To the outside observer the Jews at that time were the most religious people on earth, and
in some sense this is true. Never was a nation so ruled by the written law of God; never did a nation
so carefully and scrupulously study its sacred books, and pay greater reverence to its priests and
teachers. The leaders of the nation looked with horror and contempt upon the unclean, uncircumcised
Gentiles, and confirmed the people in their spiritual pride and conceit. No wonder that the Romans
charged the Jews with the odium generis humani.
Yet, after all, this intense religiosity was but a shadow of true religion. It was a praying
corpse rather than a living body. Alas! the Christian Church in some ages and sections presents a
similar sad spectacle of the deceptive form of godliness without its power. The rabbinical learning
and piety bore the same relation to the living oracles of God as sophistic scholasticism to Scriptural
theology, and Jesuitical casuistry to Christian ethics. The Rabbis spent all their energies in "fencing"
the law so as to make it inaccessible. They analyzed it to death. They surrounded it with so many
hair-splitting distinctions and refinements that the people could not see the forest for the trees or
the roof for the tiles, and mistook the shell for the kernel.^199 Thus they made void the Word of God
by the traditions of men.^200 A slavish formalism and mechanical ritualism was substituted for spiritual
piety, an ostentatious sanctimoniousness for holiness of character, scrupulous casuistry for genuine
morality, the killing letter for the life-giving spirit, and the temple of God was turned into a house
of merchandise.
The profanation and perversion of the spiritual into the carnal, and of the inward into the
outward, invaded even the holy of holies of the religion of Israel, the Messianic promises and hopes
which run like a golden thread from the protevangelium in paradise lost to the voice of John the
Baptist pointing to the Lamb of God. The idea of a spiritual Messiah who should crush the serpent’s
head and redeem Israel from the bondage of sin, was changed into the conception of a political
deliverer who should re-establish the throne of David in Jerusalem, and from that centre rule over
the Gentiles to the ends of the earth. The Jews of that time could not separate David’s Son, as they
called the Messiah, from David’s sword, sceptre and crown. Even the apostles were affected by
this false notion, and hoped to secure the chief places of honor in that great revolution; hence they
could not understand the Master when he spoke to them of his, approaching passion and death.^201
The state of public opinion concerning the Messianic expectations as set forth in the Gospels
is fully confirmed by the preceding and contemporary Jewish literature, as the Sibylline Books
(about b.c. 140), the remarkable Book of Enoch (of uncertain date, probably from b.c. 130–30),
the Psalter of Solomon (b.c. 63–48), the Assumption of Moses, Philo and Josephus, the Apocalypse
of Baruch, and the Fourth Book of Esdras.^202 In all of them the Messianic kingdom, or the kingdom
of God, is represented as an earthly paradise of the Jews, as a kingdom of this world, with Jerusalem(^199) The Rabbinical scholasticism reminds one of the admirable description of logic in Goethe’s Faust:
"Wer will was Lebendig’s erkennen und beschreiben,
Sucht erst den Geist hinauszutreiben;
Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand,
Fehlt leider! nur das geistige Band."
(^200) Matt. 15:2, 3, 6; Mark 7:3, 5, 8, 9, 13. It is significant that Christ uses the word παράδοσιςalways in a bad sense of such
human doctrines and usages as obscure and virtually set aside the sacred Scriptures. Precisely the same charge was applied by
the Reformers to the doctrines of the monks and schoolmen of their day.
(^201) Matt. 16:21-23; Mark 8:31-33; Luke 9:22, 44, 45; 18:34; 24:21 John 12:34.
(^202) See, of older works, Schöttgen, Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae tom. II. (De Messia), of modern works, Schürer, l.c. pp.
563-599, with the literature there quoted; also James Drummond, The Jewish Messiah,Lond. 1877.
A.D. 1-100.