300 AGNOSTICISM: A REJOINDER vm 



from that of the " sect of the Nazarenes " than is 

 that of Paul himself. I am quite aware that 

 orthodox critics have been capable of maintaining 

 that John, the Nazarene, who was probably well 

 past fifty years of age, when he is supposed to have 

 written the most thoroughly Judaising book in 

 the New Testament the Apocalypse in the 

 roughest of Greek, underwent an astounding 

 metamorphosis of both doctrine and style by the 

 time he reached the ripe age of ninety or so, and 

 provided the world with a history in which the 

 acutest critic cannot [always] make out where the 

 speeches of Jesus end and the text of the narrative 

 begins ; while that narrative is utterly irreconcil- 

 able, in regard to matters of fact, with that of his 

 fellow-apostle, Matthew. 



The end of the whole matter is this : The 

 "sect of the Nazarenes/' the brother and the 

 immediate followers of Jesus, commissioned by 

 him as apostles, and those who were taught by 

 them up to the year 50 A.D., were not " Christians" 

 in the sense in which that term has been under- 

 stood ever since its asserted origin at Antioch, but 

 Jews strict orthodox Jews whose belief in the 

 Messiahship of Jesus never led to their exclusion 

 from the Temple services, nor would have shut 

 them out from the wide embrace of Judaism. 1 



1 "If every one was baptized as soon as he acknowledged Jesus 

 to be the Messiah, the first Christians can have been aware of no 

 other essential differences from the Jews." Zeller, Vortrdge 

 (1865), p. 26. 



