For the dispersed Jews, held by a racial tie, association was a matter of course. Marked off by religion if not by aspect from Gentiles everywhere, they were a community within the Gentile community. For the first Jesuists, association was not thus a matter of course all round. For the slaves, seeking friendship, and the poor, seeking help, it may have been; but the more prosperous were for that very reason less spontaneously attracted. The fundamental tie was the so-called “Eucharist,” which at first, in varying forms, was probably only an annual rite: the agapae or love feasts were common to the multitude of pagan associations. Accordingly many adherents tended to “forsake the assembling of themselves together,”[17] and it was plainly the function of the bishop to act upon these. Not only the Epistle to the Hebrews and that of Jude but those of Barnabas and Ignatius, and The Shepherd of Hermas, anxiously or sternly urge the duty of regular meeting. Addresses by bishops and “prophets” would be natural means of promoting the end.
Who then produced the literature? Once more, there is no evidence. If any of the Epistles might at first sight seem “genuine,” they are those ascribed to James and Jude, essentially Judaic or Judaistic documents, especially the former, in which (ii, 1) the cumbrous formula “the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory” exhibits a Christian interpolation. It is essentially in the spirit of the Teaching, a counsel of right living, calling for works in opposition to the new doctrine that faith is the one thing needful, and sounding the Ebionitic note (v, 1): “Go to now, ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you.” But save for the interpolation and the naming of Jesus Christ in the sentence of preamble, there is no specific Jesuist or Christist teaching whatever. If this document was current among the Jesuists, it was borrowed from a Jewish author who had at most one special item of belief in common with them, that of “the coming [or presence] of the Lord” (v. 7, 8); and here there is no certainty that “the Lord” meant for the writer the Christ.
Once more, then, we turn for our first clue to the Judaic Teaching, which on its face exhibits the gradual accretion of Jesuist elements, beginning with an Ebionitic mention of the “Servant” Jesus, and proceeding step by step from a stage in which wandering “apostles” or “prophets” must subsist from hand to mouth and from day to day, to one in which settled prophets are supported by first fruits, and yet a further one in which bishops and deacons appear to administer while prophets and teachers continue to teach. And as the “prophets” constitute a class which in the third century has disappeared from the church, as if its work were done; and as they bear the name given to the chief producers of the sacred literature of Judaism, it would seem to be the natural surmise that they were the primary producers of special literature for the early Christian churches.
[3] Cp. Weizsäcker, The Apostolic Age, Eng. trans, i, 55. It is just possible that among people devoutly awaiting the imminent end of the world, some such communions might have a brief existence. [↑]
[4] A good support to Hobbes’s thesis that the sin against the Holy Ghost is sin against the ecclesiastical power. [↑]
[6] Cp. [Acts xiii, 1]; [xv, 32]; [Rev. xvi, 6]; [xviii, 20, 24]. [↑]