AGNOSTICISM: A REJOINDER. 181 



all shall know that there is no truth in the things whereof they have been in- 

 formed concerning thee; but that thou thyself walkest orderly, keeping the law 

 (ibid., 24). 



How far Paul could do what lie is here requested to do, and 

 which the writer of the Acts goes on to say he did, with a clear 

 conscience, if he wrote the epistles to the Galatians and Corinth- 

 ians, I may leave any candid reader of those epistles to decide. 

 The point to which I wish to direct attention is the declaration 

 that the Jerusalem 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 dissen- 

 sions of the followers of Jesus, speaks of Paul as a " ringleader of 

 the sect of the Nazarenes " (Acts xxiv, 5), which must have af- 

 fected 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 con- 

 gregation of the disciples, and, later, of converts at Jerusalem — 

 the Jerusalem church — was emphatically the " sect of the Naza- 

 renes," no more in itself to be regarded as anything outside Juda- 

 ism than the sect of the Sadducees or of the Essenes.* In fact, the 

 tenets of both the Sadducees and the Essenes diverged much 

 more widely from the Pharisaic standard of orthodoxy than Naz- 

 arenism did. 



Let us consider the position of affairs now (a. d. 50-60) in rela- 

 tion to that which obtained in Justin's time, a century later. It 

 is plain that the Nazarenes — presided over by James " the brother 

 of the Lord," and comprising within their body all the twelve 

 apostles — belonged to Justin's second category of " Jews who ob- 

 serve the law, believe Jesus to be the Christ, but who insist on 

 the observance of the law by Gentile converts," up till the time 

 at which the controversy reported by Paul arose". They then, ac- 

 cording to Paul, simply allowed him to form his congregation of 

 non-legal Gentile converts at Antioch and elsewhere ; and it would 

 seem that it was to these converts, who would come under Justin's 

 fifth category, that the title of " Christian " was first applied. If 

 any of these Christians had acted upon the more than half -per- 

 mission given by Paul, and had eaten meats offered to idols, they 

 would have belonged to Justin's seventh category. 



Hence, it appears that, if Justin's opinion, which was doubtless 

 that of the church generally in the middle of the second century, 

 was correct, James and Peter and John and their followers could 



* All this was quite clearly pointed out by Ritschl nearly forty years ago. See " Die 

 Entstehung der alt-katholischen Kirche" (1850), p. 108. 



