The Acts of the Apostles

INTRODUCTION xxv
proof of the careful sense of justice of the historian
St. Luke.i
1 Different stages are to be traced in the anti-Semitism (anti-
Judaism) of the early Gentile-Christians. St. Luke marks the first
stage ; for St. Paul was never anti-Judaistic ; of course the early
Church soon forgot Rom. xi, 25-32, if it ever really gave heed to
this passage. St. Luke himself has adopted from St. Paul the
theory of the hardening of Israel without Rom. xi. 25 ff; yet he
regards the religion and piety of the Old Testament with the
deepest reverence ; he still joys over every Jew who is converted,
and does not in the least place the individual under the ban of
his general theory. "St. John" marks the next stage. Here the
Jews are already almost always mentioned only in terms which
imply the Divine Rejection, and are treated as massa proditionis
ct jperdttionis ; yet the author, looking back to the pre-Christian
epoch, suffers them to stand in their privileged position (iv.22 :
ij auTTipia e/c rdv 'lovdaloiv iarlv, i. •' 47 We dXrjdui 'laparjXelTtjs, iv
V 56Xos ovK iaTiv, x. 8 is to be confined to false Messiahs). The
third stage is marked by the Apologists, who, agreeing with St.
Luke and St. John in the theory of Israel's hardening, regard
the ordinances revealed to the Jews in the Old Testament as a
means of discipline and punishment; who, by forced interpreta-
tion, deprive the Jews of all the promises referring to their nation,
and separate the men of God of the Old Testament from con-
nection with the Jewish people. The fourth stage is characterised
by the so-called Epistle of Barnabas, the author of which rejects,
together with the Jewish nation, the whole cultus and all the
legal ordinances of the Old Testament as a diabolical misrepresentation
of the truth, and accordingly admits the Old Testament,
which he claims exclusively for Christianity, only under an allegorical
interpretation. The fifth and last stage is given in Marcion
and the Gnostics. Here, together with the Jewish nation and
Judaism, the whole Old Testament is thrown overboard, either as
a book of the devil or of the Demiurge ; either as a complicated
work composed of utterly different elements, or as a book full of
absurd myths and lying invention. All these standpoints have their
roots in Paulinism, and their champions sought to establish them by
appealing to the teaching of St. Paul This fact is perhaps the
strongest proof that St. Paul was a writer essentially incomprehensible
to his age, however well he must have been understood