But as soon as the Apostles embraced the Gentiles in their teaching this bitterness would greatly increase; for then, besides proclaiming One who had suffered the death of the cross at the hands of His own people to be the appointed Head and Deliverer of that people, the Apostles opened all the benefits of His Headship to the very nations in the midst of which the Jews lived with the proudest sense of their own superior claim to the favour of God. We see, by the example of St. Paul and St. Barnabas, how the Apostles addressed themselves in each city to their brethren in the synagogue, and through them to the Gentile proselytes, male and female, who frequented it; how they received into the communion of the Church such as accepted their message, and these not only when they were Jews, but the Gentiles also; and how, by the decision of the Council at Jerusalem, the Gentiles so entering were not bound to accept the ceremonial law of Moses nor the rite of circumcision. If it was a grievous offence to Jewish pride that a crucified man should be propounded as the son of David and King of Israel, how intense was the anger excited by the fact that the children of the hated and despised nations were allowed to enter into possession of the divine inheritance of Israel's race without receiving circumcision, the pledge of the Jewish covenant, the mark of the children of Abraham!
Such was the double cause of indignation which led the Jews continually to plot against the life of St. Paul, to cut off St. James by the sword of Agrippa, to attempt at the same time the life of St. Peter, and during the whole period of apostolic preaching to set the Roman magistrates against the Christians.
We must add another cause of Jewish enmity, which, coming upon the two great causes already indicated, must have still more inflamed it.
For a considerable time, perhaps down to the persecution of Nero in the year 64,[158] the Christian faith appeared to the Romans to be what Gallio, the proconsul of Achaia, and the brother, be it observed, of Seneca, called it, "a question of a word and names, and of your," that is, the Jewish, "law;" so that practically, in this first time, to use the well-known expression of Tertullian, the apostolic preaching "was sheltered under the profession of a most famous, at least a licensed religion."[159] This means that whereas by the laws existing at Rome before the coming of our Lord, the setting up of religions not authorised by the Senate was strictly forbidden; and whereas the profession of their own religion was everywhere allowed to the Jews as subjects of the empire, who were not called upon to renounce their ancestral belief, and whose synagogues were much frequented, as we know from Horace, even in his time; the first teachers of the Christian faith being Jews, and using the synagogue itself as a means of propagating their message, were covered by the protection extended to the Jewish religion. To the unbelieving Jews this protection, thus enjoyed by those whom they considered not only teachers of a false Messiah, but surrenderers of the special privileges and promises of the Jewish race, must have been very galling. Were apostates to be saved by their Jewish character from the very punishment which the Roman law itself imposed on religious innovators? Were they who overturned the very foundation of Jewish distinction to preach their sect under cover of the Jewish name? Accordingly they set themselves to kindle Roman enmity against the Christian faith by every means in their power. In the whole period between the conversion of Cornelius and the destruction of their own temple and city they were sleepless enemies, so that they fulfilled to the utmost the divine prediction, "Therefore, behold I send to you prophets and wise men and scribes: and some of them you will put to death and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city: that upon you may come all the just blood that hath been shed upon the earth, from the blood of Abel the just even unto the blood of Zacharias, the son of Barachias, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. Amen. I say unto you all these things shall come upon this generation."[160]