xxi. 9), and that the permission applies only to such cases, the

exceptional nature of which, as well as their temporary character, as charismatic and miraculous gifts, would prevent their being used as precedents for women engaging in regular public discourse (1 Thess. v. 19). In 1 Cor. xiv. 24 the ἰδιῶται (synonymous with the ἀμύητοι in the statutes of Hellenic religious associations) are mentioned as admitted along with the ἀπίστοι to the didactic services, and, according to _v._ 16, they had a place assigned to them separate from the congregation proper. We are thus led to see in them the uninitiated or not yet baptized believers, that is, the _catechumens_.--=The Sacramental part of the service=, the separation of which from the didactic part was rendered necessary on account alike of its nature and purpose, and is therefore found existing in the Pauline churches as well as in the church of Jerusalem, was scrupulously restricted in its observance, in Jewish and Gentile churches alike, to those who were in the full communion of the Christian church (Acts ii. 46; 1 Cor. xi. 20-23). The celebration of the Lord’s Supper (δεῖπνον κυριακόν, 1 Cor. xi. 21), after the pattern of the meal of institution, consisting of a meal partaken of in common, accompanied with prayer and the singing of a hymn, which at a later period was named the Ἀγάπη, as the expression of brotherly love (Jude _v._ 12), was the centre and end of these _evening_ services. The elements in the Lord’s Supper were consecrated to their sacramental purpose by a prayer of praise and thanksgiving (εὐχαριστία, 1 Cor. xi. 24; or εὐλογία, 1 Cor. x. 16), together with a recital of the words of institution which contained a proclamation of the death of Christ (1 Cor. xi. 26). This prayer was followed by the kiss of brotherhood.[10] In the service of song they used to all appearance besides the psalms some Christian hymns and doxologies (Eph. v. 19; Col. iii. 16).[11]--The homiletical as well as the eucharistic services were at first held daily; at a later period at least every Sunday.[12] For very soon, alongside of the Sabbath, and among Gentile Christians, instead of it, the first day of the week as the day of Christ’s resurrection began to be observed as a festival.[13] But there is as yet no trace of the observance of other festivals. It cannot be exactly proved that infant baptism was an Apostolic practice, but it is not improbable that it was so.[14] Baptism was administered by complete immersion (Acts viii. 38) in the name of Christ or of the Trinity (Matt. xxviii. 19). The charism of healing the sick was exercised by prayer and anointing with oil (Jas. v. 14). On the other hand, confession of sin even apart from the public service was recommended (Jas. v. 16). Charismatic communication of the Spirit and admission to office in the church[15] was accomplished by prayer and laying on of hands.[16]

§ 17.8. =Christian Life and Ecclesiastical Discipline.=--In accordance with the commandment of the Lord (John xiii. 34), brotherly love in opposition to the selfishness of the natural life, was the principle of the Christian life. The power of youthful love, fostered by the prevalent expectation of the speedy return of the Lord, endeavoured at first to find for itself a fitting expression in the mother church of Jerusalem by the voluntary determination to have their goods in common,--an endeavour which without prejudice of its spiritual importance soon proved to be impracticable. On the other hand the well-to-do Gentile churches proved their brotherly love by collections for those originally poor, and especially for the church at Jerusalem which had suffered the special misfortune of famine. The three inveterate moral plagues of the ancient world, contempt of foreign nationalities, degradation of woman, and slavery, were overcome, according to Gal. iii. 28, by gradual elevation of inward feeling without any violent struggle against existing laws and customs, and the consciousness of common membership in the one head in heaven hallowed all the relationships of the earthly life. Even in apostolic times the bright mirror of Christian purity was no doubt dimmed by spots of rust. Hypocrisy (Acts v.) and variance (Acts vi.) in single cases appeared very early in the mother church; but the former was punished by a fearfully severe judgment, the latter was overcome by love and sweet reasonableness. In the rich Gentile churches, such as those of Corinth and Thessalonica, a worldly spirit in the form of voluptuousness, selfishness, pride, etc., made its appearance, but was here also rooted out by apostolic exhortation and discipline. If any one caused public scandal by serious departure from true doctrine or Christian conduct, and in spite of pastoral counsel persisted in his error, he was by the judgment of the church cast out, but the penitent was received again after his sincerity had been proved (1 Cor. v. 1; 2 Cor. ii. 5).

§ 18. HERESIES IN THE APOSTOLIC AGE.[17]

When Christianity began its career of world conquest in the preaching of the Apostle Paul, the representatives of the intellectual culture of the ancient world assumed toward it an attitude, either of utter indifference, or of keen hostility, or of readiness to accept Christian elements, while retaining along with these many of their old notions. From this mixing of heterogeneous elements a fermentation arose which was the fruitful mother of numerous heresies.

§ 18.1. =Jewish Christianity and the Council of Apostles.=--The Lord had commanded the disciples to preach the gospel to all nations (Matt. xxviii. 19), and so they could not doubt that the whole heathen world was called to receive the church’s heritage; but feeling themselves bound by utterances of the Old Testament regarding the eternal validity of the law of Moses, and having not yet penetrated the full significance of the saying of Christ (Mark v. 17), they thought that incorporation into Judaism by circumcision was still an indispensable condition of reception into the kingdom of Christ. The Hellenist Stephen represented a more liberal tendency (Acts vi. 14); and Philip, also a Hellenist, preached at least occasionally to the Samaritans, and the Apostles recognised his work by sending down Peter and John (Acts viii. 14). On the other hand, it needed an immediate divine revelation to convince Peter that a Gentile thirsting for salvation was just as such fit for the kingdom of God (Acts x.). And even this revelation remained without any decisive influence on actual missionary enterprise. They were Hellenistic Jews who finally took the bold step of devoting themselves without reserve to the conversion of the Gentiles at Antioch (Acts xi. 19). To foster the movement there the Apostles sent Barnabas, who entered into it with his whole soul, and in Paul associated with himself a yet more capable worker. After the notable success of their first missionary journey had vindicated their claim and calling as Apostles of the Gentiles, the arrival of Jewish zealots in the Antiochean church occasioned the sending of Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem, about A.D. 51, in order finally to settle this important dispute. At a Council of the Apostles convened there Peter and James the Just delivered the decision that Gentile converts should only be required to observe certain legal restrictions, and these, as it would seem from the conditions laid down (Acts xv. 20), of a similar kind to those imposed upon proselytes of the gate. An arrangement come to at this time between the two Antiochean Apostles and Peter, James, and John, led to the recognition of the former as Apostles of the Gentiles and the latter as Apostles of the Jews (Gal. ii. 1-10). Nevertheless during a visit to Antioch Peter laid himself open to censure for practical inconsistency and weak connivance with the fanaticism of certain Jewish Christians, and had to have the truth respecting it very pointedly told him by Paul (Gal. ii. 11-14). The destruction of the temple and the consequent cessation of the entire Jewish worship led to the gradual disappearance of non-sectarian Jewish Christianity and its amalgamation with Gentile Christianity. The remnant of Jewish Christianity which still in the altered condition of things continued to cling to its principles and practice assumed ever more and more the character of a sect, and drifted into open heresy. (Comp. § 28).

§ 18.2. =The Apostolic Basis of Doctrine.=--The need of fixing the apostolically accredited accounts of the life of the Redeemer by written documents, led to the origin of the Gospels. The continued connection of the missionary Apostles with the churches founded by them, or even their authority of general superintendence, called forth the apostolic doctrinal epistles. A beginning of the collection and general circulation of the New Testament writings was made at an early date by the communication of these being made by one church to another (Col. iv. 16). There was as yet no confession of faith as a standard of orthodoxy, but the way was prepared by adopting Matt. xxviii. 19 as a confession by candidates for baptism. Paul set up justification through faith alone (Gal. i. 8, 9), and John, the incarnation of God in Christ (1 John iv. 3), as indispensable elements in a Christian confession.

§ 18.3. =False Teachers.=--The first enemy from within its own borders which Christianity had to confront was the ordinary Pharisaic Judaism with its stereotyped traditional doctrine, its lifeless work-righteousness, its unreasonable national prejudices, and its perversely carnal Messianic expectations. Its shibboleth was the obligation of the Gentiles to observe the Mosaic ceremonial law, the Sabbath, rules about meats, circumcision, as an indispensable condition of salvation. This tendency had its origin in the mother church of Jerusalem, but was there at a very early date condemned by the Apostolic Council. This party nevertheless pursued at all points the Apostle Paul with bitter enmity and vile calumnies. Traces of a manifestation of a Sadducean or sceptical spirit may perhaps already be found in the denial of the resurrection which in 1 Cor. xv. Paul opposes. On the other hand, at a very early period Greek philosophy got mixed up with Christianity. Apollos, a philosophically cultured Jew of Alexandria, had at first conceived of Christianity from the speculative side, and had in this form preached it with eloquence and success at Corinth. Paul did not contest the admissibility of this mode of treatment. He left it to the verdict of history (1 Cor. iii. 11-14), and warned against an over-estimation of human wisdom (1 Cor. ii. 1-10). Among many of the seekers after wisdom in Corinth, little as this was intended by Apollos, the simple positive preaching of Paul lost on this account the favour that it had enjoyed before. In this may be found perhaps the first beginnings of that fourfold party faction which arose in the Corinthian church (1 Cor. i.). The Judaists appealed to the authority of the Apostle Peter (οἱ τοῦ Κηφᾶ); the Gentile Christians were divided into the parties of Apollos and of Paul, or by the assumption of the proud name οἱ τοῦ Χριστοῦ, sought to free themselves from the recognition of any Apostolic authority. Paul successfully opposes these divisions in his Epistle to the Corinthians. Apprehension of a threatened growth of gnostic teachers is first expressed in the Apostle Paul’s farewell addresses to the elders of Asia Minor (Acts xx. 29); and in the Epistle to the Colossians, as well as in the Pastoral Epistles, this ψευδώνυμος γνῶσις is expressly opposed as manifesting itself in the adoption of oriental theosophy, magic, and theurgy, in an arbitrary asceticism that forbade marriage and restricted the use of food, in an imaginary secret knowledge of the nature and order of the heavenly powers and spirits, and idealistic volatilizing of concrete Christian doctrines, such as that of the resurrection (2 Tim. ii. 18). In the First Epistle of John, again, that special form of Gnosis is pointed out which denied the incarnation of God in Christ by means of docetic conceptions; and in the Second Epistle of Peter, as well as in the Epistle of Jude, we have attention called to antinomian excrescences, unbridled immorality and wanton lust in the development of magical and theurgical views. It should not, however, be left unmentioned, that modern criticism has on many grounds contested the authenticity of the New Testament writings just named, and has assigned the first appearance of heretical gnosis to the beginning of the second century. The Nicolaitans of the Apocalypse (iii. 5, 14, 15, 20) appear to have been an antinomian sect of Gentile Christian origin, spread more or less through the churches of Asia Minor, perhaps without any gnostic background, which in direct and intentional opposition to the decision of the Apostolic Council (Acts xv. 29) took part in heathen sacrificial feasts (comp. 1 Cor. x.), and justified or at least apologized for fleshly impurity.

FIRST DIVISION.

History of the Development of the Church during the Græco-Roman and Græco-Byzantine Periods.

§ 19. CONTENT, DISTRIBUTION AND BOUNDARIES OF THOSE PERIODS.

At the very beginning of the Apostolic Age the universalistic spirit of Christianity had already broken through the particularistic limitations of Judaism. When once the substantial truth of divine salvation had cast off the Judaistic husk in which the kernel had ripened, those elements of culture which had come to maturity in the Roman-Greek world were appropriated as means for giving to Christian ideas a fuller and clearer expression. The task now to be undertaken was the development of Christianity on the lines of Græco-Roman culture, or the expansion of the church’s apostolicity into catholicity. The ancient church of the Roman and Byzantine world fulfilled this task, but in doing so the sound evangelical catholic development encountered at every point elements of a false, because an unevangelical, Catholicism. The centre, then, of all the movements of Church History is to be found in the Teutono-Roman-Slavic empire. The Roman church preserved and increased her importance by attaching herself to this new empire, and undertaking its spiritual formation and education. The Byzantine church, on the other hand, falling into a state of inward stagnation, and pressed from without by the forces of Islam, passes into decay as a national church.

The history of this first stage of the development of the church falls into =three periods=. The first period reaches down to Constantine the Great, who, in A.D. 323, secured to Christianity and the church a final victory over Paganism. The second period brings us down to the close of the universal catholic or œcumenical elaboration of doctrine attained by the church under its old classical form of culture, that is, down to the close of the Monothelite controversy (§ 52, 8), by the Sixth Œcumenical Council at Constantinople in A.D. 680. But inasmuch as the _Concilium quini-sextum_ in A.D. 692 undertook simply the completion of the work of the two previous œcumenical synods with reference to church constitution and worship, and as here the first grounds were laid for the great partition of the church into Eastern and Western (§ 63, 2), we prefer to make A.D. 692 the closing limit of the second period. The conclusion of the third period, is found in the overthrow of Constantinople by the Turks in A.D. 1453. The first two periods are most evidently distinguished from one another in respect of the outward condition of the church. Before the times of Constantine, it lives and develops its strength amid the oppression and persecution of the pagan state; under Constantine the state itself becomes Christian and the church enjoys all the advantages, all the care and furtherance, that earthly protection can afford. Along with all this worldly splendour, however, a worldly disposition makes its way into the church, and in exchange for its protection of the church the state assumes an autocratic lordship over it. Even in the inner, and pre-eminently doctrinal, development of the church the two periods of this age are essentially distinguished from one another. While it was the church’s endeavour to adopt only the forms of culture of ancient paganism, while rejecting its godless substance, it too often happened that pagan ideas got mixed up with Christianity, and it was threatened with a similar danger from the side of Judaism. It was therefore the special task of the church during the first period to resist the encroachment of anti-Christian Jewish and Pagan elements. In the first period the perfecting of its own genuinely Christian doctrinal content was still a purely subjective matter, resting only on the personal authority of the particular church teachers. In the second period, on the other hand, the church universal, as represented by œcumenical synods with full power, proceeds to the laying down and establishing of an objective-ecclesiastical, œcumenical-catholic system of doctrine, constituting an all-sided development of the truth in opposition to the one-sided development of subjective heretical teaching. In doing so, however, the culture of the old Græco-Roman world exhausted its powers. The measure of development which these were capable of affording the church was now completed, and its future must be looked for among the new nationalities of Teutonic, Romanic, and Slavic origin. While the Byzantine empire, and with it the glory of the ancient church of the East was pressed and threatened by Islam, a new empire arose in the West in youthful vigour and became the organ of a new phase of development in the history of the church; and while the church in the West struggled after a new and higher point in her development, the Eastern church sank ever deeper down under outward oppression and inward weakness. The partition of the church into an Eastern and a Western division, which became imminent at the close of the second period, and was actually carried out during the third period, cut off the church of the East from the influence of those new vital forces, political as well as ecclesiastical, and which it might otherwise, perhaps, have shared with the West. By the overthrow of the East-Roman empire the last support of its splendour and even of its vital activity was taken away. Here too ends the history of the church on the lines of purely antique classical forms of culture. The remnants of the church of the East were no longer capable of any living historical development under the oppression of the Turkish rule.

FIRST SECTION.

History of the Græco-Roman Church during the Second and Third Centuries (A.D. 70-323).[18]

§ 20. CONTENT, DISTRIBUTION AND BOUNDARIES OF THIS PERIOD.[19]

As the history of the beginnings of the church has been treated by us under two divisions, so also the first period of the history of its development may be similarly divided into the =Post-Apostolic Age=, which reaches down to the middle of the second century, and the =Age of the Old Catholic Church=, which ends with the establishment of the church under and by Constantine, and at that point passes over into the Age of the œcumenical Catholic or Byzantine-Roman Imperial Church.--As the Post-Apostolic Age was occupied with an endeavour to appropriate and possess in a fuller and more vigorous manner the saving truths transmitted by the Apostles, and presents as the result of its struggles, errors, and victories, the Old Catholic Church as a unity, firmly bound from within, strictly free of all compulsion from without, so on the basis thus gained, the Old Catholic Church goes forward to new conflicts, failures, and successes, by means of which the foundations are laid for the future perfecting of it through its establishment by the state into the Œcumenical Catholic Imperial Church.[20]

§ 20.1. =The Post-Apostolic Age.=--The peril to which the church was exposed from the introduction of Judaistic and Pagan elements with her new converts was much more serious not only than the Jewish spirit of persecution, crushed as it was into impotence through the overthrow of Jewish national independence, but also than the persecution of anti-Christian paganism which at this time was only engaged upon sporadically. All the more threatening was this peril from the peculiar position of the church during this age. Since the removal of the personal guidance of the Apostles that control was wanting which only at a subsequent period was won again by the establishment of a New Testament canon and the laying down of a normative rule of faith, as well as by the formation of a hierarchical-episcopal constitution. In all the conflicts, then, that occupied this age, the first and main point was to guard the integrity and purity of traditional Apostolic Christianity against the anti-Christian Jewish and Pagan ideas which new converts endeavoured to import into it from their earlier religious life. Those Judaic ideas thus imported gave rise to Ebionism; those Pagan ideas gave rise to Gnosticism (§§ 26-28). And just as the Pauline Gentile Christianity, in so far as it was embraced under this period (§ 30, 2), secured the victory over the moderate and non-heretical Jewish Christianity, this latter became more and more assimilated to the former, and gradually passed over into it (§ 28, 1). Add to this the need, ever more pressingly felt, of a sifting of the not yet uniformly recognised early Christian literature that had passed into ecclesiastical use (§ 36, 7, 8) by means of the establishment of a New Testament =canon=; that is, the need of a collection of writings admitted to be of Apostolic origin to occupy henceforth the first rank as a standard and foundation for the purposes of teaching and worship, and to form a bulwark against the flood of heretical and non-heretical =Pseudepigraphs= that menaced the purity of doctrine (§ 32). Further, the no less pressing need for the construction of a universally valid =rule of faith= (§ 35, 2), as an intellectual bond of union and mark of recognition for all churches and believers scattered over the earth’s surface. Then again, in the victory that was being secured by Episcopacy over Presbyterianism, and in the introduction of a Synodal constitution for counsel and resolution, the first stage in the formation of a hierarchical organization was reached (§ 34). Finally, the last dissolving action of this age was the suppression of the fanatical prophetic and fanatical rigorist spirit, which, reaching its climax in =Montanism=, directed itself mainly against the tendency already appearing on many sides to tone down the unflinching severity of ecclesiastical discipline, to make modifications in constitution, life and conversation in accordance with the social customs of the world, and to settle down through disregard of the speedy return of the Lord, so confidently expected by the early Christians, into an easy satisfaction in the enjoyment of earthly possessions (§ 40, 5).

§ 20.2. =The Age of the Old Catholic Church.=--The designation of the universal Christian church as Catholic dates from the time of Irenæus, that is, from the beginning of this second part of our first period. This name characterizes the church as the one universally (καθ’ ὅλου) spread and recognised from the time of the Apostles, and so stigmatizes every opposition to the one church that alone stands on the sure foundation of holy scripture and pure apostolic tradition, as belonging to the manifold particularistic heretical and schismatical sects. The church of this particular age, however, has been designated the Old Catholic Church as distinguished from the œcumenical Catholic church of the following period, as well as from the Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic churches, into which afterwards the œcumenical Catholic church was divided.

At the beginning of this age, the heretical as well as the non-heretical Ebionism may be regarded as virtually suppressed, although some scanty remnants of it might yet be found. The most brilliant period of Gnosticism, too, when the most serious danger from Paganism within the Christian pale in the form of Hellenic and Syro-Chaldaic Theosophy and Mysteriosophy threatened the church, was already past. But in Manichæism (§ 29) there appeared, during the second half of the third century, a new peril of a no less threatening kind, inspired by Parseeism and Buddhism, which, however, the church on the ground of the solid foundations already laid was able to resist with powerful weapons. On the other hand the Pagan element within the church asserted itself more and more decidedly (§ 39, 6) by means of the intrusion of magico-theurgical superstition into the catholic doctrine of the efficacy of the church sacraments and sacramental acts (§ 58). But now also, with Marcus Aurelius, Paganism outside of Christianity as embodied in the Roman state, begins the war of extermination against the church that was ever more and more extending her boundaries. Such manifestation of hostility, however, was not able to subdue the church, but rather led, under and through Constantine the Great, to the Christianizing of the state and the establishment of the church. During the same time the episcopal and synodal-hierarchical organization of the church was more fully developed by the introduction of an order of Metropolitans, and then in the following period it reached its climax in the oligarchical Pentarchy of Patriarchs (§ 46, 1), and in the institution of œcumenical Synods (§ 43, 2). By the condemnation and expulsion of Montanism, in which the inner development of the Post-Apostolic Age reached its special and distinctive conclusion, the endeavour to naturalize Christianity among the social customs of the worldly life was certainly legitimized by the church, and could now be unrestrictedly carried out in a wider and more comprehensive way. In the Trinitarian controversies, too, in which several prominent theologians engaged, the first step was taken in that œcumenical-ecclesiastical elaboration of doctrine which occupied and dominated the whole of the following period (§§ 49-52).

§ 20.3. =The Point of Transition from the One Age to the Other= may unhesitatingly be set down at A.D. 170. The following are the most important data in regard thereto. The death about A.D. 165 of Justin Martyr, who marks the highest point reached in the Post-Apostolic Age, and forms also the transition to the Old Catholic Age; and Irenæus, flourishing somewhere about A.D. 170, who was the real inaugurator of this latter age. Besides these we come upon the beginnings of the Trinitarian controversies about the year 170. Finally, the rejection of Montanism from the universal Catholic church was effected about the year 170 by means of the Synodal institution called into existence for that very purpose.

I. THE RELATIONSHIP OF EXTRA-CHRISTIAN PAGANISM AND JUDAISM TO THE CHURCH.[21]

§ 21. THE SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY.

Amid all the persecutions which the church during this period had to suffer it spread with rapid strides throughout the whole Roman empire, and even far beyond its limits. Edessa, the capital of the kingdom of Osrhoëne in Mesopotamia, had, as early as A.D. 170, a Christian prince, named =Abgar Bar Maanu=, whose coins were the first to bear the sign of the cross. We find Christianity gaining a footing contemporaneously in Persia, Media, Bactria, and Parthia. In the third century we find traces of its presence in Armenia. Paul himself made his way into Arabia (Gal. i. 17). In the third century Origen received an invitation from a ἡγούμενος τῆς Ἀραβίας, who wished to receive information about Christianity. At another time he accepted a call from that country in order to settle an ecclesiastical dispute (§ 33, 6). From Alexandria, where Mark had exercised his ministry, the Christian faith spread out into other portions of Africa, into Cyrene and among the Coptic races, neighbouring upon the Egyptians properly so-called. The church of proconsular Africa, with Carthage for its capital, stood in close connection with Rome. Mauretania and Numidia had, even in the third century, so many churches, that Cyprian could bring together at Carthage a Synod of eighty-seven bishops. In Gaul there were several flourishing churches composed of colonies and teachers from Asia Minor, such as the churches of Lyons, Vienne, etc. At a later period seven missionary teachers of the Christian faith came out of Italy into Gaul, among whom was Dionysius, known as St. Denis, the founder of the church at Paris. The Roman colonies in the provinces of the Rhine and the Danube had several flourishing congregations as early as the third century.

The emptiness and corruption of paganism was the negative, the divine power of the gospel was the positive, means of this wonderful extension. This divine power was manifested in the zeal and self-denial of Christian teachers and missionaries (§ 34, 1), in the life and walk of Christians, in the brotherly love which they showed, in the steadfastness and confidence of their faith, and above all in the joyfulness with which they met the cruellest of deaths by martyrdom. The blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church, and it was not an unheard-of circumstance that the executioners of those Christian witnesses became their successors in the noble army of confessors.

§ 22. PERSECUTIONS OF THE CHRISTIANS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE.[22]

The Law of the Twelve Tables had already forbidden the exercise of foreign modes of worship within the Roman empire (_Religiones peregrinæ_, _Collegia illicita_), for religion was exclusively an affair of the state and entered most intimately into all civil and municipal relations, and on this account whatever endangered the national religion was regarded as necessarily imperilling the state itself. Political considerations, however, led to the granting to conquered nations the free use of their own forms of worship. This concession did not materially help Christianity after it had ceased, in the time of Nero, to be regularly confounded by the Roman authorities with Judaism, as had been the case in the time of Claudius, and Judaism, after the destruction of Jerusalem, had been sharply distinguished from it. It publicly proclaimed its intention to completely dislodge all other religions, and the rapidity with which it spread showed how energetically its intentions were carried out. The close fellowship and brotherliness that prevailed among Christians, as well as their exclusive, and during times of persecution even secret assemblies, aroused the suspicion that they had political tendencies. Their withdrawal from civil and military services on account of the pagan ceremonies connected with them, especially their refusal to burn incense before the statues of the emperor, also the steadfastness of their faith, which was proof against all violence and persuasion alike, their retiredness from the world, etc., were regarded as evidence of their indifference or hostility to the general well-being of the state, as invincible stiff-neckedness, as contumacy, sedition, and high treason. The heathen populace saw in the Christians the sacrilegious enemies and despisers of their gods; and the Christian religion, which was without temples, altars and sacrifices, seemed to them pure Atheism. The most horrible calumnies, that in their assemblies (_Agapæ_) the vilest immoralities were practised (_Concubitus Œdipodei_), children slain and human flesh eaten (_Epulæ Thyesteæ_, comp. § 36, 5), were readily believed. All public misfortunes were thus attributed to the wrath of the gods against the Christians, who treated them with contempt. _Non pluit Deus, duc ad Christianos!_ The heathen priests also, the temple servants and the image makers were always ready in their own common interests to stir up the suspicions of the people. Under such circumstances it is not to be wondered at that the fire of persecution on the part of the heathen people and the heathen state continued to rage for centuries.

§ 22.1. =Claudius, Nero and Domitian.=--Regarding the Emperor =Tiberius= (A.D. 14-37), we meet in Tertullian with the undoubtedly baseless tradition, that, impressed by the story told him by Pilate, he proposed to the Senate to introduce Christ among the gods, and on the rejection of this proposal, threatened the accusers of the Christians with punishment. The statement in Acts xviii. 2, that the Emperor =Claudius= (A.D. 41-54) expelled from Rome all Jews and with them many Christians also, is illustrated in a very circumstantial manner by Suetonius: _Claudius Judæos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantes Roma expulit_. The tumults, therefore, between the Jews and the Christians, occurring about the year 51 or 52, gave occasion to this decree. The first persecution of the Christians proceeding from a Roman ruler which was directed against the Christians as such, was carried out by the Emperor =Nero= (A.D. 54-68) in the year 64, in consequence of a nine days’ conflagration in Rome, the origin of which was commonly ascribed by the people to the Emperor himself. Nero, however, laid the blame upon the hated Christians, and perpetrated upon them the most ingeniously devised cruelties. Sewn up in skins of wild animals they were cast out to be devoured of dogs; others were crucified, or wrapt in tow and besmeared with pitch, they were fixed upon sharp spikes in the imperial gardens where the people gathered to behold gorgeous spectacles, and set on fire to lighten up the night (Tac., _Ann._, xv. 44). After the death of Nero the legend spread among the Christians, that he was not dead but had withdrawn beyond the Euphrates, soon to return as Antichrist. Nero’s persecution seems to have been limited to Rome, and to have ended with his death.--It was under =Domitian= (A.D. 81-96) that individual Christians were for the first time subjected to confiscation of goods and banishment for godlessness or the refusal to conform to the national religion. Probably also, the execution of his own cousin, the Consul Flavius Clemens [Clement], on account of his ἀθεότης and his ἐξοκέλλειν εἰς τὰ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἔθη (Dio Cass., lxvii. 14), as well as the banishment of Clemens’ [Clement’s] wife, Flavia Domitilla (A.D. 93), was really on account of their attachment to the Christian faith (§ 30, 3). The latter at least is proved by two inscriptions in the catacombs to have been undoubtedly a Christian. Domitian insisted upon having information as to the political significance of the kingdom of Christ, and brought from Palestine to Rome two relatives of Jesus, grandsons of Jude, the brother of the Lord, but their hands horny with labour satisfied him that his suspicions had been unfounded. The philanthropic Emperor =Nerva= (A.D. 96-98) recalled the exiles and did not listen to those who clamoured bitterly against the Christians, but Christianity continued after as well as before a _Religo illicita_, or rather was now reckoned such, after it had been more distinctly separated from Judaism.[23]

§ 22.2. =Trajan and Hadrian.=--With =Trajan= (A.D. 98-117), whom historians rightly describe as a just, earnest, and mild ruler, the persecutions of the Christians enter upon a new stage. He renewed the old strict prohibition of secret societies, _hetæræ_, which could easily be made to apply to the Christians. In consequence of this law the younger Pliny, as Governor of Bithynia, punished with death those who were accused as Christians, if they would not abjure Christianity. But his doubts being awakened by the great number of every rank and age and of both sexes against whom accusations were brought, and in consequence of a careful examination, which showed the Christians to be morally pure and politically undeserving of suspicion and to be guilty only of stubborn attachment to their superstition, he asked definite instructions from the Emperor. Trajan approved of what he had done and what he proposed; the Christians were not to be sought after and anonymous accusations were not to be regarded, but those formally complained of and convicted, if they stubbornly refused to sacrifice to the gods and burn incense before the statues of the Emperor were to be punished with death (A.D. 112). This imperial rescript continued for a long time the legal standard for judicial procedure with reference to the Christians. The persecution under Trajan extended even to Syria and Palestine. In Jerusalem the aged bishop Simeon, the successor of James, accused as a Christian and a descendant of David, after being cruelly scourged, died a martyr’s death on the cross in A.D. 107. The martyrdom, too, of the Antiochean bishop, Ignatius, in all probability took place during the reign of Trajan (§ 30, 5). An edict of toleration supposed to have been issued at a later period by Trajan, a copy of which exists in Syriac and Armenian, is now proved to be apocryphal.--During the reign of =Hadrian= (A.D. 117-138), the people began to carry out in a tumultuous way the execution of the Christians on the occasion of the heathen festivals. On the representation of the proconsul of Asia, Serenius Granianus, Hadrian issued a rescript addressed to his successor, Minucius Fundanus, against such acts of violence, but executions still continued carried out according to the forms of law. The genuineness of the rescript, however, as given at the close of the first Apology of Justin Martyr, has been recently disputed by many. In Rome itself, between A.D. 135 and A.D. 137, bishop Telesphorus, with many other Christians, fell as victims of the persecution. The tradition of the fourth century, that Hadrian wished to build a temple to Christ, is utterly without historical foundation. His unfavourable disposition toward the Christians clearly appears from this, that he caused a temple of Venus to be built upon the spot where Christ was crucified, and a statue of Jupiter to be erected on the rock of the sepulchre, in order to pollute those places which Christians held most sacred.

§ 22.3. =Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius.=--Under =Antoninus Pius= (A.D.138-161), the tumultuous charges of the people against the Christians, on account of visitations of pestilence in many places, were renewed, but the mildly disposed emperor sought to protect them as much as possible from violence. The rescript, however, _Ad Commune Asiæ_, which bears his name is very probably of Christian authorship.--The persecutions again took a new turn under =Marcus Aurelius= (A.D. 161-180) who was, both as a man and a ruler, one of the noblest figures of antiquity. In the pride of his stoical wisdom, however, despising utterly the enthusiasm of the Christians, he not only allowed free scope to the popular hatred, but also introduced the system of espionage, giving to informers the confiscated property of the Christians, and even permitting the use of torture, in order to compel them to recant, and thus gave occasion to unexampled triumphs of Christian heroism. At Rome, the noble Apologist Justin Martyr, denounced by his opponent the philosopher Crescens, after cruel and bloody scourging, died under the executioner’s axe about A.D. 165 (§ 30, 9).--In regard to a very severe persecution endured by the church of Smyrna, we possess an original report of it sent from that church to one closely related to it, embellished with legendary details or interpolated, which Eusebius has incorporated in his Church History. The substance of it is a description of the glorious martyr death of their aged bishop Polycarp (§ 30, 6), who, because he refused to curse the Lord whom he had served for eighty-six years, was made to mount the funeral pile, and while rejoicing in the midst of the flames, received the crown of martyrdom. According to the story the flames gathered around him like a wind-filled sail, and when a soldier pierced him with his sword, suddenly a white dove flew up; moreover the glorified spirit also appeared to a member of the church in a vision, clothed in a white garment. Eusebius places the date of Polycarp’s death shortly before A.D. 166. But since it has been shown by Waddington, on the basis of an examination of recently discovered inscriptions, that the proconsul of Asia, Statius Quadratus, mentioned in the report of the church of Smyrna, did not hold that office in A.D. 166, but in A.D. 155-156, the most important authorities have come to regard either A.D. 155 or A.D. 156 as the date of his martyrdom. Still some whose opinions are worthy of respect refuse to accept this view, pointing out the absence of that chronological statement from the report in Eusebius and to its irreconcilability with the otherwise well-supported facts, that Polycarp was on a visit to Rome in A.D. 155 (§ 37, 2), and that the reckoning of the day of his death in the report as ὄντος σαββάτου μεγάλου would suit indeed the Easter of A.D. 155, as well as that of A.D. 166, but not that of A.D. 156. [24] The legend of the _Legio fulminatrix_, that in the war against the Marcomanni in A.D. 174 the prayers of the Christian soldiers of this legion called forth rain and thunder, and thus saved the Emperor and his army from the danger of perishing by thirst, whereupon this modified law against the accusers of the Christians was issued, has, so far as the first part is concerned, its foundation in history, only that the heathen on the other hand ascribed the miracle to their prayer to _Jupiter Pluvius_. [25]--Regarding the persecution at Lyons and Vienne in A.D. 177, we also possess a contemporary report from the Christian church of these places (§ 32, 8). Bishop Pothinus, in his ninetieth year, sank under the effects of tortures continued during many days in a loathsome prison. The young and tender slave-girl Blandina was scourged, her body scorched upon a red-hot iron chair, her limbs torn by wild beasts and at last her life taken; but under all her tortures she continued to repeat her joyful confession: “I am a Christian and nothing wicked is tolerated among us.” Under similar agonies the boy Ponticus, in his fifteenth year, showed similar heroism. The dead bodies of the martyrs were laid in heaps upon the streets, until at last they were burnt and their ashes strewn upon the Rhone. =Commodus= (A.D. 180-192), the son of Marcus Aurelius, who in every other respect was utterly disreputable, influenced by his mistress Marcia, showed himself inclined, by the exercise of his clemency, to remit the sentences of the Christians. The persecution at Scillita in North Africa, during the first year of the reign of Commodus, in which the martyr Speratus suffered, together with eleven companions, was carried out in accordance with the edict of Marcus Aurelius.

§ 22.4. =Septimius Severus and Maximinus Thrax.=--=Septimius Severus= (A.D. 193-211), whom a Christian slave, Proculus, had healed of a sickness by anointing with oil, was at first decidedly favourable to the Christians. Even in A.D. 197, after his triumphal entrance into Rome, he took them under his personal protection when the popular clamour, which such a celebration was fitted to excite, was raised against them. The judicial persecution, too, which some years later, A.D. 200, his deputy in North Africa carried on against the Christians on the basis of existing laws because they refused to sacrifice to the genius of the Emperor, he may not have been able to prevent. On the other hand, he did himself, in A.D. 202, issue an edict which forbade conversions to Judaism and Christianity. The storm of persecution thereby excited was directed therefore first of all and especially against the catechumens and the neophytes, but frequently also, overstepping the letter of the edict, it was turned against the older Christians. The persecution seems to have been limited to Egypt and North Africa. At Alexandria Leonidas, the father of Origen, was beheaded. The female slave, Potamiæna, celebrated as much for her moral purity as for her beauty, was accused by her master, whose evil passions she had refused to gratify, as a Christian, and was given over to the gladiators to be abused. She succeeded, however, in defending herself from pollution, and was then, along with her mother Marcella, slowly dipped into boiling pitch. The soldier, Basilides by name, who should have executed the sentence himself embraced Christianity, and was beheaded. The persecution raged with equal violence and cruelty in Carthage. A young woman of a noble family, Perpetua, in her twenty-second year, in spite of imprisonment and torture, and though the infant in her arms and her weeping pagan father appealed to her heart’s affections, continued true to her faith, and was thrown to be tossed on the horns of a wild cow, and to die from the dagger of a gladiator. The slave girl Felicitas who, in the same prison, became a mother, showed similar courage amid similar sufferings. Persecution smouldered on throughout the reign of Septimius, showing itself in separate sporadic outbursts, but was not renewed under his son and successor =Caracalla= (A.D. 211-217), who in other respects during his reign stained with manifold cruelties, did little to the honour of those Christian influences by which in his earliest youth he had been surrounded (“_lacte Christiano educatus_,” Tert.).--That Christianity should have a place given it among the senseless religions favoured by =Elagabalus= or =Heliogabalus= (A.D. 218-222), was an absurdity which nevertheless secured for it toleration and quiet. His second wife, Severina or Severa, to whom Hippolytus dedicated his treatise Περὶ ἀναστάσεως, was the first empress friendly to the Christians. =Alexander Severus= (A.D. 222-235), embracing a noble eclecticism, placed among his household gods the image of Christ, along with those of Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius of Tyana, and showed himself well disposed toward the Christians; while at the same time his mother, Julia Mammæa, encouraged and furthered the scholarly studies of Origen. The golden saying of Christ, Luke vi. 31, was inscribed upon the gateway of his palace. His murderer, =Maximinus Thrax= (A.D. 235-238), from very opposition to his predecessor, became at once the enemy of the Christians. Clearly perceiving the high importance of the clergy for the continued existence of the church, his persecuting edict was directed solely against them. The imperial position which he had usurped, however, was not sufficiently secure to allow him to carry out his intentions to extremities. Under =Gordianus= the Christians had rest, and =Philip the Arabian= (A.D. 244-249) favoured them so openly and decidedly, that it came to be thought that he himself had been a Christian.

§ 22.5. =Decius, Gallus and Valerianus [Valerian].=--Soon after the accession of =Decius= (A.D. 249-251), in the year 250, a new persecution broke out that lasted without interruption for ten years. This was the first general persecution and was directed at first against the recognised heads of the churches, but by-and-by was extended more widely to all ranks, and exceeded all previous persecutions by its extent, the deliberateness of its plan, the rigid determination with which it was conducted, and the cruelties of its execution. Decius was a prudent ruler, an earnest man of the old school, endued with an indomitable will. But it was just this that drove him to the conclusion that Christianity, as a godless system and one opposed to the interests of the state, must be summarily suppressed. All possible means, such as confiscation of goods, banishment, severe tortures, or death, were tried in order to induce the Christians to yield. Very many spoiled by the long peace that they had enjoyed gave way, but on the other hand crowds of Christians, impelled by a yearning after the crown of martyrdom, gave themselves up joyfully to the prison and the stake. Those who fell away, the _lapsi_, were classified as the _Thurificati_ or _Sacrificati_, who to save their lives had burnt incense or sacrificed to the gods, and _Libellatici_, who without doing this had purchased a certificate from the magistrates that they had done so, and _Acta facientes_, who had issued documents giving false statements regarding their Christianity. Those were called _Confessores_ who publicly professed Christ and remained steadfast under persecution, but escaped with their lives; those were called _Martyrs_ who witnessing with their blood, suffered death for the faith they professed. The Roman church could boast of a whole series of bishops who fell victims to the storm of persecution: Fabianus [Fabian] in A.D. 250, and Cornelius in A.D. 253, probably also Lucius in A.D. 254, and Stephanus in A.D. 257. And as in Rome, so also in the provinces, whole troops of confessors and martyrs met a joyful death, not only from among the clergy, but also from among the general members of the church.--Then again, under =Gallus= (A.D. 251-253), the persecution continued, excited anew by plagues and famine, but was in many ways restricted by political embarrassment. =Valerianus= [Valerian] (A.D. 253-260), from being a favourer of the Christians, began from A.D. 257, under the influence of his favourite Macrianus, to show himself a determined persecutor. The Christian pastors were at first banished, and since this had not the desired effect, they were afterwards punished with death. At this time, too, the bishop of Carthage, Cyprian, who under Decius had for a short season withdrawn by flight into the wilderness, won for himself the martyr’s crown. So, likewise, in A.D. 258, suffered Sixtus II. of Rome. The Roman bishop was soon followed by his deacon Laurentius, a hero among Christian martyrs, who pointed the avaricious governor to the sick, the poor and the orphans of the congregation as the treasures of the church, and was then burnt alive on a fire of glowing coal. But Valerian’s son, =Gallienus= (A.D. 260-268), by an edict addressed to the bishops, abolished the special persecuting statutes issued by his father, without, however, as he is often erroneously said to have done, formally recognising Christianity as a _Religio licita_. The Christians after this enjoyed a forty years’ rest; for the commonly reported cruel persecution of Christians under =Claudius II.=, (A.D. 268-270) has been proved to be a pure fable of apocryphal Acts of the Martyrs; and also the persecution planned by =Aurelian= (A.D. 270-275), toward the close of his reign, was prevented by his assassination committed by a pagan officer.

§ 22.6. =Diocletian and Galerius.=--When =Diocletian= (A.D. 284-305) was proclaimed Emperor by the army in Chalcedon, he chose Nicomedia in Bithynia as his residence, and transferred the conduct of the war to the general Maximianus [Maximian] Herculius with the title of Cæsar, who, after the campaign had been closed successfully in A.D. 286, was raised to the rank of Augustus or joint-Emperor. New harassments from within and from without led the two Emperors in A.D. 286 to name two Cæsars, or sub-Emperors, who by their being adopted were assured of succession to imperial rank. Diocletian assumed the administration of the East, and gave up Illyricum as far as Pontus to his Cæsar and son-in-law Galerius. Maximian undertook the government of the West, and surrendered Gaul, Spain and Britain to his Cæsar, Constantius Chlorus. According to Martyrologies, there was a whole legion, called =Legio Thebaica=, that consisted of Christian soldiers. This legion was originally stationed in the East, but was sent into the war against the Gauls, because its members refused to take part in the persecution of their brethren. After suffering decimation twice over without any result, it is said that =Maximian= left this legion, consisting of 6,600 men, along with its commander St. Maurice, to be hewn down in the pass of Agaunum, now called St. Moritz, in the Canton Valais. According to Rettberg,[26] the historical germ of this consists in a tradition reported by Theodoret as originating during the fifth or sixth century, in a letter of Eucherius bishop of Lyons, about the martyrdom of St. Maurice, who as _Tribunus Militum_ was executed at Apamea along with seventy soldiers, by the orders of Maximian. =Diocletian=, as the elder and supreme Emperor, was an active, benevolent, clear-sighted statesman and ruler, but also a zealous adherent of the old religion as regenerated by Neo-platonic influences (§ 24, 2), and as such was inclined to hold Christianity responsible for many of the internal troubles of his kingdom. He was restrained from interfering with the Christians, however, by the policy of toleration which had prevailed since the time of Gallienus, as well as by his own benevolent disposition, and not least by the political consideration of the vast numbers of the Christian population. His own wife Prisca and his daughter Valeria had themselves embraced Christianity, as well as very many, and these the truest and most trustworthy, of the members of his household. Yet the incessant importunities and whispered suspicions of Galerius were not without success. In A.D. 298 he issued the decree, that all soldiers should take part in the sacrificial rites, and thus obliged all Christian soldiers to withdraw from the army. During a long sojourn in Nicomedia he finally prevailed upon the Emperor to order a second general persecution; yet even then Diocletian persisted, that in it no blood should be shed. This persecution opened in A.D. 303 with the imperial command to destroy the stately church of Nicomedia. Soon after an edict was issued forbidding all Christian assemblies, ordering the destruction of the churches, the burning of the sacred scriptures, and depriving Christians of their offices and of their civil rights. A Christian tore up the edict and was executed. Fire broke out in the imperial palace and Galerius blamed the Christians for the fire, and also charged them with a conspiracy against the life of the Emperor. A persecution then began to rage throughout the whole Roman empire, Gaul, Spain and Britain alone entirely escaping owing to the favour of Constantius Chlorus who governed these regions. All conceivable tortures and modes of death were practised, and new and more horrible devices were invented from day to day. Diocletian, who survived to A.D. 313, and Maximian, abdicated the imperial rank which they had jointly held in A.D. 305. Their places were filled by those who had been previously their Cæsars, and Galerius as now the chief Augustus proclaimed as Cæsars, =Severus= and =Maximinus Daza=, the most furious enemies of the Christians that could be found, so that the storm of persecution which had already begun in some measure to abate, was again revived in Italy by Severus and in the East by Maximinus. Then in order to bring all Christians into inevitable contact with idolatrous rites, Galerius in A.D. 308 had all victuals in the markets sprinkled with wine or water that had been offered to idols. Seized with a terrible illness, mortification beginning in his living body, he finally admitted the uselessness of all his efforts to root out Christianity, and shortly before his death, in common with his colleague, he issued in A.D. 311, a formal =edict of toleration=, which permitted to all Christians the free exercise of their religion and claimed in return their intercession for the emperor and the empire.--During this persecution of unexampled cruelty, lasting without intermission for eight years, many noble proofs were given of Christian heroism and of the joyousness that martyrdom inspired. The number of the _Lapsi_, though still considerable, was in proportion very much less than under the Decian persecution. How much truth, if any, there may have been in the later assertion of the Donatists (§ 63, 1), that even the Roman bishop, Marcellinus [Marcellus] (A.D. 296-304), and his presbyters, Melchiades, Marcellus and Sylvester, who were also his successors in the bishopric, had denied Christ and sacrificed to idols, cannot now be ascertained. Augustine denies the charge, but even the Felician Catalogue of the Popes reports that Marcellinus [Marcellus] during the persecution became a _Thurificatus_, adding, however, the extenuation, that he soon thereafter, seized with deep penitence, suffered martyrdom. The command to deliver up the sacred writings gave rise to a new order of apostates, the so-called _Traditores_. Many had recourse to a subterfuge by surrendering heretical writings instead of the sacred books and as such, but the earnest spirit of the age treated these as no better than _traditors_.[27]

§ 22.7. =Maximinus Daza, Maxentius and Licinius.=--After the death of Galerius his place was taken by the Dacian Licinius, who shared with Maximinus the government of the East, the former taking the European, the latter the Asiatic part along with Egypt. Constantius Chlorus had died in A.D. 306, and Galerius had given to the Cæsar Severus the empire of the West. But the army proclaimed Constantine, son of Constantius, as Emperor. He also established himself in Gaul, Spain and Britain. Then also Maxentius, son of the abdicated emperor Maximian, claimed the Western Empire, was proclaimed Augustus by the Prætorians, recognised by the Roman senate, and after the overthrow of Severus, ruled in Italy and Africa.--The pagan fanaticism of =Maximinus= prevailed against the toleration edict of Galerian. He heartily supported the attempted expulsion of Christians on the part of several prominent cities, and commended the measure on brazen tablets. He forbade the building of churches, punished many with fines and dishonour, inflicted in some cases bodily pains and even death, and gave official sanction to perpetrating upon them all sorts of scandalous enormities. The _Acta Pilati_, a pagan pseudepigraph filled with the grossest slanders about the passion of Christ, was widely circulated by him and introduced as a reading-book for the young in the public schools. =Constantine=, who had inherited from his father along with his Neo-platonic eclecticism his toleration of the Christians, secured to the professors of the Christian faith in his realm the most perfect quiet. =Maxentius=, too, at first let them alone; but the rivalry and enmity that was daily increasing between him and Constantine, the favourer of the Christians, drew him into close connection with the pagan party, and into sympathy with their persecuting spirit. In A.D. 312 Constantine led his army over the Alps. Maxentius opposed him with an army drawn up in three divisions; but Constantine pressed on victoriously, and shattered his opponent’s forces before the gates of Rome. Betaking himself to flight, Maxentius was drowned in the Tiber, and Constantine was then sole ruler over the entire Western Empire. At Milan he had a conference with Licinius, to whom he gave in marriage his sister Constantia. They jointly issued an edict in A.D. 313, which gave toleration to all forms of worship throughout the empire, expressly permitting conversion to Christianity, and ordering the restoration to the Christians of all the churches that had been taken from them. Soon thereafter a decisive battle was fought between Maximinus and Licinius. The former was defeated and took to flight. The friendly relations that had subsisted between =Constantine= and =Licinius= gave way gradually to estrangement and were at last succeeded by open hostility. Licinius by manifesting zeal as a persecutor identified himself with the pagan party, and Constantine threw in his lot with the Christians. In A.D. 323 a war broke out between these two, like a struggle for life and death between Paganism and Christianity. Licinius was overthrown and Constantine was master of the whole empire (§ 42, 2). Eusebius in his _Vita Constantini_ reports, on the basis probably of a sworn statement of the emperor, that during the expedition against Maxentius in A.D. 312, after praying for the aid of the higher powers, when the sun was going down, he saw in heaven a shining cross in the sun with a bright inscription: τούτῳ νίκα. During the night Christ appeared to him in a dream, and commanded him to take the cross as his standard in battle and with it to go into battle confident of victory. In his Church History, Eusebius makes no mention of this tradition of the vision. On the other hand there is here the fact, contested indeed by critics, that after the victory over Maxentius the emperor had erected his statue in the Roman Forum, with the cross in his hand, and bearing the inscription: “By this sign of salvation have I delivered your city from the yoke of the tyrant. ” This only is certain, that the imperial standard, which had the unexplained name Labarum, bore the sign of the cross with the monogram of the name of Christ.

§ 23. CONTROVERSIAL WRITINGS OF PAGANISM.

Pagan writers in their published works passed spiteful and contemptuous judgments upon Christians and Christianity (Tacitus, Pliny, Marcus Aurelius, and the physician Galen), or, like the rhetorician Fronto, argued against them with violent invective; while popular wit ran riot in representing Christianity by word and picture as the devout worship of an ass. But even the talented satirist Lucian of Samosata was satisfied with ridiculing the Christians as senseless fools. The first and also the most important of all really pagan advocates was Celsus, who in the second century, with brilliant subtlety and scathing sarcasm sought to prove that the religion of the Christians was the very climax of unreason. In respect of ability, keenness and bitterness of polemic he is closely followed by the Neo-platonist Porphyry. Far beneath both stands Hierocles, governor of Bithynia. Against such attacks the most famous Christian teachers took the field as Apologists. They disproved the calumnies and charges of the pagans, demanded fair play for the Christians, vindicated Christianity by the demonstration of its inner truth, the witness borne to it by the life and walk of Christians, its establishment by miracles and prophecies, its agreement with the utterances and longings of the most profound philosophers, whose wisdom they traced mediately or immediately from the Old Testament, and on the other hand, they sought to show the nothingness of the heathen gods, and the religious as well as moral perversity of paganism.

§ 23.1. =Lucian’s Satire _De Morte Peregrini_= takes the form of an account given by Lucian to his friend Cronius of the Cynic Peregrinus Proteus’ burning of himself during the Olympic games of A.D. 165, of which he himself was a witness. Peregrinus is described as a low, contemptible man, a parricide and guilty of adultery, unnatural vice and drunkenness, who having fled from his home in Palestine joined the Christians, learnt their θαυμαστὴ σοφία, became their prophet (§ 34, 1), Thiasarch (§ 17, 3) and Synagogeus, and as such expounded their sacred writings, even himself composed and addressed to the most celebrated Greek cities many epistles containing new ordinances and laws. When cast into prison he was the subject of the most extravagant attentions on the part of the Christians. Their γραΐδια and χῆραι (deaconesses) nursed him most carefully, δεῖπνα ποικίλα and λόγοι ἱεροί (Agapæ) were celebrated in his prison, they loaded him with presents, etc. Nevertheless on leaving prison, on account of his having eaten a forbidden kind of meat (flesh offered to idols) he was expelled by them. He now cast himself into the arms of the Cynics, travelled as the apostle of their views through the whole world, and ended his life in his mad thirst for fame by voluntarily casting himself upon the funeral pile. Lucian tells with scornful sneer how the superstitious people supposed that there had been an earthquake and that an eagle flew up from his ashes crying out: The earth I have lost, to Olympus I fly. This fable was believed, and even yet it is said that sometimes Peregrinus will be seen in a white garment as a spirit.--It is undoubtedly recorded by Aulus Gellius that a Cynic Peregrinus lived at this time whom he describes as _vir gravis et constans_. This too is told by the Apologist Tatian, who in him mocks at the pretension on the part of heathen philosophers to emancipation from all wants. But neither of them knows anything about his Christianity or his death by fire. It is nevertheless conceivable that Peregrinus had for some time connection with Christianity; but without this assumption it seems likely that Lucian in a satire which, under the combined influence of personal and class antipathies, aimed first and chiefly at stigmatizing Cynicism in the person of Peregrinus, should place Christianity alongside of it as what seemed to him with its contempt of the world and self-denial to be a new, perhaps a nobler, but still nothing more than a species of Cynicism. Many features in the caricature which he gives of the life, doings and death of Peregrinus seem to have been derived by him from the life of the Apostle Paul as well as from the account of the martyrdom of Ignatius, and especially from that of Polycarp (§ 22, 3).[28]

§ 23.2. =Worshippers of an Ass= (Asinarii) was a term of reproach that was originally and from early times applied to the Jews. They now sought to have it transferred to the Christians. Tertullian tells of a picture publicly exhibited in Carthage which represented a man clothed in a toga, with the ears and hoof of an ass, holding a book in his hand, and had this inscription: _Deus Christianorum Onochoetes_. This name is variously read. If read as ὄνου χοητής it means _asini sacerdos_. Alongside of this we may place the picture, belonging probably to the third century, discovered in A.D. 1858 scratched on a wall among the ruins of a school for the imperial slaves, that were then excavated. It represents a man with an ass’s head hanging on a cross, and beneath it the caricature of a worshipper with the words written in a schoolboy’s hand; Alexamenos worships God (A. σεβετε θεον); evidently the derision of a Christian youth by a pagan companion. The scratching on another wall gives us probably the answer of the Christian: _Alexamenos fidelis_.

§ 23.3. =Polemic properly so-called.=--

(a) The Λόγος ἀληθής of =Celsus= is in great part preserved in the answer of Origen (§ 31, 5). He identifies the author with that Celsus to whom Lucian dedicated the little work _Alexander or Pseudomantis_ in which he so extols the philosophy of Epicurus that it seems he must be regarded as an Epicurean. Since, however, the philosophical standpoint of our Celsus is that of a Platonist the assumption of the identity of the two has been regarded as untenable. But even our Celsus does not seem to have been a pure Platonist but an Eclectic, and as such might also show a certain measure of favour to the philosophy of Epicurus. Their age is at least the same. Lucian wrote that treatise soon after A.D. 180, and according to Keim, the Λόγος ἀληθής was probably composed about A.D. 178. Almost everything that modern opponents down to our own day have advanced against the gospel history and doctrine is found here wrought out with original force and subtlety, inspired with burning hatred and bitter irony, and highly spiced with invective, mockery, and wit. First of all the author introduces a Jew who repeats the slanders current among the Jews, representing Jesus as a vagabond impostor, His mother as an adulteress, His miracles and resurrection as lying fables; then enters a heathen philosopher who proves that both Judaism and Christianity are absurd; and finally, the conditions are set forth under which alone the Christians might claim indulgence: the abandonment of their exclusive attitude toward the national religion and the recognition of it by their taking part in the sacrifices appointed by the state.[29]

(b) The Neo-platonist Porphyry, about A.D. 270, as reported by Jerome, in the XV. Book of his Κατὰ Χριστιανῶν points to a number of supposed contradictions in holy scripture, calls attention to the conflict between Paul and Peter (Gal. ii.), explains Daniel’s prophecies as _Vaticinia post eventum_, and censures the allegorical interpretation of the Christians. Although even among the Christians themselves Porphyry as a philosopher was highly esteemed, and notwithstanding contact at certain points between his ethical and religious view of the world and that of the Christians, perhaps just because of this, he is the worst and most dangerous of all their pagan assailants. Against his controversial writings, therefore, the edict of Theodosius II. ordering them to be burnt was directed in A.D. 448 (§ 42, 4), and owing to the zeal with which his works were destroyed the greater part of the treatises which quoted from it for purposes of controversy also perished with it--the writings of Methodius of Tyre (§ 31, 9), Eusebius of Cæsarea (§ 47, 2), Philostorgius (§ 5, 1) and Apollinaris the younger (§ 47, 5). Of these according to Jerome those of the last named were the most important. In the recently discovered controversial treatise of Macarius Magnes (§ 47, 6) an unnamed pagan philosopher is combated whose attacks, chiefly directed against the Gospels, to all appearance verbally agree with the treatise of Porphyry, or rather, perhaps, with that of his plagiarist Hierocles.

(c) =Hierocles= who as governor of Bithynia took an active part in the persecution of Galerius, wrote two books Λόγοι φιλαλήθεις against the Christians, about A.D. 305, which have also perished. Eusebius’ reply refers only to his repudiation of the equality assigned to Christ and Apollonius of Tyana (§ 24, 1). While the title of his treatise is borrowed from that of Celsus, he has also according to the testimony of Eusebius in great part copied the very words of both of his predecessors.

§ 24. Attempted Reconstruction of Paganism.

All its own more thoughtful adherents had long acknowledged that paganism must undergo a thorough reform and reconstruction if it were to continue any longer in existence. In the Augustan Age an effort was made to bolster up Neopythagoreanism by means of theurgy and magic. The chief representative of this movement was Apollonius of Tyana. In the second century an attempt was made to revivify the secret rites of the ancient mysteries, of Dea Syra, and Mithras. Yet all this was not enough. What was needed was the setting up of a pagan system which would meet the religious cravings of men in the same measure as Christianity with its supernaturalism, monotheism and universalism had done, and would have the absurdities and impurities that had disfigured the popular religion stripped off. Such a regeneration of paganism was undertaken in the beginning of the third century by Neoplatonism. But even this was no more able than pagan polemics had been to check the victorious career of Christianity.

§ 24.1. =Apollonius of Tyana= in Cappadocia, a contemporary of Christ and the Apostles, was a philosopher, ascetic and magician esteemed among the people as a worker of miracles. As an earnest adherent of the doctrine of Pythagoras, whom he also imitated in his dress and manner of life, claiming the possession of the gifts of prophecy and miracle working, he assumed the role of a moral and religious reformer of the pagan religion of his fathers. Accompanied by numerous scholars, teaching and working miracles, he travelled through the whole of the then known world until he reached the wonderland of India. He settled down at last in Ephesus where he died at an advanced age, having at least passed his ninety-sixth year. At the wish of the Empress Julia, wife of Septimius Severus, in the third century, Philostratus the elder composed in the form of a romance in eight books based upon written and oral sources, a biography of Apollonius, in which he is represented as a heathen counterpart of Christ, who is otherwise completely ignored, excelling Him in completeness of life, doctrine and miraculous powers.[30]

§ 24.2. In =Neo-platonism=, by the combination of all that was noblest and best in the exoteric and esoteric religion, in the philosophy, theosophy and theurgy of earlier and later times in East and West, we are presented with a universal religion in which faith and knowledge, philosophy and theology, theory and practice, were so perfectly united and reconciled, and all religious needs so fully met, that in comparison with its wealth and fulness, the gnosis as well as the faith, the worship and the mysteries of the Christians must have seemed one-sided, commonplace and incomplete. The first to introduce and commend this tendency, which was carried out in three successive schools of philosophy, the Alexandrian-Roman, the Syrian and the Athenian, was the Alexandrian =Ammonius Saccas=,--this surname being derived from his occupation as a porter. He lived and taught in Alexandria till about A.D. 250. He sought to combine in a higher unity the Platonic and the Aristotelian philosophies, giving to the former a normative authority, and he did not hesitate to enrich his system by the incorporation of Christian ideas. His knowledge of Christianity came from Clement of Alexandria and from Origen, whose teacher in philosophy he had been. Porphyry indeed affirms that he had previously been himself a Christian, but had at a later period of life returned to paganism.--The most distinguished of his scholars, and also the most talented and profound of all the Neo-platonists, was =Plotinus=, who was in A.D. 254 a teacher of philosophy at Rome, and died in A.D. 270. His philosophico-theological system in its characteristic features is a combination of the Platonic antithesis of the finite world of sense and the eternal world of ideas with the stoical doctrine of the world soul. The eternal ground of all being is the one supramundane, unintelligible and indescribable good (τὸ ἕν, τὸ ἀγαθόν), from which all stages of being are radiated forth; first; spirit or the world of ideas (νοῦς, κόσμος νοητός), the eternal type of all being; and then, from this the world soul (ψυχή); and from this, finally, the world of phenomena. The outermost fringe of this evolution, the forms of which the further they are removed from the original ground become more and more imperfect, is matter, just as the shadow is the outermost fringe of the light. It is conceived of as the finite, the fleeting, even as evil in itself. But imperfect as the world of sense is, it is nevertheless the vehicle of the ideal world and in many ways penetrated by the ideas, and the lighting up imparted by the ideas affords it its beauty. In consequence of those rays shining in from the realm of ideas, a whole vast hierarchy of divine forms has arisen, with countless dæmons good and bad, which give room for the incorporation of all the divine beings of the Greek and oriental mythologies. In this way myths that were partly immoral and partly fantastic can be rehabilitated as symbolical coverings of speculative ideas. The souls of men, too, originate from the eternal world soul. By their transition, however, into the world of sense they are hampered and fettered by corporeity. They themselves complete their redemption through emancipation from the bonds of sense by means of asceticism and the practice of virtue. In this way they secure a return into the ideal world and the vision of the highest good, sometimes as moments of ecstatic mystical union with that world, even during this earthly life, but an eternally unbroken continuance thereof is only attained unto after complete emancipation from all the bonds of matter.[31]--Plotinus’ most celebrated scholar, who also wrote his life, and collected and arranged his literary remains, was =Porphyry=. He also taught in Rome and died there in A.D. 304. His ἐκ τῶν λογίων φιλοσοφία, a collection of oracular utterances, was a positive supplement to his polemic against Christianity (§ 23, 3), and afforded to paganism a book of revelation, a heathen bible, as Philostratus had before sought to portray a heathen saviour. Of greater importance for the development of mediæval scholasticism was his Commentary on the logical works of Aristotle, published in several editions of the Aristotelian Organon.--His scholar =Iamblichus= of Chalcis in Cœle-Syria, who died A.D. 333, was the founder of the Syrian school. The development which he gave to the Neo-platonic doctrine consisted chiefly in the incorporation of a fantastic oriental mythology and theurgy. This also brought him the reputation of being a magician.--Finally, the Athenian school had in =Proclus=, who died in A.D. 485, its most distinguished representative. While on the one hand, he proceeded along the path opened by Iamblichus to develop vagaries about dæmons and theurgical fancies, on the other hand, he gave to his school an impulse in the direction of scholarly and encyclopædic culture.--The Neo-platonic speculation exercised no small influence on the development of Christian philosophy. The philosophizing church fathers, whose darling was Plato, got acquaintance with his philosophical views from its relatively pure reproduction met with in the works of the older Neo-platonists. The influence of their mystico-theosophic doctrine, especially as conveyed in the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius (§ 47, 11), is particularly discernible in the Christian mysticism of the middle ages, and has been thence transmitted to modern times.[32]

§ 25. Jewish and Samaritan Reaction.

The Judaism of the Apostolic Age in its most characteristic form was thoroughly hostile to Christianity. The Pharisees and the mass of the people with their expectation of a political Messiah, took offence at a Messiah crucified by the Gentiles (1 Cor. i. 13); their national pride was wounded by the granting of equality to Samaritans and heathens, while their legal righteousness and sham piety were exposed and censured by the teachings of Christianity. On the other side, the Sadducees felt no less called upon to fight to the death against Christianity with its doctrine of the resurrection (Acts iv. 2; xxiii. 6). The same hostile feeling generally prevailed among the dispersion. The Jewish community at Berea (Acts xvii. 2) is praised as a pleasing exception to the general rule. Finally, in A.D. 70 destruction fell upon the covenant people and the holy city. The Christian church of Jerusalem, acting upon a warning uttered by the Lord (Matt. xxiv. 16), found a place of refuge in the mountain city of Pella, on the other side of Jordan. But when the Pseudo-Messiah, Bar-Cochba (Son of a Star, Num. xxiv. 17), roused all Palestine against the Roman rule, in A.D. 132, the Palestinian Christians who refused to assist or recognise the false Messiah, had again to endure a bloody persecution. Bar-Cochba was defeated in A.D. 135. Hadrian now commanded that upon pain of death no Jew should enter Ælia Capitolina, the Roman colony founded by him on the ruins of Jerusalem. From that time they were deprived of all power and opportunity for direct persecution of the Christians. All the greater was their pleasure at the persecutions by the heathens and their zeal in urging the pagans to extreme measures. In their seminaries they gave currency to the most horrible lies and calumnies about Christ and the Christians, which also issued thence among the heathens. On the other hand, however, they intensified their own anti-Christian attitude and sought protection against the advancing tide of Christianity by strangling all spiritual movement under a mass of traditional interpretations and judgments of men. The Schools of Tiberias and Babylon were the nurseries of this movement, and the _Talmud_, the first part of which, the _Mishna_, had its origin during this period, marks the completion of this anti-Christian self-petrifaction of Judaism. The disciples of John, too, assumed a hostile attitude toward Christianity, and formed a distinct set under the name of Hemerobaptists. Contemporaneously with the first successes of the Apostolic mission, a current set in among the Samaritans calculated to checkmate Christianity by the setting up of new religions. Dositheus, Simon Magus and Menander here made their appearance with claims to the Messiahship, and were at a later period designated heresiarchs by the church fathers, who believed that in them they found the germs of the Gnostic heresy (§§ 26 ff.).

§ 25.1. =Disciples of John.=--Even after their master had been beheaded the disciples of John the Baptist maintained a separate society of their own, and reproached the disciples of Jesus because of their want of strict ascetic discipline (Matt. ix. 14, etc.). The disciples of John in the Acts (xviii. 25; xix. 1-7) were probably Hellenist Jews, who on their visits to the feasts had been pointed by John to Christ, announced by him as Messiah, without having any information as to the further developments of the Christian community. About the middle of the second century, however, the Clementine Homilies (§ 28, 3), in which John the Baptist is designated a ἡμεροβαπτίστης, speaks of gnosticizing disciples of John, who may be identical with the =Hemerobaptists=, that is, those who practise baptism daily, of Eusebius (_Hist. Eccl._, iv. 22). They originated probably from a coalition of Essenes (§ 8, 4) and disciples of the Baptist who when orphaned by the death of John persistently refused to join the disciples of Christ.--We hear no more of them till the Carmelite missionary John a Jesu in Persia came upon a sect erroneously called Christians of St. John or Nazoreans.[33] Authentic information about the doctrine, worship and constitution of this sect that still numbers some hundred families, was first obtained in the 19th century by an examination of their very comprehensive sacred literature, written in an Aramaic dialect very similar to that of the Babylonian Talmud. The most important of those writings the so-called Great Book (_Sidra rabba_), also called _Ginza_, that is, thesaurus, has been faithfully reproduced by Petermann under the title _Thesaurus s. Liber magnus_, etc., 2 vols., Berl., 1867.--Among themselves the adherents of this sect were styled =Mandæans=, after one of their numerous divine beings or æons, _Manda de chaje_, meaning γνῶσις τῆς ζωῆς. In their extremely complicated religious system, resembling in many respects the Ophite Gnosis (§ 27, 6) and Manicheism (§ 29), this Æon takes the place of the heavenly mediator in the salvation of the earthly world. Among those without, however, they called themselves Subba, =Sabeans= from צבא or צבע to baptize. Although they cannot be identified right off with the Disciples of John and Hemerobaptists, a historical connection between them, carrying with it gnostic and oriental-heathen influences, is highly probable. The name Sabean itself suggests this, but still more the position they assign to John the Baptist as the only true prophet over against Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. As adherents of John the Baptist rejected by the Jews the old Disciples of John had an anti-Jewish character, and by their own rejection of Christ an anti-Christian character. By shifting their residence to Babylon, however, they became so dependent on the Syro-Chaldean mythology, theosophy and theurgy, that they sank completely into paganism, and so their opposition to Judaism and Christianity increased into fanatical hatred and horrid calumniation.[34]

§ 25.2. =The Samaritan Heresiarchs.=

(a) =Dositheus= was according to Origen a contemporary of Jesus and the Apostles, and gave himself out as the prophet promised in Deut. xviii. 18. He insisted upon a curiously strict observance of the Sabbath, and according to Epiphanius he perished miserably in a cave in consequence of an ostentatiously prolonged fast. Purely fabulous are the stories of the Pseudo-Clementine writings (§ 28, 3) which bring him into contact with John the Baptist as his scholar and successor, and with Simon Magus as his defeated rival. More credible is the account of an Arabic-Samaritan Chronicle,[35] according to which the sect of the Dostanians at the time of Simon Maccabæus traced their descent from a Samaritan tribe, while also the Catholic heresiologies (§ 26, 4) reckon the Dositheans among the pre-Christian sects. According to a statement of Eulogius of Alexandria recorded by Photius, the Dositheans and Samaritans in Egypt in A.D. 588 disputed as to the meaning of Deut. xviii. 18.

(b) =Simon Magus=, born, according to Justin Martyr, at Gitta in Samaria, appeared in his native country as a soothsayer with such success that the infatuated people hailed him as the δύναμις τοῦ θεοῦ ἡ καλουμένη μεγάλη. When Philip the Deacon preached the gospel in Samaria, Simon also received baptism from him, but was sternly denounced by Peter from whom he wished to buy the gift of communicating the Spirit (Acts viii). As to the identity of this man with Simon the Magician, according to Josephus hailing from Cyprus, who induced the Herodian Drusilla to quit her husband and become the wife of the Governor Felix (Acts xxiv. 24), it can scarcely claim to be more than a probability. A vast collection of fabulous legends soon grew up around the name of Simon Magus, not only from the Gentile-Christian and Catholic side, but also from the Jewish-Christian and heretical side; the latter to be still met with in the _Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions_, while in the _Acta Petri et Pauli_, we have the Catholic revision and reproduction of the no longer extant Ebionistic _Acts of Peter_ (§ 32, 6). These Judaizing heretics particularly amused themselves by making a very slightly veiled vile caricature of the great Apostle of the Gentiles by transferring to the name of the magician many distorted representations of occurrences in the life and works of the Apostle Paul. This representation, however, was recognised in the Acts above referred to and by the church fathers as originally descriptive of Simon Magus. On the basis of this legendary conglomerate Irenæus, after the example of Justin, describes him as _Magister ac progenitor omnium hæreticorum_. From a house of ill fame in Tyre he bought a slave girl Helena, to whom he assigned the role of the world creating Ἔννοια of God. The angels born of her for the purpose of creating the world had rebelled against her; she was enslaved, and was imprisoned, sometimes in this, sometimes in that, human body; at one time in the body of Helen of Troy, and at last in that of the Tyrian prostitute. In order to redeem her and with her the world enslaved by the rebel angels, the supreme God (ὁ ἐστώς) Himself came down and assumed the form of man, was born unbegotten of man, suffered in appearance in Judea, and reveals Himself to the Samaritans as Father, to the Jews as Son, and to the Gentiles as the Holy Spirit. The salvation of man consists simply in acknowledging Simon and his Helena as the supreme gods. By faith only, not by works, is man justified. The law originated with the evil angels and was devised by them merely to keep men in bondage under them. This last point is evidently transferred to the magician partly from the Apostle Paul, partly from Marcion (§ 27, 11), and is copied from Ebionite sources. The Simon myth is specially rich in legends about the magician’s residence in Rome, to which place he had betaken himself after being often defeated in disputation by the Apostle Peter, and where he was so successful that the Romans erected a column in his honour on an island in the Tiber, which Justin Martyr himself is said to have seen, bearing the inscription: _Simoni sancto Deo_. The discovery in A.D. 1574 of the column dedicated to the Sabine god of oaths, inscribed “_Semoni Sanco Deo Fidio_,” explains how such a legend may have arisen out of a misunderstanding. Although by a successful piece of jugglery--decapitation and rising again the third day, having substituted for himself a goat whom he had bewitched to assume his appearance, whose head was cut off--he won the special favour of Nero, he was thereafter in public disputation before the emperor unmasked by Peter. In order to rehabilitate himself he offered to prove his divine power by ascending up into heaven. For this purpose he mounted a high tower. Peter adjured the angel of Satan, which carried him through the air, and the magician fell with a crash to the ground. Probably there is here transferred to one magician what is told by Suetonius (_Nero_, xii.) and Juvenal (_Sat._ iii. 79 ff.) as happening to a soothsayer in Nero’s time who made an attempt to fly. The school of Baur (§ 182, 7), after Baur himself had discovered in the Simon Magus of the Clementine Homilies a caricature of the Apostle Paul, has come to question the existence of the magician altogether, and has attempted to account for the myth as originating from the hatred of the Jewish Christians to the Apostle of the Gentiles. Support for this view is sought from Acts viii., the offering of money by the magician being regarded as a maliciously distorted account of the contribution conveyed by Paul to the church at Jerusalem.[36] Recently, however, Hilgenfeld, who previously maintained this view, has again recognised as well grounded the tradition of the Church Fathers, that Simon was the real author of the ψευδώνυμος γνῶσις, and has carried out this idea in his “Ketzergeschichte.”

(c) =Menander= was, according to Justin Martyr, a disciple of Simon. Subsequently he undertook to play the part of the Saviour of the world. In doing so, however, he was always, as Irenæus remarks, modest enough not to give himself out as the supreme god, but only as the Messiah sent by Him. He taught, however, that any one who should receive his baptism would never become old or die.[37]

II. DANGER TO THE CHURCH FROM PAGAN AND JEWISH ELEMENTS WITHIN ITS OWN PALE.

§ 26. GNOSTICISM IN GENERAL.[38]

The Judaism and paganism imported into the church proved more dangerous to it than the storm of persecution raging against it from without. Ebionism (§ 28) was the result of the attempt to incorporate into Christianity the narrow particularism of Judaism; Heretical Gnosis or Gnosticism was the result of the attempt to blend with Christianity the religious notions of pagan mythology, mysteriology, theosophy and philosophy. These two tendencies, moreover, were combined in a Gnostic Ebionism, in the direction of which Essenism may be regarded as a transitional stage (§ 8, 4). In many respects Manichæism (§ 29), which sprang up at a later period, is related to the Gnosticism of Gentile Christianity, but also in character and tendency widely different from it. The church had to employ all her powers to preserve herself from this medley of religious fancies and to purify her fields from the weeds that were being sown on every side. In regard to Ebionism and its gnosticizing developments this was a comparatively easy task. The Gnosticism of Gentile Christianity was much more difficult to deal with, and although the church succeeded in overcoming the weed in her fields, yet many of its seeds continued hidden for centuries, from which sprouts grew up now and again quite unexpectedly (§§ 54, 71, 108). This struggle has nevertheless led to the furtherance of the church in many ways, awakening in it a sense of scientific requirements, stirring it up to more vigorous battling for the truth, and endowing it with a more generous and liberal spirit. It had learnt to put a Christian gnosis in the place of the heretical, a right and wholesome use of speculation and philosophy, of poetry and art, in place of their misuse, and thus enabled Christianity to realise its universal destination.

§ 26.1. =Gnosticism= was deeply rooted in a powerful and characteristic intellectual tendency of the first century. A persistent conviction that the ancient world had exhausted itself and was no longer able to resist its threatened overthrow, now prevailed and drove the deepest thinkers to adopt the boldest and grandest Syncretism the world has ever beheld, in the blending of all the previously isolated and heterogeneous elements of culture as a final attempt at the rejuvenating of that which had become old (§ 25). Even within the borders of the church this Syncretism favoured by the prevailing spirit of the age influenced those of superior culture, to whom the church doctrine of that age did not seem to make enough of theosophical principles and speculative thought, while the worship of the church seemed dry and barren. Out of the fusing of cosmological myths and philosophemes of oriental and Greek paganism with Christian historical elements in the crucible of its own speculation, there arose numerous systems of a higher fantastic sort of religious philosophy, which were included under the common name of Gnosticism. The pagan element is upon the whole the prevailing one, inasmuch as in most Gnostic systems Christianity is not represented as the conclusion and completion of the development of salvation given in the Old Testament, but often merely as the continuation and climax of the pagan religion of nature and the pagan mystery worship. The attitude of this heretical gnosis toward holy scripture was various. By means of allegorical interpretation some endeavoured to prove their system from it; others preferred to depreciate the Apostles as falsifiers of the original purely gnostic doctrine of Christ, or to remodel the apostolic writings in accordance with their own views, or even to produce a bible of their own after the principles of their own schools in the form of gnostic pseudepigraphs. With them, however, for the most part the tradition of ancient wisdom as the communicated secret doctrine stood higher than holy scripture. Over against the heretical gnosis, an ecclesiastical gnosis was developed, especially in the Alexandrian school of theology (Clement and Origen, § 31, 4, 5), which, according to 1 Cor. xii. 8, 9; xiii. 2, was esteemed and striven after as, in contradistinction to faith, a higher stage in the development of the religious consciousness. The essential distinction between the two consisted in this, that the latter was determined, inspired and governed by the believing consciousness of the universal church, as gradually formulated in the church confession, whereas the former, completely emancipated therefrom, disported itself in the unrestricted arbitrariness of fantastic speculation.

§ 26.2. =The Problems of Gnostic Speculation= are: the origin of the world and of evil, as well as the task, means and end of the world’s development. In solving these problems the Gnostics borrowed mostly from paganism the theory of the world’s origin, and from Christianity the idea of redemption. At the basis of almost all Gnostic systems there lies the dualism of God and matter (ὕλη); only that matter is regarded sometimes in a Platonic sense as non-essential and non-substantial (=μὴ ὄν) and hence without hostile opposition to the godhead, sometimes more in the Parsee sense as inspired and dominated by an evil principle, and hence in violent opposition to the good God. In working out the theosophical and cosmological process it is mainly the idea of emanation (προβολή) that is called into play, whereby from the hidden God is derived a long series of divine essences (αἰῶνες), whose inherent divine power diminishes in proportion as they are removed to a distance from the original source of being. These æons then make their appearance as intermediaries in the creation, development and redemption of the world. The substratum out of which the world is created consists in a mixture of the elements of the world of light (πλήρωμα) with the elements of matter (κένωμα) by means of nature, chance or conflict. One of the least and weakest of the æons, who is usually designated Δημιουργός, after the example of Plato in the _Timæus_, is brought forward as the creator of the world. Creation is the first step toward redemption. But the Demiurge cannot or will not carry it out, and so finally there appears in the fulness of the times one of the highest æons as redeemer, in order to secure perfect emancipation to the imprisoned elements of light by the communication of the γνῶσις. Seeing that matter is derived from the evil, he appears in a seeming body or at baptism identifies himself with the psychical Messiah sent by the Demiurge. The death on the cross is either only an optical illusion, or the heavenly Christ, returning to the pleroma, quits the man Jesus, or gives His form to some other man (Simon of Cyrene, Matt. xxvii. 32) so that he is crucified instead of Him (Docetism). The souls of men, according as the pleromatic or hylic predominates in them, are in their nature, either _Pneumatic_, which alone are capable of the γνῶσις, or _Psychical_, which can only aspire to πίστις, or finally, _Hylic_ (χοϊκοί, σαρκικοί), to which class the great majority belongs, which, subject to Satanic influences, serve only their lower desires. Redemption consists in the conquest and exclusion of matter, and is accomplished through knowledge (γνῶσις) and asceticism. It is therefore a chemical, rather than an ethical process. Seeing that the original seat of evil is in matter, sanctification is driven from the ethical domain into the physical, and consists in battling with matter and withholding from material enjoyments. The Gnostics were thus originally very strict in their moral discipline, but often they rushed to the other extreme, to libertinism and antinomianism, in consequence partly of the depreciation of the law of the Demiurge, partly of the tendency to rebound from one extreme to the other, and justified their conduct on the ground of παραχρῆσθαι τῇ σαρκί.

§ 26.3. =Distribution.=--_Gieseler_ groups the Gentile Christian Gnostics according to their native countries into Egyptian or Alexandrian, whose emanationist and dualistic theories were coloured by Platonism, and the Syrian, whose views were affected by Parseeism.--_Neander_ divides Gnostic systems into Judaistic and Anti-Jewish, subdividing the latter into such as incline to Paganism, and such as strive to apprehend Christianity in its purity and simplicity.--_Hase_ arranges them as Oriental, Greek and Christian.--_Baur_ classifies the Gnostic systems as those which endeavour to combine Judaism and paganism with Christianity, and those which oppose Christianity to these.--_Lipsius_ marks three stages in the development of Gnosticism: the blending of Asiatic myths with a Jewish and Christian basis which took place in Syria; the further addition to this of Greek philosophy either Stoicism or Platonism which was carried out in Egypt; and recurrence to the ethical principles of Christianity, the elevation of πίστις above γνῶσις.--_Hilgenfeld_ arranges his discussion of these systems in accordance with their place in the early heresiologies.--But none of these arrangements can be regarded as in every respect satisfactory, and indeed it may be impossible to lay down any principle of distribution of such a kind. There are so many fundamental elements and these of so diverse a character, that no one scheme of division may suffice for an adequate classification of all Gnostic systems. The difficulty was further enhanced by the contradiction, approximation, and confusion of systems, and by their construction and reconstruction, of which Rome as the capital of the world was the great centre.

§ 26.4. =Sources of Information.=--Abundant as the literary productions were which assumed the name or else without the name developed the principles of Gnosticism, comparatively little of this literature has been preserved. We are thus mainly dependent upon the representations of its catholic opponents, and to them also we owe the preservation of many authentic fragments. The first church teacher who _ex professo_ deals with Gnosticism is Justin Martyr (§ 30, 9), whose controversial treatise, however, as well as that of Hegesippus (§ 31, 7), has been lost. The most important of extant treatises of this kind are those of Irenæus in five books _Adv. hæreses_, and of Hippolytus Ἔλεγχος κατὰ πασῶν αἱρέσεων, the so-called _Philosophoumena_ (§ 31, 3). The Σύνταγμα κ. π. αἱρ. of Hippolytus is no longer extant in the original; a Latin translation of it apparently exists in the _Libellus adv. omnes hæreses_, which has been attributed to Tertullian. Together with the work of Irenæus, it formed a query for the later heresiologists, Epiphanius and Philaster (§ 47, 10, 14), who were apparently unacquainted with the later written but more important and complete _Elenchus_. Besides these should be mentioned the writings of Tertullian (§ 31, 10) and Theodoret (§ 47, 9) referring to this controversy, the _Stromata_ of Clement of Alexandria, and the published discussions of Origen (§ 31, 4, 5), especially in his Commentary on John, also the five Dialogues of the Pseudo-Origen (Adamantius) against the Gnostics from the beginning of the fourth century;[39] and finally many notices in the Church History of Eusebius. The still extant fragments of the Gnostic Apocryphal historian of the Apostles afford information about the teaching and forms of worship of the later syncretic vulgar Gnosticism, and also from the very defective representations of them in the works of their Catholic opponents.

§ 27. THE GENTILE CHRISTIAN GNOSTICISM.

In the older heretical Gnosticism (§ 18, 3), Jewish, pagan, and Christian elements are found, which are kept distinct, or are amalgamated or after examination are rejected, what remains being developed, consolidated and distributed, but in a confused blending. This is the case with Cerinthus. In Basilides again, who attaches himself to the doctrines of Stoicism, we have Gnosticism developed under the influence of Alexandrian culture; and soon thereafter in Valentinus, who builds on Plato’s philosophy, it attains its richest, most profound and noblest expression. From the blending of Syro-Chaldæan mythology with Greek and Hellenistic-Gnostic theories issue the divers Ophite systems. Antinomian Gnosticism with loose practical morality was an outgrowth from the contempt shown to the Jewish God that created the world and gave the law. The genuinely Syrian Gnosticism with its Parseeist-dualistic ruggedness was most purely represented by Saturninus, while in Marcion and his scholars the exaggeration of the Pauline opposition of law and grace led to a dualistic contrast of the God of the Old Testament and of the New. From the middle of the second century onwards there appears in the historical development of Gnosticism an ever-increasing tendency to come to terms with the doctrine of the church. This is shown by the founders of new sects, Marcion, Tatian, Hermogenes; and also by many elaborators of early systems, by Heracleon, Ptolomæus and Bardesanes who developed the Valentinian system, in the so-called Pistis Sophia, as the exposition of the Ophite system. This tendency to seek reconciliation with the church is also shown in a kind of syncretic popular or vulgar Gnosticism which sought to attach itself more closely to the church by the composition of apocryphal and pseudepigraphic Gospels and Acts of Apostles under biblical names and dates (§ 32, 4-6).--The most brilliant period in the history of Gnosticism was the second century, commencing with the age of Hadrian. At the beginning of the third century there was scarcely one of the more cultured congregations throughout the whole of the Roman empire and beyond this as far as Edessa, that was not affected by it. Yet we never find the numbers of regular Gnostic congregations exceeding that of the Catholic. Soon thereafter the season of decay set in. Its productive power was exhausted, and while, on the one side, it was driven back by the Catholic ecclesiastical reaction, on the other hand, in respect of congregational organization it was outrun and outbidden by Manichæism, and also by Marcionism.

§ 27.1. =Cerinthus=, as Irenæus says, resting on the testimony of Polycarp, was a younger contemporary of the Apostle John in Asia Minor; the Apostle meeting the heretic in a bath hastened out lest the building should fall upon the enemy of the truth. In his Gnosticism, resting according to Hippolytus on a basis of Alexandrian-Greek culture, we have the transition from the Jewish-Christian to a more Gentile than Jewish-Christian Gnostic standpoint. The continued hold of the former is seen according to Epiphanius in the maintaining of the necessity of circumcision and of the observances by Christians of the law given by disposition of angels, as also, according to Caius of Rome, who regards him as the author of the New Testament Apocalypse, in chiliastic expectations. Both of these, however, were probably intended only in the allegorical and spiritual sense. At the same time, according to Irenæus and Theodoret, the essentially Gnostic figure of the Demiurge already appears in his writings, who without knowing the supreme God is yet useful to Him as the creator of the world. Even Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, knew him not, until the ἄνω Χριστός descended upon him at his baptism. Before the crucifixion, which was a merely human mischance without any redemptive significance, the Christ had again withdrawn from him.

§ 27.2. =The Gnosticism of Basilides.=--=Basilides= (Βασιλείδης) was a teacher in Alexandria about A.D. 120-130. He pretends to derive the gnostic system from the notes of the esoteric teaching of Christ taken down by the Apostle Matthew and an amanuensis of Peter called Glaucias. He also made use of John’s Gospel and Paul’s Epistles to the Romans, Corinthians and Ephesians. He himself left behind 24 books Ἐξηγητικά and his equally talented son Isidorus has left a treatise under the title Ἠθικά. Fragments of both are found in Clement of Alexandria, two passages from the first are given also in the “Acts of Disputation,” by Archelaus of Cascar (§ 29, 1). Irenæus, i. 24, who refers to him as a disciple of Menander (§ 25, 2), and the Pseudo-Tertullian, c. 41, Epiphanius, 21, and Theodoret, i. 4, describe his system as grossly dualistic and decidedly emanationist. Hippolytus, vii. 14 ff., on the other hand, with whom Clement seems to agree, describes it as a thoroughly monistic system, in which the theogony is developed not by emanation from above downwards but by evolution from below upwards. This latter view which undoubtedly presents this system in a more favourable light,--according to Baur, Uhlhorn, Jacobi, Möller, Funk, etc., its original form: according to Hilgenfeld, Lipsius, Volkmar, etc., a later form influenced by later interpolations of Greek pantheistic ideas,--makes the development of God and the world begin with pure nothing: ἦν ὅτε ἦν οὐδέν. The principle of all development is ὁ οὐκ ὢν θεός, who out of Himself (ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων) calls chaos into being. This chaos was still itself an οὐκ ὄν, but yet also the πανσπερμία τοῦ κόσμου upon which now the οὐκ ὢν θεός as ἀκίνητος κινητής operated attractively by his beauty. The pneumatic element in the newly created chaos is represented in a threefold sonship (υἱότης τριμερής) of which the first and most perfect immediately after creation with the swiftness of thought takes its flight to the happy realm of non-existence, the Pleroma. The second less perfect sonship struggles after the first (hence called, μιμητική), but must, on reaching the borders of the happy realm, cast aside the less perfect part of its being, which now as the Holy Spirit (μεθόριον πνεῦμα) forms the vestibule (στερέωμα) or boundary line between the Pleroma (τὰ ὑπερκόσμια) and the cosmos, and although severed from the sonship, still, like a vessel out of which sweet ointment has been taken, it bears to this lower world some of the perfume adhering to it. The third sonship being in need of purifying must still remain in the Panspermia, and is as such the subject of future redemption. On the other hand, the greatest archon as the most complete concentration of all wisdom, might and glory which was found in the psychical elements of chaos, flew up to the firmament as ἀῤῥητῶν ἀῤῥητότερος. He now fancied himself to be the Supreme God and ruler of all things, and begot a son, who according to the predetermination of the non-existing excelled him in insight and wisdom. For himself and Son, having with them besides six other unnamed principalities, he founded the higher heavens, the so- called Ogdoas. After him there arose of chaos a second inferior Archon with the predicate ἄῤῥητος, who likewise begat a son mightier than himself, and founded a lower heavenly realm, the so-called Hebdomas, the planetary heavens. The rest of the Panspermia was the developed κατὰ φύσιν, that is, in accordance with the natural principle implanted in it by the non-existent “at our stage” (τὸ διάστημα τὸ καθ’ ἡμᾶς). As the time drew near for the manifestation of the children of God, that is, of men whose pneumatical endowment was derived from the third sonship, the son of the great Archon through the mediation of the μεθόριον πνεῦμα first devised the saving plan of the Pleroma. With fear and trembling now the great Archon too acknowledged his error, repented of this self-exaltation and with the whole Ogdoas rejoiced in the scheme of salvation. Through him also the son of the second Archon is enlightened, and he instructs his father, who now as the God of the Old Testament prepares the way for the development of salvation by the law and prophecy. The beginning is made by Jesus, son of the virgin Mary, who first himself absorbed the ray of the higher light, and as “the firstborn of the children of God” became also the Saviour (σωτήρ) of his brethren. His sufferings were necessary for removing the psychical and somatical elements of the Panspermia adhering to him. They were therefore actual, not mere seeming sufferings. His bodily part returned to the formlessness out of which it sprang; his psychical part arose from the grave, but in his ascension returned into the Hebdomas, while his pneumatic being belonging to the third sonship went up to the happy seat of the οὐκ ὢν θεός. And as he, the firstborn, so also all the children of God, have afterwards to perform their task of securing the highest possible development and perfection of the groaning creation (Rom. viii. 19), that is, of all souls which by their nature are eternally bound “to our stage.” Then finally, God will pour over all ranks of being beginning from the lowest the great ignorance (τὴν μεγάλην ἄγνοιαν) so that no one may be disturbed in their blessedness by the knowledge of a higher. Thus the restitution of all things is accomplished.--The mild spirit which pervades this dogmatic system preserved from extravagances of a rigoristic or libertine sort the ethical system resulting from it. Marriage was honoured and regarded as holy, though celibacy was admitted to be helpful in freeing the soul from the thraldom of fleshly lusts.

§ 27.3. The system set forth by Irenæus and others, as that of Basilides, represents the Supreme God as _Pater innatus_ or θεὸς ἄῤῥητος. From him emanates the Νοῦς, from this again the Λόγος, from this the Φρόνησις, who brings forth Σοφία and Δύναμις. From the two last named spring the Ἀρχαί, Ἐξουσίαι and Ἄγγελοι, who with number seven of the higher gods, the primal father, at their head, constitute the highest heaven. From this as its ἀντίτυπος radiates forth a second spiritual world, and the emanation continues in this way, until it is completed and exhausts itself in the number of 365 spiritual worlds or heavens under the mystic name Ἀβραξάς or Ἀβρασάξ which has in its letters the numerical value referred to. This last and most imperfect of these spiritual worlds with its seven planet spirits forms the heaven visible to us. Through this three hundred and sixty-five times repeated emanation the Pleroma approaches the borders of the hyle, a seething mass of forces wildly tossing against one another. These rush wildly against it, snatch from it fragments of light and imprison them in matter. From this mixture the Archon of the lowest heaven in fellowship with his companions creates the earth, and to each of them apportions by lot a nation, reserving to himself the Jewish nation which he seeks to raise above all other nations, and so introduces envy and ambition into heaven, and war and bloodshed upon earth. Finally, the Supreme God sends his First-born, the Νοῦς, in order to deliver men from the power of the angel that created the world. He assumes the appearance of a body, and does many miracles. The Jews determined upon his death; nevertheless they crucified instead of him Simon the Cyrenian, who assumed his shape. He himself returned to his Father. By means of the Gnosis which he taught men’s souls are redeemed, while their bodies perish.--The development of one of these systems into the other might be most simply explained by assuming that the one described in the _Elenchus_ of Hippolytus is the original and that its reconstruction was brought about by the overpowering intrusion of current dualistic, emanationistic, and docetic ideas. All that had there been said about the great Archon must now be attributed to the Supreme God, the _Pater innatus_, while the inferior archon might keep his place as ruler of the lowest planetary heaven. The 365 spiritual worlds had perhaps in the other system a place between the two Archons, for even Hippolytus, vii. 26, mentions in addition the 365 heavens to which also he gives the name of the great Archon Abrasax.--It is a fact of special importance that even Irenæus and Epiphanius distinguish from the genuine disciples of Basilides the so-called =Pseudo-Basilideans= as representing a later development, easily deducible from the second but hardly traceable from the first account of the system. That with their Gnosis they blended magic, witchcraft and fantastic superstition appears from the importance which they attached to mystic numbers and letters. Their libertine practice can be derived from their antinomian contempt of Judaism as well as from the theory that their bodies are doomed to perish. So, too, their axiom that to suffer martyrdom for the crucified, who was not indeed the real Christ, is foolish, may be deduced from the Docetism of their system. Abrasax gems which are still to be met with in great numbers and in great variety are to be attributed to these Basilideans; but these found favour and were used as talismans not only among other Gnostic sects but also among the Alchymists of the Middle Ages.

§ 27.4. =Valentinian Gnosticism.=--=Valentinus=, the most profound, talented and imaginative of all the Gnostics, was educated in Alexandria, and went to Rome about A.D. 140, where, during a residence of more than twenty years, he presided over an influential school, and exercised also a powerful influence upon other systems. He drew the materials for his system partly from holy scripture, especially from the Gospel of John, partly from the esoteric doctrine of a pretended disciple of Paul, Theodades. Of his own voluminous writings, in the form of discourses, epistles and poems, only a few fragments are extant. The reporters of his teaching, Irenæus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Epiphanius, differ greatly from one another in details, and leave us in doubt as to what really belongs to his own doctrine and what to its development by his disciples--The fundamental idea of his system rests on the notion that according to a law founded in the depths of the divine nature the æons by emanation come into being as pairs, male and female. The pairing of these æons in a holy marriage is called a Syzygy. With this is joined another characteristic notion, that in the historical development of the Pleroma the original types of the three great crises of the earthly history, Creation, the Fall, and Redemption, are met with. On the basis of this he develops the most magnificently poetic epic of a Christian mythological Theogony and Cosmogony. From the Βυθός or Αὐτοπάτωρ and its Ἔννοια or Σιγή, evolving his thought hitherto only in silent contemplation of his own perfection, emanates the first and highest pair of æons, the Νοῦς or Μονογενής who alone of all æons can bear to look into the depths of the perfection of the Father of all, and beside him his bride Ἀλήθεια. From them spring the Λόγος and Ζωή as the second pair, and from this pair again Ἄνθρωπος and Ἐκκλησία as the third pair. The Αὐτοπάτωρ and his Ennoia, with the first and highest pair of æons emanating for them, and these together with the second Tetras, form the Ogdoas. The Logos then begets a further removed circle of five pairs, the Decas, and finally the Anthropos begets the last series of six pairs, the Dodecas. Therewith the =Pleroma= attains a preliminary completion. A final boundary is fixed for it by the Ὅρος emanating from the Father of all, who, being alone raised above the operation of the law of the Syzygy, is endowed with a twofold ἐνεργεία, an ἐνεργεία διοριστική, by means of which he wards off all from without that would hurt, and an ἐνεργεία ἑδραστική, the symbol of which is the cross, with which he maintains inward harmony and order. How necessary this was is soon made apparent. For the Σοφία, the last and least member of the fourteen æon pairs, impelled by burning desire, tears herself away from her partner, and seeks to plunge into the Bythos in order to embrace the Father of All himself. She is indeed prevented from this by the Horos; but the breach in the Pleroma has been made. In order to restore the harmony that has thus been broken, the Monogenes begets with Aletheia a new æon pair, the Ἄνω Χριστός and the Πνεῦμα ἅγιον which emancipates the Sophia from her disorderly, passionate nature (Ἐνθύμησις), cuts out this latter from the Pleroma, but unites again the purified Sophia with her husband, and teaches all the æons about the Father’s unapproachable and incomprehensible essence, and about the reason and end of the Syzygies. Then they all, amid hymns of praise and thanksgiving, present an offering to the Father, each one of the best that he has, and form thereof an indescribably glorious æon-being, the Ἄνω Σωτήρ, and for his service myriads of august angels, who bow in worship before him.--The basis for the origination of the =sensible world=, the Ὑστέρημα, consist of the Enthymesis ejected from the Pleroma into the desert, void and substanceless Kenoma, which is by it for the first time filled and vitalized. It is an ἔκτρωμα, an abortion, which however retains still the æon nature of its divine present, and as such bears the name of Ἔξω (κάτω) Σοφία or Ἀχαμώθ (הַחָכְמוֹת). Hence even the blessed spirits of the Pleroma can never forsake her. They all suffer with the unfortunate, until she who had sprung from the Pleroma is restored to it purified and matured. Hence they espouse her, the Ektroma of the last and least of the æons, to the Ano-Soter, the noblest, most glorious and most perfect being in the æon-heaven, as her redeemer and future husband. He begins by comforting the despondent and casting out from her the baser affections. Among the worst, fear, sorrow, doubt, etc., is found the basis of the hylic stage of existence; among the better, repentance, desire, hope, etc., that of the psychic stage of existence (φύσεις). Over the beings issuing forth from the former presides Satan; over the psychical forms of being, as their highest development, presides the Demiurge, who prepares as his dwelling-place the seven lower heavens, the Hebdomas. But Achamoth had retired with the pneumatic substratum still remaining in her into the Τόπος τῆς μεσότητος, between the Pleroma and the lower world, whence she, inspired by the Ano-Soter, operates upon the Demiurge, who, knowing nothing of her existence, has no anticipation thereof. From the dust of the earth and pneumatic seed, which unobserved she conveys into it, he formed man, breathed into him his own psychical breath of life, and set him in paradise, that is, in the third of his seven heavens, but banished him to earth, when he disobeyed his command, and instead of his first ethereal garment clothed him in a material body. When men had spread upon the earth, they developed these different natures: _Pneumatical_, which free from the bondage of every outward law and not subject to the impulses of the senses, a law unto themselves, travel toward the Pleroma; next, the _Hylic_, which, hostile to all spirit and law, and the sport of all lusts and passions, are doomed to irremediable destruction; and finally, the _Psychical_, which under the discipline of outward law attain not indeed to a perfect divine life, but yet to outward righteousness, while on the other hand they may sink down to the rank and condition of the Hylic natures. The _Psychical_ natures were particularly numerous among the Jews. Therefore the Demiurge chose them as his own, and gave them a strict law and through his prophets promised them a future Messiah. The _Hylic_ natures which were found mostly among the heathens, were utterly hateful to him. The _Pneumatical_ natures with their innate longing after the Pleroma, he did not understand and therefore disregarded; but yet, without knowing or designing it, he chose many of them for kings, priests, and prophets of his people, and to his amazement heard from their lips prophecies of a higher soul, which originated from Achamoth, and which he did not understand. When the time was fulfilled, he sent his Messiah in the person of Jesus. When he was baptized by John, the heaven opened over him and the Ano-Soter descended upon him. The Demiurge saw it and was astonished, but submitted himself awe-stricken to the will of the superior deities. The Soter remained then a year upon the earth. The Jews, refusing to receive him, nailed his organ, the psychical Messiah, to a cross; but his sufferings were only apparent sufferings, since the Demiurge had supplied him in his origin with an ethereal and only seemingly material body. In consequence of the work of the Ano-Soter the Pneumatical natures by means of the Gnosis taught by him, but the Psychical natures by means of Pistis, attain unto perfection after their kind. When once everything pneumatical and psychical which was bound up in matter, has been freed from it, the course of the world has reached its end and the longed-for time of Achamoth’s marriage will have come. Accompanied by myriads of his angels, the Soter leads the noble sufferer into the Pleroma. The pneumatical natures follow her, and as the Soter is married to Achamoth, the angels are married to them. The Demiurge goes with his tried and redeemed saints into the Τόπος τῆς μεσότητος. But from the depths of the Hyle breaks forth a hidden fire which utterly consumes the Hylic natures and the Hyle itself.[40]

§ 27.5. According to Hippolytus the Valentinian school split up into two parties--an Italian party, the leaders of which, Heracleon and Ptolemæus [Ptolemy], were at Rome, and an Eastern party to which Axionicus and Bardesanes belonged. =Heracleon= of Alexandria was a man of a profoundly religious temperament, who in his speculation inclined considerably toward the doctrine of the church, and even wrote the first commentary on the Gospel of John, of which many fragments are preserved in Origen’s commentary on that gospel. =Ptolemæus= [Ptolemy] drew even closer than his master to the church doctrine. Epiphanius quotes a letter of his to his pupil Flora in which, after Marcion’s example (see § 27, 11), the distinction of the divine and the demiurgical in the Old Testament, and the relation of the Old Testament to the New, are discussed. A position midway between that of the West and of the East is apparently represented by Marcus and his school. He combined with the doctrine of Valentinus the Pythagorean and cabbalistic mysticism of numbers and letters, and joined thereto magical and soothsaying arts. His followers, the Marcosians, had a form of worship full of ceremonial observances, with a twofold baptism, a psychical one in the Kato-Christus for the forgiveness of sins, and a pneumatical one for affiance with the future heavenly syzygy. Of the Antiochean Axionicus we know nothing but the name. Of far greater importance was =Bardesanes=, who flourished according to Eusebius in the time of Marcus Aurelius, but is assigned by authentic Syrian documents to the beginning of the third century. The chief sources of information about his doctrine are the 56 rhyming discourses of Ephraem [Ephraim] against the heretics. Living at the court and enjoying the favour of the king of Edessa, he never attacked in his sermons the doctrinal system of the church, but spread his Gnostic views built upon a Valentinian basis in lofty hymns of which, besides numerous fragments in Ephraem [Ephraim], some are preserved in the apocryphal _Acta Thomae_ (§ 32, 6). Among his voluminous writings there was a controversial treatise against the Marcionites (see § 27, 11). In a Dialogue, Περὶ εἱμαρμένης, attributed to him, but probably belonging to one of his disciples named Philippus, from which Eusebius (_Præp. Ev._ vi. 10) quotes a passage, the Syrian original of which, “The Book of the Laws of the Land,” was only recently discovered,[41] astrology and fatalism are combated from a Christian standpoint, although the author is still himself dominated by many Zoroastrian ideas. Harmonius, the highly gifted son of Bardesanes, distinguished himself by the composition of hymns in a similar spirit.

§ 27.6. =The Ophites and related Sects.=--The multiform Ophite Gnosis is in general characterized by fantastic combinations of Syro-Chaldaic myths and Biblical history with Greek mythology, philosophy and mysteriosophy. In all its forms the serpent (ὄφις, נָחָשׁ) plays an important part, sometimes as Kakodemon, sometimes as Agathodemon. This arose from the place that the serpent had in the Egyptian and Asiatic cosmology as well as in the early biblical history. One of the oldest forms of Ophitism is described by Hippolytus, who gives to its representatives the name of =Naassenes=, from נָחָשׁ. The formless original essence, ὁ προών, revealed himself in the first men, Ἀδάμας, Adam, Cadmon, in whom the pneumatic, psychical and hylic principles were still present together. As the instrument in creation he is called Logos or Hermes. The serpent is revered as Agathodemon; it proceeds from the Logos, transmitting the stream of life to all creatures. Christ, the redeemer, is the earthly representative of the first man, and brings peace to all the three stages of life, because he, by his teaching, directs every one to a mode of life in accordance with his nature.--The =Sethites=, according to Hippolytus, taught that there were two principles: an upper one, τὸ φῶς, an under one, τὸ σκότος, and between these τὸ πνεῦμα, the atmosphere that moves and causes motion. From a blending of light with darkness arose chaos, in which the pneuma awakened life. Then from chaos sprang the soul of the world as a serpent, which became the Demiurge. Man had a threefold development: hylic or material in Cain, psychical in Abel, and pneumatical in Seth, who was the first Gnostic.--The founders of the =Perates=, who were already known to Clement of Alexandria, are called by Hippolytus Euphrates and Celbes. Their name implies that they withdrew from the world of sense in order to secure eternal life here below, περᾶν τὴν φθοράν. The original divine unity, they taught, had developed into a Trinity: τὸ ἀγέννητον, ἀυτογενές and γεννητόν, the Father, the Son, and the Hyle. The Son is the world serpent that moves and quickens all things (καθολικός ὄφις). It is his task to restore everything that has sunk down from the two higher worlds into the lower, and is held fast by its Archon. Sometimes he turns himself serpent-like to his Father and assumes his divine attributes, sometimes to the lower world to communicate them to it. In the shape of a serpent he delivers Eve from the law of the Archon. All who are outlawed by this Archon, Cain, Nimrod, etc., belong to him. Moses, too, is an adherent of his, who erected in the wilderness the healing brazen serpent to represent him, while the fiery biting serpent of the desert represent the demons of the Archon. The =Cainites=, spoken of by Irenæus and Epiphanius, were closely connected with the Perates. All the men characterized in the Old Testament as godless are esteemed by them genuine pneumatical beings and martyrs for the truth. The first who distinguished himself in conflict with the God of the Jews was Cain; the last who led the struggle on to victory, by bringing the psychical Messiah through his profound sagacity to the cross, was Judas Iscariot. The Gnostic =Justin= is known to us only through Hippolytus, who draws his information from a _Book of Baruch_. He taught that from the original essence, ὁ Ἀγαθός or Κύριος, יְהוָֹה, emanated a male principle, Ἐλωείμ, אֱלֹהִים, which had a pneumatical nature, and a female principle, Ἐδέμ, עֵדֶן, which was above man (psychical) and below the serpent (hylic). From the union of this pair sprang twelve ἄγγελοι πατρικοί, who had in them the father’s nature, and twelve ἄγγελοι μητρικοί, on whom the mother’s nature was impressed. Together they formed Paradise, in which Baruch, an angel of Elohim, represented the tree of life, and Naas, an Edem-angel, represented the tree of knowledge. The Elohim-angel formed man out of the dust of Paradise; Edem gave him a soul, Elohim gave him a spirit. Pressing upward by means of his pneumatical nature Elohim raised himself to the borders of the realms of light. The Agathos took him and set him at his right hand. The forsaken Edem avenged himself by giving power to Naas to grieve the spirit of Elohim in man. He tempted Eve to commit adultery with him, and got Adam to commit unnatural vice with him. In order to show the grieved spirit of man the way to heaven, Elohim sent Baruch first to Moses and afterwards to other Prophets of the Old Testament; but Naas frustrated all his efforts. Even from among the heathen Elohim raised up prophets, such as Hercules whom he sent to fight against the twelve Edem-angels (his twelve labours), but one of them named Babel or Aphrodite robbed even this divine hero of his power (a reminiscence of the story of Omphale). Finally, Elohim sent Baruch to the peasant boy Jesus, son of Joseph and Mary. He resisted all the temptations of Naas, who therefore got him nailed upon the cross. Jesus commended his spirit into the hands of the Father, into whose heaven he ascended, leaving his body and soul with Edem. So, after his example, do all the pious.

§ 27.7. The Gnosis of the =Ophites=, described by Irenæus, etc., is distinguished from that of the earlier Naasenes [Naassenes] by its incorporation of Valentinian and dualistic or Saturninian (see § 27, 9) ideas. From the Bythos who, as the primary being, is also called the first man, Adam Cadmon, emanates the thought, ἔννοια, of himself as the second man or son of man, and from him the Holy Spirit or the Ano-Sophia, who in turn bears the Ano-Christus and Achamoth. The latter, an imperfect being of light, who is also called Προύνικος, which according to Epiphanius means πόρνη, drives about through the dark ocean of chaos, over which the productive mother, the Holy Spirit, broods, in order to found for himself in it an independent world of his own. There dense matter unites with the element of light and darkens it to such a degree that even the consciousness of its own divine origin begins to fade away from it. In this condition of estrangement from God she produces the Demiurge, Jaldabaoth, יַלְדָּא בָּהוּת, son of chaos; and he, a wicked as well as limited being, full of arrogance and pride, determines that he himself alone will be lord and master in the world which he creates. This brings Achamoth to penitent deliberation. By the vigorous exercise of all the powers of light dwelling in her, and strengthened by a gleam of light from above, she succeeds in raising herself from the realm of chaos into the Τόπος τῆς μεσότητος. Nevertheless Jaldabaoth brought forth six star spirits or planets after his own image, and placed himself as the seventh at their head. But they too think of rebelling. Enraged at this Jaldabaoth glances wildly upon the deep-lying slime of the Hyle; his frightfully distorted countenance is mirrored in this refuse of chaos; the image there comes to life and forms Ophiomorphus or Satan. By order of Jaldabaoth the star spirits make man; but they produce only an awkward spiritless being that creeps along the ground. In order to quicken it and make it stand erect the Demiurge breathes into it his own breath, but thereby deprives himself of a great part of that pneumatical element which he had from his mother. The so-called fall, in which Ophiomorphus or the serpent was only the unconscious instrument of Achamoth, is in truth the beginning of the redemption of man, the advance to self-consciousness and moral freedom. But as a punishment for his disobedience Jaldabaoth drove him out of the higher material world, Paradise, into the lower, where he was exposed to the annoyances of Ophiomorphus, who also brought the majority of mankind, the heathens, under his authority, while the Jews served Jaldabaoth, and only a small number of pneumatical natures by the help of Achamoth kept themselves free from both. The prophets whom Jaldabaoth sent to his people, were at the same time unconscious organs of Achamoth, who also sent down the Ano-Christus from the Pleroma upon the Messiah, whose kingdom is yet to spread among all nations. Jaldabaoth now let his own Messiah be crucified, but the Ano-Christus was already withdrawn from him and had set himself unseen at the right hand of the Demiurge, where he deprives him and his angels of all the light element which they still had in them, and gathers round himself the pneumatical from among mankind, in order to lead them into the Pleroma.--The latest and at the same time the noblest product of Ophite Gnosticism is the =Pistis Sophia=,[42] appearing in the middle of the third century, with a strong tincture of Valentinianism. It treats mainly of the fall, repentance, and complaint of Sophia, and of the mysteries that purify for redemption, often approaching very closely the doctrine of the church.

§ 27.8. =Antinomian and Libertine Sects.=--The later representatives of Alexandrian Gnosticism on account of the antinomian tendency of their system fell for the most part into gross immorality, which excused itself on the ground that the pneumatical men must throw contempt upon the law of the Demiurge, ἀντιτάσσεσθαι, (whence they were also called Antitactes), and that by the practice of fleshly lusts one must weaken and slay the flesh, παραχρῆσθαι τῇ σαρκί, so as to overcome the powers of the Hyle. The four following sects may be mentioned as those which maintained such views.--

a. =The Nicolaitans=, who in order to give themselves the sanction of primitive Christianity sought to trace their descent from Nicolaus [Nicolas] the Deacon (Acts vi. 5). But while they have really no connection with him, they are just as little to be identified with the Nicolaitans of the Apocalypse (§ 18, 3).

b. In a similar way the =Simonians= sought to attach themselves to Simon Magus (§ 25, 2). They gave to the fables associated with the name of Simon a speculative basis borrowed from the central idea of the philosophy of Heraclitus, that the principle of all things (ἡ ἀπέραντος δύναμις) is fire. From it in three syzygies, νοῦς and ἐπίνοια, φωνή and ὄνομα, λογισμός and ἐνθύμησις, proceed the six roots of the supersensible world, and subsequently the corresponding six roots of the sensible world, Heaven and earth, Sun and moon, Air and water, in which unlimited force is present as ὁ ἐστώς, στάς, and στησόμενος. Justin Martyr was already acquainted with this sect, and also Hippolytus, who quotes many passages from their chief treatise, entitled, Ἀπόφασις μεγάλη and reports scandalous things about their foul worship.

c. =The Carpocratians.= In the system of their founder Carpocrates, who lived at Alexandria in the first half of the second century, God is the eternal Mould, the unity without distinctions, from whom all being flows and to whom all returns again. From Him the ἄγγελοι κοσμοποιοί revolted. By the creation of the world they established a distinct order of existence apart from God and consolidated it by the law issuing from them and the national religions of Jews and Gentiles founded by them. Thus true religion or the way of return for the human spirit into the One and All consists theoretically in Gnosis, practically in emancipation from the commands of the Demiurge and in a life κατὰ φύσιν. The distinction of good and bad actions rests merely on human opinions. Man is redeemed by faith and love. In order to be able to overcome the powers that created the world, he is in need of magic which is intimately connected with Gnosis. Every human spirit who has not fully attained to this end of all religious endeavour, is subjected, until he reaches it, to the assumption of one bodily form after another. Among the heroes of humanity who with special energy and success have assailed the kingdom of the Demiurge by contempt of his law and spread of the true Gnosis, a particularly conspicuous place is assigned to Jesus, the son of Joseph. What he was for the Jews, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, etc., were for the Gentiles. To the talented son of Carpocrates, named Epiphanes, who died in his seventeenth year, after impressing upon his father’s Gnostic system a boundless communistic and libertine tendency with community of goods and wives, his followers erected a temple at Cephalonia, in which they set up for divine honours the statues of Christ and the Greek philosophers. At the close of their Agapæ, they indulged in _Concubitus promiscuus_.

d. =The Prodicians= flourished about the time of Clement of Alexandria, and were connected, perhaps, through their founder Prodicus, with the Carpocratians. In order to prove their dominion over the sensible world they were wont to appear in their assemblies naked, and hence are also called =Adamites=. So soon as they succeeded in thus reaching the state of innocence that had preceded the fall, they maintained that as pneumatical king’s sons they were raised above all law and entitled to indulge in unbridled lust.

§ 27.9. =Saturninus=, or Satornilus of Antioch, according to Irenæus, a disciple of Menander, was one of the oldest Syrian Gnostics, during the age of Hadrian, and the one in whose system of Dualism the most decided traces of Parsee colouring is found. From the θεὸς ἄγνωστος the spirit world of the kingdom of light emanates in successive stages. On the lowest stage stand the seven planet spirits, ἄγγελοι κοσμοκράτορες, at their head the creator of the world and the god of the Jews. But from eternity over against the realm of light stands the Hyle in violent opposition under the rule of Satanas. The seven star spirits think to found therein a kingdom free and independent of the Pleroma, and for this purpose make an inroad upon the kingdom of the Hyle, and seize upon a part of it. Therefore they form the sensible world and create man as keeper thereof after a fair model sent by the good God of which they had a dim vision. But they could not give him the upright form. The supreme God then takes pity upon the wretched creature. He sends down a spark of light σπινθήρ into it which fills it with pneumatical life and makes it stand up. But Satanas set a hylic race of men over against this pneumatical race, and persecuted the latter incessantly by demons. The Jewish god then plans to redeem the persecuted by a Messiah, and inspires prophets to announce his coming. But Satan, too, has his prophets, and the Jewish god is not powerful enough to make his views prevail over his enemy’s. Finally the good God sends to the earth the Aeon [Æon] Νοῦς, in what has the appearance of a body, in order that he as σωτήρ may teach the pneumatical how to escape, by Gnosis and asceticism, abstaining from marriage and the eating of flesh, not only the attacks of Satan, but also the dominion of the Jewish god and his star spirits, how to emancipate themselves from all connection with matter, and to raise themselves into the realm of light.

§ 27.10. =Tatian and the Encratites.=--The Assyrian Tatian, converted to Christianity at Rome by Justin Martyr, makes his appearance as a zealous apologist of the faith (§ 30, 10). In his later years, however, just as in the case of Marcion, in consequence of his exaggeration of the Pauline antithesis of flesh and spirit, law and grace, he was led to propound a theory of the dualistic opposition between the god of the law, the Demiurge, and the god of the gospel, which found expression in a Gnostic-ascetic system, completely breaking away from the Catholic church, and reaching its conclusion in the hyperascetic sect of the Encratites that arose in Rome about A.D. 172. He now became head and leader of this sect, which, with its fanatical demand of complete abstinence from marriage, from all eating of flesh and all spirituous liquors, won his approval, and perhaps from him received its first dogmatic Gnostic impress. Of Tatian’s Gnostic writings, Προβλήματα and Περὶ τοῦ κατὰ τὸν σωτῆρα καταρτισμοῦ, only some fragments, with scanty notices of his Gnostic system, are preserved. His dualistic opposition of the god of the Old Testament and the god of the New Testament cannot have meant a thorough hostility, for he makes the Demiurge sitting in darkness address himself to the supreme God in the language of prayer, “Let there be light.” He declares, however, that Adam, as the author of the fall, is incapable of redemption.--His followers were also called Ὑδροπαραστάται, Aquarii, because at the Supper they used water instead of wine. See Lit. at § 30, 10.

§ 27.11. =Marcion and the Marcionites.=--Marcion of Sinope in Pontus, who died about A.D. 170, was, according to Tertullian, a rich shipmaster who, on his arrival in Rome, in his early enthusiasm for the faith, bestowed upon the Church there a rich present, but was afterwards excommunicated by it as a heretic. According to the Pseudo-Tertullian and others he was the son of a bishop who excommunicated him for incontinence with one under the vow of virginity. The story may possibly be based upon a later misunderstanding of the charge of corrupting the church as the pure bride of Christ. He was a man of a fiery and energetic character, but also rough and eccentric, of a thoroughly practical tendency and with little speculative talent. He was probably driven by the hard inward struggles of his spiritual life, somewhat similar to those through which Paul had passed, to a full and hearty conception of the free grace of God in Christ; but conceived of the opposition between law and gospel, which the Apostle brought into harmony by his theory of the pædogogical office of the law, as purely hostile and irreconcileable. At Rome in A.D. 140, the Syrian Gnostic =Cerdo=, who already distinguished between the “good” God of Christianity and the “just” God of Judaism, gained an influence over him. He consequently developed for himself a Gnostic system, the dominating idea of which was the irreconcilable opposition of righteousness and grace, law and gospel, Judaism and Christianity. He repudiated the whole of the Old Testament, and set forth the opposition between the two Testaments in a special treatise entitled _Antitheses_. He acknowledged only Paul as an Apostle, since all the rest had fallen back into Judaism, and of the whole New Testament he admitted only ten Pauline epistles, excluding the Pastoral Epistles and the Epistles to the Hebrews, and admitting the Gospel of Luke only in a mutilated form.[43] Marcion would know nothing of a secret doctrine and tradition and rejected the allegorical interpretation so much favoured by the Gnostics, as well as the theory of emanation and the subordination of Pistis under Gnosis. While other Gnostics formed not churches but only schools of select bands of thinkers, or at most only small gatherings, Marcion, after vainly trying to reform the Catholic church in accordance with his exaggerated Paulinism, set himself to establish a well organised ecclesiastical system, the members of which were arranged as _Perfecti_ or _Electi_ and _Catechumeni_. Of the former he required a strict asceticism, abstinence from marriage, and restriction in food to the simplest and least possible. He allowed the Catechumens, however, in opposition to the Catholic practice (§ 35, 1), to take part in all the services, which were conducted in the simplest possible forms. The moral earnestness and the practical tendency of his movement secured him many adherents, of whom many congregations maintained their existence for a much longer time than the members of other Gnostic sects, even down to the seventh century. None of the founders of the old Gnostic sects were more closely connected in life and doctrine to the Catholic Church than Marcion, and yet, or perhaps just for that reason, none of them were opposed by it so often, so eagerly and so bitterly. Even Polycarp, on his arrival in Rome (§ 37, 2), in reply to Marcion’s question whether he knew him, said: Ἐπιγνώσκω τὸν πρωτότοκον τοῦ Σατανᾶ.--The general scope and character of =the System of Marcion= have been variously estimated. All older ecclesiastical controversialists, Justin, Rhodon in Eusebius, Tertullian and Irenæus, in their description and refutation of it seem to recognise only two principles (ἀρχαί), which stand in opposition to one another, as θεὸς ἀγαθός and θεὸς δίκαιος. The latter appears as creator of the world, or Demiurge, the god of the Jews, the giver of the law, unable, however, by his law to save the Jews and deter them from breaking it, or to lead back the Gentiles to the observance of it. Then of his free grace the “good” God, previously quite unknown, determined to redeem men from the power of the Demiurge. For this purpose he sends his Logos into the world with the semblance of a body. By way of accommodation he gives himself out as the Messiah of the Jewish god, proclaims the forgiveness of sins through free grace, communicates to all who believe the powers of the divine life, is at the instigation of the angry Demiurge nailed to the cross to suffer death in appearance only, preaches to Gentiles imprisoned in Hades, banishes the Demiurge to Hades, and ordains the Apostle Paul as teacher of believers.--The later heresiologists, however, Hippolytus, in his Elenchus, Epiphanius, Theodoret, and especially the Armenian Esnig (§ 64, 3), are equally agreed in saying that Marcion recognised three principles (ἀρχαί); that besides the good God and the righteous God he admitted an evil principle, the Hyle concentrated in Satan, so that even the pre-Christian development of the world was viewed from the standpoint of a dualistic conflict between divine powers. The righteous God and the Hyle, as a _quasi_ female principle, united with one another in creating the world, and when the former saw how fair the earth was, he resolved to people it with men created of his own likeness. For this purpose the Hyle at his request afforded him dust, from which he created man, inspiring him with his own spirit. Both divine powers rejoiced over man as parents over a child, and shared in his worship. But the Demiurge sought to gain undivided authority over man, and so commanded Adam, under pain of death, to worship him alone, and the Hyle avenged himself by producing a multitude of idols to whom the majority of Adam’s descendants, falling away from the God of the law, gave reverence.--The harmonizing of these two accounts may be accomplished by assuming that the older Church Fathers, in their conflict with Marcion had willingly restricted themselves to the most important point in the Marcionite system, its characteristic opposition of the Gods of the Old and New Testaments, passing over the points in which it agreed more or less with other Gnostic systems; or by assuming that later Marcionites, such as Prepon (§ 27, 12), in consequence of the palpable defectiveness and inadequacy of the original system of two principles, were led to give it the further development that has been described.[44]

§ 27.12. The speculative weakness and imperfection of his system led =Marcion’s Disciples= to expand and remodel it in many ways. Two of these, Lucanus and Marcus, are pre-eminent as remodellers of the system, into which they imported various elements from that of Saturninus. The Assyrian =Prepon= placed the “righteous” Logos as third principle between the “good” God and the “evil” Demiurge. Of all the more nameful Marcionites, =Apelles=, who died about A.D. 180, inclined most nearly to the church doctrine. Eusebius tells about a Disputation which took place in Rome between him and Rhodon, a disciple of Tatian. At the head of his essentially monistic system Apelles places the ἀγέννητος θεός as the μία ἀρχή. This God, besides a higher heavenly world, had created an order of angels, of whom the first and most eminent, the so-called _Angelus inclytus_ or _gloriosus_ as Demiurge made the earthly world after the image and to the glory of the supreme God. But another angel, the ἄγγελος πυρετός, corrupted his creation, which was already in itself imperfect, by bringing forth the σὰρξ ἁμαρτίας, with which he clothed the souls enticed down from the upper world. It was he, too, who spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, and as the god of the Jews gave the law from Sinai. The Demiurge soon repented of his ill-fated performance, and prayed the supreme God to send his Son as redeemer. Christ appeared, lived, wrought and suffered in a real body. It was not, however, the σὰρξ ἁμαρτίας that he assumed, but a sinless body composed out of the four elements which he gave back to the elements on his ascension to heaven. Towards the close of his life Apelles seems, under the influence of the mystic revelations of a prophetess, Philoumena, whose φανερώσεις he published, to have more and more renounced his Gnostic views. He had already admitted in his Disputation with Rhodon, that even on the Catholic platform one may be saved, for the main thing is faith in the crucified Christ and the doing of his works. He would even have been prepared to subscribe to the Monotheism of the church, had he not been hindered by the opposition between the Old Testament and the New.

§ 27.13. The painter =Hermogenes= in North Africa, about A.D. 200, whom Tertullian opposed, took offence at the Catholic doctrine of creation as well as at the Gnostic theory of emanation, because it made God the author of evil. He therefore assumed an eternal chaos, from whose striving against the creative and formative influence of God he explained the origin of everything evil and vile.

§ 28. EBIONISM AND EBIONITIC GNOSTICISM.[45]

The Jewish-Christianity that maintained separation from Gentile-Christianity even after the overthrow of the Holy City and its temple, assumed partly a merely separatist, partly a decidedly heretical character. Both tendencies had in common the assertion of the continued obligation to observe the whole of the Mosaic law. But while the former limited this obligation to the Christians of Jewish descent as the peculiar stem and kernel of the new Messianic community, and allowed the Gentile Christians as Proselytes of the Gate to omit those observances, the latter would tolerate no such concession and outran the Old Testament monotheism by a barren monarchianism that denied the divinity of Christ (§ 33, 1). At a later period the two parties were distinguished as Nazareans and Ebionites. On the other hand, in the Ebionites described to us by Epiphanius we have a form of Jewish Christianity permeated by Gnostic elements. These Ebionites, settling along with the Essenes (§ 8, 4) on the eastern shores of the Dead Sea, came to be known under the name of Elkesaites. In the Pseudo-Clementine scheme of doctrine, this Ebionitic Gnosis was carried out in detail and wrought up into a comprehensive and richly developed system.

§ 28.1. =Nazareans and Ebionites.=--Tertullian and with him most of the later Church Fathers derive the name Ebionite from Ebion, a founder of the sect. Since the time of Gieseler, however, the name has generally been referred to the Hebrew word אֶבְיוֹן meaning poor, in allusion partly to the actual poverty of the church of Jerusalem (Gal. ii. 10), partly to the association of the terms poor and pious in the Psalms and Prophets (comp. Matt. v. 3). Minucius Felix, c. xxxvi. testifies that the Gentile Christians were also so designated by those without: _Ceterum quod plerique “Pauperes” dicimur, non est infamia nostra, sed gloria_. Recently, however, Hilgenfeld has recurred to the patristic derivation of the name.--In Irenæus the name Ebionæi makes its first appearance in literature, and that as a designation of Jewish Christians as heretics who admitted only a Gospel according to Matthew, probably the so-called Gospel according to the Hebrews (§ 32, 4), branded the Apostle Paul as an apostate, insisted upon the strict observance of the Jewish law, and taught on Christological questions “_consimiliter ut Cerinthus et Carpocrates_” (§ 27, 1, 8), while they denied that Christ was born of a virgin, and regarded Him as a mere man. Origen († A.D. 243) embraced all Jewish Christians under the name Ἐβιωναῖοι but did not deny the existence of two very different parties among them (διττοὶ and ἀμφότεροι Ἐβιωναῖοι). Eusebius does the same. Jerome again is the first to distinguish the more moderate party by the name Nazareans (Acts xxiv. 5) from the more extreme who are designated Ebionites. This too is the practice of Augustine and Theodoret. The former party acknowledged the virgin birth of Christ and so His divine origin, assigned to Paul his place as Apostle to the Gentiles, and made no demand of Gentile Christians that they should observe the ceremonial law of Moses, although they believed that they themselves were bound thereby. The latter again regarded it as absolutely necessary to salvation, and also held that Christ was the Messiah, but only a man, son of Joseph by Mary, endowed with divine powers in His baptism. His Messianic work, according to them, consisted in His fulfilling by His teaching the Mosaic law. His death was an offence to them, but they took comfort from the promise of His coming again, when they looked for the setting up of an earthly Messianic kingdom. Paul was depreciated by them and made of little account. Ebionites of both parties continued to exist in small numbers down to the fifth century, especially in Palestine and Syria. Both however had sunk by the middle of the second century into almost utter insignificance. The scanty remains of writings issuing from the party prove that especially the non-heretical Jewish Christianity before the close of this century had in great part abandoned its national Jewish character, and therewith its separate position as a religious sect, and by adopting the views of the Pauline Gentile Christianity (§ 30, 2) became gradually amalgamated with it.[46]

§ 28.2. =The Elkesaites.=--Independent accounts of this sect in substantial agreement with one another are given by Hippolytus in his _Elenchus_, by Origen as quoted in Eusebius, and by Epiphanius. Their designation has also led the Church Fathers to assume a sect founder of the name of Elxai or Elchasai, who is said to have lived in the time of Hadrian. The members of the sect themselves derived their name from חֵיל כְּסָי, δύναμις κεκαλυμμένη, the hidden power of God operating in them, that is, the Holy Spirit, the δύναμις ἄσαρκος of the Clementine Homilies. Probably it was the title of a book setting forth their esoteric doctrine, which circulated only among those bound under oath to secrecy. Origen says that the book was supposed to have fallen down from heaven; Hippolytus says that it was held to have been revealed by an angel who was the Son of God himself. Elxai obtained it from the Serians in Parthia and communicated it to the Sobiai, probably from שֹׁבְעַ; then the Syrian Alcibiades brought it from Apamea to Rome in the third century. The doctrinal system of the Elkesaites was very variable, and is represented by the Church Fathers referred to as a confused mixture of Christian elements with the legalism of Judaism, the asceticism of Essenism, and the naturalism of paganism, and exhibiting a special predilection for astrological and magical fancies. The law was regarded as binding, especially the precepts concerning the Sabbath and circumcision, but the sacrificial worship was abandoned, and the portions of the Old Testament referring to it as well as other parts. Their doctrine of baptism varied from that of baptism once administered to that of a baptism by oft repeated washings on days especially indicated by astrological signs. Baptism was for the forgiveness of sins and also for the magical cure of the sick. It was administered in the name of the Father and the Son, and in addition there were seven witnesses called, the five elements, together with oil and salt, the latter as representative of the Lord’s Supper, which was celebrated with salt and bread without wine. Eating of flesh was forbidden, but marriage was allowed and highly esteemed. Their Christology presented the appearance of unsettled fermentation. On the one hand Christ was regarded as an angel, and indeed as the μέγας βασιλεύς, of gigantic size, 96 miles high, and 24 miles broad; but on the other hand, they taught also a repeated incarnation of Christ as the Son of God, the final One being the Christ born of the virgin. He represents the male principle, and by his side, as the female principle, stands the Holy Spirit. Denial of Christ in times of persecution seemed to them quite allowable. At the time of Epiphanius,--who identifies them with the _Sampseans_, whose name was derived from שֶׁמֶשׁ the sun, because in prayer they turned to the sun, called also Ἡλιακοί,--they had for the most part their residence round about the Dead Sea, where they got mixed up with the Essenes of that region.--More recently the Elkesaites have been brought into connection with the still extant sect of the Sabeans or Mandeans (§ 25, 1). These Sabeans, from צבע meaning טבע, βαπτίζειν, are designated by the mediæval Arabic writers _Mogtasilah_, those who wash themselves, and _Elchasaich_ is named as their founder, and as teaching the existence of two principles a male and a female. [47]

§ 28.3. =The Pseudo-Clementine Series of Writings= forms a literature of a romantic historico-didactic description which originated between A.D. 160 and 170.

a. The so-called =Homiliæ XX Clementis=[48] were prefaced by two letters to the Apostle James at Jerusalem. The first of these is from Peter enjoining secrecy in regard to the “Kerugma” sent therewith. The second is from Clement of Rome after the death of Peter, telling how he as the founder and first bishop of the church of Rome had ordained Clement as his successor, and had charged him to draw up those accounts of his own career and of the addresses and disputations of Peter which he had heard while the Apostle pursued and contended with Simon Magus, and to send them to James as head of the church, “bishop of bishops, who ruled the church of Jerusalem and all the churches,” that they might be certified by him. The historical framework of the book represents a distinguished Roman of philosophical culture and of noble birth, named Clement, as receiving his first acquaintance with Christianity at Rome, and then as going forth on his travels to Judea as an eager seeker after the truth. At Alexandria (§ 16, 4) Barnabas convinces him of the truth of Christianity, and Clement follows him to Cæsarea where he listens to a great debate between Peter and Simon Magus (§ 25, 2). Simon defeated betakes himself to flight, but Peter follows him, accompanied by Clement and two who had been disciples of the magician, Niceta and Aquila. Though he goes after him from place to place, Peter does not get hold of Simon, but founds churches all along his route. On the way Clement tells him how long before his mother, Mattidia, and his two brothers had gone on a journey to Athens, and how his father, Faustus, had gone in search of them, and no trace of any of them had ever been found. Soon thereafter the mother is met with, and then it is discovered that Niceta and Aquila are the lost brothers Faustinus and Faustinianus. At the baptism of the mother the father also is restored. Finally at Laodicea Peter and Simon engage a second time in a four-days’ disputation which ends as the first. The story concludes with Peter’s arrival at Antioch.

b. The ten books of the so-called =Recognitiones Clementis=,[49] present us again with the Clement of the historical romance, the historical here overshadowing the didactic, and a closer connection with church doctrine being here maintained. Critical examinations of the relations between the two sets of writings have more and more established the view that an older Jewish-Christian Gnostic work lay at the basis of both. This original document seems to have been used contemporaneously, but in a perfectly independent manner in the composition of both; the Homilies using the materials in an anti-Marcionite interest (§ 27, 11), the Recognitions using them in such a way as to give as little offence as possible to their Catholic readers. Still it is questionable whether this original document, which probably bore the title of Κηρύγματα Πέτρου, embraced in its earliest form the domestic romance of Clement, or only treated of the disputation of Peter with Simon at Cæsarea, and was first enlarged by addition of the Ἀναγνωρισμοί Κλήμεντος giving the story of Peter’s travels (Περίοδοι).