Benjamin Bacon - The Making of the New Testament

Jesus' martyrdom was effected through the priests, the temple authorities; but at the instigation of the scribes and Pharisees. His adherents were soon after driven out from orthodox Judaism and subjected to persecution. This persecution, however, soon found its natural leadership, not among the Sadducean temple-priesthood, but among the devotees of the Law. It was "in the synagogues." From having been quasi-political it became distinctly religious. This persecution by the Pharisees is on the whole less surprising than the fact that so many of the Jewish believers should have continued to regard themselves as consistent Pharisees, and even been so regarded by their fellow-Jews. In reality Jewish Christians as a rule could see no incompatibility between average synagogue religion and their acceptance of Jesus as the man supernaturally attested in the resurrection as destined to return bringing the glory of the Kingdom. Jesus' idea of 'righteousness' did not seem to them irreconcilable with the legalism of the scribes; still less had they felt the subtle difference between his promise "Ye shall be sons and daughters of the Highest" and the apocalyptic dreams which they shared with their fellow-Jews. Saul the persecutor and Paul the apostle were more logical. In Gal. ii. 15-21 we have Paul's own statement of the essential issue as it still appeared to his clear mind. Average synagogue religion still left room for a more fatherly relation of God to the individual, in spite of the gradual encroachment of the legalistic system of the scribes. Men not sensitive to inconsistency could find room within the synagogue for the 'paternal theism' of Jesus, even if this must more and more be placed under the head of 'uncovenanted mercies.' To Paul, however, the dilemma is absolute. One must trust either to "law" or "grace." Partial reliance on the one is to just that extent negation of faith in the other. The system of written precept permits no exception, tolerates no divided allegiance. If the canon of written law be the God-given condition of the messianic promise, then no man can aspire to share in the hope of Israel who does not submit unreservedly to its yoke. Conversely, faith is not faith if one seek to supplement it by the merit of "works of law."

From this point of view the Jew who seeks forgiveness of sins by baptism "into the name of Jesus" must be considered an apostate from the Law. He acknowledges thereby that he is following another Way, a way of "grace," a short-cut, as it were, to a share in Israel's messianic inheritance by the "favour" of a pretended Messiah. The same Paul who after his conversion maintains (Gal. ii. 21) that to seek "justification" through the Law makes the grace of God of none effect, must conversely have held before conversion that to seek it by "grace" of Jesus made the Law of none effect. Even at the time of writing the axiom still held: No resistance to the yoke of the Law, no persecution (Gal. v. 11).

It is true, then, that the legalistic system of prescription and reward had developed – could develop – only at the expense of the less mechanical, more fatherly, religion of a Hosea or an Isaiah. Even scribes had admitted that the law of love was "much more than all whole burnt-offering and sacrifice." And the movement of the Baptist and of Jesus had really been of the nature of a reaction toward this older, simpler faith. The sudden revolt in Paul's own mind against the scribal system might not have occurred in the mind of a Pharisee unfamiliar with Greek ideas. But to some extent Paul's experience of the conflict of flesh and spirit, a 'moral inability' to meet the Law's demands was a typical Christian experience, as Paul felt it to be. To him it became the basis of an independent gospel. To him the Cross and the Spirit imparted from the risen Messiah were tokens from God that the dispensation of Law is ended and a dispensation of Grace and Son ship begun. Without this Pauline gospel about Jesus Christianity could never have become more than a sect of reformed Judaism.

The teaching and martyrdom of Jesus had thus served to bring out a deep and real antithesis. Only, men who had not passed like Paul from the extreme of trust in legalism to a corresponding extremity of despair might be pardoned for some insensibility to this inconsistency. We can appreciate that James and Peter might honestly hold themselves still under obligation of the written law, even while we admit Paul's logic that any man who had once "sought to be justified in Christ" could not turn back in any degree to legal observance without being "self-condemned."

Christianity may be said to have attained self-consciousness as a new religion in the great argument directed by Paul along the lines of his own gospel against Peter and the older apostles. Its victory as a universal religion of 'grace' over the limitations of Judaism was due to the common doctrine of 'the Spirit.' This was the one point of agreement, the one hope of ultimate concord among the contending parties. All were agreed that endowment with 'the Spirit' marks the Christian. It was in truth the great inheritance from Jesus shared by all in common. And Peter and James admitted that to deny that uncircumcized Gentiles had received the Spirit was to "contend against God."

After Paul's death ecclesiastical development took mostly the road of the synagogue. The sense of the presence and authority of 'the Spirit' grew weaker, the authority of the letter stronger. From the outset even the Pauline churches, in ritual, order, observance, had followed instinctively this pattern. All continued, as a matter of course, to use the synagogue's sacred writings. Paul himself, spite of his protest against "the letter," could make no headway against his opponents, save by argument from 'Scripture.' He had found in it anticipations and predictions of his own Christian faith; but by an exegesis often only little less forced and fantastic than that of the rabbinic schools in which he had been trained. This was a necessity of the times. The reasoning, fallacious as it seems to-day, had appealed to and strengthened Paul's own faith, and was probably effective with others, even if the faith really rested on other grounds than the reasoning by which it was defended. The results of this biblicism were not all salutary. The claims of written authority were loosened rather than broken. Paul himself had found room enough within these defences for the religion of the Spirit; but a generation was coming with less of the sense of present inspiration. Dependence on past authority would be increased in this new generation in direct proportion to its sense of the superior 'inspiration' of the generation which had gone before. Paul is unhampered by even "the scriptures of the prophets" because in his view these take all their authority and meaning from "the Lord, the Spirit." Hence "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Only the remembered "word of the Lord" has authority for Paul beyond his own, even when he thinks that he also has the Spirit. With that exception past revelation is for Paul subordinate to present. But Paul's immediate disciple, the author of Hebrews, is already on a lower plane. This writer looks back to a threefold source of authority: God had spoken in former ages "by the prophets" and to the present "by a Son," but he looks also to an apostolic authority higher than his own: The word "was confirmed unto us by them that heard, God also bearing witness with them, both by signs and wonders, and by manifold powers, and by gifts of the Holy Ghost." Similarly the author of the Pastoral Epistles (90-100?) holds the "pattern of sound words" heard from Paul as a "sacred deposit," which is "guarded," rather than revealed, "by the Holy Spirit." The "sound words" in question are defined to be "the words of our Lord Jesus Christ." These, taken together with "the doctrine which is according to godliness," fix the standard of orthodoxy. To "Jude" (100-110?) the faith is something "once for all delivered to the saints." His message is: "Remember, beloved, the words spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ." Authority increases, the sense of the revealing Spirit decreases.