THAT Paul, in consequence of the death–blow which he gave to Jewish Pharisaism, was pursued by a particular section of the Judæe Christian Church with unrelenting opposition, is a matter of history. It needs no further proof than the large sections in his Epistles which are occupied with arguments against Pharisaic or Gnostic Judaism, such as had invaded the Churches of Corinth, Galatia, Colossæ, and Crete. But true though it is that he was obliged to contend in lifelong struggle with a party, it is not true that he remained long unrecognised by the Church at large. The supposition that he was, has merely originated from the exceptional literary activity of a single section of Christian Ebionites. Dr. Lightfoot, in his essay on “St. Paul and the Three,” has shown, by patient and entirely candid investigation, that even the Church of Judæa was not exclusively anti–Pauline, and that the anti–Pauline faction within it, so far from representing the tendencies of the whole Christian Church, did not even represent the Christians of Palestine. The Christian Jews of the Holy Land naturally continued, as a body, to observe the Mosaic Law—as was done by St. Paul himself so far as he could do so without compromising the emancipation of the Gentiles—until the fall of Jerusalem rendered all such observance a mere mockery and sham.1 If the Passover, the very central ordinance of Mosaism, was rendered simply impossible, God had Himself demonstrated that the aeonof the Law was closed. The withdrawal of the Church to Pella, caused by a recollection of the warnings of Jesus, would look to the Jews like an unpatriotic desertion of their cause; and the frantic denunciations of the Mins, which date from this epoch, were but signs of the gathering detestation of Jew for Christian which culminated in the savage massacres by Bar–cochba of those Christians who refused to apostatise and blaspheme. When the name of Jerusalem had given way to that of Ælia Capitolina, and Christians were allowed to live where no Jew might set his foot, the Church of the new city became predominantly Gentile, and was for the first time governed by a Gentile bishop.2 It is not till after this period that we hear of two sects distinct from each other, but often confused. These were the Nazarenes and the Ebionites. The NAZARENES were not in any way hostile to the work and memory of Paul, and they differed from other Christians only in holding that the Law was still binding on Jewish converts. “The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs”—a book which, whether written by a Nazarene or not, expresses their general tenets so far as we can gather them—not only does not oppose the doctrines of St. Paul, but, though written from the Judæo–Christian standpoint, puts into the mouth of Benjamin a splendid eulogy of Paul, as one who is to arise from that tribe “beloved of the Lord, listening to His voice, enlightening all the Gentiles with new knowledge.” The EBIONITES, on the other hand—a powerful and zealous sect—breathed the exact spirit of Paul’s Jndaising enemies, and the views of many of them became deeply tinged with the Gnostic tendencies of the more advanced Essenes. To this section of the Ebionites we owe the forgeries known as the Clementine Homilies, the Clementine Recognitions, extant in a Latin paraphrase of Rufinus,3 and a spurious letter of Peter to James. In the Homilies St. Paul is surreptitiously attacked in the guise of Simon Magus.4 The allusion to his reproof of St. Peter at Antioch is too plain to be overlooked, and discredit is thrown on his doctrine, his revelations, and his independent attitude towards James. In the letter of St. Peter he is still more severely, though still covertly slandered, as “the enemy” whose teaching was antinomian and absurd, and who calumniouslv asserted that St. Peter held one view and sanctioned another. In the Recognitions these attacks do not appear, but “the enemy” sent by Caiaphas to arrest St. Peter at Antioch, and who throws St. James down the Temple steps, is evidently meant for St. Paul, and this notable story is believed to have been borrowed from a prating fiction called the “Ascents of James,” which is also the source of the venomous calumny that Paul was a Gentile who had accepted circumcision in hopes of marrying the High Priest’s daughter, and had only apostatised from Mosaism when his hopes were disappointed.5
It is on trash of this kind, at once feeble and virulent, at once baseless and malignant, that some have based the belief that there was deadly opposition between Paul and the Twelve, and that his work was not fully recognised till the close of the second century. The fact, however, is that these Ebionite slanders and forgeries are representative of none but an isolated sect. Justin lived in Samaria in the earlier half of the second century, and shows no trace of these views. Hegesippus was a Jewish Christian who travelled to Rome in the middle of the second century, visiting many Christian Churches; and Eusebius, who knew his writings, vouches for his perfect orthodoxy.6 Such being the case, it is hardly even necessary to prove that the other churches of the second century were in no sense anti– Pauline. It may be true that for a short time there were two sections—a Jewish and a Gentile—in the Church of Rome, and even that each section had its own bishop, the possible successors respectively of the Apostles of the circumcision and of the uncircumcision.7 But if so, these two sections were, at the close of the first century, united under the gentle and orthodox Clement; and even on the doubtful hypothesis that the Clementines had a Roman origin, their indirectness—the cautious, subterranean, timid sort of way in which they attack the great Apostle—is alone a decisive proof that the forger couldbynomeansrelyonthegeneral sympathyofthereadersintowhosehandshiswritingsfell. And yet on this very attenuated apex is built the huge inverted pyramid of inference, which finally declares the Epistle of St. Jude to be a specimen of one of the letters, breathing sanguinary hatred and atrocious falsehood, which are supposed to have been despatched from Jerusalem in the name of the Apostles, and in the composition of which, “since James and Jude probably could not speak Greek,” they probably employed Greek secretaries!8 Let any one read the Epistle of St. Jude, and consider, verse by verse, how it could be possibly applied to St. Paul, and how absolutely such a theory contradicts every really authentic fact of his relation to the Apostles, as well as the character and bearing of the Apostles themselves, and he will be able to estimate the validity of the criticism which calmly represents as reasonable history this darkening fume of inferences from the narrow aperture of a worthless forgery.