20,
21.)
They therefore request that he should perform a certain public
religious act in the Temple, in order that
all shall know that there is no truth in the things whereof
they have been informed concerning thee; but that thou
thyself walkest orderly, keeping the law (_ibid_. 24).[77]
How far Paul could do what he is here requested to do, and which the
writer of the Acts goes on to say he did, with a clear conscience, if
he wrote the Epistles to the Galatians and Corinthians, I may leave
any candid reader of these epistles to decide. The point to which I
wish to direct attention is the declaration that the Jerusalem
Church, led by the brother of Jesus and by his personal disciples and
friends, twenty years and more after his death, consisted of strict
and zealous Jews.
Tertullus, the orator, caring very little about the internal
dissensions of the followers of Jesus, speaks of Paul as a "ringleader
of the sect of the Nazarenes" (Acts xxiv. 5), which must have affected
James much in the same way as it would have moved the Archbishop of
Canterbury, in George Fox's day, to hear the latter called a
"ringleader of the sect of Anglicans." In fact, "Nazarene" was, as is
well known, the distinctive appellation applied to Jesus; his
immediate followers were known as Nazarenes; while the congregation of
the disciples, and, later, of converts at Jerusalem--the Jerusalem
Church--was emphatically the "sect of the Nazarenes," no more, in
itself, to be regarded as anything outside Judaism than the sect of
the Sadducees, or that of the Essenes.
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