Before the end of the Ist century, however, this belief in the immediate nearness of the Second Coming had died away[[11]]. The promise that the second Gospel puts into the mouth of Jesus that some of His hearers should not taste of death until they saw the Son of Man come with power[[12]], had become incapable of fulfilment by the death of the last of those who had listened to Him. Nor were all the converts to the faith which His immediate disciples had left behind them possessed with the same simple faith and mental equipment as themselves[[13]]. To the poor fishermen and peasants of Judaea had succeeded the slaves and freedmen of great houses—including even Caesar’s own,—some of them professionally versed in the philosophy of the time, and all with a greater or less acquaintance with the religious beliefs of the non-Jewish citizens of the great Roman Empire[[14]]. The preachings and journeys of St Paul and other missionaries had also brought into the Christian Church many believers of other than Jewish blood, together with the foreign merchants and members of the Jewish communities scattered throughout the Roman world, who were better able than the Jews of Palestine to appreciate the stability and the organized strength of the Roman Empire and to desire an alliance with it. To ask such men, deeply engaged as many of them were in the pursuit of wealth, to join in the temporary communism and other-worldliness practised by the first Christian Church would have been as futile as to expect the great Jewish banking-houses of the present day to sell all that they have and give it to the poor.
Another cause that profoundly altered the views of the early Christian communities must have been the catastrophe and final dispersion of the Jewish nation. Up to the time of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem under Titus, the Christians not only regarded themselves as Jews[[15]], but were looked upon by such of the other subjects of Rome as had happened to have heard of them, as merely one sect the more of a race always factious and given to internal dissensions. Yet even in St Paul’s time, the Christians were exposed to a bitter persecution at the hands of those orthodox Jews who seemed to the Gentile world to be their co-religionists[[16]], and it is probable that in the outbreak of fanaticism attending the first Jewish war, they suffered severely at the hands of both combatants[[17]]. The burning of the Temple must also have been a crushing blow to all who looked for a literal and immediate fulfilment of the Messianic hope, and its result was to further accentuate the difference between the Christians and the Jews[[18]]. Moreover, the hatred and scorn felt by these last for all other members of the human race had now been recognized by the Gentiles[[19]], and the repeated insurrections attempted by the Jews between the time of Titus and the final war of extermination under Hadrian showed that these feelings were shared by the Jewish communities outside Palestine[[20]]. It was therefore not at all the time which worldly-wise and prudent men, as many of the later Christian converts were, would choose for identifying themselves with a race which not only repudiated the relationship in the most practical way, but had lately exposed themselves on other grounds to the deserved execration of the civilized world.
It is, then, by no means surprising that some of the new converts should have begun to look about them for some compromise between their recently acquired convictions and the religious beliefs of the Graeco-Roman world in which they had been brought up, and they found this ready to their hand in the pre-Christian sects which we have ventured above to class together under the generic name of Gnostic. In the Orphic poems, they found the doctrine of successive ages of the world, each with its different characteristics, which coincided well enough with the repeated declaration of the Christians that the old world was passing away,—as was indeed the fact since the conquests of Alexander[[21]]. They found, too, both in the Orphic poems and in the mixed religions like that of the Alexandrian divinities which had sprung from the doctrines taught by these poems, the legend of a god dying and rising again for the salvation of mankind told in a way which had many analogies with the Gospel narratives of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus[[22]]. Among the Essenes, too, who may have owed, as has been said above, some of their doctrines to Orphic inspiration, they found all the modest virtues of sobriety, chastity, and mutual help which had already distinguished the Christian Church above all the other religious associations of the time. And among both the Orphics and the Essenes was to be noticed the strained and fanciful system of interpretation by allegory and figure which enabled them to put their own construction upon the words not only of the books of the Jewish Canon, but of those writings which had begun to circulate among the scattered Christian communities as containing the authentic teaching of Jesus and His immediate disciples[[23]]. Add to this that the Simonians, and no doubt other pre-Christian Gnostic sects of which we have lost all trace, had already shown the mixed populations of the Levant how to reconcile the innovations of a teacher of impressive and commanding personality with their own ancestral traditions[[24]], and that the many mysteries then diffused throughout the ancient world offered a ready means of propagating new doctrines under cover of secrecy; and it will be seen that most of the sources from which the founders of the great post-Christian sects afterwards drew their systems were then lying open and ready to hand.
The prize which awaited success was, moreover, no mean one. It is sometimes said that the only distinction that awaited a leader of the Church at this time was the distinction of being burned alive[[25]]. Yet the fear of impeachment to be followed by a still more horrible death never prevented English statesmen in the XVIIth century from struggling with each other for place and power; while the State had not as yet made any serious attempt to suppress the propagation of Christianity by force. On the other hand, a Christian bishop, even at this early date, occupied a position which was really superior to that of most functionaries of the secular State. Gifted with almost complete power over his flock in temporal as well as in spiritual matters, he was at once their judge and their adviser; and, so long as there were Pagan emperors on the throne, the faithful were forbidden to come to any tribunal but his[[26]]. His judgments, too, had a greater sanction than those of any temporal judge; for while he could not indeed lawfully condemn any of his hearers to death, he had in the sentence of excommunication which he alone could pronounce, the power of cutting them off from eternal life. The adoration with which he was regarded by them also surpassed the respect paid to proconsul or legate[[27]]; and the literature of the time is full of allusions to the way in which, when brought before the temporal rulers, he was attended by weeping multitudes who crowded round him even in prison, imploring his blessing and kissing his fetters[[28]]. Hence it is not to be wondered at that such a position was eagerly sought after, that envy of the episcopate was the principal sin against which the Christian writers of the sub-Apostolic age warned their readers[[29]], and that it is to the disappointment at failing to attain the highest places in the orthodox Church that they ascribe the foundation of all the principal post-Christian sects[[30]]. Without taking this accusation as literally correct, it is plain that the chance of irresponsible power over those whom they could convince must have proved a most alluring bait to religious-minded persons who were also ambitious and intellectual men of the world[[31]].
Thus it came about that during the IInd and IIIrd centuries, there arose more than one teacher who set himself to construct a system which should enable its votaries to retain the Hellenistic culture which Alexander’s conquests had spread throughout the whole civilized world with the religious and moral ideas which the enthusiasm and energy of the first Christians had begun to diffuse among the lower classes of citizens[[32]]. Alexandria, the natural meeting-place between the East and West, was no doubt the scene of the first of these attempts, and the writings of Philo, fortunately still extant, had already shown the way in which the allegorical system of interpretation could be used to this end. That many of the founders of post-Christian Gnostic sects were Alexandrian Jews is the constant tradition of the Christian Church, and is antecedently probable enough[[33]]. But other Gnostic leaders were certainly not Alexandrians and came from centres sufficiently distant from Egypt to show that the phenomenon was very widely spread, and that the same causes produced the same results in the most distant places and entirely outside the Jewish community. Marcion, the founder of the Marcionite Church, was a native of Pontus. Saturnilus or Saturninus—the name is spelt differently by Irenaeus and Hippolytus—came from Antioch, Theodotus from Byzantium, others, such as Cerdo, and probably Prepon the Syrian, began teaching in Rome, while we hear of a certain Monoimus, who is said to have been an Arab[[34]]. Most of these are to us merely names, only very brief summaries of the different systems founded or professed by them having been preserved in the heresiologies compiled by the Fathers of the Church both before and immediately after the alliance of the Christian Church with the Roman State under Constantine.
Of these treatises, the two, which, up to about sixty years ago, formed our main sources of information with regard to the Gnostics of the sub-Apostolic age[[35]], are the writings of St Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons about the year 177 A.D., and of Epiphanius, Bishop of Constantia in Cyprus, who tells us he wrote in the seventh year of Gratian or 374 A.D. The first of these is considerably later in date than the heresiarchs in refutation of whose doctrines he wrote his five books “against Heresies”; and although he is most probably honest in his account of their tenets, it is evident that Irenaeus was incapable of distinguishing between the opinions of the founders of the sects which he controverts and those of their followers and successors. Epiphanius, on the other hand, wrote when the Catholic Church was already triumphant, and his principal object seems to have been to blacken the memory of those competitors whom she had already outdistanced in the race for popularity and power. Hence he spares no pains to rake together every story which theological hatred and unclean imagination had ever invented against her opponents and rivals; while his contempt for consistency and the rules of evidence show the intellectual depths to which the war which orthodox Christianity had from the first waged against Hellenistic culture had reduced the learning of the age. The language in which he and the other Catholic writers on heresy describe the Gnostics is, indeed, the first and most salient instance of that intolerance for any other opinions than their own, which a recent writer of great authority declares the Apostles and their successors derived from their Jewish nationality[[36]]. “The first-born of Satan,” “seducers of women,” “savage beasts,” “scorpions,” “ravening wolves,” “demoniacs,” “sorcerers,” and “atheists” were the mildest terms in which Epiphanius and his fellow heresiologists can bring themselves to speak of the sectaries. They afford ample justification for the remark of the philosophic Emperor Julian that “no wild beasts are so hostile to men as Christian sects in general are to one another[[37]].”
From this lack of trustworthy evidence, the discovery in 1842 at a convent on Mt Athos of eight out of the ten books of the Philosophumena now generally attributed to Hippolytus, Bishop of “Portus Romana” in 230 A.D.[[38]], seemed likely to deliver us. The work thus recovered bore the title of the Refutation of all Heresies, and did succeed in giving us a fairly clear and coherent account of some twenty Gnostic sects, the very existence of many of which was previously unknown to us. Moreover, it went a good way beyond its predecessors in pointing out that the real origin of all the heretical sects then existing was to be found, not so much in the diabolic inspiration which other writers thought sufficient to account for it, as in the Pythagorean, Platonic, and other philosophies then in vogue, together with the practice of astrology and magic rites which had come to form an important part of all the Pagan religions then popular. It also showed a very extensive and apparently first-hand acquaintance with the works of the Gnostic leaders, and the lengthy quotations which it gives from their writings enable us to form a better idea than we had before been able to do both of what the Gnostic tenets really were and of the arguments by which they were propagated. Unfortunately the text of the Philosophumena has not been able to withstand the assaults of those textual critics who have already reduced the Book of Genesis to a patchwork of several authors writing at widely separate times and places, and writers like Dr. Salmon and Prof. Stähelin have laboured to show that the author of the Philosophumena was taken in by a forger who had himself concocted all the documents which Hippolytus quotes as being the work of different heresiarchs[[39]]. Their conclusions, although they do not seem to put the matter entirely beyond doubt, have been accepted by many theological writers, especially in Germany, and in the course of the discussion the fact has emerged that the documents quoted can hardly go back to an earlier date than the year 200 A.D.[[40]] It is therefore unlikely that Hippolytus had before him the actual words of the heresiarchs whom he is endeavouring to refute; and if the Philosophumena were all we had to depend upon, we might despair of knowing what “the great Gnostics of Hadrian’s time” really taught.
The reason for this paucity of documents is also plain enough. “The antidote to the scorpion’s bite,” to use a patristic figure of speech[[41]], was felt by the early Church to be the actual cautery, and its leaders spared no pains to rout out and burn the writings of the heretics pending the time when they could apply the same treatment to their authors. Even before their alliance with Constantine had put the resources of the State at their disposal, they had contrived to use the secular arm for this purpose. In several persecutions, notably that of Diocletian, which was probably the most severe of them all, the Christian scriptures were particularly sought for by the Inquisitors of the State, and many of the orthodox boasted that they had arranged that the police should find the writings of the heretics in their stead[[42]]. Later, when it came to the turn of the Christians to dictate imperial edicts, the possession of heretical writings was made punishable with severe penalties[[43]]. Between orthodox Christian and Pagan it is a wonder that any have survived to us.
A lucky chance, however, has prevented us from being entirely ignorant of what the Gnostics had to say for themselves. In 1851, a MS. which had been known to be in the British Museum since 1778, was published with a translation into a curious mixture of Latin and Greek by the learned Petermann, and turned out to include a sort of Gospel coming from some early Gnostic sect[[44]]. From a note made on it by a writer who seems to have been nearly contemporary with its scribes, it is known as Pistis Sophia or “Faith-Wisdom”; and the same MS. also contains fragments of other works coming from a cognate source. In 1891, a papyrus in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which had been brought into this country in 1769 by the traveller Bruce, was also published with a French translation by M. Amélineau, an ex-Abbé who has long made the later Egyptian language his peculiar study, and proved to contain two documents connected with the system disclosed in the Pistis Sophia[[45]]. Both MSS. are in Coptic of the dialect of the Sahid or Upper Egypt, to which fact they probably owe their escape from the notice of the Byzantine Inquisitors; and they purport to contain revelations as to the next world and the means of attaining salvation therein made by Jesus on His return to earth after the Resurrection. Although these several documents were evidently not all written at one time and place, and cannot be assigned to a single author, the notes and emendations appearing on the MSS. show that most of them must have been in the possession of members of the same school as their composers; and that therefore we have here for the first time direct and authentic evidence of the Gnostic tenets, as put forward by their adherents instead of by their opponents.
The collation of these documents with the excerpts from other Gnostic writings appearing in early writers like Clement of Alexandria who were not professed heresiologists[[46]], shows that the post-Christian Gnostic sects had more opinions in common than would be gathered from the statements of St Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, and that they probably fulfilled a real want of the age[[47]]. All of them seem to have held that there was one Supreme Being, the source of all good, and that matter was inherently malignant and opposed to him. All of them, too, seem to have taught the perfectibility of man’s nature, the salvation of at any rate the majority of mankind, and the possibility of their rising in the scale of being; and all of them held that this was to be effected mainly by means of certain mysteries or sacramental rites which were assumed to have a magical efficacy. All these fundamental characteristics find their origin in the beliefs of the pre-Christian religions and religious associations described above, and doubtless owed much to their influence. But with these, there was now combined for the first time the recognition of the divinity of One who, while appearing upon earth as a man among men, was yet thought by all to be endowed with a greater share of the Divine nature than they. Orpheus, Moses, Homer, and the Jewish prophets had in turn been claimed as religious teachers who were divinely inspired; but Jesus was asserted by every later Gnostic school of whose teachings we have any evidence to have been Himself of higher essence and substance than the rest of mankind[[48]]. How far this assertion was dictated by the necessity for finding a superhuman authority for the revelation which each Gnostic leader professed to make to his disciples may be open to question; but in view of some contemporary controversies it is well to draw attention to the fact that the Divinity in some shape or other of Jesus, as well as what is now called His “historicity,” was never for a moment called in question during the first three centuries by Gnostic or Catholic. Μονογενής or Monogenes[[49]]—a word which Catholic writers later confused with Μονογεννητός or “only-begotten,” but which is best represented by the corresponding Latin expression unicus or “unique” (i.e. one of a kind)—is the word in which the Gnostics summed up their conceptions of the nature of Jesus[[50]].