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Early Christianity outside
the Roman Empire

Two Lectures delivered at Trinity College, Dublin,
by F. CRAWFORD BUR K ITT, M.A., Trinity
College, Cambridge .

CAMBRIDGE, at the University Press, 1899.

dambrtTjge:
PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY,
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

All Rights reserved.

/ dedicate this Book
to the Rev. GEORGE SALMON D.D.
Provost of Trinity College, Dublin,
in grateful acknowledgment
of his kindness to myself
and in admiration of the unfailing acuteness
of his critical judgment.

' ' With matter of Heresie the West hath beene often and
much troubled; but the East part neuer quiet, till the deluge of
miserie wherein noiv they are, ouerivhelmed them. The chief est
cause nvhereof doth seeme to haue lien in the restlesse ivits of
the Grecians, euermore proud of their oivne curious and subtile
inuentions, which when at any time they had contriued, the
great facilitie of their language serued them readily to make
all things faire and plausible to men's 'understanding. Those
graund hereticall impieties therefore, which most highly and
immediatly touched God and the glorious Trinitie, were all in a
manner the monsters of the East."
HOOKER, Ecclesiastical! Politic V iii.

INTRODUCTION.
To the student of general history Christianity
makes its appearance as a Greek religion. The
first Christian communities of any considerable size
had their home in the great Greek cities on the
eastern shores of the Mediterranean. In Alexandria,
in Antioch, in Ephesus, in Smyrna, in Corinth — all
near the sea, and in easy communication with one
another — the little Churches came into being and
developed their organisation. The whole Ecclesias
tical vocabulary is Greek. Bishops, Priests, Deacons,
the Laity, Baptism, the Eucharist, all the terms are
Greek in origin. It is the same with literature.
From the alien religion out of which Christianity
had sprung the Church inherited her Sacred Books
in a Greek translation, and the writings of Christians
that after a time were added on to the Canon of
b. i

EARLY CHRISTIANITY

Scripture as a New Volume — these writings were
composed in Greek also. In a word, the Church
grew up on Greek soil.
The life of the Greek cities reacted on the
development of the Churches. The thought and
activity of small and progressive bodies must always
be largely determined by the atmosphere of the
great world outside, whether by way of protest or
of assimilation. For this reason early Christian
literature, apart from the Jewish controversy, is
mainly occupied with an attack upon Greek vices
and the Greek Pantheon. With these no terms
were possible. But as Christianity advanced an
antagonist came on the scene more honourable and
therefore more dangerous than Jupiter and his
court or even than the Genius of the Emperor.
No Religion could establish itself in the Greek-
speaking world without coming to a reckoning with
Greek Philosophy. Christianity had to face the
old problems of the One and the Many, of Mind
and Matter, of the infinite Divine Essence and its
Manifestation in time and place.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 3
Not that the Church, the main body of
Christians, was in any hurry to engage in these
difficult studies. They were forced on her from
outside, from the borderland between Christianity
and Heathendom, where thinkers such as Valentinus
and Basilides attempted to unite the science and
philosophy of the then civilised world with the life
and doctrines of the new religion. The instinct of
the Church, rather than her logical power, rejected
the early Gnostics and their Ogdoads, but it was
not possible to go on for ever with mere refutation.
After three centuries a system was elaborated which
the Church was able to recognise, and the Christian
Faith was enshrined in a fixed symbol, which
remains to this day as the accepted Christian
account of the nature of God in Himself and of
the relations between God and man. The Creeds
mark the final Concordat between Christianity and
Philosophy. We all know that this is not the whole truth.
The Church may have grown up on Greek soil,
but Christianity itself is not Greek in origin.

EARLY CHRISTIANITY

The very earliest stage of all, that stage which it is
most important for all of us to know and under
stand, is not Greek but Semitic. Our Lord was
not sent save unto the lost sheep of the House of
Israel. He lived the life of a Jew. He spoke in
the current dialect of Palestine to His fellow-
countrymen, and His conversations with his friends
and His controversies with His foes turned on the
things which troubled or interested the Jewish
community of Palestine in the early part of the first
century of our Era. Christ came not to promul
gate a Creed, a form of words containing the
quintessence of philosophical truth, but to live a
life among men ; and for us to feel the true force
of His words, to appreciate the attitude He took up
towards the current hopes and beliefs of those
among whom He lived, we must find out and
understand those beliefs. We must learn the
language that His contemporaries spoke and study
their phraseology.
When we attempt to do this we catch a glimpse
of a very different world from that of Greek

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 5
Christianity. Alas, it is only a glimpse ! The
great catastrophe of the Jewish War, culminating
with the sack of Jerusalem, finally separated the
Church and the Synagogue. The Jewish state
came to an end, and with it perished the primitive
Semitic Christianity. The Christians of Judaea
fled to the mountains, and when the troubles were
over the survivors seem to have mingled themselves
with the Greek-speaking urban population. Thus
the one community which might have preserved
the earliest traditions was swallowed up. So far as
we can find out, Christianity ceased in the land of
its birth, save that a small colony about which we
only know the Greek names of its Bishops is said
to have struggled on in Jerusalem. The shadow of
their names falls across the page of Eusebius, but no
deed or word is assigned to the silent figures.
Thus it has come to pass that our information
even about the outward events of our Lord's
ministry is so painfully scanty. The story of the
earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth and of the first
days of the infant community was known to the

EARLY CHRISTIANITY

Church, and has come down to us, only through
certain literary channels. Those events of the
early Galilean ministry which are recorded in
S. Mark's narrative are known to us, but how few
others ! The Church's acquaintance with the first
stage of Christianity rested on written documents,
not on living tradition : for good and for evil the
Greeks did not know Christ after the flesh.
Let me remind you in passing that this is not
a mere literary question of Sfuellenkritik. On the
contrary, it is the keystone of Protestantism. The
one thing which historically justifies us in breaking
with the Catholic tradition is this breach of conti
nuity at the earliest period. We are entitled to
criticise the Greek Gospels freely, to suggest on
due evidence that phrases or figures have been
wrongly or imperfectly apprehended, in a word we
have a right privately to revise the judgments of the
Church, mainly because the Church of the second
century was so far removed in spirit and in know
ledge from the life of Judaea in our Lord's day.
Do not let me be misunderstood. I am not

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 7
maintaining that this separation was not inevitable.
The work of the Church was to overcome the
world, not to furnish material for archaeologists.
Still, if we could know more about the beliefs,
the rites, the sacraments, of the community of
' Nazarenes ' that S. Jerome mentions more than
once with such tantalising brevity, it is my firm
conviction that we should possess a key that would
unlock many of the riddles which obstruct the
Evangelic history and darken to us the recorded
sayings of Christ.
But if between the Church of the second
century and the Apostles there is a great gulf fixed,
in what words are we to describe the difference
between the Nicene and Post-Nicene Church and
primitive Christianity ? Here all will acknowledge
the vastness of the change. At the same time, it
may be said that the change was due to natural
growth : the line that it took was, as a matter of
fact, the historical development of Christianity.
The Church of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus is
undoubtedly continuous with that of Athanasius

EARLY CHRISTIANITY

and Hilary, and that Church came to Nicaea and
proceeded to Chalcedon. After all, the Creeds are
merely the formal ratification of the best theology
of the great Churchmen. The new Constitution
was, in fact, inevitable — like the promulgation of
the Pope's Infallibility at a later day, long after the
dogma had been a pious inference in the Roman
communion. This may indeed be so, and I for one should be
very willing to believe that the rigidity of the later
Church was indispensable for it to withstand the
shock of the Barbarian invasions which swept away
the ancient Civilisation. But the object that I have
chiefly had in view in these Lectures is to glance
at a strangely neglected branch of the Church, a
branch in full communion and fellowship with the
rest of the Christian body and proud of its Apostolic
descent, yet cut off by political and linguistic cir
cumstances from that struggle with Greek philosophy
which so greatly influenced the Christianity of the
Greek-speaking populations within the Roman
Empire.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 9
I speak, of course, of the Christianity of the
Euphrates valley, of the Church whose language
was Syriac and its metropolis Edessa. But before
we settle down to our study of this Church we
shall do well to consider how it came to pass that it
is the only historical rival of the Greeks.
Let us look round the Roman Empire. To
the north and west it is obvious that Greek- speaking
Christianity could have no competitors. Marcion of
Pontus to all intents and purposes counts as a Greek.
The few Christians of Armenia used Syriac until the
4th century. The Latin Christianity of the West
and of N. Africa is wholly the child of Greek
Christianity. At a much later period it also de
veloped distinctive characteristics, but it inherited
nothing of primitive Christianity which it did not
get through Greek Christianity. The language,
the laws, the customs of the Latins are all utterly
foreign to Palestine and Semitic thought.
Nor does Egypt supply anything for our purpose.
Christianity was early established in Alexandria, but
Alexandria was less Egyptian than Gibraltar is

EARLY CHRISTIANITY

Spanish. There is little to shew that Christianity
spread among the native Egyptians till the rise of
monasticism, still less that a Christian literature
existed in any Coptic dialect before the latter half
of the 3rd century. The vast increase of infor
mation about the condition of Egypt under the
Empire which the last fifty years has witnessed, has
served only to confirm the familiar words of Gibbon.
" The progress of Christianity was for a long time
confined within the limits of a single city, which
was itself a foreign colony ; and, till the close of the
2nd century, the predecessors of Demetrius were
the only prelates of the Christian Church.... The
body of the natives, a people distinguished by a
sullen inflexibility of temper, entertained the new
doctrine with coldness and reluctance ; and even in
the time of Origen it was rare to meet with an
Egyptian who had surmounted his early prejudices
in favour of the sacred animals of his country. As
soon, indeed, as Christianity ascended the throne,
the zeal of those barbarians obeyed the prevailing
impulsion ; the cities of Egypt were filled with

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. u
bishops, and the deserts of Thebais swarmed with
hermits1." The political fortunes of Edessa, the metropolis
of the Syriac-speaking Church, offer a remarkable
contrast to any other centre of early Christianity.
Until a.d. 216, in the reign of Caracalla, Edessa
was outside the Roman Empire. The Toparch or
kinglet of the place, whose name seems always to
have been Abgar or Ma'nu, owed some allegiance to
the Parthian monarchs, but the little state enjoyed
most of the conditions favourable for independent
literary development. The language of the people
was also the language of the nobles and of govern
ment. The local patriotism was that of the ancient
Greek states or the Italian commonwealths of a
later day, and was as far as possible removed from
the cosmopolitanism of the Empire. At the same
time the city was not cut off from a wide inter
course with surrounding communities. The Ara
maic of Edessa was more than a mere local dialect :
it was the medium of commerce throughout the
1 Bury's Gibbon ii 60.

EARLY CHRISTIANITY

Euphrates valley, while the Aramaic of Palmyra
and of Palestine hardly differed from it more than
Lowland ' Scots ' differs from the standard English.
Edessa, in one word, was situated on the confines of
two great civilisations, the Greek and the Persian,
while at the same time it had not been robbed of its
own Semitic culture. The extant remains of Syriac
literature are almost wholly the product of later ages
and less fortunate conditions ; it is the misfortune
of Edessa, not her fault, that she was unable to
maintain her intellectual freedom through the shock
of the Persian wars. But the ease and vigour of
the earliest surviving literature of the Syriac-
speaking Church, whether prose, poetry, or philo
sophical discussion, unmistakably reflect the glory
of Edessa's three hundred years of honourable
independence. Christianity appears to have reached the
Euphrates valley about the middle of the second
century. The Bishops of Edessa trace their
succession to Serapion, Bishop of Antioch from
190 to 203, and there is all the more reason for

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 13
believing this tradition to be historically exact,
because it contradicts so glaringly the alternative
story of the successful preaching of Christianity at
Edessa by Addai, one of the 72 disciples. We
need not, however, delay long over the outward
history of the Syriac-speaking Church. The sub
ject has been well worked out by the Rev. Prof.
Tixeront, a French scholar of the school of
Duchesne1. The main thing that concerns us
here is that Christianity was planted in Edessa and
the Church organisation established there while it
was yet an independent state.
For the inner character of Syriac-speaking
Christianity in its early stages we must turn from
history to the surviving documents. The list, alas,
is miserably scanty. The later Syrians had different
tastes and a different standard of orthodoxy from
their forefathers and we may certainly add from
ourselves. Syriac literature, as it has come down
to us, consists for the most part of the contents of
1 Les Origines de tEglise d'Edesse ...par L.-J. Tixeront,
Paris, 1888.

14 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
one great Monophysite library, that of the Convent
of S. Mary Deipara in the Nitrian desert. The
mere fact that it did not contain a ms. of the
Diatessaron is enough to shew that its collection of
the earlier Syriac writings is quite inadequate.
Nevertheless, enough remains to give us some idea
of the temper of the first two centuries of Syriac
Christianity in its. very varied forms.
It will be convenient to give here a list of the
works which supply the materials for our investiga
tion. They may be grouped under six heads, as
follows :
I. The Old Testament in Syriac, commonly
called the Ptshittd.
2. The Evangelion da-Mepharreshe or Old
Syriac Version of the Gospels, and the closely
allied Diatessaron of Tatian.
3. The Doctrine of Addai and the early
Martyrologies (Acts of Sharbel, Barsamyd, etc.).
4. The Book of the Laws of Countries, com
monly known as ' Bardesanes De Fato,' but really
composed by Bardaisan 's disciple Philip.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 15
5. The Syriac Acts of Thomas, including the
great Gnostic Hymn which is ascribed by modern
scholars to Bardaisan himself.
6. The Homilies of Aphraates.
It is the two last of these, the Acts of Thomas
and Aphraates' Homilies, which more especially
concern us. You will notice that I have included
neither the works of Ephraim Syrus nor the revised
version of the N.T. in Syriac which goes by the
name of the Peshitta. The reason is only partly
chronological. Ephraim's chief literary activity and
the publication of the N.T. Peshitta may both be
placed about the middle of the 4th century. But
they stand apart from the list given above for
other reasons. Both represent that effort to keep
pace with the Greeks, which ossified the Syriac
language and landed the Syriac-speaking Churches
in the course of a hundred years in the opposite
errors of the Monophysites and the Nestorians.
The N.T. Peshitta is a revision of the Old
Syriac, not a fresh translation. It must have been
the work of learned and conscientious scholars : its

16 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
great merit is that it left so much of the old work
standing. Accuracy and timidity are the chief
characteristics of the revisers, and we can still trace
the influence of Greek theology and the Greek
grammarians as well as the use of Greek mss.1
Ephraim's excessive verbosity makes it difficult
to discover his real theological position. In a time
of transition, such as he lived in, the art of saying
nothing in a great many words must have been
exceedingly useful, and the saint who preferred to
glue together the pages of Apollinaris's book rather
than attempt to confute the writer must have been
aware that argument was not his strong point.
The ultimate reasons which led to the short-lived
and disastrous triumph of Greek thought over the
native Syriac Christianity were political rather than
theological, and Ephraim only too well represents
the temporary and verbal complaisance of the Syriac-
1 The Word and the Spirit are treated for theological purposes
as masculine, contrary to the genius of the language, and in
Joh i 14 flesh is substituted for the Old Syriac body. In
Grammar we may notice the consistent omission of the Semitic
'and' at the beginning of the apodosis, e.g. in Lk xii 46.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 17
speaking subjects of the Christianised Empire at the
end of the 4th century1. It was a state of things
which could not last long, and in a couple of
generations after Ephraim hardly a single orthodox
community was left in Mesopotamia. Let us not
linger now over the ill-matched union of Greek and
Semitic thought, but go back to the time when the
Syriac-speaking Church was still free and innocent.
The Old Testament in Syriac first claims our
attention, and chiefly because it may serve to remind
us of one most important factor among the popula
tions of the Euphrates valley, viz. the Jews. The
appellation Peshitta (i.e. 'simple') by which this
version is familiarly known to us does not seem to
be older than the 9th century. It was probably
given to distinguish it from the work of Paul of
Telia, which is a translation made from Origen's
Hexapla and consequently embellished with a
1 Ephraim's emancipation from the native tradition is well
illustrated by the fact that he quotes the Apocalypse by name
(Opp. Syr. ii 332 c), though the book was not, and is not to this
day, included in the Syriac Canon.

i8 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
complicated apparatus of critical signs. But the
Syriac Vulgate of the O.T. is much more ancient
than the name Peshitta. It is largely and accu
rately quoted by Aphraates, and unmistakeable
traces of its use appear in the Acts of Thomas : in
other words, it has as early an attestation as our
surviving materials carry us.
The Peshitta is a direct translation from the
Hebrew, in all essentials from the Massoretic text.
Some books, such as Chronicles, are amazingly
paraphrased, but the variations appear to be due to
the caprice of the translator or his exegetical
tradition, not to differences of reading in the under
lying Hebrew. Apart from intentional paraphrase
the translation is fairly done : so well, in fact, that
we cannot think of it as the work of Gentiles. It
seems to me not improbable that it is a monument
of Jewish learning of the great age of translations,
the age of Aquila and Symmachus, which has been
taken over by the Christian Church. Had it been
wholly the work of Christians, I cannot but think
that we should have heard of the singular erudition

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 19
of the translators and of their courage in breaking
away from the Greek tradition. However that
may be, the Peshitta is in itself an unanswerable
demonstration that the earliest Syriac Church con
tained a large Jewish element. This is quite in
accordance with the early traditions in the Doctrine
of Addai1, and harmonises (as we shall see) with
what is found in Aphraates. Thus the independent
civilisation of Edessa made a vernacular translation
necessary, while the presence of an influential
Jewish factor in the infant Church secured that the
translation of the Old Testament should be made
from the original Hebrew.
The earliest N.T. Canon of the Syriac-speaking
Church consisted of the Gospel, the Epistles of
S. Paul, and the Acts. "The Law and the
Prophets and the Gospel from which ye read every
day before the people, and the Epistles of Paul
which Simon Cephas sent us from the city of
Rome, and the Acts of the Twelve Apostles which
1 Phillips, E. tr. pp. 32, 33. 2 — 2

EARLY CHRISTIANITY

John the son of Zebedee sent us from Ephesus, —
from these writings shall ye read in the Churches of
the Messiah and besides them nothing else shall ye
read." This is the Canon of the Doctrine of
Addai1, and the list is confirmed by the actual
practice of Aphraates. I am not going to enter on
the difficult and disputed question of the relative
priority of the translation into Syriac of the Four
Gospels and of the Diatessaron, important as it is in
many ways. The investigation would involve us in
a mass of detail quite foreign to the scale of this
Lecture. Speaking generally, we may say that the
scanty notices in Syriac writings and the usage of
Aphraates himself are most naturally interpreted if
we assume the Diatessaron to have been first in the
field. Before the discovery of the Sinai Palimpsest
of the Four Gospels in the Old Syriac version
there was no doubt that the arguments for the
priority of the Diatessaron seemed much the stronger.
But now the balance of internal evidence has very
considerably shifted : the more intimately we know
1 Syriac text, p. 46.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 21
the Evangelion da-Mepharreshe, the more primitive
seems to have been its original form.
What concerns us now is not so much the
literary history of the Gospel in Syriac as the light
thrown by these early versions on the knowledge
accessible to the translators. The earliest retrans-
lation of our Lord's words into a Semitic tongue
cannot fail to contain much that is of interest for
us. And we find, as might have been anticipated,
a mixture of happy intuition and of helplessness.
At every turn we are reminded that we are dealing
with mere translations and adaptations of the Greek
Gospels, yet with translations which have often the
rare opportunity of being more exact and more
happy than the original work. Happily also the
translator was unhampered by pedantic methods,
such as some four centuries later disfigured the
effort of Justinian's clergy to give the people of
Palestine the Scriptures in their own tongue : no
version is more idiomatic than the Old Syriac or
less affected. The Proper Names are given in the
original forms or an approximation thereto : Halpai,

EARLY CHRISTIANITY

Mattai and Malku replace A\<f>alo<;, M.a60alo<;
and MaX^o?. By the Latins and ourselves Xpto-To?
is transliterated, but the Syriac has Me'shiha, the
Messiah or Anointed one ; in the accusation of
Lk xxiii 2 ("saying that he is Christ a king")
the term used is Malkd Meshihd, the very same
phrase syllable for syllable that we so often meet
with in Jewish literature and usually translate by
'King Messiah1.' It is still more surprising and
instructive to find that w salvation' is identified by
the Syriac usage with 'life.' "Zcorrjp is Mahydna
'Life-giver,' and 'to be saved' is 'to live.' This
is the more remarkable, as Syriac has several words
meaning 'to deliver,' 'to protect,' and 'to be safe
and sound.' May we not therefore believe that
this identification of 'salvation' and 'life' is the
genuine Aramaic usage, and that the Greek Gospels
have in this instance introduced a distinction which
was not made by Christ and His Aramaic-speaking
disciples ?
1 According to Dalman (Worle Jesu, 240) we ought not to
render it 'King Messiah' but ' The anointed King.'

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 23
But exegetical help of this kind is not always to
be got out of the Syriac versions. In cases of real
difficulty we can often see that the translator is
only struggling with the unknown meaning of the
Greek, and that his rendering, for all its Semitic
appearance, contains no element of originality.
There is one very marked instance, which will
serve to illustrate what I mean. No phrase in the
Gospel is more characteristic or more obscure than
the title o k/o? tov dvdpwirov, the Son of Man, used
by our Lord of Himself in many very varied aspects
of His mission. To seize the full meaning, or
meanings, we must be able to retranslate the Greek
words into the original Aramaic expression. It is
well known that in some circumstances the Aramaic
dialects use the phrase 'a son of man' for 'a human
being'; moreover, there is an undoubted connexion
of some kind between our Lord's use of 'The Son
of Man' and the very similar phrase in Daniel's
Vision1 which itself was written in Aramaic. For
many reasons, therefore, we turn to the Syriac
1 Dan vii 13.

24 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
renderings of o vio<; rov dvdpanrov with some justi
fiable expectation of obtaining help. As a matter
of fact, we get none at all. The ordinary rendering
in the Old Syriac documents, as in the Peshitta
N.T., is b'reh d"ndshd — a phrase sufficiently like
barnashd 'a human being' to sound original, but
really just as little native Syriac as 'The Son of
Man' is English. 'The Son of Man' has no
natural meaning in English : it is a mere con
ventional rendering of 6 vlo<; tov dvdpcoTrov.
Similarly, b'reh d"ndshd has no natural meaning in
Syriac. Moreover, it is not the rendering of the
O.T. Peshitta in Dan vii 13, which has bar
'n&shin which means (if it has any real meaning)
'son of some folk.' Nor is this all. B'reh d"ndshd,
if not a very illuminating translation, is at least
inoffensive. But the earliest Syriac documents
give us here and there, sometimes singly and some
times in conjunction, the amazing alternative b'reh
d'yaftrd. This is a literal, a too literal, rendering
of 6 vios rov dvOpanrov. It means filius uiri, 'the
on of the man.' The fact that so inadequate a

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 25
rendering is actually found can only be explained
on the supposition that it was the primitive Syriac
equivalent for the Greek words. But if it could be
tolerated at all, there must have been an utter
absence of exegetical tradition in the Church.
Thus we come back to the point from which
we started. The Greek-speaking Church and its
daughters were wholly dependent for its historical
information about our Lord and His times on the
bare letter of the Greek Gospels, and the only
advantage in this respect enjoyed by the Christians
of Edessa was that their native idiom was akin to
that of Palestine.
In studying the Syriac-speaking branch of the
Church, therefore, we may not hope to find an
organisation more primitive than that of Justin
Martyr or Hegesippus. But we know too little
about the Church of the second century not to be
grateful for anything that promises to throw light
upon its aims and beliefs. And here the Syriac
evidence is of real value. The Christianity planted
in the Euphrates valley in the latter half of the

26 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
second century seems to have developed more slowly
— in other words, changed less — than that of the
Greeks. Two hundred years later, in the middle
of the fourth century, we still hear the old watch
words in their full vigour from the mouth of a
monk and bishop of the orthodox communion.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 27

THE CREED OF
APHRAATES.
To appreciate the significance of the Homilies of
Aphraates we must first consider their date and the
personality of the writer. About the date there is
fortunately no doubt. Of the twenty-two Homilies
the first ten were composed a.d. 337, and the re
maining twelve a.d. 344 : the additional Homily
On the Cluster is dated a.d. 345. Thus they
appeared in the stormy years between the death of
Constantine and the second return of S. Athanasius
from exile. The author, Aphraates (or more ac
curately Afrahat), obtained from his countrymen
the name of the Persian Sage. He was a monk,
and must also have been a bishop. Dr William
Wright conjectures that he was bishop of the

EARLY CHRISTIANITY

Convent of S. Matthew near Mosul \ It is certain
that he had a seat in a Synod, held a.d. 344 in the
diocese of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, and that he was
selected to draw up the encyclical letter of the
Synod. This letter he subsequently published as
No. 14 of the Homilies.
Thus Aphraates was one of the foremost leaders
of the orthodox Syriac-speaking Church in the
second quarter of the 4th century. Some of his
fellow-bishops had been to Nicaea, and he himself
is writing in the very middle of the great Arian
controversy. His words, therefore, cannot fail to
shew the temper of his time. Moreover, the plan
of his great work is admirably fitted to give us the
information we are seeking. We speak of the
' Homilies ' of Aphraates, but the volume of dis
courses which goes by that name is not a collection
1 Wright's Syriac Literature, p. 33, following a statement in
a late Ms. (B. M. Orient. 1017). A full discussion of the rank
and status of Aphraates is to be found on pp. 157, 158 of
Dr Gwynn's Introduction to the translations of select works of
Aphraates and Ephraim in vol. xiii of the Select Library of
Nicene and post-Niccne Fathers.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 29
of occasional sermons. On the contrary, it is a
complete and ordered exposition of the Christian
Faith in answer to a request for information from an
inquirer. The twenty-two Homilies correspond to
the twenty-two letters of the Semitic Alphabet, and
the first word of each Homily begins with the
corresponding letter of the Alphabet in order, the
first with Alaph, the second with Beth, and so right
through. This is not a mere fanciful quip, but a
serious plan to enable the true order of the discourses
to be ascertained and, if needful, restored. It is
difficult to interpolate or mutilate an acrostic
without immediate discovery1. And as if the
acrostic arrangement were not enough, Aphraates
enumerates the series in order at the end of the
twenty- second Homily.
Once more I must remind you of the state of
Ecclesiastical affairs at the date of the publication of
Aphraates' works. The Council of Nicaea has
1 The acrostic arrangement has actually enabled Wright to
dispose at once of N. Antonelli's argument about the 14th Homily
(Wright's Aphraates, p. 9 note).

30 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
been held not half a generation ago, the Emperor
Constantine has just died, and Athanasius is in exile.
The flames of the Arian controversy are consuming
the vitals of the Empire. Christianity is divided up
into rival camps, each anathematising the other,
while according to one authority the public posting
system is quite thrown out of gear by the troops of
eager bishops hastening from synod to synod1.
What then has Aphraates to say about the crisis in
the Church ?
The astonishing answer is — absolutely nothing.
Neither Athanasius nor Arius is even mentioned.
We hear nothing of Homoousians or Homceousians,
Semiarians or Sabellians. Incidentally Aphraates
names ' Marcion, who doth not acknowledge our
Creator to be good ' ; he speaks of ' Valentinus, who
preacheth that his Creators arc many, and that God
in His perfection hath not been uttered by the
mouth, neither hath the understanding searched
Him out ' ; and he devotes a sentence of con
temptuous reprobation to the Babylonian arts of the
1 Ammianus Marcellinus xxi 16, quoted by Gibbon ii 359.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 31
Manichees \ But upon the controversies of his own
day he is silent. This does not come from enmity
to the Greeks, for in Homily V (Of the Wars) he
expresses at length his firm conviction, based upon
the visions of Daniel, of the ultimate failure of the
Persian attack upon the Empire 2. Nor does it
come from want of interest in theological discussion,
as we may see from the very title of Homily XVII
' Of the Messiah, that He is the Son of God.' To
this Homily we shall return presently, but we shall
best do justice to Aphraates by starting in the order
he has so carefully indicated. Instead of picking
out the most definite or startling doctrinal passages,
let us begin with Homily I On Faith s. Out of the
abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh : in a
doctrinal treatise that which is put first must in the
eyes of the author be fundamental.
Faith, then, according to Aphraates, is like a
building made of various materials of various colours.
1 Aphr. Ill 9. 2 Aphr. v 6, 19, 24.
3 This Homily is translated in full by Dr Gwynn, pp. 345—
352. It has also been translated by Dr Budge in his edition of
Philoxenus, vol. ii, pp. clxxv— clxxxvii.

32 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
But the foundation of our faith is Jesus Christ, the
Rock upon which the whole is built, as said the
prophets (§2). First a man believes, then loves,
then hopes, then is justified and perfected, and he
becomes a Temple for the Messiah to dwell in, as
Jeremiah said : The Temple of the Lord, the Temple
of the Lord — ye are the Temple of the Lord, if ye
will make fair your ways and your works 1, and as
said our Lord Himself Ye are in Me, and I am in
you (§3). The man who has Faith will study to
make himself worthy of being a dwelling-place of
the Spirit of the Messiah. There must be Fasting,
Prayer, Love, Alms, Humility, Virginity, Con
tinence, Wisdom, Hospitality, Simplicity, Patience,
Gentleness, Sadness a, Purity : Faith asks for all
these ornaments (§4). Christ is both the founda
tion and the inhabitant of the House of Faith :
Jeremiah says men are the Temples of G°d and the
Apostle said The Spirit of Christ dwelleth in you.
This comes to the same thing, for the Lord said :
1 Jer vii 4, 5 (Pes A).
The technical term for the monastic life.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 33
/ and My Father are one (§5). The Messiah is
spoken of by the prophets as a Stone or Rock
(§§6 — 9), and as a Light (§§10, 11). He is the
only foundation that can stand the fire (§§ 12, 13).
Such Faith the Saints of old time had (§§ 14 — 16),
and those also who were benefited by our Lord on
earth (§ 17). Faith carries us up to heaven, saves
us from the Deluge, looses the prisoners, quenches
the fire, feeds the hungry, brings back from the
grave, stops the mouths of lions, humbles the proud,
and exalts the meek (§ 18).
Perhaps you may find this vague and rhetorical.
But Aphraates does not leave us here. After the
praise of Faith he goes on to tell us exactly in what
it consists, and this Creed of his is so remarkable a
document that I give it in full.
"For this," he says (§ 19), "is Faith : —
When a man shall believe in God, the Lord of all,
That made the heaven and the earth and the seas
and all that in them is,
Who made Adam in His image,
Who gave the Law to Moses,
Who sent of His Spirit in the Prophets,
Who sent moreover His Messiah into the world.
B. 3

34 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
And that a man should believe in the coming to life of
the dead,
And believe also in the mystery of Baptism :
This is the Faith of the Church of God.
And that a man should separate himself
from observing hours and sabbaths and months and
seasons,
and enchantments and divinations and Chaldaism and
magic,
and from fornication and from revelling and from vain
doctrines, the weapons of the Evil One, and from
the blandishment of honeyed words, and from
blasphemy and from adultery,
And that no man should bear false witness,
and that none should speak with double tongues :
These are the works of the Faith that is laid on the
true Rock,
which is the Messiah,
upon Whom all the building doth rise."
You will recognise at once the spirit of this
Creed. It is familiar to us all ; it has been familiar
to us for nearly twenty years, for it is the spirit
which pervades the Didache. To Aphraates
Christianity was the revelation of a Divine Spirit
dwelling in man and fighting against moral evil,
not first and foremost a tissue of philosophical
speculation about the nature of the Divinity in

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 35
itself. But this is wholly alien to the temper of
Greek and Latin Christianity, as it manifests itself
from the fourth century onward. According to the
Creeds which to this day we recite, the inter-relation
of the Trinity and the events of the Passion con
stitute the faith of the Church. Nor is this view
confined to formal ecclesiastical documents.
"Firmly I believe and truly
God is Three, and God is One ;
And I next acknowledge duly
Manhood taken by the Son."
So runs the beginning of Gerontius' dying
confession in J. H. Newman's poem, and it only
expresses in modern verse what the Church of the
Empire would have us confess as the essence of the
Christian Religion1.
Not that Aphraates did not acknowledge the
1 For a contrast to Aphraates in Syriac literature see
Philoxenus, Discourse II 32 (Budge's Eng. Tr., p. 29). There
are, it should be noticed, traces of a (baptismal) Symbol in
Aphraates, e.g. " He is the First-born Son, the offspring of
Mary. ..He suffered, lived again, ascended into the height. ..He
is the Judge of dead and living, who shall sit on the Throne'-
(xiv 39).
3—2

36 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
Trinity, or was anything like a modern Unitarian.
The Syriac-speaking Church, in common with the
rest of Christendom, baptized in the Triple Name,
as is commanded in Matt xxviii 19. "The Head of
the man," says Aphraates (xxm 63 = Wright 500),
"is the Messiah. O thou that swearest by thy head
and that falsely, if thou dost truly hold the three
great and glorious Names that were invoked upon
thy head, the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit, when thou didst receive the Seal of thy life,
— do not swear by thy head ! " Or again (xxm
60 = Wright 496): "Above the heavens, what is
there — who doth suffice to tell ? Beneath the
earth, what is laid ? — there is none to say ! The
firmament — upon what is it stretched out, or the
heavens — upon what are they hung ? The earth —
on what is it pillowed, or the deep — in what is it
fixed ? We are of Adam, and here with our senses
we perceive little. Only this we know : that God
is one, and His Messiah one, and one the Spirit,
and one the Faith, and one Baptism. More than
thus far it doth not help us to speak ; and if we

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 37
say more we fall short, and if we investigate we are
helpless." After revolving round the theological
circle, we are surprised to find that Gibbon ends
where Aphraates had begun ; " the incomprehen
sible mystery which excites our adoration eludes
our enquiry1." It would have been well for the
peace of the Christian world if it had always
imitated the modesty of the Persian Sage.
One more point remains to be noticed in con
nexion with Aphraates' doctrine of the Trinity.
In Semitic languages there is no neuter, and Ruh,
the word for wind or spirit, is feminine ; in the
older Syriac literature, therefore, before the influence
of Greek theology made itself felt, the Holy Spirit
also is feminine. Thus in the Old Syriac version
of Joh xiv 26 we actually read The Spirit, the
Paraclete, she shall teach you everything2. And so
it is only in accordance with the earliest usage that
1 Gibbon ii 347.
2 In the Peshitta she (or it) is changed to he. Another
instance where the feminine usage seemed too heterodox to
stand is Lk xii 12. But in many passages the feminine is
retained even in the Peshitta, e.g. Lk iv 1, Joh vii 39.

38 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
in a doxology (xxm 63 = Wright 498) Aphraates
ascribes, "glory and honour to the Father and to
His Son and to His Spirit, the living and holy,"
where living and holy are feminine adjectives in the
better ms. But he goes further : it is not a question
of mere grammatical niceties. In the treatise, On
Virginity against the Jews (xvm 10 = Wright 354),
he says : " We have heard from the law that a man
will leave his father and his mother and will cleave
to his wife, and they will be one flesh ; and truly a
prophecy great and excellent is this. What father
and mother doth he forsake that taketh a wife ?
This is the meaning : that when a man not yet
hath taken a wife, he loveth and honoureth God his
Father, and the Holy Spirit his Mother, and he
hath no other love. But when a man taketh a
wife he forsaketh his Father and his Mother, those
namely that are signified above, and his mind is
united with this world ; and his mind and his heart
and his thought is dragged away from God into the
midst of the world, and he loveth and cherisheth it,
as a man loveth the wife of his youth, and the love

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 39
of her is different from that of his Father and of his
Mother." We shall find still more startling developments
of this doctrine of the Spirit when we come to the
Bardesanian Acts of Thomas. Here I would only
remind you that there is very early Christian
authority for it. In the ancient Gospel according to
the Hebrews, as quoted by Origen and S. Jerome,
our Lord Himself speaks of His Mother the Holy
Spirit1. And before we condemn the doctrine
altogether, let us remember that the age which
followed its final disappearance polluted the Christian
vocabulary with the word ©eoTo/co?.
I should like also to point out that just as
Aphraates' doctrine of the Spirit, strange as it
appears to us, is only a survival of one of the most
1 The authorities for this well-known saying are to be found
e.g. in Westcott's Introduction to the Study of the Gospels, App. D.
Origen (in Joann. II 12) explains it away by saying that the
Holy Spirit does the will of the Father and therefore may rightly
be described as the Mother of Christ, in accordance with
Matt xii 50.
In Ephraim Syrus the Holy Spirit is still grammatically
feminine, but no specially feminine functions are ascribed to

40 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
primitive Christian beliefs, so too Homily XVII
Of the Messiah that He is the Son of God is an echo
of one of the most remarkable sayings recorded in
S. John's Gospel1. The Homily, like so many that
Aphraates wrote, is directed against the Jews, who
complained that Christians worshipped a man whom
they called Son of God, in defiance of God's own
word / am God, and there is none beside me2 (§ i).
Her. "The Father nods and the Son knows ; The works by the
Spirit are performed." Beyond such generalities Ephraim does
not go.
"Confess that the Father is; Do not confess that He can be
denned.
Believe that the Son hath been ; Do not believe that He can be
searched out.
Affirm that the Holy Spirit is ; Do not affirm that She can be
examined.
That they are One believe and And that They are Three do
affirm ; not doubt.
Believe that the Father is first ; Affirm that the Son is second ;
That the Holy Spirit also is — Do not doubt She is the third."
(Ephr. Opp. Syr. iii 194: the change of tense in the second
line may be due to the exigencies of metre). The chief point
insisted on by Ephraim appears to be the impalpability of the
Spirit (e.g. iii 161).
1 Joh x 33 — 36. This Homily is translated in full by
Dr Gwynn, pp. 387—392.
2 Cf. Deut xxxii 39.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 41
Aphraates sets himself the task of defending the
Christian practice, even if he should concede to the
Jews that Jesus whom the Christians call God was
only a man. " Though," he continues, " we
truly hold that Jesus our Lord is God the Son of
God, and the King the Son of the King, Light from
Light, Son 1 and Counsellor and Guide and Way
and Saviour and Shepherd and Gatherer and Door
and Pearl and Lamp ; and by many Names is He
called. But now we will shew that He is the Son
of God and that He is God who from God hath
come " (§ 2). For the name of divinity has been
given to just men, as for instance to Moses, who
was made a God not to Pharaoh only but also to
Aaron '' (§ 3), and though the Jews say God has no
son, yet He called Israel His First-born 3, and
Solomon His son •- David also says of them : / have
said, Ye are Gods and sons of the Highest all of you "

1 Sic: cf. Isaiah ix 6 and also § 9.
2 Exod vi 1, vii 1. 3 Exod iv 22, 23.
4 2 Sam vii 14 ; cf. Heb i 5.
6 Ps Ixxxii (Ixxxi) 6.

42 EARLY CHRISTIANITY

(§4). God gives the most exalted titles to whom
He will : He called impious Nebuchadnezzar King
of Kings. For man was formed by Him in His
own image to be a Temple for Him to dwell in,
and therefore He gives to man honours which He
denies to the Sun and the Moon and the host of
Heaven1 (§§ 5, 6). Man of all creatures was first
conceived in God's mind2, though he was not placed
in the world till it was ready for him (§ 7). Why
should not we worship Jesus, through whom we
know God, Jesus who turned away our mind from
vain superstitions and taught us to adore the One
God, our Father and Maker, and to serve Him ?
Is it not better to do this than to worship the kings
and emperors of this world, who not only are
apostates themselves but drive others also to apo
stasy ? (§ 8). Our Messiah has been spoken of in
the prophets even to the details of the Crucifixion3
1 Deut iv 17. 2 Ps xc (lxxxix) i, z.
3 Among other more ordinary Testimonia Aphraates quotes
Zech xiv 6 (In that day there shall be cold and frost) as a
prophecy of the cold day when Peter had to warm himself by
the fire (Joh xviii 18).

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 43
(§§ 9, 10). We therefore will continue to worship
before the Majesty of His Father, who has turned
our worship unto Him. We call Him God, like
Moses ; First-born and Son, like Israel ; Jesus, like
Joshua the son of Nun ; Priest, like Aaron ; King,
like David ; the great Prophet, like all the prophets ;
Shepherd, like the shepherds who tended and ruled
Israel. And us, adds Aphraates, has he called Sons
and made us His Brothers, and we have become
His Friends (§§ 11, 12).
Nothing less than the full abstract here given
does justice to Aphraates' style and method. It is
surely most surprising and instructive to meet with
work animated by this spirit in the middle of the
4th century. For my own part, I feel it follows
too closely the lines of our Lord's answer to the
Jews for me to venture to brand it as unorthodox.
In the following chapter we shall glance at the
teaching of Aphraates upon Baptism, Marriage, and
Asceticism : this will lead us on to the Gnostic
doctrines found in the Acts of Thomas. But before
leaving this part of the work let me once more call

44 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
attention to the absence of the Greek influence in
Aphraates. The Persian Sage lived outside the
Roman Empire and was educated in a culture but
little touched by Greek philosophy. He did not
feel that necessity for logical subordination, for the
due relation of the parts to the whole, which the
Greeks were the first of mankind to strive after.
And dare we say that he and his Church were
altogether to be pitied ? It is unlikely that the
human intellect can form a logical system of the
Universe : a logical Creed or 'Weltanschauung' by
its very nature betrays its human parentage and
temporary value. With a most imperfect know
ledge of the constitution of the world we live in, by
an uncritical use of Scripture, at a time when every
art and every science was decaying, the Greeks
attempted in a form of words to define the Inde
finable. They succeeded for a while in obtaining
the allegiance of the Oriental Church, the time of
their victory being approximately the reigns of the
heathen Julian and the Arian Valens. Under
stress of persecution the Christians closed their

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 45
ranks and unified their public confession of Faith1.
But what I have brought before you to-day from
the works of Aphraates shews clearly that there was
no inner unity between East and West. In the
East the theology of S. Athanasius and S. Basil was
a foreign graft, not a genuine natural growth : it is
therefore not surprising that the Syriac-speaking
Church broke away hardly a single generation after
an orthodox Emperor was seated on the throne.
The mass of the Orientals, especially those more
distant from Constantinople and Antioch, became
Nestorian ; and those who remained soon found
that their position also was untenable. It was
impossible for the barbarians to remain at peace
with the Greeks : the Church was divided, and the
way paved for the triumph of Islam.
1 See Hort's Two Dissertations, pp. 128 — 133.

46 EARLY CHRISTIANITY

THE SACRAMENTS IN
APHRAATES.
The teaching of Aphraates about the Sacraments
throws most curious and instructive side-lights upon
the mind of the Church in the fourth century. As
in the case of his doctrine of the Trinity and the
person of Christ, it is not so much the orthodoxy or
heterodoxy as the utter independence of Aphraates
which strikes the modern reader. The good bishop
goes on in his easy simple style with a tone of
assured authority and unconsciousness of serious
opposition, and it is only when we pause and try to
fit his utterances into the schemes of doctrine and
practice with which we are familiar that we realise
that we are moving in another world. The Church
of Aphraates, like the Church of S. Athanasius, is
the legitimate child of second-century Christianity,

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 47
but it has come by another line of descent and the
cousins have not all things in common.
With regard to the Lord's Supper Aphraates
is comparatively normal. In the Eucharist the
faithful partake of the Body and Blood of Christ.
It must be taken fasting, but the fast must be such
as once for all was prescribed by Isaiah, "for always
is fasting from evil things better than fasting from
bread and water1." The fasting of Abel and
Enoch, of innocent Noah, of faithful Abraham, of
unrevengeful Joseph are to be our models. "If
purity of heart be absent, the fast is not accepted.
And remember and see, my beloved, that it is well
that a man should cleanse his heart and keep his
tongue and cleanse his hands of evil ; for it is not
fitting to mix honey and wormwood. For if a
man would fast from bread and water, let him not
mix with his fasting abuse and cursing. Thou hast
but one door to thy house — that house which is a
Temple of God ; it doth not beseem thee, O man,
that by the door where the King doth enter in
1 m 8.

48 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
should come forth filth and dirt ! For when a man
will fast from all that is abominable and will take
the Body and Blood of the Messiah, let him take
heed to his mouth whereby the King doth enter in.
Thou hast no right, O man, through that same
mouth to give out unclean words ! Hear what our
Saviour saith : That which entereth into a man doth
not defile him ; but that which cometh forth from the
mouth, that defileth him'." The fast here enjoined
is metaphorical, but there can be no doubt that
Aphraates teaches the doctrine that our Lord is
physically present in the consecrated elements.
We may pause by the way to note Aphraates'
singular and picturesque explanation of the three
days and three nights among the dead which
Christ had predicted for Himself. In his dis
course on the Passover2 he says that our Lord gave
His Body and Blood to the disciples at the Last
Supper. But, he argues, he whose body is eaten3
1 III 2. 2 XII 6, 7.
3 In XII 9 (Wright, p. 222, line 3) we must read 'akil: the
ms. has 'ekal (or 'dkH).

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 49
and blood drunk, is already counted among the
dead. The three days and three nights are to
be reckoned from the time of the Supper, and, as
Aphraates puts the three hours' darkness as one
whole night and the ensuing time of light on Good
Friday afternoon as one whole day, he has no
difficulty in making up the required number.
Moreover, he adds, this is why Christ kept silence
before Pilate and the Jews, for it was impossible
that one who is counted among the dead should
speak. These things, however, belong to the curiosities
of exegesis : they do not have much bearing upon
the general history of Christian Doctrine. It is
otherwise with the theory of Baptism as presented
to us in Discourse VII.
The majority of the references to Baptism in
Aphraates contain little that is especially startling.
Christian baptism is the true circumcision1; it is
administered, as we have already seen, in the Names
of the Three Persons of the Trinity2; by baptism-
1 xn 9. 2 xxm 63: see above, p. 36.
B. 4

50 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
regeneration is conferred, sins are washed away1,
and the body is preserved in the Day of Judgement2.
"From baptism do we receive the Spirit of the
Messiah. For in the same hour that the priests
invoke the Spirit, the heavens open and it cometh
down and broodeth upon the waters, and they that
are baptized are clothed with it. For from all that
are born of the body the Spirit is far away, until
they come to the Birth by water, and then they
receive the Holy Spirit8." In accordance with
ancient custom the rite of baptism is performed at
Eastern- All this is normal, regular, almost common
place. Suddenly we are transported into a different
planet. Baptism is not the common seal of every
Christian's faith, but a privilege reserved for monks.
The passage where this amazing view is enforced
is so important that I give it at length. In the
Discourse upon Penitents, after reciting the story
of Gideon who by the trial of water picked out his
1 IV 19. 2 VI 14.
3 vi 14: cf. Gwynn, p. 371. 4 xn 13.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 51
three hundred from ten thousand men, and after
quoting our Lord's words that many are called but
few chosen, Aphraates goes on to say1: "Where
fore thus should the trumpeters, the heralds of the
Church, cry and warn all the Society of God
before the Baptism — them, I say, that have offered
themselves for virginity and for holiness, youths and
maidens holy — them shall the heralds warn. And
they shall say : He whose heart is set to the state
of matrimony, let him marry before baptism, lest
he fall in the spiritual contest and be killed. And
he that feareth this part of the struggle let him turn
back, lest he break his brother's heart like his own.
He also that loveth his possessions let him turn
back from the army, lest when the battle shall wax
too fierce for him he may remember his property
and turn back, and he that turneth back then is
covered with disgrace. He that hath not offered
himself and hath not yet put on his armour, if he
turn back he is not blamed ; but every one that
doth offer himself and put on his armour, if he
1 VII 20.
4—2

52 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
turn back from the contest becometh a laughing
stock." This is a strange exhortation, strange at least
to us Westerns. Perhaps it was not so much
Constantine's fault as the fault of his spiritual ad
visers that his famous baptism was so long delayed.
But indeed this deliberate reservation of baptism for
the spiritual aristocracy of Christendom shews us
that we are dealing with a view of the sacraments
quite other than the Catholic view. Those who
are not yet baptised may nevertheless, according to
Aphraates, belong to the Society of God1, and if
they do not volunteer for the sacramental life they
are not blamed.
I need scarcely remind you that Aphraates is
not alone in holding this theory of the sacraments.
It was the theory of the Marcionites, and we shall
see that it was enforced with even greater rigour by
the unorthodox party in the Syriac-speaking Church.
Something like it also reappears in the Paulicians
1 Q'ydmeh dAldhd.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 53
and Cathars of a later day1. So also, I suppose,
Buddhism is a community of monks : the people
are adherents, not members of the body.
It is very difficult to pass a true judgement upon
Aphraates' conception of the Christian life. So
much depends on the amount of influence which
the inner community had upon the mass of the
people, or, looking at the matter from another point
of view, how much the unbaptised lay Christian
felt himself to be a member of Christ. Unfortu
nately we have very little evidence on these points.
One thing at least is certain. We who live in
a sacramental system of Christianity, whether we
be Catholics or Protestants, ought to be deeply
grateful to the true instinct which produced the
sacrament of Holy Matrimony. It is not by chance
that Dom Parisot in his ingenious Introduction to
the writings of Aphraates was unable to find any
reference to this institution, for I suspect that our
Persian Sage would have recoiled from the thought
1 See especially the Cathar ritual in Mr Conybeare's Key of
Truth, pp. 160 — 170.

54 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
of such a ceremony with horror. We are so
accustomed to the solemnisation of weddings that
we may easily come to think of the act as natural
and inevitable, but the words of Aphraates teach us
that it was not always so regarded. It is surely no
light gain to Christian society that the bridal feast
has been hallowed with the blessing of the Church.
With this we must take leave of Aphraates and
the orthodox circles of the Syriac Church. I hope
I have succeeded in leaving upon you a favourable
impression of the Persian Sage. As a theologian,
his modesty in speculation and his abstinence from
abusive language are virtues rare in his own age and
admirable in all ages, while his independent know
ledge of the Bible has hardly been equalled among
the Fathers1- As a writer and as a theologian he
is greatly superior to his more famous contemporary
S. Ephraim, the poverty of whose thought is scarcely
more appalling than the fecundity of his pen.
1 It must have required no small amount of courage, as well
as intelligence, to reject the application of Lam iv 20 to Christ:
cf. Just. Ap. 1 55 ; Tert. adv. Marc, in 6, etc.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 55

'BARDESANES' DE FATO.
The philosophical dialogue known as ' Bardesanes
De Fato' is not the work of Bardaisan himself but
of his disciple Philip. It was composed not long
after the Romans had taken possession of Edessa,
i.e. about the middle of the 3rd century. In
form it is modelled upon the Dialogues of Plato,
Bardaisan taking the place of Socrates as the chief
speaker and the teacher of a younger generation.
I do not now propose to enter upon any full
discussion of the dialogue, not because it is not
interesting in itself, but because the school out of
which it came exercised only an indirect influence
upon the later developments of the Syriac-speaking
Church. The disciples of Bardaisan, like their
great master, were tainted with heresy, and I

56 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
imagine that the De Fato owes its preservation to
what is but a side-interest, viz. the graphic de
scriptions contained in it of the varied customs of
the nations of the earth with regard to marriage and
other social observances. Tn fact, the title of the
work in our ms. is 'The Book of the Laws of the
Countries1.' The main object of the dialogue is to expound
the doctrine of the three influences which are at
work upon man. These are his Nature, his Fate,
and his Free-will. By Nature men are born, they
grow to maturity and age, and they die : so far all
men are alike. By their Fate distinctions are intro
duced between them, — the distinctions of wealth
and poverty, beauty and ugliness, health and sick
ness. These are not wholly in our power and
come, at least partly, by Fate ; for the doctrine
that misfortunes are all sent as punishments for sin
is expressly rejected2. But in addition to their
Nature and their Fate men are moved by their
1 The dialogue was discovered by Cureton, and edited in his
Spicilegium Syriacum, 1855. 2 Spicilegium, p. 9.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 57
Free-will, which has been given to them as a gift
from God's bounty. It is in respect of this gift of
Free-will that man was made in the image of God1.
By his Free-will a man can modify his Fate to
some extent, and with regard to his Free-will, and
that alone, will he be judged at the Last Day.
Moreover the commandments of God are such that
they are easy, for they are independent of Fate, and
only the Will is needed to perform them. Even if
a man be poor and sick he can love and bless and
speak the truth, and can pray for the good of every
man he knows, while if he be rich and strong he
can in addition help his neighbour. Nothing can
hinder us from these things : we are not commanded
to do anything involving bodily strength or mental
cleverness. Nay more, when a man does well and
abstains from evil he is glad — every man, that is,
except those who were created not for good and are
called tares ''. The commandments of God are
easy : it is success in this life that is barred with
obstacles '".
1 Spicilegium, pp. 3, 4- 2 Ibid- P- 5 ad fin. 3 Ibid. p. 7.

58 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
The proof of the existence of Free-will in man
is made to rest partly on the diversity of customs of
various nations of men compared with the uniformity
of each species of animal all over the world, and
partly on the actual observed changes of human
customs arising from royal decrees to conquered
subjects or now in these last days from conversion
to the new race of us Christians1.
Two points in this curious and interesting work
appear to me to deserve attention. The first is the
strongly religious tone by which it is marked, —
religious, that is, as distinct from ecclesiastical or
merely speculative. The dialogue starts with the
old question why God did not make man so that he
should not sin, and the judgement to come is not
taught but assumed. It is the fear of God which
sets us free from all other fears2- At the same
time the tone of the book is singularly uneccle-
siastical. The Unity of God and the Judgement
are the only doctrines of the Church which present
themselves, while but for a passing reference to the
1 Spicileg., p. 20. - Ibid. p. ¦*.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 59
Parable of the Sower we might have supposed that
the author was ignorant of the New Testament.
But the almost Jewish tone of parts of the dialogue
is of more than passing interest, when we remember
the Jewish culture of Aphraates1. Though the
form of the dialogue is borrowed from Plato, the
spirit is Semitic : the hands may be the hands of
Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob.
The other point which I wish to notice here is
the very curious doctrine of the composition of the
Cosmos, a doctrine certainly rare in Christian
writings and perhaps due to Bardaisan himself.
According to this doctrine the Universe is com
pounded of what the author calls Ithye or Elemental
Beings. These, if not eternal, were at least pre-
existent to the present order of things, and the
work of creation consisted above all in arranging
the Elements out of Chaos into an Order, whereby
the Elements could neither do serious injury to
1 Note that in Gen i 26 the dialogue says man was made ' in
the image of Elohim,' not simply ' in the image of God ' : cf.
Gen vi 1 Pesh.

60 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
each other nor be seriously injured themselves.
The Machine has been set going, and the Parts do
not collide, as they would if they had been left to
themselves and their spheres of action not strictly
limited. Nevertheless even the Elements have
some degree of freedom, and for this they also will
appear to be judged at the Last Day. But their
freedom is but small compared with that of man's :
it is in respect to his freedom that man stands at
the head of creation1.
It is a picturesque conception. According to
Bardaisan the world was not brought into being out
of nothing, nor formed of matter naturally inert,
but it is a beautifully balanced combination of
independent and often antagonistic forces. I do
not think we shall do justice to the fundamental
idea unless for the Sun and the Moon, the Sea
and the Winds, we substitute in thought the forces
of nature which make up our modern universe,
such properties of matter I mean as Gravitation
and Electricity. 1 Spicileg., pp. 4, 21.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 61
But after our excursion into the fascinating
wilderness of cosmic speculation we must not forget
that the same theory of man's place in the universe
has already met us in Aphraates. After reading
the dialogue De Fato it does not come to us with
such a shock to hear the argument of Aphraates
that God Almighty has not denied the name of
God and of Son to men, though He has expressly
forbidden such an honour to be given to the Sun
and the Moon and the host of Heaven1.

I must pass by the bright star of all Syriac
literature, the great Hymn of the Soul that went
down to Egypt for the One Pearl. This, the most
noble poem of Christian Antiquity, is no doubt
familiar to all of you : it is worth while to learn
Syriac, so as to be able to read it in the original.
All I need point out here is that the same con
ceptions of the Trinity— perhaps I ought rather to
say, the same metaphors for the relations of the
1 See above, p. 42.

62 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
Trinity to man — are found in the Hymn as in
other early Syriac literature. The King of Kings,
the ghieen of the East, and the Viceroy, the next
in rank, are respectively the Father, Mother and
Brother of the Soul : there can be little doubt that
they correspond to the Father, the Holy Spirit, and
the Son,

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 63

THE ACTS OF JUDAS THOMAS.
We have now come to that original and charac
teristic product of early Syriac-speaking Christianity,
the Acts of Judas Thomas, the brother of our Lord
and the Apostle of India.
I am quite aware that this statement is highly
controversial. The Acta Thomae are commonly
supposed to be one of a series of fabulous Greek
tales describing the missionary adventures of all the
Apostles. This conception of the work I hold to
be altogether erroneous. That the stories told in
the Acts of Thomas have little or no historical basis
is indeed almost self-evident, but I do not believe
that it was intended to form part of a series, and
I believe most firmly that it was originally composed
in Syriac, not Greek. Possibly also I ought to

64 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
defend myself for investing an admittedly fabulous
narrative with so much importance. It is not so
very long ago since students of Church history
might be divided into the credulous folk who
wholly or partly believed these tales, and the wise
who neglected them altogether. But the present
generation is too much accustomed to the serious
religious novel not to be in sympathy with a
doctrinal work cast in narrative form. That the
Acts of Thomas is the work of a man very much in
earnest there can be no manner of doubt. The
style is simple, as becomes the narrative setting, but
it is as truly a book of religious philosophy as the
Pilgrim' 's Progress, and it demands from us serious
study. Before indicating the main grounds upon which
I regard these Acts as a Syriac work it may be not
superfluous to give a short abstract of the story
which forms the framework of the book1.
I. At the beginning we are told how the
1 A complete English Translation is given in Wright's
Apocryphal Acts, vol. ii, pp. 146 — 298-

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 65
Twelve Apostles divided the countries of the earth
among themselves by lot, and that the lot which fell
to Judas Thomas — Judas the Twin — was India.
But Judas Thomas did not wish to go and preach
to the Indians, so our Lord appeared to an Indian
merchant named Habban, a servant of King
Gundaphar, and sold Thomas to him as a slave.
Thomas and Habban go off by sea and disembark
at the town of Sandaruk (or, Sanadruk). Here they
find that the King of the place is making a great
feast to celebrate his only daughter's marriage, and
they go in with the rest to the feast. At the feast
Thomas sings a curious Hymn : he also prophesies
the violent death of one of the guests, an event
which comes to pass that very night. The King
hears of this and forces Thomas to go in and pray
over the bride. He does so and then departs. But
when the bride and bridegroom are alone our Lord
Himself appears to them in the likeness of Thomas
and persuades them both to a life of virginity. In
the end the King also is converted, and the young
people join St Thomas in India.
b. 5

66 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
II. Meanwhile Thomas and Habban had gone
on to King Gundaphar in India, and Thomas
agrees to build a palace for the King. But all the
money that is given him for the palace he spends
among the poor. When King Gundaphar discovers
it he is very angry, and casts Thomas into prison
till he shall make up his mind by what death he
shall die. Now that very night Gad, the King's
brother, dies and is taken by angels to heaven :
there he sees a magnificent palace, which is the very
palace that has been built for his brother by the
Apostle. So Gad begs to be allowed to come back
to life that he may buy the palace from the King,
as he does not know its value. This is granted ;
but when the King hears the tale he understands
and believes. Thomas is set free, and the King
and his brother are both baptised in a bath-house
and receive the Eucharist.
III. After this Judas Thomas brings to life a
youth who had been killed by a devil in the form of
a black snake1.
1 In this story, as in some of the others, the prayers and
exhortations of Thomas are given at considerable length.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 67
IV. Next an ass's colt, of the stock that served
Balaam the prophet, comes and speaks and directs
Thomas to the city. At the gate of the city the
colt falls down and dies, having performed its
mission. V. In the city Thomas delivers a beautiful
woman from the attacks of a devil. The woman is
baptised and she receives the Communion.
VI. During the ceremony a young man's
hand withers, and he confesses that he had killed a
woman who would not live a life of virginity with
him. On his repentance he brings Judas Thomas
to the dead woman's body, and by means of the
Apostle she is brought to life again. She then
describes the torments of the unchaste that she
had seen in hell, and the episode closes with an
exhortation. VII. After these things while the Apostle is
preaching in India, the General of King Mazdai
comes beseeching him to free his wife and daughter
from evil and lascivious devils. Judas Thomas
leaves his converts under the care of the deacon
S—2

68 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
Xanthippus (or, Xenophon) and goes with the
General. On the way the horses of their chariot
break down, but four wild asses come to be har
nessed in their stead, and with their help the devils
are driven out and the women healed.
VIII. Soon after this a noble lady, by name
Mygdonia, the wife of Cyrus1, a kinsman of King
Mazdai, is converted by Thomas to the life of
virginity. Cyrus is in despair ; and when his
personal influence fails to move Mygdonia, he goes
and complains to the King, who sends and arrests
Thomas at the house of Sifur the General. Thomas
is scourged and sent to prison, where he sings a
Hymn of praise". But Mygdonia remains firm,
and secretly visits Thomas in the prison with her
nurse Narqia : there he baptises them and celebrates
the Eucharist. In the meanwhile King Mazdai
1 The name Cyrus, in Syriac KSrhh, is preserved un-
corrupted in the Sachau MS. In the British Museum MS. it is
misspelt K&rtsh, and in the Greek corrupted to Xaptcnos.
2 In front of this Hymn, which is undoubtedly a genuine
portion of the Acts, the British Museum Codex inserts the great
Hymn of the Soul.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 69
and Cyrus, who regard the conversion of Mygdonia
as due to magic and enchantment, agree to let
Thomas go if he will tell her to be as she was
before. Thomas warns them that it will be useless,
and that neither his persuasion nor tortures would
change her new spirit : this is proved to be the case,
and Mygdonia refuses to listen to the Apostle when
he pretends to tell her to go back to her husband.
After this Thomas returns to the house of Sifur
the General and baptises him and his family, and
gives them also the Eucharist : at the same time
Mygdonia converts Tertia, the wife of King Mazdai.
Mazdai now becomes seriously angry and drags
Thomas off to prison again, but on the way he
converts Vizan, the King's son. In the prison the
Apostle makes his final address, beginning with the
Lord's Prayer. Manashar, Vizan's wife (who has
just been healed of a long sickness by our Lord
Himself appearing to her in the form of a youth),
joins them in the prison, and the Apostle baptises
Vizan, Manashar, and Tertia. In the morning
Thomas is brought out and condemned to death by

70 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
the King : he is taken outside the town and after a
short prayer is speared by four soldiers. Before his
death he ordains Sifur and Vtzari, and the converts
continue in the faith after being encouraged by a
vision of the ascended Judas Thomas.
The bones of the Apostle were secretly taken
away to the ' West ' by one of the brethren, but a
long time afterwards the dust from the grave charms
away a devil from one of King Mazdai's sons,
whereupon the king also believes and prays Sifur
and the brethren for forgiveness.
Such is the tale of St Thomas. It is quite
possible that some of the details of the legend are
older than our Acts. The reputed bones of the
Apostle were preserved at Edessa, and doubtless
some story of their adventures had grown up around
the shrine. But the real interest of the Acts is not
historical, any more than the interest of Lear or
Hamlet is historical. The interest lies in the
prayers and sermons of Judas Thomas. These are
not mere embellishments of the narrative, but the

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 71
very essence of the book. What the author wishes
us to give our earnest attention to is the Gospel
of Virginity and Poverty and its effect upon the
soul. As to the intense seriousness of the book
there can be no doubt at all : no early Christian
writer, orthodox or heterodox, would quote the
Lord's Prayer in full merely for ornament.
It will be noticed even from this short summary
that the Acts of Thomas form a work complete in
itself. From the moment that St Thomas starts
for India we hear no more of the other Apostles.
He is absolutely independent of every one except
his Lord. The word Church occurs only once and
that by mistake1. Moreover the whole framework
of the tale is Eastern, and Eastern of a very decided
type. The proper names are such as would occur
to a Syriac-speaking Christian, but they could
hardly have been invented by a Greek. It is to
Justi's Iranisches Namenbuch not to Pape's Grie-
chische Eigennamen that we have to look for their
1 The first word of the Hymn in the first Act : the Greek has
T\ KOpf).

72 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
elucidation. Cyrus — not in the Greek but in an
approximation to the genuine Oriental form —
Mazdai, Vizan, Manashar, are good old Persian
names. Mygdonia is another name for Nisibis.
Except Xenophon the deacon and Tertia the queen
there is not one European-sounding name among
them. But the main argument for regarding the Acta
Thomae as an original Syriac composition is inde
pendent of these general considerations. It consists
in the large number of passages where the existing
Greek is either a mistranslation or a misreading of
the Syriac. The Greek and the Syriac often
diverge freely from one another, and there is often
no attempt to translate literally ; but in a sufficient
number of instances the evidence is clear enough for
an induction. A full critical discussion involves considerations
of Syriac grammar and palaeography and would be
out of place here : I must refer the reader to
my paper in the Journal of Theological Studies
for October, 1899. At the same time I will

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 73
indicate in a couple of examples the nature of
the evidence.
When Judas Thomas is about to go away with
Sifur the General to cure his wife and daughter he
bids farewell to his converts, and says to them : " Be
ye holding to us and looking at us as the ministers
of God ; though we also, if we do not take pains
that we may be worthy of this name, punishment
we shall receive, and for judgment and requital
it will be to us" (Wright, Syriac Text 23711_14 =
Bonnet, Acta Thomae 4813-16). The corresponding
Greek has : " Remember us, as also we remember
you : for unless we fulfil the burden of the command
ments (to toov ivToXoiv (jiopTLov TeXecrcofiev) we
shall not be worthy heralds of the name of Christ,
and moreover shall receive at the last punishment
for our own heads (ttjv Ttfiaipiav . . . t?)? eavTcav
Kecpa\r}<;) ". Here there is wide divergence, but a
glance at the Syriac at once reveals its origin. The
Syriac idiom for 'to take pains' is literally 'to take
up the burden' and a word-for-word rendering of
the Syriac in this passage would be " if we do not

74 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
take up the burden that we may be worthy of this
name." The Greek translator misunderstood the
phrase, and in his version he brought in the wholly
foreign conception of submitting to the yoke of the
law. Similarly, the odd introduction of iceifiaXr] in
the latter part of the sentence comes from the fact
that the Syriac word for punishment (not necessarily
capital) is literally "a putting on the head." It
would be a miracle indeed if the Greek were original
here and the Syriac with its characteristic and
perfectly natural idioms a translation.
One. example more. You will remember that
the daughter of the King of Sandaruk was converted
with her husband to a life of Christian virginity on
her bridal night. The next morning her mother
expostulates with her. In the girl's reply she says
among other things, according to the Greek (Bonnet
I219), igovOiviaa tov avh pa tovtov I have despised
this man, i.e. her husband. This is, to say the
least, surprising. The young man had just been
converted along with herself, and to despise one's
fellow-believers has never been a Christian virtue,

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 75
even in the most heretical sects. But the difficulty
vanishes when we look at the Syriac, which has
not 'this man ' but 'thisdW,' i.e. the epyov t^?
alo-)(yvr]<; mentioned three lines before1. In Syriac
writing gafirct ' man ' and "/3d&d ' deed ' are almost
exactly alike, different as they sound. Thus the
unsatisfactory expression in the Greek is easily
explicable as a translator's misreading : on any other
hypothesis it would be difficult to account for its
presence. These are but two instances out of many, and
in what follows I shall feel justified in assuming the
Acts of Thomas to be an original Syriac composition.
I need only add that the same view is held by
Nbldeke, and (as I have learnt quite lately) it was
also maintained by the late Prof. R. L. Bensly.
But if these Acts be of Syriac origin we are
dealing with a work immensely important for the
history of Christian thought in the Euphrates Valley.
To begin with, the work is one of the oldest non-
biblical monuments of Syriac literature. The text
1 Cf. also Wright 29920.

76 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
of the quotations from the Gospels alone would be
enough to shew this. Whatever editorial touches
the Acts of Thomas may have received, the Scrip
ture allusions have been left in their original form,
for they follow the Old Syriac, not the Peshitta.
Notably this is the case with the Lord's Prayer,
which as I remarked above is quoted in full, and in
agreement with the very striking renderings of
Cureton 's text. The example of Aphraates warns
us, it is true, from dating a Syriac work early because
its doctrinal statements appear too primitive for the
4th century, but in the case of the Acts of Thomas
we have to take into account the popularity of the
book even in orthodox circles. There are clear
references to it in Ephraim1, and Jacob of Serug
wrote a poem on the Palace which St Thomas built
in Heaven for the King of India. I do not think
we shall be far wrong if we put the date of our Acts
before the middle of the 3rd century. Of course
they have suffered a little in transmission. Here
and there a too definitely unorthodox clause has
1 Carm. Nisib. 42.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 77
been excised altogether or some harmless platitude
has been substituted, but the general accuracy of the
text as published by Wright is attested by the very
ancient palimpsest fragments at Sinai.
I have designated the work as unorthodox.
This perhaps requires some justification. Judged
by an Athanasian standard it is of course quite
heretical, but the standard of the early Syriac-
speaking Churches was nearer that of Aphraates.
To my own mind the un-catholic note is struck in
the puritan recklessness of the writer : he never
allows for the weakness of humanity or for the
economy of Church government. This is the note
of Tertullian, of Montanus, of the Donatists — the
note struck in our own century by Edward Irving.
But more definite indications are not wanting. In
the first place, I cannot believe that an orthodox
circle would have developed the very remarkable
belief that Judas Thomas — Judas the Twin — was
the twin-brother of our Lord Himself. Not only
do men and women in these Acts mistake the one
for the other, but the very devils and wild beasts

78 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
salute the Apostle as 'Twin of the Messiah1.' No
wonder that some of the mss. have obliterated this
title !
The argument commonly relied upon for re
garding the Acta Thomae as ' Gnostic ' is the
occurrence of certain mystical and very imperfectly
understood expressions in the prayers and invoca
tions. Some few of these have disappeared in
Syriac from the text as preserved in the British
Museum ms. used by Wright, and many more have
been left out in the Sachau ms. at Berlin : but in
some cases at least the queer phrases in the Greek
are the result not of heterodox doctrine but of the
ignorance or helplessness of the writer2. The
discussion of such points involves critical details and
the niceties of Semitic grammar : all that needs to
be pointed out here is the improbability that a
writer so much in earnest as the author of the Acts
would indicate an elaborate and strange cosmogony
by a few side touches.
1 Wright 197, 208.
2 E.g. Bonnet 3ou~13 ( = Wright 20910-13) : cf. Gen i 2 in
the Peshitta.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 79
In any case there is a great gulf fixed between
these Acts and the thoroughly Greek Gnostic Acts
of John. According to the Acts of John the highest
gift of the true Christian is spiritual insight to
perceive the hidden meaning of that which is hidden
from the uninstructed believer. "Behold Me,"
Christ says there to St John, " in truth that I am,
not what I said, but what thou art able to know —
The things that they say of Me I had not, and the
things that they say not those I suffered. Now
what they are I will signify unto thee, for I know
that thou wilt understand1." The language of the
Acts of Judas Thomas is quite other than this.
Not philosophy but ethics is here the essence of
Christianity : the chief aim of the writer is to
produce a change of conduct, not spiritual enlighten
ment. St Thomas knows that the mysteries of
life cannot be rightly uttered in human speech, but
so far as may be he expounds them to all the
people. There is no intentional concealment of
doctrine, no inner circle of Illuminati.
1 Acta lohannis XV (James, Apocrypha Anecdota ii, p. 20 ff.).

80 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
These Acts strike a higher, shriller, note than
that of Catholicism, but now and again it rings
true. If we overlook the fantastic machinery of
the tale, and remember that the author was living
in a world distracted by the indecisive yet devas
tating struggle of Greek and Persian, a world
also where what there was of art, of science, of
philosophy, was still wholly pagan, we shall find
something with which to sympathise and even
something to inspire. No one, save only St Francis
of Assisi, has ever so whole-heartedly preached in
the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Nowhere
in Christian literature do the merchant's goods
appear so little in comparison with the Pearl of
great price. "As long as we are in the world,"
says St Thomas, " we are unable to speak about
that which all the believers in God are going to
receive. For if we say that He hath given us
Light, we mention something which we have seen ;
and if we say that He hath given us Wealth, we
mention something that is in the world ; and if we
speak of Clothing, we mention something that

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 81
nobles wear ; and if we speak of dainty Meats, we
mention something against which we are warned ;
and if we speak of this temporary Rest, a chastise
ment is appointed for it. But we speak of God
and of our Lord Jesus, and of Angels and Watchers
and Holy Ones, and of the New World, and of
the incorruptible food of the tree of Life, and of the
draught of the water of Life ; of what Eye hath
not seen, nor Ear heard, nor hath it entered into
the Heart of man to conceive, — what God hath
prepared from of old for those who love him1."
Surely this is the language of Gnosticism at its best.
It is unencumbered with irrelevant details about
the origin and physical constitution of the universe,
it is couched in no uncouth jargon of ./Eons and
Emanations, but it expresses as clearly as words can
speak the great doctrine that our knowledge and
our terminology is and must always remain relative
and approximate. All things are said in Figures,
because the Things Eternal are the things that are
not seen, neither can they be named with a name.
1 Wright 205; Eng. Tr. 177.
B. 6

82 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
The teaching of the Acts of Thomas contains
another feature which must not remain unnoticed.
It is a feature which, though not heretical in itself,
is in early documents characteristic rather of Gnostic
thought than of Catholic teaching. This is the
lack of interest in controversy against the Jews and
against idolatry. Judas Thomas does not bring
forward unorthodox opinions about the old dispen
sation or the worship of heathen gods : he simply
passes these things by with the turn of a phrase.
Thus we read (Transl. p. 207) that God's will was
spoken by the Prophets, but Israel did not obey
because of their evil genius1. Again, the devils
confess that they take pleasure in sacrifices and
libations of wine on the altars as well as in murder
and adultery (Transl. p. 213)2- But these are
mere allusions by the way : it is not so much
against the gods that St Thomas preaches as against
the evil nature in man. Contrast this with the

1 In the Syriac, yas^hon btshd: cf. Dent xxxi 21 and the
corresponding Jewish doctrines.
2 See also Transl. p. 198.

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 83
elaborate polemic against the Jews in Aphraates,
and the long sermons against idolatry in the Doctrine
of Addai. So much indeed is it the rule that the
'Acts' of martyrs should contain a testimony
against the worship of idols that in the Latin
version of the Acta Thomae there is an extended
interpolation, telling how St Thomas refused to
worship the Sun-god when he was brought before
King Mazdai.
The interest of the author of the Acts of Thomas
lay in the workings of human nature, not in the
conflicting claims of rival religions — in a word, it
lay in the conversion of individual souls rather than
in the establishment of a Church. But to the
Catholic writers from the very earliest period the
case was different. To them the Jewish question
was vital, not so much for the sake of convincing
the Jews of error as to establish their own position.
There stood the Holy Oracles, the promises of
God to His people — to whom did they apply ? It
was as essential for the early Church to establish
her claim to be the true heir of the Covenants, as
6—2

84 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
it is for the High Anglican of our day to make out
a case for the apostolical succession of the English
bishops. With the Gnostics, unless I am mistaken,
the position of things was not quite the same.
Early Catholicism was a historical religion, proved
by texts out of the Old Testament and by the
events of the life of Jesus of Nazareth : Gnosticism,
on the other hand, was what we call natural religion,
a philosophy. The philosophy might be illustrated
from the Old Testament or the New, but it was
really independent of the Bible. It was not the
application of the old promises of God that troubled
the author of the Acts of Thomas but the aimlessness
of men's lives, which to him appeared to be filled
with care and sorrow about that which must quickly
pass away for ever.
In the conception of the Church — that is, the
organised body of believers, — as a thing in itself to
be worked for and fostered, lies, I think, the point
of difference between Catholicism and Gnosticism,
between Aphraates and the Acts of Thomas. To
the convert of Judas Thomas there was literally

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 85
nothing left on this earth to live for. "Would
that the days passed swiftly over me, and that all
the hours were one," says Mygdonia, " that I
might go forth from this world, and go and see
that Beautiful One with whose impress I have been
sealed1, that Living One and Giver of life to those
who have believed in Him, where there is neither
day nor night, and no darkness but light, and
neither good nor bad, nor rich nor poor, neither
male nor female, nor slaves nor freemen, nor any
proud and uplifted over those who are humble2."
The old civilisation was doomed, but this religious
Nihilism puts nothing in its place. To the orthodox
Christian, on the other hand, the Church stood as a
middle term between the things of the next world
and of this. It was the Body of Christ and
therefore eternal ; something worth living for and
working for. Yet it was in the world as much as
the Empire itself. The idea of the Church thus
1 I.e. ' into whose Name I have been baptised.' Wright's text
must here be corrected from the Sachau MS.
2 Wright, Transl. p. 265.

86 EARLY CHRISTIANITY
formed an invaluable fixed point, round which a
new civilisation could slowly crystallise.

But to return to our main subject. The chief
characteristics, the chief differentia, of early Chris
tianity outside the Roman Empire in the only region
where it is to be found, have their origin either in
the ascetic ideal or in the absence of the specifically
Greek philosophical influence. Now for reasons
very unlike these two points should have a great
interest to us English-speaking Christians. Instead
of sitting in judgment, therefore, upon the short
comings of the ancient Church of the Euphrates
Valley and pointing out its unsuitableness for the
age of Constantine and the requirements of the
Byzantine Empire, I wish to recommend the early
history and doctrines of that Church to your study
and your sympathy. We also have no part nor lot
in the Empire, and our philosophy is not in bondage
to the Greeks. Upon us will come, sooner or later,
the task of adjusting our Faith and our Science, of

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 87
reconciling the Catholic Religion with Christian
Verity, as the Athanasian Creed puts it. In the
Christian Verity — that is, Theological Science, — of
the 4th century there was much that was temporary,
ignorant, Greek, as indeed there is in the science,
Christian or otherwise, of our own day. I think it
will help not only the historical investigator of the
history of dogma, but also those who are fashioning
the channel of our own beliefs to take serious
account of the non-Greek Church of the East.
The spirit of Asceticism touches us from another
side. In these cold climates the ascetic ideal has
never been a really dominant factor. It is always
necessary to make so much provision for the flesh
that it is impossible to aim at forgetting its require
ments. Even at Marseilles, in Cassian's day, it
provoked merely ridicule when some of the monks
attempted to live as the Egyptians lived in the warm,
dry deserts. But the British Empire covers many
lands and many climates, and it is the simple fact
that in the land where Judas Thomas is fabled to
have lived and taught the natural instincts of the

EARLY CHRISTIANITY.

people still identify true religion with the life of the
wandering mendicant. The other day a lady,
the wife of a missionary who has spent many
years with her husband at a mission station in
Southern India, told me that when Christianity
really takes possession of a native of India, when he
becomes really converted, he is frequently anxious
to take up the wandering ascetic life. I shewed
my friend the Acts of Judas Thomas, and she was
interested to find in it so much of the ethical type
which an Indian convert would naturally be disposed
to admire. These converts, remember, are Protest
ants who have heard of Christianity only through
the stately and respectable formularies of the
Church of England or through one of the sects
of English nonconformists. 0 testimonium animae
naturaliter — asceticae ! But if asceticism grows so
naturally and inevitably on Eastern soil it must be
a fact of human nature with which we have to
reckon — to direct and educate, it may be, but not
altogether to repress. Even if the heathen 'ascetic'
of modern India has often more points in common

OUTSIDE THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 89
with the Friar of the later middle ages than with
St Francis of Assisi or Judas Thomas, yet he
represents an ideal not wholly alien to the teaching
of the New Testament. We live in an age of
a victorious and progressive material civilisation :
even if we are content to enter into life by keep
ing the commandments only, it may be well to
remember the counsel of perfection which our Lord
Himself gave to the rich young man. To refuse
to listen to the note struck so eloquently, if so
monotonously, in the Acts of Judas Thomas is to
neglect one of the features which distinguish men
from the beasts that perish.

B.

CONTENTS.

Introduction .
The Creed of Aphraates .
The Sacraments in Aphraates
' Bardesanes ' De Fato
The Acts of Judas Thomas

PAGE i
27
46 5563

CA.MBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
THE RULES OF TYCONIUS (Texts & Studies iii i).
Cambridge, at the University Press, 1894.
THE OLD LATIN AND THE ITALA (Texts &
Studies iv 3). Cambridge, at the University Press, 1896.
FRAGMENTS OF THE BOOKS OF KINGS
ACCORDING TO THE TRANSLATION OF
A QUI LA, from u, MS. formerly in the Geniza at Cairo.
With 6 facsimiles. Cambridge, at the University Press, 1897.
Also in paper covers, without facsimiles.

THE HYMN OF BARDAISAN, rendered into English.
Essex House Press, 1899.

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