VIII. Christians, as such, no longer take into account the distinctions of race, age, rank, nationality and worldly culture, but the Christian community must be conceived as a communion resting on a divine election. Opinions were divided about the ground of that election.
IX. As Christianity is the only true religion, and as it is no national religion, but somehow concerns the whole of humanity, or its best part, it follows that it can have nothing in common with the Jewish nation and its contemporary cultus. The Jewish nation in which Jesus Christ appeared, has, for the time at least, no special relation to the God whom Jesus revealed. Whether it had such a relation at an earlier period is doubtful (cf. here, e.g., the attitude of Marcion, Ptolemæus the disciple of Valentinus, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas, Aristides and Justin); but certain it is that God has now cast it off, and that all revelations of God, so far as they took place at all before Christ, (the majority assumed that there had been such revelations and considered the Old Testament as a holy record), must have aimed solely at the call of the "new people", and in some way prepared for the revelation of God through his Son.[160]
Footnote 152:[ (return) ]
See, as to this, Celsus in Orig. III. 10 ff. and V. 59 ff.
Footnote 153:[ (return) ]
The marks adduced in the text do not certainly hold good for some comparatively unimportant Gnostic groups, but they do apply to the great majority of them, and in the main to Marcion also.
Footnote 154:[ (return) ]
Most of the Gnostic schools know only one God, and put all emphasis on the knowledge of the oneness, supramundaneness, and spirituality of this God. The Æons, the Demiurgus, the God of matter, do not come near this God though they are called Gods. See the testimony of Hippolytus c. Noet. 11; και γαρ παντες απεκλεισθησαν εις τουτο ακοντες ειπειν 'οτι το παν εις 'ενα ανατρεχει ει ουν τα παντα εις 'ενα ανατρεχει και κατα θυαλεντινον και κατα Μαρκιωνα, Κηρινθον τε και πασαν την εκεινων φλυαριαν, και ακοντες εις τουτο περιεπεσαν, 'ινα τον 'ενα 'ομολογησωσιν αιτιον των παντων 'ουτως ουν συντρεχουσιν και αυτοι μη θελοντες τη αληθεια 'ενα θεον λεγειν ποιησαντα 'ως ηθελησεν.
Footnote 155:[ (return) ]
Continence was regarded as the condition laid down by God for the resurrection and eternal life. The sure hope of this was for many, if not for the majority, the whole sum of religion, in connection with the idea of the requital of good and evil which was now firmly established. See the testimony of the heathen Lucian, in Peregrinus Proteus.
Footnote 156:[ (return) ]
Even where the judicial attributes were separated from God (Christ) as not suitable, Christ was still comprehended as the critical appearance by which every man is placed in the condition which belongs to him. The Apocalypse of Peter expects that God himself will come as Judge (see the Messianic expectations of Judaism, in which it was always uncertain whether God or the Messiah would hold the judgment).
Footnote 157:[ (return) ]
Celsus (Orig. c. Celsum, V. 59) after referring to the many Christian parties mutually provoking and fighting with each other, remarks (V. 64) that though they differ much from each other, and quarrel with each other, you can yet hear from them all the protestation, "The world is crucified to me and I to the world." In the earliest Gentile Christian communities brotherly love for reflective thought falls into the background behind ascetic exercises of virtue, in unquestionable deviation from the sayings of Christ, but in fact it was powerful. See the testimony of Pliny and Lucian, Aristides, Apol. 15, Tertull Apol. 39.
Footnote 158:[ (return) ]
The word "life" comes into consideration in a double sense, viz., as soundness of the soul, and as immortality. Neither, of course, is to be separated from the other. But I have attempted to shew in my essay, "Medicinisches aus der ältesten Kirchengesch" (1892), the extent to which the Gospel in the earliest Christendom was preached as medicine and Jesus as a Physician, and how the Christian Message was really comprehended by the Gentiles as a medicinal religion. Even the Stoic philosophy gave itself out as a soul therapeutic, and Æsculapius was worshipped as a Saviour-God; but Christianity alone was a religion of healing.