Were the Jews Trinitarians, before the coming of Christ? I know of no satisfactory evidence of this fact. All the efforts to prove it have ended in mere appeals to cabalizing Jews, who lived long after the New Testament was written. . . . . . . If it be true, as some assert, that the Jews of our Saviour’s time, before they became Christians, were accustomed to believe that their Messiah was to be a divine person, how can it be accounted for, that, after the first generation of Christians among them, the great body of Jewish converts in Palestine, and many elsewhere, became Ebionites, the peculiarity of whose opinion was a denial of the divine nature of that Saviour whom they professed to honor? If all the tendency of their education and traditional belief had been as stated above, this fact seems to be altogether unaccountable. It speaks more than volumes of mere reasoning from conjecture, or from the declarations of Rabbis living long after the Christian era had commenced; of which we find such striking examples in P. ALLIX’s learned book on ancient Jewish opinions. . . . How much the pious Jews of ancient times actually deduced from such passages [of the Old Testament as appear to ascribe a divine nature to the Messiah, and to set forth the Spirit of God as a divine person] we do not know; and we possess no adequate means of determining. But that the later Jews, and in particular those cotemporary with the apostles, knew nothing of the doctrine of a Trinity, seems to be rendered nearly certain from the fact, that neither Josephus, nor Philo in all his numerous speculations on the subject of religion, gives any intimation of this. Whatever there is in Philo that seems to approach to this, is merely the eclectic philosophy intermingled with his religious views, and may be found in heathen writers almost or quite as fully as in him. At all events, the Nazarean and Ebionitish sects, so prevalent among early Christian Jews, incontestably prove what the usual and predominant state of the Jewish mind was. — MOSES STUART.
The first extract is taken from Stuart's “Critical History of the Old Testament Canon,” p. 407; the second, from his article on Schleiermacher, in the “Biblical Repository” for April and July, 1885, vol. vi. p. 107.
The Hebrew people were little concerned with metaphysical questions. . . . That Jehovah, who is highly exalted above all that is finite, who according to the very idea of him is invisible, whose very aspect is consuming, should come down to this world, clothe himself with a costume that is finite, and become man, — this thought is wholly foreign to the Hebrew religion, in itself considered. Much rather must we admit, that the Hebrew religion glories in the fact, that, in opposition to the heathen world, it holds fast the holy personality of Jehovah, pure and highly exalted above nature and the whole world; but this it could not do, if it had established a homousia, e.g. of humanity with Divinity in any sense. To keep itself above all natural religion, the moral view taken by the Hebrew religion must form for itself such a metaphysical view of the relation between God and the world, as lay far distant from God’s becoming a man; yea, even such an one that the Hebrew world would shudder and be astonished at a thought like this. — J. A. DORNER, apud Stuart, in Bib. Sac., vol. vii. p. 699.
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