THE BIBLE. 



3S5 



THE BIBLE. 1 



By Professor W. EOBERTSON SMITH, of the University of Aberdeen. 



1 1 .— T HE NEW TESTAMENT. 



T)ELATI0N of the Earliest Christianity to 

 the Literary and Intellectual Activity of 

 the Age. — la the literature of Palestine at the 

 time of Christ we distinguish a learned and a 

 popular element. The learned class, or scribes, 

 were busy on their twofold structure of Halacha, 

 or legal tradition and inference, supplementing 

 and "hedging in" the Pentatenchal law; and 

 Haggada, or fantastic exegesis, legendary, ethi- 

 cal, or theosophic, under which the religious 

 directness of the Old Testament almost wholly 

 disappeared. The popular religious literature of 

 the day seems again to have been mainly apoca- 

 lyptic. The people never wearied of these 

 mysterious revelations couched in strange sym- 

 bolic and enigmatic forms, and placed in the 

 mouths of ancient patriarchs and worthies, which 

 held forth golden visions of deliverance and 

 vengeance in a shape which, because crasser 

 and earthlier, was also more palpable than the 

 spiritual hopes of the old prophets. Beyond 

 the limits of Palestine thought took a wider 

 range. In adopting the Greek language the 

 Hellenistic Jews had also become open to the 

 influences of foreign speculation, and the schools 

 of Alexandria, whose greatest teacher, Philo, 

 was contemporary with the foundation of Chris- 

 tianity, had in great measure exchanged the faith 

 of the Old Testament for a complicated system 

 of metaphysico-theological speculations upon the 

 Absolute Being, the Divine Wisdom, the Logos, 

 and the like, which by the aid of allegorical 

 interpretation were made to appear as the true 

 teaching of Hebrew antiquity. To these currents 

 of thought the relation of the earliest Chris- 

 tianity, entirely absorbed in the one great fact 

 of the manifestation of God in Christ crucified, 

 risen, and soon to return in glory, was for the 

 most part hostile, when it was not merely super- 

 ficial. With the spirit of the scribes Jesus had 

 openly .joined issue. In the legal tradition of the 

 elders he saw the commandment of God annulled 



1 This article was contributed by Prof. Smith to the 

 new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, now in 

 course of publication ; and for writing it the author has 

 been suspended from the ministry by tlie Free Church 

 of Scotland, and is to be tried for heresy. 



25 



(Matthew xv.). It was his part not to destroy, 

 but fill up into spiritual completeness the teach- 

 ing of the old dispensation (Matthew v.); and 

 herein he attached himself directly to the pro- 

 phetic conception of the law in Deuteronomy 

 (Matthew xxii. 37, ff.). And not only in his 

 ethical teaching, but in his personal sense of fel- 

 lowship with the Father, and in the inner con- 

 sciousness of his Messianic mission, Jesus stood 

 directly on the Old Testament, reading in the 

 Psalms and Prophets, which so vainly exercised 

 the unsympathetic exegesis of the scribes, the 

 direct and unmistakable image of his own ex- 

 perience and work as the founder of the spiritual 

 kingdom of God (cf. especially, Luke xxiv. 25, 

 ff.). Thus, Jesus found his first disciples among 

 men who were strangers to the theological culture 

 of the day (Acts iv. 13), cherishing no literature 

 but the Old Testament witness to Christ, and 

 claiming no wisdom save the knowledge of him. 

 At first, indeed, the church at Jerusalem was 

 content to express its new life in simple exercises 

 of faith and hope, without any attempt to define 

 its relation to the past dispensation, and without 

 breaking with the legal ordinances of the temple. 

 But the spread of Christianity to the Gentiles 

 compelled the principles of the new religion to 

 measure themselves openly with the Judaism of 

 the Pharisees. In the heathen mission of Paul 

 the ceremonial law was ignored, and men became 

 Christians without first becoming proselytes. The 

 stricter pharisaically-trained believers were hor- 

 ror-stricken. The old apostles, though they could 

 not refuse the right hand of fellowship to workers 

 so manifestly blessed of God as Paul and Barnabas, 

 were indisposed to throw themselves into the new 

 current, and displayed considerable vacillation in 

 their personal conduct. Paul and his associates 

 had to fight their own battle against the constant 

 efforts of Judaizing emissaries, and the rabbini- 

 cal training acquired at the feet of Gamaliel en- 

 abled the apostle of the heathen to meet the 

 Judaizers on their own ground, and to work out 

 the contrast of Christianity and Pharisaism with 

 a thoroughness only possible to one who knew 

 Pharisaism from long experience, and had learned 

 the gospel not from the tradition or teaching of 



