er of the sect
of the Nazarenes" (Acts xxiv. 5), which must have affected James much in
the same way as it would have moved the Archbishop of Canterbury, in
George Fox's day, to hear the latter called a "ringleader of the sect of
Anglicans." In fact, "Nazarene" was, as is well known, the distinctive
appellation applied to Jesus; his immediate followers were known as
Nazarenes; while the congregation of the disciples, and, later, of
converts at Jerusalem--the Jerusalem Church--was emphatically the "sect
of the Nazarenes," no more, in itself, to be regarded as anything
outside Judaism than the sect of the Sadducees, or that of the
Essenes[51]. In fact, the tenets of both the Sadducees and the Essenes
diverged much more widely from the Pharisaic standard of orthodoxy than
Nazarenism did.

Let us consider the position of affairs now (A.D. 50-60) in relation to
that which obtained in Justin's time, a century later. It is plain that
the Nazarenes--presided over by James, "the brother of the Lord," and
comprising within their body all the twelve apostles--belonged to
Justin's second category of "Jews who observe the Law, believe Jesus to
be the Christ, but who insist on the observance of the Law by Gentile
converts," up till the time at which the controversy reported by Paul
arose. They then, according to Paul, simply allowed him to form his
congregations of non-legal Gentile converts at Antioch and elsewhere;
and it would seem that it was to these converts, who would come under
Justin's fifth category, that the title of "Christian" was first
applied. If any of these Christians had acted upon the more than
half-permission given by Paul, and had eaten meats offered to idols,
they would have belonged to Justin's seventh category.

Hence, it appears that, if Justin's opinion, which was probably that of
the Church generally in the middle of the second century, was correct,
James and Peter and John and their followers could not be saved; neither
could Paul, if he carried into practice his views as to the indifference
of eating meats offered to idols. Or, to put the matter another way, the
centre of gravity of orthodoxy, which is at the extreme right of the
series in the nineteenth century, was at the extreme left, just before
the middle of the first century, when the "sect of the Nazarenes"
constituted the whole church founded by Jesus and the apostles; while,
in the time of Justin, it lay midway between the two. It is therefore a