Moreover, the doctrine of the writer of the fourth gospel
is more remote from that of the "sect of the Nazarenes" than is that
of Paul himself. I am quite aware that orthodox critics have been
capable of maintaining that John, the Nazarene, who was probably well
past fifty years of age, when he is supposed to have written the most
thoroughly Judaising book in the New Testament--the Apocalypse--in the
roughest of Greek, underwent an astounding metamorphosis of both
doctrine and style by the time he reached the ripe age of ninety or
so, and provided the world with a history in which the acutest critic
cannot [always] make out where the speeches of Jesus end and the text
of the narrative begins; while that narrative is utterly
irreconcilable, in regard to matters of fact, with that of his
fellow-apostle, Matthew.
The end of the whole matter is this:--The "sect of the Nazarenes," the
brother and the immediate followers of Jesus, commissioned by him as
apostles, and those who were taught by them up to the year 50 A.D.,
were not "Christians" in the sense in which that term has been
understood ever since its asserted origin at Antioch, but Jews--strict
orthodox Jews--whose belief in the Messiahship of Jesus never led to
their exclusion from the Temple services, nor would have shut them out
from the wide embrace of Judaism.[79] The open proclamation of their
special view about the Messiah was doubtless offensive to the
Pharisees, just as rampant Low Churchism is offensive to bigoted High
Churchism in our own country; or as any kind of dissent is offensive
to fervid religionists of all creeds.
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