Note (return) — Chapter VI

10. Meanwhile the existence of such a Jewish Christianity is not as yet proved, and therefore we must reckon with the possibility that the remodelled form of the Jewish Christian sources, already found in existence by the revisers of the Pseudo-Clementine Romances, was solely a Catholic literary product. In this assumption, which commends itself both as regards the aim of the composition and its presupposed conditions, we must remember that, from the third century onwards, Catholic writers systematically corrected, and to a great extent reconstructed, the heretical histories which were in circulation in the churches as interesting reading, and that the extent and degree of this reconstruction varied exceedingly, according to the theological and historical insight of the writer. The identifying of pure Mosaism with Christianity was in itself by no means offensive when there was no further question of circumcision. The clear distinction between the ceremonial and moral parts of the Old Testament, could no longer prove an offence after the great struggle with Gnosticism.451 The strong insistence upon the unity of God, and the rejection of the doctrine of the Logos, were by no means uncommon in the beginning of the third century; and in the speculations about Adam and Christ, in the views about God and the world and such, like, as set before us in the immediate sources of the Romances, the correct and edifying elements must have seemed to outweigh the objectionable. At any rate, the historian who, until further advised, denies the existence of a Jewish Christianity composed of the most contradictory elements, lacking circumcision and national hopes, and bearing marks of Catholic and therefore of Hellenic influence, judges more prudently than he who asserts, solely on the basis of Romances which are accompanied by no tradition and have never been the objects of assault, the existence of a Jewish Christianity accommodating itself to Catholicism which is entirely unattested.