Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/160

 to death as an impostor." He then went on to charge them boldly with the guilt of this murder, and summing up the evidences and consequences of their crime, he called on them to repent, and yield to this slain and risen Jesus the honors due to the Messiah. It was his name which, through faith in his name, had made this lame man strong, and restored him to all his bodily energies, in the presence of them all. That name, too, would be equally powerful to save them through faith, if they would turn to him, the prophet foretold by Moses, by Samuel, and all the prophets that followed them, as the restorer and leader of Israel, and through whom, as was promised to Abraham, all the families of the earth, should be blest. But first of all to them, the favored children of Abraham, did God send his prophet-son, to bless them in turning away every one of them from their iniquities.

The beautiful gate.—The learned Lightfoot has brought much deep research to bear on this point, as to the position of this gate and the true meaning of its name; yet he is obliged to announce the dubious result in the expressive words, "In bivio hic stamus," ("we here stand at a fork of the road.") The main difficulty consists in the ambiguous character of the word translated "beautiful," in Greek,, (horaian,) which may have the sense of "splendid," "beautiful," or, in better keeping with its root,, (hora,) "time," it may be made to mean the "gate of time." Now, what favors the latter derivation and translation, is the fact that there actually was, as appears from the Rabbinical writings, a gate called Hhuldah, (חולדה) probably derived from חלד (hheledh) "age," "time," "life,"—from the Arabic root خلد (khaladh) "endure," "last," so that it may mean "lasting or permanent." There were two gates of this name distinguished by the terms greater and smaller, both opening into the court of the Gentiles from the great southern porch or colonnade, called the Royal colonnade. Through these, the common way from Jerusalem and from Zion led into the temple, and through these would be the natural entrance of the apostles into it. This great royal porch, also, where such vast numbers were passing, and which afforded a convenient shelter from the weather, would be a convenient place for a cripple to post himself in.

There was, however, another gate, to which the epithet "beautiful" might with eminent justice be applied. This is thus described by Josephus. (Jew. War. book V. chap. 5, sec. 3.) "Of the gates, nine were overlaid with gold and silver,—* * * but there was one on the outside of the temple, made of Corinthian brass, which far outshone the plated and gilded ones." This is the gate to which the passage is commonly supposed to refer, and which I have mentioned as the true one in the text, without feeling at all decided on the subject, however; for I certainly do think the testimony favors the gate Huldah, and the primary sense of the word seems to be best consulted by such a construction.

The porch of Solomon.—, (stoa Solomonos.) This was the name commonly applied to the great eastern colonnade of the temple, which ran along on the top of the vast terrace which made the gigantic rampart of Mount Moriah, rising from the depth of six hundred feet out of the valley of the Kedron. (See note on page 94.) The Greek word,, (stoa,) com. trans. "porch," does not necessarily imply an entrance to a building, as is generally true of our modern porches, but was a general name for a "colonnade," which is a much better expression for its meaning, and would always convey a correct notion of it; for its primary and universal idea is that of a row of columns running along the side of a building, and leaving a broad open space between them and the wall, often so wide as to make room for a vast assemblage of people beneath the ceiling of the architrave. That this was the case in this, appears from Josephus' description given in my note on page 95, sec. 1. The stoa might be so placed as to be perfectly inaccessible from