h. It adds to the interest of this inquiry to remember that Ilillel himself lived, according to the tradition of the rabbins, to the great age of 120, and may therefore have been present among the doctors of Luke ii, 46, and that Gamaliel, his grandson and substantially his suc- cessor, was at the head of this school during the whole of the ministry of Christ, as well as in the early portion of the history of the Acts. We are thus able to explain the fact which so many passages in the gospels lead us to infer — the existence all along of a party among the scribes themselves more or less disposed to recognise Jesus of Nazareth as a teacher (John iii, 1 ; Mark x, 17), not far from the kingdom of God (xii, 34), advocates of a policy of toleration (John vii, 51), but, on the other hand, timid and time-serving, unable to confess even their half- belief (xii, 42), afraid to take their stand against the strange alliance of extremes which brought together the Sadduc^an section of the priesthood and the ultra-Pharisaic followers of Shammai. When tlie last great crisis came, they apparently contented them- selves with a policy of absence (Luke xxiii, 50, 51), pos- sibly were not even summoned, and thus the council which condemned our Lord was a packed meeting of the confederate parties, not a formally constituted Sanhe- drim. All its proceedings, the hasty investigation, the immediate sentence, were vitiated by irregularity (Jost, i, 407-409), Afterwards, when the fear of violence was once over, and popular feeling had turned, we find Ga- maliel summoning courage to maintain openly the pol- icy of a tolerant expectation (Acts v, 34 ).
5. Education and Life. — (1.) The special training for a scribe's office began, probabh', about the age of thir- teen. According to tlie Pirke Ahoth (v, 24), the child began to read the Mikra at five and the jMishna at ten. Three years later every Israelite became a child of the law (Bar-Mitsoah}, and was bound to study and obey it. The great mass of men rested in the scanty teach- ing of their synagogues, in knowing and repeating their Tephillim, the texts inscribed on their phylacteries. For the boy who was destined by his parents, or who devoted himself, to the calling of a scribe, something more was
inherit eternal life?" or casuistic, "What might a man do or leave undone on the Sabbath?" or ceremonial, "What did or did not render him unclean?" We are left to wonder what were the questions and answers of the schoolroom of Luke ii, 40; but those proposed to our Lord by his own disciples, or by the scribes, as tests of his proficiency, may fairly be taken as types of what was commonly discussed. The Apocryphal gospels, as usual, mock our curiosity with the most irritating pue- rilities. (Comp. Kcaufid. Infant, c. 45, in Tischendorf, Codex Apoc. A'. 7'.). In due time the pupil passed on to the laws of property, of contracts, and of evidence. So far he was within the circle of the Halachah, the simple exposition of the traditional "words of the scribes." He might remain content with this, or might pass on to the higher knowledge of the Beth-ham-Mid- rash, with its inexhaustible stores of mystical interpre- tation. In both cases, pre-eminently in the latter, par- ables entered largely into the method of instruction. The teacher uttered the similitude, and left it to his hearers to interpret for themselves. See Parablk. That the relation between the two was often one of genial and kindly feeling we may infer from the saying of one famous scribe, "I have learned much from the rabbins my teachers, I have learned more from the rab- bins'my colleagues, I have learned most of all from my disciples" (Carpzov, .4/)/). Crif. i, 7).
(2.) After a sufficient period of training, probablj' at the age of thirty, the probationer was solemnly admitted to his office. The presiding rabbi pronounced the for- mula, "I admit thee, and thou art admitted to the chair of the scribe," solemnly ordained him by the imposition of hands (the il3i'20 = ;;^£(po^£rT/«), and gave to him, as the symbol of his work, tablets on which he was to note down the sayings of the wise, and the "key of knowledge" (comp. Luke xi, 52), with which he was to open or to shut the treasures of divine wisdom. So ad- mitted, he took his place as a Chaher, or member of the fraternity, was no longer aypajifinTOQ Kal ISuorrjc (Acts iv, 13), was separated entirely from the multitude, the brute herd that knew not the law, the " cursed" " people of the earth" (John vii, 15, 49). (For all the details in the above section, and many others, comp. the elaborate treatises by Ursinus, Antiqq. f/eb., and Heubner, De Aca- deniiis Ilehrceorum, in Ugolini Thesaur. ch. xxi.)
(3.) There still remained for the disciple after his ad- mission the choice of a variety of functions, the chances of failure and success. He might give himself to any one of the branches of study, or combine two or more of them. He might rise to high places, become a doctor of the law, an arbitrator in family litigations (Luke xii, 14), the head of a school, a member of the Sanhedrim, He might have to content himself with the humbler