Note 7 — Chapter IV · THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

(12) In this connection may be noted the appearance of a quasi-impersonal Messianism and Christism on the border-land of Jewish and early Christian literature. Of this, a main source is the Book of Enoch, of which the Messianic sections are now by general consent assigned to the first and second centuries B.C. There the Messiah is called the Just or Righteous One;7 the Chosen One;8 Son of Man;9 the Anointed;10 and once “Son of the Woman.”11 Here already we have the imagined Divine One more or less concretely represented. He is premundane, and so supernatural, yet not equal with God, being simply God’s deputy.12 When then we find in the so-called Odes of Solomon, recently recovered from an Ethiopic version, a Messianic psalmody in which, apparently in the first Christian century, “the name of the gospel is not found, nor the name of Jesus;” and “not a single saying of Jesus is directly quoted,”13 it is critically inadmissible to pronounce the Odes Christian, especially when a number are admitted to have no Christian characteristics.14 When, too, the writer admittedly appears to be speaking ex ore Christi, a new doubt is cast on all logia so-called. Such literature, whether or not it be pronounced Gnostic, points to the Gnostic Christism in which the personal Jesus disappears15 in a series of abstract speculations that exclude all semblance of human personality. All the evidence points for its origination to abstract or general conceptions, not to any actual life or teaching. It spins its doctrinal web from within.