The life and work of St. Paul

706 APPEWDIX.
which fa given twelfth hi order in the Shemone Eere.* It in probable that his grandfather,
who was equally liberal in many of his sentiments, would yet have been
perfectly willing to authorise a similar prayer. His sense of expediency was so little
identical with any indifference to pure Mosaism, that when he died It was said that the
purity and righteousness of Pharisaism was removed, and the glory of the Law ceased. 8
Neither, then, in St. Paul's original zeal for the oral and written Law, nor in the liber-
ality of hia subsequent views and decisions about Mosaic observances, do we find any
reason whatever to doubt the statement of his relation to Gamaliel, but on the contrary
we find it confirmed by many minute and, at first sight, counter indications. And as far
as the speech of Gamaliel is concerned, it seems probable that his toleration would have
had decided limits. As it is by no means clear that he did not afterwa/rds sanction the
attempt to suppress the Christians, so it is by no means improbable that up to this time
even Saul of Tarsus, had he been present at the debate, might have coincided with the
half-tolerant, but also half-contemptuous, views of his great teacher. Although the
Pharisees, in their deadly opposition to the Sadducees, were always ready to look with
satisfaction on that one part of Christianity which rested on the belief in the Resurrection,
the events of the next few months greatly altered the general relations of the
Church, not only towards them, but also towards the entire body of the Jewish people,
of whom, up to this time, a great multitude had welcomed its early manifestations with
astonishment and joy.
EXCURSUS VL (p, 93).
CAPITAI. PUNISHMENTS : THE STONIHQ o* ST. STKPHEW.
GENERALLY speaking the Sanhedrin were not a sanguinary tribunal. They shuddered
at the necessity of bloodshed, and tried to obviate its necessity by innumerable regulations.
So great was their horror at putting an Israelite to death, that any means of
avoiding it seemed desirable. Simeon Ben Shatach is the only conspicuous Rabbi who,
for his cruelty in deciding causes, is said " to have had hot hands." Josephus expressly
marks it as disgraceful to the Sadducees that, unlike the rest of their nation, they were
savage in their punishments. "We are told that if even once in seven years Rabbi
Eleazar Ben Azariah went so far as to say that if once hi seventy years a Sanhedrin
inflicted capital punishment it deserved the opprobrious title of "sanguinary." 1 The
migration of the Sanhedrin forty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, from their
434.) The notion that this Samuel the Less (for his name is, perhaps, given to distinguish him from
the prophet Samnel : cf. o ntyas, as the title of Herod, Life of Christ, i., p. 48, n.) has anything to
do with Saul (Shaftl being a contraction of Shamnel, and Paulas being supposed to mean the little ;
Alting, Schilo, iv. 28 ; Basnage, Bk. III. 1., pp. 12, 13) is an absurdity hardly worthy of passing
notice. (Eisenmeng. Entd. JuAenth., 1L 107 ; Buxtorf, Lex. Talm., 1,201, 2,662 ; Wolf, Bibl. Hebr.,
i. 1,119.)
1 In point of fact, there Is a considerable amount of
obscurity
about this prayer. The Shemoneeert
or cimida is a prayer recited alter the Shema. It is named from the "eighteen blessings," or
sections, of which it is composed, and is recited three times a day, or oftener on feast days. It
actually contains nineteen sections, the 12th, which is numbered 11 bit, being the celebrated iirfcotA
%0-Afinfm, or prayer against the minim, or heretics. Now, in Jtr. BeraeMth, ch. iv., 8, we are
expressly told that this prayer was added to the Amida at Jabne, and therefor* by Gamaliel II. in
the second century, long after the destruction of Jerusalem (Cahen, Hist, de la Priere, p. 30, sq. ;
and Megittah, f. 17, 2)i How this can be reconciled with the ascerted death of Samuel the Little,
before the destruction of Jerusalem, is only one of the confusions and contradictions which meet us
in every stage of Talmndic literature. Hallel
(quoted by Schwab) says that the prayer is sometimes
called the Messing (by euphemism) of the BadduceeB," and is intended as a protest of the Pharisees
against the mixture of temporising and severity by which the Sadducees ruined their country.
Chronology shows this to bo futile.
SotaA, f. 49, 1. He, or bin grandson, are cited with high respect for various minute decisions
la the BeracMth. (See Schwab's TraiU des BeraeMth, pp. 1, 11, 12, Ac.)
Xoenoft, t 7, 1 ; Derenbourg, p. 901.