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For, in reality, no book in the New Testament collection would so completely have shocked the prejudices of the Johannine party. John's own views are well known to us from the Apocalypse. John was the most enthusiastic of millenarians and the most narrow and rigid of Judaizers. In his antagonism to the Pauline innovations he went farther than Peter himself.
The Inquisition, at least, did not proceed against the Jews, but against the Judaizers; that is, against those who, after being converted to Christianity, relapsed into their errors, and added sacrilege to their apostasy by the external profession of a creed which they detested in secret, and which they profaned by the exercise of their old religion.
When Paul heard what had happened in Galatia, he was very indignant and wrote the Epistle to the Galatians simply for the purpose of exposing the utter error of these Judaizers. But in addition to this proof of the error of the Judaizers, Paul appeals to their own personal experience.
Of most of these the name alone remains: such are the Martinovtsy, the Strigolniki, the Judaizers, and so on. All these sects were dying away when the Raskol broke out; and it absorbed all the vague, embryonic beliefs floating in the popular mind.
It was just as when modern Judaizers come around and get after young converts and tell them that in addition to believing in Jesus Christ, they must keep the Mosaic Seventh Day Sabbath, or they cannot be saved. This is simply the old controversy breaking out at a new point.
If we recollect the negotiations which took place with respect to the noisy affair of the claims of the Cortes of Aragon, we shall see to which side the court of Rome leaned. As we are speaking of intolerance with regard to the Judaizers, let us say a few words as to the disposition of Luther toward the Jews.
He is speaking in the opening sentence of the Judaizers of the time of St. Paul:
According to all appearances, if the apostate monk had found himself in the place of Torquemada, the Judaizers would not have been in a better position. What, then, was the system advised by Luther, according to Seckendorff, one of his apologists?
Dionysius had contained nothing but the derision and confutation of all we have just read, it is certain that he doth in no way concern himself with the harmless Millennarians, but with the Jews and Judaizers. It is to be clearly seen that Dionysius had nothing in his eye, but the ridiculous excesses of Nepos, and his peculiar tenets upon circumcision, &c.
It is also true that both these great apostles behaved quite inconsistently, Peter at Antioch, and Paul afterwards at Jerusalem, when he consented to the propositions of the Judaizers, and burdened himself with certain Jewish observances in a vain attempt to conciliate some of the weaker brethren.
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