ANTE AND POST-MESSIANIC JEWS.
By R. Abbey
The non-observance of the wide and vital distinction between these two classes of people, both of which are properly called Jews, leads to a long list of errors which are frequently seen in the church. Our popular history needs whittling up along here. The people who composed the church during, and previous to, the lifetime of our Saviour, are, by us, collectively called Jews, no matter from what ancestral stock they, or any of them, may have descended. But subsequent to that time we see the Jews standing, as is the case now, in open and stout hostility to the church—the very same church. To get at the idea correctly, we must, I think, divide the Jews into three religious classes. First, the whole body constituting the church at and before the birth of Jesus. Second, those in the lifetime of the Saviour, and subsequently, who did not acknowledge his Messiahship for lack of sufficient evidence respecting it. And third, those who rejected him. Before the coming of Christ, or the appearance rather, there was no general disagreement among them on the subject of a Messiah. Of course the manner of the appearance and sacrifice, and all circumstances attending it, were unknown to everybody. And of course, among the masses, there was much ignorance about the whole subject. Secondly, during the lifetime of Jesus nobody acknowledged his Messiahship as a matter of faith. Expectation and hope rose and fell, at times, according to circumstances. His resurrection, and the scenes attending it, alone gave the final evidence. So that up to about the time of Pentecost, or soon after, there was no decisive acceptance or rejection of him. At Pentecost they began to separate finally, and to take sides strongly, and, of course, with vehement antagonism, because the question was vital to religion. But this separation could, at first, reach none but the few who were in and near Jerusalem. The great body of the church, those in Greece and elsewhere, must await further and more confirmatory evidence. The news from Jerusalem, startling in the highest degree, would excite the liveliest hopes and fears. On the very day of Pentecost three thousand were convinced and gave in their adhesion each to each, as a few others had done before, and sealed their faith by solemn baptism. And soon after, we hear of five thousand more doing the same thing, and then multitudes upon multitudes, month after month and year after year, as the horizon of convincing evidence extended. Considering the condition of the countries over which the entire church extended, it must have been a number of years—perhaps not less than thirty or forty—before the entire church could intelligibly and definitively decide this vital question. So that, during this time, there must have been hundreds of thousands, yea, and millions, who neither rejected nor received Jesus as the true Saviour. As they would hear the rumors, they must necessarily await fuller and more final evidence. The apostles and others furnished this final evidence as their travels and preaching extended. Thirdly, therefore the separation which began so formidably on the very day of the feast of Pentecost, continued and extended until it went through and included every member of the church. Meanwhile, new members who came in did as we do now, under a full recognition of the Christship of Jesus. Let it be remembered, the only question on which the church divided, was whether the man Jesus was or was not the Christ of Scripture—the Old Testament. As to the relative numbers of those finally receiving and finally rejecting Jesus, our information is only very general. Each was certainly very large; so represented in Acts, in many places. Most probably there was no very great disparity in the receiving and rejecting Jews. So I think from the best data I can gather. So we have two sets of Jews, the one receiving and the other rejecting, not the doctrine of Christship, but the claims of Jesus to it. But they could not both continue to be called Jews. Being different things, they must, of necessity, have different names. And so we are told that at Antioch the Jesus party began to be called Christians, and they are still so called, and the other party retained the old name. But we are told that the Christian party, and not they, are the true Jews. But a name does not change the character of a thing. So that post-Messianic Jews, so far from being the religious or ecclesiastical descendants of the anti-Messianic Jews, are apostates. If Jesus was the Christ of Scripture, then it follows that the rejecting Jews were wholesale apostates from the faith of their fathers. The Christship being the central and vital principle of Bible religion, and Jesus being the Christ, then the rejecting Jews turned square away from their former faith. If this is not so, then Jesus is not the Christ, and Christians are apostates. It is, therefore, a manifest error to speak of modern Jews as holding the religion of the Jews before the Saviour’s time. They repudiate every part of it. “Why, do they not hold the Old Testament?” it may be inquired. Yes, they hold the history, the geography, the biography, etc., of the book, but reject its religion in toto. They repudiate the religion of the Old Testament in this, that they repudiate the Christ of the Old Testament. What is the Old Testament without its Christ? It is a book of considerable unauthentic information and unauthorized rules of social life, and nothing more.—R. Abbey, in the Methodist.