Lost and Hostile Gospels. Baring-Gould Sabine
very heart of Ebionite Christianity in the second, if not the first century, and show us what was the Church of St. James and St. Peter, the Church of the Circumcision, with its peculiarities and prejudices intensified by isolation and opposition. In that curious book we find the same hostility to the sacrificial system of Moses, the same abhorrence of blood-shedding in the service of God. This temper of mind can only be an echo of primitive Nazarene Christianity, for in the second century the Temple and its sacrifices were no more.
Primitive Jewish Christianity, therefore, reproduced what was an essential feature of Essenism – a rejection of the Mosaic sacrifices.
In another point Nazarene Christianity resembled Essenism, in the poverty of its members, their simplicity in dress and in diet, their community of goods. This we learn from Hegesippus, who represents St. James, Bishop of Jerusalem, as truly an ascetic as any mediaeval monk; and from the Clementines, which make St. Peter feed on olives and bread only, and wear but one coat. The name of Ebionite, which was given to the Nazarenes, signified “the poor.”
There was one point more of resemblance, or possible resemblance, but this was one not likely to be observed by those without. The Therapeutae in Egypt, who were apparently akin to the Essenes in Palestine, at their sacred feasts ate bread and salt. Salt seems to have been regarded by them with religious superstition, as being an antiseptic, and symbolical of purity.40
Perhaps the Essenes of Judaea also thus regarded, and ceremonially used, salt. We have no proof, it is true; but it is not improbable.
Now one of the peculiarities of the Ebionite Church in Palestine, as revealed to us by the Clementines, was the use of salt with the bread in their celebrations of the Holy Communion.41
But if Christ and the early Church, by their teaching and practice, conformed closely in many things to the doctrine and customs of the Essenes, in some points they differed from them. The Essenes were strict Sabbatarians. On the seventh day they would not move a vessel from one place to another, or satisfy any of the wants of nature. Even the sick and dying, rather than break the Sabbath, abstained from meat and drink on that day. Christ's teaching was very different from this; he ate, walked about, taught, and performed miracles on the Sabbath. But though he relaxed the severity of observance, he did not abrogate the institution; and the Nazarene Church, after the Ascension, continued to venerate and observe the Sabbath as of divine appointment. The observance of the Lord's-day was apparently due to St. Paul alone, and sprang up in the Gentile churches42 in Asia Minor and Greece of his founding. When the churches of Peter and Paul were reconciled and fused together at the close of the century, under the influence of St. John, both days were observed side by side; and the Apostolical Constitutions represent St. Peter and St. Paul in concord decreeing, “Let the slaves work five days; but on the Sabbath-day and the Lord's-day let them have leisure to go to church for instruction and piety. We have said that the Sabbath is to be observed on account of the Creation, and the Lord's-day on account of the Resurrection.”43
After the Ascension, the Christian Church in Jerusalem attended the services in the Temple44 daily, as did the devout Jews. There is, however, no proof that they assisted at the sacrifices. They continued to circumcise their children; they observed the Mosaic distinction of meats; they abstained from things strangled and from blood.45
The doctrine of the apostles after the descent of the Holy Ghost was founded on the Resurrection. They went everywhere preaching the Resurrection; they claimed to be witnesses to it, they declared that Jesus had risen, they had seen him after he had risen, that therefore the resurrection of all men was possible.46 The doctrine of the Resurrection was held most zealously by the Pharisees; it was opposed by the Sadducees. This vehement proclamation of the disputed doctrine, this production of evidence which overthrew it, irritated the Sadducees then in power. We are expressly told that they “came upon them (the apostles), being grieved that they taught the people, and preached through Jesus the Resurrection.” This led to persecution of the apostles. But the apostles, in maintaining the doctrine of the Resurrection, were fighting the battles of the Pharisees, who took their parts against the dominant Sadducee faction,47 and many, glad of a proof which would overthrow Sadduceeism, joined the Church.48
We can therefore perfectly understand how the Sadducees hated and persecuted the apostles, and how the orthodox Pharisees were disposed to hail them as auxiliaries against the common enemy. And Sadduceeism was at that time in full power and arrogance, exercising intolerable tyranny.
Herod the Great, having fallen in love with Mariamne, daughter of a certain Simon, son of Boethus of Alexandria, desired to marry her, and saw no other means of ennobling his father-in-law than by elevating him to the office of high-priest (B.C. 28). This intriguing family maintained possession of the high-priesthood for thirty-five years. It was like the Papacy in the house of Tusculum, or the primacy of the Irish Church in that of the princes of Armagh. Closely allied to the reigning family, it lost its hold of the high-priesthood on the deposition of Archelaus, but recovered it in A.D. 42. This family, called Boethusim, formed a sacerdotal nobility, filling all the offices of trust and emolument about the Temple, very worldly, supremely indifferent to their religious duties, and defiantly sceptical. They were Sadducees, denying angel, and devil, and resurrection; living in easy self-indulgence; exasperating the Pharisees by their heresy, grieving the Essenes by their irreligion.
In the face of the secularism of the ecclesiastical rulers, the religious zeal of the people was sure to break out in some form of dissent.
John the Baptist was the St. Francis of Assisi, the Wesley of his time. If the Baptist was not actually an Essene, he was regarded as one by the indiscriminating public eye, never nice in detecting minute dogmatic differences, judging only by external, broad resemblances of practice.
The ruling worldliness took alarm at his bold denunciations of evil, and his head fell.
Jesus of Nazareth seemed to stand forth occupying the same post, to be the mouthpiece of the long-brooding discontent; and the alarmed party holding the high-priesthood and the rulership of the Sanhedrim compassed his death. To the Sadducean Boethusim, who rose into power again in A.D. 42, Christianity was still obnoxious, but more dangerous; for by falling back on the grand doctrine of Resurrection, it united with it the great sect of the Pharisees.
Under these circumstances the Pharisees began to regret the condemnation and death of Christ as a mistake of policy. Under provocation and exclusion from office, they were glad to unite with the Nazarene Church in combating the heretical sect and family which monopolized the power, just as at the present day in Germany Ultramontanism and Radicalism are fraternizing. Jerusalem fell, and Sadduceeism fell with it, but the link which united Pharisaism and Christianity was not broken as yet; if the Jewish believers and the Pharisees had not a common enemy to fight, they had a common loss to deplore; and when they mingled their tears in banishment, they forgot that they were not wholly one in faith. Christianity had been regarded by them as a modified Essenism, an Essenism gravitating towards Pharisaism, which lent to Pharisaism an element of strength and growth in which it was naturally deficient – that zeal and spirituality which alone will attract and quicken the popular mind into enthusiasm.
Whilst the Jewish Pharisees and Jewish Nazarenes were forgetting their differences and approximating, the great and growing company of Gentile believers assumed a position of open, obtrusive indifference at first, and then of antagonism, to the Law, not merely to the Law as accepted by the Pharisee, but to the Law as winnowed by the Essene.
The apostles at Jerusalem were not disposed to force the Gentile converts into compliance with all the requirements of that Law, which they regarded as vitiated by human glosses; but they maintained that the converts must abstain from meats offered to idols, from the flesh of such animals as had been strangled, and from blood.49 If we may trust the Clementines, which represent the exaggerated Judaizing
The reference to salt as an illustration by Christ (Matt. v. 13; Mark ix. 49, 50; Luke xiv. 34) deserves to be noticed in connection with this.
Clem. Homil. xiv. 1: “Peter came several hours after, and breaking bread for the Eucharist, and putting salt upon it, gave it first to our mother, and after her, to us, her sons.”
Acts xx. 7; 1 Cor. xvi. 2; Rev. i. 9.
Const. Apost. lib. viii. 33.
Acts ii. 46, iii. 1, v. 42.
Acts xv.
Acts i. 22, iv. 2, 33, xxiii. 6.
Acts xxiii. 7.
Acts xv. 5.
Acts xv. 29.