CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
TURNING now from these scriptural investigations, let us glance for a moment at the state of religious thought at the period we are considering.
What themes were uppermost in men's minds? we ask.
What were bishops thinking about in those days, or what had they mainly at heart?
We should be glad of a fuller answer to these questions than is vouchsafed us in the brief extracts from Papias which remain; yet the little which we find has its significance, and we welcome it with gratitude, however unexpected the picture it discloses.
Says the historian Eusebius, after giving several miraculous incidents narrated by Papias:
"This same writer adds other matters too as having come to him from unwritten tradition, several parables and precepts of the Saviour, and some other things quite too mythical.
Among other things he declares that after the resurrection of the dead, a thousand years would follow, during which Christ's kingdom would exist cor-
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
poreally upon this earth.
Which ideas," adds Eusebius apologetically, "I think were assumptions of his own, misconceiving the apostolic narratives, and not comprehending certain things upon their pages which were spoken mystically.
For he seems to have been a man of extremely small intelligence."!
On other occasions he speaks of Papias with the greatest respect, calling him once "a man most learned in all matters, and well acquainted with the Scriptures ;'.2 but doctrines had changed, it seems, in two hundred years, and the notion of an earthly kingdom had fallen under suspicion when Eusebius wrote. The point remains, however, that this bishop of the second century, whose name is honored throughout Christendom, looked forward confidently to an earthly reign of Christ in Jerusalem for one thousand years.
This is not our conception of the future, it must be confessed.
Yet let us go back some eighteen centuries, place ourselves beside Papias for a moment, and see if the notion is as unaccountable on his part as at first sight ap1 Hist. Ecc., ili. 39, 11-13.
2 iii. 36, 2, This passage is missing in some manuscripts, and is regarded by many as an interpolation; but it is in any case an early estimate of the man, and therefore worth preserving.
Comp., also, rb, Bly, 8
PAPIAS pears.
The Christian Church, we must remember, had hardly passed as yet out of the atmosphere of Jewish belief; out of the grasp of ideas, I mean, which viewed the present world as the scene of both earthly and heavenly functions, and the fit stage even for the awful events of the Day of Judgment.
In the splendid symbolism of the Prophets things invisible and visible, imagination and reality, became one.
" Blow ye the trumpet in Zion," says Joel, "sound an alarm in my holy mountain; .
. for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand." "And it shall come to pass .
. that I will pour out \my spirit upon all flesh ; ne your sons and your ©) + neth .
MRL Sad ja MOAR Dey daughters shall pipes your old men shall i dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.'
"So shall ye know that I am the Lord your God dwelling in Zion."!
"Behold," says Isaiah, "the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate."
"TI will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the Lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger."
Out of this terror and woe Israel alone shall be saved.
"Israel shall be saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation : ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world
1 Joel ii. 1-3, 28; iii. 17.
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
without end."
In those days "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them."
"For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind."
"They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord." 1 When the nation returned from captivity, they came to a land where they were to reign forever, under a prince of the house of David.
"And they shall dwell in the land that I have given unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers have dwelt; and they shall dwell therein, even they, and their children, and their children's children for ever : and my servant David shall be their prince for ever As time went on, and troubles multiplied over Israel, this reign of Jehovah among his people took more definite form.
It was to introduce a new zon into history; the "coming age," the "regeneration." 2
Jewish thoughts fixed themselves on some great deliverer.
A Messiah should appear, to reign upon the earth over all 1 Is. xiii. 9, 13; xlv. 17; xi. 6; Ixv. 17, 25.
2 Ezek. xxxvii.
25; Jer. xxiv. 6.
8 Matt. xii. 32; Mark iv. 19; Luke xvi. 8; 2 Tim. iv. 10.
IIo PAPIAS the righteous!
This reign would be of vast length ; four hundred years, said some, as the tribes wandered four hundred years in the wilderness ; a thousand years, said others.
'Is not one day with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day?"
During the century preceding the birth of Jesus this messianic reign of a thousand years had gained firm hold of the Jewish imagination, and the final judgment had been thrust into the far-off background, till that happy period had passed.®
1 At first the Jews seem to have thought of God alone as ruler in the restored kingdom.
The idea of a Messiah appears vaguely in Daniel vii. 13, 22, in a form which had much influence upon the Jewish imagination; but more definitely in the Sibylline Oracles of about the same period, and the Book of Enoch.
(The Sibyllines and Enoch belong probably, in their Jewish form, to the first or second century before Christ; afterwards they were both much added to by Christian writers.) See Sibyll. iii. 49, 766, 767; Enoch ro,
II, 90-100; also, Psalms of Solomon xvii. 4, 5; 1 Macc. iv.
46; xiv. 41.
2 2 Ezra vii. 28.
The idea of a thousand years can be traced back, more or less distinctly, to Ps. xc. 4.
If Jehovah had taken six days (2. e, six thousand years) for the creation and continuance of the existing universe, which was nearing its end, there must follow another thousand years of rest and happiness.
(Epis. Barnabas XVey) Lrens, ULE. Ni. 23, 2)3) Ver265) 30) 8 Weber, System d. Altsynag. Palis. T: heologie, 334, 3723
Schiirer, ist. of Jewish People in Time of Christ, Div. TI.
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
II These Jewish prophecies, as we have seen, were the unquestioned authorities to which the earlier generations of Christians naturally turned for proof or confirmation of their faith.
But even when Christian records appeared at last to take their place beside the ancient Scriptures, were there not intimations of the same kind there also?
However skillfully modern exegesis may deal with the New Testament, must we not all confess to the presence of certain verses there which sadly bewilder us, and which we would gladly eliminate from the sacred text?
How are we to understand these words: "Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."!
Or these: "Then came unto him the mother of Zebedee's children with her sons, worshipping him, and desiring a certain thing of him.
And he said unto her, What wilt thou?
She saith unto him, Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom.
And Jesus answered vol. ii. 137, etc.; Liicke, Offenbarung, i. 40-342; Hausrath,
Time of Jesus, i. 191-204; C. H. Toy, Judaism and Christianity, 52-68, 372-414; J. H. Allen, Zarly Christianity, ch. i.; J. Drummond, Jewish Messiah.
1 Matt. xvi. 28; Mark xiv. 62.
PAPIAS and said .
. To sit on my right hand, and on my left, is not mine to give, but z¢ shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of my Father." 4
Or, again: "Then answered Peter and said unto him, Behold we have forsaken all, and followed thee ; what shall we have therefore? And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel."?
Or how interpret what Jesus says to his disciples at the Last Supper: "I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath appointed unto me; that ye
'may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, * and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of ~ Tsrael." 8
Whatever impression we may receive from ' these words, or however easy it may be in these
Eel of "cathe on wrpovl Of, ¢ ob THA days to reduce them to spiritual terms, and make them still pass current, there can be no doubt how the immediate disciples of Jesus understood them.
What a startling confession row tie, fro pl VN i lies in these words: " We trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel." 4
Still more incomprehensible the question put 1 Matt. xx. 20-23.
2 Matt. xix. 27, 28.
8 Luke xxii. 29, 30.
4 Luke xxiv. 21.
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
to the risen Lord: "Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel ?"
Not even the death and final ascension of the Lord could quench this hope of the visible messianic kingdom.
If he was taken up into heaven just when his disciples were awaiting his final triumph, (it was only to return to thd,
| ticu hobo ¥ earth, and establish there his throne.' Said) (1 He pun Peter to the crowds which thronged around him ie
" ne bose q i in the Temple: "He shall send Jesus Christ, te Bal ve ies fen which before was preached unto you: whom Tht Jowjsee, Ova Th the heaven must receive until the times of res- "wwinrynad dew titution of all things, which God hath spoken "°°* \ | ia Ng of by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the fost. (Lda world began."2
So far as the New Testament macclicalya ea history carries us, the moment did not come + Ye Wa om when the Apostles of Jesus renounced this) oc Veiu 4 Qu long-inherited expectation.
'" Therefore judge: a he Linnstasne nothing before the time," says Paul, "until the , Lc avrorhil< fe Lord come, who both will bring to light the, 4 : To.
| 1 BBS hidden things of darkness, and will make mani- "*" fest the counsels of hearts."8
"For as often ths) meareal ak as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do Karma, Th vee TO show the Lord's death till he come." * "Behold, wv At ot uno
I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, ' but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the 1 Acts i. 6.
2 Acts ili. 20, 21; Mark xvi. 19.
8 1 Cor. iv. 5.
4 xi. 26.
PAPIAS twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.''?
"For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep.
For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God : and the dead in Christ shall rise first : then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we be ever with the Lord."?
Inthe latter days came a certain disenchantment, as the first expectation remained so long unfulfilled, but there was no surrender of the hope itself: "There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord 1 1 Cor. xv. 51, 52.
2 1 Thess. iv. 15-17.
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as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. ... But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
. Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth," 1
How profoundly this dream had affected the early Christian imagination is shown by the strange speculations current for many generations over the resurrection of the body.
Paul's Epistles, as we remember, hint at a controversy on this point which evidently had a more serious and personal import for his readers than it is easy for us to conceive.
He had assured his followers from the first, as we have just seen, that those still living when the end came, though entering at once upon the new kingdom, would yet have no precedence or advantage over those who had died in the mean time?
Although already in their graves, these would yet be received with the rest.
But in what bodies would they come?
And in what form would the living themselves enter into the Messiah's realm ? Would they retain their for1 2 Peter iii. 3-13.
2 1 Thess. iv. 15.
PAPIAS mer bodies, or be clothed with new?
" But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?
Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.
. So also is the resurrection of the dead.
It is sown in corruption ; it is raised in incorruption. ..
. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body." } The question of the spiritual body and its relation to the actual body long remained a grave one.
For more than a century, we discover as we read the discussions of the future life, resurrection always means resurrection of the flesh.
The controversy of that period was never with those who denied the future or questioned immortality; it was with those who doubted bodily resurrection.
Apart from that condition, the future seems to have had no meaning to the Christian believer.
"If you have fallen in with any who are called Christians," said Justin Martyr, a contemporary of Papias, "who yet say that there is no resur1 1 Cor. xv. 35-38, 42, 44.
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
rection of the dead, but that their souls are [{': taken up into heaven immediately upon death, \ do not suppose that they are Christians."
2 | "Tf the Saviour proclaimed salvation to the | soul alone, what new thing did he bring us, | beyond what was taught by Pythagoras and |
Plato, and all their band?'"'?
Irenzeus, writing a generation later, is still greatly disturbed by the heretics who claim that the spirit rises to heaven at the moment of death.
'" Whatsoever all the heretics with the greatest solemnity may have asserted, they come to this at last ; they blaspheme the Creator, and deny the salvation of the image of God, which the flesh certainly is.'8
"They deny the power of God,— who fix their thought upon the infirmity of the flesh ; and forget his strength who raises it from the dead." 4
"For the heretics, despising the handiwork of God, and not allowing the salvation of their flesh, claim that immediately upon their death they shall pass beyond the heavens." ®
As with Christ, who appeared in bodily form after the resurrection, so will it be with the Christian.
"Ifthe Lord tarried until the third day in the lower parts of the earth,® afterwards
1 Trypho, 80.
2 De Resurrectione, 10.
Attributed to Justin.
8 Tren., Her., iv. Preface, 4.
Wel Ssn2s DEVE she 6 Eph. iv. 9.
PAPIAS rising in the flesh, — how must they not be put to confusion who declare that the 'lower parts' mean this earth of ours, but that only their inner man, leaving here the body, ascends into the supercelestial place." 4
If the soul alone is saved, says Tertullian, a \little later, man is only half saved.
"He is 'saved only so far as the soul is concerned, but lost as to the flesh, if the flesh does not rise." 2
Does not Paul say, "' We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body" ? But "it will be impossible to be judged for things done in the body, if there is no body."?
No aspect of this question is too trivial or grotesque to be solemnly discussed, and all objections met.
Tertullian quotes Paul triumphantly : "In this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven."
But how can we be clothed upon, he asks, unless there be a body to be clothed?
"For being found naked, the flesh having been laid aside or worn out, the dead recover it again, so that being reclothed in flesh they may then be clothed upon in immortality ; for one cannot be clothed upon, unless already clothed."* If the 1 Tren., Her., v. 31, 2.
2 Tertull. adv. Mare. i. 24.
8 2 Cor. v. 10; Tertull. adv. Mare. v. 12.
4 2 Cor. v. 2; Tertull., Res. Car., 42.
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11g unbeliever asked how it was possible to gather together again the scattered remains of the departed, once dissolved in death, the Christian apologist answered : " Although to men it may appear quite impossible that what has passed into the universe should be separable from it again, yet it is not possible for God to be ignorant either of the limbs themselves, or of the particles of which they consist, or whither each of the dissolved particles passes, or what element has received that which is dissolved and found other affinities."!
Philosophers might believe in the natural immortality of the soul ; but not so the Christian.
Oddly enough, the advocates of transmigration were considered as coming nearer the true Christian doctrine than believers in spiritual immortality.
They at least showed due respect to the body.
'The Pythagoreans and Platonists affirm in a manner quite approaching our own that the soul returns into the body ; though not indeed into the same, nor always into human bodies ; Homer for instance being supposed to have passed into a peacock.
. .. They at least knocked at the door of truth, although they entered not.".?
It was held that 1 Athenagoras, /es., 2.
2 Tertull., Res. Car, 1.
Pulsata saltem, licet non adita veritate.
PAPIAS the soul can have no distinct individuality, except as attained through the body; can have neither happiness nor misery, reward nor punishment.
'Man cannot be said to exist when the body is dissolved, and scattered abroad, even though the soul continue by itself ; it is absolutely necessary that the end of man's being should be reached in a reconstitution of the two, body and soul.''? a I do not mean that this thought is put always in its grossest form.
One writer of the period at least gives it as attractive a guise as such a doctrine is capable of: " Do you think that if anything is withdrawn from our feeble eyes, it perishes to God?
Every body, whether dried up into dust, or dissolved into moisture, or compressed into ashes, or attenuated into smoke, is withdrawn from us, but it is reserved for God in the custody of the elements." ? Indeed, long before this epoch, under Platonic influence no doubt, the great problem had been touched in far nobler mood, and in words which must have been familiar in some Christian circles.
" For the corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthy tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things."
"God created man to be immortal, and made him to 1 Athenagoras, Res., 25.
2 Minucius Felix, Octav., 34.
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
be an image of his own being." !
But this, as we see, was not the aspect of the theme which prevailed in the early church.
In the next century Origen handles it with freer hand than any before ; yet even he recognizes no distinction between the resurrection of the dead and the resurrection of the body.
Those who deny the one deny the other. ?
Such being the prevailing views, it is no longer strange that Papias should believe in a messianic reign upon earth.
Indeed, he had grounds for his faith quite independent of the written Scriptures.
The oral traditions, on which he so much relied, had something to tell him on this point also.
Among them was a conversation of Jesus with his disciples, which he narrates ir? the Fourth Book of his Interpretations or Commentaries, as follows:
'The presbyters who had seen John, the disciple of the Lord, declared that they had heard him tell how the Lord described these times, saying ;
The days will come when vines shall grow, each one bearing ten thousand branches, and upon each branch ten thousand twigs, and upon each one of the twigs ten thousand shoots, and upon every shoot ten thousand bunches, and upon 1 Wis. Sol. ix. 15; ii. 23.
See Toy's Judaism, 386-388.
2 Prin.,ii. 10,1 and 2. See, also, Clem. Alex., Strom., iv. 26.
PAPIAS every bunch ten thousand grapes, and each grape when pressed shall yield twenty-five metres of wine.
And when one of the saints takes hold of a cluster, another shall cry out, 'I ama better cluster, take me; bless the Lord through me.'
So, too, the grain of wheat shall produce ten thousand ears, and every ear shall bear ten thousand grains, and every grain shall yield ten pounds of fine flour, clear and pure; and all the other fruit trees and seeds and herbs shall bear fruit in similar proportions; and all animals feeding on the fruits of the earth shall become peaceable and in accord one with the other, being subject to man in all subjection."
This, according to Papias, was spoken by Jesus in the presence of the Twelve, of whom Judas alone proved skeptical.
"But Judas the traitor would not believe, but asked how such fruitfulness could be created by the Lord; and the Lord said ; They shall see who enter upon that kingdom." 4
This extract would certainly not be worth quoting on its own account; nor, it must be confessed, does it increase our esteem for the 1'Tren., £727., V. 33, 33 V33) 4c Comp. Apocalypse of Baruch xxix. 5. There is an obvious resemblance between these passages, pointing apparently to some common source of written or more probably oral tradition.
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
venerable Fathers, one of whom could. solemnly report such tales, as " credible to all believers," and the other repeat them with full approval.
But whatever lets us into the hidden thoughts of this remote period is of distinct value; and nothing could help us better to understand the. crude and conflicting beliefs out of which our ©
2 ~ The wrils Christian faith was born, or the heterogeneous anol traditions from which by slow processes our , tf / four Gospels had to be sifted, than this extraorThe oe wy ae pe vu. OLooVd Ws dinary prophecy, so long credited without disse a may to Jesus himself.
A still higher warrant for his belief, probably ; well known to Papias,! was found in the widely || circulated Revelation of St. John, now standing | at the close of the New Testament.
In this ©' K3 ek at wh * book, which seems like an echo of the ancient /*% Jewish Prophets, and which, apart from its preface and occasional references to "the Lamb," seems as purely Jewish as those Prophets themselves, the earlier conception of the Messiah's coming has taken a more definite form.
Let us glance at the main features of 1 The Book of Revelation was unquestionably known at this time, as passages like Zrypho, 81, prove.
We may naturally infer that Papias was familiar with it, though Eusebius does not mention the fact.
He merely says, on his own account, that Revelation was probably written by the Presbyter John.
(Hist. Ecc., iii. 39, 6.)
PAPIAS this singular Apocalypse.
The last days are drawing nigh, as the writer believes,! and their awful events are revealed to him in vision.
When seal after seal has been broken, and woe has followed woe, and the seven angels have brought upon the earth their seven plagues, and Babylon, the Mother of all Abominations, has fallen, the Messiah comes forth through the opening skies, followed by the armies of heaven, to overthrow the kings of the earth, and exterminate all his foes; the old serpent Satan is bound and cast into the bottomless pit ; thrones appear, judgment begins, and they who have borne witness to Jesus rise from their graves, to live and reign with Christ a thousand years.?
The elect are few; on these death hath no more power; they are priests of God and Christ.3
This is the first resurrection.
When the thousand years have passed, Satan is loosed, the enemies of Israel are gathered, like the sands of the sea, for a last assault upon the beloved city Jerusalem; fire comes down from heaven to destroy them ; Satan is cast once for all into the lake of fire and brimstone, to be tormented day and night forever and ever.
The second resurrection follows.
A great white throne appears, and we behold the last Judgment.
De Revaitey3:
2 xix. 11-21; xx. I-4.
BEXXen eas
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
« And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. ... And the sea gave up the dead which were in it ; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them."
" And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God ; and the books were opened .
. and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works."
" And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire."
" And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire.
This isthe second death.''!
Death has been destroyed, and eternal life begins.
A new heaven and a new earth take the place of the first heaven and the first earth.
"And I sawa new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away ; and there was no more sea.
And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God."
And 1 Rev. xx. 7-15.
PAPIAS the city "had a wall great and high, and had twelve gates, .
. and names written thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel...
. And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it...
. And the nations .
. shall walkin the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honor into it...
. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him." 1
The splendid vision ends where it began: on earth and in Jerusalem.
This singular book has always seemed strangely out of place in a collection of Christian writings.
A vision which concerns itself almost exclusively with Jerusalem, its temple, its elders, its altars, and its worshipers,? which reflects throughout the Jewish hatred of Rome and its rulers,? which reserves its bitterest scorn for 1 Rev. xxi.; xxii. 1-3,
123 Iv. 4; Vis) xt) ds 8 xiii. 1, 14-18; xiv. 8; xvi. 2, 19; Xvil. I-5, 9-123; xviii.
2-19.
Comp. Mommsen, Provinces of the Roman Empire, li, 214 n.
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the "synagogues of Satan," those who, while claiming to be Jews, are not worthy of the name,! and which has constantly before its eyes
Mount Zion and the Twelve Tribes of Israel,? would seem to bear its Jewish stamp upon its face.
How singular the moment in Christian history when the church could claim such a oy writing as its own, without a thought of incongruity!
One recent critic declares it unequivocally a Jewish prophecy, written during the horrors of the Roman siege, then translated and applied to Christian uses during the persecutions under Domitian.2
Other commentators, following this idea, point out not two, but three or four different authors, Jewish and Christian.*
And indeed there seems little reason to doubt that the perplexities which that confused narrative has caused have been largely owing to 1 ii. Q; iii. 9.
2.5; vii. 4-8; xiv. 1; xv. 3; xxi. 12.
8 Die Offenbarung Johannis, eine Jiidische Apokalypse in christlicher Bearbeitung, Eberh. Vischer, 1886.
This writer points out that the Christian passages, connected chiefly with the worship of the Lamb, constitute only about one eighth of the book, and when removed leave it a much more consistent whole.
The Christian interpolations are: i.iii.; v. 6, 8-10, with single words in 12, 13; vi. 1,16 (word "Lamb"); vii. 9-17; xi. 8; xii. 11, 17; xiii. 8-10; xiv. I-5, 10, 12, 13;
XV. 3; XVi. 15; xvii. 6,14; Xviil. 20; XIX. 7, 9, 10,13; XX. 4-0; xxi. 5-9, 14, 22, 23, 27; xxii. 1, 3, 6-21.
4 Pfleiderer, Urchristenthum, 350-350.
PAPIAS the fact that it is not a single writing, but a combination of several prophecies of different dates.1
For our present purposes it matters little whether the Revelation was originally a Christian writing, or a Jewish prophecy accepted and remoulded by the Christian Church.
The significant thing is that a book should exist at all which could be called with equal reason Jewish or Christian.
In any case it shows how vague was once the dividing line between the two faiths.
In any case it shows what vivid expectations of an earthly future were haunting ~ Jewish and Christian minds alike; and what ample authority Papias had for his millennial dreams.
Whatever its origin, there is no doubt of the profound influence which this Apocalypse exerted on the Christian belief of early generations ; an influence which did not wholly cease till the year 1000 A. D. had come and gone?
There is no more delicate problem than for a later generation to interpret to itself the beliefs of an earlier and more primitive age.
Readers of the New Testament for eighteen centuries have rarely made even the attempt to do so;
1 Note X.
2 "Many documents of this epoch open thus: ' Appropinquante mundi termine."
Alzog, Manual of Christian History, ii. 392 n.
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and consequently that familiar volume, when read to-day, is apt to convey to us in many places almost any meaning but that which is naturally and simply its own.
It is only by force, therefore, and at the peril of much confusion and possible misunderstanding, that we,
| © , it remind ourselves that Papias's conception of the lt temporal messiahship is in all essential points % that of the New Testament itself.
To us this wo} v« ape she is a purely materialistic idea.
Yet when we ova. mt se ih bluntly pronounce it so, we must remember ~j/ be Fhe CE er that if materialistic, it is the materialism of the i,
Sr a, Reiyhlas Sermon on the Mount and the Prodigal Son, the |, »# .
>, P} Parable of the Talents and the Good Samari- , eae tan; for it is safe to say that there is nothing in © fi the earlier Gospels which is inconsistent with "> ait « this messianic future, or does not distinctly pre4°"! suppose it.
The Paradise of those Gospels,} the kingdom of heaven," the eternal punishment or reward,? the "end of the world,'* hell,® resurrection,® day of judgment,' eternal life,® 1 Luke xxiii. 43; 2 Cor. xii. 4; Rev. ii. 7.
2 Matt. iii. 2; iv. 17; xxiv. 30; Mark ix.47; Luke xxi. 31; xili. 28, 29.
8 Matt. xix. 29; xxv. 31-46.
Comp. Enoch 105.
4 Matt. xiii. 39, 40; xxiv. 3.
5 Matt. v. 29, 30; Mark ix. 47; Luke xvi. 22-26.
6 Matt. xxii. 28, 30; Luke xiv. 14; xx. 33-30.
7 Mark vi. 11; Matt. xi. 22; xii. 36; 2 Pet. iii. 7.
8 Mark x. 17, 30; Luke xviii. 18-30.
PAPIAS redemption,! immortality,? are all parts of the same fundamental conception.
So with all the lofty moral ideals of which the Gospels are so full, and for which we chiefly prize them; if these ideals seem to us to demand for their realization a larger field than this visible universe, the Christian of that age did not think so.
In his view, the divine qualities of charity, faith, love, purity, forgiveness, self-consecration, were all attainable within the earthly kingdom which was to appear before that generation had passed, and which, at certain exalted moments, seemed already to have begun.?
Plainly, it was as true then as now that the spiritual mind sees _all things spiritually.
And we cannot doubt that this messianic framework, within which the religious thought of the age of necessity moved, took varied character and coloring according to the special mind which held it ; shap1 Luke xxi. 28-32.
2 The word "immortality " does not occur in the Gospels.
In the Epistles we find it twice; in the one case ascribed to God, as his exclusive attribute (1 Tim. vi. 16), in the other, promised to all of Christ's followers.
(1 Cor. xv. 23, 53, 54.) In three other instances where the word appears in our translation, it should read "incorruption," or "incorruptible."
(Rom. ii. 7; 1 Tim. i. 17; 2 Tim. i. 10.) 8 Luke xvii. 21.
It is uncertain whether this should be translated "within you," or " among you."
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
ing itself for religious natures of the higher type in strict obedience to their imperious needs.!
In any case, millenarism was the prevailing Christian belief of the age.
Within the ranks of primitive Judaic Christianity, at least, barbaric 4) to the world's eye,? untouched as yet by philo- \ sophic speculation, it was the universal faith.
It was the orthodoxy of the century.
None but heretics questioned it. So far from being alone in his faith, Papias represented in this respect all the accepted writers, all the Christian " Fathers," of his time.
Justin Martyr, his contemporary, discusses this point with Trypho the Jew, after the following fashion: "'Tell me,' said
Trypho, 'do you really claim that this place, Jerusalem, is to be rebuilt, and do you expect your people to come together in it, and be made happy with Christ and the Patriarchs and Prophets?'
. .. And I answered, I am not so worthless a fellow, O Trypho, as to say one thing and mean another.
. Many, as I have told you, think otherwise.
. But I, and all entirely right-minded Christians, know well that there is to be a resurrection of the flesh, and 1 Note Y.
2 Tatian, an Assyrian convert to Christianity (about 160), has no hesitation in speaking of the Scriptures as "barbaric( writings," and of himself as a " disciple of the barbaric philosophy."
(Add. to Greeks, 29, 42.)
PAPIAS that for a thousand years Jerusalem will be built .up and adorned and enlarged; as the prophets
Ezekiel and Isaiah and the others declare.''!
Irenzeus,? alarmed at the errors which were creeping into the church, wrote a work of five books "against Heresies ;" but for Papias and his doctrine he has only approving words. There was no heresy in that, but only the highest truth.
Quoting the words of Jesus as given Matt. xxvi.
29, Irenzeus says: " Here the Lord promised to drink of the fruit of the vine with his disciples ; thus indicating at the same time an earthly inheritance in which the new fruit of the vine is drunk, and his own fleshly resurrection.
For it is the,newly risen flesh alone that could receive the newcup. For he cannot possibly be thought of as drinking of the fruit of the vine with his disciples in supercelestial places ; nor again can they who drink it be conceived as without flesh ; as it is the property of flesh, not spirit, to drink of the vine."
The "New Jerusalem" of the 1 Trypho, 80.
Justin rests his faith upon Is. Ixv. 17, etc.; Ps. xc. 4; Rev. xx. 4, 5.
See, also, Zrypho, 51, 110, 139.
AN 1B HS 8 Her., v. xxxiil. 1.
Irenzeus takes Luke xviii. 29, 30, and Matt. xix. 29, very literally. "These refer to the times of the Kingdom .
. in which they shall have no earthly occupation, but shall have a table prepared for them by God, which shall supply them with all possible dishes."
(Vv. 33, 2.)
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
Apocalypse is the true and actual Jerusalem ; the Jerusalem of history having been but the image of the real.
"Of this tabernacle Moses received the pattern on the Mount; and nothing is allegorical here [in the New Jerusalem], but everything firm, true, and substantial, prepared by God, for the enjoyment of righteous men." 4
According to the " Presbyters," whom Irenzeus, as well as Papias, quotes so often, there are to be gradations of well-being in these messianic realms.
'For since the men themselves are real, the transplanting must be real; so that they shall not vanish away among things that are not, but progress among things that are.
. .. There is a distinction therefore between those who produce a hundred-fold, who produce sixty-fold, and who produce thirty-fold: the first will be taken up into the heavens, the second will pass their time in Paradise, the last will inhabit the city.
Therefore it is that the Lord said, 'In my Father's house are many mansions..47
Tertullian ° also writes a bitter " Prescription against Heretics ;" but finds no place among the heresies for the doctrine of the millennium.
The end of the world, as he believes, is close 1 Her., V. 35, 2:
2 y. 36, 2; John xiv. 2.
8 A. D. 145-220.
PAPIAS at hand, awaiting only the destruction of the Roman empire.
"For we know that a mighty shock is impending over the entire universe, the end of the present world, threatening fearful woes, and retarded only by the continued existence of the Roman empire."!
In view of this, the hope of the faithful lies in the coming of the Messiah's kingdom.
"We avow that there is a kingdom promised us upon earth, this side of heaven, yet in another state of being; I mean after the resurrection for a thousand years, in the divinely built city of Jerusalem, let down from heaven.
Indeed, this prophecy has been very lately fulfilled, during the expedition to the East.
For it appears, even upon pagan testimony, that in Judea for forty days, in the morning hours, a city hung down from the skies, disappearing with all its walls at the approach of day.
This we affirm to be the city provided by God for receiving the saints on their resurrection, and refreshing them with an abundance of spiritual blessings, as a recompense for those things which, in this world, we have either despised or lost."
The worst heretics, in Tertullian's eyes, are those who claim for the soul an immediate immortality.
"Let us now turn to those Scriptures 1 Afol., 32.
2 Tertull. adv. Marc. iii. 24.
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
which refute those animalists, for I will not call them spiritualists,! who claim that the resurrection is here and now, or immediately upon the departure from this life."
Are we not told that the Lord must first come in the clouds of heaven?2
"But who has yet seen Jesus descending from heaven, in like manner as the Apostles saw him ascending ?*.
. Indeed, is there any one who has risen again — except the heretic?" 4
It is not necessary to pursue these citations further. They represent, as I have said, the prevailing faith of the period.
Origen ° seems to have been the first to oppose these "disciples of the letter," and insist upon a figurative interpretation of the New Jerusalem and its joys;® and there were soon others to follow in his steps.? But the old belief, deeply intrenched in 1 " Animales istos, ne dixerim spiritales."
2 Luke xxi. 27.
8 Acts i. II.
4 Res. Car., xxii. Tertullian turns this millennial belief to account in many ways.
He finds in it the most unanswerable argument in the troublesome matter of second marriages.
"Since these things are so, how will a woman find place for another husband, who holds her own even to futurity?"
(AZonog., 10.) 5 a. D. 185-254.
6 Prin., ii. 11, 2.
7 A Pannonian bishop, Victorinus, otherwise little known, writing about A. D. 300, ends a commentary on the Apoca-
PAPIAS the Scriptures themselves, and resenting the devices of the allegorists, held its own persistently. In western churches, and certain regions of the East, it remained unshaken through the third century.!
In fact, it has never yet died out of the Christian Church.
The expectation of a millennial reign, under some form, has shown strange power to survive; even its grossest features reappearing generation after generation.
Even where it has been rejected as a doctrine, it has left its ineffaceable stamp; and it will hardly be claimed that the popular
)notion of the future to-day is essentially nobler or more "spiritual," except in name, than 'these primitive beliefs.
The creeds of the church have disclaimed the Apocalyptic doctrine as a whole; but, for some occult reason, while silent upon the millennium, have retained
'the resurrection of the flesh, and the visible _return of Christ in glory to judge the quick
"and dead, In these days we mention the mile » ; BA Fe % weer" wy : iy lennium only with a smile; but the first two lypse with the words: " Therefore they are not to be heard who assure themselves that there is to be an earthly reign of a thousand years."
(Comm. on the Apocalypse, 22.) Eusebius's idea of such beliefs we have already seen.
(P. 107.)
1 Euseb., Hist. Lcc., vii. 24; Lactantius, Dv. Znstit., vii.
14, 24. Comp. Zucyc. Brit., gth ed., art. " Millennium," by Harnack.
THE MILLENNIAL REIGN
Christian centuries are not to be explained without it ; nor was it surrendered by the infant church till unwelcome speculations from without came in to disturb its naive messianic dream.
CHARA LR]
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
It is hardly to be supposed that beliefs such as have just been described would satisfy all minds.
Papias himself, as will be remembered, alludes to certain "retailers of strange doctrines;"' 1 thus suggesting other intellectual currents than any which we have yet traced.
We have seen, too, that the "shipmaster of Pontus," as he was called,? was giving the churches something to think of; and we soon find that Marcion's mental restlessness was one instance only of a theological ferment which portended serious results.
Let us return for a moment to Marcion and the Scripture investigations which he was pursuing.
In the course of those investigations he came upon writings more ancient, and to his mind far more trustworthy, than the floating Gospel narratives then chiefly in vogue.
These were the Epistles of Paul.
To Marcion, as we have already seen, Paul was the only true 1 P.6.
2 P. 83.
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
Apostle.
He was the "Apostle, not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father."!
He had a Gospel of his own to preach, very different from that of the older Apostles, whom he had so sharply rebuked for their "dissimulation."2
Paul was the real representative of Christ and his word.
We cannot be surprised that Marcion found a difference between the earlier Gospels and Paul's Epistles (supposing that his Gospels and Epistles corresponded with ours), for the conflicting views of Christ which these writings present strike every thoughtful reader to-day.
In the Gospels, we have the homely details of the Master's daily life and speech, with hardly a hint of his celestial functions ; in the Epistles, the celestial functions become all in all, with hardly a hint of the earthly and human career.
| In the Gospels, the Jewish life and fceremonial )\< are frankly assumed ; in the Epistles, they are AY f as frankly dismissed, as "weak and beggarly «,
, elements," to which no Christian should " desire *"™ for, OAV 4 again to be in bondage." ® ¢ é Wink Trpowe vy In a word, for we need not look far to ex- | plain this distinction, Paul was a scholar of the * |
1 Gal. i. I.
2 Gal. ii.
13. See Tertull. adv. Marc. i. 20; iv. 3; v. I.
3 Gal. iv. 9.
PAPIAS rabbis; and as such versed not only in the barren subtilties which we commonly associate with that name, but also in much wider investigations.
It was a period of transcendental speculation, whose influence could hardly have failed to reach the Jewish schools of thought, even had the Jewish mind been less responsive then than it is now to the spiritual or intellectual activities of the hour.
In Alexandria, as we know, the contact of Greek and Jewish thought had produced one of the most farreaching theological movements of the age; and neither Palestine nor Tarsus was so far distant from Alexandria as to remain wholly uninfluenced by its religious life2 According to an early tradition, Paul had sat at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the most advanced scholars of his day ;° and, whether this be true or not, his
1 There is no proof that Paul was directly influenced by Philo; but there is abundant evidence that the same general influences were at work both in Palestine and in Alexandria.
2 Acts xviii. 24-28 ; xix. 1.
8 Acts xxii. 3.
In his own writings Paul never mentions Gamaliel; nor is there any special evidence, so the critics think, of Gamaliel's influence upon his thought.
(Hausrath, Time of Apostles, iii. 33, 34.) At the same time, due weight must be given the above passage from Acts, as a tradition.
According to a rabbinical tradition, Gamaliel taught 500 scholars " Greek wisdom."
(Gfrorer, Urchrist.,i. 2, 402-40 5.)
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
Epistles in themselves give abundant proof of his familiarity with the best rabbinical training then current.
We need not go beyond that training, or the Jewish literature of the age, to find tokens of a widespread Hellenistic influence, which a mind like Paul's would be the last to have escaped.1
He comes to his new faith with ideals of the Messiah and his reign quite unlike those of the Galilaean disciples.
He, too, is looking for a speedy coming of the Lord,? but the Messiah of whom he dreams is a being I of a far more exalted type.
This was a theme ~ evidently on which Jewish speculation had ..y | ar already occupied itself, and over which Paul ©" himself must have pondered, long before he had heard of Jesus of Nazareth.
We have already spoken of the influence upon the Jewish imagination exerted by Daniel's vision of the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven.
"I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him.
And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him.'"'? But other texts
1 Note Z.
MOR ik Pos wap 31 ANNES, ie Aye 8 Dan. vii. 13-27.
See, also, Enoch xlvi.—xlviii., 1xi., xc.
PAPIAS there were which had also exercised the ingenuity of the age, and whose influence upon Paul's messianic ideals his Epistles plainly show.!
Among these was the double narrative of the creation in Genesis, to which he attached so profound a significance.
The distinction between the first two chapters of Genesis, which was pointed out by a French critic® about a century ago, and which became almost the starting-point of modern biblical criticism, had been discovered by Jewish scholars, it seems, seventeen centuries before, and had led, in Alexandria at least, to very mystic conclusions.
According to the first chapter, "God created man in his own image.'
According to the second, "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."* Here, then, according to the schools, are two creations; the first a heavenly man, of divine birth and divine nature;
» the second of the earth, earthy.
The latter 1 1 Cor. x. 1-4; Gal. iii. 16.
2 Gen. i, ii.
8 Astruc, Conjectures sur les Mémoires Originaux, etc.
1753:
4 Geni) 2775 31) 7-8 "Soul, according to the ancient division, was the life of the senses, or animal life, as distinct from body, on the one hand, and spirit, on the other.
Comp.
1 Thess. v. 23.
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
was the real man, as he has already appeared on earth, the former the ideal man, as conceived in God's thought, and dwelling with him from all eternity.1_ This heavenly or ideal man has become identified in Paul's thought with the Messiah ; and upon the above passage he bases his doctrine of the first and second,
Adam.
"So it is written, The first'man) Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.
Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual.
The first man is of the earth, earthy ; the second man is the Lord from heaven." ?
1 Philo, in commenting upon Gen. ii. 7, says: " There are two species of men; one is the heavenly man, the other the earthly.
The heavenly has no part whatever in the perishable or earthly creation, being born in the image of God; but the other was fashioned out of vagrant matter called earth.
Therefore the heavenly man is not spoken of as created, but as formed in God's image; while the earthly was not begotten, but created." Leg. Alleg.,i.12.
See, also, De Mundi Opif., 46; Leg. Alleg., i. 16; i. 29.
This image of God, or archetypal man, Philo elsewhere identifies with the Logos.
(Confus. Ling. 28.) Comp. Gfrorer, Urchrist.,i. 267 ; Hausrath, Zime of Apostles, iii. 22, 97; Pfleiderer, Urchrist., 2s 2 x Cor. xv. 45-47.
In saying "it is written," it is uncertain whether Paul means to give the whole verse as aScripture citation, or only the first clause; but the natural inference is that it is the whole, and that he is quoting from
PAPIAS These are conceptions, we must remember, for which Paul found the way prepared, even if the definite ideals were not given, in his earlier faith. The idealizing process had already begun.
The Messiah has ceased in his thought to be the earthly ruler of an earthly kingdom, he has become a celestial being, present with God from the beginning, and awaiting the moment to enter upon his earthly mission.
Paul is looking for a heavenly Messiah, and finds him in Jesus of Nazareth, who, having risen from the dead, has thus shown himself a being of spiritual nature; the very Lord from heaven.
It is in this light that Paul attaches such supreme importance to the resurrection of Jesus.
Indeed, he tells us little else of Jesus but this one fact.
He assures us that if this be not true, then his preaching was vain, and all faith in Christ vain.!
If it were not true, then even some Scripture version then familiar in the schools, but no longer known.
(Hausrath, Zme of Apostles, iii. 22; Weizsacker, Apos. Age, ii. 276.) It should be added that there is no other evidence than this passage affords that the distinction of the "first Adam" and "last Adam " was in vogue in Paul's time, as it is not found in rabbinical literature, it is claimed, till after the time of Christ.
(See Professor G. F.
Moore, on "Last Adam," in Your. of Biblical Literature, 1897.) :
1 1 Cor. xv. 14; also, Rom. i. 4.
This belief is based partly on Old Testament prophecies.
(1 Cor. xv. 3, 4.)
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
those who had died in the faith had perished.1
In this escape from the grave lay the very proof and secret of his messiahship.
The belief in the resurrection of Jesus? was already current in the Christian community, it appears, when Paul entered it ;* but it was not on this testimony that he relied for his own acceptance of it.
Others had had their visions of the risen one; he, too, had had his.
He also had seen Christ.4
But to what does he allude here?
Not of course to such bodily appearances of Jesus as are described in the earlier
Gospels ;® for it is never supposed that Paul was in Jerusalem at that period, nor is it conceivable, had he witnessed these miraculous incidents, that he would have waited for the lesser it Cor, xv. 13.
2 We have already seen the widely different meanings attached in those days to the terms "resurrection " and "immortality."
(Pp. 116-123.) Resurrection meant simply the rising from the grave; it might be to pass into spiritual realms, it might be to enter the earthly kingdom of the Messiah.
The belief in it in some form had long been held in certain Jewish schools.
(Acts xxiii. 8; Josephus, Azizq., Xviii. I, 3.) Bt Com, sain By} 7 4 x Cor. ix. 1; xv. 8.
"I neither received [the gospel] of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus
Christ."
Gal. i. 12.
5 Mark xvi. 9-18.
PAPIAS miracle at Damascus, to be converted.
He must be referring to some special vision, at Damascus or elsewhere,' granted to him after becoming acquainted with the new faith, but before his final acceptance of it.
What the nature of this vision was we can easily conjecture from the description of a similar experience, which he gives us himself with singular vividness.
"I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord.
I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth ;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.2, And I knew such a man... how that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter."
However obscure these psychological phenomena may be to us, to Paul, with whom they were not infrequent,! they evidently
1 The incident at Damascus is nowhere mentioned in the Epistles, and our only knowledge of it is from the contradictory accounts in Acts (ix. 3-9; xxii. 6-11; xxvi. 12-18).
These accounts point to some oral tradition, based perhaps on Gal. i. 15-17.
2 According to rabbinical theology there were seven heavens.
Paul seems here to identify the third of these with Paradise.
2 Cor. xii. 2, 4.
See Liicke, Ofendarung, i.
287, etc.
3 2 (Coe sath in, * Acts xvi. 9, 103 xviii. Q; XXll. 17-21; xxiii. 11; xxvii.
23, 24.
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
carried great meaning.
They were his revelations.
They supplied him with the(intuitions ) aT Wa which were so much more convincing than any "Wiuyiira' human testimony.
In the present case, this Cr Ananth apparition of the risen Jesus, objectively real to Urol frags him, was plainly the very proof for which he
¢ was waiting.
Not the living man, in flesh and bones, to be touched and handled, and to partake of physical nourishment, but the spiritual and already glorified Jesus, coming down from the right hand of God.
, Jesus therefore had /7 not really died; he had triumphed over death, , , , ; and had now descended from heavenly regions, ;!,,j to reveal himself in spiritual form to Paul.
In thus overcoming death, and establishing the spiritual kingdom, he made the spiritual life possible for all who believed in him.
"Christ 1 Luke xxiv. 36-43.
As these Gospel narratives are later, \'~ than the Epistles, we may fairly assume that Paul's state-/ ments of a purely visionary appearance are the oldest form" of the tradition of Christ's resurrection; the other accounts ;,, marking the gradual legendary accretions.\ As Paul uses iN Neve 4A on the same language in describing the appearance of Christ to)
{y¢ a, [fy [Tee Peter, James, and the other disciples, as in speaking of his | if own vision, he no doubt thought of them all as spiritual |
& ve OS he Corte ft manifestations.
(1 Cor. xv. 5, 6, 7, 8.) In the case of the } multitudes (xv. 6), the vision of one, in moments of great | excitement, might easily be accepted as the vision of all.
For this subject, see Toy's Fudaism, 274, 394; C. C.
Everett's Gospel of Paul, 211-213, 217, 227.
hy oe
PAPIAS the firstfruits ; afterward they that are Christ's at his coming." * With his coming, the new life would begin.
All his followers, whether then living, or already dead, would be clothed in incorruptible bodies, and enter upon immor- ' tal life.
'Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality." 2 j\ In view of these convictions,,drawn from his
\Vprevious faith,,we cannot be "surprised that Paul's language concerning his Master takes from the beginning so exalted a form.
He describes him as sent forth from God "in the fulness of time."
He calls him the "Lord of glory."
He declares that through him we and all things exist.
He holds him to be the very t{ Son of God,.sent to the earth for a season, "in ; the likeness of sinful flesh."?
As Paul pursues ee .adeshis mission, we cannot but feel that this lofty conception grows more and more celestial, less and less human.
Indeed, if his shorter Epistles, 151 Conixy, 23:
2 xv. 51-53.
8 Gal. iv. 4; 1 Cor. ii. 8; viii. 6; Rom. viii. 3.
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
admitted by Marcion into his collection, but questioned by later scholars, are really his, the heavenly regions, with their hierarchy of Angels,
Principalities, and Powers, became to Paul the familiar scene of the entire Gospel transaction.?
In these heavenly places, as he believed, Christ was throned, "Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come."
Christ was the supreme agent in creation: "For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, .
. all things were created by him, and for him."
Paul goes so far as to say, "In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily." 2
These are sublime ideals.
If the human Jesus still holds his own in this celestial companionship, a great stepshas been taken towards that union of the human and the divine, for which the human soul so passionately sighs.
It is the supreme test of idealism, that while it lets the imagination range at will in highest realms, it is yet able to keep the feet firmly planted on solid earth.
It is not strange that Paul could not meet this test.
Too much was at stake.
What Christianity meant to him, if 1 Note AA.
2 Eph. i. 21; Col. i. 16; ii. 9.
PAPIAS he was to accept it at all, was the advent of a heavenly being on earth.
If Christ was not such a being, then his faith was vain.
The theological refinements of centuries have accustomed men to feel that such a being could be human and superhuman in one.
To Paul, standing at the threshold of these discussions, no such illusion was possible.
If Jesus was really the superterrestrial visitant which his resurrection declared, then his human life in Galilee could have been only a passing incident, of little meaning.
It was but the visible token, the sign-manual, of a divine event.
To blend that earthly life with the spiritual functions of the Son of God became to Paul more and more impossible, and he ceased at last to attempt it.
The time came when he could say:
"Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.''}
How else can we explain the fact that Paul's writings contain so few allusions of any kind to ithe life or teachings of Jesus?
That life had hardly ended when Paul came upon the scene; its memories were still fresh ; the companions
.- of Jesus were at hand to tell him, if he chose # to ask, all the personal qualities that had exerted such mighty power over men.
But he did not Rea D Byte BA EB @
1 2 Cor. v. 16.
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
choose to ask.
He prides himself upon not asking. He takes special pains to say to the Galatians: 'When it pleased God
. to reveal his Son in me, .
. I conferred not with flesh and blood : neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus.
Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days.
But other of the disciples saw I none, save James the Lord's brother." 1
In other words, their memories of the Lord's daily life and speech, or of : ie : y q 4 his familiar habits and tones, had no interest 7° Guard Jh, for Paul.
Even the precepts of the Master ¢\4)\)..\ ph. had no place in Paul's teachings.
His letters * to his followers would have gained tenfold moral power, if reinforced by lofty maxims from the Master's lips.
So, at least, it seems to us, to whom the earthly life of Jesus is the great spiritual event of the ages.
But no: a few allusions to his death and resurrection, two or three scanty references to the words of Christ, whether told him by others, or received by special vision, we cannot tell," and that is all.
No parables, no beatitudes, no exhortations, no 1 Gal. i. 15-19.
2 x Cor. vii. 10, 12, 25; ix. 14 ; Xl. 23, 24; xv. 3; I Thess. iv. 15.
PAPIAS discussions with Pharisee or publican, no selfconsecration to a sacred career, no heroic selfsacrifice.
Those earthly incidents, we must suppose, were for the hour only, and for those who witnessed them; the real Jesus, all the time, was the celestial visitant.!
The grand meaning of that life in this view was not that the human became divine, but that divinity dwelt for a moment in the ranks of humanity.
Except for the Christ himself, and those that "are Christ's," the human and divine remained as distinct as ever.
Had this involved the Apostle Paul alone, it would be simply one chapter the more of the world's religious philosophy, to be easily closed, and forgotten.
Where it affects the struggles of many generations to gain a firmer hold upon divine realities, it becomes a more serious affair.?
1 Even where Paul brings Jesus forward as an example, it is the heavenly Jesus, not the human.
(2 Cor. viii. g; Phil. ii. 5-8.) ? Difficulties over this problem began early.
Tertullian complains that the simple-minded, who are always in the majority, charged theirleaders with preaching two Gods, or three, like the pagans; being too simple-minded to understand that "the trinity grows out of the unity." | (Praaan3:)
Origen, who seems to have been the first to fairly face the question of the union of God and man in Jesus, virtually surrenders the task.
He thinks human language quite incompetent to explain it, and doubts if even the holy Apostles
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One disciple, at least, was not slow in following in the steps of the great Apostle.
Paul's exalted conception of Christ had seized upon Marcion's imagination.
It had been forgotten by the churches, he declared, which had clung too fondly to the terrestrial promises of Judaism and its terrestrial scenery.
Both the Christian Scriptures and the Christian faith needed a thorough purification.
According to Marcion, pursuing Paul's thought quite beyond Paul himself, Christianity owed nothing whatever to Judaism ; its coming was an absolutely new epoch in the career of humanity; not a higher unfolding of a previous revelation, but the very beginning of man's higher life.
It was the first entrance of the divine into the world.
In the presence of this new life, and the heavenly future which it involved, all speculation upon the messianic kingdom and the end of the world lost its interest.
An endless future in celestial companionship disclosed itself.
Till then God had been wholly unknown ; he revealed himself first in Christ.
All previous history compared with this was as earthly to heavenly.
The Old Testament was not false ; it was the story of a primordial race under an understood it.
Possibly, indeed, "it was a mystery beyond the grasp of the entire celestial host."
(Pram, ii. 6, 2.)
PAPIAS inferior and primordial God.
Marcion shrunk from none of the logical consequences of his position.
'A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit," he quoted; "neither a good tree corrupt fruit."!
The cruelties and idolatries of Israel could have come only from an evil deity.
Jehovah was a God indeed, the Creator of the world, as the Jewish Scriptures claim ; but it was this lower world which he created ; above which was a spiritual world, where dwells the supreme God.?
For the theologian of to-day, to have two Gods to account for would be embarrassing.
Not so to Marcion ; hardly so, indeed, to any of the Christian divines of that early time, accustomed as they were to speak of the " prince of the world," or "prince of the power of the air,' with his legions of evil angels or demigods.
Marcion was fond of quoting from the 1 Luke vi. 43.
2 Tertull. adv. Marc. i. 2, etc. ; Iren., Her., i.27, 2; Hipp.
Vil. 20, 30; X19); Clem. Alex:) St7o72-, iil.) 3); iil 4 sivenne Marcion's speculative tendencies have been generally ascribed to the influences of Cerdo, a Syrian mystic whom he met in Rome.
(Tertull. adv. Marc.i. 2; Iren., Her., i. 27, 2; ili. 4, 3; Euseb., 7st. Acc., iv. 10; iv. 11, 2.)
As we know hardly anything about Cerdo, however, except that Marcion was his follower, the disciple is much more important to us, in any case, than the master.
8 John xiv. 30; Eph. ii. 2; ili 10; i. 21; vi. 12.
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Psalms: " God standeth in the congregation of the mighty ; he judgeth among the gods."
"I have said, Ye are gods." 1
These were phrases quite as familiar, of course, to the Christian as to the Jew, and must have meant something to them both.
In fact, polytheism died slowly, even under the assaults of Judaism or Christianity ; losing its name in the process, while bequeathing to them its spirit.
For Marcion, these two Gods were the keystone of his system.
The true God, the only dne worthy of the name, was pure spirit, the embodiment of goodness and love, dwelling in the highest heavens, calm and undisturbed.2
The other, Demiurge or Cosmocrator, as you choose, whom he identified with the Jehovah of the Jews,? was the lover of war, and the embodiment of sternness and cruelty.4
His supreme characteristic was justice.
He is the God who "creates evil," ® who spoiled the Egyptians, who required "an eye for an eye," ® who made Saul a king, and then
1 Ps. Ixxxii. 1, 6; Tertull. adv. Marc. i. 7.
202i. O03 L725, Vil.
8 Hipp. vii. 30; Iren. i. 27, 2.
Comp. Heb. xi. 10; Eph. vi. 12.
4 Tren. i. 27,2; Tertull. i.6.
Comp. Life of Tennyson, i.
314.
5 Is. xlv. 7; Tertull. ii. 20.
6 Ex. xxi. 24; Tertull. ii. 18.
PAPIAS repented of it,! who had to ask Adam, " Where art thou?" not knowing where he had hid himself,2 and came down to Sodom and Gomorrah, to "see whether they had done altogether according to the cry of it which had come unto him," and who rejected Moab and Ammon for all time, for not offering hospitality to the Israelite invaders.
Jehovah, according to Marcion, sincerely thought himself the one only God, being unaware of the higher Being in whose place he was figuring.
The Prophets, ignorant also of the ineffable Father, were inspired by the Demiurge to predict a false
Messiah, who came indeed, but came only to insure to scattered Israel the recovery of their land, and the repose of Abraham's bosom; while the true Messiah came to offer liberation to the human race.® The two worlds, according to this daring innovator, were as distinct as the two Gods.
The one was a spiritual realm, the other purely. earthly, having to do with matter alone, in 1 Sam. xv. 11; Tertull. ii. 24.
Tertull. ii. 25.
Deut. xxiii. 3; Tertull. iv. 24.
Tertull. i. 11.
Justin, Afol., i. 58; Iren. iv. 34, 1-5; Epiph., Her., 42, Co co) oN 43; Tertull. iii. 4, 21-24.
See, also, Iren.i. 27, 3; Tertull.
1s yp Rory
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which inheres all evil;! a dualistic notion by no means peculiar to Marcion, but standing ready then as now as the easiest explanation of the existence of evil and sin.2, Between these two worlds no communication was possible, as the material can have no touch with the spiritual, nor even consciousness of it.
Only by introducing into the lower world the quality of spirit could the alliance between the two be established.
This was accomplished by the Son of God, who appeared in Capernaum unannounced and without human birth, who took the name of Christ that he might be the more readily recognized as the expected Messiah,4 who assumed the form of Jesus of Nazareth, who put on the "appearance of sinful flesh," and led a spirit-life on earth,® to awaken there the latent sense of the divine.
Many perplex1 Tertull. i. 15; v.19; Hipp. x. 19.
2 Hippolytus (assuming that the Phzlosophumena discovered in 1842 is his) traces Marcion's dualism wholly to Empedocles (Phz/os., vii. 29, 30), though it might as well have come from Persian and other sources at that time.
Indeed, he needed hardly to go farther than his master Paul.
(Rom. vii. 5-23, 25; Gal. v.17.) It is doubtful if Marcion speculated much on this or other abstract points.
SeCompat Corsi. i; Lertully 4,13:
4 Tertull. iii. 15, 19; iv. 7, 19.
CR ALOS elo: 00 ul Sealer kOs 6 Tren. i. 27, 3; Tertull. i. 9.
PAPIAS ing problems which have disturbed the Christian world from the beginning disappear in this hardy process ; not least, that of a suffering God.
As the birth and childhood of Christ were apparent rather than real, so also his death.
It was the futile vengeance of the Demiurge against one who came to supplant him.
The agonies of the crucified God were apparent agonies, the death a phantom death.!
The flesh, whether of Christ or of his followers, has no place in the resurrection.
The resurrection is a purely spiritual event.
It is the escape of the spirit to higher realms; its passage, through sphere after sphere, to its heavenly home?
These strange doctrines were by no means mere matters of speculation, or of Scripture criticism alone.
They meant with Marcion the purging of the Scriptures of their Jewish corruptions, and the purification of the church of all its false dogmas.
He undertook this reform unflinchingly.
He undertook a moral reform, also, with quite as unflinching a hand; for he held that the precepts of the Gospel had been neglected, and demanded a far more rigid enforcement.
If matter is evil, and the flesh sinful,' then all fleshly pursuits are sinful.
He 1 Tertull. iii. 8; iv. 42; v. 6.
2 iii. 3, 4, 8-10, 18, 24; Epiph., Wer., xlii. 4.
8 Rom. viii. 3.
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brought into sharp contrast the Mosaic laws of divorce and those of Jesus, and included marriage itself among the evils to be reformed.
No marriage was allowed in his churches, nor were married persons admitted to baptism unless first divorced.1
He taught abstinence from meats, as well as from the pleasures of the world.2, His continence, and the abstemiousness of his disciples, were among the severest charges which his opponents had to bring against him.* None led a stricter life in those days than the followers of Marcion, nor were any more ready, when the hours of persecution came, to face the horrors of martyrdom.
However abstract and impracticable these notions may seem to us, in those days they had power to arouse the highest enthusiasm, and 1 Tertull. adv. Marc. i. 29; iv. 11,17, 34; v.73; Clem. Alex.,
Strom., iii. 4.
2 Tertull. i. 28; Hipp. vii. 30.
8 Tertull., Pres., 30; Adv. Marc. i. 14.
The church of that day seems to have found this ascetic tendency inconvenient.
It did not wish the Gospel precepts to be taken too seriously.
These offenders were dubbed " Encratites," or " Abstinents ;" not a very opprobrious epithet, one would think, yet we find' all the church historians talking as solemnly of Encratites as though they were thieves or murderers.
The Encratites figure conspicuously among the heretical sects.
(Iren. i. 28, 1; Euseb., Ast. Lcc., iv. 29, 2, 3.) 4 Tertull. i. 27; Euseb., Hist. Zcc., v. 16, 21; iv. 15, 46.
PAPIAS for a time it seemed as if they might prevail, and the Christian church be founded on dogmas even more transcendental than those of Paul.
The movement spread rapidly.
"As wasps build their combs," says Tertullian, Marcion's most unforgiving foe, "'so do these Marcionites build their churches." 1 In point of fact, the Marcionite church became a clearly defined and compact organization, and held its own among Christian churches, with its bishops and presbyters, quite into the fifth century.
A bishop of the fifth century claims to have converted more than ten thousand Marcionites in Syria.?
A historian of the same period writes bitterly :
"This heresy is not only found to-day in Rome and Italy, it has overrun Egypt and Palestine also, Arabia and Syria, Cyprus and the Thebaid, even Persia, and other regions far and wide." ® It is worth noting here that it was the uncompromising asceticism of the Marcionites quite as much as their theological dogmas which brought them into disrepute.
The early Chris1 Tertull. adv. Marc. iv. 5.
2 Epiph., Her., 42.
See Zahn, Kanonsgesch., i. 595, 607 ; Epiph. xlii. 1, 3; Theodoret to Leo, and to Monks of Constantinople, Zfzs., 113, 145.
3 Epiph., Her., xlii. 2.
Note BB.
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tian conscience seems to have encountered great difficulty in adjusting these nice points of the new ethics, and often found itself in strange predicaments; not knowing at first where to draw the lines between the customs of the world and the requirements of the Christian
Scriptures.
Tertullian himself, who denounces Marcion to-day for forbidding marriage,! is found to-morrow denouncing another theologian quite as severely for marrying not once only, but twice; or, as this writer gracefully puts it,
"marrying persistently." ?
Another interesting personage, whose independent thought brought him into disrepute about this same time, was Basilides.?
Judging from the fragmentary accounts which the church has handed down to us, we infer that he appeared first in Syria, and went from there to Egypt, which was apparently the scene of his best teaching or preaching, and the centre from which emanated the many schools which bore
1 Tertull. adv. Marc. i. 29.
2 Tertull. adv. Hermogenem,i.
"Nubit assidue."
Is not this a delightful way of characterizing a man who (the chances are), after losing one wife, chose to marry another?
8 Judging from Justin, Afol., i. 26, Trypho, 35, compared with Euseb., Hzst. Ecc., iv. 7, 3, and Clem. Alex., Stvom., vii.
17, Basilides's active period must have been between 133 and 160.
Comp. Harnack, Chron., i. 290.
PAPIAS his name.!
Though we have to content ourselves with little knowledge of the man, yet the character of his doctrines appears plainly enough through the hostile criticisms which they evoked.
Basilides was no organizer like Marcion, and was less interested in missionary or practical concerns than in getting at the interior meaning of Christianity and its significance for the world.
He does not seem to have shared Marcion's aversion to Judaism, yet at the same time occupied himself little with this point, being influenced more by the mystic tendencies current then in Alexandria, than in questions of Scripture criticism.
Christianity presented itself to his mind less as a historic event than as a spiritual process, releasing mankind from its thralldom by revealing the soul's innate divineness.2_ The eastern mind welcomed allegory and symbolism, and few have ever gone farther into the realm of abstractions than Basilides.
The Jewish Jehovah was to him a very anthropomorphic Deity.
God was above all personification ; he was absolute Being.
He could not even be defined.
He was above every name that is named.?
We can assert only his 1 Hipp. vii. 27; Epiph., Her., xxiii. 1; xxiv. 1; Euseb., fist. Ece., iv. 7, 3.
2 Clem. Alex., Strom., iv. 26.
8 Hipp. vii. 20.
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existence.
Indeed, hardly that.
To other philosophers he may be existence pure and simple;! to Basilides he is non-existence.
So at least Basilides's historians insist, making much sport of this non-existing Being who yet creates existing worlds.2, Lhis exalted Being, or NotBeing, must of course be far removed from the actual universe.
Two celestial regions intervene, each with its invisible hierarchy of principalities and powers; above the Hebdomad the Ogdoad, above the Ogdoad the highest heavens, or realm of the Infinite.
In the Ogdoad rules a mighty Archon, of great power and splendor, knowing of nothing beyond the Firmament, and fancying himself the one God; in the Hebdomad a second and inferior Archon, Jehovah of 1 Philo, Som., i. 39.
"udvoy etvat 7d dy."
2 Hipp. vii. 21. "The non-existing God brought the world into non-existence out of non-existing substances."
Hippolytus traces this, with much of Basilides's doctrine in general, from Aristotle.
Comp. Ritter, Azstory of Ancient Philosophy, iii. 114; Hipp. x. 14.
3 Hipp. vii. 24; x. 14; Eph. ii. 2.
In some accounts of Basilides, or his followers, these two or three heavens are extended to 365, with a special ruler, Abraxas or Abrasa, the letters of whose name give the number 365.
(Iren.i. 24, 3-7; ii. 16, 2; Hipp. vii. 26; Philo, Som., i. 22.) Eph. iv.
10, "above all the heavens," gives the same idea of an indefinite number of heavens, with their hierarchies.
(Eph. iii. 10.)
PAPIAS the Jews, also ignorant of all above himself, and also deeming himself the God of Gods.
Each of these Archons creates for himself a son, who sits at his right hand; each son being endowed with a portion of the eternal sonship which makes him superior to the Archon himself.
Below these realms is the kosmos or earth in which we live, awaiting the divine awakening.
All this.time, within this lower creation lay a germ or seed of the divine, the incipient sonship of the Highest, planted in certain souls, and constituting them children of God.
This was hidden from both Archons.
It was the great mystery, — "which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men." ? The universe has always carried at its heart this mighty longing for the infinite: "For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.
. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.'?
At last comes the Gospel, flashing like a flame of light from sphere to sphere, from the highest to the Ogdoad, from the Ogdoad to the Hebdomad, through every Principality and Power and Do1 Hipp. vii. 26.
2 Eph. iii. 4, 9; 1 Cor. ii. 13.
8 Rom. viii. 19, 22; Hipp. vii. 27
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minion.
Each Archon learns the mystery with dismay, but yields his power at once to the Son who has revealed it.
Finally, this light descends upon Jesus the son of Mary, imparting to him its radiance!
From Jesus it passes at once to the spiritual portion of the race, to the sons of God who have so long awaited it.
The world endures till all the elect, becoming intuitively conscious of their sonship, "follow Jesus, and hasten upward, to come forth purified." ?
Light seeks light.
Man seeks heaven as his native place.® It will be seen that in this system the Son of God, although taking the form of Jesus of Nazareth, is no more an actual man than the Archons or the spirits of the Ogdoad.
No doctrine of the incarnation having yet been formulated, the relation of God to Christ was variously conceived, and appears in these different treatises under various forms of union.
1 A highly spiritualized interpretation of the tradition preserved in Luke i. 35.
2 Hipp. vii. 25, 26; x. 14; Tren. i. 24, 6; Clem. Alex. ii. 3; a1.,6; iv.120.
8 The process of man's preparation or purification, according to this system, is no slight one. He passes from stage to stage of being, apparently; his sins in a previous life or lives being expiated in this.
His life runs back into the infinite.
Comp. Clem. Alex. iv. 12.
PAPIAS With Basilides, as with Marcion, if not also with Paul, it is clear that the whole process was apparent rather than real.
The highest heavenly power, Nous, descending upon the earth, united himself with the son of Mary, led his earthly life, suffered himself to be apparently crucified, then returned again to him that sent him.!
Whatever Gospels Basilides had before him, his conception of the Gospel narrative was purely mystical.?
It is not easy for us to bring these strange abstractions back to life.
We do not think in Ogdoads or Hebdomads nowadays, and it is hard for us to take seriously such barbaric terms.
But then, if we refuse it here, we must for the same reason refuse to take the entire religious thought of the age seriously.
We have already found how foreign to our beliefs were certain ideas of men in best repute, and on the most solemn of religious themes.®
If 1 Hipp. vii. 26; Clem. Alex. ii. 8. According to one account, strongly suggestive of caricature, Basilides represented
Jesus as allowing Simon of Cyrene to carry his cross, and then transfiguring Simon into his own likeness, and standing by with asmile, as Simon was crucified in his stead.
(Iren. i. 24,4; Epiph., Her., xxiv. 3, 8; Luke xxiii. 26.) 2 Noteee:
8 Pp. 116-121, 131-135. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, gives some idea of the difficulties which these heavenly hierarchies
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Papias or Tertullian seems less fantastic than Marcion or Basilides, is it not rather a difference in their imaginative or speculative habits, than because the one comes essentially nearer than the other to the religious ideals of to-day?
If we would know our spiritual progenitors at all, we must consent to take them on their own ground ; to speak their language, and think for the moment their thoughts.
This becomes still more essential as we approach another of the noted thinkers of this period.
We have already formed some idea of the speculative tendencies then abroad, and can easily see how such tendencies must have been stimulated by the new spiritual problems which Christianity brought to the front.
Among those most profoundly impressed by these problems, and who seized them if not in their most imaginative, at least in their most poetic aspects, was Valentine.
As in previous cases, we get our knowledge of the man and his caused the Christian mind, in the following singular avowal:
"For I myself, notwithstanding my bonds, cannot comprehend heavenly matters; as the places of the angels, and the companies of them under their Archons, and all these things seen and unseen; being still a learner in such affairs."
(Zrail., v. 2.) Lightfoot understands him to say that he does understand; which is even more peculiar. (A fos. Fathers,
147.) It would be more considerate to suppose him satirical.
PAPIAS writings only through a hostile medium, and are permitted to recover but few facts of a life which must have been full of excitement and interest.
No interpretations of Christianity, in its hours of freshness and bloom, could have greater charm for us than those of the keener-sighted and more intellectual of its disciples; but unfortunately it is precisely these which are least likely to have been preserved.
Valentine seems to have been a native of Egypt, possibly of Jewish birth, to have pursued his studies in Alexandria, and to have come to Rome to teach at about the same time with Marcion himself.?
The descriptions of his doctrines and those of his numerous followers have become so hopelessly mixed that it is even more difficult than in other instances to discriminate between master and disciple, and harder still to interpret his thoughts into anything like the language of to-day.
We can at best only hint at beliefs which had such great vogue, and exerted such widespread influence upon the nascent Christianity, that they must not be passed by in entire silence.
To Valentine, as to Basilides, the coming of Christ was a stupendous moment in the world's
1 Epiph., Her., xxxi. 2.
2 About 140-155; Euseb., Hist. Ecc., iv. 11, 3.
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history ; the goal and fulfillment of its destiny.
Ages had been preparing for it, forecasting step by step the supreme hour when the divine essence in man, after many sufferings, should recognize and rejoin its heavenly source.
These foreshadowings of the final event, so far as we can reconstruct them, are like splendid rehearsals on a celestial stage; the longings, the frustrations, the eventual attainments, of heavenly natures leading the way to the great human drama.
In those days there was little to impede the imagination in its dramatizations ; no cold scientific habits, or too definite historical knowledge, or over-critical instincts; no acquaintance with Copernican or Galilzan systems, to forbid the creation of sphere beyond sphere as the scene of these invisible transactions, no limit to the heavenly beings needed to people those spheres.
God, according to this exposition of Christianity, is the fathomless abyss where thought stops.
He is Depth, consorting with Silence.} He cannot, or will not, remain alone or inactive ; longs, indeed, for some object of his love.
From him therefore issue successive emanations or self-manifestations ; series after series
1 Tren. i. 1, I.
PAPIAS of AZons.!
There are thirty of these highest /Eons, constituting the Pleroma, or infinite Fullness.
Of these Nous alone (foreshadowing Christ and Jesus) knows the Father, revealing him in due time to the other A®ons.2
The first disturbance of the celestial harmony is caused by the youngest of the A£ons, Wisdom,' who in her untimely longing for the Infinite rushes forth from the Pleroma, only to bring into being an abortive mass which is afterwards shaped into the earth.
This is the beginning of evil in the universe.
Great consternation seizes the remaining A*ons; and the lost harmony is restored only by the appearance of Christ and the Holy Spirit, completing the mystic number of the A¢ons, and imparting at 1 'Aidy.
Originally a space of time; or eternity.
Comp.
1 Tim. i.17; Heb. i. 23 xi. 3; Tertull. adv. Val. 4.
2 Tren.i. 1, 1; i. 2, 5; Hipp. vi. 29; vi. 30.
These thirty, fons appear in pairs: Nous and Alethia, Logos and Zoe, Anthropos and Ecclesia, etc.
Epiphanius gives more barbaric names for the AXons, mentioning at the same time the Greek equivalents.
(xxxi. 2, 4, 6.) At Valentine's hands these AXons embodied, we may suppose, abstract conceptions, whether we go the length of Baur or not: "Alle diese als fonen hypostasirte Begriffe sind die Kategorien unter welchen das absolute Wesen gedacht werden muss, oder die
Logik des géttlichen Denkens selbst."
(Christ.
Gnosis, 127, n.) 3 Sodla.
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last to the celestial company the knowledge of the Divine.!
The scene being now shifted to lower regions, the Demiurge appears.
He is the Creator and ruler in his own sphere, called into being by the above catastrophe, and an ignorant and unconscious agent in higher hands ; imaging the infinite Powers in action above him, and preparing the way for his own downfall.
Heis enthroned upon seven heavens, and fancies himself the Supreme ; declaring, "I am God, and beside me there is none else."* His agent and creature is the spirit of evil, the Devil, or Cosmocrator,? who strives to keep man a creature of earth.
His reign continues until the Son, whom he has himself created, and supposes wholly his own, and whom he sends forth to relieve men's woes, heals those woes ina higher sense, revealing the hidden mystery, while the Demiurge, finding himself dethroned, yields to his destiny.'
For this great drama, as we have seen, three Christs, or manifestations of the Christ, are necessary,® the last of whom embodies himself
1 Tren. i. 2, 2-5; Hipp. vi. 30; vi. 31.
2 Tren. i. 5, 4; Is. xlv. 5, 6.
8 Tren. i. 5, 4; Eph. vi. 12.
4 Tren. i. 5,6; Hipp. vi. 36.
5 Nous or Monogenes, Christ, and Jesus.
PAPIAS for his human mission in the son of Mary.1 At his appearance, his own disciples, the truly "spiritual," recognize him at once, are revealed in their true nature, and rise with him to heavenly places. These spiritual beings are the real humanity; they are "the salt of the earth," and have been foreshadowed, like the rest, from all time.?
Their tragic struggles on earth are the efforts of the higher nature to purify itself from alien elements.
They are "children of eternal life."
In one of the few passages from Valentine's writings which have been preserved, he pictures this struggle of imperishable beings in a perishable universe: "Ye are immortal from the beginning, and are children of eternal life; but ye were willing to have death apportioned you, that ye might spend and consume it, so that in you and through you death might die.
For when ye overcome the world, but are not yourselves destroyed, ye are lords over creation and over all that is perishable."4
Man is bound to his baser appetites only so long as the Demiurge rules over him and suppresses his
1 "Christ passed through Mary as water flows through a tube."
Iren. i. 7,2; Tertull. adv. Val. 27; Hipp. vi. 35.
2 Tren. i. 6, 1.
8 Anthropos is one of the original Zons.
Tren. i. 1, 1.
# Clem. Alex. iv. 13.
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consciousness of a higher estate.
The earthly passions are strangers to his heart, and treat it as travelers do an inn, dwelling in it for a moment, but not regarding it astheirown.
"It seems to me to fare with the heart much as with a tavern; which is worn and trodden into ruts, and is ofttimes covered with the filth of travelers who have dwelt there wantonly; having no care of the place, as belonging to others.
Such a place is the heart so long as no thought is taken of it; being unclean and the abode of many demons.
But when he who alone is good, the Father, visits it, it becomes sanctified, and full of light.
And he who has such a heart is blessed, and shall see God." ! In the great consummation these varied elements return to their own.
All that is mundane disappears.
Death dies.
The spiritual regains its home, and the primitive harmony is restored."
In all this, if our interpretation can be trusted at all, we find a spiritual process throughout ; a phenomenal world, in which all that is human or earthly disappears in its ideal significance.
Only in this mighty process of the ages could the rising of humanity from its low estate, and its assumption of its better nature, be fitly typi1 Clem. Alex. ii. 20; Hipp. vi. 34.
2 Clem. Alex. v. 1; Iren.i. 7, 1; Tertull. adv. Val. 29, 32.
PAPIAS fied.
And the main features of this scheme, it is to be remembered, are found by Valentine or his school within the letter of the Jewish or Christian Scriptures.
It is the hidden meaning of those holy books, disclosing itself to those who have the key.
The sublime imagery of the Old Testament Prophets, which the Demiurge himself was unable to interpret, was now for the first time disclosing to the initiated its secrets.' The writings of Evangelists and Apostles, the '"'oracles of the Lord" himself, had their hidden sense as well, which the " spiritual" alone could discern.2
Paul was their authority for this: " But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: which none of the princes of this world knew.
. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God:
. neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man." 8
It is Paul, too, who says : "It pleased the Father that in him the entire Pleroma should dwell." 4
EOTren sie 3 Ol ee Sais 23. 8, 1.
8 1 Cor. ii. 7, 8,14, 15; Iren. i. Shy Sp * Col. i. 19; ii. g; Iren. i. 3, 4.
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It is Paul who speaks of "thrones, dominions, principalities and powers ;"" and of "the worldrulers of this darkness, and the spirit-hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places."1
When we read in the Scriptures, "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul," 2 we are to understand this not of the Supreme Deity, but of the Demiurge, who could impart only the "soul," or animal powers, leaving the spirit to come in due time from the true God.
The thirty years spent by Jesus before he entered upon his ministry portray the thirty AZons of the Pleroma; as also does the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard.
The lost sheep of the Gospels typifies Wisdom, the youngest Zon, wandering beyond the Pleroma ; the woman seeking her lost piece of silver denotes
Enthymesis, or the yearning for the Infinite, recovered by that same A'on, after many ages, at the coming of the Christ.* 1 Rom. viii. 38; Col. i. 16; Eph. vi. 12; Iren. i. 4, 5.
2 Gen. ii. 7; Iren. i. 5, 5; Hipp. vi. 34.
3 Tren. i. 3, 1; Matt. xx. 1-6.
Add the hours at which the laborers went into the vineyard, 1, 3, 6,9, 11, and you have thirty.
4 Tren. i. 8, 4; Luke xv. 4, 8, 9.
Some of these mystic terms, such as " homoousios," to denote oneness of essence
PAPIAS This sounds trivial enough to our modern tastes.
Yet we may be sure that it was the most trivial instances that were most willingly preserved ; and even through these we can discern an earnest and determined search for the spirit hidden beneath the letter of Christian truth.
Nowhere has man's dim sense of something divine as his by right, or of a higher world to which he belongs yet does not belong, found bolder utterance than in these occult readings of the Christian Scriptures.
Had the Valentinian Gospel been known among the Italian painters of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, one scene, at least, would not have remained without its artist.
The aged Simeon, we are told, taking the infant Jesus in his arms, "blessed God, and said, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." }
This was a symbol of the Demiurge, looking down upon the child who had come to take from him the kingdom which he had, until then, supposed was his own.? with the divine, have held their own in the later Christian theology. (Iren. i. 5, 1 and 5. Comp. Harnack, Hist. of Dog., i. 257, n. 3.) 1 Luke ii. 28, 29.
2 Tren. i. 8, 4.
See Note DD.
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
Perhaps I owe my readers an apology for leading them, thus unawares, into the deadly ambush of Gnosticism ; but that name has acquired so forbidding a sound that I must be excused for having postponed the mention of it to the last possible inoment.
Yes, this is Gnosticism, in so far as that many-sided movement can be seen in the persons of its most noted exponents.
It is no place here to analyze Gnosticism, or give its history, but the thing itself can no more be ignored in speaking of the second century than the presence of the scientific spirit in speaking of the nineteenth.
The question is not so much to define Gnosticism, as to let Gnosticism define the age in which it appeared.
Gnosticism was simply the theological attitude of the time; the form in which its religious philosophy chose to shape itself.
When the Roman empire in its career of conquest set all religions and philosophies face to face, bringing the worships and systems of the East into Rome itself, some startling results were bound to follow; and these dualistic and allegoric extravagances are only isolated instances of those results.
It would be impossible, if we desired, to trace all the Gnostic schools back to their sources; but some lines can be briefly pointed out.
ePAPLAS Obscure indications of what was happening even on purely Jewish soil are afforded by such stories as that of Simon the Sorcerer; who, whatever his real character, had a great religious following in Samaria in apostolic times, and was regarded as the "Great Power of God." ! But other indications, much less obscure, appeared elsewhere, at the same time.
Both Basilides and Valentine, we must remember, had some connection with the schools of Alexandria, an intellectual centre where the contact of classic philosophies with Hebrew and other oriental faiths was more marked and fruitful than at any other point.
That Judaism had long felt, in some measure, this rationalizing influence, we know very well ;? but all other
1 Acts viii.
10.
Literally, "the Power of God called Great;" as though the highest of the attendant spirits of Deity.
Simon was credited by many of the ancient writers with being the fountain-head of all the Gnostic sects.
(Justin, 4707.) 1.263 ti. 15, Inen: 1.23, 23) 41. Prefi:: Hipp. vi. 7— 20; Epiph. i. 2,1; Euseb. iv. 22,5; Apos. Const., vi. 7.)
In later history he became a highly mythical personage, and is regarded by many as a purely imaginary character.
(Baur, Christ. Gnosis, 303-313; Zeller, Acts, i. 250-267.) But there seems little doubt of the existence of such a leader, and none at all of the movement itself of which he was the traditional head.
2 See Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom of Solomon, and still later Jewish literature.
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Hellenistic tokens are but faint compared with what we find in the writings of an early contemporary of Paul, Philo the Alexandrian Jew.!
To Philo, as to other thoughtful Jews, the literal interpretation of Hebrew history, with its cruelties, its idolatries, and its gross anthropomorphism, had become intolerable.
From this the Greek and Roman fashion of dealing with the gods of their Olympus? offered a convenient and welcome escape.
The Old Testament received an occult interpretation.
It was a grand piece of symbolism, intended from the beginning to hide diviner truths.
Later generations, troubled in their turn by traditional beliefs too sacred to be renounced yet too unreal to be longer retained, owe an immense debt to Philo for having domesticated this spiritualizing process within the Jewish faith.
At his hands the Old Testament became a splendid allegory, behind which the sublimest tenets of philosophy
1 Aristobulus, a Jewish writer under Ptolemy Philometer, about B. Cc. 160, showed similar' tendencies; but few traces of his writings remain.
(Clem. Alex. i. 15; v.14; vi. 3; Euseb., Hist. Lcc., vii. 32, 16.) For Philo, consult Ritter, Wist. of Ancient Philosophy, iv.
407-473; Hausrath, Zime of Apos., i. 161-189; Keim, Jesus of Nazara, i. 276, etc.; Ewald, Hist. of Lsrael, vii. 194, etc.
2 Cicero, De Natura Deorum, ii. 23-28; Boissier, La Religion Romaine, il. 121-147.
PAPIAS lay hidden, and in which Moses and the Patriarchs became types of heavenly virtues, or lofty metaphysical ideals. Judaism became the mouthpiece of Stoic and Platonic philosophy.
This process of interpretation once entered upon, there is no necessary limit in any direction.
Jehovah comes to embody the highest thought of Deity.
He is the One Supreme; he is the universe itself; he is the All!
He cannot be defined, for he has no distinctive qualities or names.
"He is not of a nature to be described, but is simply Being." 2 This Philo finds hidden in the words: " Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold."® The world has been in existence, ideally, from the beginning of time.
As man was created "after the image of God," 4 so this visible universe is only an image of the archetypal idea, or real world, existing in the mind of Deity.® In creating the visible world he could not act of himself, "for it was not lawful that the wise and blessed God should touch ignorant and disorderly matter."® But there was no lack of helpers; the air being
1 Philo, Leg. Alleg.,i.14.
% Leg. Alleg.,i. 15; Som. i. 39.
8 Ex. xx. 23.
£ Gen. i. 27.
5 De Mund. Opif., 4, 6.
6 Vict. Off, 13; Sac. Abel, 28.
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
filled with incorporeal beings, called by philosophers demons, but by the Scriptures angels, passing constantly back and forth, as seen by Jacob in his dream.!
These spirits are the words of God, at the head of whom is the Word, the Logos, the Idea of ideas.2
The Logos performs many functions, and so receives many epithets at Philo's hands.
He is the image of God, as being the original or archetypal man ;? he is the High Priest ;* he is the first-born,® the Helper or Comforter ;® he is the Second God.
" Why is it," Philo asks, "that the Scripture says, 'In the image of a god created he man ?' as if it were the image of another
God, and not himself?
Very beautifully and wisely has this expression been used," is the re1 Som.,i. 21,22; De Mund. Opif., 24.
Philo evidently feels that there is a loophole here for the introduction of evil into the world, always so embarrassing a problem for the theologians.
In speaking of the creation of man, he says quite seriously :
'" Most appropriately, therefore, did God assign the making of this creature to his lieutenants, saying, 'Let us make man'
(Gen. i. 26); so that man's intellectual achievements could be ascribed to God alone, his sins to the others."
(Confus. Ling.
35; De Mund. Opif., 24.
Comp. Plato's 77mMeaus, 41, 42, 68.) 2 Confus. Ling., 8,28; De Mund. Opif., 6, 46; Leg. Alleg., ii. 21.
8 Confus. Ling., 28.
4 Som., i. 37.
5 Som, i. 37+ 6 Vit. Mos., iii. 14.
PAPIAS ply ; "for it was impossible for anything mortal to be made in the image of the most high God, the Father of all; it could be made only after the second god, his Logos."!
The Scriptures, according to Philo, make a distinction between the "sons of men," who build towers of Babel, and the "sons of God," who, though not quite worthy perhaps to be called sons of God himself, are yet "virtuous and wise," and deserve to be called children of his "eternal image, his most sacred Word."2
The seventy elders who saw the God of Israel typify these higher souls striving for the actual sight of God. The primitive man was formed of finest clay, receiving from God a breath of divine life which he has never wholly lost.
When Abraham was led forth, and bade "to look towards heaven, and tell the stars," it typified the soul escaping from itself and becoming absorbed in God.® This occult wisdom which enables one to discover the hidden truth of things is naturally not open to all; it comes by inspiration to those capable of it.
It comes in trances, such as that 1 Fragmenta, 625, quoted by Eusebius; Corfus. Ling., 28.
2 Confus. Ling., 28.
8 Ex. xxiv. 10; Confus. Ling., 23, 20.
4 De Mund. Opif., 47, 51.
® Gen. xv. 5; Leg. Alleg., iii. 9, 12, 15; Mom. Mut., 4.
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
which fell upon Adam, or upon Abraham, "as the sun was going down." !
The mind, in this exalted state, receives direct notions of invisible things; sacred mysteries, not to be imparted to the uninitiated.
Philo describes, with great emotion, the rapture of the God-inspired soul ; how, "raised up on wings .
. having passed beyond all sensible things, it yearns for the things of the mind; and beholding there, in their perfect beauty, the patterns and ideals of things perceptible here to the sense, it is seized by a sober intoxication, like the frenzy of the Corybantes, only with a nobler longing, and so is borne upward to the very verge of supersensual things, into the presence of the great king." ? Indeed, he does not hesitate to declare, like Paul,® that he had himself shared in these unspeakable experiences.* This revived Platonism, tinged with oriental mysticism, Philo passed on to more philosophic and creative thinkers, at whose hands it took a form even more abstract, and lasted, as the Neo-Platonic School, quite into the fifth cenIGens i. 2h xv. 12:
2 De Mund. Opif., 23; Leg. Alleg., iii. 33; Cain, 14; Quis Jibei Sp Eee 8 2 Cor. xii. I-4.
4 De Migrat. Abr., 7, 34.
Note EE.
184.
PAPIAS tury, counting no less a personage than the Emperor Julian among its disciples, and affording a dignified close to the long reign of Greek philosophy.
Certainly, philosophic mysticism could hardly reach a higher point than in the person of Plotinus, the founder of the school, who so disdained his own bodily existence that he refused to tell either his parents, his country, or his birthday ; who, when asked to sit for his portrait, declined to leave to posterity an image of so base an image, and who four times, through the intensity of his spiritual passion, rose to actual union with God.!_ This touch of apparent fanaticism was only an outward and incidental feature of a singularly noble life and refined system of thought, which claims our attention here as one token the more of the lofty themes which were then occupying the best minds of the age.
It gives us the philosophic side of the movement whose religious or Gnostic form we have just seen under the contact of Christianity.
It cannot be said that any direct connection can be established between Philo and the Gnostic schools.
The origin of Gnosticism is absolutely obscure, and all that can be done is to
1 A. D. 205-270.
Porphyrius, Vita Plotini, ch. TE 10,) 23) Select Works of Plotinus, Taylor, pp. xliii, Ixviii.
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
point out the relation of Basilides and Valentine to Alexandria, and the unequivocal resemblance between many of Philo's ideas and theirs.
What Philo had done for Judaism, in disclosing its occult significance, these and others were easily led to do for the younger faith which was making its appearance as Philo left the stage.
The more easily, as the early Christians clung so tenaciously to their Jewish origin, and insisted on discovering their own highest mysteries hidden beneath the words of Moses and the Prophets.
To the profane eye, it might seem a somewhat subordinate réle to assign to Christianity, to make it simply an echo of the older dispensation ; but this was not the view of the age we are studying, as we have had abundant opportunity to note.
Marcion, indeed (who was Gnostic rather by courtesy), made quick work of the whole Jewish matter, casting it scornfully aside as unworthy intelligent thought ; but Basilides and Valentine, with their numerous followers, welcomed the allegorical method with fervor, and gave it a footing in Christian councils from which it has never yet been dislodged.1
The extraordinary aspects which it 1 Marcion held many ideas in common with the Gnostics, and so is commonly classed with them; but at the same time had an aversion to the allegorical method, and showed
PAPIAS assumed at their hands, hardly more fantastic, after all, than with many of their medizeval and modern imitators, find an easy explanation in the more ingenuous temper of those primitive days, and the disturbed spiritual conditions to which Christianity at first addressed itself.
It would need more explanation still, if Christian tenets had not stirred the pagan imagination to novel flights.
The three names which I have given are but a few out of many ; some later, some probably earlier than themselves.
The followers of Basilides and Valentine became subdivided into various sects, alongside of which, from similar or different sources, sprang up numberless schools known to us hardly more than through their names.
The earliest writer upon this subject mentions twenty-one distinct sects ;! while another, somewhat later, gives twenty -two.?
Gibbon knows of fifty ;? one of the latest and most thorough historians of Gnosticism gives forty-three.
We are to think of these sects as spread over the entire field of Christendom, little of the speculative or idealizing tendencies which chiefly characterize the movement.
1 Tren., Her., 1.
2 Hippolytus, Ref Omnium Heresium.
8 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xv.
* Matter, Histoire Critique du Gnosticisme.
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
and entering by antagonism or assimilation into the life and thought of all the churches.
As time went on, it is plain that their doctrines, in some quarters, at least, became more and more extravagant.
Charlatans entered their ranks, impostors played the hypocrite under the mask of their convenient tenets, voluptuaries availed themselves of the distinction between carnal and spiritual to indulge in forbidden pleasures, and to decline any such profession of their Christian faith as would involve the perils of martyrdom.!
They seem also to have borrowed much from the astrological superstitions of the hour, and magicians and ghost-fanciers found as many dupes among them as they find among the worshipers of this enlightened nineteenth century.?
But despite these vagaries, common to it with many similar movements, Gnosticism was a power to be reckoned with in many directions.
In the domain of morals, 1 Tren. i. 25, 4; i. 6, 2-4; iii. 18, 5; Clem. Alex. iv. 4; iv.
9; Euseb., Hist. Lcc., iv. 7,93 Tertull., Scorp., 15.
2 Hipp. v. 21, etc.; Origen, Ce/s., vi. 24.
Anz, a recent writer on this subject, traces the various Gnostic sects to an original gnomic cult whose home was in Babylon.
According to him it provided occult formulz for guiding the soul through the seven planetary spheres, with their seven hostile
Archons, or doorkeepers, up to the highest heaven.
(Ursprung d. Gnosticismus.) Comp. Iren. i. 21, 5.
PAPIAS apart from certain aberrations, it advocated a system of asceticism too exacting to be popularly accepted, yet which reappeared later in the rigors of monasticism ; in the field of worship, it contributed more than its share to the hymnology and ritual of the young church ;! while it was the source apparently of much of the magic ceremonial which has held its place with such singular persistency in Christian worship.?
Most important of all, however, and the service by which it will be longest remembered, is the light it throws upon the theological speculations out of which the Catholic theology was born.
It will be clear from the above, I think, that Gnosticism has little claim to be called a system.
There is but slight proof that these various schools held any conscious relation to each other, or recognized any common fellowship.
It is doubtful even whether they had any common name, until this name was conferred upon them by the historians of heresy, for purposes of classification.
Their prominent character1 Tren. i. 21, 3 and 5; Hipp. v. 10; vi. 47; Canon Muratori, 4; Tertull., Car. Christi, 17.
See Matter, ii. 264, B5L5 Harnack, Hist. of Dog., i. 241; also, Pistis Sophia.
2 Tren. i. 21, 3-5; Clem. Alex. vii. 17; Renan, Ast, vi.
154; vil. 144.
3 Note FF.
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istic was held to be the claim to an occult knowledge of the Christian revelation.
The Gnostic is he who knows ; who has a profounder insight into the eternal secrets than the unillumined worshiper ; and through this knowledge gains immediate access to Deity.
This mystic insight into things divine became a contagious doctrine, and the first impulse evidently was to insist upon it as the distinguishing attribute of the true Christian.
The leading Christian Father of the end of the century, Clement of Alexandria, so far from resenting the name Gnostic, claims it for himself and all of his faith.
The Gnostic, according to him, is the true Christian.
He is the only one who penetrates to the inner knowledge of things ; and by this knowledge overcomes the world, and becomes one with God.}
For a moment Gnosticism seemed destined to implant itself in the bosom of Christianity.?
Afterwards the tendency fell under suspicion, and this very claim of superior knowledge was denounced, and became the convenient desigi@lem. Alexsds1% 1. 6; 1. 13); 1. 17; i. 205) iv. 17-22.
2 Tertull., Prax.,7, 8.
To see the sort of influence which Gnostic thought was exerting upon the inchoate
Christian theology, it is only necessary to read a passage like this, where Tertullian is proving that the Son can issue from the Father, yet remain the same as the Father, and has to borrow Valentine's Zons for his own purposes.
IPAS nation of the many groups which were wandering from the trodden paths.
In later days, as is well known, Gnosticism was declared a heresy ; and it may be expected of me, before dropping the subject, to draw the exact lines which separate it from Christianity.
Some of my readers have already taken exception, perhaps, to my treating the movement as if it were really part and parcel of Christian history.
It must be remembered, however, that we are not treating Christian history as a whole; we are standing within the second century, to see what was happening then and there; and with the best purpose in the world, I can see no distinction whatever at that time between the three leaders here mentioned and other Christian teachers.
They had their opponents, no doubt, from the start.
Justin Martyr hated Marcion with a godly hatred, and declared his followers impious heretics.
At the same time he admits that they "are called Christians," just as Pharisees and Sadducees were called Jews; the one case seeming to him quite as unrighteous as the other.1
The Gnostic was worse than other heretics, it appears, mainly because he denied that the Messiah would reign in Jerusalem a thousand years.
The other F athers, haters of 1 Trypho, 35, 80.
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I9I heretics as they were, all acknowledged that the prominent Gnostics claimed to be Christian, and were commonly called so.
Perhaps none of them puts the case with more tell-tale simplicity than Tertullian.
" As they are heretics," he says, "they cannot be Christians, .
. and so have no right to the Christian writings ; so that we may properly say to them: Who are you? When and whence did youcome?
What have you to do with my property, as you are none of mine?
You, Marcion, by what right do you cut my wood?
You, Valentine, who gave you leave to turn my streams aside?
Apelles, why are you removing my landmarks?
This is my property; I have held it a long time; I held it first ; I have safe title-deeds from the original owners; I am the heir of the Apostles." 1
The simple fact is that these men considered themselves Christians, and were called so by others ;? they had their churches, bishops, Scriptures, and worship, and are charged by their opponents with aspiring to high ecclesiastical positions ;* they base their doctrines on the Christian Scriptures ;* one of them is the 1 Tertull., Pres., 37.
2 Justin, Apol., i. 26; Trypho, 35, 80; Iren. iv. 33, 3.
3 Tren. iv. 26, 3; Tertull. Pres., 30, 32; Val. 4. eelvens te Prefer ins) On 1a Oy 5 sells 15,22
PAPIAS first scholar known to us to edit a Gospel, or collect the Epistles of Paul;1 another, according to his critics, wrote a commentary on the Gospels in twenty-four books.2
It would have been difficult for any of their opponents at that moment to have brought forward more satisfactory credentials than these.
If it is claimed that they were pronounced heretics in the end, and cast out of fellowship by the leading churches of the time, this cannot be denied.
But what shall we say of Tertullian, who abandoned the church because it would not come over with him into Montanism??
Or of Justin 1 Tertull. adv. Mare. iv.; v.
2 Basilides.
Comp. Euseb., Hist. Ecc., iv. 7, 7; Clem.
Alex. iv. 12.
Sy Dertull 72a) los Deed ai aon VG VBE (CaS 7; Jerome, De Vir. lil., 53.
The Montanists were the followers of Montanus, a Phrygian reformer and enthusiast, who lived about 170.
He claimed that the prophetic gifts recognized in apostolic times (1 Cor. xii. 10, 28; xiv. 1, 5
31) still existed; and that the Paraclete promised by Christ (John xiv. 16, 26; xvi. 7) had really come.
The movement resembled somewhat the Second Advent excitements of later days, and brought to a sharp issue the question whether divine inspiration could still be present in the church, or had disappeared with the Apostles.
With this went, of course, the question whether there could still be inspired writings; a dispute which was speedily settled by the establishment of a New Testament Canon.
Comp.
Euseb., Hist. Hec., v. 14-18; Epiph., Her., xlviii. 1; also,
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
Martyr, Papias, and Irenzeus, who were declared heretics for their millennial errors?
Or of Tatian, cast out for his asceticism ? Judged by the final decisions of the church, when doctrines were at last established, every one of these church Fathers fell into heresies quite as perilous to the faith as the speculative errors of Gnosticism.
It is quite superfluous at this distance to attempt to determine their degrees of error, or even to insist upon the name of heretic at all.
At that time, it must be remembered, there could be no genuine heresy, for there was no established faith. No Councils had yet rendered their decisions.
There was no accepted Christian canon.
There was no Christian Church.
Churches there were, scattered through Asia Minor, Palestine, Greece, Rome, Africa, and Gaul; but no Church; no one organization including them all; no single head; no full consciousness of unity.1 We are witnessing Holtzmann, Zinieit., 118; Harnack, Hés¢. of Dog., i. 95108.
1 The term "catholic church" (universal church) begins to be heard about this time.
In earlier hours "the church" seems to have been conceived of only as an ideal gathering of believers, to be realized, like all else, in the coming kingdom.
(Eph.i. 10, 22, 23; Teaching of Twelve Apos., 9, 10.) The word "catholic" is found first in Ignatius, though prob-
PAPIAS in these very struggles, and the dissensions which they reveal, the first motives for a compacter union.
The sense of unity, however feeble, is beginning to assert itself, though writers differ as to the tests to be applied.t
Before many years there will plainly be some established tribunal before which all teachers of novel or false doctrines must appear and give account of themselves.
But meantime all doctrines have their chance.
If Justin and Irenzeus have a right to their views of the great Christian mysteries, so have Basilides, and Valentine, and Bardesanes, and Saturninus.
Fortunately these great questions could not be decided in a moment ; and the world's philosophy had got well inside the church before the gates were closed." ably without its later technical meaning.
(Symrn., viii. 2; also, Mart. of Polycarp, viii.
1.) Irenzus uses it, though not familiarly.
(i. 10, 3.) Origen still speaks more easily of "churches" than "the church."
(Ce/s., v. 59; vi. 21.) Also Tertull., Pres., 26, 30; Clem. Alex. vii. 17.
1 Tertull., Pres., 20, 21, 28, 32, 6; Iren. iii. 2, 15 iii. ah 1p iii. 4,1; v. 20,1; Tertull. adv. Marc. iv. 4; Clem. Alex.
Vii. 17.
2 The exact relation of Gnosticism to Christianity has always been a subject of dispute.
Some writers represent it as coming into full existence only on Christian soil (Baur,
Christ. Gnosis ; Schwegler, Vachapos. Zeitalter, ii. 231); others that it has no necessary connection with Christianity, but
THEOLOGICAL. SPECULATIONS
I do not mean to intimate that there was any moment when these Gnostic ideas were received with universal favor.
Indeed, the opposition to them began at once.
By the end of the century, the great magnates of the church had entered upon an unsparing campaign against the whole mystic crowd.
The vagaries of the followers, if not of the leaders, gave ample field for satire and caricature.
The very mention of fEZons or of the Pleroma filled the good Fathers with mirth.
"Iu, Iu, Pheu, Pheu!" cries Irenzus ; "for well may we strike the tragic note at this audacity; at these unblushing names coined for a system of falsehood."!
He professes to be much affected at the sorrows of Acamoth,? sitting and weeping over her exile has a far remoter origin.
(Matter, Hist. Crit., i. 259, 399.) Neander treats it as a reaction of the antique principle against the Christian, but gives the great Gnostic systems a wholly sympathetic treatment.
(/7/isz., i. 366, etc.) Renan regards Gnosticism as a species of croup or measles, to which the infant Christendom was of necessity exposed, and from which it had reason to congratulate itself for having escaped on such easy terms.
(/7/7st., vi. 140.) Harnack, with less humor, perhaps, but keener historic sense, calls the Gnostics, out and out, the "theologians of the first century," 7. ¢., first century of the Christian Church.
(7st. Dog, i. 227.) For Pistis Sophia, a recently discovered Gnostic writing, see Note GG.
1 Tren. i. 11, 4.
2 Same as Sophia, p. 170.
PAPIAS from the Pleroma, and suggests that all the seas, fountains, and rivers, and especially the hot-springs, flowed from her tears.!_ Tertullian considered Bythos and Sige, Nous and Veritas, as the first four-in-hand known to history ; was evidently anxious lest the A£ons, from their stupendous number, should not be adequately housed in the heavenly regions ; and imagined the celestial palaces piled up, story upon story, and labeled, no doubt, "rooms to let."?
The amenities so familiar to all theological literature were visited freely upon the great leaders of the movement, especially upon Marcion, whose successful propaganda of his doctrines exposed him to peculiar virulence.
The epithets applied to him form an instructive theologic anthology.
Justin Martyr called him a devil;* Polycarp, "the firstborn of Satan;"'* Irenaeus a snake ;§
Hippolytus, a hound;® Rhodo, a wolf ;7 Epiphanius, a viper;® Cyprian, a blasphemer ; ®
1 Tren. i. 4, 4.
Comp. Orig., Celsus, v. 55.
2 Tertull. adv. Val. 7.
8 Apol., i. 26; i. 58.
4 Tren. ili. 3, 4; Euseb., Wist. Ecc., iv. 14, 7.
LG Oly Si 6 Philos., vil. 30.
7 Euseb., Hzst. Hec., v.13, 4.
8 Her., xiii. 14.
® Concilium Carthag., 52.
THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
Tertullian, at different moments of his wrath, a monster, a gnawing-mouse, and a cuttlefish.?
Meantime, despite all vituperation and excommunications, the new doctrines got a hearing everywhere, and left hardly a single region unvisited.
The following century found Marcionites and Valentinians from Gaul to Africa.?
The several historians of heresy enumerate as many sects as churches, and intimate, one after another, that the worst of the task is still to be undertaken.2
In the fourth century, during the Arian controversy, Gnostics still existed in Gaul, Spain, and Aquitania, and still troubled the faithful by their over-zealous asceticism.'
In the sixth century there was still necessity for Byzantine legislation against the Marcionites.®
Our chief interest in Gnosticism, however, is in its beginnings, before it has yet been pronounced an outcast, and while it is still fighting on equal terms against the early traditions, and luring the Christian mind so resistlessly into IV ianCeeeti all. 20s 2 Justin, Apol., i. 26; Trypho, 35; Tertull. adv. Val. i.;
Tren. i. 13, 7; iv. Pref.
3 Trenzus, Tertullian, Hippolytus.
4 Philaster de Haeresibus, \xxxiv.
5 Matter, il. 314.
PAPIAS the regions of abstract speculation.
Before it can be banished from the churches, its work is accomplished.
For more than a century, as we have seen, Christianity has been so steeped in allegory and mysticism that it can never be quite the same again.?
1 Note HH.