A church dictionary

by Walter Farquhar Hook

NARTHEX. (Gr. and Lat.) This name is given by ancient writers to a part of the fabric of the Christian church. There was the exterior or outward, and the interior or inward, Narthex.

The exterior narthex, which we may call the ante-temple, consisted of the whole circumference of the outward courts, including the vestibulum or porch, and the atrium or area before the church.

The interior narthex, or ante-temple within the church, (the only part properly so called,) was the first section or division of the fabric, after entering into the church, and was peculiarly allotted to the monks and women, and used for the offices of rogations, supplications, and night watches. Here likewise they placed the dead corpses, whilst the funeral rites were performing. This lower part of the church was the place of the Energumens and the Audientes; and hither Jews, heathens, heretics, and schismatics were sometimes allowed to come, in hopes of their conversion by hearing the Scriptures read and sermons preached.

Dr. Beveridge and others seem to place here the font or baptistery, as in our modern churches. But it is certain that, for many ages, the baptistery was a distinct place from the body of the church, and reckoned among the Exedræ, or buildings adjoining to the church.

This part of the church was called Narthex, because being long, but narrow, and running across the front of the church, it was supposed to resemble a ferula, that is, a rod or staff; for any oblong figure was by the Greeks called νάρθηξ, Narthex.

NATIONAL COVENANT. (See Confessions of Faith.)

NAVE. The central passage of the church, extending from the west end to the transept or choir. The derivation of this word has been a matter of dispute. Some very plausibly derive it from νάος, others from navis, a ship, since the nave resembles the hull of a ship turned upside down; and refer both this term and νάος also to the ancient Phœnicians, whose original temples were said to be their vessels thus reversed. At all events it is remarkable that both the old French nef, the Italian and Spanish nave, and the Latin navis, all signify a ship as well as the nave of a church. (See Churches and Cathedral.)

NAVICULA; ship, or ark. A vessel formed “like the keel of a boat,” out of which the frankincense was poured in Bishop Andrewes’ chapel, and Queen Elizabeth’s chapel. Canterbury’s Doom, 1646. See Hiereugia Anglicana, pp. 4, 5, and 9.

NAZARENES. Christian heretics, so called. This name was originally given to all Christians in general, because Jesus Christ was of the city of Nazareth. But afterwards it was restrained to a sect of heretics, who affected to assume it rather than that of Christians. Their religion was a strange jumble of Judaism and Christianity: for they were Jews by birth, were circumcised, kept the sabbath, and other observances of the Mosaical law; and at the same time received the New Testament as well as the Old, acknowledged Jesus Christ to be the Messiah, and practised the Christian baptism. Theodoret indeed pretends they honoured Jesus Christ only as a just and good man; and he places the beginning of their heresy about the time of Domitian. St. Augustine makes them the successors of those whose obstinacy in the like opinions was condemned by the apostolical Council of Jerusalem.

The Nazarenes (as well as the Ebionites) were descended from those Christians, who left Jerusalem a little before the siege, and retired to the country about Jordan, called Perea; whence they are sometimes called Peratics. There were some of them remaining in the time of St. Augustine. They dwelt about Pella in Decapolis, near the river Jordan, and at Berea, a city of Lower Syria. They perfectly understood the Hebrew tongue, in which they read the books of the Old Testament.