Epistles of John - The Preterist Archive

XV111
ST JOHN THE APOSTLE, AND HIS "WRITINGS.
to an exiled diaspora ; Christianity had thenceforward no more
to do with the people of Israel, but with the heathen Roman
state, and with individual Jews only so far as these in their
malice denounced the Christians to the Romans. But, at the
same time, that period of Pauline labour was past, during which
there was a necessity for warning against the errors and the
labours of the TrapeicraKrot ^revSaSeXcpoi (Gal. ii. 4), who taught
that Christ and His salvation was the monopoly of the Jews,
that circumcision and the fulfilment of the law was the condition
of fellowship in the Messianic hope,—thus bringing men back to
a dependence on their works.
In opposition to them, St Luke,
the investigator (Luke i. 3), had collected together in his
Gospel, under the Divine Spirit's guidance, all those events and
those discourses in the life of Christ which showed that not
only Israel, and not all
Israel, had inheritance in the salvation
of the Gospel. The destruction of Jerusalem had impressed
the seal upon his testimony (comp. Luke xxi. 24).
But, all this notwithstanding, there were still found among
the Christian communities, a circle of Jewish-Christian Churches
which had so little understood the judicial acts of the Lord upon
Jerusalem that they still clung with blind wilfulness to the preservation
of the dissolved Jewish nationality, to the use of the
Semitic (Aramaic) tongue, and the continuance of Jewish usages.
These Churches were conducted by their ungodly traditionalism
to a separation from the rest of the Church, being known first
as Nazarenes ; in the last stage of their perversion and apostasy
they appear in history as Ehionites. They saw in Christ only a
second Lawgiver— as might have been expected from their
legal position and relations ;
using only the Aramaic Gospel of
St Matthew, in which the declarations of Christ concerning
His Divinity are not yet so prominent as in the other Gospels,
Christ became contracted in their creed to the limits of a mere
man. It cannot be demonstrated that this error had already in
St John's time reached its final point of development ; nor can
it be established that St John, living in Ephesus, w r as brought
into direct conflict with these heretics, or that a " refutation of
Ebionitism " is to be sought for in his Gospel. 1 But it is certainly
a possible supposition, that the gradual separation of the
1
Jerome, Epiphanius, and, in later times, Grotius, thought that they
perceived such a polemical aim in the Gospel of St John.