WITH the New Testament in our hands it may be surprising to say that we know comparatively little about the beginnings of Christianity. It does not register with most Christians that our information is scanty, because they are primarily concerned with the New Testament as a revelation of what is necessary for ‘salvation’ and assume that it incorporates everything of consequence.
Yet it is easy enough to see how little we are told. Although the public life of Jesus was a brief one it must have been filled with incidents which have not been reported. The Gospel of John says as much.1 And if the events of a year or two are represented so sketchily in the Gospels, how much worse is it with the early history of the immediate followers of Jesus occupying the thirty years from A.D. 36 to 66! If we deduct from the Acts of the Apostles the space devoted to constructed speeches, and add what can be gleaned from the letters of Paul, we have even less material regarding developments in Palestine during these three vital decades than is afforded about Jesus by the shortest of the Gospels.
The single New Testament writer who concerns himself with the experiences of the Jewish believers in Jesus, the Nazoreans (Nazarenes), furnishes us with little more than an idealised preface to the career of Paul and the evangelisation of the Gentiles. It is evident that Jacob (James), the brother of Jesus, was a figure of outstanding significance; but we learn hardly anything about him from the New Testament, and have to turn elsewhere for further enlightenment.
This is a very serious matter for the student of Christian Origins, since to a large extent the truth about Jesus is not certified to us by any documents coming directly from those Judean and Galilean communities which flourished in the formative period of the Nazorean Church. From that period there is not extant a single scrap of a Hebrew or Aramaic text which speaks of Jesus or tells us about the beliefs and experiences of his Jewish followers. We have nothing in primitive Christian material corresponding to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Consequently to obtain what knowledge we can we have not only to subject the New Testament records to the most drastic analysis: we have to study Jewish history and traditions, the writings of the Church Fathers and early ecclesiastical historians, and various relics of lost books which through one or another ancient authority have been preserved.
By far the most consequential factor which has deprived us of access to the ‘inside story’ of Jesus and his early Jewish adherents is the Jewish struggle with Rome, particularly the first revolt which came to boiling point in A.D. 66, but also the second revolt which broke out in A.D. 132.
Jewish resistance to the domination of heathen Rome had been in evidence long before the public ministry of Jesus, and through the bad government and oppressive measures of the Roman procurators after the untimely death of the Jewish king Agrippa I in A.D. 44 it became so intensified that war was inevitable. In this time and atmosphere Christian beginnings are set, and no account of them is of great worth which does not recognise the effect of the situation on the minds of loyal Jews who adhered to Jesus as their Messiah.2
It was agreed by the pious in Israel that Rome was the archenemy of God and his people.3 It was identified with the Fourth Kingdom, the worst of all aggressors of the prophecy of Daniel vii. Only the advent of the Messiah could destroy its power, as one of the later apocalyptic writers declares:
‘A Fourth Kingdom will arise, whose power will be harsh and evil far beyond those which were before it . . . and it will hold fast the times, and will exalt itself more than the cedars of Lebanon . . . And it will come to pass when the times of his consummation that he should fall has approached, then the principate of my Messiah will be revealed . . . and when it is revealed it will root out the multitude of his host.’4
The messianic conviction behind the revolt is stressed by the Jewish historian Josephus writing under the patronage of the Roman victors:
‘What more than all else incited them [the Jews] to the war was an ambiguous oracle, likewise found in their sacred scriptures, to the effect that at that time one from their country would become ruler of the world. This they understood to mean someone of their own race, and many of their wise men went astray in their interpretation of it. The oracle, however, in reality signified the sovereignty of Vespasian, who was proclaimed emperor on Jewish soil.’5
With messianic fervour inspiring it, the struggle with the far superior Roman forces was a terrible one, in which terrorism, fanaticism and burning patriotism all played a part. The tragic climax was reached with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in A.D. 70. As the writer has stated in an earlier work:
‘The loss of life in the war was appalling. Josephus estimated that one million one hundred thousand perished in the siege of Jerusalem alone. Before this many thousands had died or been killed in Jerusalem and in other parts of the country. The total of captives taken throughout the war numbered only ninety-seven thousand. Of those who survived the siege, the combatants, the aged and feeble were killed. Eleven thousand prisoners died of starvation before their fate could be determined, and the tale of death was to continue to mount with those sent to the mines, or dispatched to the various provinces to be killed in the theatres by the sword or torn limb from limb by wild beasts.’6
The casualties at Jerusalem were so heavy because the population of the city was swollen with refugees who had sought safety there, and with pilgrims come to worship in the Temple, who were caught by the Roman encirclement.
The followers of Jesus, the Nazoreans, had had their head-quarters at Jerusalem. There James, the brother of Jesus, had presided over their affairs until his judicial murder c. A.D. 62, reported by Josephus and others.7 When the war threatened the capital the Nazorean community in obedience to a revelation as tradition declares,8 abandoned the city and fled across the Jordan. We do not know how far this story is correct; but it appears that some of the leaders escaped. In any case they were only a fraction of the Nazoreans of Palestine, who were numerous in other parts of the country, and we may believe that not a few took refuge in Jerusalem and perished there. Their fate would probably have been the same if they stayed in their own homes, as we can see from what Josephus reports regarding places they inhabited such as Caesarea, Lydda and Joppa, mentioned in the Acts, and of course Galilee down to the lakeside.
At the beginning of the revolt the Gentiles of Caesarea ‘massacred the Jews who resided in their city; within one hour more than twenty thousand were slaughtered, and Caesarea was completely emptied of Jews, for the fugitives were arrested by order of Florus and conducted in chains to the dockyards’. Reaching Lydda, Gallus found the town deserted, because the inhabitants had gone to Jerusalem, but fifty persons discovered were killed and the town burnt.9
Galilee, where Jesus had lived and taught and which was the home of the Jewish resistance movement, suffered particularly. ‘The Romans never ceased, night or day, to devastate the plains and to pillage the property of the country-folk, invariably killing all capable of bearing arms and reducing the inefficient to servitude. Galilee from end to end became a scene of fire and blood; from no misery, no calamity was it exempt.’ Later in the war there was heavy slaughter along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. ‘One could see the whole lake red with blood and covered with corpses, for not a man escaped. During the following days the district reeked with a dreadful stench and presented a spectacle equally horrible. The beaches were strewn with wrecks and swollen carcases.’10
In these circumstances we may fairly hold that a high percentage of the Nazoreans of Palestine perished in the war. Mortality among the elderly and infirm was specially heavy. So if Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and therefore before A.D. 37, very few who had seen and heard him can have been alive forty years later. The war created a gap only tenuously bridgeable in early Christian history. As Dr. Brandon has expressed it,11 Christianity went into a tunnel, and when it emerged again a decade or more later much had changed.
There is something further to be said about the survivors of the war. Early rabbinical literature reveals an inevitable consequence of the conflict, and of the troubled period preceding it, which has to be taken fully into account. Many, especially of the older generation, were gravely impaired in health and memory. People whose testimony was of importance about past events and practices made contradictory statements, got dates mixed and persons and events confused. It was very natural, but most unfortunate. The manner in which the Sanhedrin had functioned and the services of the Temple had been conducted had partly to be reconstructed on idealised lines, which can be employed by the historian only with considerable caution, a caution which some scholarly writers on the life of Jesus have failed to exercise. It is probable that some of the problems in the Gospels are attributable to the same causes, which makes it most unwise to emphasise the value of oral tradition.
In the study of the Gospels—all written after the war—it is customary to allow for the attitudes and intentions of the authors and for their editorial work in the employment and arrangement of the sources available to them. But it should also be expected that there would be different versions of the same story, comparable sayings linked with different times and events, on the ground that post-war testimony could not fail to be governed by uncertainties of memory. For the same reason, quite apart from changes in the narrative or in the words of Jesus made deliberately in view of altered conditions, we should expect passages in the Gospels to be coloured by aspects of Jewish affairs later than the time of Jesus and affecting the records by unintentional anachronism.
We shall be considering the composition of the Gospels in later chapters, when it will be of consequence to ascertain as far as possible how much about Jesus, and in what form, had gone out of Palestine before the war, and what additional material from Nazorean circles became available to Christians subsequently. What we have clarified so far is that the Jewish revolt had a messianic impetus, and that the effects of the war were profound for nascent Christianity, heavily diminishing what could be known about Jesus, depriving the Church—now become predominantly Gentile—of authoritative guidance in matters of faith, and opening the door for the increasing intrusion of alien beliefs.
But the pregnant years before the war are of the greatest import, since if they were characterised by strong Jewish messianism it is certified to us that the beginnings of Christianity were part and parcel of it. The New Testament leaves us in no doubt that the early followers of Jesus were Jews, and that they adhered to him from the conviction that he was the expected Messiah. As late as John's Gospel this is clearly stated, and when those who had been nearest to Jesus established a community in Jerusalem it was as the Messiah, the Son of David, that Jesus was proclaimed.12 This was the sensational message to be carried far and wide. In the highly explosive circumstances in Palestine at the time, with the fervency of popular longing for the coming of the Messiah, no other message could have produced such eager response, excited and bitter controversy, and governmental hostility. The opposition did not come from the Jewish masses,13 but from those in the seat of authority responsible to Rome. In Palestine Christianity as a new religion did not exist. The Nazoreans were zealous for the Law of Moses.
Quite soon the message was carried beyond Palestine and reached Greek-speaking people on the fringe of Judaism. Those who accepted it at Antioch in Syria were dubbed Christians. The name derives from Christos (Christ), the Greek translation of the Hebrew title Messiah, meaning the anointed one. We may not evade, or seek to modify, this basic fact, that the terms Christ and Christian testify that the Church was founded on messianic convictions, on belief that Jesus was the Messiah.
At the time that Christianity got going in other lands and began to attract non-Jews fresh from polytheism messianic agitation was rife in the Roman Empire. Jewish Zealots from Palestine, acting as apostles (envoys), were seeking to enlist support for their anti-Roman activities among the Jews of the Diaspora. The circumstances were repeated before the second Jewish revolt in the reign of Hadrian. These emissaries did not get much response, however, from the cities of the west, because the Jews there were very sensible of the privileges they enjoyed under Roman rule, and had no desire to see them withdrawn, leaving them at the mercy of hostile Greeks, if it should be credited that they were parties to a treasonable conspiracy. The Roman authorities were well aware of what was going on, and they were particularly concerned about Zealot propaganda in key cities where there was a large Jewish population, such as Alexandria and Rome itself. The Emperor Claudius (A.D. 41–54) actually wrote to the Jews of Alexandria warning them not to entertain itinerant Jews from the province of Syria (of which Judea was a part) if they did not wish to be treated as abettors of ‘a pest which threatens the whole world (i.e. the Roman Empire)’.14 He ordered the expulsion of foreign Jews from Rome ‘who were continually making disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus (i.e. engaging in messianic agitation)’.15
The late Acts of the Apostles, a product of the reign of the more tolerant Emperor Trajan, in its apologetic effort to placate the Romans, does not altogether conceal the truth, but does try to disguise it in claiming that the Christian message was misrepresented by its Jewish traducers. In the light of the actual conditions we can see, however, that the Jews in the Greek cities attacked Paul and his colleagues in their missionary journeys because they believed them to be Zealot agitators, since they were proclaiming the Messiah, and in self-protection took action against them. At Thessalonica the local Jews informed the magistrates that ‘these subverters of the Empire have now reached here . . . and they are all actively opposed to the Imperial decrees, saying there is another Emperor, one Jesus’.16
Paul was eventually indicted at Caesarea before the Roman Governor Felix as ‘a plague-carrier, a fomentor of revolt among all the Jews of the Empire, a ringleader of the Nazorean party’.17 One of the planks in Paul's platform had been anastasis Christou (the resurrection of Christ), which could equally be understood as ‘Messianic uprising’. It was known that he had been establishing messianic groups in many places which might easily become, if indeed some of them were not, cells of the conspiracy, and also that he had been collecting funds to take to Jerusalem for the Nazoreans of Judea, which could be thought to be for the purchase of weapons.18
The Christian message obtained the most recruits among the slaves and underprivileged. Many of them, as we find in Paul's letters, were not only of low morality, but factious, restless and disaffected. Not a few must have been antagonistic to the Roman regime and only too willing to take part in subversive activities. Otherwise it would hardly have been needed to impress upon them to behave peacefully and correctly, pay the Roman imposts and be submissive, honour and pray for the emperor and his representatives.19 The Romans were not fools, and must have had some justification for regarding Christianity as a dangerous and hostile superstition.20 It is significant that after the suppression of the first Jewish revolt the Romans did not outlaw Judaism, though they tried to make it certain that non-Jews professing this faith were genuine converts; but they did outlaw Christianity. They had long been familiar with the Jewish religion and knew that militant messianism was not common to all Jews. Christianity on the other hand, stemming from a Jewish sect, was wholly messianic and committed to propaganda on behalf of an asserted king and world ruler called Jesus. It could and did produce a violent anti-Roman document in the Book of Revelation. If Christians, who were not Jews, refused to burn incense before Caesar's image, it was to be put down not to religious scruples but to treasonable opinions.
Strange as it may appear to those who think of the deity of Jesus in a religious sense, it was the messianic character of Christianity which contributed directly to his deification among believers from the Gentiles. Messianism represented the conviction that the existing world order would presently be overthrown. The empire ruled by Caesar and his legions would pass away, and in its place there would be the Kingdom of God governed by the Messiah and his people. Christianity identified the Messiah with Jesus. There was ‘another king’, another emperor, to whom allegiance was transferred.
The message about Jesus found a lodging among peoples who believed in the commerce of gods with mortals and were accustomed to the deification of rulers and other outstanding personalities. The Acts testifies to this. When a cripple was cured at Lystra during the mission of Paul and Barnabas, the populace cried, ‘The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men,’ and hailed Barnabas as Zeus and Paul as Hermes. The Greeks of Caesarea, acclaiming the speech of King Agrippa when he appeared in state, shouted, ‘It is the voice of a god, not of a man.’
The whole Roman Empire was at this time knit by an Imperial cult, which conjoined the worship of Rome and the emperor. The cult had developed in the reign of Augustus, who for reasons of State policy accepted deification and authorised the building of temples in which he was worshipped. He was formerly decreed Son of God (Divi Filius) by the Senate. A typical inscription, dated 7 B.C., hails him as ‘Caesar, who reigns over the seas and continents, Jupiter, who holds from Jupiter his father the title of Liberator, Master of Europe and Asia, Star of all Greece, who lifts himself up with the glory of great Jupiter, Saviour’.
Gaius Caligula (A.D. 37–41) became obsessed with the notion of his deity, and his sycophantic officials played up to him. Suetonius reports that Lucius Vitellius, legate of Syria, returning to Rome at the end of his term of office, adored the emperor by prostrating himself on the ground and would only appear before him with head veiled. The same authority tells how Gaius ‘began to arrogate to himself a divine majesty. He ordered all the images of the gods, which were famous either for their beauty, or the veneration paid to them, among which was that of Zeus Olympius, to be brought from Greece, that he might take their heads off and substitute his own . . . He also instituted a temple and priests, with choice victims, in honour of his divinity. In his temple stood a statue of gold, the exact image of himself . . . The most opulent persons in the city offered themselves as candidates for the honour of being his priests, and purchased it successively at an immense price.’21
A later emperor, Domitian (A.D. 81–96), insisted that his governors commence their letters to him, ‘Our Lord and our God commands.’ It became a rule, says Suetonius, ‘that no one should style him otherwise in writing or speaking’.22
Among Gentile believers in Jesus as the true emperor it was not possible to hold him to be inferior in dignity to Caesar. So we find in the Gospels the term Son of God (the Imperial Divi Filius) conjoined with the Jewish royal title of Messiah.23 The late Gospel of John, composed not long after the reign of Domitian, even borrows the words of address which that emperor demanded, and makes Thomas address Jesus as ‘My Lord and my God’.24
The Christians would have had some additional justification for holding Jesus to be divine if in fact they had heard him described as Son of God in a purely messianic sense by the Nazorean preachers. The term had been applied to the great king who was the immediate son of David,25 and could therefore be appropriated for the Messiah. Not only so; for the Messiah was regarded by the Nazoreans as the representative Israelite, and Israel was called the Son of God, the Firstborn, the Only-begotten, and Dearly Beloved One.26
Such Jewish thinking, however, obviously did not imply the deity of the Messiah. Even the Hellenised Paul in his mystical philosophy never went as far as speaking of Christ as God, though his doctrine of the Messiah as the pre-eminent expression of God is so delicately poised in its terminology that it could be misunderstood by those unacquainted with its peculiar esoteric Jewish background of thought connected with the Archetypal Man.27 But in the milieu of Gentile Christianity, especially in conjunction with Pauline usage of the language of Plato and the Mystery cults, not only was there no deep-seated objection to paying divine honours to Jesus, there was the strongest natural disposition to do so. In due course in some Christian circles under gnostic influences the result was a movement towards dualism, and monotheism was only saved by the complex doctrine of the Trinity.
With these matters we are not here concerned. What does concern us is that Jesus would never have been proclaimed to the Gentiles at all had it not been for the conviction that he was the Messiah through whom the Kingdom of God would be established throughout the earth. Such proclamation finds clear utterance in the words of the Book of Revelation: ‘The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our Lord [i.e. God], and of his Messiah; and he shall reign for ever and ever.’ In view of the Imperial cult it was bound to happen that for many Christians of non-Jewish origin King Messiah would become the Lord Christ, like the Lord Serapis, Saviour and Son of God, with Caesar stigmatised as a false god, whose pretensions were blasphemous. But we should remember that the earliest Christian reference to the Antichrist makes him to be distinguished by the claim that he is God.28
It is not only the title Christ which confirms that the essence of the proclamation about Jesus was that he was the Messiah. There is another word associated with it, also deriving from Hebrew in its Christian usage, the word Evangelion (Gospel). This translates the Hebrew Besorah (Glad Tidings), basar (to give out glad tidings).
The Glad Tidings awaited by Israel was news that the messianic deliverance was imminent. This is conveyed by Luke in the angelic announcement to the shepherds of Bethlehem, ‘Do not be afraid, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy for all the people, that today in the city of David a deliverer has been born to you, none other than the Lord Messiah.’ The message echoes the words of Isaiah ix: ‘Unto us a son is born; and the government shall be upon his shoulder . . . Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it and establish it.’ The gospel spread by the apostles conveyed these glad tidings. With such an electrifying message they could be no other than evangelists.
Jewish expectation of the Glad Tidings rested on passages like Isaiah xl. 9 f, lii. 7 and lxi. I f, where with reference to the Great Consolation the Greek version, the Septuagint, uses the verb evangelizomai. God would intervene to save his people in their distress, and by the hand of his Messiah demonstrate his government of the world. All nations should acknowledge the One God and cease from warfare. As an ancient Jewish prayer declares, ‘We therefore hope in thee, O Lord our God, that we may speedily behold the glory of thy might, when thou wilt remove the abominations from the earth, and the idols will be utterly cut off, when the world will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty, and all the children of flesh will call upon thy name, when thou wilt turn unto thyself all the wicked of the earth.’29
The gospel of the early Christians was no other than this gospel, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God and with it the disclosure confirmed by the Scriptures of the identity of the Messiah. So the opening of Mark's Gospel sees the beginnings of the Glad Tidings of Jesus the Messiah in the prophecy of Isaiah xl and Malachi iii. I. Thus the word gospel had a messianic significance associated with prophetic passages of the Bible relating to the Kingdom of God and held to support the claim that Jesus was the Messiah who would inaugurate it. Since books were often titled by the Jews from their initial words, it may well have been that a Nazorean collection of Old Testament Testimonies compiled at an early date bore the name Gospel because it began appropriately with a Glad Tidings quotation. If this was so, and such a collection was a vital source of the records of the life of Jesus, it would explain how these records came to be known as Gospels.
As we have briefly indicated, the gospel message envisaged the conversion of the heathen from idolatry. Paul regarded it as his peculiar mission to go to the Gentiles with this message.30 But he also declared that there was a difference between his gospel and that of the other apostles. What was this difference? It did not concern the objective of the message, participation in the felicities of the Kingdom of God through faith in Jesus as Messiah. This was what salvation meant, being preserved in the Day of Messianic Judgement, and entitled to reign with the Messiah in his terrestrial kingdom. Where Paul was in conflict with his fellow-apostles was in holding, alike for Jews and Gentiles, that salvation in this sense was not obtainable by repentance and keeping the commandments of God laid down in the Law (Torah), but was wholly conditional upon acceptance of the death of Jesus as an atoning sacrifice. He stressed the cardinal efficacy of the Crucifixion as the passport to future bliss, certified by the resurrection. By this means God had made all who believe the recipients of his grace, or graciousness, in offering a free pardon in the Messiah by which converted Gentiles were assured of equal privileges with Jewish believers and would inherit with them the same promises made to Israel.
In formulating this doctrine for the benefit of the Gentiles Paul could not fail to think of the pagan mysteries with their conception of individual salvation by identification with a god in his death and resurrection. In their ignorance the Gentiles in the providence of God had stumbled upon a truth which the advent of the Messiah permitted to be seen in its real significance. Released from the cruder pagan aspects the doctrine was calculated to make a strong appeal, especially to the poorer people denied the salutary benefits of the initiatory rites of the Mystery cults. The salvation in Jesus which Paul brought could be obtained without effort and without price: it was open to all as a free gift, to slave as well as freeman, female as well as male, Gentile as well as Jew. But the salvation this gospel conferred was still expressed by Paul in Jewish terms, namely, inheritance with the saints in the enduring Messianic Kingdom through the acquisition of a deathless body on the Messiah's return from heaven.
In course of time the doctrine of salvation underwent a change. Partly this was due to non-Jewish influences upon Christianity, the philosophical concept of the redemption of the soul from imprisonment in the flesh and its reascent to God, and partly to the other-worldliness resulting from the failure of the Second Advent to materialise. The expectation of a Kingdom of God on earth was largely discarded as insufficiently spiritual, though the Church retained belief in the resurrection of the body and the Last Judgement. We can see how the new ideas were gaining ground in the middle of the second century from Justin Martyr's Dialogue with the Jew Trypho, though they were still unorthodox. Trypho challenges Justin, ‘Do you really admit that this place, Jerusalem, will be rebuilt; and do you expect your people to be gathered together, and made joyful with the Messiah and the patriarchs and prophets . . . ?’ Justin replies that he does admit this, though some who are good Christians think otherwise. He goes on to say: ‘But if you have come across some who are called Christians . . . who say there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls, when they die, are taken to heaven, do not imagine that they are Christians. . . . But I and others, who are right-minded Christians on all points, are assured that there will be a resurrection of the dead, and a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned and enlarged, as the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah and others declare.’31
Christians continue to be troubled today by the Church's contradictory doctrines, which arose from the unhappy endeavour to blend incompatible Pagan and Jewish ideas. We have not wished to go, further into these matters than is essential. Our purpose has been to show that Christianity was in origin a messianic movement,32 springing from the soil of Palestine at a critical moment in Jewish history, and that its development as a new religion was conditioned by its subsequent non-Jewish environment. While retaining many of the marks of its ancestry, including the retention of the Jewish Scriptures on which its initial messianic impetus depended, it became transformed by the assimilation of alien ideas and modes of thought. In the process it ceased to be a reliable guide to its own beginnings, so that now we can only reach back to them with enormous difficulty by first of all recognising that the change did take place, and that the cause of it was not fresh illumination but fresh circumstances, and then questing in the lumber room of Christian antiquity for relics of the primitive period which somehow survived.
1. Jn. xx. 30–1, xxi. 25.
2. See Schonfield, The Jew of Tarsus and Saints Against Caesar, also below Chapter 4.
3. Psalms of Solomon; Habakkuk Commentary (Dead Sea Scrolls).
4. Apocalypse of Baruch, xxxix. 5–7.
5. Josephus, Wars, VI. v. 4. The Roman authors take a similar view, cf. Tacitus, Hist. v. 13, Suetonius, Vespas. 4. The oracle is not specified, but Josephus was probably alluding to the Star prophecy of Nu. xxiv. 17–18. The Targum of Onkelos here paraphrases the passage, ‘When a king shall arise out of Jacob, and the Messiah shall be anointed from Israel, he will slay the princes of Moab, and reign over the children of men; and Edom [i.e. Rome] shall be an inheritance.’
6. Schonfield, Saints Against Caesar, p. 142.
7. Josephus, Antiq. XX. ix. I and Hegesippus, Memoirs (quoted by Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. Bk. 2, ch. xxiii).
8. Euseb. Eccl. Hist. Bk. 3, ch. v. (cf. Mk. xiii. 14–18). A variation of the tradition is offered by Epiphanius, Adv. Haeres, XXX. ii. 2. and Mens et Pons, xv.
9. Josephus, Wars, II. xviii. 11, xix. 1.
10. Josephus, Wars, III. iv. 1, X. 9.
11. S. G. F. Brandon, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church.
12. Jn. i. 41, 45; Acts ii. 30.
13. See Acts v. 26.
14. Letter of Claudius to the Alexandrians.
15. Suetonius, Claud. xxv; Dio Cassius, lx. 6; Acts xviii. 2.
16. Acts xvii. 6–7.
17. Acts xxiv. 5.
18. The circumstances were paralleled before the Second Jewish Revolt by the missionary journeys of Rabbi Akiba, who in fact was guilty of doing what Paul was wrongly accused of. See Schonfield, The Jew of Tarsus, p. 181.
19. Rom. xiii; I. Tim. ii. 1–3; I. Pet. ii. 12–17.
20. Tacitus, Annals, xv. 44.
21. Suetonius, Gaius, xxii.
22. Suetonius, Domit. xiii.
23. Mk. xiv. 61; Mt. xvi. 16; Lk. i. 32; Jn. i. 49, vi. 69, xx. 31.
24. Jn. xx. 28.
25. II. Sam. vii. 13–14; Ps. ii. 6–8.
26. Exod. iv. 22; Hos. xi. 1; Apoc. Ezra, vi. 55; Jer. xii. 7.
27. See Schonfield, The Jew of Tarsus, ch. vii.
28. II. Thess. ii. 3–4.
29. The Alenu prayer (Authorised Jewish Prayer Book).
30. Acts ix. 15, xvii. 22–31, xxvi. 16–20; Gal. ii. 7.
31. Justin, Dial. lxxx.
32. For a fuller treatment of Jewish-Christian history and beliefs see Schonfield, The Jew of Tarsus and Saints Against Caesar, also Brandon, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Chruch and Schoeps, Theologie und Geschichte des Judenchristentums.