The Birth of the Christian Religion

[1] Les Livres du Nouveau Testament traduits du grec en francais avec introduction generale et notices, 1922.

[2] A complete bibliography of the subject would fill a larger volume than this present. The list below is limited to the most important of recent works dealing with the essentials, and especially to those which the present author has used or had in view when preparing his own:

E. RENAN: Histoire des origines du christianisme, 1863-1881. A brilliant synthesis, needing correction to-day at many points but unequalled, at least in our literature, and never replaced.

L. DUCHESNE: Histoire ancienne de l'Eglise, i (1906).

B. W. BACON: The fourth Gospel in research and debate (1918), The Story of the Jews and the beginnings of the Church (1926); Studies in Matthew (1930).

W. BOUSSET: Kyrios Chrlstos (1913, 1921).

R. BULTMANN: Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition (1921).

C. CLEMEN: Paulus, sein Leben und Wirken (1904); Religionsgeschichtliche Erklarung des Neuen Testaments (1929).

F. CUMONT: Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain (1929).

M. GOGUEL: Introduction au Noweau Testament (i-v, 1923 ss.); Jesus de Nazareth (1925); Jean-Baptiste (1928); La Vie de Jesus (1932).

C. GUIGNEBERT: Manuel d'histoire ancienne du Chrlstianisme (1906); Le Christianisme antique (1921); Jesus (1933).

A. HARNACK: Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur (1893, 1897, 1904); Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in die drei ersten Jahrhunderten (1906); Beitrage zur Einleitung in das New Testament (i—vi, 1906—1914).

E. HENNECKE: Handbuch zu den neutestamentllchen Apokryphen (1904); Neutestamentliche Apokryphen (1923—1924).

A. JULICHER: Einleitung in das Neue Testament (1931); Die Gleichnisrede Jesu (1902).

M. J. LAGRANGE: Evangile selon saint Matthieu (1927); Evangile selon saint Marc (1929); Evangile selon saint Luc (1921); Evangile selon saint Jean (1925).

H. LIETZMANN: Handbuch zum Neuen Testament (1926-1932); Geschichte der alten Kirche. i. Die Anfange (1932).

E. LOHMEYER: Das Urchristentum, i, I. Johannes der Taufer (1932).

E. MEYER: Ursprung und Anfange des Christentums (1921-1923).

E. NORDEN: Agnostos Theos (1913); Die Geburt des Kindes (1923).

R. REITZENSTEIN: Die hellenistischen Mysterlenreligionen (1920).

A. SCHWEITZER: Geschichte der Leben Jesu Forschung (1913, 1926); Geschichte der paulinischen Forschung (1911).

B. H. STREETER: The four Gospels (1924); The primitive Church (1929).

J. WEISS: Das Urchristentum (1914, 1917).

J. WEISS, W. BOUSSET and W. HEITMULLER: Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments neu ubersetzt und fur die Gegenwart erklart (1917—1918).

J. WELLHAUSEN: Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien (1911); Das Evangelium Matthaei (1914); Das Evangelium Marci (1909); Das Evangelium Lucae (1904); Das Evangelium Johannis (1908).

P. WENDLAND: Die Urchristlichen Literaturformen. (1912).

[1] R. Eisler's defence of the partial authenticity of supplements contained in the Slavic version of The Jewish War is distinguished by great learning and subtlety. A criticism of the thesis may be found, by M. Goguel, in Revue d'histoire et de philosophic religieuses, March-April 1930, pp. 177—190.

[2] ii, 1—16: Paul's self-defence against other missionaries, ending in a violent outburst against Jewish persecutors, in the spirit and style of Acts; iii, 2b-4, interpolation of the same character, presupposing a long experience of persecution (iii, 2a should be attached to 5: "we have sent Timothy, our brother and servant of God in the Gospel of the Christ, to know how you stand in the faith," etc.).

[3] A fragment with a style all its own, making a violent breach in the moral precepts at the end of the Epistle. The apocalyptic description, which is a deliberate paraphrase of Gospel texts, stamps itself as later than the apostolic age (cf. iv, 15 and Mark ix, 1, xiii, 30; also v, 1-2 with Mark xiii, 31; Matthew xxiv, 43; Luke xii, 39).

[4] The end of verse 3 seems to have been added to give the Epistle the character of instruction addressed to the universal Church. The words "and I am of Christ," in verse 12, are probably interpolated.

[5] i, 17-ii, 8. "The princes of this world," in ii, 8, are not political rulers of human appointment, of whom there would be no need to inform us that they are not in God's confidence. Jesus is here called "the Lord of glory," in allusion to Psalm xxiv, 7-9. The quotation in verse 9 probably comes from some Apocrypha and must be a gloss.

[6] Observe that, in vii, 10, the author appeals to the Gospel prohibition of divorce (cf. Mark x, 9), and then, in verse 12, takes it on himself to authorize the divorce of the Christian partners in a mixed marriage if the pagan partner takes the initiative. The case presented in verses 36-38, of the believing guardian of a virgin, who is given permission to marry her if he feels it necessary, does not belong to the earliest Christian age.

[7] x, 12-13 looks like an editor's addition. The whole passage is a homily on the sacrament of the Supper as understood in xi, 23-26.

[8] 12b-14 may be another editorial addition. On the general theme cf. 1 Thessalonians ii, 1—12, Acts xx, 33—35.

[9] 17-18 again suspect as editorial.

[10] Note that the passage forbidding women to speak in the assemblies

conflicts with what is presupposed by xi, 3-16. But xiv, 33b-35 is evidently interpolated.

[11] Interpolation is betrayed not only by the higher quality of the author's aim but by the forced connexions xii, 31 and xiv, 9, which are doublets. Moreover, xiii, 13, which contradicts what has gone before, seems to have been added to the song.

[12] The priority of ix is evident from the fact that, in it, the collections have not yet been made either in Macedonia or in Corinth, whereas in viii the Macedonian collection is ready and Paul has finished organizing the collection at Corinth. See Delafosse iii, 15-16.

[13] The insulting invectives against the Galilean apostles (cf. 1 Corinthians i, 2, 6, 13) are counterblasts to those which Revelation i—iii launches against Paul and his followers.

[14] For the help which came from Macedonia, cf. Philippians iv, 15, i6 and Acts xviii, 2, 3 (where it appears that the money brought from Macedonia enabled Paul to give himself entirely to his preaching).

[15] xi, 12b-xii, 4. If this apology is not from Paul himself, it is founded on more complete and precise information than canonical Acts. But the date assigned to the great vision in xii, 2 makes a difficulty. Paul's capital vision must have been that which converted him, which cannot have taken place about the year 40. (Can there be some influence here from Galatians ii, 1?)

[16] These are dealt with by Acts xiii, 14-xiv, 23; xvi, 1-5

[17] Marcion's version lacked i, 18-20, the personal visit to Peter; also the "again" in ii, i. But this passage, which fits so ill with the context, may well be an addition.

[18] v, 13-26; vi, 7-10, 12-16. It seems as though v, 1-12 should be attached to iv, 21-31, and that vi, 1—6 may be an addition; vi, 11 might rejoin the conclusion, 17-18.

[19] Many critics doubt whether the salutations of xvi, 3-16 (if not also xvi, 1-2, 21—22) originally belonged to Romans, and are inclined to think them addressed to the community at Ephesus. The final doxology, xvi, 25-27, is recognized as a Marcionite addition, although the entire chapters xv-xvi were at first wanting in Marcion's Apostolicon.

[20] To the same gnosis belongs iii, 21-26, to which iv, 15, 25 are coordinated. In the exposition of the gnosis vii, 7-25 seems of secondary origin.

[21] i, 18-iii, 20, where the indictment of the pagans, which has a rhetoric of its own, seems to have been borrowed from a Jewish source. In ii, 14, 15 we may suspect a gloss.

[22] The fragment which follows xv, 7 seems lost in this place. In the moral part, the verses in respect for established authority (xiii, 1—7) are by a later hand; 8-12 depend on the Gospel tradition. The warning against heretics, xvi, 17-20, belongs to a time when gnostic editors were at work.

[23] The essential formula is Colossians i, 15-19, which should be compared with Philippians ii, 6-10.

[24] Ephesus would be thought by the editors to have a better claim than Laodicea to an apostolic letter.

[25] Note the quotation of the baptismal hymn in v, 14. On the other hand, it results from ii, 20, iii, 5; iv, 11 that inspired prophets still stand with apostles in the first rank.

[26] ii, 6-11 is a short poem of Christian gnosis inserted by means of an artificial transition (verse 5).

[27] The rules of discipline in 1 Timothy ii-iii, 13 break into the warning against false teachers, thereafter resumed, while ii, 11-15a, forbidding women to teach (parallel to 1 Corinthians xiv, 34-35), is an evident surcharge in the rules about woman's dress, etc.

[28] Cf. especially 1 Clement, 36, 2; Hebrews i, 3-4.

[29] In ii, 3-4 the author expresses himself in much the same terms as the author of Luke i, 1-2. Similarly in xiii, 7, where the founders of the community to which the Epistle is addressed are represented as belonging to a time long passed. Assuming that the community addressed was the Roman, the founders referred to would be Peter and Paul, here associated as we find them in Clement's Epistle.

[30] We get a glimpse of Gospel tradition only in ii, 3-4; v, 7-10 is com- monly regarded as a reference to the scene in Gethsemane; it refers in reality to Psalm xxii, on which the synoptic account was constructed.

[31] 2 Peter i. The announcement by Jesus of Peter's death (13-14), and the appeal to a great revelation on "the holy mountain," in which the apotheosis of the Christ is completed (16-19), refer to the Apocalypse of Peter, not to John xx, 18-19, nor to the Gospel stories of the transfiguration.

[32] In v, 12 the author forbids oath-taking in the terms of Matthew v, 34 but without giving any sign that he is quoting a Gospel precept.

[33] 1 John v, 6-8 appears to be an interpolation to connect with John xix, 34-35 (water and blood, after the lance-thrust), a passage equally secondary in the fourth Gospel.

[34] Note that the author proves by Psalm cx, 1 that Jesus was not the son of David (cf. Mark xiii, 35-37).

[35] 1 Clement, 5. The two apostles appear as legendary heroes, Peter taking precedence of Paul, as in canonical Acts.

[36] The year 155, assigned by many as the date of Polycarp's martyrdom, ill accords with what we know of his coming to Rome in the time of Anicetus. It is more probable that Polycarp died under Marcus Aurelius, in 166, as Eusebius indicates. Thus the letter to the Philippians could have been written between 150 and 160.

[37] Note that while Christian apocalyptic had a fixed centre in the name of Jesus, Jewish apocalyptic was always rambling loosely round the topic of the Messiah, which was not definitely crystallized round an historical name.

[38] The author of the Ascension proper seems to say (ix, 14) that "the god of this world" and his auxiliaries will crucify the Son of God without recognizing him; but in that he is not dependent on 1 Corinthians ii, 8.

He also seems to say that the Christ remained on the earth for eighteen months after his resurrection, an opinion held by some of the gnostics.

[39] A translation of the Greek fragment and of the Ethiopian version will be found in Henneke, Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, 1923, pp. 314—327.

[40] The Akhmim fragment has a different order. It gives the first place to the felicity of the elect, two unnamed persons among the redeemed taking the place of Moses and Elijah as types of the promised glory.

[41] An obscure passage in the Ethiopian version but better preserved in the Greek fragment (cf. James in The Journal of Theological Studies, April 1931, pp. 270-279).

[42] This can only be the Mount of Olives. Note the same designation, "holy mountain," in 2 Peter i, 18.

[43] Cf. Bacon, Studies in Matthew, 146.

[44] The Church which Hermas sees in vision is already old. He took her at first to be the Sibyl {Vision, ii, 4); and the real Church as he knew it on earth has an experience of persecution acquired after the reign of Trajan.

[45] Virtues, vices, even impressions, are freely personified by Hermas. These personifications are not, with him, simple metaphors; they belong to the old Roman animism which put a god into every phenomenon. Thus he sees the Church in the form of a respectable matron. It would be difficult to understand why his shepherd, angel of penitence, should come from Arcadia, were it not that the image has been borrowed from a non-Christian type which we encounter again in the Hermetic Poimandres, in comparison with whom the Johannine Christ is acclaimed the true shepherd.

[46] 1 Apology, 66. The formula "Memoirs of the apostles" which is customary with Justin has no traditional warrant; he uses it to give distinction to this literature which he somewhat boldly assimilates to Xenophon's Memoirs about Socrates. It is not clear that Justin had the idea of a fixed canon; he appears to have made use in ordinary of the three Synoptics; also of John and perhaps of the Gospel of Peter.

[47] Heresies, iii, 1. Note that Tatian's Diatessaron, about 170, is founded on the canonical Gospels and that Theophilus of Antioch, about 190, constructed a harmony of the four Gospels. The canon of four had become law at Alexandria in the time of Clement, about 200.

[48] The priority of Mark results from the fact that it is to be considered as a source for Matthew and Luke. Beyond that it is impossible to assign precise dates to the stages of its revision.

[49] This conclusion is wanting in the oldest manuscripts, though it is of earlier date than they. The author of it knew the three other Gospels and Acts. It has been conjectured that it replaced another conclusion either lost or suppressed. The only fact of which we can be certain is that it was intended to fill an obvious gap and bring Mark into line with the other Gospels.

[50] The Meal of the Anointing (xiv, 3-9) breaks up the prelude to the arrest and betrayal and, by anticipation, doubles the last meal, where everything which concerns the Passover and the preparations for it is an interpolation in the story of an ordinary meal which took place on 13 Nisan;

of this story (where verse 24 is obviously adventitious), xiv, 23, 25 is the debris. (See my Les Livres du N. Testament, 273-274.)

[51] Mark vi, 7-18 (Matthew x), mission of the Twelve; xii, 38—40, against the Pharisees (cf. Matthew xxiii), probably conceived in the source as the conclusion of the Jerusalem ministry.

[52] Cf. B. W. Bacon, Is Mark a Roman Gospel? 1919, and the criticism of this book in Revue d'histoire et litterature religieuses, 1920, p. 627, where we read "it was perhaps for want of something better that the Roman community first accepted this Gospel text."

[53] Eusebius, History, iv, 14, 1; v, 24, 16.

[54] The collection of Logia, or discourses, was made to meet the practical needs of Christian catechesis, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that its original author was a disciple of Jesus. That hypothesis appears self-evident only to those who hold that the reason for making the collection was the desire to get a fixed and authentic version of the teaching of the Christ. But the real reason was the need to provide the catechists with an adequate repertoire of matter for their teaching.

[55] The two prefaces are closely co-ordinate. On the mutilation of the preface to Acts in the editorial elaboration of that book, see my Les Actes des Apotres, 133-140.

[56] Duplicate of the mission of the Twelve, symbolic of the evangelization of Israel, and intended to signify the evangelization of the pagans already announced in iv, 16-30.

[57] Theme resumed in Acts i, 9-11. Its connexion with the Apocalypse of Peter has been noted above, p. 37. The role attributed to Herod in the passion of the Christ (xxiii, 6-12) brings the third Gospel rather near to the Gospel of Peter.

[58] The author effects his purpose by bringing together all the apparitions of the Risen One in a unitary perspective. There is reason to believe that the characteristic words of the mystical supper were absent in the original Luke and that the last meal was not there presented as the Passover meal. In this, its original form, the Gospel would therefore be earlier than the introduction of the Sunday Easter in the circle for which it was written, and if this circle was Roman it follows that the Gospel would be that of some Roman group which ignored or was unacquainted with the gnosis of the Epistles attributed to Paul, the harmonization of Mark and Luke having coincided with the unification of the various Roman groups.

[59] In the stories of the resurrection: Luke xxiv, 12 (perhaps authentic), 24, cf. John xx, 3—10; 36-40, cf. John xx, 19—21, 27. It is probable that in Acts xii, 1-2 the original document mentioned the death of John along with that of James, conformably to Mark x, 39 and to the testimony of Papias, and that the revision of the document which brings John to the front in the first chapter suppressed the mention of his execution in deference to the Ephesian legend.

[60] The hypothesis of an Aramaic original has been weightily maintained in recent times.

[61] In the perspective of the first three Gospels the Galilean ministry of Jesus seems to last a few months and the Jerusalem ministry a few days; in John, the life of Jesus is crowned by a ministry of three whole years, he being regarded as forty-six when he began to teach—a symbolic trait (ii, 20). Such figures have mystical significance; but in all four Gospels chronology is only a framework for the distribution of evangelical matter.

[62] So far as we can speak of last editions prior to canonization, when the last retouchings of all four Gospels may well have been made at the same time.

[63] Schmidke, Neue Fragmente und Untersuchungen zu juden-christlicen Evangelien, 1911, boldly contests Jerome's assertion, and even refuses him all knowledge of the Gospel in question. See on this subject Waitz in Henneke 10-32 and E. Meyer i, 261; these authors doubt only that Jerome made the double translation into Greek and Latin of which he boasts (De viris, 2).

[64] Waitz, 55, would attribute this citation to the Gospel of the Hebrews.

[65] Not having the context, it is impossible to say exactly what was the Easter observance of the Nazareans, except that their fast covered the whole time of the passion from the last meal to the resurrection.

[66] Waitz, 44 ff., is inclined to place it between 100 and 130, between the Synoptics and John.

[67] Collected and translated in Preuschen, Antilegomena, 2—3, 135—136.

[68] Salome comes on the scene and puts a question to Jesus about the end; Jesus insists on the disappearance from the perfect state of everything related to sex. Pretence of mystery on the subject.

[69] It is not certain nor even probable that it depends on the fourth Gospel in its canonical form; its spirit and composition belong rather to the pre-canonical time.

[70] Eusebius, vi, 12. Note that the bishop, without examining the book, permitted the reading of it in the community where he found it in use. On his attention being drawn afterwards to the Docetism of certain passages, he rejected it on that ground.

[71] According to Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, vii, 17, 106. Irenaeus (Heresies, iii, 11, 9) says the Gospel of Truth had nothing in common with the canonical Gospels. But had he read it?

[72] To these tendencies are attributed the suppression of all that concerns the earthly birth of the Christ, the non-paschal character of the last supper, etc. See Henneke, 74.

[73] It is evident that the earthly epiphany of the Christ was for a long time limited to the period between his baptism and resurrection—as in Mark, John, the Gospel of the Ebionites, Basilides, etc. The idea of miraculous conception, by itself, is mythological and does not otherwise imply encratism. It is possible that the exaltation of Mary and the infant Jesus began in gnosis. On the Genna Marias, mentioned by Epiphanius, 26, 2, see Henneke, 82, 83, 109.

[74] The brothers and sisters of Jesus are represented in this book as the

children of an earlier marriage of Joseph who has become quite an old man when he married Mary. Jerome transformed the brothers and sisters of Jesus into his cousins. Western tradition has followed Jerome.

[75] The whole work of the Christian imagination in accounting for the origin of the religion is well summed up in the following quotation borrowed by Eusebius, ii, 1, 4, from the Hypotyposes, Book 7, of Clement of Alexandria: "The Lord, after his resurrection, transmitted the gnosis to James the Just, to John and to Peter; these passed it on to the other apostles; the other apostles to the seventy disciples, of whom was Barnabas"—a fragment of Jewish-Christian gnosis. The canonical books (Gospels and Acts) are concerned, on the other hand, to transform the teachings of Jesus from post-resurrection utterances into discourses pronounced by him during his mortal life. But the gnostic tradition may well be, in all respects, the older.

[76] Observe that canonical Acts have collected a legend of Peter and a legend of Paul already considerably developed. The final edition of the book combines the two legends with facts having a surer basis, the whole forming an anti-gnostic synthesis—which brings us back to the preceding note. Henneke has good ground for saying (p. 140) that the question of spurious literature in primitive Christianity is still in need of investigation as a whole and fundamentally.

[77] These Clementine apocrypha are, perhaps, too neglected at the present time, though the school of Bauer made much of them in the middle of the last century. We have to distinguish the Kerygmata, which belong to Jewish-Christian gnosis from the Praxeis, a work of anti-gnostic Christianity recounting the combats between Peter and Simon Magus from Caesarea to Antioch. On the highly complicated history of these Clementine romances, see Henneke, 212—215, and 0. Culmann, Le probleme litteraire et historique du roman pseudo-clementin, 1930.

[1] Annals, xv, 44: "Auctor hujus nominis Christus, Tiberio imperitante, per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio affectus erat. Repressaque in praesens, exitialis superstitio sursus erumpebat, non modo per Judaeam, originem ejus mali, sed per Urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut turpia confluunt celebranturque."

[2] Epistolae, 96, 7. Christians under judicial interrogation told Pliny "quod essent soliti stato die ante lucem convenire carmenque Christo quasi deo dicere secum invicem." The Carmen is an alternating chant, hymn or liturgy. Pliny understands that the executed man, spoken of by Tacitus, is regarded as a god by his followers.

[3] Antiquities, xviii, 21: Ta men loipa panta gnwmh twn Farisaiwn omologousa, duskinhtoV de tou eleuqerou erwV estin autoiV monon hgemona kai despothn ton qeon upeilhfosin.

[4] From this we can see the meaning and importance of the question

about paying tribute to Caesar in the synoptic Gospels (Mark xii, 13-17 and parallels). The story was invented to prevent Christianity being confused with the Judaism of the extremists. It is by no means certain that Jesus and his first followers would have shown so much consideration for Caesar's authority. Observe that Mark puts the question into the mouths of Pharisees and Herodians, for whom the question was important.

[5] The mistakes and exactions of the last procurators contributed to inflaming the religious passions of the Jews. As soon as revolution started in Jerusalem the friends of the Romans had to flee and, as the empire was then badly governed, rebellion was well organized before Vespasian was charged to suppress it.

[6] Herod was not less hated than the Romans, but more skilful in exacting obedience. It was the Jews themselves and the Samaritans who demanded and obtained the deposition of Archelaus in the year 6 of our era. But the mass of the people never settled down under Roman rule to which the upper class had accommodated itself. The fire smouldered till the explosion of the year 66.

[7] The date given in Luke iii, 1, if we take it as referring to the preaching of John the Baptist, is too late, although his activity as a preacher cannot have been of long duration; Simon Magus, whose date cannot be exactly given, was a contemporary of the apostolic age; Elchasai, founder of a baptist and judaizing sect in Transjordania, appeared about 100.

[8] With the difference, that Simon, in the legend, was regarded as having been a disciple of John; which is not so with Elchasai. In spite of what we read in Acts viii, 9-24, it is unlikely that Simon ever found his way into Christianity, but he may have had some connexion with John or with his sect.

[9] It reveals an effort to subordinate John to Jesus, by making John himself avow his subordination, or by drawing distinctions between the baptism of John and Christian baptism, but without success in disguising that the latter was borrowed from the former.

[10] Antiquities, xviii, 9, 2. The notice finds credit because it seems to be independent of the Gospel tradition. But it may not be really independent.

[11] Matthew xi, 11. But the end of verse 3: "Notwithstanding, he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he," is a Christian addition intended to make the preceding statement inoffensive. It seems, however, that to give a better balance both to the text and the thought we ought, with many church fathers and some moderns, to take this saying in a strictly comparative sense: "he that is smaller than John"—in the order of time, junior by age and manifestation, that is to say, Jesus—"is, in the kingdom of heaven, greater than he." This interpretation saves the pre-eminence of Jesus, and his importance in regard to the kingdom, without excluding John from the number of the elect. The messianic programme announced in Matthew xi, 2-6, might very well be applied, in its principal elements, by John's sectaries to John and by Christians to Jesus.

[12] Mark i, 7-8 and parallels. As nobody can be either bathed or washed

in holy Spirit, it is obvious that baptism in spirit reposes on baptism in water, and the former has never existed apart from the latter.

[13] Mark i, 5 speaks of the desert, the region round the Dead Sea, as the scene of the preaching and of the Jordan as the scene of the baptizing, followed by Matthew iii, 1, 5. Luke all the region round about the Jordan as the scene of the preaching. The indications of place in John i, 28 and iii, 23, though more precise, are far from being more trustworthy.

[14] This baptism in running water was distinct from the legal ablutions. Holscher supposes it derived from the regions bordering on the Euphrates (Babylon) and from Mesopotamia. Renan thought the same. (Vie de Jesus, 103; Les Disciples, 462-465.)

[15] Acts xviii, 24—28; xix, 1—6. From these notices we may conclude that Christian baptism was not originally understood as a baptism of spirit, as the editor of Acts would make out.

[16] Matthew ii, 1, connected with Micah v, 1; 13-15, where Hosea xi, 1, which refers to Israel, is made into a prediction of the flight into Egypt; 16-18, massacre of the children, linked to Jeremiah xxxi, 15, which concerns the Captivity; 19—23, return to Judea and settlement at Nazareth linked to the prophecy "he shall be called a Nazorean," of which it is very difficult to find the origin, unless we may suppose the evangelist to be applying to the Christ, by a play of words, the saying about Samson in Judges xiii, 5, "he shall be a nazir"; iv, 12—16, Jesus at Capernaum, presented as fulfilment of Isaiah viii, 23-ix, i, which refers to the Assyrian deportations.

[17] The legend preserved in Luke, while contradicting that in Matthew, is better arranged, but not more consistent.

[18] In Matthew (i, 1-17) Jesus descends from David through Solomon; in Luke (iii, 23-38), through Nathan. But both come to a common termination in Joseph, who was held to be the father of Jesus by the Jewish-Christian circles in which the genealogies were invented.

[19] Ancient tradition was not unanimous on this point, as we may see from the anecdotes in Mark xii, 35-37 (and parallels) and from the so-called Epistle of Barnabas.

[30] Cf. Holscher, 230, n. 10; 239, n. 5. Ed. Meyer ii, 423, n. 2, maintains the connexion of the name with Nazareth. On the other hand, the existence of Nazareth at the time of Jesus has been denied, but wrongly. Nazareth was then in existence and only because it existed could it be used for a forced explanation of the title Nazorean when the effort was made to efface the original connexion of Jesus and his sect with the baptist sect of which they were really the issue. There is no etymological relation between Nazareth and the Nazareans or Nazoreans, whose Semitic names are written with a tsade, and the nazirs, which is written with a zain. The nazirs are "men under vow" (devoted). Nazorean probably means "observer."

[21] Matthew xi, 2-17 (Luke vii, 18-20, 22-25). On any interpretation the mise en scene and the statements attributed to the Christ reflect a polemic, courteous enough, between the sectaries of Jesus and the sectaries of John after the death of their respective leaders.

[22] It was in this character that the story (Mark i, 9-11 and parallels) occupied the first place in Gospel catechizing. The story was not conceived to show that Jesus had belonged to John's sect, but to disguise it. The intention was to show forth the messianic initiation of Jesus.

[23] The dove in the story is a mythological element somewhat time-worn. Nevertheless it is not without significance that the bird of Astarte becomes the emblem of the Spirit who, in the Gospel of the Hebrews, is expressly said to be the mother of the Christ.

[24] This word (dunameiV) is found in the saying attributed to Herod Antipas about the miracles attributed to Jesus.

[25] For an analysis of the miracle stories in the synoptic tradition see Bultmann, 129-150.

[26] They are so represented in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Epistles, especially in those to the Corinthians. Observe also what is said in Mark xvi, 17-18.

[27] The journey chiefly in question is that mentioned in Mark vii, 24, 31, the itinerary of which is extremely vague. Critics since Wellhausen who suppose it to have an historical basis, by connecting Luke xiii, 31-32 with Mark 14-16, have drawn the conclusion that Jesus quitted Galilee because of the Tetrarch's threatening attitude. But, in Mark, the journey to Tyre is contrived to bring in the story of the Canaanite woman, and the return through Decapolis to provide a frame for the miracles of the deaf-mute and the second multiplication of loaves, all of them stories whose symbolic meaning will hardly be contested. On the other hand, the anecdote in Luke, which floats in air without attachment, is equally without historical consistency. It may well be that the hostility of the Tetrarch had a part in determining Jesus to make for Jerusalem; but there is nothing to prove that this motive induced Jesus to take so long a journey beyond the confines of Galilee.

[28] Matthew iv, 25; Luke vi, 17. The mise en scene which in Mark iii, 7-12 is the frame for a mass of miracles is no less artificial than the arrangement of the discourse which follows them.

[29] For analysis of the teaching attributed to Jesus in the synoptics see especially Bultmann, 4-129.

[20] In the Encyclopedia Biblica, ii, art. "Gospels." Goguel, La Vie du Jesus, is more recent.

[21] Mark xv, 34; Matthew xxvii, 46. The saying is taken from Psalm xxii, 2. For this cry of despair Luke substitutes words of confidence borrowed from Psalm xxxi, 5, "into thy hand I commit my spirit." John substitutes "it is finished" (xix, 30).

[32] Mark ii, 27. The sentence is not reproduced in the parallels perhaps because its character is rather philosophic than religious.

[33] The mention of "the brothers of the Lord" in i Corinthians ix, 5 and in Galatians i, 19 (James) confirms the indication in Mark vi, 3 (Matthew xiii, 55, 56) concerning the brothers, enumerated by name, and the sisters of Jesus, although the scene of the preaching at Nazareth may be constructed

to make way for the aphorism "no prophet has honour in his own country." Cf. Bultmann, 15, 29. Taken by itself the mention of the mother and brothers of Jesus in Acts i, 14 would be open to suspicion.

[34] Mark i, 15; Matthew iv, 17. This feature is omitted in the parallel passage, Luke iv, 14-15; not, perhaps, without intention.

[35] Granting that the reign of the Spirit began in the Christian community after the resurrection of Jesus, Christian baptism properly so-called cannot have been conferred before (cf. John xx, 22-23; Acts ii, 1-4, 37-38). But that idea is forced. In John iii, 22-26 it is stated that Jesus baptized; then, iv, 2, that he did not baptize, but that his disciples took his place in that office; finally, vii, 39, that "as yet there was no Spirit." These statements are contradictory, the result of theological embarrassment, the last two apparently glosses. Weak as is the historical authority of the fourth Gospel, it is clear that the chief author of it found nothing inconvenient in the idea that preaching and baptism went together both with Jesus and with John.

[36] Vie de Jesus, 312-319. Renan forces the point both in the historicity he attributes to the texts and in the highly poetic commentary he passes on them. But the fundamental idea may be retained. Observe that, in regard to baptism, takes John iii, 22—23 and iv, 1 as literal history, while seeing in iv, 2 a gloss or a scruple of the editor.

[37] It should never be forgotten that an ordinary meal, especially certain meals of primitive and ancient peoples, had a religious character. It was so among the Jews and in particular among the Essenes.

[38] Daniel vii, 13; Parables of Enoch. In the Pauline gnosis the Heavenly Man, by contrast to the first Adam, is identical with the Son of Man of the Gospel tradition. But this transcendental idea of the Messiah is not of Jewish origin. The anointed of Jahveh was at first and remained, in essentials, a man.

[39] Granting the pagan origin of the notion and the influence of Chaldeo-Iranian tradition on Jewish eschatology and apocalyptic, there is not much room for hypothesis. The thesis of a Chaldeo-Iranian origin has been developed by Reitzenstein. Holscher (192, n. 2) adopts it in the main; but the history of the myth and of its evolution is still obscure. There seems no reason to think that the myth had any influence on the preaching of Jesus, but it is far otherwise with the apostolic tradition.

[40] Reitzenstein, Das iranische Erosungs mysterium, 130, maintains that Jesus accepted and used "the Man" in an eschatological sense and with a feeling of his own for union with God which can hardly have been borrowed. Obscure theology, to which Holscher, sup. cit., does not adhere. This transcendent and mythical notion of "the Man" is much more easily attributed to Jesus conceived as risen from the dead than to Jesus himself in his lifetime. The latter hypothesis would make the primitive Gospel of Jesus much more gnostic than it really was.

[41] Josephus, Antiquities, xx, 5, 1; 8, 6; War, ii, 13, 5.

[42] Implied by the editor of Acts, v, 35-39, in the words he puts into the mouth of Gamaliel.

[43] Mark xi, 11 and xiii, 1-2 has sometimes been cited to prove that Jesus and his disciples had never previously seen Jerusalem. This is transforming the little arts of the Gospel editors into facts of history.

[44] Each of the two hypotheses has supporters. They are not incompatible and each can be supported by texts. But the texts are not as consistent as they would need to be to furnish support. That the preaching of Jesus had staggering success is not probable, nor that it lasted long before alarming the Tetrarch.

[45] The previsions attributed to him are conceived systematically in respect to the facts foreseen, as well as to the prophecies regarded as fulfilled by his passion. Thus the agony in Gethsemane, which the fourth Gospel is at pains to suppress, localizes a scene, deduced from Psalm xxii, but originally without specification of time and place, as we find it in Hebrews v, 7-10, where it is taken directly from the Psalm and is not, as many suppose, an echo of the Gospel story.

[46] Zechariah ix, 9; Genesis xlix, 11; Psalm cxviii, 25—26. If we admit the historicity of this triumphal entry into the city it would necessarily follow that Jesus deliberately set himself to fulfil the prophecy of Zechariah ix, 9. Did he, then, intend to inaugurate the Great Event on the Mount of Olives? In that case he falls into line with "the Egyptian" who according to Josephus had the same intention. But the kind of evidence on which the tradition reposes (fulfilment of supposed prophecies) gives not the slightest support to the historicity of the facts narrated.

[47] The expulsion of the traders fulfils Zechariah xiv, 20; Malachi iii, i. If Jesus and his followers had violently taken possession of the temple court, the incident would not have terminated in an academic debate as to the authority under which Jesus claimed to act; the Roman garrison would have arrested him on the spot. Compare the case of Paul in Acts xxi, 27-34.

[48] The incidents recorded of the Jerusalem ministry—academic discussion on the authority of Jesus and of John, on tribute to Caesar, on the resurrection, on the David's sonship of the Messiah, and the rating of the Pharisees—were conceived independently of each other, and then linked together by artificial transitions for the purpose of filling the Jerusalem ministry with sufficient contents.

[49] The opinion recently defended by R. Eisler (Jesus Basileus, 1930) with great erudition but feeble proofs. The additions to Josephus' Jewish War in the Sclavonic version, on which Eisler chiefly relies, are probably interpolations and, even if authentic, do not contain all he would draw out of them.

[50] The legend of Judas is out of harmony with the legend of the Twelve to which the attempt has been made to weld it. In reality Jesus did not choose the Twelve. They were the committee to which the first community of believers entrusted the management of their affairs after the death of Jesus. Their appointment has been antedated to the time of his ministry. On the other hand, the treachery of Judas has no sense unless we suppose him to have been one of the chief disciples. In the apostolic list Judas, the

traitor, occupying the last place, is a pendant to Peter, the renegade, occupying the first place. The legend of his death in Matthew xxvii, 3-10 and Acts i, 16—20 is wholly fictitious, and the legend of his treason, founded on some texts of the Old Testament, may have no more reality than the story of Peter's denial. Cf. Bultmann, 159, 167, 171.

[51] Mark xiv, 27 (Matthew xxvi, 31), where the flight of the disciples is represented as announced in Zechariah xiii, 7. John xvi, 32 is in line with Mark, but without the reference to prophecy. In Luke there is no flight of the disciples from Jerusalem; they remain there and Jesus accordingly is made only to predict the failure of their faith (xxii, 32).

[52] The dramatization of the incident goes crescendo in Mark, Matthew, John.

[53] Mark xiv, 17-21; Matthew xxvi, 21-25; Luke xxii, 31-34; John xiii, 36—38. Bultmann, 162, thinks that the sources of Luke xxii, 31-32 knew nothing of the denial (epistrezaV being an editorial insertion; but it may be understood in the active = "bringing back"). The fact is that the whole story of the denial has the look of a later addition.

[54] Mark xiv, 22-24; Matthew xxvi, 26-28; Luke xxii, 19-20. In Luke the end of verse 19, after to uper umwn didomenon, and verse 20 seem to be late additions, coming from 1 Corinthians xi, 24-25 (completed by Mark xiv, 24). The reviser of Luke and Acts knew the Eucharist as a breaking of bread and it seems that in the revision of Luke he had in mind at first its eschatological meaning (the banquets of the elect in the coming Kingdom), the author of the sources being ignorant of the mystic meaning contained in 1 Corinthians. His ignorance is not surprising if the mystic meaning did not originate with Paul.

[55] The elements of this older version are embedded in Mark xiv, 23, 25. The words, "Take, this is my body," seem to have been inserted in place of the original, "Verily I say unto you I will eat no more bread," etc., a formula parallel to, "I will drink no more wine," etc., in verse 25 and in Luke xxii, 15-18. In the latter mention of the Passover has been substituted for "bread," so as to make the Last Supper into a pascal feast.

[56] The scene in Gethsemane has been compressed and transported in a very curious way in John xii, 27-33, when the agony appears to dissolve into an echo of the transfiguration.

[57] Dramatization is obvious in the story as given in each of the Synoptics. The object is to present the Christ as master of his destiny. See Revue d'histoire et de litterature religieuses, 1922, p. 445.

[58] This trial, in Mark and Matthew, is composed of three elements easily distinguishable: (1) the saying about the temple which Jesus boasts he could destroy and rebuild in three days, and the testimony in relation to it—a saying which embarrassed the tradition, and which, if Jesus really pronounced it, would have been brought up in evidence before Pilate as proof of messianic pretentions; the authentic version of the saying would be in Matthew xxvi, 61, in preference to Mark xiv, 58 and John ii, 19, which expressly give it an allegorical meaning; (2) the messianic declaration made

bv Jesus as Son of God, a correction in advance of the condemnation of Jesus as King of the Jews and intended to account for this condemnation by the blindness of the Jewish authorities in presence of the mystic Christ, the divine Saviour; (3) finally, the scene of the outrages inflicted on the Christ (Mark xiv, 65; Matthew xxvi, 67-68), which is a fulfilment of prophecies, especially of Isaiah i, 5 and liii, 3. The last two elements are fictitious; as to the first, there is fiction at least in the setting.

[59] The morning session of the Sanhedrim (Mark and Matthew), in which Luke (xx, 66 and xxiii), who omits the night session, has lodged the trial, is a duplicate of the condemnation. In the source document this was probably the meeting at which the accusers draw up the charge to be brought before Pilate. Matthew tacks on to it the legend of the repentant Judas. In all four Gospels the story of the trial by Pilate is cut in two by the incident of Barabbas, invented less for the purpose of dramatization than to transfer, from Pilate to the Jews, the responsibility for the condemnation, which is now fixed on the Jews by the most artificial of devices. In this way Pilate is made the judge in a comic opera in which the trial loses its legal form. The intervention of Pilate's wife, in Matthew, is another attempt to white-wash the procurator. Pilate is represented as unable, in law, to refuse ratification of a sentence pronounced by the Sanhedrim according to rule. Thus arranged, the editor's version of the story defies both logic and probability.

[60] Annas (Hanan) had been deposed since the year 15.

[61] Jesus being regarded as a political agitator, his case would be dealt with by the Roman authority and not left to be tried by the Sanhedrim.

[62] It seems certain, however, that the Sanhedrim had then the right to carry out a sentence of death pronounced in a case which came within its sphere of jurisdiction.

[63] Every conceivable subtlety has been employed to reconcile the time-table of the Synoptics with that of John. They cannot be reconciled. If "traditional" be taken as meaning "historical" neither of the conflicting dates is more traditional than ths other. But the synoptic date is secondary to the Johannine, the chain of stories which make up the ritual drama of the passion having been originally invented to fit what may be called the Johannine hypothesis of the Christ as the pascal lamb. While it is probable that Jesus came to Jerusalem for the Passover and was crucified on one of the days of the week before the feast, it is not impossible that he came at another time of the year, and that the coincidence of the passion with the Passover was founded solely on mystical reasons, the meaning of the feast being promptly Christianized by the hellenist Christians.

[64] It would be that of the first generation if it be true that the idea of the Christ as Son of Man and Son of God was accepted at once by the earliest community. So thinks Bousset (Kyrios Christos, 20) supporting his view, in the first place, on 1 Corinthians xv, taken as testimony of Paul. There is no reason, however, for holding that belief in Jesus, as transfigured into the Christ by his resurrection, was at once expanded into the idea of the Man-Christ pre-existent to his appearance on earth.

[65] The cohort which accompanies Judas is a happy thought for enhancing the scene of the arrest. Had Jesus been arrested by a cohort of Roman soldiers the affair would have taken a very different turn.

[66] This story betrays a respect for Roman authority which can hardly have existed in the ranks of Christian believers before Hellenist Christianity had become widely spread.

[67] According to the dates commonly accepted for the canonical Gospels, the Gospel of Peter would have to be in dependence upon Luke. The relation of the two Gospels is probably more complex. The Herod incident in Luke has not the air of an improvised fiction, but seems rather to be the compressed version of a story parallel to that of the trial before Pilate, which had a place in the original framework of the Gospel.

[68] These facts form the background, but less as memories than as themes to exploit, explain and interpret in the ritual, that is, in the mystical poem of the passion.

[69] Jerome, Ep. lviii (Latin Patrology, xxii, col. 581): "Ab Hadriani temporibus usque ad imperium Constantini... in loco Resurrectionis simulacrum Jovis; in crucis rupe, statua ex marmore Veneris a gentibus posita colebatur. . . . Bethleem nunc nostram, et augustissimum orbis locum . . . lucus obumbrabat Thamuz, id est Adonidis, et in specu, ubi quondam Christus parvulus vagiit, Veneris amasius plangebatur." Places consecrated to pagan cults in Jerusalem may well have been requisitioned for consecration to the risen Christ just as the grotto at Bethlehem, consecrated to Adonis, was requisitioned for his birth.

[70] John xix, 17 says that Jesus carried his cross; this to indicate the Christ's independence of mortal aid and his willing acceptance of death.

[71] The aromatic wine is in Mark xv, 23; it may well have been the first form under which the fulfilment of Psalm lxix, 22 was indicated. It is from this Psalm that Matthew takes the gall, which he substitutes for the myrrh of Mark. The offering of vinegar, doubling in Mark and Matthew that of the wine mixed with spices, comes in all four Gospels as the last incident before the death of the Christ. The adventitious character of the incident is most perceptible in Mark (xv, 37), where we read that Jesus, having emitted a loud cry, breathed his last. This cry, which is inarticulate, was that mentioned in the original document; the previous citation of Psalm xxii, with all that follows from it, is a second version of the original, added by the evangelist.

[72] Variations in the synoptics on the theme furnished by Psalm xxii, 7-9. Luke makes one of the robbers insult Jesus and converts the other, the incident of the good robber being substituted for all in Mark and Matthew that relates to the quotation from Psalm xxii, 2.

[73] Fulfilment of Psalm xxii, 19, wliich John xix, 23-24 cites expressly, taking pains to distinguish, in spite of the text he is quoting, between the friendly division of the garments and the casting of lots for the robe. See my Le quatrieme Evangile, 486.

[74] We have seen above the meaning, in Mark and Matthew, of the

citation of Psalm xxii, 2 and the substitution for it by Luke and John. The latter (xix, 25-27) places the mystic testament of the Christ—the sayings or Jesus to his mother and to the beloved disciple—before the last words.

[75] John suppresses this, the death of his Christ being triumphal. The prodigy seems to have been added to Mark xv, 33. Probably intended as the fulfilment of Amos viii, 9-10.

[76] Also wanting in John. In the Synoptics the incident means what we read in Hebrews vi, 19-20 and x, 19-20. By the rending of the veil of his flesh the Christ enters the heavenly sanctuary, there to offer his blood, and thus open eternal life to the believer.

[77] John xix, 31-37. Fulfilment of Exodus xii, 44 (Psalm xxxiv, 21) and of Zechariah xii, 10. The incident of the lance thrust may have been suggested by the last text. For the symbolic explanation connect with 1 John v, 6-7. This mystical imagery is good compensation for the centurion's profession of faith in the synoptic story and the rending of the veil. The substitution of the one symbol for the other may well have been deliberate.

[1] The name "field of blood" is appropriate to a place of burial, but not to a cemetery "for strangers" (Matthew xxvii, 7). The idea indicated by the name is that of a burial place reserved for those who came to a bloody end in a violent or infamous death, such as suicides and executed criminals. Nothing could be more obviously artificial than the connexion of this place with "the price of blood"—the thirty pieces of silver which Judas is said to have received from the priests for betraying Jesus. The fiction contained in Matthew xxvii, 3-10, laying violent hands on certain Biblical texts (Zechariah xi, 12-13, amalgamated with Jeremiah xxxii, 6-9), has imagined a connexion between the money and the name of the place; while another fiction (Acts i, 16-20), based on other texts (Psalms lxix. 26; cix, 8), contradicts the first and connects the name with the blood of Judas, which it spills on the field bought by him with the high priests' money and where he is said, literally, to have burst. The two versions of the myth denounce each other as inventions and cancel out. "The field of blood" existed before the time of Jesus. We may conjecture that the original tradition retained some memory of a connexion between Aceldama and the crucified Jesus and that later on, when the Christ had been furnished with a befitting tomb, from which his body had miraculously disappeared to prove him risen from the dead, this connexion with Aceldama was shifted from Jesus to Judas.

[2] Cf. Acts xiii, 29, and see Le quatrieme Evangile, 496-498.

[3] Matthew xxvi, 60, attributing the tomb to Joseph. Luke xxiii, 53 has "a tomb in which no man had yet been buried," followed by John who for symbolism, places the tomb in a garden.

[4] Mark xv, 46; xvi, 4 insisting on the great size of the stone; Matthew xxvii, 60 does the same; Luke xxiv 2 merely mentions the presence of the stone.

[5] The correspondence of this timing, in distribution, with the ritual of Adonis cannot be fortuitous.

[6] John xx, 17. In the interpolated passage, 2-10, Mary of Magdala, before she yet knows that Jesus is risen, gives the information to Peter and the beloved disciple.

[7] It was invented in order to conceal the real condition of the burial behind a fulfilment of prophecies.

[8] These gnostic revelations are founded on instructions given by the risen Christ. So, too, are the Pauline gnosis and the Apocalypse of Peter.

[9] Examples may be found in the discourses which the editor of Acts puts into the mouths of Peter and of Paul when addressing Jewish audiences. These discourses represent the apology for Christianity as presented to the Jews in the earliest Christian times.

[10] John xx. The apparitions described in this chapter form the climax and bring the story to a definite end. On them the Church was founded. Chapter xxi is an addition. The Galilean apparition first described in it can by no possibility be fitted into the framework of xx. It is a parallel story, with a more limited purpose, which the author of xx, if he knew of it, decided to leave out.

[11] J. Weiss, Das Urchristentum, 11; R. Schutz, Apostel und Junger, 1921, pp. 98 ff. Cf. E. Meyer, iii, 216, n. 1. But Meyer is over-hasty in deciding that a vision of Peter and study of Scripture immediately established the faith of the apostolic group; that a vision of the Twelve determined their return to Jerusalem and that Psalm cx caused them to give Jesus the title of "Lord." The requisitioning of texts did not originate this faith but followed its onward movement.

[12] The word ekklesia is found again in Matthew xviii, 17, which is in the same current of tradition; but there ekklesia simply means "community."

[13] Mention omitted in Matthew xxvii, 7.

[14] John xxi, 15-17. The triple protestation of love, with a triple investiture in answer, seems designed to correspond with the triple denial, by way of reparation.

[15] So much may be retained as historical from Acts ii, 42-46; vi, 2—3.

[16] Acts iii-iv, 22. For criticism of this story see my Les Actes des Apotres, 222-251. The name of John at the side of Peter is a later addition; this out of respect for the Ephesian legend and its saint. We shall see later that the same preoccupation has caused John's name to be omitted after that of James (xii, 2). In the story before us, the discourse of Peter, his arrest and appearance before the Sanhedrim appear to have been invented by the editor to fill out the picture.

[17] This concludes the original story.

[18] In place of these cramped conditions, which the charity of believers

could, or would, correct when they ran to extremes, the editor of Acts gives us glimpses of a fairly comfortable state of things in which pious sages live in common on a fund continually renewed, under God's blessing, bv the accession of new members who bring into it all they have. Preuschen, Die Apostelgeschichte, 28, compares it with what we are told of Pythagoras and his disciples. But the editor is more likely to have been inspired directly by what Josephus says about the Essenes.

[19] Documentation in Harnack, Mission und Ausbreitimg des Christentums, 13, 307 ff.

[20] Mark iv, 7-13, 30; cf. Matthew x. Luke ix, 1-6, 10 has the resume of Mark's missionary discourse addressed to "the twelve apostles," and in x, 1-24 he gives the same discourse in extenso and makes it addressed to "seventy-two other disciples," as he found it in the source used also by Matthew. These seventy-two disciples are figures of the missionaries of the Gentiles, and the doubling is in keeping with the fiction which reserves the status of apostles to the Twelve.

[21] Acts vi, 13. The elements of the text are contradictory: we are told of a legal trial before the Sanhedrim while the execution is an affair of mob violence. Many think there was no trial and that Stephen perished in a riot, stoned to death by the audience whom some discourse of his had scandalized. There is no proof whatever that the trial is a faint copy of the trial of Jesus by the high priest in the Gospels. The editor seems to have been unwilling to let Stephen be condemned on the charges brought against him before the Sanhedrim, offences against the Law of Moses. His thesis was better suited by having him massacred for reproaching the Jews for their agelong infidelity.

[22] If Jesus ever uttered this saying, he did not understand it in the sense in which Stephen seems to have interpreted it.

[23] Acts vii, 58, 60. All this is an interpolation in the account of the stoning.

[1] Cf. Heitmuller, Zum Problem Paulus und Jesus, Z.N.W., 1912, 320- 327; Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 92.

[2] The notice in Acts xi, 26 does not mean that the name "Christians" was bestowed on the Antioch disciples all at once, but that the pagans were not slow in so naming them. No doubt the pagans, constantly hearing the name "Christ" invoked by the new believers, took it for a proper name and thought they were calling the sect after its founder. The same would hold true of Tacitus, "Auctor hujus nominis Christus" {Annals, xv, 44).

[3] The story about Simon in Acts viii, 5-25 is interpolated and incoherent. In certain respects Simon is the chief actor in it. But it seems that an earlier story put him in relation only with Philip from whom he wished to buy the power to work miraculous cures, which the editor of Acts turned into

a proposal to buy the Holy Spirit from Peter. In the first version Simon was denounced as a sorcerer, while in the story before us he and his sect are belittled in comparison with Christianity. The legend of Peter's relations with Simon was largely developed in later tradition and it is probable that the editor got hold of it while in process of development. It is doubtful not only whether Simon ever received Christian baptism, as the story declares, but whether he had any direct relations either with Philip or with Peter. His reputation as the father of heretical gnosis rests upon the fact that he was contemporary with the apostolic age and that his sect came into competition with nascent Christianity.

[4] Acts ix, 32—35; cure of a paralytic at Lydda (on the model of the paralytic in Luke v, 18-24); raising Dorcas from the dead at Joppa (ix, 36-43, on the model of Jairus' daughter, Luke v, 21-24, 35-43, and the resurrection performed by Elijah and Elisha). These miracles are localized at Lydda and Joppa so as to bring Peter to Caesarea, the Roman political headquarters, as the right place for the conversion of a Roman centurion.

[5] See Les Mysteres paiens et le Mystere Chretien, 144-146, 153-155.

[6] There seems to be no doubt as to the fact of the relationship, although we are ignorant of the circumstances in which the relations of Jesus joined the group of Galilean believers. The James who is the chief figure in the first community when Paul comes to Jerusalem for the last time (Acts xxi, 18) is the brother of Jesus and he is the identical James who, in Galatians ii, 9, is counted as a "pillar" along with Peter and John. On his first journey Paul interviewed him and Cephas at the same time; but we have seen above that Galatians i, 18-20 is probably not primitive in the Epistle. The two sons of Zebedee (John and the other James) seem to have had a rather important standing by the side of Peter; but the probability is that both of them perished in 44, while Peter had to flee from the city. James, brother of the Lord, would then become the chief person in the Jerusalem community.

[7] The legend was conceived in the same spirit as the great saying which appointed Peter the keeper of the keys of the kingdom (Matthew xvi, 17—19) and, like it, must have had a Syro-Palestinian origin. But the origin cannot have been narrowly Jewish-Christian. It is in point to remember that Paul, who was never chief figure at Antioch during his life, was bound to fall still further into the background there after his death. Even in the communities of Syria and Palestine that leaned towards hellenism, legend would there tend to work in Peter's favour.

[8] The tale fits in with the fiction of ix, 22-26a, where Paul is made to preach at Damascus, then has him introduced to the apostles by Barnabas, and brings him back to Tarsus, whither Barnabas goes to seek him in order to bring him to Antioch. The whole story, including the commission given to Barnabas by the Jerusalem community to go to Antioch and see what has happened there is aimed at making the Twelve the prime authors of all propaganda. It is certain that Barnabas did not remain in Jerusalem after the death of Stephen.

[9] The mention of Barnabas as "Joseph called Barnabas, a Levite of Cyprus," in iv, 36-37, really belongs to xiii, 1 and is an anticipation. The former passage as a whole (36-37) is of a piece with the fictions indicated in the notes above and is highly suspect. If Barnabas was a Cypriot, it is not likely that he would have land to sell in Judea. See Les Actes des Apotres, 262-265.

[10] These statements express an ardent conviction which goes beyond the reality of the facts it brings to light. The disproportion between statement and fact may be explained either by Paul's visionary temperament or by the intervention of an editor who, at a later date, introduced into the Epistle a highly systematic interpretation of the facts in question.

[11] Acts xi, 26 seems to reduce the common mission of Paul and Barnabas at Antioch to one full year before their journey to Jerusalem (xi, 30) and the mission in Cyprus and Lycaonia which they are said to have accomplished together. As to the journey, it took place at the date indicated (end of 43 or beginning of 44), but the motive of it was the question of the legal observances. As to the mission, it was probably not carried out in the conditions indicated but replaces the mission to Syria and Cilicia, mentioned in Galatians i, 21-24, which must have filled the greater part of the fourteen years (according to Galatians ii, i) between Paul's conversion and his journey to Jerusalem to discuss the question of legal observances. See Les Actes des Apotres, 474-476, 506.

[12] Acts ix, 1-30. The story suppresses the mission-journey in Arabia (the Nabatean kingdom) mentioned in Galatians i, 17, and, in the face of all likelihood makes Paul begin preaching immediately in Damascus and in Jerusalem in contradiction to Galatians i, 17 and 22.

[13] Compare 2 Corinthians xii, 14, where mention is made of a culminating vision, which is not described but may well have been, in the mind of the author, the vision which led to Paul's conversion.

[14] Acts ix, 10-16: here the mission is outlined in a vision that comes to Ananias and in keeping with all that Acts will tell about Paul; Acts xxii, 1: here the mission is to the Gentiles, plainly announced in a vision Paul is said to have had in the temple at Jerusalem, after his conversion; Acts xxvi, 16-18: here the mission is laid down by Jesus himself in the original vision.

[15] The fiction is not the journey into Arabia; that journey explains the intervention of the Nabatean ethnarch at Damascus (related in 2 Corinthians xi, 32-33) which determined Paul to flee the city and for which Acts ix, 23-25 substitutes a Jewish plot to kill him. See Les Actes des Apotres, 414-421.

[16] Cf. Acts ix, 26-30 and Galatians i, 18-20. It has been pointed out above that the editor of Acts in ix, 26-30 and xi, 22-26 manoeuvres Barnabas and Paul with a view to making it appear that the foundation of the Christian groups at Antioch and elsewhere in Syria and Cilicia depend in the closest possible way on the apostles in Jerusalem, to whom in reality those foundations owed nothing at all. It will be noted that if Galatians i, 18-20 is a fiction (as it seems to be) pointing in the same direction as Acts

ix, 26-30, then the interpolator of it can have only half understood what the fiction in Acts was aimed at, for he is concerned only to subordinate Paul to Peter.

[17] On this letter, of the year 41, see Seston, L'empereur Claude et les chretiens in Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 1931, No. 3. The letter clearly attests the attention the Roman government is paying to Jewish affairs, the fear it has of Jewish agitations which starting at one point might have repercussions through all the empire, and its intention to suppress these disturbances. But it remains possible, even probable, that Christian preaching had something to do in the movement which Claudius intends to suppress.

[18] Acts vi, 9, where mention is made of Cyrenean and Alexandrian Jews among Stephen's audience.

[19] The story of Mark's apostolate at Alexandria belongs to legend, and the list of the first bishops of Alexandria, like that of the Roman bishops, was made up after the event.

[20] "What Suetonius says (Claud., 25) may easily be understood in that sense, "Judaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantes Roma expulit," if we suppose that Chrestus stands for Christus and that Suetonius mistook the object of the agitation for the author of it. With the same event is connected what Dio Cassius tells (lx, 6, 6) of the measures taken by Claudius against the Jews in the beginning of his reign, and many connect with it the notice about Aquila in Acts xviii, 2; at the same time they adopt the year 49, indicated by Orosius (viii, 6, 15), as the date of the edict. All that is not equally consistent; we do not know on what Orosius' date is founded; the notice in Acts, an interpolation, may be a guess of the editor. That Claudius tried to expel all the Jews is improbable and action would be taken only against disturbers of the peace. If Christians were aimed at, the date must be much earlier than the Epistle to the Romans.

[21] It would be fourteen whole years if the figure of Galatians ii, i has to be added to the three years of i, 18. But, disregarding the suspicion which falls on i, 18-20, the figure in ii, i seems to indicate the time elapsed since the apostle's conversion, so that we ought to subtract from fourteen, if not the three years, i, 18, at least the time occupied by the journey into Arabia and the stay at Damascus.

[22] Text completed as indicated in note 9 above.

[23] For example, the story about the preaching at Iconium (xiv, 1-2), to which was probably attached what is said about the stoning of Paul (19-20) which the editor has transferred to Lystra.

[24] A tale invented to furnish a reason for the journey of Barnabas and Paul, the true object of which is given further on in xv, 1-5. Paul and Barnabas were together in Jerusalem only once and it was at the date indicated by xi, 27-30, a little before the death of Agrippa I. The prophet Agabus who figures here turns up in xxi, 10-11, an interpolated passage. Our editor was not willing that Jerusalem should have no prophets when there were so many at Antioch. For the same reason he represents Jude and

Silas as prophets in xv, 32. The famine of xi, 28 is taken from Josephus, Antiquities, xx, 5, 2. See Les Acts des Apotres, 472, 605, 785-788.

[25] We have seen above how, in the editing of Acts, a common mission of Barnabas and Paul to Cyprus and Lycaonia has been substituted for their common mission to Syria-Cilicia, the former mission being placed by the editor between two journeys of Barnabas and Paul to Jerusalem (Acts xi, 30 and xv, 1-4). Of the two journeys only one took place and at the date indicated for the first; thus the substituted mission hangs in air. Other instances of one event made into two for editorial convenience will be found in the book. One might almost say that it raises this kind of amplification to the dignity of a principle. With regard to the present case see Les Actes des Apotres, 474-476, 498-499; 571. Galatians (ii, 1-10) knows of only one journey of Barnabas and Paul to Jerusalem, at the date Acts assigns to the first journey, and with the object of the second.

[26] Acts xv, 1-2. This preamble comes from the source document and agrees in substance with Galatians ii, 1-11, if the two texts are correctly understood. See Les Actes des Apotres, 565-566.

[27] The statement accords with the strange egotism with which, in this passage, Paul, or his interpreter, estimates his providential vocation.

[28] This James, brother of Jesus, is certainly intended in Galatians ii, 12; cf. i, 19. At the time of the Jerusalem meeting the other James, brother of John, was still alive and is not likely to have been a dumb member of the assembly. The preponderance of James the Lord's brother would not be established till after the disappearance of the three principal disciples of Jesus.

[29] Note that the theory of the double apostolate is not elsewhere formulated in the Epistle. Peter alone was the gainer by it.

[30] In Acts xv, 13-21 (discourse of James) and 28-29 (apostolic letter) some special observances, abstinence from blood and the flesh of strangled animals, regulation of marriage, are substituted for the collection mentioned in Galatians ii, 10. The substitution must have been deliberate, the editor having antedated the collection in the fiction of xi, 27-30, and belittled its importance.

[31] Cf. Holscher, 199, 227 n. 2.

[32] E. Meyer, iii, 420. But there is no ground to conclude with Meyer (after Acts xii, 25) that the delegates from Antioch were still in Jerusalem when James and John were executed.

[33] Acts xii, 1-2 mentions only the execution of James, but in hesitating language. Mark x, 39 leaves no doubt as to the martyrdom of both the sons of Zebedee and the text invites the conclusion that they perished under the same conditions. See Les Actes des Apotres, 482-484. The martyrdom of John is suppressed out of regard for the Ephesian legend of his residence and death in Asia Minor towards the end of the first century.

[34] According to Acts xii, 25, John-Mark left Jerusalem, after Peter's escape, in company with Barnabas and Saul; but this because the editor wants John-Mark for the companion of the two missionaries on the apostolic

journey narrated in xiii—xiv (which never took place), and also to make him the cause of the separation between Barnabas and Paul (which was caused quite otherwise). As John-Mark was really at Antioch at the time of the separation we may believe that he had fled thither with Peter.

[35] Silas, after carrying to Antioch the letter of the Jerusalem elders, left with Jude (xv, 33; 34 is an interpolation co-ordinated with 40); but he returned to Antioch since we find him there after the quarrel ready to accompany Paul into Asia Minor, as John-Mark accompanies Barnabas in Cyprus. Agrippa's persecution caused Silas also to flee to Antioch and he, too, will have come there with Peter.

[36] Galatians ii, 13-14. The rating administered to Peter by Paul leads to nothing definite, but continues in the general discussion of justification by faith alone without the law. This might be counted an argument against the point of view which dominates this passage. It is difficult to understand how this point of view can have been Paul's, and no less difficult to regard the story of the conflict as a pure fiction.

[37] The writer of the Epistle is unwilling to confess that Paul's reprimand had the effect of embroiling him with Barnabas and making his further stay in Antioch impossible.

[38] Galatians ii, 11-14 gives good ground for believing that Paul broke with Barnabas at the same time as with Peter and for the same reason or on the same pretext. The deeper motive was the growing self-importance of Paul; the pretext or occasion would be the accommodation which Barnabas and Peter wished to make with the Judaizers.

[39] Acts xii, 12. In view of the general character of the story, insistence on this detail is out of place.

[40] 1 Peter v, 13; testimony of John the Elder in Papias. On the gratuitously unfavourable testimony which Acts gives about John-Mark see Les Actes des Apotres, 519-522.

[1] The journey and the stay at Antioch mentioned in Acts xviii, 22 in all probability never took place. See Les Actes des Apotres, 706-710.

[2] As the first "we" in the edited version of Acts appears in the narrative of the stay at Troas (xvi, 10), commentators have been prompt to assume that Luke first joined Paul at this place; but some critics have supposed that he was the Macedonian of the dream who, according to our story, decided Paul to pass into Macedonia. But, if we are to determine the participation of Luke in the comings and goings of Paul and other events by the alternations of "we" with impersonal forms of speech, we must assume that the editor of Acts has made no cuttings in Luke's narrative, suppressed nothing and interpolated no fictitious incidents and discourses. Now it is certain that he has done all three. The text rather invites us to think that

he who says "we" in the Troas story had been with Paul all along. There is no risk in supposing that from their starting point at Antioch he followed Paul in his haphazard journeyings, the painful stages of which are described in terms strongly suggestive of an eye-witness. The tradition which makes Luke a Christian of Antioch may well proceed from explicit testimony of the primitive book before the editor got to work on it, and is confirmed by the fact that the original author seems well informed about Antioch affairs and to have understood the birth of Christianity from his Antioch point of view. Cf. Les Actes des Apotres, 627-631.

[3] Acts xvi, i is vaguely completed by xiv, 20-21.

[4] Cf. Colossians i, 1; iv, 10-11. 2 Timothy i, 5 knows both Timothy's mother and grandmother—information which the cautious critic finds rather too complete. In Acts xxi, 20-26 the nazirate of Paul is alleged as the reason for Timothy's circumcision. But Paul, when playing his part as a Jew, could practise any Jewish observance demanded by the occasion; it was not to please the Jews that he took the vows of a nazir, as we shall see later on. It is hardly credible that any pagan was ever circumcized by Paul merely to please the Jews.

[5] At Iconium, as well as at Antioch of Pisidia, we may to some extent supplement the vague indication of Acts xvi, 4-5 by xiv, 1-3, 19, 20, and xiii, 14, 43, 50-51—employed with discernment.

[6] Pressing hard on the text of Acts we might infer that the missionaries merely traversed the country without preaching in it. This is the interpretation of the text given, perhaps without warrant, by those who construe the Epistle as addressed to the communities of Lycaonia-Pisidia which belonged to the Roman province called Galatia, but were not Galatian country. The problem of the destination of the Epistle, on which critics are divided, would be non-existent if Paul, in the course of one and the same mission, founded the communities of Lycaonia and Pisidia, and then some others in Phrygia and Galatia proper, without going as far as Ancyra and Pessinonte, the Epistle to the Galatians being finally addressed to the whole of these communities.

[7] The Epistle presupposes this, and the little we know about the preaching at Iconium and Antioch of Pisidia does not contradict it.

[8] Acts xvi, 9-10. The "we" appears in this passage which must have been taken without alteration from the source document; 6-8 may be regarded as a highly compressed summary. There is no reason to suppose that Luke was the Macedonian, nor that he came from Philippi.

[9] Acts xvi, 22, 39-40. The edited version makes Paul's captivity last for one night marked by various prodigies, in sequence to which Paul, after getting the town magistrate to exculpate him as a Roman citizen, is said to have been set free. The earthquake and its consequences are conceived on this pattern of a theme common in religious legend (cf. Euripides, Bacchae, 436-441, 502-503, 606-628). There is a contradiction between the proud attitude of Paul, the humble demeanour of the magistrates, and the order to quit the place without delay. The claim to be a Roman citizen is

borrowed from Paul's trial at Jerusalem and repeated. Paul was liberated without much delay, but probably by the intervention of his friends and on their bail—a trait seemingly transposed to the story that follows (xvii, 9)—on condition of his immediate departure.

[10] A story cut down and changed like the one preceding. The beginning of it comes from the source document, but the riot which drives the missionaries out of the town takes place the moment after their arrival and too soon, as it did at Philippi, this time, however, provoked by Jews, as the former was by pagans. 1 Thessalonians making no reference to any occurrence of this kind, there is reason to suspect that our editor has balanced the pagan riot which put an end to Paul's ministry at Philippi by a similar charge against the Jews of Thessalonica.

[11] Acts xvii, 10-12. The notice about Berea seems to have a fictitious conclusion (13—14), which repeats what has been said about Thessalonica. The indications about Silas and Timothy (15) must have been changed by the editor; they are not in agreement with 1 Thessalonians iii, 1-2, nor even with Acts xviii, 5.

[12] To be inferred from 1 Thessalonians iii, 1-2.

[13] In like manner the discourse in the synagogue at Antioch of Pisidia (xiii, 16-40) is a specimen of the teaching given to a Jewish audience, and the discourse to the elders of Ephesus (xx, 10-35) a specimen of instructions to the heads of congregations.

[14] xvii, 28. The line, "for in him we live and move and have our being," is also borrowed from the poem of Epimenides, entitled Minos, in which we also find the saying about the Cretans in Titus i, 12. (Rendel Harris, St. Paul and Greek Literature, Woodbrooke Essays, 7, p. 7.)

[15] Though Paul did not think that Athens might be altogether neglected, we should misconstrue his mind and the mind of the first Christian generation by concluding with E. Meyer (iii, 328-9) that Athens was the chief aim of the mission, in respect of which the preachings in the Macedonian towns was no more than rapidly completed preparation, Paul's main purpose being to overthrow hellenic philosophy on the ground where it was most at home. The editor of Acts seems to have had some such notion; but to accept the famous discourse and its mise en scene as authentic would be placing too much confidence in his fictions.

[16] 1 Thessalonians iii, 1-2, 5-7 shows that Paul was afraid the group of Christians would not hold together after his departure; he avows his misgivings after being reassured by the good news which Silas and Timothy brought to him at Corinth.

[17] Acts xviii, i, 2, 3. His mission in Asia Minor seems to have been carried through in difficult material conditions. Later on Paul accepted help from Philippi. But on arriving at Corinth it would seem that he had to work for his living. It is possible also that his mishap at Athens induced him to test the ground before beginning his propaganda in the atmosphere of Corinth. In xviii, 2 the reference to the edict of Claudius is a later addition.

[18] Cf. Philippians iv, 15-16, which shows that the Philippians helped

Paul in his mission at Thessalonica. It is a doubtful point whether Lydia is expressly indicated, and as Paul's wife, in iv, 3, though it has been maintained by some from ancient time.

[19] The story of the Corinthian mission, like the others, is mutilated and incoherent. Besides the addition in xviii, 2 (indicated in note 17), 4 should be placed after 7 and 7 attached to the beginning of 5, reading: "But, when Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul took up his preaching." It is then that he leaves Aquila's house and begins to preach in the synagogue. What is said in verse 6 about his quarrel with the Jews is an addition repeating the stereotyped procedure that everywhere Paul addressed himself to the pagans only after being rejected by the Jews. Paul's difficulties began after the conversion of Crispus and the others (8); between 8 and 9 there is a gap; then mention should have been made of the difficulties which no doubt compelled Paul to leave the synagogue; the vision of 9 will then encourage him to go on with his preaching in spite of everything; but there is another gap, either before or after 11, for we expect an account of the results of his ministry and get only an indication of its length.

[20] To these eighteen months we must add the time spent by Paul in Aquila's house while he waited for his auxiliaries. No account need be taken of the "many days" of verse 18, which is only a bit of stitching to make a forced connexion between the mention of Paul's departure and the Gallio incident.

[21] See Les Actes des Apotres, 698-699.

[22] See Les Actes des Apotres, 508-518.

[23] Acts xviii, 18-23 is a badly constructed and largely fictitious story, indicating Syria (18) as the goal of the journey, because the editor—repeating the devices he employed on the journey of Barnabas and Paul to Jerusalem at the rime of the Antioch mission—cut the last approach of Paul to the mother-community into two; the vow mentioned in the same passage (18) belongs to the last journey and we shall meet it later on. The visit of Paul to the synagogue at Ephesus is wrongly timed; like the journey to Jerusalem and to Syria it is intended to disguise the true motive which determined Paul to visit the communities he had recently founded in Galatia and Phrygia. Of set purpose the editor ignores Paul's conflicts with the Judaizing Christians, just as he will know nothing of the difficulties Paul had just encountered at Corinth, in which Apollos had been involved. See Les Actes des Apotres, 703-710.

[24] Acts xviii, 24-28. An incoherent and touched-up story. The restriction (25), "knowing only the baptism of John," taken rigorously, contradicts the preceding statement, "he gave exact teaching about Jesus." The restriction goes with the kind of catechizing which Aquila and Priscilla are supposed to give Apollos (26). The end of the story (28), in which the preaching of Apollos is made to consist of a prolonged refutation of the Jews, throws a veil over the voluntary or involuntary part played by Apollos in the divisions at Corinth, just as what precedes is to minimize his part at Ephesus. See Les Actes des Apotres, 710-717.

[25] Acts xix, 1-7. The story hangs together better than that of Apollos, doubtless because the editor has put more of his own into the latter. See Les Actes des Apotres, 717—723.

[26] Acts viii, 14-17. Here fiction keeps to ground level and the story may serve to throw light on that of Apollos and of the twelve disciples. See Les Actes des Apotres, 368—370.

[27] Cf. 2 Corinthians iii, i, where some contempt is shown for such letters which were in common use and one would think necessary.

[28] Acts xix, 8-10 is a summary of the authentic story in the source document from which the editor has cut out, as he does elsewhere, the details of Paul's success and the difficulties he encountered. To make up for this he credits Paul with a parcel of miracles which form a worthy pendant to those operated by the shadow of Peter (v, 15-16), also an invention of his own. The misadventure of the Jewish exorcist has the look of being a borrowed story adapted to the history of Paul in order to bring in somehow the edifying example given by the believers of Ephesus in burning the sorcerers' books in sequence to the former incident (18-20), See Les Actes des Apotres, 752—753, 756.

[29] In 1 Corinthians xv, 32 there is an allusion to fighting with beasts at Ephesus, a passage whose meaning has been much discussed and the authenticity open to discussion; in xvi, 8-9 there is mention of effectual ministry in the city, but "many adversaries." The riot described in Acts xix, 23—41 fills the place of all the difficulties and setbacks Paul had to meet at Ephesus. The passage which mentions companions of Paul (29b—3i) and the allusion to companions in the speech of its local magistrate (37) having the look of surcharges, and the whole story having no real attachment to Paul's Ephesian ministry, the not improbable supposition has been made that the editor of Acts found some story of an anti-Jewish riot at Ephesus and converted it into a riot against Paul. (Hypothesis of Wellhausen, taken up in Les Actes des Apotres, 752-753, 756.)

[30] Acts xix, 21-22, taking account of the fact that the editor deliberately omits everything that relates to the collection for the saints at Jerusalem.

[31] The editor has neutralized the significance of the collection by saying nothing about it in the situations where it played a part and by representing it as a kind of symbolic act in the fictitious story where the prophet Agabus comes in (Acts xi, 27—30). See Les Actes des Apotres, 471—475.

[32] E. Meyer, iii, 451, would infer from 1 Corinthians i, 12; iii, 21, where Cephas is mentioned along with Paul, that Peter also came to Corinth at this time. But we may conclude with as much probability from iii, 4-9 and iv, 6 that Apollos only followed Paul to Corinth, Peter's name being merely invoked against Paul by some of his opponents. But it remains a possibility which we may regard as little probable.

[33] In this passage Paul, recalling his promise, seems anxious to keep it.

[34] Acts xix, 21-22. This connects with 1 Corinthians iv, 17; xvi, 1-11 where, before announcing the coming of Timothy, he says that the col-

lection in Macedonia and Corinth is to be carried out on the lines he had laid down for Galatia.

[35] Notwithstanding the somewhat cold reception Corinth had given him he had promised to return before long; later he concluded he must wait until tempers there had cooled down. Hence no doubt came the accusation of fickleness to which he replies in 2 Corinthians i, 15-20; ii, 4.

[36] There seems no reason to identify this person with the incestuous man of 1 Corinthians v, 1-5, though some critics do so.

[37] 2 Corinthians i, 8-11, to which ii, 6 corresponds, seems to reflect such a state of mind, rather than the fear of some external danger in which Paul might have lost his life; for example, the riot described in Acts xix, 23-40 (so E. Meyer, iii, 12), in which Paul ran no danger, supposing it ever took place.

[38] 2 Corinthians ii, 3-4; vii, 8-12. It is this sad and severe letter which many have thought reproduced, at least in part, in 2 Corinthians x—xiii, where, rather, some fragments of it are preserved.

[39] The role of Titus may be deduced from 2 Corinthians ii, 11—13; vii, 6-7; viii, 6, 16—17, 23, on which xii, 18 has editorial dependence. We do not know how Titus arrived in Asia at Paul's side in the nick of time to save the situation, nor how, his mission done, he disappeared from Paul's company.

[40] According to 2 Corinthians xiii, 1 this was the third stay made by Paul in the city; the first, that of his mission, being much the longest; the second, certainly a short one, was that when he was checked and unable to restore order in the community; the third preceded his departure for Jerusalem and probably represents the three months which, according to Acts xx, 2-3, Paul spent "in Hellas," the editor being extremely cautious in dealing with the relations between Paul and Corinth at that time.

[41] This chronology is somewhat wavering. Retaining the coincidence with Gallio's proconsulates Paul's mission to Corinth would be completed in 51 or 52, the apostle arriving at Corinth in 49 or 50, and the missions tp Asia Minor and Macedonia filling the years 44-49. The mission to Ephesus cannot have been begun before 52 or 53 and ended towards 55 or 56, and Paul would then not leave Corinth for good before the spring of 56 or 57. E. Meyer (iii, 447) puts this final departure in 59; but he does this in order that he may place the death of Paul, with that of Peter, in 64, during Nero's persecution.

[42] Cf. Romans xv, 26-27; xvi, 1.

[43] In Acts xx, 4 Gaius is said to be "of Derbe." But the original list may have been worked over and this Gaius may be the Corinthian (mentioned in Romans xvi, 23) charged to bring the collection from Achaia. See Les Actes des Apotres, 759-762.

[44] The vow is antedated in xviii, 18, where the text has been retouched by the editor (see Les Actes des Apotres, 704-705). This verse should be attached to xx, 16 and xxi, 23—26 as referring to the same vow. The matter in question is that of a temporary nazirate and a vow taken with special

reference to a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The head was not shaved again while the vow was in force, but only on discharge from it as one of the sacrifices prescribed by the Law. The vow is antedated in the story of the fictitious journey which the editor has duplicated from the account before us. For the ordinary conditions of such vows see Les Actes des Apotres, 796-798.

[45] Acts xx, 5—6. The account of the sea passage is clumsily attached to the list of Paul's companions, and the "we" of the source document suddenly reappears because the editor has here picked up the thread of the original. As we know from the Epistles that Luke was not with Paul at Athens nor in the missions that followed, we may conclude that he remained at Philippi.

[46] The miracle of raising Eutychus from the dead which Paul is said to have performed at Troas is on the Old Testament model, like the raising of Dorcas by Peter (ix, 36-43).

[47] The editor of Acts, who says not a word about the collection, takes advantage of the stay at Miletus to lodge in this place an allocution by Paul to the elders of Ephesus on the model of a pastoral discourse to the ministers of the flock. It will be noted that the editor, whose intention is to say nothing about Paul's death, is careful to make Paul predict it (25) as a consequence of the journey he has undertaken.

[48] The account of the meeting with the brethren at Tyre has, to say the least, received additions, the prophetic warning given by the brethren having a compromising likeness to what Paul himself has just said at Miletus. The seven days at Troas, the seven days at Tyre and, later on, the seven days at Puteoli (xxviii, 14) have more the look of edifying parentheses than real memoranda.

[49] The conclusion of the incident (xxi, 12-14) must be nearly identical with what Luke made to follow a prediction by Philip's prophetic daughters.

[50] Acts xxi, 15-16. Before the visit to James our author clumsily places a favourable reception by the brethren in general. The source document, on the contrary, represents the hospitality of Mnason as a kind of precaution against too hasty contact with the body of Judaizing Christians.

[51] According to Josephus (Antiquities, xix, 6, 1) Agrippa I, anxious to make a show of religion, released a number of poor nazirs from their vows, by paying their expenses for the various sacrifices required of them by the Mosaic Law (see Numbers vi).

[52] Acts xxi, 20-26. The discourse of the elders is intelligible and holds well together except for the perceptible gloss, after the words "thou seest, brother, how many thousands of Jews there are," which adds the explanation "of those who believe." Verse 22 is an artificial transition intended to make some sort of connexion between what has just been said about the disposition of believing Jews and the advice about to be given to Paul to prove his zeal for the Law before these same Jews by taking(?) a vow. The lame reference to the pseudo-apostolic decree (xv, 9) is in keeping with the false perspective.

[53] From xxi, 27 it would seem that the editor thought the nazirate lasted seven days. See Les Actes des Apotres, 805.

[54] The brethren mentioned in xxi, 23 had certainly been under the vow for some time.

[55] In the editor's thesis, all the groups of nascent Christianity, Jewish and hellenist, keep the Law, the Jewish with the rigour of the Mosaic code, the hellenist in conformity with the prohibitions supposed to apply to all the children of Noah, and not only to the descendants of Abraham. See Les Actes des Apotres, 804-807.

[56] Except on this supposition the sequence of the affair is not intelligible.

[57] There may be an echo of the source document in xxiii, 11. But the vision is more likely to have taken place on the night following Paul's arrest. It reveals the working of Paul's mind which suddenly led him to see that he might carry his message to Rome under Roman authority. See Les Actes des Apotres, 835-837.

[58] The transfer of Paul to Caesarea must have followed very soon after his arrest, but the editor has deliberately thrown the circumstances into confusion. It is certain that the Jewish authorities would not lose a moment in putting forth every possible effort to get their hands on the man whom the intervention of the Roman soldiers had saved from the fury of their people. If they thought it likely that the charge of profaning the temple would fail they could still claim Paul as a religious agitator whose revolutionary activities they had the right to suppress, especially at Jerusalem. But the tribune could not hand over to them a Roman citizen whose right to be judged only in a Roman court was incontestable. Accordingly he would at once refer the case to the procurator.

[59] The resumption of the story is as easy to recognize as the interpolation which breaks it up. In xxii, 23—24 we find ourselves back at the exact point where we stand in xxi, 34-35.

[60] Acts xxii, 25-29. The scene is dramatized by the editor on much the same lines as his fiction of the scourging of Paul at Philippi (xvi, 35-39), which it recalls rather too vividly.

[61] xxii, 30-xxiii, 10. The editor is plainly in error in making Ananias high priest in office at the time of Paul's trial. High priest in 47, he was deposed before 52.

[62] For a discussion of this and the other fictions at this point, in which the naive audacity of the editor is indulged as freely as in die story of the sitting of the Sanhedrim, see Les Actes des Apotres, 838-842.

[63] xxiii, 23-30. Having invented a Jewish plot against Paul our editor has now to mobilize hundreds of soldiers to escort Paul to Caesarea, but the mention of the departure by night and the halt at Antipatris may come from the source document. The report of the tribune Lysias is no less an invention than the sitting of the Sanhedrim, of which it gives an account to Felix.

[64] xxiii, 31-35. The declaration of Felix to Paul (33), "I will hear thee when thy accusers are come," has no sense unless Paul himself invoked the

jurisdiction of the procurator in order to avoid falling into the hands of the Sanhedrim which claimed him.

[65] xxiv, 22-23. Two motives are alleged for the adjournment: the first, Felix knew in advance what line to take in regard to the Christian propaganda—this must come from the source document; second, that Felix wished to await the coming of Lysias—a pretext invented by the editor.

[66] xxiv, 27. The editor has thought he might add that, since Felix did not release Paul before giving up office, it was to please the Jews. The fact is that Felix left Paul's case just where it was when he was relieved of office; but during the two years of its adjournment it is quite possible that an understanding, more or less tacit, was formed between the procurator and the Sanhedrim to let the matter sleep. The Jewish authority could not have much ground for complaint so long as Paul was held prisoner and the official adjournment would seem a denial of the right Paul had claimed. For the discussion of the passage, see Les Actes des Apotres, 867-870.

[67] xxiv, 22. See Les Actes des Apotres, 862—863.

[68] Aged six at the death of her father in 44, Drusilla was married in 52 to the king of Emesa, Aziz, who had himself circumcised to obtain her hand; but their union was short-lived, for the procurator Felix fell in love with her at sight and succeeded in detaching her from her husband through the good offices of a friend of his, a Jewish sorcerer from Cyprus, while Drusilla made no scruple about marrying the uncircumcised Roman in her eagerness to escape from the jealousy of Berenice, her elder sister by ten years, who envied Drusilla her greater beauty (Josephus, Antiquities, xx, 7, 1-2). Of Felix, Tacitus writes as follows: "Per omnem saevitiam et libidinem jus regium servili ingenio exercuit."

[69] xxv, 9. The editor pretends that Festus wishes to repeat at Jerusalem the proceeding previously attributed to the tribune Lysias, tliat of assembling the Sanhedrim for a fuller inquiry, taking its verdict as to the guilt or innocence of the accused and getting from it a sentence which it would then be his business, as a Roman magistrate, to ratify.

[70] According to the editor's point of view, Festus understood all along that the whole affair was concerned with beliefs debated among the Jews; but the procurator, faced by the demand of the Sanhedrim, is supposed unable to refuse it, just as he will be unable to refuse ratification of its sentence, if Paul elects to be tried at Jerusalem. The case is presented in the same way as the trial of Jesus in the Gospels.

[71] The silly remark here attributed to the procurator is intended to corroborate the certificate of innocence he has just given to Paul in assuring Agrippa that Paul's activities in the affair were concerned only "with a certain Jesus, a dead man, whom Paul declared to be alive."

[72] After all, then, the examination before Agrippa provides Festus with nothing to put into his report to Caesar!

[73] "We" makes a new appearance when the sea story begins (xxvii, 1) after being in eclipse since the arrival at Jerusalem. The eclipse is partly explained by the mutilations and substitutions in the intermediate stories.

[74] The only one mentioned is Aristarchus of Thessalonica; but Timothy must also have been among them.

[75] The story of the sea passage has been changed only by interpolations, easily discernible, aimed at giving greater importance to Paul's role in this part of the story. Examples are the following: Paul's prophetic but rejected advice to winter in Crete rather than in the place called Fair Haven; reminder of this advice and announcement, in the midst of the tempest, that no lives would be lost; probably also the intervention of Paul to denounce the sailors about to desert the ship and its passengers, and the exhortation to take food (30-38). On the substantial authenticity of the story of the tempest, which has been questioned, see Les Actes des Apotres, 921-922.

[76] The miracle of the harmless viper and its conclusion (3-6) remind us a little too closely of the adventure at Lystra (xiv, 8—18) in the invented story of the mission which Paul and Barnabas are said to have made into Asia Minor. The marvellous cures performed by Paul are apparently introduced to provide a filling for the three months spent at Malta.

[77] From xxviii, 16, which contains the last "we," the source document must have run on to the indication in verse 30 of the two years spent by Paul in the condition known as custodia libera.

[78] xxviii, 31. Paul devoted himself to preaching the Gospel in his own house, but it was not for the purpose of enabling him to do so that the relative liberty of which he took advantage was granted him.

[79] xxviii, 22-23a. But how could the Jews of Rome at this date (62) have said to Paul that they knew of Christianity only by hearing of it as a sect that was spoken against?

[80] xxviii, 25b-27. The quotation from Isaiah is found again in Mark iv, 2 (Matthew xiii, 14-15; Luke viii, 10); John xii, 39-40.

[81] There is no reference to this project outside the Epistle to the Romans (xv, 24), and it would seem that Paul had renounced it even before the end of his Roman captivity. But legend has not allowed the reference to it in Romans to fall into oblivion. In any case 2 Timothy iv, 16 can be understood as a first trial at which Paul was acquitted.

[82] Romans xv, 19, 23-24. Paul seems to have regarded Spain as the limit of the Western world. Circumstances may have led him to consider it impossible to reach this limit, or simply to think no more about it.

[1] "Exitiabilis superstitio" is to be reckoned among the "atrocia aut pudenda" which flowed into Rome from all sides. Suetonius, without connecting the persecution of the Christians with the burning of Rome, writes to the same effect (Nero, 16): "Afflicti suppliciis Christiani, genus honunum superstitionis novae et maleficae." The secrecy of the Christian

meetings furnished a pretext for the imputation of infamous crimes; but similar imputations had previously been brought against the Jews.

[2] Tacitus writes: "Igitur primum correpti qui fatebantur." The object of fatebantur has to be established from the context. The first reference is to the exitiabilis superstitio of which Christus is the author and the next to the multitude condemned rather for odium generis humani. E. Meyer (iii, 507) says that Tacitus expressly avoided being more precise because his object was to show how the prosecution of incendiaries developed, in course of the pursuit, into the prosecution of Christians in general. In reality the first Christians laid hold of were arrested as incendiaries, and those hunted down afterwards were arrested as Christians, without the establishment of any judicial distinction between the two categories. Nevertheless the text of Tacitus can only be understood naturally as meaning a confession of incendiarism by the first of the accused. But, in view of the multitude denounced, we have still to ask what these first confessions were worth. Reitzenstein, Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen, iii, 122, maintains with some probability that the inquisition was carried out by Nero's police in the interests of the emperor and that the first to be arrested were no other than the spies employed by the police for the occasion, as happened in the trial of Octavia, when a pretended accomplice appeared to confess to adultery which had not been committed.

[3] A point perfectly treated by Renan, L'Antichrist, 154-155.

[4] Clement's evocation of the Roman martyrs comes as conclusion to a long discourse on the evil deeds, discord and jealousy recorded in the Old Testament from Cain to David. The author then comes to "examples of our generation"—to be understood as meaning the Christian age, not in the chronological sense of his contemporaries—and takes the apostles to begin with: Petron, dV dia zhlon adikon ouc ena oude duo, alla pleionaV topon thV doxhV. dia zhlon kai erin PauloV upomonhV braxeion edeixen . . . dikaiosunhn didaxaV ton kosmon kai epi to terma thV dusewV elqwn kai marturhsaV epi twn hgoumenwn, outwV aphllagh tou kosmou kai eiV ton agion topon eporeuqh . . . ToutoiV toiV andrasin osiwV politeusamenoiV sunhqroisqh polu plhqoV eklektwn . . . This crowd is the multitudo ingens of Tacitus; but we cannot be sure that the two apostles and the crowd perished on the same occasion. We have here a retrospective view of the Roman martyrs at the time of Nero. Cf. H. Lietzmann, Petrus und Paulus in Rome, 228-236.

[5] Cf. Acts xii, 17. We have seen above why the editor of Acts omits to mention the locality to which Peter fled.

[6] Account should be taken, however, of what has been said above under the Epistle to the Philippians. Peter may have been at Rome among those of whom Paul complains that they were preaching a Gospel more or less opposed to his. The fact is that the editor of Acts, who has brought the entire Roman community to pay sympathetic homage to Paul, would have been in no mind to call attention, even if he knew of them, to the divisions,

factions and contrary currents which might exist among the Roman brethren in Nero's time. At all events it is risky to suppose with E. Meyer (iii, 508) that the "jealousy and discord," of which Clement speaks in connexion with Peter and Paul, may be interpreted as playing a part in the denunciation of Christians mutually hostile. The only precise detail known in regard to the mass of the victims concerns denunciation by pagan relatives. As to the apostles, their denunciation may well have been the work of non-Christians, without any need to make the Jews responsible.

[7] Romans, 4. ouc wV petroV kai pauloV diatassomai umin. This puts the letter of Ignatius on the same level as Clement and Dionysius.

[8] In Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History ii, 25. Writing to the Romans, Dionysius said that the communities of Corinth and Rome were both taught by Peter and Paul who were equally together in martyrdom at Rome. A legendary and uncritical view of primitive history.

[9] 1 Peter v, 13. Mark is mentioned in this passage; also Sylvanus (12). We have seen that Colossians iv, 10 and Philemon 24 suppose Mark at Rome, but as one of Paul's followers, while John the Elder (in Papias) makes him the interpreter of Peter. All of which is uncertain enough.

[10] John xx, 18-19 (a plain hint in xiii, 36). Martyrdom is clearly implied, and apparently by crucifixion, without indication of place. But, considering the late age of the testimony, we may believe that the author had Rome in mind. See Le quatrieme Evangile, 524-525.

[11] Lietzmann, 274, concludes for the authenticity of the burial places traditionally assigned to Peter and Paul.

[12] Eusebius, iii, 5, 3, names Pella, beyond the Jordan, as the first place at which they stayed. It is noteworthy that the Judaizing Christians of those regions kept the name "Nazoreans."

[23] Meyer, iii, 517, 554 (on the strength of Dio Cassius, 67, 14), thinks he was a Jew. But the Christian inscriptions, older than the legends Meyer sets aside, have to be reckoned with.

[24] In all probability the sacramentum in question was the oath taken at baptism.

[15] "Affirmabant autem hanc fuisse summam vel culpae suae vel erroris, quod essent soliti stato die ante lucem convenire carmenque Christo quasi deo dicere secum invicem, seque sacramento non in scelus aliquod obstringere, sed ne furta, ne latrocinia, ne adulteria committerent, ne fidem fallerent, ne depositum appellati abnegarent."

[16] "Nec mediocriter haesitavi: I Sitne aliquod discrimen aetatum, an quamlibet teneri nihil a robusrioribus differant; II Detur poenitentiae venia, an ei, qui omnino Christianus fuit, desisse non prosit; III Nomen ipsum, si flagitiis careat, an flagitia cohaerentia nomini puniantur."

[17] Eusebius, iv, 26 (the text quoted in iv, 13 is apocryphal).

[18] Romans xiii, 1-7. A piece of padding, but introduced with a purpose.

[19] This Quadratus may be the same as the person mentioned by Eusebius in iii, 37 and v, 17. As those raised from the dead are associated with those

cured of disease perhaps we should see in the multiplication of both classes a mere rhetorical flourish.

[20] Eusebius is mistaken in making the apology addressed to Hadrian. It has only recently been recovered and reconstructed. See R. Harris and A. Robinson, The Apology of Aristides, 1891, and Harnack, Chronologie, i, 271-273.

[21] Cf. Colossians ii, 16-19; Acts vii, 53 (Galatians iii, 19).

[22] In the Dialogue, 2-3, Justin himself, not, perhaps, without literary artifice, recounts the stages of his religious experience.

[23] Observe that Justin here encounters Celsus, who was acquainted with the Great Church, but views Christianity as a medley of sects affecting the same name for ever quarrelling and reproaching each other with unmentionable crimes. Origen, Contra Celsum, iii, 12 and v, 63.

[24] Justin here follows the doctrine of the Book of Enoch on the fallen angels.

[25] 1 Apology, 6. The mention of the prophetic spirit after the angels is possibly an interpolation. See Tumiel, Histoire des dogmes (1932), 168—170.

[26] Justin's imagination seems to have been occupied with a dedicatory inscription to the ancient divinity Semo Sanctus. But did he find out for himself that Simon came to Rome in the time of Claudius?

[27] 1 Apology, 26, 58. In the latter passage Justin says of Marcion: "He is still teaching.... Many, accepting his doctrine as the only true, make a mock of us."

[28] 1 Apology, 35, 48. The supposition has been made by some that Justin had in mind the apocryphal Acts of Pilate and that he knew them. But he speaks of official and authentic Acts, which he has not seen. The references to the registers of Quirinius and to the Acts of Pilate are conceived in identical terms.

[29] 2 Apology, 5-7. Here again Justin reproduces the Book of Enoch on the fallen angels and the bad demons.

[30] Cf. Rougier, Celse, 361-429.

[31] An authentic and contemporary account of them is contained in the letter which the Lyonnaise community addressed for the purpose to the communities of Asia and Phrygia. A copy of it was carried, with letters of the martyrs concerning the Phrygian prophets (Montanism), to the bishop of Rome by the priest Irenaeus. The story of the martyrdoms is reproduced in part in Eusebius, v, 1-4.

[32] We do not know whether Pothinus also came from Asia, but the fact that the account of the trials undergone at Lyons is addressed to the communities of Asia and Phrygia points in that direction.

[33] It was thus in all the persecutions, except that the accused in 64 do not seem to have been given the choice between death and apostasy.

[34] The manner in which they are characterized in the letter (Eusebius, v, 1, 48) merits attention: "Those who never had a trace of faith, nor any feeling of the new marriage garment (Matthew xxii, 11-13), nor thought of the fear of God, but who by turning back brought the Way into contempt."

[1] The Aramean formula is retained in 1 Corinthians xvi, 22. Revelation xxii, 20 echoes it in a translation. Mar, marana is the Aramean equivalent of kurioV. This may be a title of honour and a term of politeness. In Christian usage it was a messianic title, a cult name giving divine attribute to its object.

[2] On the meaning and consequences of this see throughout Bousset, Kyrios Christos.

[3] Maranatha still appears in the Liturgy of the Didache. Abba (Father) came at some time into Christian usage (Mark xiv, 36; Romans viii, 45; Galatians iv, 6). It still retains Amen.

[4] Because, in synagogal reading, the divine name Adonai, "Lord," was usually read in place of Jahveh, which it was forbidden to pronounce.

[5] The whole chapter forms part of an instruction on the use of the flesh of animals sacrificed to idols. The position assigned to Jesus is that of a cult-lord, but the only true Lord in that category.

[6] Psalm ii, 7, quoted in Acts xiii, 32-33, where it is the equivalent of Psalm cx, 1 in the argument of Acts ii, 34-36.

[7] A strange feature is borrowed from the mystery religions in Revelation xix, 16: the title "King of Kings and Lord of Lords" is not only written on the mantle of the Christ but also tattooed on his thigh.

[8] Fragment of the Gospel of the Hebrews quoted by Jerome, De viris, 2.

[9] Certain cosmogonies, the Babylonian in the first instance, naturally place the creation of the world in the spring, creation being the myth of the new year.

[10] 1 Apology, 67, 7. The concluding remark about the instructions given by the risen Christ remind us less of Luke xxiv, 44-49 and Acts i, 2 than of the Apocalypse of Peter and of some of the gnostic gospels.

[11] Under these conditions it seems impossible to maintain that the Sunday Easter was only introduced at Rome in the time of Anicetus, otherwise we should have to place the editing of the Gospels after that date (157-168).

[12] See Dolger, Sol salutis, 98 ff. Evidence in Tertullian, Apologeticum, 16, 9 and in Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, vii, 7, this last inspired by 2 Corinthians iv, 6, where the symbolism is almost Justin's.

[13] Cf. Hebrews vi, 4; x, 32. In 2 Corinthians iv, 4, 6 the fwtismoV may well refer to baptismal initiation.

[14] Mark i, 8, lo; Matthew iii, 11, 16; Luke iii, 16, 22; John i, 31, 34; Acts i, 5.

[15] R. Reitzenstein, Die Vorgeschlchte der Christlichen Taufe, would make Christian baptism depend on the baptism of the Mandeans. There may be a relationship between the two, but the alleged dependence is quite unproved, seeing that the Mandean sect is much later than the birth of Christianity. The only sacrament of the Mandeans was a repeated baptism which should

be compared, in its repeatable character, with that of the Elchasites. It is, moreover, established that the ritual of Mandean baptism owed much to the ritual of the Syrian Nestorians. A common origin is presumable; but to bring all back, including the Christian eucharist, to Mandean rites, is pure wilfulness.

[16] See the texts cited in note 15. Belief in Jesus as the Son of God passed through the following stages. In the first stage he was consecrated God's Son and Christ by his resurrection (Romans i, 4); in the second, the consecration was thrown back to his baptism (prevailing perspective of the Synoptics); in the third, it was further thrown back to his conception. The idea of the Christ as pre-existent was bound to end in proclaiming him Son of God from all eternity.

[17] The trinitarian formula in Matthew xxviii, 19 was probably added at the canonical revision and Mark xvi, 16 at the final deutero-canonical revision. In Luke xxiv, 47 baptism is implied only, as it must have originally been in the text of Matthew. John iii, 22 represents Jesus as himself baptizing. But the statement is attenuated in iv, 2 and vii, 39.

[18] If Jesus baptized he did so under the same conditions as John. Some writers would have us believe that Jesus separated from John because he attached no importance to baptism. A refinement of the imagination!

[19] Mark vi, 32-34 and parallels. In Mark viii, 1-9 and Matthew xv, 32-39 there is a second multiplication of loaves which is a duplicate of the first. Mark's reason for admitting the duplicate is to make the first a type of Jewish-Christian initiation and the second of hellenist-Christian. In John vi, 51-58 (discourse on the bread of life) the symbolism of flesh and blood is brought into relation with the multiplication of the loaves (5-14).

[20] "Gnosis" in the text.

[21] 1 Corinthians xi, 2, 17-34. This is a homogeneous instruction intended to order the Supper in keeping with the mystical conception announced in 24-25 and applied in 26—34. This instruction does not depend on the Gospels nor even on the gospel tradition, except in so far as the mystic conception of the Supper, linked to the mystic conception of redemption, is inserted into a framework, previously fixed, in which the Supper is in no sense a pascal meal but prefigures the festival of the elect in the Kingdom of God. The framework in question is also presupposed in the traditional accounts of the institution in the three Synoptics.

[22] The integrity of Justin's text is subject to caution. The last line about Jesus crucified and the Spirit as the author of the prophecies, and the earlier mention of the Christ and the Spirit, may have been added for conformity to traditional practices. Cf. Turmel, Histoire des dogmes, ii, 169-170.

[23] Literally "participating (incorporated) in the symbol of his death" and not "in the image of his death" as though the author were here teaching Docetism. The baptism of the Christ, not his death, is the image.

[24] The mobility of the miraculous rock in the desert is a rabbinic tradition. Philo (Legum alleg., ii, 36) says that the rock is "the wisdom of God" and the manna "word of God."

[25] The mention of "mingled wine" after "water" is highly suspect (pothrion udatoV kai kramatoV). It is probable that Justin means to describe a communion with bread and water, not with bread and wine. Cf. Harnack, Brot und Wasser, die eucharist elements bei Justin. On communion without wine in Christian antiquity, see Lietzmann, Messe und Herrenmahl, 246, 249. Tatian and the encratites, Marcion also, celebrated without wine. What has been quoted above about communion in the desert (1 Corinthians x, 1-5) may well be in accord with that practice.

[26] Turmel also suspects the mention of the Spirit in this passage. See note 22.

[27] But Justin shows knowledge of the rendering of thanks by the prophets which, according to Didache, x, 5, might be prolonged at their discretion.

[28] The prayer of thanksgiving simply indicated in the Gospels. In the time of Justin the communion required only the exercise of thanksgiving over the bread and wine; the words called "the words of institution" were introduced into the liturgy at a later date. (They are artificially introduced in the liturgy of Hippolytus.)

[29] The spiritual powers who ruled the visible world and without whose knowledge the coming of the Son had been effected. We have seen the place which this piece of mythology holds in diverse parts of the New Testament.

[30] This confirms what has been said in note 25 of Justin's knowing the communion without wine.

[31] The words, "I will raise him up at the last day," have been added to the end of verse 54.

[32] For that reason probably the explanation is addressed to the disciples, not to the people who, strangers to faith, are incapable of understanding it.

[33] As already said, instruction on the communion comprises 1 Corinthians xi, 2, 19-34. It is intended to authorize the mystic communion and to substitute it, as a liturgical function, for the common meal, which the primitive Supper was, and at which real abuses might occur.

[34] Mark xiv, 22-25; Matthew xxvi, 26-29; Luke xxii, 14-20 (but the end of verse 19, after "given for you," and verse 20 suggest interpolation).

[35] There has been much dissertation about the meaning of the preposition apo (before tou kuriou in verse 23), which need not exclude intermediaries between Jesus and the author of the story. But on the hypothesis of intermediaries, as the matter concerns an act of the Christ and not a plain teaching, we should expect peri rather than apo. The author places the case of the Supper among the other paradoseiV which the Corinthians have received from him. Are all these to be transformed into Gospel traditions passed on by the Galilean apostles? Moreover, whether it be tradition or private vision, the story as here given is not in the primitive Gospel.

[36] The words "till he come" are indispensable for the balance both of the phrasing and the thought. There is no ground to regard them as interpolated.

[37] Because Luke xxii, 19 originally contained these words only, there is no ground for recognizing (in excluding "this is my blood") "this is my body" as an authentic saying—a metaphor employed by Jesus to indicate the fate in store for him. None of our texts has the least suspicion of this metaphor. It is highly probable that the original text of Luke referred to a supper without wine, but having the same mystic sense as the supper with bread and wine. See L'Evangile selon Luc, 511-512.

[38] It is evident that the parallelism of the "passover," that is, the whole festival meal, with the "cup" (verses 17—18) is artificially created.

[1] Romans iii, 27-iv, 24, verse 25 being the transition to the gnosis developed in the following chapters. See above, the analysis of the Epistle, p. 253.

[2] Romans v, 12, 18—19. The oracular style of this gnosis attests its relatively ancient character. In 14 we read that death reigned from Adam to Moses even in those who had not sinned by imitation—epi tw omoiwmati—of Adam's sin. We might translate, "in the manner of Adam's sin." Account must be taken of this meaning of the word for the interpretation of vi, 5, sumfutoi tw omoiwmati tou qanatou autou, where there is no more question of an appearance of death (Docetism) than there is here question of an appearance of sin.

[3] Genesis ii, 17; iii, 19. There is nothing whatever in this ancient text, taken as it stands, to suggest that death is the natural consequence of sin. Death results from the fact that, by the will of God, man has no part of the tree of life, the fruit of which nourishes the immortals.

[4] Leg. alleg., i, 31; De opif. mundi, 134. In Philo the celestial man is the ideal, divine and absolute type of humanity indicated in Genesis i, 27; the terrestrial man is the man of history, father of the human race, to which Genesis ii, 7 would refer.

[5] As a slave is sold to his master.

[6] The text does not mean that a non-earthly Christ has been crucified somewhere in the clouds by the "princes of the air," but that the "princes of this world" are responsible for the passion of Jesus, just as it is attributed in the Gospels to "the powers of darkness" (Luke xxii, 53), or to the "prince of this world," the devil (John xiv, 30). There is no more reason to substitute the devil for the "princes" of 1 Corinthians and to identify him with Marcion's demiurge.

[7] Romans viii, 18-27. The whole of this passage differs in style from that of the context; rather ponderous prose in which there is no parallelism; viii, 28 joins on quite naturally to 17.

[8] Differing in this respect from Romans v-vi, where the gnosis may borrow Biblical language here and there but not as specific quotations;

doubtless because it is being developed on a system of its own and not as a commentary on particular texts.

[9] It would be better to translate, or rather to transcribe, "by which he made even the aeons," but without taking this word in the full gnostic sense. The word belongs to the gnostic vocabulary, and has a meaning analogous to that of gnosis.

[10] The text (Psalm viii, 6) says: "Thou hast made him but little inferior to Elohim," or "to the Elohim."

[11] Hebrews vii, 1-2. "King of Righteousness" is the author's etymology of Melchisedec. The original may well have meant the god "Sedec is my King" (compare Adonizedec, "Sedec is my Lord," name of a king of Jerusalem in Joshua x, i). Salem is understood by the author in its etymological sense. Very probably it refers to Jerusalem.

[12] vii, 14. The author reasons as though Melchisedec had no real ancestors and never died. But the point of interest for us lies in the author's intention to ignore the earthly origin of Jesus.

[13] ex 'Iouda anatetalken.

[14] kaq' omoiothta helps us to understand omoiwma in Romans vi, 3-6.

[15] xi, 2-40. We are even told (3) that "by faith the aeons fell into order at the word of God and the visible was not made of things that appear." This, though hardly intelligible to us, corresponds to what was said in the preamble i, 2 (see note 9 above). We would say that eternal ideas are realized in the visible world; but, to our author, the eternal ideas, as such, are just as real, if not more real, as they are when visibly externalized.

[16] Cf. ix, 11-12, and the prayer Supplices in the Roman canon of the Mass. The Epistle to the Hebrews, which has sometimes been said to be indifferent to the Eucharist, if not to oppose it, is on the contrary full of eucharistic symbolism. We read (x, 10) that "we were sanctified by the offering" made once for all "of the body of Jesus Christ," by "the blood of the covenant" (x, 29).

[17] The Peratae used the same expression—"in him all the pleroma judged good to dwell" (Philosophoumena, v, 2). In our next chapter the gnostics will be speaking to us again about the pleroma. The term means—God and the spiritual world as it subsists in God and forms his plenitude. The concept is founded on the idea of emanation from the source and return to it. The application of it to the Christ has never been fully and openly made by Christianity, where it has been rather compressed than developed, especially in the theology of the Latin Church. Two parallel strophes may be distinguished in the quoted passage (15-17, 18-20).

[18] The conception is at once physical and theological. The stoiceia are the principal parts of the cosmos and the four elements thought to constitute all bodies; but they are also the astral spirits on whom all parts of the cosmos, including humanity, were held to depend. (See Toussaint, L'Epitre de S. Paul aux Colossiens, 137-146.)

[19] The Divinity, or the divine world, being, as it were, externalized in the Christ, who is the true pleroma.

[20] The word peplhrwmenoi plays with "pleroma." The literal translation would be "pleromed"—introduced into the pleroma.

[21] We get a glimpse of what this catastrophe of the pleroma may have meant in the thought of this Christian writer; but one would like to know what the catastrophe meant—for there certainly was one—in the system which the gnosis of our Epistle opposes, while yet imitating it.

[22] See above, p. 255.

[23] The meaning is that believers are parts in an invisible pleroma whose radiance is continually obstructed by the visible world in the condition to which it has come after its perversion by the "principalities" whom the Christ has conquered.

[24] Literally "the body." The real substance of the true mystery, which is the true salvation, is in the pleroma-Church, which is the body of the Christ.

[25] Unintelligible passage. Guided by verse 23 perhaps we may read verse 18 simply: en tapeinofrosunh kai eqelorhskia twn aggelwn.

[26] The word embateuwn is a word of the mystery-language denoting the "first step" of initiation.

[27] stoiceia. See note 18.

[28] Terms borrowed from the mystery the author is attacking.

[29] Prone to exaggeration as Paul was he can hardly have said that the Gospel in his time had been preached to "every creature under heaven." Cf. the spurious ending of Mark (xvi, 15), where we find the same formula.

[30] In some circles Jahveh Sabaoth was identified with Zeus Sabazios. On the origin of this Epistle see p. 26.

[31] The name in question is "Lord," kurioV;, a word of the Jahveh-cult. It is not the name "Jesus" which is above every name. Moreover, it is the name "Lord" that stands out in the concluding confession. The name "Jesus" corresponds to the abasement of the Christ, and "Lord" to his exaltation.

[32] Verse 25 may be intended by the author in a spiritual sense and 28 a comment in terms of the common belief (see Le quatrieme Evangile, 214). The descent into Hades is an old mythological theme which has undergone various transformations in the theologies. Ishtar in Babylonian mythology goes down to bring back Tammuz; the vegetation gods, who die and revive, also descend into Hades and return. Later the myth was sublimated. We have seen how the descent is treated in Philippians; there it becomes the descent of a celestial being into an inferior world. In some gnostic systems an aeon falls out of the pleroma and has to be ransomed. The descent of the Christ to the abode of the dead makes contact on one side with this old mythology.

[33] Romans x, 6, 7; Ephesians iv, 9-10 mention the descent only, without speaking of the Christ's activity among the dead. Matthew xxvii, 51-5} seems to imply the descent without definitely adopting it.

[34] Dialogue, 72. The Jeremiah text is quoted by Irenaeus to the same purpose. Apostolic Preaching, 78; Heresies, iv, 22. Ignatius, Magnesians, ix, 2,

says that Jesus went to raise the prophets because they had been his disciples in spirit. Hermas, Parable, ii, 16, has the dead evangelized by the apostles, not by the Christ.

[35] On this point see Harnack, Marcion, 170.

[36] It was early remarked that the Logos is called qeoV not o qeoV. He is divine but not God absolutely.

[37] To get the balance of the thought and the rhythm the words o gegonen should be made part of verse 4, as many ancient witnesses do, instead of joining them to 3, where they have no reason to be.

[38] Everything lives by the Logos and in the Logos. Recall the pleroma, note 17 above.

[39] katelaben can be taken in the double sense of "understand" and "contain" (or stop).

[50] Genesis i, 2. The darkness floating over the Abyss is here one of the elements in the primal chaos and has nothing of the moral meaning attached to the darkness of John i, 5, where darkness is the equivalent of evil, as in the religion of Zoroaster.

[41] John xii, 31; xiv, 30; xvi, 11. The "prince of this world" has the function of the "principalities" and "powers," spoken of in the Epistles; but his character is perceptibly different. He did not originally belong to the pleroma and can never have been a part of it.

[42] John viii, 44. This passage defines the nature of the devil, "a homicide from the beginning," "liar and father of lies," in whom truth is not. There is no question of his initial fall: he has always been as we find him to-day. See Le quatrieme Evangile, 299—301.

[43] John i, 9-12. All the references to John the Baptist (6-8, 15) appear to have been added to the poem of the incarnate Logos: ditto the last member of verse 13. "Those who believe in his name" explains the preceding line of the poem and the plural of the verbs in verse 13 (in the traditional text) agrees with the explaining line.

[44] The reading oV . . . egennhqh in place of oi . . . eggenhqhsan is that of Irenaeus and Tertullian and Justin seems to read it so. This verse refers quite naturally to the birth of the Logos in time, his appearance in human form, but would come in very awkwardly if understood of the birth of believers, of which, however, the divine sonship of Jesus is the prototype. See Le quatrieme Evangile, 101—104.

[45] The word "and we saw his glory, glory like that which an only begotten son might take from his father" is an irrelevant intrusion which arrests the development of the sentence and breaks the rhythm. It is in the manner of i John i, 1.

[46] This "plenitude" is not the pleroma of gnosis—and the point is worthy of note as marking the relations of our Gospel to religious doctrines ot the time—but explains what has just been said of the Logos (verse 14) as full of grace and truth," what is now added being the direct sequel to this assertion.

[47] Many interpreters, reluctant to think that the word "grace" in this

formula can be taken in its proper sense of benefit, but with two different objects—since, according to the context (14 and 17), grace is eternal life, the objective gift of salvation—deem it possible to translate not "grace (eternal life) for grace (gift of the Law)" but "grace upon grace," that is, superabundance of salvation. But the following lines, which are explanatory, favour the first interpretation, to which the Johannine language is not repugnant. It is only in the gnosis of Paul's Epistles that the Law cannot be spoken of as a "grace," or divine favour, in the ordinary sense of the word.

[48] Cf. the "invisible God" of Colossians i, 15.

[49] This is the meaning of i, 13—14 even if we do not admit the reading (oV eggenhqh) of Irenaeus and Tertullian. None the less the Son, in the body of the Gospel, is conceived to pre-exist, as Son, to his incarnation in the flesh.

[50] The passages in our Gospel which speak of the resurrection of the dead in the strict sense of the formula, that of rising up after death and burial, are probably the insertions of an editor. They are v, 28-29; vi, 29, 40, 44, 54.

[51] The author of the Epistle has in view specially xix, 34, water and blood issuing from the side of Jesus when pierced by the soldier's lance. Misunderstanding of the spirit of both our Gospel and the Epistle reaches its limit in those who have imagined that decomposition of the blood might have produced what looked like a flow of blood and water, or that the decomposition might have been invented to prove against Marcion that the blood of Jesus was real. See Le quatrieme Evangile, 492.

[52] Cf. vii, 39.

[53] In Matthew i, 16 and Luke iii, 23 we can see editorial artifice to bring the genealogies into accord with the idea of virgin conception.

[54] See Bacon, Studies in Matthew, 151-164.

[55] Cf. Bacon, 33-35.

[56] Acts i, 3-11. This preamble, artificially attached to the prologue (1-2), which has been mutilated and interpolated for that purpose, gives the impression of being a resume or extract cut out from a more complete and developed story closely analogous if not identical with what we read in the Apocalypse of Peter.

[57] The scene is analogous to that of Acts in what concerns the revelation on a mountain, but the sketching more cursory.

[58] The background the same as in Acts i, 3-11 but the source document is more systematically rearranged.

[59] Debris of the same traditions elaborated in another way.

[60] The resemblance to Acts i, 3-11 is closer, in the more developed form of the ending of Mark made known by a fifth-century manuscript recently discovered.

[61] Cf. Bacon, 148-150.

[62] Bacon, 151. The theme has been studied by Gressmann and Norden.

[63] Bacon, 153. The theme of the star is taken up in the Ignatian Letters

(Ephesians, 19) but not in direct relation with Matthew ii, 2, y, 9-10, as we might hastily conclude. For the first statement made is that the birth of the Christ was unknown to "the prince of this world," and that the Lord was revealed "to the worlds" (aeons) by the star which eclipsed all other stars, destroyed magic and every bond of iniquity—which can only be understood of the Christ glorified in his resurrection.

[64] See La quatrieme Evangile, 144; Bacon, 150-151. The Feast of the Epiphany was originally Dionysiac.

[65] Notably Lidzbarski, Mandaische Liturgien, 1920, etc.

[66] The chief advocate of what may be called panmandeanism was R. Reitzenstein, Der Vorgeschichte der christlichen Taufe, 1929, etc.

[67] On the presence of this instruction in the Marcionite collection, see Harnack, 87.

[68] Hermas, Vision, i, 2, 4; ii, 1-3, 4.

[69] 2 Clement, 14, 1-2 (cf. Ephesians i, 22-23); 3-5 (cf. 1 Corinthians ii, 9).

[70] Revelation xxi, 9—10. Our homilist develops the metaphor into an eternal type which, spiritual in itself, comes to sensible form in the flesh of the Christ and in his followers, who themselves are his flesh.

[71] Magnesians, 4; 6-7 (cf. Trallians, 2-3); 13, Trallians, 6-7.

[1] With de Faye, Gnostiques, 430.

[2] Origen, C. Celsum, v, 72. Celsus says that the Helenians took the name from their master Helenos. This must be a mistake of Celsus or of the source on which he depends.

[3] Origen (C. Celsum, i, 57; vi, 15; In Johannem, xiii, 27) represents Dositheus as a Samaritan Messiah who appeared after Jesus and at the same time as Simon; in like manner Hegesippus in Eusebius, iv, 22, 5. In the apocryphal Clementines (Homilies, ii, 23; Recognitions, i, 54; ii, 8) Dositheus is said to have been a disciple of John the Baptist and to have succeeded him as leader of the sect he had founded and to have soon been supplanted by Simon.

[4] This results from the testimony of Origen. See the preceding note.

[5] The doctrine and the practice of the Simonians here meet the gnosis of Carpocrates, which we shall consider later on, and their Docetism constitutes an affinity to Marcion. The idea that the same divinity reveals himself, and may be worshipped under different names, is met with elsewhere.

[6] Hippolytus used an addition called Apophasis megale which he attributed to Simon. This stands in the closest affinity to the system of Valentinus and may well not come from the Simonian sect at all.

[7] Justin, 1 Apology, 26; Irenaeus, Heresies, i, 23; Eusebius, iii, 26, 1-2.

[8] Epistola Apostolorum (ed. Schmidt, 1919).

[9] Hegesippus (in Eusebius, iv, 22-27) mentions the Satornilians after the Basilideans.

[10] On all these sects see de Faye, 189, 202, 349—354, 444-446.

[11] See Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, ii, 3, 10; iii, 1, 3-4; iii, 2. Clement gives extracts from peri dikaiosunhV.

[12] Irenaeus, Heresis, i, 25.

[13] On Valentinus see Irenaeus, Heresies, i, i-6 and 11; Phllosophoumena, vi, 2.

[14] Ignatius, Magnesians, 8, 2, doubtless alludes to Sige when he says that Christ is the eternal Logos, who does not proceed from Silence (reading of the Greek MSS.).

[15] It is not easy to find one's way through this system which has doubtless come down to us with retouchings. Inconsistence and duplication may well have existed in the original. But as there are three Saviours (Horos, Christos and the aeon Jesus) and two Wisdoms (Sophia and Hacamoth) we may suppose (invoking the resume in Epiphanius, Heresies, xxxi, 4, where there seems to be only one Saviour) that the system was originally constructed on the fall of Sophia who assumed the part of Hacamoth, and on a scheme of redemption simplified to that extent (Bousset, Gnosis, 342). Even so the authentic quotations in Clement are enough to show that Valentinus did not construct his system with much regard to modern notions of probability.

[16] Stromata, iii, 7, 59. Clement says elsewhere (vi, 8, 71) that Jesus was apaqhV. The Gospel of Peter (Fragment, verse 10) seems to say the same. Perhaps the Gospel of the Egyptians started this doctrine.

[17] In the fragment of a homily quoted by Clement, iv, 13, 69, Valentinus addresses the initiates of his sect as follows: "You are immortal from the beginning"—that is, by nature—"you have challenged death"—in your human bodies—"that you might conquer death and that death might die in you and by you. So then, when you put the world to flight and scatter its deceitful elements without scattering the energies of your mind, you are the sovereigns of creation and masters of all perishable realities." We may see from this that Valentinus was not without eloquence nor even without philosophy. But Clement was not altogether mistaken in saying that Valentinus attributes to his "spirituals" the work of Jesus Christ himself. Between his "spiritual" mind and a stoic sage the difference is not great.

[18] Cf. Burkitt, Early Eastern Christianity (1904), 156—192.

[19] The quotations from Heracleon made by Origen in his commentary on the fourth Gospel furnish trustworthy and fairly complete information about this gnostic's doctrine. They have been collected by Brooke, Texts and Studies, i, 4 (1891).

[20] Tertullian (De Praescript, 30) mentions the sum—two hundred thousand sesterces. On the letter of introduction see Adv. Marcionem, i, 1 and iv, 4.

[21] See Harnack, Marcion.

[22] Tertullian, Adv. Marcionem, i, 19: "Separatio legis et evangelii

proprium et principale opus est Marcionis, nec poterunt negare discipuli eius quod in summo instrumento habent, quo denique initiantur et indurantur in hanc haeresim. Nam hae sunt Antithesis Marcionis, id est contrariae oppositiones, quae conantur discordiam evangelii cum lege committere, ut ex diversitate sententiarum utriusque instrumenti diversitatem quoque argumententur deorum."

[23] Tertullian, Adv. Marcionem, i, 14: "Mellis et lactis societatem qua suos infantat..." The same usage among the Naassenes is attested by Philosophoumena, v, 8, and is found again in the liturgy of Hippolytus.

[24] According to Philosophoumena, vii, 31, a certain disciple of Cerdo, named Prepon, made matter into a third principle beside the two gods.

[25] Adv. Marcionem, iv, 2: "Ex iis commentatoribus quos habemus, Lucam videtur Marcion elegisse, quam caederet."

[26] 1 Clement, 47. The reference is to 1 Corinthians i, 10-12: "The epistle of the blessed Paul, the apostle, which he first wrote to you at the beginning of the Gospel." A little further on we find a paraphrase, without reference to the hymn of charity (xiii, 1—7). To make this hymn depend on Clement is a gross misconstruction alike of the hymn and of the Clementine letter. If Clement is in nowise inspired, for his doctrine, by the salvation gnosis contained in the Epistles, there were many others like him who wrote after the formation of the canon.

[27] In the third century Marcionism was still formidable enough for Origen to be at pains lo refute it. At the time of Epiphanius (obit., 403) there were Marcionites in Rome, in Egypt as far as the Thebaid, in Palestine, Arabia, Syria, Cyprus, and even in Persia. Perhaps the last adepts of the sect were absorbed into Manicheism which was closely akin to their doctrine. We may indeed consider Mani, who invoked the names of Zoroaster, Buddha and Jesus, as the last of the great gnostics. His religious doctrine had the same basis as the ancient Persian religion, later penetrated by Babylonian influence (Reitzenstein, Das iranische Erlosungsmysterium, 94).

[1] This results from the close connexion between Didache, xv and xiv. The Didache makes no mention of presbyters (elders)—priests—just as there is no mention of them in Philippians i, 1; in 1 Timothy iii, 2-13; in 1 Clement 42, 4; in Hennas, Vision, iii, 5, 1.

[2] Vision, ii, 4, 3. The difficulty of identifying the Clement of Hermas with the author of the so-called Epistle of Clement would be insurmountable if the composition of this letter is dated in the reign of Domatian (81-96), but there would be no difficulty if the letter is not earlier than 125-135. We should then conclude that neither the Clement of the Epistle and of Hermas, nor the Hermas of The Shepherd were disciples of the apostles, and that there is no mention of them in the New Testament.

[3] See Vision, iii, 5, 1, a curious passage which still takes the word

"apostle" in the wide sense of an itinerant preacher, but shows the importance attached to the presbyteral episcopate by giving it prior place to the teaching apostle and to the teaching prophet.

[4] Vision, ii, 4, 2-3; iii, i, 8 ("presbyters"). Vision,, ii, 2, 6; iii, 9, 7 ("the heads of the Church")—-compare Hebrews xiii, 7, 17, 24 and 1 Clement i, 3; 21, 6. Vision, ii, 4, 3 ("the presbyters presiding over the Church").

[5] Vision, iii, 9, 7—10. The same persons are aimed at in Parable, viii, 7, 4—6, as "faithful and good men but given to jealousy about preferments and honours, and all completely in bondage to the folly of striving for the first place and for honours."

[6] Recall the testimony of Justin, 1 Apology, 65, 67, quoted above.

[7] Compare "the holy vine of David" in Didache, 9, 2.

[8] In 1 Apology, 8 Justin says of the only God what Marcion was saying about the demiurge: that he extracted the world "from unformed matter." If Justin did not believe that matter was eternal, he does not seem to have asked himself whence it came.

[9] In contrast to the Paul of 1 Corinthians vii, the Paul of the Pastorals recommends marriage in positive terms (cf. 1 Timothy ii, 15; v, 14; Titus ii, 4).

[10] Irenaeus (Heresies, i, preface) and Tertullian (De Praescriptione), without prejudice to the authenticity of the passage, apply it to Valentinus. Tertullian applies the passage recommending marriage (1 Timothy iv, 2-3) to Marcion. Cf. 2 Timothy ii, 14; iii, 7.

[11] It will be noted that the distinction between spiritual and psychic is clearly laid down in 1 Corinthians ii, 10-16. In the sequel (iii, 1-3) the psychics are said to be "carnal." We have seen above that Valentinus had three classes—pneumatics, psychics and hylics (material).

[12] The private meeting of Polycarp and Marcion of which Irenaeus speaks {Heresies, iii, 3, 4) might have taken place at Rome. If Polycarp died in 166 he might have come to Rome about 160.

[13] Title of a work of Irenaeus mentioned by Eusebius, v, 26, and preserved only in an Armenian version recently (1934) discovered.

[14] Exposition, 3 (from the Italian translation by Faldati).

[15] On this point see especially Bacon, Studies in Matthew, 18-23.

[16] See also Bacon, 32-36.

[17] See Bacon, Is Mark a Roman Gospel? (1919); cf. Revue d'histoire et de litterature religieuses, 1920, 427—430.

[18] There is high probability that John xxi, 15-23 (the commission to Peter) was written in Asia for the satisfaction of the Roman community (see Le quatrieme Evangile, 69-71). Again, in the Book of Acts the forced introduction of John's name into headlines (iii, i, 3-4, 19; viii, 6), and the apparently forced silence kept about the martyrdom of John in xii, 2, where only the martyrdom of James is mentioned, may well have been a concession made by Rome in favour of the Ephesian legend of the beloved disciple. (See Les Actes des Apotres, 55, 218-223, 227, 246, 368, 481-484.)

[19] See Les Actes des Apotres, 669-680, 777.

[20] See especially 1 Clement, 26, 2 (Hebrews i, 3-4). It is certain that Clement uses the Epistle to the Hebrews, but he does not quote it as having canonical authority. As to his other quotations, he refers to 1 Corinthians as historical evidence and not precisely as an officially sanctioned writing.

[21] De Pudicitia, 20: "Et utique receptior (more widely accepted) apud ecclesias epistola Barnabae illo apocrypho (forbidden for public use) Pastore moechorum."

[22] Heresies, iii, 11, 9; Exposition, 99-100 (Faldati's translation, 168-9).

[23] The canon of Muratori justifies the exclusion of The Shepherd on the grounds that the collection of prophets is complete in the Old Testament and that, not being apostolic, it cannot be admitted into the New.

[24] 1 Apology, 6.

[25] Text after Lietzmann, Symbolstudien, xiv, in Zeitschrift fur N.W., 1927, p. 91.

[26] PisteueiV eiV criston 'Ihsoun, ton uion tou qeou, ton gennhqenta dia pneumatoV agiou ek MariaV thV parqenou.

[27] Cf. Lietzmann, art. cit.; Hennecke, 575.

[28] Kai uioV sou apedeicqh ek pneumatoV agiou kai parqenou gennhqeiV. Cf. Lietzmann, Messe, 158.

[29] Streeter, loc. cit.; Bacon, 58.

[30] The interpretation given by Bacon (55) of the passage in Tertullian, De Pudicitia, where he says that The Shepherd has been judged apocryphal and spurious, "ab omni concilio ecclesiarum," seems rather forced. The reference is not to a succession of set Councils, but simply to unanimous agreement.

[31] The word ceirotonhsate here translated "choose" does not necessarily imply the laying on of hands, but that meaning may be supposed.

[32] 1 Timothy iii, 1-13; iv, 14; v, 1, 19; 2 Timothy i, 1-6; ii, 24-26; iv, 18-20; Titus i, 5-9 (where the "presbyters" of 5 are individualized in the "bishop" of 7).

[33] The Diotrephes of 3 John 9, even if he had no personal existence, is an historical type of the bishop with no liking for wandering preachers.

[34] This should be taken as meaning a strict monogamy.

[35] Nevertheless Philippi may have had as bishop the Valens who is said by Polycarp (Epistle, 11) to have made himself unworthy of his office (hypothesis of Delafosse, Lettres de Ignace d'Antioche, 33).

[36] 1 Clement, 42, 44. The language of the author of these passages is clearly not that of a man who had known the apostles and was writing only thirty years after the death of Peter and Paul.

[37] Tertullian seems to have applied to the Marcionites in particular what he says of gnostics in general, De Praescriptione, 41.

Ante sunt perfect; catechumeni quam edocti. Ipsae mulieres haereticae quam procaces! . . . Ordinationes eorum temerariae, leves, inconstantes: nunc neophytos collocant, nunc saeculo obstrictos, nunc apostatas nostros . , . Itaque alius hodie episcopus, eras alius; hodie diaconus qui

eras lector; hodie presbyter qui eras laicus: nam et laicis sacerdotalia numera injungunt.

[38] In 172, according to the Chronicle of Eusebius; in 152, according to Hippolytus, Heresies, 48, 1. See the discussion of these dates in P. de Labriolle, La Crise Montaniste, 569. Maximilla died about 180, Montanus and Priscilla having previously disappeared. The date 172 mav be a little too late; it is a question whether it originally referred to the outbreak of the movement or to some event which brought it to the attention of the communities. [39] Irenaeus and the martyrs of Lyons, without positively approving the saints of Phrygia, wished them not to be condemned. The attitude of Pope Eleutherus seems to have conformed to the views of Irenaeus. Tertullian, Adv. Praxeam, 1, speaks of a bishop of Rome who, on the point of giving express recognition to the Montanist prophesyings, was circumvented by the logician Praxeas, so that he suppressed the letter of approval which he had already written. It was probably round Zephyrinus (198-217) in the first years of his episcopate that Praxeas wove his plots.

[40] Approximate date. The attitude of the bishop of Rome to Montanism seems to have contributed, at least indirectly, to the secession of Tertullian.

Early Christian Writings is copyright © Peter Kirby <E-Mail>.