It is at this point, where this decisive breach with: legalism is accomplished, that Jesus is compelled to leave Palestine (Mt 15%! || Mk), to give up the attempt to win the people, and devote Himself to the training of the Twelve. It was only to a select company that His mind could now be unfolded; a great gulf had been fixed between Him and the worshippers of the law, across which no under- standing was possible. Nor do the Gospels give us the means of knowing how far He was able to carry the education of the Twelve on this subject. The ‘meats and drinks and divers washings’ were
art of a system; what of the remaining part of it? What of all that element of the law which was identified with the temple and its worship? What of animal sacrifice? What even of the covenant sign, circumcision? As for the temple,
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the ritual worship. But was this element in the law to have fulfilment through Him, or was it nly to be destroyed? The one hint we have of an wswer to this is the fact that Jesus spoke of His own death as the basis of a (new) covenant between God and man—that covenant which Jeremiah fore- told (31°), which has as its fundamental blessing the forgiveness of sins. To connect the forgiveness of sins with the shedding of blood is in the Bible sri a to conceive the shedding of blood as sacrificial ; only sacrificial blood atones for sin. In the great word spoken at the Supper, therefore, Jesus hints at a fulfilment in His own person of that whole side of the law which has to do with spurosohing God in worship, Mt 26%. He gives the impulse and the justification to that inter- pretation of His life and death in relation to the (Levitical) law which we afterwards find in the Ep. to the Hebrews.
On the whole, then, it may be said that the attitude of Jesus to the law was that of entire loyalty to it as the revelation of God’s will, entire comprehension of it in its principle and aim, entire subordination of every expression of it to its prin- ciple, entire superiority to all human interpreta- tions of it, as designed perhaps for its greater security, but actually making it of no effect ; and entire indifference, not indeed to the law as con- stituting an order for approaching God in worship, but to those elements in the law which, because in themselves without ethical significance, operated to corrupt conscience, and to divide men from one another without moral ground.
II. THe ATTITUDE OF THE EARLY CHURCH TO THE LAW, AND ESPECIALLY THE PRACTICE AND TEACHING OF 51. PauL.—A. At first the law presented no problem to the Christian society. All the members of that society were Jews, and devout Jews. The Ananias who baptized St. Paul is described as εὐλαβὴς κατὰ τὸν νόμον, and as having testimony borne to him by all the Jews inhabiting Damascus (Ac 22"), and this character was no doubt typical. The early Christians, in company with the apostles, assiduously frequented the temple (Ac 2 31 51 *°); the observance of the law, so far as it was observed by common people, would be a matter of instinct with them—a part of their nationality, the relation of which to their religion never presented itself to their minds. The charges made against them by the priests have never any reference to the law, and the proofs adduced for the Messiahship of Jesus, which seem to have filled a considerable space in apostolic preaching, were related not to the law, but to prophecy. ΑΒ far as the Bk. of Acts gives us any indication, difficulty first emerged in connexion with the preaching of St. Stephen. He was charged with speaking ‘ blasphemous words against Moses and against God’; with incessantly ‘speak- ing words against this Holy Place and against the law’; with saying that ‘Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place, and change the customs which Moses delivered to us’ (Ac 6). From these accusations we can only infer that the new wine was Depoaning to burst the old bottles, and that the enemies of Christianity, with senses sharpened by hatred and fear, saw perhaps sooner than its friends that it was essentially irreconcilable with the established legalism of the Jewish Church. It was divine and human; Judaism was national and traditional ; it could not harmonize finally with the traditional and national framework. But in the Christian society itself, so natural was it for Jews to live as Jews, even after they accepted Jesus as the Christ, that the difficulty was not felt.
This di‘ficulty was first forced on the attention of every one by the circumstances attendant on the reception of Cornelius into the Church. While |
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St. Peter, divinely led from Joppa to Czsarea, was yet preaching the gospel in Cornelius’ house, the Holy Spirit fell on all those who heard the word (Ac 10%). The circumcised believers who were there were amazed, but St. Peter saw the significance of the event, and at once had them received into the Church by baptism, and associ- ated familiarly with them (Ac 113. When his conduct—which really meant that the ceremonial law, as a Jewish national law, separating the Jews as God’s people from all others, had ceased to have religious significance—was called in question at Jerusalem (Ac 11%), he defended it apparently with the full consciousness of what it meant. ‘If God gave them the same put as he gave us also when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I should obstruct God?’ (cf. Ac 157), It is implied here that the gift of God—in other words the Holy Ghost—is the essential of Chris- tianity, and the only one; where it is found, nothing else counts, and no questions are to be raised ; circumcision is nothing and uncireumcision is nothing. But if this is so, then (so far as it isa term of communion and a condition of salvation) does not the law as a whole, to which men were bound by cireumcision, cease to have any religious significance? Is it not possible already to define the Church as a society in which there is neither Jew nor Greek ?*