Bigg, The Clementine Homilies (Studia Biblica et Eccles. II. p. 157 ff.), has propounded the hypothesis that the Homilies are an Ebionitic revision of an older Catholic original (see p. 1841: "The Homilies as we have it, is a recast of an orthodox work by a highly unorthodox editor." P. 175: "The Homilies are surely the work of a Catholic convert to Ebionitism, who thought he saw in the doctrine of the two powers the only tenable answer to Gnosticism. We can separate his Catholicism from his Ebionitism, just as surely as his Stoicism"). This is the opposite of the view expressed by me in the text. I consider Bigg's hypothesis well worth examining, and at first sight not improbable; but I am not able to enter into it here.
Footnote 403:[ (return) ]
The attitude of the recently discovered "Teaching of the twelve Apostles" is strictly universalistic, and hostile to Judaism as a nation, but shews us a Christianity still essentially uninfluenced by philosophic elements. The impression made by this fact has caused some scholars to describe the treatise as a document of Jewish Christianity. But the attitude of the Didache is rather the ordinary one of universalistic early Christianity on the soil of the Græco-Roman world. If we describe this as Jewish Christian, then from the meaning which we must give to the words "Christian" and "Gentile Christian", we tacitly legitimise an undefined and undefinable aggregate of Greek ideas, along with a specifically Pauline element, as primitive Christianity, and this is perhaps not the intended, but yet desired, result of the false terminology. Now, if we describe even such writings as the Epistle of James and the Shepherd of Hermas as Jewish Christian, we therewith reduce the entire early Christianity, which is the creation of a universal religion on the soil of Judaism, to the special case of an indefinable religion. The same now appears as one of the particular values of a completely indeterminate magnitude. Hilgenfeld (Judenthum und Juden-christenthum, 1886; cf. also Ztschr f. wiss. Theol. 1886, II. 4) advocates another conception of Jewish Christianity in opposition to the following account. Zahn, Gesch. des N.T-lich. Kanons, II. p. 668 ff. has a different view still.
Footnote 404:[ (return) ]
Or even Ebionitism; the designations are to be used as synonymous.
Footnote 405:[ (return) ]
The more rarely the right standard has been set up in the literature of Church history, for the distinction of Jewish Christianity, the more valuable are those writings in which it is found. We must refer, above all, to Diestel, Geschichte des A. T. in der Christl. Kirche, p. 44, note 7.
Footnote 406:[ (return) ]
See Theol. Lit. Ztg. 1883. Col. 409 f. as to the attempt of Joël to make out that the whole of Christendom up to the end of the first century was strictly Jewish Christian, and to exhibit the complete friendship of Jews and Christians in that period ("Blicke in die Religionsgesch." 2 Abth. 1883). It is not improbable that Christians like James, living in strict accordance with the law, were for the time being respected even by the Pharisees in the period preceding the destruction of Jerusalem. But that can in no case have been the rule. We see from, Epiph., h. 29. 9. and from the Talmud, what was the custom at a later period.
Footnote 407:[ (return) ]
There were Jewish Christians who represented the position of the great Church with reference to the Old Testament religion, and there were some who criticised the Old Testament like the Gnostics. Their contention may have remained as much an internal one, as that between the Church Fathers and Gnostics (Marcion) did, so far as Jewish Christianity is concerned. There may have been relations between Gnostic Jewish Christians and Gnostics, not of a national Jewish type, in Syria and Asia Minor, though we are completely in the dark on the matter.
Footnote 408:[ (return) ]
From the mere existence of Jewish Christians, those Christians who rejected the Old Testament might have argued against the main body of Christendom and put before it the dilemma: either Jewish Christian or Marcionite. Still more logical indeed was the dilemma: either Jewish, or Marcionite Christian.
Footnote 409:[ (return) ]
So did the Montanists and Antimontanists mutually reproach each other with Judaising (see the Montanist writings of Tertullian). Just in the same way the arrangements as to worship and organisation, which were ever being more richly developed, were described by the freer parties as Judaising, because they made appeal to the Old Testament, though, as regards their contents, they had little in common with Judaism. But is not the method of claiming Old Testament authority for the regulations rendered necessary by circumstances nearly as old as Christianity itself? Against whom the lost treatise of Clement of Alexandria "κανων εκκλησιαστικος 'η προς τους Ιουδαιζοντας" (Euseb., H. E. VI. 13. 3) was directed, we cannot tell. But as we read, Strom., VI. 15, 125, that the Holy Scriptures are to be expounded according to the εκκλησιαστικος κανων, and then find the following definition of the Canon: κανων δε εκκλησιαστικος 'η συνωδια και συμφωνια νομον τε και προφητων τη κατα την του κυριου παρουσιαν παραδιδομενηι διαθηκηι, we may conjecture that the Judaisers were those Christians, who, in principle, or to some extent, objected to the allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament. We have then to think either of Marcionite Christians or of "Chiliasts," that is, the old Christians who were still numerous in Egypt about the middle of the third century (see Dionys. Alex, in Euseb., H. E. VII. 24). In the first case, the title of the treatise would be paradoxical. But perhaps the treatise refers to the Quarto-decimans, although the expression κανων εκκλησιαστικος seems too ponderous for them (see, however, Orig., Comm. in Matth. n. 76, ed. Delarue III. p. 895) Clement may possibly have had Jewish Christians before him. See Zahn, Forschungen, vol. III. p. 37 f.
Footnote 410:[ (return) ]
Cases of this kind are everywhere, up to the fifth century, so numerous that they need not be cited. We may only remind the reader that the Nestorian Christology was described by its earliest and its latest opponents as Ebionitic.
Footnote 411:[ (return) ]
Or were those western Christians Ebionitic who, in the fourth century still clung to very realistic Chiliastic hopes, who, in fact, regarded their Christianity as consisting in these?