Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/80

Rh curing the sick on the Sabbath, in ridiculous contrast. In the fourth Gospel he goes further, and actually denies the alleged ground for the original institution of the Sabbath; he denies that God had ever ceased from his work, or rested: "My Father worketh hitherto." I However, in effecting these cures he committed a capital offence; the Pharisees so regarded it, and took measures to insure his punishment. It does not appear that they were illegal measures. It is probable they took regular and legal means to bring him to condign punishment as a Sabbath-breaker. He escaped by flight.

Such was the Sabbath with the Hebrews, such the recorded opinion of Jesus concerning it. There were also other days in which labour was forbidden, but with them we have nothing to do at present. Jesus taught piety and goodness without the Hebrew limitations; of course, then, the new wine of Christianity could not be put into the old bottles of the Jews. Their fast days and Sabbath days, their rites and forms, were not for him.

Now, not long after the death of Christ his followers became gradually divided into two parties. First, there were the Jewish Christians; that was the oldest portion, the old school of Christians. They are mentioned in ecclesiastical history as the Ebionites, Nazarines, and under yet other names. Peter and James were the great men in that division of the early Christians. Matthew, and the author of the Gospel according to the Hebrews, were their evangelists. The church at Jerusalem was their stronghold. They kept the whole Hebrew law; all its burdensome ritual, its circumcision and its sacrifices, its new-moon days and its full-moon days, Sabbath, fasts, and feasts; the first fifteen bishops of the church at Jerusalem were circumcised Jews. It seems to me they misunderstood Jesus fatally; counting him nothing but the Messiah of the Old Testament, and Christianity, therefore, nothing but Judaism brightened up and restored to its original purity.

I have often mentioned how strongly Matthew, taking him for the author of the first Gospel, favours this way of thinking. He represents Jesus as commanding his dis-