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indeed, never question the appropriation of these smaller traits to their Messiah; but their understanding being blinded, they dispute their applicability to ours. Many of these prophecies, besides, had a twofold fulfilment; one in an inferior event near at hand; and this as the emblem and earnest of the remote accomplishment in the Messiah,-supporting the "deferred hope" of faith, which, not thus intermediately propped, "maketh the heart sick."

144. Religious sects in the time of the apostles.

The Pharisees, so named from, to divide or separate, stood aloof from other men, as less holy than themselves; but their holiness consisted in attention to the formalities and ceremonies of the Mosaic code, which they overlaid by the addition of vain traditions, calculated to draw away attention from the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith. By fasting twice in the week, and scrupulously paying tithe of small herbs, they threw the great moral duties into the background, and retained and cherished the vices of rapaciousness and supercilious contempt of the humbled penitent. They had no holiness of heart, no sound principle of religion within, no spirituality; but resembled platters clean only on the outside

monuments ostensibly splendid, but filled with dead men's bones. They earnestly sought proselytes to their own wilful blindness. They believed in a future state of the soul; but rather in a metempsychosis than a conscious individual resur

rection.

It is an artifice of Satan to beguile men into a persuasion, that because the Pharisees are condemned by our Saviour for their hypocrisy, we cannot separate ourselves too far from every one of their observances. Hence prayer and fasting are disregarded, and the Sabbath openly violated; and lawful tribute is refused, or grudgingly given, under pretence that these things are pharisaical. And no doubt they are so, if coupled with moral remissness; but as means of holiness, as cisterns of grace, and as compliances with the Divine law, they are essential branches of duty, concerning which our Saviour said, These ye ought to have done, and not have left the moral duties undone.

The Scribes were not a sect, but men studious of the law, who instructed the people by their explanations of it; and are sometimes called "doctors," or "lawyers." They were principally of the tribe of Levi; and in character resembled the Pharisees, with whom they are associated in our Lord's denunciations.

The Sadducees confined their faith to the law of Moses, excluding all other books of the Old Testament, perhaps with the exception of Joshua. They therefore said there was no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; and thus shut out all hope of futurity of which the individual is conscious, even that of materialists, a sect who deny a separate state of souls, yet admit that God may again breathe intelligent life into the body. Our Saviour taking up the Sadducees on their own ground, shewed that even by the Pentateuch a future state may be proved; since God, in calling himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. How they could believe the Pentateuch and disbelieve in angels, it is not easy to determine. They denied fate, and conceived man to be left to his own free-will entirely. As they held no recompense in futurity, they were of course a licentious sect -Jewish Epicureans boasting principally of the rich, prosperous, and unbridled in passions, as their adherents. The founder of the sect was one Sadoc, a word signifying just, from P, Matt. xxii. 23, Acts xxiii. 8.

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God produces some good out of evil: and the effect of the contrariety of these two sects was, that when our Saviour or his apostles refuted the arguments or reproved the vices of the one, they were pretty sure of a favourable hearing with the other, Matt. xxii. 34, Acts xxiii. 7. Yet these contending bodies could unite when their own interest was concerned-as they did to put our Saviour to death; for the high-priest Caiaphas was a Sadducee, Acts v. 17. Our Lord called both a generation of vipers, Matt. iii. 7, xvi. 6, 11, 12.

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There is mention in the New Testament of the Herodians, and of Galileans, whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices. As Herod Antipas was tetrarch of Galilee, these denominations are by some supposed to be the same-adulators

of Herod, who asserted the claims of that tetrarch to dominion under the Roman power, and justified his compliance with several heathen usages of Rome (called in Mark viii. 15, the leaven of Herod); such as building temples with images for idolatrous worship, Joseph. Antiq. lib. v. c. 12. The Pharisees, holding that the Roman power ought not to be recognised, came, together with the Herodians, to have that political point settled, and to entangle Him in his discourse; and as the stamp on the current coin was the token of subjection, our Lord's Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's (Matt. xxii. 15-22), settled the political question against the Pharisees, by recommending subjection to the powers that be, while he condemned the impieties of the Herodians.

As to the Galileans, it is only said by Josephus, that they were seditious, and that tumults were often stirred up by them during the great feasts in the Temple, Antiq. xv. 4, 7, xvii., ix. 3, vi., xvii. 10. This induced Herod the Great to build the fortress of Antonia, commanding its courts and precincts. Josephus relates that Archelaus put to death three hundred Galileans, or people from the country, at a festival, when in the act of sacrificing; and it is possible that a similar insurrection was repressed in the same manner by the Roman governor; Antiq. lib. ii. cap. i. § 3.

The Gaulanites were a body of Galileans, who, on the death of Herod the Great, in the tenth year of Christ, took arms under Theudas, a native of Gaulan or Golan (one of the six cities of refuge, beyond Jordan, Josh. ii. 8)—to resist paying tribute to Cæsar, as a servitude which the Jews should refuse. This insurrection began in consequence of the census set on foot by Cyrenius, and was soon suppressed, the leader being slain. They were not Herodians, Acts v. 37, ii. 2. The New Testament abounds with inculcations of civil subjection, chiefly directed against the spirit of such insurgents. The kingdom was

not of this world.

The pure doctrines of the Gospel, indeed, soon after its rise, began to be tainted with errors both civil and religious, and with heresies brought into the church by converts both Jewish and

pagan. The Nazarenes were of the former class.

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This name,

given generally to the disciples of Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναζωραίος (John xix. 19), until A.D. 41, when they were first called Christians at Antioch, Acts xi. 26. - sometime afterwards became a term of reproach, as still by Jews and Mahometans. signifies a person separated, sequestered, consecrated to the service of Jehovah ; and was marked by not shaving the head, as in Samson (Judges xiii. 5), who was a Nazarite from his birth; and in Samuel, 1 Sam. i. 11. In allusion to the former passage, St. Matthew states that Joseph dwelt at Nazareth, that it might be [so was that] fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene, Matt. ii. 23. This was a play upon the words, but established the typical prefiguration of Jesus by Samson. The inscription on the cross seems to have been written ambiguously by Pilate, to be understood in a sense of honour or of contempt; and might either be a full acknowledgment of his titles as a consecrated person and a king-though not of this world; or might suit the taste of those who scoffed at both these pretensions. The chief-priests, with their usual thickheadedness or inveteracy, wanted something more explicit; but Pilate reproved their eagerness in the words, yéypapa yέypapa. The vow of Paul, or of Aquila, who shaved his head at Cenchrea, was opposite to that of a Nazarite—a votum civile, a sign of a temporary seclusion from the world.

Properly speaking, however, the term Nazarene is restricted to the Judaising Christians, who still adhered to the letter of the law respecting circumcision, the Sabbath, and the Jewish festivals, as binding on all converts to Christianity. This matter occasioned much division in the early church. Peter and Paul differed on the subject at Antioch; Paul justly rebuking Peter for his vacillation in personally living as a Gentile, and yet, for fear of the Jews, compelling the Gentiles to Judaise, Gal. ii. 12, Acts xi. 3, A.D. 41.

The Gentile converts of Antioch appealed to a council of apostles and elders at Jerusalem (Acts xv.); where Peter turned round, and pleaded for the entire deliverance of the Gentiles from the Judaising yoke; while the others, like men of sense, and guided by the Spirit of God, deemed it wise to make the

innovation gradually, and not to violate at once the prejudices of the chosen people, so long accustomed to venerate the institutions of Moses; and, with this view, they only imposed on the Gentiles the abstaining from meats offered to idols, and a few other temporary restrictions in things peculiarly obnoxious to the Jews. For Moses was read in every city in the synagogues every Sabbath-day, Acts v. 20, 21. Expedience is generally dangerous and censurable; but there are exceptions, and this is

one.

Paul, with the same view, directed Timothy, his disciple and a half-Jew, to be circumcised, A.D. 53; and declared to the Corinthians (1 Cor. viii. 13), with respect to eating meats offered to idols, that, though persuaded that an idol is nothing in the world, he would abstain while the world lasted from the flesh of heathen victims (which was often sold publicly after a sacrifice), rather than he would throw a stumbling-block before a weak brother, for whom Christ died.

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But his general sentiment was that the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life, 2 Cor. iii. 6; that circumcision is of the heart and in the spirit, and not in the letter; that no man should judge the disciples in meats or drinks, in holy-days or newmoons, since all that was wanted was a new creature, Col. ii. 16, Gal. vi. 15. The Judaising spirit, however, gained ground; but the general body split into the Nazarenes and Ebionites.

Among the Christians who had taken refuge at Pella from the destruction at Jerusalem were these two sects, the former of whom were only distinguished by a rigorous attachment to the ceremonies of the Mosaic law. The Ebionites were tainted with some leaven of the Gnostic heresy, which had gained ground under Simon Magus at Pella; and which, by considering the body of Christ as a mere phantom, only suffering in appearance, destroyed the doctrine of the atonement. This was the heresy of the Aokɛraí (from dokéw, to appear); but as the bodily existence of the risen Saviour was well known, a qualified sense of the doctrine was devised, namely, that Jesus was a mere man until his baptism in Jordan, when Christ, an emanation from God, illapsed upon him, which left him immediately before his

crucifixion.

This notion of two distinct beings, Jesus and

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