confirm them. Not less than the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, but more, is required of those who would enter the kingdom of Heaven. Jesus accepted the institutions and observances of Judaism as a positive element in religion, and conformed to them; but he did not attribute to these externals intrinsic worth in the sight of God nor allow that punctiliousness about them was by itself a sign of superior religiousness. Tithing garden-herbs was well, but not to be so preoccupied with it as to forget that justice, charity, and fidelity are of greater account than mint, anise, and cummin.

The subject of Jesus' teaching was the reign of God. The phrase was associated in Jewish thought especially with the prophecies in Zech. 14, 9 and Obad. verse 21; it was an age in which the Lord should be sovereign in all the world, the one God, universally acknowledged. Though the Jews often connected it with the coming of the Messiah, the idea of the reign of God was in origin and meaning independent of that expectation. God had, indeed, been king from the beginning, but his sovereignty was not recognised by men. When Israel at Sinai uttered the words, "All that the Lord has spoken we will do and listen to," for the first time a people p.ofessed its allegiance to God's kingship. And this profession every Jew renewed daily in the recitation of the Shema (Deut. 6, 4–9), submitting himself to the authority of the "kingdom of Heaven." The reign of God was thus a present reality in so far as God's sovereignty was acknowledged, the obligation to obey his law assumed, and his will done. In so far as the Jewish people came short of this, the reign of God was an unfulfilled ideal. But it was their firm faith that the time would come when it should be fully realised, not in this one nation alone, but throughout the world. The reign of God would then be revealed in its glory and power. This was the essentially religious form of the Jewish expectation of the golden age to come.

To these ideas and expectations the teaching of Jesus

attaches itself. The reign of God, manifest and universal, is about to begin. To live in the world as it will be then is the supreme object of desire and striving. Inasmuch as it is the very definition of the reign of God that his will is done on earth as it is done in heaven, only those can have a place in it whose character corresponds to its nature; it is a world in which there are none but good and godly men. Jesus' idea of true religion has already been described. The piety, morality, and charity which constitute it have no esoteric sense or sectarian definition. The conception of piety naturally draws most upon the Psalms as expressions of religious experience; and when Jesus tells his hearers what kind of men the reign of God and its blessings belong to, it is the character of the humble and godly in the Psalms that he depicts. It was the type of piety he exemplified in his own life and tried to cultivate in his followers. A distinctively Jewish feature, as compared with the Psalms, is the thought of God as the Father in Heaven, and the influence of this conception not only on piety but on morality and charity, in all which spheres it has an important place in the teaching of Jesus.

To illustrate the nature and worth of the kingdom of God, Jesus frequently employed parables, or comparisons, a mode of teaching much used in the synagogue. The parables of Jesus display a fertility of invention and a felicity of expression that give them a poetic charm rarely found in the parables of the rabbis.

In what way the reign of God was to be inaugurated, the advent of which he believed to be imminent, is a question with which Jesus does not seem at first to have concerned himself. If we can trust the order of time in the Gospel tradition, it was not till toward the end of his brief career that he spoke to his disciples of the Son of Man who was to come on the clouds of heaven, and of the judgment with which the present period of the world's history should end, as foretold in Daniel and in certain visions of Enoch. The phrase "son of man," which in the mother tongue of

Jesus and his disciples meant simply a human being (indefinite), acquired a specific sense only in this apocalyptic association—the figure “like a man" whom Daniel and Enoch saw in heaven, and whom the latter identified with "the righteous and elect one," the Messiah.

On the arrest of Jesus his disciples fled and made their escape to Galilee. Before long, however, they returned to Jerusalem. They believed that God had brought Jesus to life again and taken him up to heaven, whence he would shortly descend in power and glory. He was himself the Son of Man, of whose imminent coming to judgment he had spoken. Their faith that Jesus was the Messiah was thus re-established, and their expectation took a new form. This faith was connected with visions of their risen Master. According to the tradition Paul received, he appeared first to Peter, then to the Twelve,1 afterward to others, either singly, as to James (Jesus' brother) and to Paul himself, or to numbers together once to more than five hundred.

In Jerusalem, where they awaited the descent of the Messiah from heaven, the disciples had their own meetings by night in private houses, but they spent much of their time in the courts and halls of the temple, and used the opportunity which the resort to the holy house gave them to endeavour to convert others to their faith that Jesus was the Messiah. They were the more zealous in these efforts because they believed that only those who, repenting of their sins, acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah would be saved when he came to judgment.

For proof they adduced Scripture texts, especially Psalm 22, in which they found the death of the Messiah foretold in all detail and circumstance just as Jesus died on the cross. In other Psalms they found predictions that the Messiah should be raised from the dead (Psalm 16, 8-11), and be seated at the right hand of God (Psalm 110, 1). That Jesus has been raised from the dead and taken

1 In the earliest accounts the scene of these first appearances was probably Galilee.

up to heaven they were witnesses, for they had seen him.1 In confirmation they pointed to the miraculous cures they wrought by the name of Jesus. The arguments and exhortations of the Apostles made converts, both among the residents of Jerusalem and the visitors who came up to the feasts from many lands. Some priests are said to have been among them, and later we read of Pharisees who embraced the faith.

The leading men in the little community of believers were the three who had been the closest companions of Jesus, Peter and the brothers, James and John, the sons of Zebedee. There were twelve "Apostles"-the number was important because it was the symbol of their mission to the twelve tribes of Israel-but though as members of this group they enjoyed a certain precedence, the rest of the Twelve figure only in the catalogues, not in the history.2 James, the brother of Jesus, was not one of the Twelve, but his relation to Jesus made him an important accession to the ranks of the disciples, and at a later time he became one of the pillars of the church in Jerusalem, taking precedence even of Peter.

At first the disciples seem to have confined their efforts to Jerusalem, but when the momentary expectation of the coming of the Messiah subsided, they extended the sphere of their labours to the surrounding country, while converted pilgrims returning to their homes carried the gospel to remoter parts. The spirit and method of the propaganda are represented in the instructions traditionally ascribed to Jesus (Matt. 10, 1 ff.). The missioners (Apostles) were to address themselves to Jews only, avoiding towns inhabited by heathen or Samaritans. They went from place to place, depending on the hospitality of the inhabitants for entertainment. If they met an unfriendly reception in any place they were not to brave persecution, but to flee to another. Their business was urgent, for before they were

1 See Acts 2, 32.

2 The field was thus left free for apocryphal legends.

through with the cities of Israel the Son of Man would come. So Jesus had foretold.

The disciples of Jesus the Nazarene, as they seem to have been commonly called, were orthodox and pious Jews, whose Messianic and eschatological beliefs were their sole peculiarity. They worshipped in the temple and frequented the synagogues with the rest. As their numbers grew they perhaps formed a congregation of their own, as any group of Jews who could muster the quorum for prayer (ten men) was free to do, the synagogue being a purely voluntary association.1

Outside of Palestine the disciples of Jesus followed for a time the practice of the Apostles in Jerusalem and addressed themselves with their gospel to Jews only. But in mixed communities, where there were not only proselytes to Judaism but many other "religious persons" who frequented the synagogues and accepted the fundamental ideas of Judaism without becoming proselytes, the knowledge of the gospel filtered by various channels into heathen circles and prepared the way for direct efforts for the conversion of Gentiles.

The preaching to Gentiles was not merely an extension of the missionary field, it was the beginning of a Gentile Christianity. Converts from heathenism necessarily apprehended the gospel in a very different way from the Jewish disciples in Jerusalem. The whole background and setting of the disciples' conception-the life under the Law, Jewish Messianic expectations, and Jewish eschatology-were lacking. On the other hand, they brought their own modes of religious thought, and attached to the words they heard the signification and connotations of their own speech. The greatest difference of all was that the gospel of the Lord Jesus appeared to them, as it could not to Jewish believers, to be a new religion. However close its relation to Judaism might be, in making faith in the Lord Jesus the condi

1 Thus we read in Acts (6, 9) of synagogues of the Libertines (Roman freedmen) and others.