Paul’s mission among the Gentiles forced the question to a solution and resulted in a grand act of
emancipation, yet not without great struggle and temporary reactions.
All the Christians of the first generation were converts from Judaism or heathenism. It could
not be expected that they should suddenly lose the influence of opposite kinds of religious training
and blend at once in unity. Hence the difference between Jewish and Gentile Christianity throughout
the apostolic age, more or less visible in all departments of ecclesiastical life, in missions, doctrine,
worship, and government. At the head of the one division stood Peter, the apostle of the circumcision;
at the head of the other, Paul, to whom was intrusted the apostleship of the uncircumcision. In
another form the same difference even yet appears between the different branches of Christendom.
The Catholic church is Jewish-Christian or Petrine in its character; the Evangelical church is Gentile
or Pauline. And the individual members of these bodies lean to one or the other of these leading
types. Where-ever there is life and motion in a denomination or sect, there will be at least two
tendencies of thought and action—whether they be called old and new school, or high church and
low church, or by any other party name. In like manner there is no free government without parties.
It is only stagnant waters that never run and overflow, and corpses that never move.
The relation between these two fundamental forms of apostolic Christianity is in general
that of authority and freedom, law and gospel, the conservative and the progressive, the objective
and the subjective. These antithetic elements are not of necessity mutually exclusive. They are
mutually complemental, and for perfect life they must co-exist and co-operate. But in reality they
often run to extremes, and then of course fall into irreconcilable contradiction. Exclusive Jewish
Christianity sinks into Ebionism; exclusive Gentile Christianity into Gnosticism. And these heresies
were by no means confined to the apostolic and post-apostolic ages; pseudo-Petrine and
pseudo-Pauline errors, in ever-varying phases, run more or less throughout the whole history of
the church.
The Jewish converts at first very naturally adhered as closely as possible to the sacred
traditions of their fathers. They could not believe that the religion of the Old Testament, revealed
by God himself, should pass away. They indeed regarded Jesus as the Saviour of Gentiles as well
as Jews; but they thought Judaism the necessary introduction to Christianity, circumcision and the
observance of the whole Mosaic law the sole condition of an interest in the Messianic salvation.
And, offensive as Judaism was, rather than attractive, to the heathen, this principle would have
utterly precluded the conversion of the mass of the Gentile world.^432 The apostles themselves were
at first trammelled by this Judaistic prejudice, till taught better by the special revelation to Peter
before the conversion of Cornelius.^433(^432) "Circumcision," says Renan (St. Paul, ch. III. p. 67)."was, for adults, a painful ceremony, one not without danger, and
disagreeable to the last degree. It was one of the reasons which prevented the Jews from moving freely about among other people,
and set them apart as a caste by themselves. At the baths and gymnasiums, those important parts of the ancient cities, circumcision
exposed the Jew to all sorts of affronts. Every time that the attention of the Greeks and Romans was directed to this subject,
outbursts of jestings followed. The Jews were very sensitive in this regard, and avenged themselves by cruel reprisals. Several
of them, in order to escape the ridicule, and washing to pass themselves off for Greeks, strove to efface the original mark by a
surgical operation of which Celsus has preserved us the details. As to the converts who accepted this initiation ceremony, they
had only one course to pursue, and that was to hide themselves in order to escape sarcastic taunts. Never did a man of the world
place himself in such a position; and this is doubtless the reason why conversions to Judaism were much more numerous among
women than among men, the former not being put, at the very outset, to a test, in every respect repulsive and shocking. We have
many examples of Jewesses married to heathens, but not a single one of a Jew married to a heathen woman."
(^433) Acts 10 and 11.
A.D. 1-100.