Scribes, a learned body of men, otherwise denominated lawyers, whose influence with the Jewish nation was very great at the time when our Savior appeared.
There is every probability that they must have taken their rise contemporaneously with the commencement of the Mosaic polity. They were both a learned and a sacred caste. They had the care of the law; it was their duty to make transcripts of it; they also expounded its difficulties, and taught its doctrines, and so performed several functions which are now distributed among different professions, being keepers of the records, consulting lawyers, authorized expounders of holy writ, and, finally, schoolmasters—thus blending together in one character the several elements of intellectual, moral, social, and religious influence.
In the New Testament the scribes are found as a body of high state functionaries, who, in conjunction with the Pharisees and the high-priests, constituted the Sanhedrim, and united all the resources of their power and learning in order to entrap and destroy the Savior of mankind. The array of influence thus brought against 'the carpenter's son' was very great. That influence comprised, besides the supreme power of the state, the first legal functionaries, who watched Jesus closely in order to detect him in some breach of the law; the recognized expositors of duty, who lost no opportunity to take exception to his utterances, to blame his conduct, and misrepresent his morals; also the acutest intellects of the nation, who eagerly sought to entangle him in the web of their sophistries, or to confound him by their artful questions. Yet even all these malign influences failed. Jesus was triumphant in argument; he failed only when force interposed its revengeful arm.
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John Kitto was an English biblical scholar of Cornish descent.Born in Plymouth, John Kitto was a sickly child, son of a Cornish stonemason. The drunkenness of his father and the poverty of his family meant that much of his childhood was spent in the workhouse. He had no more than three years of erratic and interrupted education. At the age of twelve John Kitto fell on his head from a rooftop, and became totally and permanently deaf. As a young man he suffered further tragedies, disappointments and much loneliness. His height was 4 ft 8 in, and his accident left him with an impaired sense of balance. He found consolation in browsing at bookstalls and reading any books that came his way.
From these hardships he was rescued by friends who became aware of his mental abilities and encouraged him to write topical articles for local newspapers, arranging eventually for him to work as an assistant in a local library. Here he continued to educate himself.
One of his benefactors was the Exeter dentist Anthony Norris Groves, who in 1824 offered him employment as a dental assistant. Living with the Groves family, Kitto was profoundly influenced by the practical Christian faith of his employer. In 1829 he accompanied Groves on his pioneering mission to Baghdad and served as tutor to Groves's two sons. In 1833 Kitto returned to England via Constantinople, accompanied by another member of the Groves mission, Francis William Newman. Shortly afterwards he married, and in due course had several children.
A London publisher asked Kitto to write up his travel journals for a series of articles in the Penny Magazine, a publication read at that time by a million people in Britain, reprinted in America and translated into French, German and Dutch. Other writing projects followed as readers enquired about his experiences in the East amidst people living in circumstances closely resembling those of Bible times.
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