. He took that of the Incarnation, the
Godhead revealing the Truth to mankind by manifestation of itself among
men, in human flesh.
The apostles to the circumcision naturally appealed to the ruling
religious passion in the Jewish heart—the passion of hope for the promised
Messiah. The Messiah was come. The teaching of the apostles to the
circumcision necessarily consisted of an explanation of this truth, and
efforts to dissipate the false notions which coloured Jewish Messianic
hopes, and interfered with their reception of the truth that Jesus was the
one who had been spoken of by the prophets, and to whose coming their
fathers had looked.
To the Gentiles, St. Paul preached Christ as the revealer to a dark and
ignorant world of the nature of God, the purpose for which He had made
man, and the way in which man might serve and please God. The Jews had
their revelation, and were satisfied with it. The Gentiles walked in
darkness; they had none; their philosophies were the gropings of earnest
souls after light. The craving of the Gentile heart was for a revelation.
Paul preached to them the truth manifested to the world through Christ.
Thus Pauline teaching on the Incarnation counteracted the downward drag of
Nazarene Messianism, which, when left to itself, ended in denying the
Godhead of Christ.
If for a century the churches founded by St. Paul were sick with moral
disorders, wherewith they were inoculated, the vitality of orthodox belief
in the Godhead of Christ proved stronger than moral heresy, cast it out,
and left only the scars to tell what they had gone through in their
infancy.
Petrine Christianity upheld the standard of morality, Pauline Christianity
bore that of orthodoxy.
St. John, in the cool of his old age, was able to give the Church its
permanent form. The Gentile converts had learned to reverence the purity,
the uprightness, the truthfulness of the Nazarene, and to be ashamed of
their excesses; and the Nazarene had seen that his Messianism supplied him
with nothing to satisfy the inner yearning of his nature. Both met under
the apostle of love to clasp hands and learn of one another, to confess
their mutual errors, to place in the treasury of the Church, the one his
faith, the other his ethics, to be the perpetual heritage of Christianity.
Some there were still who remained fixed in their prejudices, self‐
excommunicated, monuments to the Church of the perils she had gone
through, the Scylla and Charybdis through which she had passed with
difficulty, guided by her Divine pilot.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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