whatever obscurity may hang over its local position, its spiritual features stand out with vivid clearness. We have in the Epistle to the Hebrews a picture of early Christian life such as is drawn in detail nowhere else (compare 3 John), and which still, as we must see, represents a necessary phase in the growth of the Church. The first enthusiasm and the first hope had, as we shall notice later, passed away. Believers began to reckon loss and gain. Some were inclined to overrate the loss; and we learn elsewhere that dark clouds hung over the close of the apostolic age. Compare 2 Tim. 1:15; Apoc. 2, 3; 2 Pet. 3:1 ff.; 1 John 2:18 ff.
We might have expected it to be otherwise, and we do in fact unconsciously clothe the first centuries in light. But in this Letter the reality of imperfection meets us; and in the very sadness of the portraiture we feel with fresh force that Christianity is historical, entering into life and subject to the common influences of life.
And more than this: we learn from this Epistle that the early difficulties of Churches were not dealt with tentatively, as if the truth were the result of the free conflict of thought. The false view was met at once by the corresponding lesson. Error called out the decisive teaching but it had no part in creating it.
The phase of feeling traced in the Epistle has been spoken of as a necessary one in the development of Christian life. It is not difficult to see how this was so. Those who suffered in the trial were Jews; and the narrative of the Acts shews plainly with what loyal devotion the first believers from among the Jews observed the Law. Even at a later date St Paul before the Sanhedrin claimed to be a true Jew. For a time this fellowship of the Church and Synagogue was allowed on both sides. Little by little the growth of the Gentile element in the Church excited the active hostility of the Jews against the whole body of Christians, as it troubled the Jewish converts themselves. This hostility could not fail to be intensified in Palestine by the spread of aggressive nationalism there shortly before the outbreak of the Jewish war (comp. Jos.
de B. J.
2.23, 29 ff.; 4:11ff.); and it is not unlikely that the solemn cursing of the heretics (
Mini<m
) in the Synagogues, which became an established custom after the fall of Jerusalem (Weber
Altsynag. Theol.
147
f.), may have begun from that time (comp. Just. M.
Dial.
16 and Otto's note; Epiph.
Haer.
29.9, i. p. 124).
Meanwhile the Jewish converts had had ample time for realising the true relations of Christianity and Judaism. Devotion to Levitical ritual was no longer innocent, if it obscured the characteristic teaching of the Gospel. The position which rightly belonged to young and immature Christians was unsuited to those who ought to have reached the fulness of truth (Heb. 5:11 ff.). Men who won praise for their faith and constancy at the beginning of a generation which was emphatically a period of transition, might well deserve blame and stand in peril of apostasy, if at the end of it they simply remained where they had been at first. When as yet the national unbelief of the Jews was undeclared, it was not possible to foresee that the coming of Christ would bring the overthrow of the old order. The approaching catastrophe was not realised in the earlier apostolic writings. In the Epistle to the Hebrews it is shewn to be imminent. In the Gospel and Epistles of St John it is, as it were, lost in the fulness of the life of the Church.