[Footnote 1: Luke vi. 24, 25.]
[Footnote 2: Luke xiv. 12, 14.]
[Footnote 3: A saying preserved by very ancient tradition, and much used, Clement of Alexandria, Strom. i. 28. It is also found in Origen, St. Jerome, and a great number of the Fathers of the Church.]
[Footnote 4: Prov. xix. 17.]
This, however, was not a new fact. The most exalted democratic movement of which humanity has preserved the remembrance (the only one, also, which has succeeded, for it alone has maintained itself in the domain of pure thought), had long disturbed the Jewish race. The thought that God is the avenger of the poor and the weak, against the rich and the powerful, is found in each page of the writings of the Old Testament. The history of Israel is of all histories that in which the popular spirit has most constantly predominated. The prophets, the true, and, in one sense, the boldest tribunes, had thundered incessantly against the great, and established a close relation, on the one hand, between the words "rich, impious, violent, wicked," and, on the other, between the words "poor, gentle, humble, pious."[1] Under the Seleucidæ, the aristocrats having almost all apostatized and gone over to Hellenism, these associations of ideas only became stronger. The Book of Enoch contains still more violent maledictions than those of the Gospel against the world, the rich, and the powerful.[2] Luxury is there depicted as a crime. The "Son of man," in this strange Apocalypse, dethrones kings, tears them from their voluptuous life, and precipitates them into hell.[3] The initiation of Judea into secular life, the recent introduction of an entirely worldly element of luxury and comfort, provoked a furious reaction in favor of patriarchal simplicity. "Woe unto you who despise the humble dwelling and inheritance of your fathers! Woe unto you who build your palaces with the sweat of others! Each stone, each brick, of which it is built, is a sin."[4] The name of "poor" (ebion) had become a synonym of "saint," of "friend of God." This was the name that the Galilean disciples of Jesus loved to give themselves; it was for a long time the name of the Judaizing Christians of Batanea and of the Hauran (Nazarenes, Hebrews) who remained faithful to the tongue, as well as to the primitive instructions of Jesus, and who boasted that they possessed amongst themselves the descendants of his family.[5] At the end of the second century, these good sectaries, having remained beyond the reach of the great current which had carried away all the other churches, were treated as heretics (Ebionites), and a pretended heretical leader (Ebion) was invented to explain their name.[6]
[Footnote 1: See, in particular, Amos ii. 6; Isa. lxiii. 9; Ps. xxv. 9, xxxvii. 11, lxix. 33; and, in general, the Hebrew dictionaries, at the words:
[Hebrew: evion, dal, ani, anav, chasid, ashir, holelim, aritz].]
[Footnote 2: Ch. lxii., lxiii., xcvii., c., civ.]
[Footnote 3: Enoch, ch. xlvi. 4-8.]
[Footnote 4: Enoch, xcix. 13, 14.]