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martes, 12 de octubre de 2021

HISTORIA DEL CRISTIANISMO CAPITULO 10

 

Chapter X 1

The history of Jewish Christianity from the seventh century to the represent day is principally a record of individual converts, who, such was the intolerance of the times, scarcely dare acknowledge their Jewish extraction for fear of persecution on the ground of sympathy towards their former co-religionists. Bitter accusations have been brought against Jewish Christians by Jewish writers, of fanatically persecuting their brethren, and it is sad to relate but honest to confess that in a great many instances these charges are true. When, however, the religious and social conditions are taken into consideration certain circumstances appear which explain many of these unhappy occurrences,

A large number of so-called converts were compulsory Christians, whom the Jews classed as Anusim, as distinguished from Meshumadim Apostates), who had been baptized in order to escape confiscation of their goods, if not the loss of their lives, or had adopted the Christian faith from motives of self interest. Such converts had their every action scrutinized by a vigilant and bigoted clergy ever on the look out to discover the least signs of relapse into Judaism; and immunity from espionage was often only purchased by a zeal for Jewish conversion and persecution of those who resisted the Christian claims. The crime of Judaizing, which sometimes meant nothing more than saying a word in favor of the Jews, was punished by heavy fines, confiscation of property, lifelong imprisonment, or death, according to the heinousness of the offence. The instinct for self-preservation may thus be pleaded in extenuation of much that Jewish people suffered at the hands of Christianized Jews.

In the case of sincere Jewish Christians, who must always be distinguished from Christianized Jews, the real motive which animated them was the desire to open the eyes of their brethren to the saving truth that Jesus is the Messiah. The efforts of these converts, however, were too often frustrated by the clergy supporting them, who with great zeal but little understanding went beyond the gentler arts of persuasion and demonstration to use harsher methods to soften obdurate hearts. Many a mission, which might have proved successful if the Jewish converts had been left alone to present their case in their own way, was turned into a massacre by ecclesiastical interference or popular malice, to the great sorrow of those who were unwittingly responsible. In the instances of definite fanaticism which have to be recorded, the harsh polemics and burnings of the Talmud, one must remember that blasphemy was a much more grievous sin in those days, that the torment of the damned in hell was a reality that made any present suffering worth while if it could secure immunity, and that cruelty in word and act was less tempered by social custom.

The Jews themselves were by no means guiltless of acts of violence, though with more excuse, especially when goaded to madness by persecution, and they frequently behaved so vengefully towards converts as to bring down retributive measures on their own heads. One can only read with shame some of their penitential prayers and their obscene libels on Jesus and his mother which they wrote and studied in secret.

As for those ghouls of Jewish race, mercifully few, who battened on their people’s misery, and used Christianity as a cloak to enrich themselves by the spoilation of their brethren, no words can express their infamy, which is as much a disgrace to Judaism as it is to Jewish Christianity.

Considering the persecutions which the Jews in Europe endured at Christian hands, and the corrupt state of the Christian religion, it is a great wonder that there were any sincere converts at all, instead of the love of Christ the Jew saw only undying hatred. The methods which were employed in his attempted conversion could not but confirm him in his detestation of so barbarous a faith.

Every passion was in arms against them. The monarchs were instigated by avarice; the nobility by the warlike spirit generated by chivalry; the clergy by bigotry; the people by all these concurrent motives. Each of the great changes which were gradually taking place in the state of the world seemed to darken the condition of this unhappy people, till the outward degradation worked inward upon their own minds. Confined to base and sordid occupations, they contracted their thoughts and feelings to their station. individual and national character must be endowed with more than ordinary greatness if it can long maintain self-estimation after it has totally lost the esteem of mankind; the despised will usually become despicable.131

There is a considerable element of truth in this statement, though it is straining the facts to suggest that the Jews ever sunk into a state of complete degradation. Surprising as it is they were able to give of their best during the dark night of persecution, and their sweetest poetry and most profound philosophy was penned under the awful conditions of their existence.

One cannot help feeling to a certain extent that the church in desiring Jewish conversion was not so much concerned that this people might share in the blessings of Christ, but that a sore and excresence on the Christian body politic might be removed. Popular superstition even had it that the Jew was possessed of an offensive odor, which disappeared on his baptism. At the best, Jewish survival was a challenge to Christian supremacy, and the war on Judaism was a war on an enemy of the State. To employ a modern American expression, the Jew was Christendom’s Public Enemy No. 1.

But the object of this history is not to record the sufferings of the Jewish people, which have been fully dealt with by many writers, yet in justice to those who might have been Christ’s but for Christendom, one cannot omit in the course of the narrative some account of Christian methods of propaganda among the Jews.

One may say indeed that a reference to these methods is essential to the history; for the story of Jewish Christianity is almost inextricably intertwined with that of the Jewish people. It is a curious kind of history with little of logical sequence; a stepping from century to century and from place to place through all the lands of Israel’s dispersion, examining the archives for evidence of Jewish believers in Jesus Christ, and noting the part they played in their day and generation. Occasionally one lights on a family or group that offers a more protracted picture, a beacon that burns a little longer than others before it is swallowed up in the surrounding darkness. Yet a beacon is a static thing, and our chain of believing Israelites is marching with the centuries, a procession of torchbearers.

For many hundreds of years, long anterior even to the fateful fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, a Jewish population had been building up in the great western peninsular of Spain. The country had suffered in the early fifth century the ruthless invasion of the barbarian hordes that swept across Europe, vandals, Alani and Suevi, but by A.D. 429 the two first had retired to Africa and the last had been entirely subdued by the Visigoth Theodoric in 456. Although nominally the reoccupation of Spain was for the Roman emperor, it was not long before the Visigoths had established a kingdom free from any allegiance to Rome. Jewish non-resistance to the invaders had preserved them from some of the worst severities of the struggle, and under the earlier Visigothic kings who favored the Arian interpretation of Christianity they multiplied and prospered. A change took place with the adoption by a later king Recared of the Nicene Creed, and it was in this reign that the first laws adverse to the Jews were passed, A.D. 589.

But these decrees were as nothing compared with what was to follow twenty-five years later. Inspired by the Byzantine Emperor, Heraclius, the compulsory conversion of all the Jews in the Visigothic kingdom was decreed by King Sisebut in A.D. 614. The proclamation, as preserved in the Spanish code Fuero Jusgo, runs as follows:

Whereas Truth itself instructs us to ask, and to knock, assuring us that the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence: it cannot be doubted that whosoever fails to approach it with an ardent desire, is a despiser of the proffered grace.

Wherefore, if any of those Jews as yet unbaptized, shall delay to be himself baptized, or neglect to send his children and slaves to the priest for baptism while it is offered, thus abiding without the grace of baptism, for the space of one year from the issue of this decree: every such transgressor, wherever found, shall be stripped, and shall suffer one hundred lashes, as likewise the due penalty of exile: his goods shall be forfeit to the king; and in order that his life may be the more painful, if unamended. such goods shall become the perpetual property of those on whom the king shall bestow them.

The decree fell like a bombshell on the Jewish communities, and even a famous contemporary churchman, St. Isidore of Seville, felt that the king had exceeded his duties. “Sisebut,” he wrote, “by urging the Jews into Christianity, had indeed ‘a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.’ For he forcibly compelled those whom he should rather have persuaded by arguments of the faith.”132

The protests of the Jews were in vain. The author of the Shevet Yehudah (The Scepter of Judah) has given an argument put forward by one of the learned representatives. He thus addressed the king:

It is written in our Law, that Israel formerly despised the great gift of God, the land flowing with milk and honey. I ask, O king, what should be the penalty of those who despise the gift of God? The king replied: “That too is wisely stated in your law; the loss of what they despise. See then, O king,” said the rabbi, “to what thou hast said. Thou hast offered us in baptism a life everlasting. Be then the penalty for its neglect the loss of that blessing.” But the king answered, “Compulsion is unjust in matters concerning the body, and that goodly land related to the body; but in things spiritual, it is proper, just as a child is coerced in its learning.”

The wholesale baptism of the Jews followed. Some fleeing for refuge to the neighboring kingdom of the Franks, found to their horror and distress that a similar decree had been enacted there by the reigning monarch, King Dagobert.

Thus was begun that pernicious policy which peopled Spain and Portugal, except for the interval of Moorish rule, with crypto-Jews down to the present day. Bound to Christianity by baptismal water, their faith had not more substance than water. Outwardly conforming to the riles of the Church, they led a life of painful and fearful hypocrisy. No less than 90,000 Jews are said to have submitted to Sisebut’s Christening.

Nineteen years later, when the Gothic throne was seized by Sisenand with the help of the Franks, there was a short respite from compulsory conversion. At the fourth Council of Toledo it was decreed:

Concerning Jews, this holy synod has resolved to compel no one hereafter to accept our faith. For God has mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will, he hardeneth: and such persons are not saved without consent, but willingly, that the attribute of justice may be kept secure. For as man by his own freewill, in yielding to the serpent, did perish; so when the grace of God doth call, each man is saved in believing, by the conversion of his own mind. Therefore, they are not to be urged by constraint, but persuaded through the free faculty of the will into conversion.

Respecting those already forced into Christianity, as was done in the time of the most religious prince Sisebut, since it is evident that they have been partakers in the Divine sacraments, have received the grace of baptism, have been anointed with the chrism, and have received the body and blood of our Lord, it is right that these be obliged to retain the faith which, although under compulsion and necessity, still they have undertaken, lest the name of God be blasphemed, and the faith which they have assumed be accounted worthless and despicable.133

We have given this Canon in full, but there are others of the same Council from which extracts must be quoted, for it is only in the very words of these old decrees that we can obtain a true historical insight into the workings of the minds of the creators.

Many who were formerly exalted to the Christian faith, are now known not only in blasphemy against Christ to perpetrate Jewish rites, but have even dared to practise the abomination of circumcision…. Transgressors after this sort, being apprehended by authority of the prelates, shall be recalled to the true worship according to Christian doctrine: so that those whom their own will cannot amend, may be coerced by sacerdotal correction.134

We decree that the sons and daughters of Jews are to be separated from their parents, lest they likewise be involved in their errors.135

Let there be no further communion of Jews who have been transferred to the Christian faith, with such as adhere to their ancient rites; lest perchance, by mingling with them, they be subverted.136

Jews having Christian wives, are to be admonished by the bishop of their diocese, that if

they desire to abide with them, they must become Christian; and if, being so admonished, they refuse to obey, they shall be separated.137

Jews who were formerly Christian, but are now deniers of the faith in Christ. are not to be admitted in evidence at law, although they declare themselves Christians.138

Can testimony be clearer as to what was the aim of these enactments? Judaism and the very name of Jew was an abomination, and must be rooted out of any Christian country. Wives are to be separated from husbands, children from parents, baptized Jew from obdurate Jew. What room was there here for true acceptance of Christ? Hearts broken with grief. Minds tortured with suffering. If Christ was incarnate anywhere, surely it was in the souls of those who stoutly resisted him. But perhaps it was not Christ, but another in the shape of the outraged Nazarene.

One remembers Brownings’s passionate lines:

“Thou! if thou wast He. who at mid-watch came, By the starlight, naming a dubious name!

And if, too heavy with sleep -- too rash With fear -- O Thou, if that martyr-gash Fell on Thee coming to take thine own,

And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne -- “Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.

But, the Judgment over, join sides with us! Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,

Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed! Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!

“We withstood Christ then! Be mindful how At least we withstand Barabas now!”139

 

 

 

 

Chapter XX 1

There could be no doubt that Rabinowitz and his movement had caused a fluttering in Christian circles. Here was no imposing of the Christian faith on Jews from without, but an adoption, or rather reclamation, of Christianity by Jews from within. The churches could stand by, but they could not participate in this domestic matter. It was clear that Jesus must be something more to the Jew than he could be to the Gentile, for he was the legal King of Israel. It was like watching the growth of a royalist party within an old-established republic.

The same spirit which led Theodore Herzel to seek the solution of the Jewish problem in a revived Jewish State had led Joseph Rabinowitz to seek a solution in a Jewish divinely controlled Kingdom, with Jesus as the sovereign. In both cases it was the manifestation of anti- semitism that was the influential cause. It must be remembered that the New Testament was a sealed book to thousands of Jews, and never having read it they judged the book by the deeds of those who claimed to be bound by its teaching. It was in desperation that they turned to it now to find the exact authority which lay behind the pogroms and blood-libels. The situation is exemplified by the experience of Rabbi I. Lichtenstein, district rabbi of Tapio-Szele in Hungary. In a pamphlet called Judenspiegel he wrote:

I used to think that Christ was the plague and curse of the Jews, the origin and promoter of our sorrow and persecution. In this conviction I grew to years of manhood, and still cherishing it I became old. I knew no difference between true, and merely nominal Christianity; of the fountain head of Christianity itself I knew nothing. Strangely enough, it was the horrible Tisza-Eszlar blood accusation which first drew me to read the New Testament. This trial brought from their lurking- places all the enemies of the Jews, and once again, as in olden times, the cry reechoed, “Death to the Jew!” The frenzy was excessive, and among the ringleaders were many who used the name of Christ and his doctrine as a cloak to cover their abominable doings. These wicked practices of men, wearing the name of Christ only to further their evil dangers, aroused the indignation of the true Christians, who, with pen on fire and warning voices, denounced the lying rage of the anti- semites. In articles written by the latter in defence of the Jews, I often met with passages where Christ was spoken of as he who brings joy to man, the Prince of Peace, and the Redeemer, and his Gospel was extolled as a message of love and life to all people. I was surprised, and, scarcely trusting my eyes, I took a New Testament out of its hidden corner; a book which some forty years ago I had in vexation taken from a Jewish teacher, and I began to turn over its leaves and to read. How can I express the impression which I then received? Not the half had been told me of the greatness, power, and glory of this book. formerly a sealed book to me. All seemed so new to me, and yet it did me good like the sight of an old friend, who has laid side his dusty, travel- worn garments, and appears in festal attire.

In another pamphlet Judenthum und Christenthtum he says:

A sudden glory, a light, flashed through my soul. I looked for thorns, and gathered roses: I discovered pearls instead of pebbles; instead of hatred, love; instead of vengeance, forgiveness; instead of bondage, freedom; instead of pride, humility; instead of enmity, conciliation; instead of death, lire, salvation, resurrection, and heavenly treasure.

Rabbi Lichtenstein began to quote the New Testament from his pulpit to the scandal of some of his congregants, who accused him to the chief rabbi of Budapest of heterodoxy. The outcome was that Rabbi Lichtenstein admitted his faith in Christ, and had to resign his office. His voice could not be stilled, however, and he went on preaching the amazing truth that had been revealed to him. He would not be baptized, and remained with the Jewish community until his death at the advanced age of eighty-five, on October 16, 1909.

Lichtenstein and Rabinowitz were no isolated cases: they had their contemporaries and their immediate successors; they were, indeed, representative of an entirely new generation of Jewish Christians more on the pattern of the original Nazarenes. The position of these New Covenant Jews raised an acute problem in the Christian Church. They would not be absorbed, they would not be assimilated. They claimed the right as Jews to maintain the name and customs of their race. They held that they had not forsaken Judaism, but crowned it with Jesus, the chief corner stone. Understanding Christians welcomed and sympathized with the manifestation: it answered to their own scriptural convictions that Israel would return to its allegiance with resultant revival of true faith among all believers. They looked to the Jewish Christians to proclaim a purer Christianity, uninfluenced by the doctrinal controversies which had rent the Catholic Church. Others, fearful that an independent reading of the New Testament by the Jews, untutored by Gentile traditional interpretations, would undermine the structure of their faith, raised a loud cry of Ebionitism. If Jewish Christianity would not submit to be poured into their peculiar denominational mould, they were determined to wreck it by branding it as a heresy. The liberty which the apostle Paul had won for the Gentiles they were unwilling to grant to the Jews. A particularly insistent evangelical group raised the standard of what they called “dispensational truth” in an effort to prove that until the second advent of Jesus it was impossible for the Jewish people to be converted, and therefore that any attempt to found a separate national Jewish Christian communion was outside of the Divine Plan, and foredoomed to failure.

On this ‘Ebionite” issue the battle was joined. The old theology apportioned the Biblical blessings to the Church and left the curses to the Jews. One cannot help feeling that much of Gentile Christian anxiety was now lest the tables should be turned, and that Jacob would somehow trick Laban out of his birthright of the Promised Land and leave him only the barren Mount Seir. Jewish Christianity would have both the Law and the Promises and Gentile Christianity would be relegated to the position of the poor relation accepting the spiritual charity of Israel.

One very vital aspect of the situation the Gentile Christians entirely ignored, and that was the injury they were doing to the simple enthusiastic faith of the Jewish Christians by embroiling them in their doctrinal controversies. Many a Jewish convert entered the Church in the naive belief that all Christians were brethren. They had no prior knowledge of the subtler denominational distinctions, and the discovery was a grave shock to their idealism. Even worse,  they frequently found that they were not wanted in the Church, and were frozen out by ill- disguised dislike. The Jewish temperament, so susceptible to atmospheric feeling, wilted with the chill of Christian austerity. The convert, who had dared all for Christ’s sake, and expected the warmth of his new brethren to solace him for what he had lost, was subjected to the torture of a loneliness which only the deepest faith could support. With a wry smile the Jewish Christians touched the limp hand of charity, shuddering inwardly at the contact. Gladly do we admit that his bitter experience was not

161

universal. There were Gentile Christians who were friends of Israel in deed as well as in name, and who poured themselves out in love to bring comfort to the stranger. These received their reward in a very passion of gratitude and responsive affection.

Among the mistakes of the Church in dealing with Jewish Christians has been a too ready action on the principle that all converts should of necessity become missionaries to their own people, whether they were qualified for this work or otherwise. The desire for witness is always strong among those who have found a great truth, which appears to them to give form and meaning to chaotic and inexplicable circumstances: it springs mainly from a high-souled and wholly good desire to share the blessings we enjoy with others less fortunate. Missionary service often however, works a subtle change in motive and transforms a beneficent instinct into something that partakes of spiritual arrogance and in time becomes a quite indefensible mania for proselytism. Very few, and only those who live in the closest contact with God, are able to resist this process. How utterly true are the words of Paul: “And how shall they preach, except they be sent?”

The situation has been particularly difficult for those Jewish Christians whose former life has been spent in enclosed Jewish surroundings. By accepting Christ they have not only been cast out of their homes, but out of their places of employment. Some have been scholars and knew no trade. In any case, their Jewishness made engagement by a Gentile employer difficult. The Mission door opened up a way not only of keeping body and soul together, but of expressing devotion to Christ in practical service. It has only been realized later that service to Christ has become servitude to a Committee, and to break away meant untold hardship not only to self but to wife and children, which family love — so strong in the Jew — dare not contemplate. Some Missions have been wiser than to insist on the convert becoming a missionary, when he has had no vocation, and they have established trade training-schools and workshops with a view to making him self-supporting and independent. Such efforts are all to the good, but the relief is still small, having no regard to the growing numbers of Jews who are finding their spiritual peace in following their Messiah. It is plain that the real solution to the problem can only come when Jewish prejudice has sufficiently abated, and the much vaunted Jewish tolerance is no longer an impressive but quite unsubstantial argument in contrasting Christianity with Judaism, but is real and and manly enough to give liberty of conscience to Jewish Christians and so to banish forever the pain of the broken family circle. One knows that the root cause is the Jewish fear of assimilation, which sees in the cutting off of the offending member the only means of safeguarding the integrity of the race. When this fear is removed by the superlative Jewishness attached to Jewish Christianity, then it is to be anticipated that a better state of affairs will result.


2

At a series of missionary conferences from the close of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 the Ebionite theme recurred again and again and was dealt with according to the convictions of the various speakers.

Mark John Levy, a sturdy advocate of the loyal Jewish Christian position and founder of the Christian Jews’ Patriotic Alliance, succeeded in bringing the subject before the British Hebrew Christian Alliance in the ‘nineties; but his resolution was “tabled” undoubtedly because of its supposed danger to the servants of the missionary societies. Dr. Rosedale, the president, actually confessed to Levy that “The Hebrew Christian missionaries are dependent on the Gentile Christians for support and they cannot afford in justice to their families to risk the charge of Judaizing.”

Elsewhere others were raising the standard of Jewish Christian independence; in Galatia there was Christian Theodore Lucky: in Hamburg Paulus Grun through the columns of his magazine Ephratha, organ of the Jewish Christian Association, and again in South Africa Philip Cohen, who edited The Messianic Jew for the Jewish messianic Movement. Cohen gives three cogent reasons for a change of attitude on the part of Jewish Christians:

1          Deep love to our own nation, to its history and its traditions.

2          A deep conviction that we who are Hebrew Christians can best serve the cause of Christ by demonstrating to our people that we still belong to them.

3          The conviction that Jewish Christianity can only impress the Jewish mind by taking on a distinctively Jewish coloring.

Lucky in an impassioned speech at a Jewish Christian Conference in Stanislau in 1903


stated:

I do not demand from my fellow-believers the complete and strict observance of all Jewish customs at any price. Here is a brother who says, “We live in exile and are not our own masters, and though I would like to keep the entire ceremonial law, and all the more because I am a disciple of Jesus, I cannot do it. I am a soldier and must eat barrack fare. I must rest on Sunday and work on the Sabbath for the sake of by daily bread.” Well, he is my brother nevertheless. I do not judge his conscience, nor is he to let me be a conscience to him in the matter of meals, or of the Sabbath, all of which are only a shadow of that of which we have the substance in Christ. On the other hand, another says, “Because I believe in Christ therefore I give up the Sabbath.” Well, he is no less acceptable to God on that account, and I do not despise him for it nor condemn him. But I am sorry for him, and it hurts me to the depth of my heart because he too is a child of Israel and should help us to build up the walls of Jerusalem.

Mark Levy, in 1907. addressed an appeal to the General Assembly of the Episcopal Church of the United States, in which he pleaded for the restoration of the original Hebrew Christian branch of the Church, and for the public proclamation of the Scriptural truth.


That the Church does not require its Jewish members to forsake their own people, but leaves them in their Christ-given liberty to have their children circumcised according to God’s covenant with Abraham, should they so desire, and to observe all the other customs inherited from their fathers, provided it be clearly understood that neither Jew nor Gentile can be saved through the works of the Law, but solely through the sacrifice and atonement of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

The General Assembly responded with a resolution in that sense, retaining the exact words that Levy had used.

Neither were there wanting Gentile Christians who fully appreciated the need for the establishment of a revived Jewish Christian communion. That famous Hebraist, the late Canon

A.  H. Box, said at the London Missionary Conference of 1903:

I venture to beseech Jewish Christians to take this question into their prayerful consideration. I know full well that many of them are affectionately attached to Gentile Christian communities, and that it will be fairly difficult to find a common basis. But I would ask them at least to set this unity before them as their goal. And should a homogeneous Hebrew Christian Church be formed centering round a liturgy which is informed with a certain adaptation to the national and historic Jewish spirit, may those who cannot give their full and hearty allegiance to such a Church at least refrain from putting hindrances in the way of its free development.

The Rev. Th. Lindhagen at the International Jewish Missionary Conference at Stockholm in 1911 rightly stated:

It cannot be denied that up to now the relation of the Jewish Christians to their people has been far from altogether satisfactory. The reproaches which have been levelled against them and against the missionaries who work among them are unfortunately only too well grounded. It is quite true that there are Jewish Christians and missionaries to the Jews who make an altogether vicious use of Paul’s word to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek.” The apostle cannot have meant these words as advocating the annihilation of their nationality …. It is equally true that the Gentile Church has helped to estrange Jewish Christians from their own people through calling them “proselytes.” an unscriptural term in direct opposition to the pronouncements of Paul in Romans 11, where he speaks of the Jews as the natural branches, and the Gentiles as branches of a wild olive which had been grafted on to the good tree against all natural tendency. In this respect a thorough-going change of policy and practice is necessary. “I am verily a man which am a Jew, a Hebrew of the Hebrews” — there is much need for these words to be heard and spoken once more without shame among our Jewish Christian brethren. That the ideal of an autonomous Jewish Christian Church is closely connected with these aspiration regarding the right attitude of Hebrew Christians to their people is self-evident.

So the struggle went on, the pangs which heralded the coming birth of a new Jewish Christianity. The fact that the issue was so widely discussed, and that feeling ran so high, was in


itself sufficient indication that no mere academic question was being dealt with, but that there was a definite quickening, a separate Jewish Christian consciousness was taking form.

Then came the World War, and for a time the tribulation of Jewish Christianity was

submerged in the tribulation of the nations. Yet the war itself was to be linked with this strange history in the mysterious purposes of God.


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