of Alexandrian philosophy. Moreover, the doctrine of the writer
of the fourth gospel is more remote from that of the "sect of the
Nazarenes" than is that of Paul himself. I am quite aware that orthodox
critics have been capable of maintaining that John, the Nazarene, who
was probably well past fifty years of age, when he is supposed to have
written the most thoroughly Judaising book in the New Testament--the
Apocalypse--in the roughest of Greek, underwent an astounding
metamorphosis of both doctrine and style by the time he reached the ripe
age of ninety or so, and provided the world with a history in which the
acutest critic cannot [always] make out where the speeches of Jesus end
and the text of the narrative begins; while that narrative, is utterly
irreconcilable, in regard to matters of fact, with that of his
fellow-apostle, Matthew.

The end of the whole matter is this:--The "sect of the Nazarenes," the
brother and the immediate followers of Jesus, commissioned by him as
apostles, and those were taught by them up to the year 50A.D., were not
"Christians" in the sense in which that term has been understood ever
since its asserted origin at Antioch, but Jews--strict orthodox
Jews--whose belief in the Messiahship of Jesus never led to their
exclusion from the Temple services, nor would have shut them out from
the wide embrace of Judaism.[52] The open proclamation of their special
view about the Messiah was doubtless offensive to the Pharisees, just as
rampant Low Churchism is offensive to bigoted High Churchism in our own
country; or as any kind of dissent is offensive to fervid religionists
of all creeds. To the Sadducees, no doubt, the political danger of any
Messianic movement was serious; and they would have been glad to put
down Nazarenism, lest it should end in useless rebellion against their
Roman masters, like that other Galilean movement headed by Judas, a
generation earlier. Galilee was always a hotbed of seditious enthusiasm
against the rule of Rome; and high priest and procurator alike had need
to keep a sharp eye upon natives of that district. On the whole,
however, the Nazarenes were but little troubled for the first twenty
years of their existence; and the undying hatred of the Jews against
those later converts, whom they regarded as apostates and fautors of a
sham Judaism, was awakened by Paul. From their point of view, he was a
mere renegade Jew, opposed alike to orthodox Judaism and to orthodox
Nazar