♦ Being forbidden to enter a walled town, they could not worship in the synagogue in such places ; but in unwalled towns a corner was frequently reserved for them in the syna- gogue, on condition that they were the first to enter and the last to depart (see Hastings' DB iii. B7»).
(v.='), which suggests an authoritative summons before an official body. And when we read in v.^ 'Jesus heard that they had cast him out,' this seems to imply that some grave act of formal censure liml lieeii passed upon the man.
Oi I 111- ' ■' :l :' excommunication was practised in til I iiigogue in the time of Christ,
these |i:i,;iji - i.a,ve us in no doubt. But now comes tlie quesiiun whether at that time there were difl'erent kinds of excommunication. In the Talmud two degrees are recognized, a minor, niddAi ('nj), and a major, herein (onn) ; the former being a temporary exclusion from tlie synagogue together with a restriction upon social intercour.se with others, while the latter amounted to a ban of indefinite or permanent duration.* It must be remeinliereil, huweM'r, tli.U as an authority upon Jewish iis.iues I lie 'l',i I iiiiiil does not carry us back to the e:nlie-l rhii^iiaii age, and that for the practice of .lewish cimrls in the time of our Lord the NT itself is our only real source of information. And while it has sometimes been fancied that in the Gospels we have an indication of two kinds or degrees of excommunication — the diroirmdyuiyoi of Jn 9" 12*'' 16^ being distinguished either, as some- thing more severe, from the Aipopi^ei.i' of Lk 6-, or, as something more mild, from the iKf^aWeiv of Jn 934.35_t,he truth is that there are no a.lequate grounds for such discriminatinn^. M is. nt Course, quite possible, and even likely, ilial 111 lie- lime of Christ there were distinct grade- n| .x. lu-ieii from the privileges of the .Jewish c.iiiniiiniil \ . corre- sponding to the lutev iiidd li i and /e/v///,i hut the NT cannot be said to testily to aiiyilnng more than the fact of excommunicalioii ilselt.
For the immediate origin of the jiractice of excommunication as it meets us in the Gospels, we have only to go back to Ezra and the days after the E.xile, when the strictest discipline was abso- lutely essential to the solidarity, indeed to the very existence, of the Jewish Church and nation. Ezra insisted that those Jews who hatl married foreign wives should either put away both their wives and the children born of them, or forfeit their whole substance and be separated from the congregation of Israel (Ezr lO^). But the ultimate roots of the practice are to be sought in the Penta- teuchal legislation, with its exclusion of the cere- monially unclean from the camp of the congregation (Lv 13*^- **, Nu 5'-- ''), and its devotion to destruction (mn, whence D"3n) of whole cities or tribes as enemies of Israel (Dt 2''* S'^ 7- ; cf. Jg 21", where the men of Jabesh-gilead themselves fall under the ban of extermination for not coming up to Mizpeh along \\ith their brethren).
With regard to the grounds on which, in our Lord's time, sentence of excommunication was passed, the Talmud speaks of twenty-four oH'cnces as being thus puiiislialile -a rouml number wliiih is not to be taken t..o literally (.A -r/sA /we,,,-,, .art. ' Ex- comiimiiicatien ■) lliciuuh latei- Kabliiiiieal .lutho-
aut
When we read that the rulers decreed that any one
* The attempt has sometimes been made to discover in the language of the Talnuid a thud and more n\\ ful kmd of excom- munication named j,/iami atla {i^n l) and in ace idancewith this it has been supposed thit thci n a\ 1 1 r f i 11 e to the three presumed def,rees of Jl \ish e\ ini lun il n I k e^^ — the\ shall separate \oii from thtir oui] in\ ( '/') and reproach \on(ft tt.ii) and cast out \our nai le isl\i1 (sham- matt i) But It 13 now f,ei erall\ aeknow ledt,ed that the idea of this thieef Id distin tun ih due to a mistake and that, IS used in the T-ilmud la i itt < is simply a general designa- tion foi both the inlilii md the hrrem (see Buxtorf LeXK-mi,
t II 1 1 I he constant L\X
rei 1 ' lCh27) and
th t th in the NT as
e\i 1 uig (Mk 147), Ac
EXCOMMUNICATION
EXCUSE
who confessed Jesus to l^o T'lni^t sliould be put out of the synagogue (Jn !i -' I-" i. I lii^ may show that they possessed a laiu> (li-rivu.>iiary power of fixing the grounds (it .•. ( lisia^tical censure. But if the later lists of Talinudical writers rest on traditions that go back to the time of Christ, there were certain recognized categories of ott'ence, sucli as 'dealing lightly with any of the Rabbinic or Mosaic ]irecepts,' under which it would be easy for the Jewish casuists to arraign any one who called Jesus Master or acknowledged Him to be the Messiah.
ii. Christian excommunication.— It lies be- yond the scope of this Dictionary to deal with excommunication as practised in the Apostolic Church, and as it meets us especially in tlie Pauline writings. But in the teaching of our Lord Himself we find the principles at least of the rules which St. Paul lays down in 1 Co 5, 2 Co «"", 1 Ti 1™, Tit 3".