Page:David Baron – The History of the Ten "Lost" Tribes.djvu/64

 "Jews" of all the Twelve Tribes scattered abroad, who stood (as already shown in Part II.) in closest connection with the Temple and hierarchy in Jerusalem, and were never "lost"; and the Greeks among whom they were dispersed were "Gentiles."

(e) And what can be said of such a perverted application of the question in Acts i. 6, namely, that when the disciples, immediately before Christ's ascension, asked: "Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" it was not their own nation, the "Jews," that they meant, and Jerusalem the centre of God's kingdom on earth—but some "lost" tribes in distant regions of which they knew nothing—I suppose on the same principle of Anglo-Israel interpretation when Peter, with the eleven on the Day of Pentecost, for instance, addressed the people as "Ye men of Israel," and again, "Let all the house of Israel, therefore, know assuredly that God hath made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom ye crucified" (Acts ii. 22–36)—he did not speak to the assembled multitude of "Jews" before him, but over their heads to some distant regions where there were some wandering "lost" tribes who alone were entitled to the name "Israel." But such assertions are altogether too ridiculous to be treated seriously.

The "Israel" which "was evidently in the minds of the apostles," and to whom Peter spoke, and of whom Paul wrote in that great prophetic section in his Epistle to the Romans (chaps. ix.–xi.), were the "Jews," whether of Palestine or in the "Dispersion," who are the only representatives of all the Twelve Tribes of "Israel" with whom Scripture or prophecy has any concern, and not any supposed "lost" tribes to be identified after many centuries by Anglo-Israel writers as the British and the United States.

(f) "Lastly, the final word," we are told, "must