Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/847

Rh P B P B 823 tianity from being naturalized in the world, and to bring the churches once more under the exclusive guidance of the Spirit and His charismata. The critical situation thus arising spread in the course of a few decades over most of the provincial churches. The necessity of resisting the inexorable demands of the prophets led to the introduction of new rules for distinguishing true and false prophets. No prophet, it was declared, could speak in ecstasy, that was devilish ; further, only false prophets accepted gifts. Both canons were innovations, designed to strike a fatal blow at prophecy and the church organization re-established by the prophets in Asia, the bishops not being quite pre pared to declare boldly that the church had no further need of prophets. But the prophets would not have been suppressed by their new methods of judging them alone. A much more important circumstance was the rise of a new theory, according to which all divine revelations were summed up in the apostles or in their writings. It was now taught that prophecy in general was a peculiarity of the Old Testament (&quot;lex et prophetaj usque ad Johannem &quot;) ; that in the new covenant God had spoken only through apostles ; that the whole word of God so far as binding on the church was contained in the apostolic record the New Testament ; l and that, consequently, the church neither required nor could acknowledge new revelations, or even instructions, through prophets. The revolution which this theory gradually brought about is shown in the trans formation of the religious, enthusiastic organization of the church into a legal and political constitution. A great many things had to be sacrificed to this, and amongst others the old prophets. The strictly enforced episcopal constitution, the creation of a clerical order, and the for mation of the New Testament canon accomplished the overthrow of the prophets. Instead of the old formula, &quot; God continually confers on the church apostles, prophets, and teachers,&quot; the word now was &quot;The church is founded in the (written) word of the prophets (i.e., the Old-Testa ment prophets) and the apostles (viz., the twelve and Paul).&quot; After the beginning of the 3d century there were still no doubt men under the control of the hierarchy who experienced the prophetic ecstasy, or clerics like Cyprian who professed to have received special directions from God ; but prophets by vocation no longer existed, and these sporadic utterances were in no sense placed on a level with the contents of the sacred Scriptures. See Biickmann, &quot; Ueber die Wunderkrai te bei den ersten Christen und ihr Erloschen,&quot; in the Ztsclir. f. d. ges. luther. Thcol, u. Kirchf,, 1878, p. 216-255 (learned but utterly uncritical) ; Bonwetsch, &quot;Die Prophetic im apostol. un.l nachapostol. Zeitalter,&quot; in the Ztschr. f. kirchl. IVissensch. u. kirchl. Lcben, 1884, part 8, p. 408 sq., part 9, p. 460 sq. ; Harnack, Die Lchre der zwolf Apostel, 1884, p. 93-137. (A. HA.) PROSELYTE (Trpoo-r/Auros) is the term most frequently adopted by the Septuagint, especially in legal passages, to represent the Hebrew -a The ger, or more fully ger t j toshdb, is not any &quot; stranger &quot; but a stranger dwelling in a Hebrew community and enjoying a certain measure of protection. In old time at least the position of such a stranger was no doubt very insecure, for he had no strong kinsmen to take his part, and so, like the widow and orphan, with whom many passages of the Old Testament associate him, he was liable to oppression. The law as well as the prophets commend him to the humane regard of his neighbours, but it would have been quite foreign to antique ideas to grant him equal rights (see Lev. xxv. 45 ; Deut. xxiii. 20). Like the Arabic jar, therefore (whose name is at bottom the same), he must have gene rally sought to attach himself as a client to some indi vidual or community able to protect him, and so we must 1 The Apocalypse of John was received into it, not as the work of a prophet, but as that of au apostle. understand the metaphor in passages like Ps. xv. 1, xxxix. 12. In the old Hebrew kingdom the word ger had a civil not a religious significance, and it would almost seem that a poor Israelite without inheritance might sink to this position, which indeed is scarcely distinguishable from that of the Levite in Jud. xvii. 8, who went forth to sojourn (gur) where he might find a place. The exile and the restoration made a change in this as in all other aspects of Hebrew society. On the one hand Ezekiel xlvii. 22 and Isa. xiv. 1 contemplate that the restored nation shall be recruited by strangers who are received on equal terms ; but, as the Jews returned not as an inde pendent nation but as a distinct religious community, this implies especially that the sons of the stranger, by joining Israel, observing the Sabbath, and holding fast to Jehovah s covenant, may gain admission to all the privi leges of the temple and its worship. So it is put in Isa. Ivi. 6, 7 in marked contrast to the restrictions laid down in Deut. xxiii. 3, 7 sq. That the views of the prophets had practical issue cannot be doubted ; even the foreign Nethi- nim in the second temple were rapidly transformed not merely into good Israelites but into Levites. The condi tion of admission to the full privileges of an Israelite, in particular to the passover, is, according to the Priestly Code (Exod. xii. 48 ; Numb. ix. 14), circumcision,- to which the later Jewish usage adds lustration by immer sion in water (baptism, t blld) and the presentation of a sacrifice (korban). The immersion, about which there has been a good deal of controversy, some maintaining that it came into use later than Christian baptism, was really a necessary act for one who had been previously unclean, and may be held to be involved in the general Pentateuchal law of ceremonial washings. The later technical name for a heathen who thus joined the theo cracy was pl^n &quot;IJ, &quot;proselyte of righteousness.&quot; The free admission of foreigners to the Jewish church is a mark of the universalistic tendency which, in spite of all the narrownesses of Judaism under the law, accom panied the break-up of the old national system. On the other hand the so-called Law of Holiness (later than Ezekiel but earlier than the Priestly Code), which is contained in Lev. xvii. sq., presents a different line of transition from the purely civil to the religious meaning of ger. In these laws, which proceed throughout on the principle that Israel, and all that has to do with Israel, must be regu lated by regard to formal holiness, it is demanded that certain rules shall be enforced not only on Israelites proper but on strangers sojourning in their land. They are not to eat blood (xvii. 10), commit incest (xviii. 26), sacrifice to Moloch (xx. 2), or blaspheme Jehovah (xxiv. 16); and for murder and other crimes they are to be answerable to the Hebrew authorities according to Hebrew law (xxiv. 22). These rules are in substance the third being ex tended to a prohibition of idolatry generally the &quot;Noachic laws&quot; to which in later usage a man or woman might pro mise to conform and thereby, without becoming a regular member of the theocracy, be recognized as a &quot; proselyte of the gate,&quot; i.e., &quot;within the gates of Israel.&quot; What the Law of Holiness proposed to enforce became in fact the theocracy not possessing political power over strangers a voluntary obligation assumed by those &quot; who worshipped God&quot; (o-e/So /Aej/ot TOV 6(6v, Acts xiii. 50, xvi. 14, xvii. 4, 17, xviii. 7 in E.V. often rendered &quot;devout&quot;). The proselytizing zeal of the Jews is spoken of in Mat. xxiii. 15, and by many Greek and Latin writers. Up to the time of Hadrian it was facilitated by the favour gene rally extended to the Jews by the Roman emperors ; and not only on Semitic soil, as at Damascus, where Josephus tells us that most of the women were proselytes, but