About A.D. 140. every heresy, almost every heresiarch, found welcome reception. All new opinions, all attempts to harmonise Christianity with the tenets of the Greek philosophers, with the Oriental religions, the Cosmogonies, the Theophanies, and Mysteries of the East were boldly agitated, either by the authors of the Gnostic systems or by their disciples. Valentinus the Alexandrian was himself in Rome, so also was Marcion of Sinope. The Phrygian Montanus, with his prophetesses, Priscilla and Maximilla, if not present, had their sect, a powerful sect, in Rome and in Africa. In Rome their convert, for a time at least, was the Pope; in Africa, Tertullian. Somewhat later, the precursors of the great Trinitarian controversy came from all quarters. Praxeas, an Asiatic; Theodotus, a Byzantine; Artemon, an Asiatic; Noetus, a Smyrniote, at least his disciples, the Deacon Epigenes and Cleomenes, taught at Rome. Sabellius, from Ptolemais in Cyrene, appeared in person; his opinions took their full development in Rome. Not only do all these controversies betray the inexhaustible fertility of the Greek or Eastern imagination, not only were they all drawn from Greek or Oriental doctrines, but they must have been still agitated, discussed, ramified into their parts and divisions, through the versatile and subtile Greek. They were all strangers and foreigners; not one of all these systems originated in Rome, in Italy, or in Africa." On all these opinions the Bishop of Rome was almost compelled to sit in judgment; he must receive or reject, authorise or condemn; he was a proselyte, whom it would be the ambition of all to gain. No one unfamiliar with Greek, no one not to a great extent Greek by birth, by education, or by habit, could in any degree comprehend the conflicting theories. The Judaising opinions, combated by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, maintained their ground Christianity. among some of the Roman Christians for above a Judaising A passage of Aulus Gellius illustrates the conscious inadequacy of the Latin to express, notwithstanding the innovations of Cicero, the finer distinctions of the Greek philosophy: Hæc Favorinum dicentem audivi Græcâ oratione, cujus sententias, quantum meminisse potui, retuli. Amænitates vero et copias ubertatesque verborum, Latina omnis facundia vix quidem indispisci potuerit. Noct. Att. xii. Favorinus, of the time of Hadrian, was a native of Arles in Gaul. b tina. century or more after that Apostle's death. A remarkable monument attests their power and vitality. There can be slight doubt that the author of that singular The Clemenwork, commonly called the Clementina, was Roman, or rather a Greek domiciled in Rome." Its Roman origin is almost proved by the choice of the hero in this earliest of religious romances. Clement, who sets forth as a heathen philosopher in search of truth, becomes the companion of St. Peter in the East, the witness of his long and stubborn strife with his great adversary, Simon the Magician; and if the letter prefixed to the work be a genuine part of it, becomes the successor of St. Peter in the see of Rome. It bears in its front, and throughout, the character of a romance; it can hardly be considered even as mythic history. Its groundwork is that so common in the latest Greek and in the Latin comedy, and in the Greek novels; adventures of persons cast away at sea, and sold into slavery; lost children by strange accidents restored to their parents, husbands to their wives; amusing scenes in what we may call the middle or mercantile life of the times. It might seem borrowed, in its incidents, from a play of Plautus or Terence, or from their originals; a kind of type of the Ethiopics of Bishop Heliodorus, or the Chærea and Callirhoe. The religious interest is still more remarkable, and no doubt faithfully represents the views and tenets of a certain sect or class of Christians. It is the work of a Judaising Christian, according to a very peculiar form of Ebionitism. The scene is chiefly laid in Palestine and its neighbourhood, its original language is Greek. The views of the author as to the rank, influence, and relative position of the Apostles, is among its most singular characteristics. So far from ascribing any primacy to St. Peter, though St. Peter is throughout the leading personage, James, Bishop of Jerusalem, is the acknowledged head of Christendom, the arbiter of Christian doctrine, the Bishop of Bishops, to whom Peter himself This is the unanimous opinion of b I entertain some doubt on this point. those who, in later days, have critically A good critical edition of this work, in investigated the Clementina - Schlie- its various forms, is much to be desired. man, Neander, Baur, Gieseler. ἔγω Κλήμης Ρωμαίος ὠν, in init. This does not prove much. This is abundantly proved by Schlieman and by Neander. bows with submissive reverence. Of any earlier visits of Peter to Rome the author is ignorant. Clement encounters the Apostle in Palestine; in Palestine or in the East is carried on the whole strife with Simon Magus. Yet Peter is the Apostle of the Gentiles, to Peter the heathens owe their Christianity. More than this, there is a bitter hatred to St. Paul, which betrays itself in brief, covert, sarcastic allusion, not to be mistaken in its object or aim.a The whole purpose of the work is to assert a Petrine, a Judaising, an anti-Pauline Christianity. The Gospel is but a republication of the Law, that is, the pure, genuine, original Law, which emanated from God. God is light, his Wisdom or his Spirit (these are identified and are both the Son of God) has dwelt in different men, from Adam to Jesus. The whole world is one vast system of Dualisms, or Antagonisms. The antagonism of Simon Magus to St. Peter is chiefly urged in the Clementine homilies; but there are manifest hints, more perhaps than hints, of a second antagonism between Peter and Paul, the teacher of Christianity with the Law, and the teacher of Christianity without the Law. Here then is the representative of what can scarcely be supposed an insignificant party in Rome (the various forms, reconstructions, and versions in which the Clementina appear, whole, or in fragments, attest their wide-spread popularity) who does not scruple to couple fiction with the most sacred names. Of the whole party it must have been the obvious interest to exalt St. Peter, to assert him as the founder, the Bishop of the true Church in Rome; and it is certainly singular that in all the early traditions, which are more than allusions to St. Peter at Rome, Simon Magus appears as his shadow. Has, then, the myth grown out of the pure fiction, or is the fiction but an expansion of the myth ? d In the letter of St. Peter, Tivis gàe τῶν ἀπὸ ἐθνῶν, τὸ δι ̓ ἐμοῦ νόμιμον ἀπεδοκίμασαν κήρυγμα, τοῦ ἐχθροῦ ἀνθρώπου ἀνομόν τινα καὶ φλυαρώδη προσηκάμενοι didacnaziav. If we could doubt that here St. Paul, not Simon Magus is meant, the allusions xi. 35, xvii. 19, and elsewhere, to the very acts and words of St. Paul are conclusive. Compare Schlieman, Die Clementine, 74, 96, 534, &c. e Strictly speaking the authority for Simon Magus being at Rome is earlier than that for St. Peter. The famous passage of Justin Martyr on the inscription Semoni Sanco, is about twenty years older than the Epistle of Dionysius of Corinth,-the first distinct assertion of St. Peter in Rome. Euseb. H. E. ii. 13, 14. At all events these works are witnesses to the perpetuity and strength, to a late period, of these Judaising opinions in Rome. Their fictitious form in no way invalidates their authority as expressing living opinions, tenets and sentiments. If not Roman (I have slight doubt on this head), there is an attestation to the wide spread oppugnancy of a Petrine and a Pauline party; to strong divergence of opinion as to the relative rank and dignity of the Apostles. A.D. 109. Out of the antagonism between Judaïc and anti-Judaïc Christianity arose the first conflict, in which the Controversy Bishop of Rome, as the leader of a great part of about Easter. the Christian confederation, assumed unwonted authority. Difference of opinion did not necessarily lead to open strife -from difference of observance it was unavoidable. The controversy about the time of keeping Easter, or rather the Paschal Feast, had slept from the days of Polycarp and Anicetus of Rome. Towards the close of the second century it broke out again. Rome, it is remarkable, now held the anti-Judaïc usage of the variable feast, and in this concurred with the churches of Palestine, of Cæsarea, and Jerusalem. These were chiefly of Gentile descent, and probably from near neighbourhood to the Jews were most averse to the usages of that hostile and odious race. The Asiatic churches had adhered to the ancient Jewish custom, the observance of the 14th day of the month (Nisan). The controversy seems to have been awakened in Rome by one Blastus, denounced as endeavouring secretly to enslave the Church to Judaism. The Bishop Victor deposed the obstinate schismatic from the Roman A.D. 196. Presbytery. But the strife was not confined to Rome. The Asiatic Christians, under Polycrates of Ephesus, maintained their own, the Judaïc usage, sanctioned, as was asserted, by the martyr Polycarp, by Philip the Deacon, and even by St. John. Victor, supported by the Bishops, Theophilus of the Palestinian Cæsarea, Narcissus of Jeru Schlieman assigns the Recognitions to some time between 212 and 230-the Clementina, no doubt, are of an earlier date. p. 327, et seqq. Est præterea his omnibus Blastus accedens, qui latenter Judaismum vult introducere. Pascha enim dicit non aliter custodiendum esse nisi secundum legem Moysi 'xiiii, mensis.-Præscript. Hæret. This is from an addition, probably an ancient one, to the Treatise of Tertullian. salem, by some in Pontus, in Osroene, in Gaul, and by Bacchylides of Corinth, peremptorily demanded a Council to judge the Asiatic Bishops; threatened or actually pronounced a disruption of all communion with those who presumed to maintain their stubborn difference from himself and the rest of the Christian world. The strife was appeased by the interposition of Irenæus, justly, according to the Ecclesiastical historian, called a Man of Peace. Irenæus was Bishop of Vienne in Gaul; and so completely is Christianity now one world, that a Bishop of Gaul allays a feud in which the Bishop of Rome is in alliance with the Bishops of Syria and of the remoter East, against those of Asia Minor. Africa does not look with indifference on the controversy. Irenæus had already written an epistle to Blastus in Rome, reproving him as author of the schism: he now wrote to the Bishop Victor, asserting the right of the Churches to maintain their own usages on such points, and recommending a milder tone on these ceremonial questions.1 It was not till the Council of Nicea that Christendom acquiesced in the same Paschal Cycle. The reign of Commodus, commencing with the last Reign of twenty years of the second century, is an epoch in the history of Western Christendom. Commodus, 180-193. The feud between the Judaising and anti-Judaising parties in Rome seemed to expire with the controversy about Easter. The older Gnostic systems of Valentinus and Marcion had had their day. Montanism was expelled from Rome to find refuge in Africa. In Africa Latin Christianity began to take its proper form in the writings of Tertullian. Rome was absorbed in the inevitable disputes concerning the Divinity of the Saviour, the prelude to the great Trinitarian controversy. The Bishops of Rome, Eleutherius, still more Victor, and at the commencement of the third century Zephyrinus, Callistus, before dimly known by scattered allusions in Tertullian and Eusebius, and still later writers, have suddenly emerged into light in the h Euseb. H. E. v. 15. The Latin book ascribed to Novatian, against the Jewish distinction of meats, shews Judaism still struggling Iwithin the church on its most vital peculiarities. The author of this tract wrote also against circumcision and the Jewish sabbath. |