(b) The statement here repeated about the tribe of Benjamin, and that the "majority of our Lord's disciples at the time of His earthly ministry were connected with the tribe of Benjamin," is nothing but a fiction invented by Anglo-Israelites, as already shown in Part I. (See page 17.)

The only thing which is historically true is that the Apostle Paul was of the tribe of Benjamin, but he was called after our Lord's earthly ministry was ended, and he was appointed not to the "lost tribes," but to preach Christ's Gospel among the Gentiles (Acts xxii. 21; Rom. xi. 13; Gal. i. 16).

(c) The nation which brings forth the fruits of the kingdom of God during the present dispensation of Israel's national unbelief is not the British Empire, but the Church of Christ—the elected body out of all nations and kindreds and peoples and tongues, who are called "a chosen generation (or 'elect race'), a royal priesthood, a holy nation (εθνος), a people for God's own possession" (1 Peter ii. 9).

(d) To state that the Jews themselves understood Christ's statement in Matt. xxi. 43 as referring to some "lost" Israel, because in John vii. 35 they said: "Will He go unto the dispersed (την διασποραν) among the Gentile (or 'Greeks'), and teach the Greeks?" is not true.

The "dispersed" among the Greeks were Hellenistic "Jews" of all the Twelve Tribes scattered abroad, who stood (as already shown in Part II.) in closest connection with the Temple and hierarchy in Jerusalem, and were never "lost"; and the Greeks among whom they were dispersed were "Gentiles."

(e) And what can be said of such a perverted application of the question in Acts i. 6, namely, that when the disciples, immediately before Christ's ascension, asked: "Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" it was not their own nation, the "Jews," that they meant, and Jerusalem the centre of God's kingdom on earth—but some "lost" tribes in distant regions of which they knew nothing—I suppose on the same principle of Anglo-Israel interpretation when Peter, with the eleven on the Day of Pentecost, for instance, addressed the people as "Ye men of Israel," and again, "Let all the house of Israel, therefore, know assuredly that God hath made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom ye crucified" (Acts ii. 22-36)—he did not speak to the assembled multitude of "Jews" before him, but over their heads to some distant regions where there were some wandering "lost" tribes who alone were entitled to the name "Israel." But such assertions are altogether too ridiculous to be treated seriously.

The "Israel" which "was evidently in the minds of the apostles," and to whom Peter spoke, and of whom Paul wrote in that great prophetic section in his Epistle to the Romans (chaps. ix.-xi.), were the "Jews," whether of Palestine or in the "Dispersion," who are the only representatives of all the Twelve Tribes of "Israel" with whom Scripture or prophecy has any concern, and not any supposed "lost" tribes to be identified after many centuries by Anglo-Israel writers as the British and the United States.

(f) "Lastly, the final word," we are told, "must be that of our Lord," and then there follows the quotation of the glorious promise and prophetic forecast from Acts i. 7, 8: "Ye shall receive power when the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth"; and we are assured that the last sentence refers "to the regions beyond—an expression that was fully understood to mean the dispersed among the Gentiles"—by which, I suppose, we are meant to understand, the "lost" tribes.

But the sentence—και εως εσχατον της γης—means, as it has been properly rendered, "unto the end (or 'uttermost part') of the earth," and has always been "fully" and properly understood by the Church of Christ as a Divine warrant and forecast of the preaching of the Gospel, not to the Dispersed among the Gentiles, but to the heathen world.

Note II.
THE PROMISES OF A MULTITUDINOUS SEED, AND THAT ISRAEL SHALL BECOME A GREAT AND MIGHTY NATION.