296 AGNOSTICISM : A REJOINDER vill 



direct attention is the declaration that the Jeru- 

 salem Church, led by the brother of Jesus and by 

 his personal disciples and friends, twenty years 

 and more after his death, consisted of strict and 

 zealous Jews. 



Tertullus, the orator, caring very little about 

 the internal dissensions of the followers of Jesus, 

 speaks of Paul as a " ringleader of the sect of the 

 Nazarenes" (Acts xxiv. 5), which must have 

 affected James much in the same way as it would 

 have moved the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 

 George Fox's day, to hear the latter called a 

 "ringleader of the sect of Anglicans." In fact, 

 " Nazarene " was, as is well known, the distinctive 

 appellation applied to Jesus ; his immediate 

 followers were known as Nazarenes ; while the 

 congregation of the disciples, and, later, of converts 

 at Jerusalem the Jerusalem Church was em- 

 phatically the " sect of the Nazarenes," no more, 

 in itself, to be regarded as anything outside 

 Judaism than the sect of the Sadducees, or that 

 of the Essenes. 1 In fact, the tenets of both the 

 Sadducees and the Essenes diverged much more 

 widely from the Pharisaic standard of orthodoxy 

 than Nazarenism did. 



Let us consider the position of affairs now (A.D. 

 50-60) in relation to that which obtained in 



1 All this was qnite clearly pointed out by Ritschl nearly 

 forty years ago. See Die Entstehung der alt-katholischeu Kirche 

 (1850), p. 108. 



