Note (return) — Chapter VI

The Jewish Christians took no considerable part in the Gnostic controversy, the epoch-making conflict which was raised within the pale of the larger Christendom about the decisive question, whether, and to what extent, the Old Testament should remain a basis of Christianity, although they themselves were no less occupied with the question.407 The issue of this conflict in favour of that party which recognised the Old Testament in its full extent as a revelation of the Christian God, and asserted the closest connection between Christianity and the Old Testament religion, was so little the result of any influence of Jewish Christianity, that the existence of the latter would only have rendered that victory more difficult, unless it had already fallen into the background, as a phenomenon of no importance.408 How completely insignificant it was is shewn not only by the limited polemics of the Church Fathers, but perhaps still more by their silence, and the new import which the reproach of Judaising obtained in Christendom after the middle of the second century. In proportion as the Old Testament, in opposition to Gnosticism, became a more conscious and accredited possession in the Church, and at the same time, in consequence of the naturalising of Christianity in the world, the need of regulations, fixed rules, statutory enactments etc., appeared as indispensable, it must have been natural to use the Old Testament as a holy code of such enactments. This procedure was no falling away from the original anti-Judaic attitude, provided nothing national was taken from the book, and some kind of spiritual interpretation given to what had been borrowed. The "apostasy" rather lay simply in the changed needs. But one now sees how those parties in the Church, to which for any reason this progressive legislation was distasteful, raised the reproach of "Judaising,"409 and further, how conversely the same reproach was hurled at those Christians who resisted the advancing hellenising of Christianity, with regard, for example, to the doctrine of God, eschatology, Christology, etc.410 But while this reproach is raised, there is nowhere shewn any connection between those described as Judaising Christians and the Ebionites. That they were identified off-hand is only a proof that "Ebionitism" was no longer known. That "Judaising" within Catholicism which appears, on the one hand, in the setting up of a Catholic ceremonial law (worship, constitution, etc.), and on the other, in a tenacious clinging to less hellenised forms of faith and hopes of faith, has nothing in common with Jewish Christianity, which desired somehow to confine Christianity to the Jewish nation.411 Speculations that take no account of history may make out that Catholicism became more and more Jewish Christian. But historical observation, which reckons only with concrete quantities, can discover in Catholicism, besides Christianity, no element which it would have to describe as Jewish Christian. It observes only a progressive hellenising, and in consequence of this, a progressive spiritual legislation which utilizes the Old Testament, a process which went on for centuries according to the same methods which had been employed in the larger Christendom from the beginning.412 Baur's brilliant attempt to explain Catholicism as a product of the mutual conflict and neutralising of Jewish and Gentile Christianity, (the latter according to Baur being equivalent to Paulinism) reckons with two factors, of which, the one had no significance at all, and the other only an indirect effect, as regards the formation of the Catholic Church. The influence of Paul in this direction is exhausted in working out the universalism of the Christian religion, for a Greater than he had laid the foundation for this movement, and Paul did not realise it by himself alone. Placed on this height Catholicism was certainly developed by means of conflicts and compromises, not, however, by conflicts with Ebionitism, which was to all intents and purposes discarded as early as the first century, but as the result of the conflict of Christianity with the united powers of the world in which it existed, on behalf of its own peculiar nature as the universal religion based on the Old Testament. Here were fought triumphant battles, but here also compromises were made which characterise the essence of Catholicism as Church and as doctrine.413