sacred psalmist, Isaiah, the evangelist among the prophets, Elijah the Tishbite, who reappeared
with Moses on the Mount of Transfiguration to do homage to Jesus, and John the Baptist, the
impersonation of the whole Old Testament, are the most conspicuous links in the golden chain of
the ancient revelation.
The outward circumstances and the moral and religious condition of the Jews at the birth
of Christ would indeed seem at first and on the whole to be in glaring contradiction with their divine
destiny. But, in the first place, their very degeneracy proved the need of divine help. In the second
place, the redemption through Christ appeared by contrast in the greater glory, as a creative act of
God. And finally, amidst the mass of corruption, as a preventive of putrefaction, lived the succession
of the true children of Abraham, longing for the salvation of Israel, and ready to embrace Jesus of
Nazareth as the promised Messiah and Saviour of the world.
Since the conquest of Jerusalem by Pompey, b.c. 63 (the year made memorable by the
consulship of Cicero. the conspiracy of Catiline, and the birth of Caesar Augustus), the Jews had
been subject to the heathen Romans, who heartlessly governed them by the Idumean Herod and
his sons, and afterwards by procurators. Under this hated yoke their Messianic hopes were powerfully
raised, but carnally distorted. They longed chiefly for a political deliverer, who should restore the
temporal dominion of David on a still more splendid scale; and they were offended with the servant
form of Jesus, and with his spiritual kingdom. Their morals were outwardly far better than those
of the heathen; but under the garb of strict obedience to their law, they concealed great corruption.
They are pictured in the New Testament as a stiff-necked, ungrateful, and impenitent race, the seed
of the serpent, a generation of vipers. Their own priest and historian, Josephus, who generally
endeavored to present his countrymen to the Greeks and Romans in the most favorable light,
describes them as at that time a debased and wicked people, well deserving their fearful punishment
in the destruction of Jerusalem.
As to religion, the Jews, especially after the Babylonish captivity, adhered most tenaciously
to the letter of the law, and to their traditions and ceremonies, but without knowing the spirit and
power of the Scriptures. They cherished a bigoted horror of the heathen, and were therefore despised
and hated by them as misanthropic, though by their judgment, industry, and tact, they were able to
gain wealth and consideration in all the larger cities of the Roman empire.
After the time of the Maccabees (b.c. 150), they fell into three mutually hostile sects or
parties, which respectively represent the three tendencies of formalism, skepticism, and mysticism;
all indicating the approaching dissolution of the old religion and the dawn of the new. We may
compare them to the three prevailing schools of Greek philosophy—the Stoic, the Epicurean, and
the Platonic, and also to the three sects of Mohammedanism—the Sunnis, who are traditionalists,
the Sheas, who adhere to the Koran, and the Sufis or mystics, who seek true religion in "internal
divine sensation."- The Pharisees, the "separate,"^56 were, so to speak, the Jewish Stoics. They represented
the traditional orthodoxy and stiff formalism, the legal self-righteousness and the fanatical bigotry
of Judaism. They had most influence with the people and the women, and controlled the public
worship. They confounded piety with theoretical orthodoxy. They overloaded the holy Scriptures
(^56) From. שׁרַפָּ They were separated from ordinary persons and all foreign and contaminating influences by the supposed
correctness of their creed and the superior holiness of their life. Ewald (IV. 482): "Pharisäer bezeichnetGesonderteoderBesondere,
nämlich Leute die vor andern durch Frömmigkeit auszgezeichnet und gleichsam mehr oder heiliger als andere sein wollen.
A.D. 1-100.