36 CHAPTER I PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY IN THE HISTORY OF THE JEWISH AND HEATHEN WORLD. an all-ruling providence. They numbered their follow- stitution preparatory to the Christian redemption, and ers among the rich, and had for some time possession of as such received deepest reverence from Christ and his the office of the high-priest. Caiaphas belonged to their apostles, while they sought by terrible rebuke to lead party. its unworthy representatives to repentance. It therefore The difference between the Pharisees and Sadducees could not fail of its saving effect on those hearts which reappears among modern Jews, who are divided into the yielded to its discipline, and conscientiously searched orthodox and the liberal or rationalistic parties. the Scriptures of Moses and the prophets. 3. The Essenes (whom we know only from Philo Law and prophecy are the two great elements of the and Josephus) were not a party, but a mystic and ascet- Jewish religion, and make it a direct divine introduction ic order or brotherhood, and lived mostly in monkish to Christianity, “the voice of him that crieth in the wilseclusion in villages and in the desert Engedi on the derness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in Dead Sea.56 They numbered about 4,000 members. With the desert a highway for our God.” an arbitrary, allegorical interpretation of the Old Testa1. The law of Moses was the clearest expression of the ment, they combined some foreign theosophic elements, holy will of God before the advent of Christ. The Decwhich strongly resemble the tenets of the new Pythag- alogue is a marvel of ancient legislation, and in its two orean and Platonic schools, but were probably derived tables enjoins the sum and substance of all true piety and (like the Gnostic and Manichaean theories) from eastern morality—supreme love to God, and love to our neighreligions, especially from Parsism. They practised com- bor. It set forth the ideal of righteousness, and was thus munion of goods, wore white garments, rejected animal fitted most effectually to awaken the sense of man’s great food, bloody sacrifices, oaths, slavery, and (with few departure from it, the knowledge of sin and guilt.57 It exceptions) marriage, and lived in the utmost simplici- acted as a schoolmaster to lead men to Christ58 that they ty, hoping thereby to attain a higher degree of holiness. might be justified by faith.”59 They were the forerunners of Christian monasticism. The same sense of guilt and of the need of reconciliThe sect of the Essenes came seldom or never into ation was constantly kept alive by daily sacrifices, at first contact with Christianity under the Apostles, except in in the tabernacle and afterwards in the temple, and by the shape of a heresy at Colossae. But the Pharisees and the whole ceremonial law, which, as a wonderful system Sadducees, particularly the former, meet us everywhere of types and shadows, perpetually pointed to the realities in the Gospels as bitter enemies of Jesus, and hostile as of the new covenant, especially to the one all-sufficient they are to each other, unite in condemning him to that atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross. death of the cross, which ended in the glorious resurGod in his justice requires absolute obedience and rection, and became the foundation of spiritual life to purity of heart under promise of life and penalty of believing Gentiles as well as Jews. death. Yet he cannot cruelly sport with man; he is the § 10. The Law, and the Prophecy. truthful faithful, and merciful God. In the moral and ritDegenerate and corrupt though the mass of Judaism ual law, therefore, as in a shell, is hidden the sweet kerwas, yet the Old Testament economy was the divine in- nel of a promise, that he will one day exhibit the ideal of 56 The name is variously written (̓Εσσηνοί, ̓Εσσαι̃οι, righteousness in living form, and give the penitent sin̓Οσσαι̑οι) and derived from proper names, or from the ner pardon for all his transgressions and the power to Greek, or from the Hebrew and Aramaic The most plausible fulfil the law. Without such assurance the law were bitter derivations are from , ὅσιος, holy; from , physician (comp. the irony. corresponding term of Philo, θεραπευτής, which, however, As regards the law, the Jewish economy was a relimeans worshipper, devotee); from , seer; from the rabbinical , gion of repentance. watchman, keeper (Ewald, formerly); from , to be silent (Jost, 2. But it was at the same time, as already, hinted, Lightfoot); from the Syriac chasi or chasyo, pious, which is the vehicle of the divine promise of redemption, and, of the same root with the Hebrew chasid, chasidim (De Sacy, as such, a religion of hope. While the Greeks and RoEwald, IV. 484, 3rd., and Hitzig). See Schürer, N. T. Zeitgesch. mans put their golden age in the past, the Jews looked for pp. 599 sqq., and Lightfoot’s instructive Excursus on the Estheirs in the future. Their whole history, their religious, senes and the Colossian heresy, in Com. on Coloss. (1875), pp. 73, 114-179. Lightfoot again refutes the exploded derivation of Christianity from Essenic sources.
57 Rom. 3:20: Διὰ νόμου ἐπίγνωσις ἁμαρτιας. 58 Παιδαγωγὸς εἰς Χριστόν 59 Gal. 3:24
