“It fills the Church of God: it fills
The sinful world around;
Only in stubborn hearts and wills
No place for it is found.”—KEBLE.
THE life of these early Christians was the poetic childhood of the Church in her earliest innocence. It was marked by simplicity, by gladness, by worship, by brotherhood. At home, and in their place of meeting, their lives were a perpetual prayer, their meals a perpetual love–feast and a perpetual eucharist. In the Temple they attended the public services with unanimous zeal. In the first impulses of fraternal joy many sold their possessions to contribute to a common stock. The numbers of the little community increased daily, and the mass of the people looked on them not only with tolerance, but with admiration and esteem.
The events which followed all tended at first to strengthen their position. The healing of the cripple in Solomon’s porch; the bold speech of Peter afterwards; the unshaken constancy with which Peter and John faced the fury of the Sadducees; the manner in which all the disciples accepted and even exulted in persecution, if it came in the fulfilment of their duties;1 the power with which they witnessed to the resurrection of their Lord; the beautiful spectacle of their unanimity; the awful suddenness with which Ananias and Sapphira had been stricken down; the signs and wonders which were wrought by the power of faith; the zeal and devotion which marked their gatherings in Solomon’s porch, caused a rapid advance in the numbers and position of the Christian brothers. As their influence increased, the hierarchic clique, which at that time governed the body which still called itself the Sanhedrin, grew more and more alarmed. In spite of the populace, whose sympathy made it dangerous at that time to meddle with the followers of Jesus, they at last summoned the two leading Apostles before a solemn conclave of the Sanhedrin and senate.2 Probably, as at the earlier session, the whole priestly party were there—the crafty Annas, the worldly Caiaphas,3 the rich, unscrupulous, money–loving body of Kamhiths, and Phabis, and Kantheras, and Boethusîm,4 the Pharisaic doctors of the law, with Gamaliel at their head; John, perhaps the celebrated Johanan Ben Zakkai;5 Alexander, perhaps the wealthy brother of the learned Philo;6 the same body who had been present at those secret, guilty, tumultuous, illegal meetings in which they handed over the Lord Jesus to their Roman executioners—were again assembled, but now with something of misgiving and terror, to make one more supreme effort to stamp out the Galilæan heresy.
The Apostles, when first brought before the Sanhedrin, had been arrested in the evening by the Captain of the Temple, and had been released with strong threats, partly because the Sadducees affected to despise them, but still more because they did not know how to gainsay the miracle of the healing of the cripple. The Apostles had then openly declared that they should be compelled by the law of a higher duty to disregard these threats, and they had continued to teach to increasing thousands that doctrine of the resurrection which filled the Sadducees with the greatest jealousy. It was impossible to leave them unmolested in their career, and by the High Priest’s order they were thrust into prison. The Sanhedrin met at dawn to try them; but when they sent for them to the prison they found that the Apostles were not there, but that, delivered by “an angel of the Lord,” they were calmly teaching in the Temple. In the deepest perplexity, the Sanhedrists once more despatched the Levitical officer to arrest them, but this time without any violence, which might lead to dangerous results. They offered no resistance, and were once more placed where their Lord had once stood—in the centre of that threatening semicircle of angry judges. In reply to the High Priest’s indignant reminder of the warning they had received, St. Peter simply laid down the principle that when our duty to man clashes with our duty to God, it is God that must be obeyed.7 The High Priest had said, “Ye want to bring upon us the blood of this man.” The words are an awful comment on the defiant cry, “His blood be on us, and on our children.” Thenthe Sanhedrin had not been afraid of Jesus; now they were trembling at the vengeance which might yet be brought on them by two of the despised disciples. The phrase is also remarkable as furnishing the first instance of that avoidance of the name of Christ which makes the Talmud, in the very same terms, refer to Him most frequently as Pelonî8—“so and so.” Peter did not aggravate the Priests’ alarm. He made no allusion to the charge of an intended vengeance; he only said that the Apostles, and the Holy Spirit who wrought in them, were witnesses to the resurrection and exaltation of Him whom they had slain. At these words the Sanhedrin ground their teeth with rage, and began to advise another judicial murder, which would, on their own principles, have rendered them execrable to their countrymen, as an assembly given to deeds of blood.9 This disgrace was averted by the words of one wise man among them. How far the two Apostles were protected by the animosities between the rival sects of Sadducees and Pharisees we do not know, but it was certainly the speech of Gamaliel which saved them from worse results than that scourging by Jewish thongs—those forty stripes save one— which they received, and in which they exulted.10
That speech of Gamaliel was not unworthy of a grandson of Hillel—of one of those seven who alone won the supreme title of Rabbanîm11—of one who subsequently became a President of the Sanhedrin. It has been strangely misunderstood. The supposed anachronism of thirty years in the reference to Theudas has led the school of Baur to deny altogether the genuineness of the speech, but it has yet to be proved that the allusion may not have been perfectly correct. The notion that the speech was due to a secret leaning in favour of Christianity, and the tradition of the Clementine Recognitions, that Gamaliel was in heart a Christian,12 have no shadow of probability in their favour, since every allusion to him in the Talmud shows that he lived and died a Pharisee. Nor, again, is there the least ground for Schrader’s indignation against his supposed assertion of the principle that the success of a religion is a sufficient test of its truth. We must remember that only the briefest outline of his speech is given, and all that Gamaliel seems to have meant was this—‘Let these men alone at present. As far as we can see, they are only the victims of a harmless delusion. There is nothing seditious in their practice, nothing subversive in their doctrines. Even if there were we should have nothing to fear from them, and no need to adopt violent measures of precaution. Fanaticism and imposture are short–lived, even when backed by popular insurrection; but in the views of these men there may be something more than at present appears. Some germ of truth, some gleam of revelation, may inspire their singular enthusiasm, and to fight against this may be to fight against God.’ Gamaliel’s plea was not so much a plea for systematic tolerance as for temporary caution.13 The day of open rupture between Judaism and Christianity was indeed very near at hand, but it had not yet arrived. His advice is neither due to the quiescence of Pharisaic fatalism, nor to a ‘fallacious laisseraller view of the matter, which serves to show how low the Jews had sunk in theology and political sagacity if such was the counsel of their wisest.’14 There was time, Gamaliel thought, to wait and watch the development of this new fraternity. To interfere with it might only lead to a needless embroilment between the people and the Sanhedrin. A little patience would save trouble, and indicate the course which should be pursued. Gamaliel was sufficiently clear–sighted to have observed that the fire of a foolish fanaticism dies out if it be neglected, and is only kindled into fury by premature opposition. Let those who venture to arraign the principle of the wise Rabbi remember that it is practically identical with the utterance of Christ, “Every plant, which my heavenly Father planted not, shall be plucked up by the roots.”15
The advice was too sound, and the authority of the speaker too weighty, to be altogether rejected. The Priests and Rabbis, tortured already with guilty anxiety as to the consequences of their judicial murder, renewed their futile command to the Apostles to preach no more in the name of Jesus, and scourging them for disobedience to their former injunctions, let them go. Neither in public nor in private did the Apostles relax their exertions. The gatherings still continued in Solomon’s porch; the agapœwere still held in the houses of the brethren. So far from being intimidated, the two Apostles only rejoiced that they were counted worthy of the honour of being dishonoured for the name of Him on whom they believed.
And here I must pause for a moment to make a remark on the grounds which have led many modern critics to reject the authority of the Acts of the Apostles, and to set it down as a romance, written in the cause of reconciliation between Judaising and Pauline Christians. My object in these volumes is not controversial. It has been my endeavour here, as in my LifeofChrist, to diffuse as widely as I can a clear knowledge of the Dawn of the Christian Faith, and to explain as lucidly as is in my power the bearing of its earliest documents. But I have carefully studied the objections urged against the authenticity and the statements of the New Testament writings; and I cannot forbear the expression of my astonishment at the baselessness of many of the hypotheses which have been accepted in their disparagement. Honesty of course demands that we should admit the existence of an error where such an error can be shown to exist; but the same honesty demands the rejection of all charges against the accuracy of the sacred historian which rest on nothing better than hostile prepossession. It seems to me that writers like Baur and Zeller—in spite of their wide learning and great literary acumen—often prove, by captious objections and by indifference to counter considerations, the fundamental weakness of their own system.16 Hausrath altogether rejects the statement that Paul was “brought up at the feet of Gamaliel,” on the ground that Paul calls himself “a zealot” for the traditions of the fathers, and must therefore have belonged far rather to the school of Shammai. He could not, according to this writer, have been trained by a Rabbi who was remarkable for his mildness and laxity. He accordingly assumes that the author of the Acts only invents the relations between St. Paul and Gamaliel in order to confer a sort of distinction upon the former, when the fame of Gamaliel the Second, founder of the school of Jabne, kept alive, in the second century, the fame of his grandfather, Gamaliel the Elder.17 Now of what value is a criticism which contemptuously, and I may even say calumniously, contradicts a writer whose accuracy, in matters where it can be thoroughly tested, receives striking confirmation from the most opposite sources? It would have been rightly considered a very trivial blot on St. Luke’s accuracy if he had fallen into some slight confusion about the enrolment of Quirinus, the tetrarchy of Abilene, the Ethnarch under Aretas, the Asiarchs of Ephesus, the “Prætors” of Philippi, the “Politarchs” of Thessalonica, the “Protos” of Malta, or the question whether “Proprætor,” or “Pro–consul,” was, in the numerous changes of those days, the exact official title of the Roman Governor of Cyprus or Corinth. On several of these points he has been triumphantly charged with ignorance and error; and on all these points his minute exactitude has been completely vindicated or rendered extremely probable. In every historical allusion—as, for instance, the characters of Gallio, Felix, Festus, Agrippa II., Ananias, the famine in the days of Claudius, the decree to expel Jews from Rome, the death of Agrippa I., the rule of Aretas at Damascus, the Italian band, &c.—he has been shown to be perfectly faithful to facts. Are we to charge him with fraudulent assertions about Paul’s relation to Gamaliel on the questionable supposition that, after reaching the age of manhood, the pupil deviated from his teacher’s doctrines?18 Are we, on similar grounds, to charge Diogenes Laertius with falsehood when he tells us that Antisthenes, the Cynic, and Aristippus, the Cyrenaic, were both of them pupils of Socrates? A remarkable anecdote, which will be quoted farther on, has recorded the terrible quarrel between the parties of Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua, of whom the former is called a Shammaite, and the latter a Hillelite;19 and yet both of them were pupils of the same Rabbi, the celebrated Hillelite, R. Johanan Ben Zaceai. Such instances might be indefinitely multiplied. And if so, what becomes of Hausrath’s criticism? Like many of the Tübingen theories, it crumbles into dust.20