Sabine Baring-Gould - Lost and Hostile Gospels

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.

The Church at Jerusalem under Mark was, to the Nazarene, alien; its bishop an intruder. To the Nazarene, the memory of Paul was still hateful. The Clementine Recognitions speak of him with thinly-disguised aversion, and tell of a personal contest between him, when the persecutor Saul, and St. James their bishop, and of his throwing down stairs, and beating till nearly dead, the brother of the Lord. In the very ancient apocryphal letter of St. Peter to St. James, belonging to the same sect, and dating from the second century, Paul is spoken of as the “enemy preaching a doctrine at once foolish and lawless.” 68 68 Τοῦ ἐχθροῦ ἀνθρώπου ἄνομον τίνα καὶ φλυαρώδη διδασκαλιάν – Clem. Homil. xx. ed. Dressel, p. 4. The whole passage is sufficiently curious to be quoted. St. Peter writes: “There are some from among the Gentiles who have rejected my legal preaching, attaching themselves to certain lawless and trifling preaching of the man who is my enemy. And these things some have attempted while I am still alive, to transform my words by certain various interpretations, in order to the dissolution of the Law; as though I also myself were of such a mind, but did not freely proclaim it, which God forbid! For such a thing were to act in opposition to the law of God, which was spoken by Moses, and was borne witness to by our Lord in respect of its eternal continuance; for thus he spoke: The heavens and the earth shall pass away, but one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law.” The Nazarene Christians, as Irenaeus and Theodoret tell us, regarded him as an apostate. 69 69 “Apostolum Paulum recusantes, apostatam eum legis dicentes.” – Iren. Adv. Haeres. i. 26. Τὸν δὲ ἀπόστυλον ἀποστάτην καλοῦσι. – Theod. Fabul. Haeret. ii. 1. They would not receive his Epistles or the Gospel of St. Luke drawn up under his auspices.

In the Homilies, St. Peter is made to say:

“Our Lord and Prophet, who hath sent us, declared that the Wicked One, having disputed with him forty days, and having prevailed nothing against him, promised that he would send apostles among his subjects to deceive. Wherefore, above all, remember to shun apostle or teacher or prophet who does not first accurately compare his preaching with [that of] James, who was called the Brother of my Lord, and to whom was entrusted the administration of the Church of the Hebrews at Jerusalem. And that, even though he come to you with credentials; lest the wickedness which prevailed nothing when disputing forty days with our Lord should afterwards, like lightning falling from heaven upon earth, send a preacher to your injury, preaching under pretence of truth, like this Simon [Magus], and sowing error.” 70 70 Hom. xi. 85.

The reader has but to study the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, and his wonder at the silence of Josephus and Justus will disappear.

Those curious books afford us a precious insight into the feelings of the Nazarenes of the first and second centuries, showing us what was the temper of their minds and the colour of their belief. They represent St. James as the supreme head of the Church. He is addressed by St. Peter, “Peter to James, the Lord and Bishop of the Holy Church, under the Father of all.” St. Clement calls him “the Lord and Bishop of bishops, who rules Jerusalem, the Holy Church of the Hebrews, and the Churches everywhere excellently founded by the providence of God.”

Throughout the curious collection of Homilies, Christianity is one with Judaism. It is a reform of Mosaism. It bears the relation to Judaism, that the Anglican Church of the last three centuries, it is pretended, bears to the Mediaeval Church in England. Everything essential was retained; only the traditions of the elders, the glosses of the lawyers, were rejected.

Christianity is never mentioned by name. A believer is called, not a Christian, but a Jew. Clement describes his own conversion: “I betook myself to the holy God and Law of the Jews, putting my faith in the well-assured conclusion that the Law has been assigned by the righteous judgment of God.” 71 71 Hom. iv. 22.

Apion the philosopher, is spoken of as hating the Jews; the context informs us that by Jews is meant those whom we should call Christians.

Moses is the first prophet, Jesus the second. Like their spiritual ancestors the Essenes, the Nazarenes protested that the Law was overlaid with inventions of a later date; these Jesus came to efface, that he might re-edit the Law in its ancient integrity. The original Law, as given by God and written by Moses, was lost; it was found again after 300 years, lost again, and then re-written from memory by Ezra. Thus it came to pass that the Old Revelation went through various editions, which altered its meaning, and left it a compound of truths and errors. 72 72 Clem. Homil. ii. 38-40, 48, iii. 50, 51. It was the mark of a good and wise Jew, instructed by Jesus, to distinguish between what was true and what was false in the Scriptures.

Thus the Nazarene thought himself a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as an Anglican esteems himself a better Catholic than the Catholics. The Nazarenes would have resented with indignation the imputation that they were a sect alien from the commonwealth of Israel, and, like all communities occupying an uneasy seat between two stools, were doubly, trebly vehement in their denunciation of that sect to which they were thought to bear some relation. They repudiated “Christianity,” 73 73 Of course I mean the designation given to the Pauline sect, not the religion of Christ. as a high Anglican repudiates Protestantism; they held aloof from a Pauline believer, as an English Churchman will stand aloof from a Lutheran.