See also artt. Man and Tongue.
H. Whkelf.r Rodinson.
MURDER. — The prevalence of muriler was one of the dark facts in the social !ind political back- ground of the early .\postolic Church. Fanaticism of a fierce and ruthless type was in the air, and human life was frequcntl3- as little regarded as is normal under such conditions. The resentment of the Zealots against the authority of Rome was a
• In Rev 109' 10 the mouth is the organ of taste ; according: to tlie curious statement of Ep. Bam. x. 8, the weasel conceives through her mouth.
48
MUKMURING
MYSIA
persistent fact in the situation from the third aecade to the final catastrophe in A.D. 70, and when cruelty and oppression were carried to excess by Felix it was inevitable that there should arise in opposition a body of extremists to whom murder was merelj' a detail in a policy.
Tims during the time of Kelix and Festus there arose the Sicarii (see Assassins), whose Jewish patriotism took a murderous shape. Their weapons were daggers {sicce ; cf. Latin sicarius, ' a mur- derer.' The law passed under Sulla against murderers was Lex Cornelia de Sicariis). Armed with these, they moved with stealth through the crowds at festival seasons, seeking to remove their opponents by assassination. Then, in order to turn aside any possible suspicion, they gave way to loud expressions of grief. We find a reference to this group in Ac 21^, where the chief captain (6 xiX'apxos), Hnding that St. Paul speaks Greek, asks: 'Art thou not then that Egyptian, which before these days stirred up to sedition and led out into the wilderness the four thousand men of the Assassins (TfT/)a/clo^X'^'o>'5 d^Bpas tCiv trLKaploiv)'!' The Sicarii must have been the easy instrument at hand to every clever impostor, and the incident referred to here was the most notable example. An Egyptian Jew gave himself out as a prophet and held out to a crowd in the wildnerness the alluring promise that the walls of Jerusalem would fall down at his word and so make the city theirs once more. Felix, however, put down the movement and took many prisoners. Josephus gives two accounts of this false prophet, in one of which {BJ II. xiii. 5) he says that the majority of the 30,000 followers were captured or slain, and in the other {Ant. XX. viii. 6) that four hundred were killed and two hundred taken prisoners.
That murder was not unknown even among those identified with the Church may be inferred from 1 P 4'°, where the writer addresses a warning to Christians. They are not to resent the fiery trial, but to rejoice as those sharing the sufferings of Christ — only ' Let none of you suffer as a murderer (us <pov(vs).' In later days it was a commonplace of anti-Christian abuse to charge Christians with the horrors of child-slaying and cannibalism, but there seems to be no sufficient reason for reading into the passage quoted any reference to these charges. As C. Bigg has said, ' A Cliristian might quite well be guilty of murder. The times were wild, and conversions must often have been imperfect ' {ICC, ' Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude,' Edinburgh, 1901, p. 177).
R. Strong.
MORMDRING.— The non-classical 'vernacular terms' (H. A. A. Kennedy, Sources of NT Greek, 1895, p. 38 ff. ) 7077i;<r/i4s and -ycryyijl^fiv are used seven times in the LXX in reference to Israel in the wilderness. The verb is used in the same con- nexion in 1 Co 10'"—' Neither murmur ye, as some of them murmured, and perished by the destroyer,' the allusion being apparently to the rebellion of Korah against the authority of Moses and Aaron, which was followed by the punishment of violent death (Nu 16). The OT reference and the evil of partisanship which had become conspicuous at Corinth (1 Co 1'= 3« 4»- '8i.) suggest that the 'mur- muring' the Apostle had in mind was that of schismatic discontent in the Church, rather than that of complaint against Providence because of the limitations of the human lot — the sense which the term most naturally suggests to us.
The second Pauline passage where the term occurs (' Do all things without murmurings and disputations ' [Ph 2''']), follows an appeal for Church harmony (vv.i-« ; cf. 4-) and is obviously a warning similar to that of 1 Co 10". The quotation from the Song of Moses (Dt 32= LXX) in the following
verses hints that the history in the wilderness is again in the author's mind.
The 'murmurers' of Jude's letter (v.") are the false teachers who have crept into the Church and are fostering discontent for their own advantage, challenging (Church) authority and railing at 'dignities ' (v.*). Again there is a reference to the incident of Korah (v.").
The murmuring of the Grecian Jews against the Hebrews (Ac 6') — a complaint against Church ad- ministration— is the only instance where murmur- ing has not a conspicuous reproof. Even here the language of the Apostles (vv.-- ■■) may hint censure.
In 1 P 4* ('using hospitality one to another without murmuring') the refei'ence appears to be to the grumbling against the obligation, imposed by Church tradition, of mutual hospitality among Christians (cf. the communistic spirit of Ac 2"). The AV translation ' without grudging ' (so also Weymouth) misses the above significance.