AGNOSTICISM: A REJOINDER. 183 



first order — it could have been written by none but a man of 

 remarkable literary capacity, who had drunk deep of Alexandrian 

 philosophy. Moreover, the doctrine of the writer of the fourth 

 Gospel is more remote from that of the " sect of the Nazarenes " 

 than is that of Paul himself. I am quite aware that orthodox crit- 

 ics 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 Judaizing book in the New 

 Testament — the Apocalypse — in the roughest of Greek, under- 

 went an astounding metamorphosis of both doctrine and style 

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

 vided the world with a history in which the acutest critic can 

 not make out where the speeches of Jesus end and the text of 

 the narrative begins ; while that narrative is utterly irreconcila- 

 ble 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 Naza- 

 renes," the brother and the immediate followers of Jesus, commis- 

 sioned 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 understood ever since its asserted origin at 

 Antioch, but Jews — strict orthodox Jews — whose belief in the Mes- 

 siahship of Jesus never led to their exclusion from the Temple 

 services, nor would have shut them out from the wide embrace of 

 Judaism.* The open proclamation of their special view about the 

 Messiah was doubtless offensive to the Pharisees, just as rampant 

 Low Churchism is offensive to bigoted High Churchism in our 

 own country ; or as any kind of dissent is offensive to fervid relig- 

 ionists of all creeds. To the Sadducees, no doubt, the political dan- 

 ger of any Messianic movement was serious, and they would have 

 been glad to put down Nazarenism, lest it should end in useless 

 rebellion against their Roman masters, like that other Galilean 

 movement headed by Judas, a generation earlier. Galilee was 

 always a hot-bed of seditious enthusiasm against the rule of Rome ; 

 and high priest and procurator alike had need to keep a sharp eye 

 upon natives of that district. On the whole, however, the Naza- 

 renes were but little troubled for the first twenty years of their 

 existence ; and the undying hatred of the Jews against those later 

 converts whom they regarded as apostates and fautors of a sham 

 Judaism was awakened by Paul. From their point of view, he 

 was a mere renegade Jew, opposed alike to orthodox Judaism and 

 to orthodox Nazarenism, and whose teachings threatened Judaism 



* " 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, "Vortrage" (1865), p. 216. 



