Hebrews 13:13

Let us go forth therefore unto him Let us go forth out of the city and camp of Judaism (Revelation 11:8) to the true and eternal Tabernacle (Exodus 33:7-8) where He now is (Hebrews 12:2). Some have imagined that the writer conveys a hint to the Christians in Jerusalem that it is time for them to leave the guilty city and retire to Pella; but, as we have seen, it is by no means probable that the letter was addressed to Jerusalem.

bearing his reproach "If ye be reproached," says St Peter, "for the name of Christ, happy are ye" (comp. Hebrews 11:26). As He was excommunicated and insulted and made to bear His Cross of shame, so will you be, and you must follow Him out of the doomed city (Matthew 24:2). It must be remembered that the Cross, an object of execration and disgust even to Gentiles, was viewed by the Jews with religious horror, since they regarded every crucified person as "accursed of God" (Deuteronomy 21:22-23; Galatians 3:13; see my Life of St Paul, ii. 17, 148). Christians shared this reproach to the fullest extent. The most polished heathen writers, men like Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, spoke of their faith as an "execrable," "deadly," and "malefic" superstition; Lucian alluded to Christ as "the impaled sophist;" and to many Greeks and Romans no language of scorn seemed too intense, no calumny too infamous, to describe them and their mode of worship. The Jews spoke of them as "Nazarenes," "Epicureans," "heretics," "followers of the thing," and especially "apostates," "traitors," and "renegades." The notion that there is any allusion to the ceremonial uncleanness of those who burnt the bodies of the offerings of the Day of Atonement "outside the camp" is far-fetched.