The life and work of St. Paul

THE DIASPORA: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM. 65
3131.
ST. STEPHEN AND THE HELLENISTS,
CHAPTER VII.
TBE DIASPORA: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM.
T6trov OVK Jftm paaitas evptlf TT}J o\KOv^.fvr}3 81 ov irapaSe'Se/CTat TOVTO rb v\ov,
jirjS' (sic) twiKpa-rtiTou fa' avrov. STKABO, ap. Jos. Antt. xiv. 7, 2. (Of. Philo,
Leg. ad Gaium, 36.)
THE gradual change of relation between tlie Jews and the Christians was an
inevitable result of the widening boundaries of the Church. Among the
early converts were " Grecians," as well as " Hebrews," and this fact naturally
led to most important consequences, on which hinged the historic future of
the Cliristian Faith.
It is not too much to say that any real comprehension of the work of
St. Paul, and of the course of events in the days after Christ, must depend
entirely on our insight into the difference between those two classes of Jews.
And this is a point which has been so cursorily treated that we must here
pause while we endeavour to see it in its proper light.
When the successive judgments, first of the Assyrian, then of the Babylonian
captivity, had broken all hopes of secular power and all thoughts of
secular pride in the hearts of the Jews, a wholly different impulse was given
to the current of their life. Settled in the countries to which they had been
transplanted, allowed the full rights of citizenship, finding free scope for their
individual energies, they rapidly developed that remarkable genius for commerce
by which they have been characterised in all succeeding ages. It was
only a wretched handful of the nation compared by the Jewish writers to
the chaff of the wheat who availed themselves of the free permission of
Cyrus, and subsequent kings of Persia, to return to their native land. 1 The
remainder, although they jealously preserved their nationality and their traditions,
made their homes in every land to which they had been drifted by the
wave of conquest, and gradually multiplying until, as Josephus tells us, 2 they
crowded every corner of the habitable globe, formed that great and remark-
able body which continues to be known to this day as " the Jews of the
Dispersion." 8
1 Of the whole nation only 42,360 returned ; and as the separate Items of the return-
ing families given by Ezra and Nehemiah only amount to 30,000, it was precariously
conjectured by the Jews that the surplus consisted of members of the ten tribes. As a
body, however, the ten tribes were finally and absolutely absorbed into the nations not
improbably of Semitic origin among whom they were scattered (Jos. Antt. xL 5, 2 ;
2 Esdr. xiii. 45). Such expressions as TO SuSexd^vAov of James i. 1 ; Acts xxvi. 7, point
rather to past reminiscences, to patriotic yearnings, and to the sacredly-treasured genealogical
records of a very few families, than to any demonstrable reality. Of the priestly
families only four courses out of the twenty-four returned (Ezra ii. 36 39).
3 Jos. Antt. xiv. 7-, 2.
' The word is first found in this sense in Dent, xxviii. 25 ; Pa. cxlvii. 2, " He shall