Note (return) — Chapter VI

The Gospel, at the time when it was proclaimed among the Jews, was not only law, but theology, and indeed syncretistic theology. On the other hand, the temple service and the sacrificial system had begun to lose their hold in certain influential circles.430 We have pointed out above (Presupp. §§. 1. 2. 5) how great were the diversities of Jewish sects, and that there was in the Diaspora, as well as in Palestine itself, a Judaism which, on the one hand, followed ascetic impulses, and on the other, advanced to a criticism of the religious tradition without giving up the national claims. It may even be said that in theology the boundaries between the orthodox Judaism of the Pharisees and a syncretistic Judaism were of an elastic kind. Although religion, in those circles, seemed to be fixed in its legal aspect, yet on its theological side it was ready to admit very diverse speculations, in which angelic powers especially played a great rôle.431 That introduced into Jewish monotheism an element of differentiation, the results of which were far-reaching. The field was prepared for the formation of syncretistic sects. They present themselves to us on the soil of the earliest Christianity, in the speculations of those Jewish Christian teachers who are opposed in the Epistle to the Colossians, and in the Gnosis of Cerinthus (see above, p. 246). Here cosmological ideas and myths were turned to profit. The idea of God was sublimated by both. In consequence of this, the Old Testament records were subjected to criticism, because they could not in all respects be reconciled with the universal religion which hovered before men's minds. This criticism was opposed to the Pauline in so far as it maintained, with the common Jewish Christians, and Christendom as a whole, that the genuine Old Testament religion was essentially identical with the Christian. But while those common Jewish Christians drew from this the inference that the whole of the Old Testament must be adhered to in its traditional sense and in all its ordinances, and while the larger Christendom secured for itself the whole of the Old Testament by deviating from the ordinary interpretation, those syncretistic Jewish Christians separated from the Old Testament, as interpolations, whatever did not agree with their purer moral conceptions and borrowed speculations. Thus, in particular, they got rid of the sacrificial ritual, and all that was connected with it, by putting ablutions in their place. First the profanation, and afterwards, the abolition of the temple worship, after the destruction of Jerusalem, may have given another new and welcome impulse to this by coming to be regarded as its Divine confirmation (Presupp. § 2). Christianity now appeared as purified Mosaism. In these Jewish Christian undertakings we have undoubtedly before us a series of peculiar attempts to elevate the Old Testament religion into the universal one, under the impression of the person of Jesus; attempts, however, in which the Jewish religion, and not the Jewish people, was to bear the costs by curtailment of its distinctive features. The great inner affinity of these attempts with the Gentile Christian Gnostics has already been set forth. The firm partition wall between them, however, lies in the claim of these Jewish Christians to set forth the pure Old Testament religion, as well as in the national Jewish colouring which the constructed universal religion was always to preserve. This national colouring is shewn in the insistence upon a definite measure of Jewish national ceremonies as necessary to salvation, and in the opposition to the Apostle Paul, which united the Gnostic Judæo-Christians with the common type, those of the strict observance. How the latter were related to the former, we do not know, for the inner relations here are almost completely unknown to us.432