Note 403 — Chapter VI

Footnote 403:

(return)

The attitude of the recently discovered "Teaching of the twelve Apostles" is strictly universalistic, and hostile to Judaism as a nation, but shews us a Christianity still essentially uninfluenced by philosophic elements. The impression made by this fact has caused some scholars to describe the treatise as a document of Jewish Christianity. But the attitude of the Didache is rather the ordinary one of universalistic early Christianity on the soil of the Græco-Roman world. If we describe this as Jewish Christian, then from the meaning which we must give to the words "Christian" and "Gentile Christian", we tacitly legitimise an undefined and undefinable aggregate of Greek ideas, along with a specifically Pauline element, as primitive Christianity, and this is perhaps not the intended, but yet desired, result of the false terminology. Now, if we describe even such writings as the Epistle of James and the Shepherd of Hermas as Jewish Christian, we therewith reduce the entire early Christianity, which is the creation of a universal religion on the soil of Judaism, to the special case of an indefinable religion. The same now appears as one of the particular values of a completely indeterminate magnitude. Hilgenfeld (Judenthum und Juden-christenthum, 1886; cf. also Ztschr f. wiss. Theol. 1886, II. 4) advocates another conception of Jewish Christianity in opposition to the following account. Zahn, Gesch. des N.T-lich. Kanons, II. p. 668 ff. has a different view still.