The life and work of St. Paul

XJLBLT PERSECUTIONS, 61
the Lcvitical officer to arrest them, but this time without any violence, which
might load to dangerous results. They offered no resistance, and were once
more placed where their Lord had once stood in the centre of that threaten-
ing semicircle of angry judges. In reply te the High Priest's indignant
reminder of the warning they had received, St. Peter simply laid down the
principle that when our duty to man clashes with our duty to God, it is God
that must be obeyed. 1 The High Priest had said, " Ye want to bring upon us
the blood of this man." The words are an awful comment on the defiant cry,
" His blood be on us, and on our children." Then the Sanhedrin had not been
afraid of Jesus ; now they were trembling at the vengeance which might yet
be brought on them by two of the despised disciples. The phrase is also
remarkable as furnishing the first instance of that avoidance of the name of
Christ which makes the Talmud, in the very same terms, refer to Him most
frequently as Peloni* "so and so." Peter did not aggravate the Priests'
alarm. He made no allusion to the charge of an intended vengeance; he
only said that the Apostles, and the Holy Spirit who wrought in them, were
witnesses to the resurrection and exaltation of Him whom they had slain.
At these words the Sanhedrin ground their teeth with rage, and began to
advise another judicial murder, which would, on their own principles, have
rendered them execrable to their countrymen, as an assembly given to deeds
of blood. 8 This disgrace was averted by the words of one wise man among
them. How far the two Apostles were protected by the animosities between
the rival sects of Sadducees and Pharisees we do not know, but it was
certainly the speech of Gamaliel which saved them from worse results than
that scourging by Jewish thongs those forty stripes save one which they
received, and in which they exulted. 4
That speech of Gamaliel was not unworthy of a grandson of Hillel of
5
one of those seven who alone won the supreme title of Rabbanim of one
who subsequently became a President of the Sanhedrin. It has been strangely
misunderstood. The supposed anachronism of thirty years in the reference to
Theudas has led the school of Baur to deny altogether the genuineness of the
not have been
speech, but it has yet to be proved that the allusion may
perfectly correct. The notion that the speech was due to a secret leaning in
favour of Christianity, and the tradition of the Clementine Recognitions, that
Gamaliel was in heart a Christian, 6 have no shadow of probability in their
favour, since every allusion to him in the Talmud shows that he lived and
" It were better for me to be
1 Cf . Plat. Apol. 29. murofuu 61 ep ftoAAov q VIM:
called '
fool '
all the days of my life, than to be made wicked before Ha-Makom," i.e.,
God
"
; literally the Place
"
(Edioth, ch. v. 6).
3 In Spanish and Portuguese fuln.no (through the Arabic). The designation otho hatsh,
"that man," is still more contemptuous, ittr
( Yeshu) is used as the contraction for rna,
and is composed of the initial letters of an imprecation.
"The Sanhedrin is not to destroy life, but to save " (Sanhedr. 42 6). (See Life of
Christ, ii. 353, and infra, Excursus VII.
* Deut. xxv. 2.
* All the Kabbans except Johanan Ben Zakkai were descendant! of Gamaliel,
* Tbolo, Cod. Apocr., p. 501,