10. The Law, and the Prophecy

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CHAPTER I PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY IN THE HISTORY OF THE JEWISH AND HEATHEN WORLD. an all-ruling providence. They numbered their followers among the rich, and had for some time possession of the office of the high-priest. Caiaphas belonged to their party.

The difference between the Pharisees and Sadducees reappears among modern Jews, who are divided into the orthodox and the liberal or rationalistic parties. 3. The Essenes (whom we know only from Philo and Josephus) were not a party, but a mystic and ascetic order or brotherhood, and lived mostly in monkish seclusion in villages and in the desert Engedi on the Dead Sea.56 They numbered about 4,000 members. With an arbitrary, allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament, they combined some foreign theosophic elements, which strongly resemble the tenets of the new Pythagorean and Platonic schools, but were probably derived (like the Gnostic and Manichaean theories) from eastern religions, especially from Parsism. They practised communion of goods, wore white garments, rejected animal food, bloody sacrifices, oaths, slavery, and (with few exceptions) marriage, and lived in the utmost simplicity, hoping thereby to attain a higher degree of holiness. They were the forerunners of Christian monasticism.

The sect of the Essenes came seldom or never into contact with Christianity under the Apostles, except in the shape of a heresy at Colossae. But the Pharisees and Sadducees, particularly the former, meet us everywhere in the Gospels as bitter enemies of Jesus, and hostile as they are to each other, unite in condemning him to that death of the cross, which ended in the glorious resurrection, and became the foundation of spiritual life to believing Gentiles as well as Jews.

§ 10. The Law, and the Prophecy.

Degenerate and corrupt though the mass of Judaism was, yet the Old Testament economy was the divine in56 The name is variously written (̓Εσσηνοί, ̓Εσσαι οι, ̓Οσσαι οι) and derived from proper names, or from the Greek, or from the Hebrew and Aramaic The most plausible derivations are from , ὅσιος, holy; from , physician (comp. the corresponding term of Philo, θεραπευτής, which, however, means worshipper, devotee); from , seer; from the rabbinical , watchman, keeper (Ewald, formerly); from , to be silent (Jost, Lightfoot); from the Syriac chasi or chasyo, pious, which is of the same root with the Hebrew chasid, chasidim (De Sacy, Ewald, IV. 484, 3rd., and Hitzig). See Schürer, N. T. Zeitgesch. pp. 599 sqq., and Lightfoot’s instructive Excursus on the Essenes and the Colossian heresy, in Com. on Coloss. (1875), pp. 73, 114-179. Lightfoot again refutes the exploded derivation of Christianity from Essenic sources. stitution preparatory to the Christian redemption, and as such received deepest reverence from Christ and his apostles, while they sought by terrible rebuke to lead its unworthy representatives to repentance. It therefore could not fail of its saving effect on those hearts which yielded to its discipline, and conscientiously searched the Scriptures of Moses and the prophets. Law and prophecy are the two great elements of the Jewish religion, and make it a direct divine introduction to Christianity, “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” 1. The law of Moses was the clearest expression of the holy will of God before the advent of Christ. The Decalogue is a marvel of ancient legislation, and in its two tables enjoins the sum and substance of all true piety and morality—supreme love to God, and love to our neighbor. It set forth the ideal of righteousness, and was thus fitted most effectually to awaken the sense of man’s great departure from it, the knowledge of sin and guilt.57 It acted as a schoolmaster to lead men to Christ58 that they might be justified by faith.”59 The same sense of guilt and of the need of reconciliation was constantly kept alive by daily sacrifices, at first in the tabernacle and afterwards in the temple, and by the whole ceremonial law, which, as a wonderful system of types and shadows, perpetually pointed to the realities of the new covenant, especially to the one all-sufficient atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross. God in his justice requires absolute obedience and purity of heart under promise of life and penalty of death. Yet he cannot cruelly sport with man; he is the truthful faithful, and merciful God. In the moral and ritual law, therefore, as in a shell, is hidden the sweet kernel of a promise, that he will one day exhibit the ideal of righteousness in living form, and give the penitent sinner pardon for all his transgressions and the power to fulfil the law. Without such assurance the law were bitter irony. As regards the law, the Jewish economy was a religion of repentance. 2. But it was at the same time, as already, hinted, the vehicle of the divine promise of redemption, and, as such, a religion of hope. While the Greeks and Romans put their golden age in the past, the Jews looked for theirs in the future. Their whole history, their religious, 57 Rom. 3:20: Διὰ νόμου ἐπίγνωσις ἁμαρτιας. 58 Παιδαγωγὸς εἰς Χριστόν 59 Gal. 3:24