Content:

Preface.

That remarkable young man came to Caesarea in Palestine about A.D. 280 to study with Pamphilus in the library the latter had assembled there along with the library of Origen. Eusebius not only catalogued these books, he read them; and to good purpose, for when in A.D- 303 he published the first edition of his Church History, it covered much of the history of Christian literature as well as of Christian life. That is why he is so constantly referred to in these pages. Eusebius was so devoted to Pamphilus, his friend and teacher, that he adopted him as his father and ever after called himself the son of Pamphilus. It was in his Life of Pamphilus, now lost, that he included the catalogue of his library. Ah, Eusebius! Immortal cataloguer, who read and summarized the books he catalogued!

Half a century or more later, Jerome flourished. He wrote in Latin, and he still influences the religious and learned worlds through his version of the Bible, the Latin Vulgate. He wrote a short dictionary of Christian biography which he called "On Illustrious Men" (De viris illustribus). He sometimes leaned heavily on Eusebius for his information, but his book has some independent value, too, and will be frequently referred to in this and every book on early Christian literature.

Bel-Air, Los Angeles

Christianity began as a proclamation and a response. Its founder wrote nothing. He called upon men to follow him, to take part in the inauguration of the reign of God. His earliest followers continued this course. They were further committed to it by their expectation of his return in triumph to judge the world. They had no thought of producing a literature; indeed, during the first fifteen years or so after his death there are no traces of their having produced any written documents.

This delay in creating literary materials is hard to explain in the light of the literature produced by other Jewish groups, notably the community at Qumran by the Dead Sea but also by those other groups out of which various apocalyptic predictions emerged. It was doubtless due not only to the expectation of Jesus' imminent return but also to the early Christian belief that the Old Testament, if properly understood, clearly pointed toward Christianity and did not need to be supplemented. Furthermore, in early times the teaching of Jesus, committed to memory, was being transmitted by word of mouth with such a degree of exactness that no written record seemed necessary; and this teaching was primarily regarded as providing the true interpretation of the Old Testament books.

Among the rabbis and their disciples, traditions were handed down orally, and in some instances these were not committed to writing until the late second century. The most important example of this process of transmission is to be found in the treatise that now forms part of the Mishnah, the Pirke Aboth or "Chapters of the Fathers."

Such oral tradition was evidently known to Paul, who quoted it as something handed down to him (I Cor. 11:23, the account of the Last Supper; I Cor. 15:3, traditions about the Resurrection). He clearly knew commandments of the Lord (I Cor. 7:10) which he could differentiate from his own counsel (I Cor. 7:12, 25), as well as traditions about the Lord's coming from heaven (I Thess. 4:15). Luke refers to such tradition in Acts 20:35. "Remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, `It is more blessed to give than to receive."' Similar formulas occur in the first letter of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians ( 3:1; 46:7) — perhaps based on Acts; Polycarp of Smyrna, about twenty years later, quotes Jesus with the words — probably derived from 1 Clement—"remembering what the Lord said" (Phil. 2:3). Not only does the manner of quotation in all these instances suggest memorized material but the items quoted cannot be found in these forms in any written gospel. It is reasonable to suppose that they were derived from oral tradition.

But have we actual mention of such a work — if anything so nebulous can be called a "work" — on the part of any early Christian writer? Sometimes it is thought that what Papias (ca. A.D. 120) says of Matthew compiling the logia in "a Hebrew dialect," and each one translating them as best he could, is an attempt to describe just such a work. But logia does not mean "sayings," and what Matthew compiled probably consisted of Old Testament oracles interpreted in relation to Jesus. The process of oral transmission is probably mentioned in Luke's opening sentence: "Just as the original eye-witnesses who became teachers of the message have handed it down to us" (1:2). And whether or not the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas is actually based on oral tradition (see chap. iv), it contains a collection, or a series of collections, ultimately derived from word-of-mouth transmission, and it clearly purports to be a record of this kind of material.

Although this elusive oral tradition must have had a great influence on Christian preaching — echoes of it have been found in many of the epistles — and on the gospels that were later written, we cannot recover it in any detail. It certainly contained some characteristic pieces of Jesus' teaching, with accounts of his last days in Jerusalem and his later appearances to the disciples. We might expect relics of it to survive in the gospels, but New Testament study is not yet in a position — if it ever will be — to pronounce exactly which portions of the gospel materials come directly from Jesus, which from the disciples. The difficulty, of course, lies in the fact that all the materials were transmitted through the disciples.

It is true that the written gospels, when they appeared, sprang up under the shadow of the oral tradition and were largely derived from it. The evangelists intended to arrange and to record the tradition as it had come to them, as well as to indicate what it had come to mean in their time. From the point of view of the story of Christian literature, the work of the evangelists is significant because it does come later and shows that a period of oral tradition preceded that of written documents. A full generation seems to have passed before Christians produced written gospels, and then they arose in Greek, not in Hebrew or Aramaic, and in circles not often close to Jewish Palestine.

With the letters of Paul and the earliest gospels a new and extraordinary force began to find written expression, a force destined powerfully to affect the life of mankind as a whole. From small and obscure beginnings, mere personal letters, for the most part, long left unpublished, this literary phase of Christianity gradually gathered strength, until it became a great tide not only potent in itself but influencing other literatures as well.

Its beginnings were in the Greek world, as far as we know, and for a century Greek seems to have been its sole vehicle; then it spread and appeared in Latin and Syriac and, in the third century, in Coptic, although at first the Christian literature of these languages consisted of translations made from Greek. Many of the earliest Christians were bilingual; but they wrote in Greek.

This voluminous literature breaks conveniently for us at the Council of Nicaea in 325, for the actions there taken so colored the subsequent literature that it can hardly be mistaken; every page of it bears their stamp. An even more practical terminus is afforded by the Church History of Eusebius, published in A.D. 326, for that book is in no small degree a history of early Christian literature as well as of the march of events, and Eusebius gives us information on not a few books that he had examined but are now lost: It is safe to say that no book is more in the hands of the student of early Christian literature than the "Church History" of Eusebius, long available in English in the annotated edition of A. C. McGiffert, and more recently in the translations of Lawlor and Oulton (1927-28) and of Lake and Oulton (1926, 1932).

Again, a convenient break in the literature of these first three Christian centuries can be noted with Irenaeus of Lyons, who about A.D. 185 wrote his principal work, the "Refutation of Gnosticism" (also known as "Against Heresies"). He begins a new period in Christian literature because with him the self-consciously orthodox Christianity of the Catholic Church is clearly set forth in contradistinction from the sects.

What has come down to us from Christian writers before Irenaeus can be grouped in four volumes of unequal but moderate size: the New Testament, the Apostolic Fathers, the early Greek apologists, and the uncanonical gospels, acts, and apocalypses (along with a few Gnostic works of various kinds). But these four groups of books are not to be thought of as absolutely separate or successive. The Apostolic Fathers overlap some of the New Testament books in date, and some of the apologies are earlier than some of the Apostolic Fathers. Uncanonical gospels, acts, and apocalypses are scattered over the years from A.D. 100 on, so that some of them are close to the later books of the New Testament. In purpose, too, the various groups of writings often coincide. The purpose of I Clement is not totally different from that of I Peter. Both Ignatius and the author of the Johannine gospel and epistles are opposed to Docetism and to Judaizing. There are apologetic materials in the New Testament as well as in the writings of the later apologists. This situation is not surprising when we bear in mind the continuity of the Christian church.

To a considerable extent this earliest Christian literature before Irenaeus reproduced literary types already developed and standardized in books that we find in the New Testament-letters, apocalypses, gospels, and acts. Most of them were anonymous or pseudonymous; they provided the popular background against which arose the products of more self-conscious Christian leaders who wrote under their own names.

The order in which these writings can best be arranged and approached presents a difficult problem, which has been variously dealt with but not solved. The earlier literature can be grouped according to type as letters, revelations, gospels, and acts, with the individual works arranged chronologically within the several groups. But when the more conscious literary movement begins, with the apologists and the writers against the sects, the scene is constantly changing from West to East and back again, and soon in the West we have Latin writers at work simultaneously with Greek, gradually taking over the Western literary field from them. The arrangement by types of literature — apologies, antiheretical works, commentaries, and so forth — is helpful, but with such a treatment those diligent writers who worked in three or four different types would have to be taken up over and over again. So it seems preferable to present the work of each of these many-sided individuals as a unit in relation to his times and problems; this is obviously the best way to describe the writings of men like Irenaeus, Clement, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Origen.

The literary disposition that began to pervade Greek Christianity in the earlier years of the second century swelled to a flood in the last third of that century and reached proportions that amaze the modern reader. The volume, variety, and vigor of this literature must be realized if we are to understand what manner of faith it was that was beginning to turn the Greco-Roman world upside down, for not the least of the elements of its strength was the intellectual attack it was making upon paganism.

We have been too much inclined to pass by all this literature and go directly to the New Testament, as though it existed apart from the contemporary and later Christian literature. And it is true that it was in the books of the New Testament and in the earliest collections of them — of the letters of Paul and of the Four Gospels — that the letter and gospel types were first set powerfully before the early Church; and Revelation and Acts offered patterns for the apocalypses and acts that were to come. But the development of Christian thought did not stop with the writing of the New Testament, and although none of these later writers achieved the insight of Paul, the first of its authors, they have something of value to contribute to our understanding of historical Christianity, the development of Christian doctrine, and the extraordinary movement, so largely literary, that in a century and a half after its formation made the New Testament the religious authority of that ancient world.

It was the conviction of the early church that the acceptance of the gospel released new powers in the human spirit, and never was this truer than in these first centuries when in the defense and advocacy of Christianity men like Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen stood forth to fight the literary battle for the new faith. It was an age of writers, publishers, books, and readers to a degree that may well surprise the modern reader and give him a new idea of the intelligence and reading interest of Christian circles in the second and third centuries.

A few Christian books not included in the New Testament may well be older than some of those that found a place in it, and they throw light upon the situations in which canonical books were written. In origin the books are interrelated, for all come from, and find their places in, the ongoing life of the church. But the story of the New Testament books has often been told and need not be repeated here. The reader is referred instead to introductions to the New Testament that emphasize the literary and historical circumstances of the New Testament books. In the present study, it will be enough to assume the existence of these circumstances without undertaking to repeat what has already been said in print about New Testament origins.

The earliest form of Christian writing was naturally the letter, the personal communication from man to man or man to group of men, such as first-century Greeks and Romans, and Jews as well, constantly wrote. In the hands of Paul this simplest form of composition had developed into a powerful instrument of religious instruction, and by A.D. 80 the collection and publication of his letters had standardized it as a Christian literary type. This is the background of all the other early Christian letters, particularly of what we know as the Letter of Clement.

Toward the end of the first century, perhaps about A.D. 95, something like a revolt broke out among the Christians at Corinth against the officers of the Church, the presbyters or elders as they were called. This disturbance became so notorious that news of it reached Rome and distressed the Church there. The Roman Church accordingly sent a long letter to the Corinthians, urging them to harmonize their differences and to show their church officers the respect due them. The letter does not name its writer. It is written simply in the name of "the Church of God that sojourns in Rome to the Church of God that sojourns in Corinth," but it was recognized very early as the work of Clement, the head of the Roman Church from about A.D. 88 to 97. Ancient writers, from Dionysius of Corinth (ca. A.D. 170) down, agree in ascribing the letter to Clement; Eusebius himself does so in his Church History (iii. 16; iv. 23. II). Dionysius wrote to Soter, bishop of Rome between 166 and 174, that it was the custom of the Corinthian Church to read Clement's letter from time to time in its meetings. So religiously useful did the letter prove that it passed into some early New Testaments, such as the Codex Alexandrinus of the fifth century, and into a Syriac manuscript of the New Testament in the Harclean version written in the twelfth century, in which the Letter of Clement immediately followed the general, or Catholic letters, to which it was evidently believed to belong.

The position of presbyter or elder first comes into prominence in Acts, written about A.D. 60 or soon after. The Corinthians had from the beginning made much of spiritual endowments (I Cor. 12-14), and it is easy to see how the new regard for church officers might have encountered difficulty in gaining support in that Church. Clement, however, speaks as though the office was of long standing and the Corinthian disloyalty to it an innovation. He rebukes them sharply for their attitude and dwells upon the bad effects discord always produces. He urges them to follow the example of the great figures of Scripture; he is remarkably familiar with the Greek version of the Jewish Bible and quotes it copiously. He reminds them of the humility of Christ and points to the harmony of the natural world. He tells the story of the phoenix, described by Herodotus (II. 73) and Pliny the Elder (Natural History 10. 2), among others. After a long admonition to lead a godly life, Clement returns to the Corinthian situation (chap. 44), points out that the officers of the Church derive their leadership in succession from the apostles, and urges upon them love, forgiveness, humility, and reconciliation. After a prayer (59:3 - 61:3) he closes with a summary of the letter.

It may seem strange that the Roman Church should take upon itself the direction of the Church at Corinth, but a number of events in Christian history had prepared the way for such a step. The Roman Church saw that the churches of Asia needed to be reminded to love their enemies and to respect the emperor, and thus transmitted I Peter to convey this corrective. As Revelation had claimed the authority of a Christian prophet writing in the name of Jesus himself, the Roman Church wrote in the name of the chief of the apostles. This it could do, the ancients thought, since it was the custodian of his tomb and so of his memory and his teaching.

In writing to the Corinthians, however, it needed no such aids for its message and wrote simply as the Church of God that sojourned in Rome. The apology with which it begins is explained by the probable persecution of the Church. "Because of the sudden and successive misfortunes and disasters that have overtaken us," Clement begins, "we think that we have been too slow to pay attention to the matters under dispute among you, beloved."

The influence of Hebrews on the Letter of Clement is very marked. It is here that we first find Hebrews reflected in Christian literature, for Clement is largely interspersed with thoughts and expressions from it.

The acquaintance of Clement with the collected letters of Paul is also clear; he is the first Christian writer to quote one of Paul's letters expressly: "Take up the letter of the blessed Paul, the apostle; what did he first write you, at the beginning of the gospel preaching?" Chapter 47 begins, and then continues with an unmistakable reference to I Cor. 1: 10-12. Not only I Corinthians but Romans and Ephesians are clearly reflected in Clement.

This knowledge of the collected letters of Paul on the part of Clement suggests that we should push the earliest possible date of Clement's letter down ten or fifteen years later than A.D. 75, suggested by Lake as the terminus a quo, although it is not certain exactly when the Pauline letters were collected. More important is Clement's reference to the envoys of the Roman Church as having "lived among us... from youth to old age" (64). Since the Roman Church was probably not established until about A.D. 60, this remark may well point to the date of the letter as A.D. 85, or later.

The resemblances of the Letter of Clement to I Peter are generally, and rightly, taken to show Clement's use of that letter. Their similarities may conceivably be the result of the parallels in the situations involved, for both are Roman letters to the Christians of the East, I Clement to those of Greece and I Peter to those of Asia Minor. But Peter's reference to himself as a "fellow elder" (5:1) has nothing to do with Clement's insistence upon the authority of elders at Corinth. The fact that in both letters those who oversee the Churches are called elders, and the Churches called "sheepfolds," points toward the continuity of doctrine and discipline at Rome, not primarily to literary relationships.

Clement cannot be said to show acquaintance with any written gospel; his quotations of Jesus' words in chapters 13 and 46 are highly stylized and seem more naturally explained as being derived from catechetical teaching. In both chapters they are introduced with the words "remembering" or "remember the words of the Lord Jesus" — the way of introducing a quotation from oral tradition, as in Acts 20:35 (see p. 2).

Lightfoot in his great commentary on the Epistles of Clement, which Harnack called the finest commentary we have on any Church Father, says that Clement's characteristics are comprehensiveness, order, and moderation. The Letter is certainly a fine example of first-century Christian teaching, and it almost won a place in the New Testament. It was accepted as scripture by Clement of Alexandria. The so-called II Clement became attached to it, and the two stand after Revelation in the Alexandrian manuscript of the Greek Bible. They are mentioned as part of the New Testament in the Apostolic Canons, a Syrian work of about A.D. 400, and stand between the catholic letters [of James] and those of Paul in the Harclean Syriac New Testament manuscript already noted. Abu'1 Barakat (1363), in his account of Christian Arabic literature, speaks of the two letters of Clement as belonging to the New Testament. But on the Greek side, the Stichometry of Nicephorus, a list of books of scripture giving the size of each in lines of Homeric length (ca. A.D. 850), lists them among the rejected books, its "apocrypha." But, in or out the New Testament, I Clement is a noble monument of Christian attitudes in Rome toward the end of the first century.

Yet for all its ancient renown — it was one of the best-known books of early Christian literature — until 1875 I Clement was known to the modern world only through a single defective Greek manuscript — the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, from which a leaf was lost just before the end of the letter. As no other versions were known to exist, no one knew how much or how little was really gone until, in 1873, Bryennius discovered in Constantinople a complete Greek text of it in a manuscript dated A.D. 1056. This text he published in 1875. One Syriac, one Latin, and two Coptic manuscripts of it have since been found, one of these last a papyrus leaf-book of the fourth century.

Clement himself was spoken of in the Shepherd of Hermas, about A.D. 100 (Vision ii. 4. 3) ; and his letter is mentioned or quoted by Dionysius of Corinth, about 170 (Church History iv. 23) ; by Hegesippus in his Memoirs, now lost, about 180 (Church History IV. 22. 1); by Irenaeus, 181-89 (Against Heresies iii. 3. 3); by Clement of Alexandria several times; by Origen (On First Principles ii. 3. 6, etc.); and by Eusebius (Church History iv. 22. 1, etc.). Although its almost complete disappearance in medieval Greek manuscripts shows its decline in prestige, its translation into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic shows its wide currency in the early period, and the fact that II Clement does not accompany it in the Latin and Coptic versions shows at how early a date these translations must have been made.

It was the Codex Alexandrinus that first made the Letter of Clement known in Europe, and when Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Constantinople, sent that manuscript to the King of England in 1628, one of the first acts of the royal librarian, Patrick Young, was to edit and publish the Letters of Clement in 1633. The subsequent publication of the Letter of Barnabas, the Letter of Polycarp, and the Ignatian letters made it possible for Cotelier in 1672 to publish the "Works of the Holy Fathers Who Flourished in Apostolic Times" (temporibus Apostolicis); when Ittig in 1699 carried on that task, he called his collection a library of Apostolic Fathers (Bibliotheca Patrum Apostolicorum). In the principal collections of Apostolic Fathers to this day (Severus of Antioch; Lightfoot; Gebhardt, Harnack, and Zahn; Lake), Clement has usually had the place of honor, at first probably because he was identified with the Clement mentioned in Phil. 4:3, but more recently because his letter is so clearly the earliest writing outside of the New Testament that we possess.

The Apostolic Fathers in the nineteenth century consisted of I-II Clement, the letters of Ignatius and Polycarp, together with the Martyrdom of the latter, the Letter of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hernias, and — because of a seventeenth-century error — the Letter to Diognetus, actually an apologetic work. With these writings was sometimes associated what remains of the writings of Papias, a contemporary of Polycarp.

In 1883, however, the situation was changed when Bryennius published, from the Constantinople manuscript of A.D. 1056 (now at Jerusalem), the text of the "Teaching of the Lord through the Twelve Apostles for the Gentiles." This little manual of church discipline, usually called the "Didache" ("teaching"), immediately evoked a great deal of controversy, which is not yet at an end. The first six chapters of the manual contain moral instruction, largely Jewish in nature and partly based on the teaching of Jesus, which was to be recited before baptism. Chapters 7-10 consist of instructions about baptism, prayer, and what seems to be the eucharist. Chapters 11-15 deal with the reception of various kinds of ministers — apostles, prophets, and teachers — who are about to be supplanted by the appointment of bishops and deacons. The last chapter is an apocalypse, apparently based on Matthew 24. Naturally the question of the date of this book was raised, and it has been located all the way from A.D. 70 to A.D. 180. A terminus ante quern is provided by a quotation from it as scripture in Clement of Alexandria (Miscellanies i. 100), between 190 and 200.

The book was later known to Eusebius, Athanasius, and a few others and was incorporated in the third-century "Didascalia" and the fourth-century "Apostolic Constitutions." In recent times two small Greek fragments of the fourth century (Oxyrhynchus Papyri xv.1782; Didache 1:36-4a, 2:7b-3:2a) and one Coptic fragment of the fifth century (British Museum, Or. MS, 9271, 10:3b - 12:2a) have been discovered. To the prayers over wine and bread, the Coptic fragment adds a prayer over chrism. In addition, Ethiopic and Georgian versions have been found. The situation became even more complicated when O. von Gebhardt, in 1884, printed a copy of a twelfth-century manuscript with a Latin version of the "Didache," I:1-2.6a, and J. Schlecht, in 1899, published a Latin document (an eleventh-century manuscript) entitled "De doctrina apostolorum" (On the Teaching of the Apostles) closely parallel to Didache 1-6 and Barnabas 18-20.

All sorts of theories have been set forth to explain the interrelations of the Greek "Didache" with the parallel texts. Goodspeed argued that both Latin versions represented the original Greek edition, composed early in the second century, perhaps at Antioch; this was used when Barnabas 18-20 was added to the first seventeen chapters and also, about A.D. 150, when the existing "Didache" was compiled. A more likely view is that "De doctrina apostolorum," which lacks the clearly Christian section in the "Didache," 1:3-2:1, represents the Jewish original "two ways" on which the first part of the "Didache" is based, and that, in turn, Barnabas 18-20 is based on the "Didache."

The ideas of the "Didache" do not vary greatly from those expressed in the Gospel of Matthew, and it appears that, at least in the latter half of the "Didache," that Gospel was used. Some of the coincidences in the first part may have resulted from the use of common oral traditions. J: P. Audet, who published a very thorough study of the little work in 1958, has argued that the first half (through II:2) comes from about A.D. 70, while the rest was added not long afterwards. Perhaps as a whole the book should be dated about the last third of the first century, possibly around A.D. 90. Its Jewish-Christian tone indicates its place of origin as the East, perhaps Syria or Alexandria.

Later on, Eusebius puts "the so-called 'Teachings of the Apostles'" among the books that are disputed and rejected (Church History iii. 25. 4). Athanasius, in his Festal Letter of A.D. 367, omits it from the New Testament but says that it and the "Shepherd of Hermas" may be read by new converts and persons preparing for baptism. The "Didache" is listed among the "apocrypha" or rejected books in the "List of Sixty Canonical Books" and in the "Stichometry of Nicephorus." It was no longer especially useful, since it had been assimilated and modernized in later manuals of discipline, and it survived only as occasional reading among the monks of Egypt.

Early in the second century a Christian prisoner guarded by ten Roman soldiers was being taken through western Asia Minor to Rome, where he was to be executed. He was the bishop of Antioch, in Syria, and his name was Ignatius. News of his coming had preceded him, and when at Laodicea his guards took the north fork of the road that led through Philadelphia to Smyrna, Christian messengers hurried along the south fork, through Tralles and Magnesia to Ephesus, to tell the brethren that he had gone the other way and that they must go to Smyrna if they hoped to see him. A number of them did so, and when, very soon after, his guards took him on to Troas, one of these brethren went with him to that port. A little later his party touched at Philippi, on their way westward. That is the last we see of Ignatius. But at Smyrna and Troas he managed to write seven letters that, though of no great length, are of extraordinary interest.

Although he was the bishop of Antioch, it is only when Ignatius enters the circle of the Churches of Asia that he writes anything significant enough to be preserved. We know of no writings of his from the years at Antioch, and of none after he left Troas for Rome; and it may be that his one sudden burst of literary activity at Smyrna and Troas was stimulated by the Christian leaders of Asia — Polycarp of Smyrna and Onesimus of Ephesus — or by the circumstances under which he wrote.

We can hardly suppose that his brutal guards — "ten leopards," he called them — did anything to facilitate his letter-writing in the way of providing him with writing materials or forwarding his letters. But an Ephesian deacon named Burrhus, who came to Smyrna with his bishop Onesimus and three others from Ephesus to see and cheer him, seems to have assisted him as far as Troas and helped with his letter-writing there. In fact, he was probably his amanuensis. Ignatius says that the Ephesians and Smyrnaeans had been instrumental in getting him this assistance.

While he was at Smyrna, Ignatius recognized this expression of Christian sympathy by writing a letter to each of these Churches. He also addressed one to the Christians of Rome, preparing them for his coming and urging that nothing be done to prevent his martyrdom, to which he had now fully made up his mind. This attitude of Ignatius can be understood if we remember the terrible prospect of a cruel death to which he must have been striving to adjust himself through these weeks of travel.

His guards took him on from Ephesus to Troas, and there he wrote three more letters: one to the Church at Smyrna, where he had been so kindly treated; one to the cChurch of Philadelphia, with which he had had a hurried contact on his way to Smyrna; and one to Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, who had evidently done all that could be done for him during his stay in that city. The persecution at Antioch was now over, and Ignatius wished the Asian Churches to write letters of encouragement to his old flock, especially as he could not rally them himself. He was being hurried on to Neapolis, and even with the aid of Burrhus could not write to all the Churches through which he would pass on his way to Rome. He asked Polycarp to do this for him, so that his triumphal progress might continue all the way to the city of his martyrdom.

We catch one more glimpse of him at Philippi, where he met with the Church. Then he disappears from our ken, for the later book on the Martyrdom of Ignatius has little historical worth. We can only suppose that he was thrown to the lions in the Coliseum; Eusebius places the date about A.D. 107-8. The exact date is uncertain.

Second-century Christianity was clouded over by a wide variety of schismatic movements: Docetism, Judaizing, Marcionism, Gnosticism, and Montanism. The first two are reflected and opposed in the letters of Ignatius and the letters and Gospel of John. Ignatius is the first Christian writer to describe the Docetic position — that Christ's suffering was not real but only a "semblance" (dokein), so that he only "seemed" to suffer. Against these views, Ignatius insisted in his letters to the Trallians and the Smyrnaeans that Christ's sufferings were real, and he bitterly retorted that the holders of such views were themselves but "semblance." He criticized the Judaizers in writing to the Magnesians and the Philadelphians; these Judaizers had an exaggerated idea of the self-sufficiency of the Old Testament and seemed to be occupied with Jewish rites.

Against the obvious danger of division within and among the churches, Ignatius urges unity upon believers, and he finds the surest guaranty of this in a uniform church organization, under the leadership of bishop, elders (presbyters), and deacons. "Do nothing without the bishop" is his remedy (Philadelphians 7). Christians must be in harmony with their bishop and, since the bishop has the mind of Christ, in harmony with Christ and the Father. Ignatius is strongly ecclesiastical in his views; he certainly believes that outside the church there is no salvation and that to be within the church requires obedience to the bishop and presbyters.

The style of Ignatius owes much to the Greco-Roman rhetoric of his time, with its fondness for paradox and vivid imagery. His is a good example of what was called the Asian style, as opposed to the more restrained Attic. The stylistic influence of the Hellenistic-Jewish treatise on martyrdom that we know as IV Maccabees seems particularly apparent.

It may be that the Christian leaders of Asia, Polycarp of Smyrna and Onesimus of Ephesus, urged upon Ignatius the duty of attacking the false doctrines current among their churches. His immediate position, as a Christian confessor, a man already condemned to death for his faith and on the way to execution, naturally gave his words great weight. But it seems unnecessary to ascribe much influence to Ignatius' fellow bishops. As Bishop of Antioch, or indeed of Syria (ROM. 2:2), he was quite capable of assessing the situation for himself, as we learn from his account of his dealings with the Philadelphians.

Ignatius speaks in his letters of the aid the brethren of Ephesus and Smyrna had given him in writing and sending his letters, and, of course, without such local aid a prisoner like him could not have either written or sent them. The Ephesians and Smyrnaeans had sent Burrhus of Ephesus (Eph. 2:1) with Ignatius to Troas to write or carry his letters (Philad. II:2; Smyrn. 12:1). Ignatius directs Polycarp to write to the churches in the cities he is likely to pass through on the rest of his journey to Rome. And a few weeks later we find Polycarp sending a collection of his letters to the church at Philippi. The free interchange of letters among the Churches of Asia, Macedonia, and Syria that is implied or reflected in the letters of Ignatius and Polycarp shows in what close touch these Churches, and probably the other leading churches of Italy and Greece, already were. Paul's letters to the Churches had led the way in this, and the letter collection that begins the Revelation, together with Hebrews, I Peter, and I Clement, had continued it. These Churches of East and West were in frequent communication by letter and these letters sometimes rose to the stature of permanent contributions to the growing treasures of what was to be Christian literature.

The letter of Polycarp to the Philippians is an immediate sequel to the letters of Ignatius. Ignatius had been taken by his guards from Troas to Neapolis and thence, it appears, to Philippi, where the Philippian Christian leaders had visited him (Pol. Phil. 9:I). After his departure they had written to Polycarp, asking him to send their letter with his to Antioch, for Ignatius had requested them to write to the Christians of his diocese. They had also asked Polycarp to send them whatever letters of Ignatius he could, and this he did writing them on his own account a kind of covering letter. He urged them to be harmonious, steadfast, and faithful but said nothing about the threefold ministry of which Ignatius made so much; in writing he simply grouped himself with his presbyters: "Polycarp and the elders with him." He evidently wrote his letter within a few weeks of Ignatius' departure for Rome, for he had no news of his fate and asked the Philippians if they had any.

Not only in polity but in doctrine and in his use of Christian literature does Polycarp stand apart from Ignatius. Ignatius is the first writer to show acquaintance with Matthew, and he knows the Pauline letters, but Polycarp also knows the Pauline letters, including the Pastorals, the Acts, Hebrews, and I Peter, and uses Christian literature much more frequently than Ignatius does. His style, however, lacks the rugged vigor and the very unconventional metaphors that make Ignatius interesting and sometimes perplexing.

A striking difficulty arises when we try to reconcile two passages in Polycarp's letter. In the first (chap. 9), he clearly regards Ignatius as dead, a martyr with other martyrs; in the second (chap.13), he asks for further information about him, evidently writing soon after Ignatius' departure for Rome. Chiefly because of this discrepancy, P. N. Harrison has argued that the letter really consists of two letters, one (chaps. 13-14). written in the year when Ignatius was martyred, the other (chaps. 1-12) written at a time of crisis in the Philippian church, perhaps just before Marcion left Asia Minor for Rome, about A.D. 135. It is possible, however, that Polycarp treats Ignatius' zeal for martyrdom as certain to achieve its goal, and that the one letter was written early rather than late. It is by no means certain that Pdlycarp has Marcion in view at this time.

This brings up the matter of the forms in which the Ignatian letters have come down to us. Eusebius speaks of seven letters (Church History iii. 36): Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians, and Romans, written from Smyrna, and Philadelphians, Smyrnaeans, and Polycarp, written from Troas. In the manuscripts of Ignatius, however, the letters begin with Smyrnaeans and Polycarp, continuing with Ephesians, Magnesians, Philadelphias, Trallians; these are followed by a string of spurious letters that cannot be dated earlier than the latter part of the fourth century, among which Romans appears following a late and unhistorical account of the Martyrdom of Ignatius, to which it has evidently given rise. The order in which the genuine letters thus appear-Smyrnaeans, Polycarp, Ephesians, Magnesians, Philadelphians, Trallians, Romans — recalls Polycarp's words to the Philippians regarding what he was sending them: "We send you, as you asked, the letters of Ignatius which were sent to us by him [that would be Smyrnaeans and Polycarp] and such others as we had in our possession [that is, those to other Churches of which Burrhus would have retained copies]." This is perhaps the original order in which Polycarp circulated the collection, much as the Pauline letter collection had been put in circulation perhaps twenty-five years earlier. That Polycarp has that collection in the back of his mind is shown when he says to the Philippians, "Neither am I nor is any other like me able to follow the wisdom of the blessed and glorious Paul, who...when he was absent wrote letters to you" (3:2). The collection he is now sending them cannot compare with that of the Pauline letters; yet he also speaks of the endurance the Philippians had seen with their own eyes "not only in the blessed Ignatius and Zosimus and Rufus... but in Paul himself and in the other apostles" (9:1), thus suggesting that Ignatius, like Paul, is a martyr and so deserves a hearing.

Both Ignatius and Polycarp were well aware of the great value the collected letters of Paul had possessed for the churches; they speak of it (Eph. 12:2; Pol. Phil. 11:3) very much as though they had had that collection of the martyred Paul in mind in creating this new collection by the soon-to-be-martyred Ignatius. Ignatius' remark to the Ephesians that Paul "in every letter makes mention of [mnemoneuei] you" may point to Ephesus as the place where Paul's letters had been collected and published.

It is not necessary to suppose that Polycarp painfully sent around among the Asian churches and gathered up the letters of Ignatius. He tells the Philippians that he is sending them "the letters of Ignatius which were sent to us by him, and such others as we had in our possession." How does Polycarp happen to have any others besides Ignatius' letters to himself and to his Church at Smyrna? He has already made a collection, it appears, before the Philippians ask him for it; indeed, Ignatius has told them to ask, for he understands what Polycarp has in mind. Apparently Burrhus, the deacon of Ephesus, who had accompanied Ignatius from Smyrna to Troas had kept copies of the letters he wrote for him for the use of his principals, Polycarp and Onesimus, and that Ignatius was aware of this and was agreeable to it. It is reasonable, then, to suppose that the letter to the Romans was among the letters Polycarp had in his possession and that he sent copies of it to the Philippians.

Two other forms of the Ignatian letters illustrate their popularity in ancient times. For they were not only generally accompanied by from six to ten spurious letters ascribed to Ignatius and written in his name, probably late in the fourth century, but each letter was interpolated and expanded, as Greek and Latin texts show. On the other hand, three of them — Polycarp, Ephesians, and Romans — are found in Syriac much abbreviated. The letters of Ignatius were, therefore, known in the early church in at least four different forms:

• The seven genuine letters, known to Eusebius in A.D. 326.
• These seven letters, accompanied by ten spurious ones.
• The seven letters individually expanded and interpolated and accompanied by several spurious letters.
• In Syriac three letters — Polycarp, Ephesians, Romans — compressed, on no particular principle, to a little more than half their original length.

Polycarp's "Letter to the Philippians" was not usually copied with the Ignatian letters; indeed, no complete Greek text of it is known, and although a group of Greek manuscripts preserves almost nine chapters of it, and Eusebius in his Church History (iii. 36. 14, 15) supplies the thirteenth, for the other four chapters we are dependent upon the Latin version.

Nearly sixty years later, in A.D. 167, Polycarp suffered martyrdom in Smyrna, at the age of eighty-six. An account of this, substantially historical, was embodied in a letter from the church of Smyrna to that of Philomelium, a town in Phrygia not far from Pisidian Antioch. It is the earliest example that has come down to us of that type of literature, the "martyrdom," which was to become so abundant. It will be more fully discussed in its chronological position in the development of Christian letter literature.

The view Christians were to take of the Jewish scriptures was a serious problem for the early Church for almost a century and a half. What were Christians to think of the Jewish Law? How were they to regard the utterances of the prophets? The Letter to the Romans and the Gospel of Matthew had grappled with these questions, and Marcion and Justin in the middle of the second century took opposite views on them. But about A.D. 130 a Christian teacher, probably in Alexandria, offered a compromise. The Jewish scriptures were true, not literally, as the Jews believed, but allegorically. When Genesis declared that Abraham circumcised 318 males of his household (14:14; 17:23), it meant to predict Jesus on the cross, for the Greek figures for 18 are iota eta (I H), the first two letters of Jesus' name, and the Greek figure for 300 is tau, or T, which could be taken as representing the cross. The allegorizing teacher who offered this interpretation was very proud of it. "No one has learned a truer lesson from me," he goes on, "but I know that you deserve it" (Barnabas 9:8, 9).

The food laws of Leviticus are also allegorized. They only mean that we are not to be like swine, wild beasts, or birds of prey. The six days of creation are the six thousand years the earth is to last before the Messiah's return, "for a day with him means a thousand years." So interpreted, the author finds the Jewish scriptures full of religious meaning and of predictions fulfilled in Christ.

One of these seems to date the book, for the writer speaks of the temple as having been destroyed and then rebuilt by those who had destroyed it, and he goes on, "It is happening. For because of the war it was destroyed by the enemy; now even the servants of the enemy will build it up again themselves" (16:14). This points to the heathen rebuilding of the temple of Jupiter on the temple site in Jerusalem, on the eve of the Bar-Cochba War of A.D. 132-35; this would date the Letter about A.D. 130-31, when Hadrian ordered the building of the new city. The literary environment of Barnabas is indicated by his use of Matthew, of Old Testament "testimonies," and of apocalyptic writings such as I Enoch, II Esdras, and II Baruch.

The Letter of Barnabas begins not in the usual fashion of Greek letters but in the informal epistolary style used in family letters, addressing its readers as "sons and daughters." Its tone changes suddenly at the end of chapter 17: "So much for this. Now let us pass to another lesson and teaching" (The words are gnosis and didache). What follows is a bold statement of Christian ethics, the Way of Light against the Way of Darkness. It is cast in fifty-one curt commands of the "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not" order, twenty-three of them positive and twenty-eight negative (chap. 19). A brief description of the Way of the Black One follows, and a general exhortation concludes the book.

No one can miss the sharp cleavage at the end of chapter 17. The idle if ingenious fancies of the allegorical interpreter give way to the stern, blunt commandments of the Christian lawgiver, with only the crudest of transitions between. It is evident that two short Christian tracts have been put together. And this impression becomes a conviction when we find that each part has been found by itself in a Latin version. The Latin translation of Barnabas extends only through chapter 17, which is properly finished off with a doxology.

The Greek manuscripts of Barnabas have an interesting history. At first it was known in Greek only in a group of eight manuscripts, all copied directly or indirectly from an earlier manuscript from which several leaves had been lost, so that the text skipped from Polycarp, "To the Philippians" 9:2, toward the end of one sentence to the "Letter of Barnabas" 5: 7, in the middle of another. But in 1859, when Tischendorf found the "Codex Sinaiticus" at St. Catherine's on Mount Sinai, he saw at once that it contained the complete Greek text of Barnabas, and, fearing that the manucript might be taken away from him the next morning, he sat up all night to copy that long-desired text. A few years later, in 1873, Bryennius made his famous discovery of the Constantinople manuscript, from which he published first the full Greek text of I and II Clement (1875), and then the long-lost "Didache" (1883). It also contained the full Greek text of Barnabas, and its readings Bryennius supplied for Hilgenfeld's edition of 1877.

The influence of the "Letter of Barnabas" was considerable, and it was long held in high regard. Clement of Alexandria, toward the end of the second century, accepted it as scripture and commented upon it in his lost "Outlines." He spoke of Barnabas as an "apostle," but so, of course, did Acts (14:14). Origen, too, included it among his disputed books, which he himself accepted as scripture. The Sinaitic manuscript includes it in the New Testament, putting it after the Revelation and before Hermas. Jerome speaks of it as being read among the apocryphal writings ("On Illustrious Men," 6). The "Clermont List," representing Egyptian usage about A.D 300, has it at the end of the Catholic or general letters, between Jude and the Revelation of John. Eusebius classes it as disputed and rejected ("Church History," iii. 25. 4). The "List of the Sixty Canonical Books" mentions it among the rejected books, the apocrypha, and the "Stichometry of Nicephorus" (ca. A.D. 850) puts it with the disputed books — the "Revelation of John," the "Revelation of Peter," and the "Gospel of the Hebrews — not among the rejected ones.

About the middle of the second century a Greek Christian of Asia, probably in the vicinity of Ephesus, wrote in the name of the apostles a letter to all the churches, gathering from the Four Gospels, the Acts, and other sources what he considered of most value and interest in the way of Christian history and tradition, ethics and expectation. He meant it as a kind of summary, for the whole world, from all the apostles, of Christian beliefs and hopes. Perhaps he felt that the growing number of Christian books must confuse simple minds, and he tried to condense all that material into one small book, about the length of I Corinthians. The idea of writing in the name of all the apostles was not new and had been taken up in the Teaching of the Lord through the Twelve Apostles, early in the second century, and again toward the end of it in the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles.

The only trace of the Epistle ofthe Apostles seems to occur in in the fifth-century Christian poet Commodian, who may reflect chapter i i in the words "Vestigium umbra non facit" ("A phantom does not make a footprint"). But the book itself was entirely unknown until Carl Schmidt reported the discovery of a part of it in Coptic in 1895. A Latin fragment of it, a single leaf from the fifth century, came to light in 1908. Meanwhile in 1907 a work in Ethiopic called The Testament of Our Lord in Galilee had been reported and described, and was recognized by M. R. James as including a version of the Epistle of the Apostles; it was published in 1913 and preserves the work in full. From these three sources, Coptic, Latin, and Ethiopic, Schmidt in 1919 published the text. But no part of it has yet been found in Greek, the original language of the book.

The writer of the Epistle ofthe Apostles names its authors as John, Thomas, Peter, Andrew, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Nathanael, Judas the Zealot, and Cephas although John i"42 explains that Cephas, so often mentioned in Paul, really means Peter. Nathanael is, of course, never mentioned in the gospel lists of apostles. The book begins with a warning against the "false apostles" Simon (meaning Simon Magus) and Cerinthus, the latter the earliest of the schismatic leaders (ca. A.D. 100). It records the creation by God the Father and his incarnation in God the Son. A summary of Jesus' miracles is given, followed by his crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. He rejoins the apostles, apparently in Galilee, and tells them of his experiences in the other world. He promises to release Peter from prison and instructs them to observe the Lord's Supper. They ask when he is to return, and he answers that it will be when a hundred and fifty years are past (so the Ethiopic; the Coptic has "When the hundred and twentieth part is fulfilled," evidently counting not from Jesus' birth but from his death). He teaches the apostles and answers their questions, promising them resurrection, and declaring that he will go with them as they preach. He predicts the conversion, work, and martyrdom of Paul and describes the signs of the end. He justifies the condemnation of the wicked but encourages the apostles to pray for sinners and commissions them as "fathers, servants, and masters." He explains the parable of the bridesmaids, giving each one the name of some virtue or faculty. The wise ones were Faith, Love, Grace, Peace, and Hope; the foolish were Knowledge, Understanding, Obedience, Patience, and Compassion. (This suggests the names given the twelve virgins in the Shepherd of Hermas, Parable 9:15). After giving further moral instruction and the prediction of schismatic teaching, he is carried away on a cloud.

The writer's historical weakness is obvious; he can assemble only eleven apostles, although he counts both Cephas and Peter and includes Nathanael (of John I:45-49). He describes Jesus as crucified by Pontius Pilate and Archelaus, although the latter disappeared from history in A.D. 6; Antipas, of course, is whom he meant.

He draws heavily upon the Four Gospels and the Acts and uses the Revelation of John, the Revelation of Peter, I Peter, and probably Ignatius (Eph. 7:2), the Letter of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hernias. He tells the famous story of Jesus and his alphabet teacher (chap. 4), which appears in the Gospel of Thomas and is quoted in Irenaeus (Against Heresies 1. 20. 1), but we cannot be sure he derived the story from that gospel; he may have gotten it from tradition. He describes Jesus as quoting extensively from the Psalms (Pss. 3 [in full], 13, 49).

There are gropings toward a creed, as when the writer in chapter 3 proclaims his doctrine of God the Father and God the Son and in chapter 5 explains the five loaves as the symbol of our faith in "the Father, the Lord Almighty, and in Jesus Christ our Redeemer, in the Holy Spirit the Comforter, in the holy church, and in the forgiveness of sins." This was just at the time when the Roman church (A.D. 140-50) was first shaping its baptismal confession, which we know as the Apostles' Creed.

The fixing of the second coming "when a hundred and fifty years are past" points to a date between A.D. 140 and 150. Justin Martyr, in Apology XLVI. 1, speaks of Jesus as having been born one hundred and fifty years before he writes. Some touches sound as though Marcion were a contemporary of the writer; he flourished at just that time. On the whole, the Epistle was probably written between A.D. 140 and 160.

Early Christians were constantly liable to sporadic persecution, and one Christian leader after another met his death by martyrdom, as we have already seen in the case of Ignatius. After the middle of the second century we find a few accounts of the trials and sufferings of the martyrs, sometimes in the form of letters such as the one about Polycarp, to which we shall presently turn, sometimes in the form of court reporting, as in the account of the Roman Christian Justin, put to death between 163 and 167, when Q. Junius Rusticus was prefect of the city of Rome. The Martyrdom of Justin describes the interrogation of Justin and seven other Christians by the prefect. The prefect engages in a brief discussion with Justin, then inquires about the Christian allegiance of all the prisoners. When they insist that they are Christians, he threatens Justin and ridicules his ideas about heavenly reward. All the Christians refuse to offer sacrifice to the gods and are therefore beheaded; other Christians later obtain their bodies for burial, and perhaps for veneration.

Another account of martyrdom comes from about the same time. This is the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the famous bishop of Smyrna whose life spanned the years between Ignatius, early in the second century, and Irenaeus, toward its end. In 154 Polycarp had visited Rome to confer with the Roman bishop Anicetus about the day on which the institution of the Lord's Supper should be celebrated. Polycarp and the Christians of Asia observed it on the fourteenth of the month Nisan, no matter on what day of the week it fell; but the Roman church celebrated the death of Christ on Friday and his resurrection "on the Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox." This was the "quartodeciman controversy" that was soon to divide Christianity. Polycarp and Anicetus could not agree about it, but they partook of the communion together and parted amicably. After his return to Smyrna, however, Polycarp was arrested and condemned to death; he suffered martyrdom by being bound to the stake, stabbed, and burned. This occurred in A.D. 166-67.

Polycarp was eighty-six years of age at the time of his martyrdom and had been bishop of Smyrna for at least fifty years. He was greatly respected and loved by Christians everywhere, and an account of his last days and death was very soon written in the form of a letter from the church at Smyrna to the one at Philomelium, two hundred miles to the east. It tells, for the most part with much restraint, of the arrest, examination, and execution of Polycarp. With it and the Martyrdom of Justin begins a new form of Christian literature that became immensely popular, the "acts of martyrdom"; the form was revived in more modern times with such effect in Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563). Such narratives played an important part in early Christian history in keeping Christians steadfast in persecutions, as members of "the noble army of martyrs." The acts of martyrdom also played a very large part in such works as the Golden Legend, written in 1275 by Jacobus de Voragine, the archbishop of Genoa, translated into English and printed by Caxton in 1483, and in such great collections as the Acta Sanctorum, which contains sixty-nine volumes in both the Antwerp (1643-1910) and the Brussels (1845-1926) editions.

Further light is thrown upon the life of Polycarp by the accounts of Irenaeus, who when he was a boy in Asia had seen Polycarp and heard him; this he relates in a letter to his friend Florinus, which fortunately was preserved in Eusebius' Church History (v. 20. 4-8). Irenaeus tells us more about Polycarp in his work Against Heresies (iii. 3. 4), where he records Polycarp's appointment by the apostles as bishop in Asia, his journey to Rome to seen Anicetus, and his famous encounter with Marcion. Marcion asked him, "Do you know me?" "I know you for the firstborn of Satan," was Polycarp's sharp reply. Eusebius seems to have learned what he knew about Polycarp from Ignatius' Letter to Polycarp, Polycarp's Letter to the Philippians, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, and what Irenaeus had to say about him.

Eusebius copied most of the Martyrdom of Polycarp into the pages of his Church History (iv. 15). There are at least five Greek manuscripts of the Martyrdom. They end with a scribal note of unusual interest, for it states that the text was copied from the papers of Irenaeus by Gaius, who lived with him. Gaius' manuscript was copied by one Socrates, in Corinth, and his again by Piomus, possibly the martyr of that name who suffered in the Decian persecution (A.D. 250). This last scribe declares that Polycarp in a vision showed him where to find the outworn manuscript written by Socrates.

It is by no means certain that this scribal note-or, for that matter, any of the materials appended to the Martyrdom in chapters 21 and 22-belong to the original form of the work, which clearly ends with chapter 20. H. von Campenhausen has forcefully argued that the Martyrdom has suffered a good deal of interpolation, especially at the hands of an editor after Eusebius' time; this editor, impressed by the resemblance of Polycarp's sufferings to those of Jesus, has added details which bring out the parallel. Be this as it may-and acts of martyrdom have usually undergone a good deal of expansion-the Martyrdom contains a moving and generally convincing account of a tragic and heroic story, too often repeated in the second and third centuries, and it marks the beginning of the great literature of martyrology.

The position of Christians in the ancient world was extremely precarious; they might at any time be reported to the authorities, who would then have no choice but to proceed against them, as followers of an unauthorized religion. Any offense given to the rabble of a city by the Christians there might cause an outbreak of legal procedure against the church, and this is what occurred in the Gallican cities of Lyons and Vienne in A.D. 177 as the reign of Marcus Aurelius was drawing to its close. The pitiful and yet heroic story of those who suffered martyrdom in these places was soon afterward told in a letter from the "servants of God who sojourn in Vienne and Lyons, in Gaul, to the brethren throughout Asia and Phrygia." This letter ranks next to the Martyrdom of Polycarp and that of Justin as among the earliest acts of martyrdom. But the letter has disappeared, and for our knowledge of it we are dependent upon the copious extracts from it which Eusebius fortunately copied into the fifth book of his Church History (1-4).

The letter records the attack of the mob upon the brethren, the intervention of the city authorities against the Christians-the defense offered by one of them, Vettius Epagathus, the examination of the others, the defection of some and the steadfastness of others. Their slaves were examined and, in fear of torture, confessed that the Christians were guilty of the crimes usually charged against them-infanticide, cannibalism, and incest. Some of the brethren displayed conspicuous courage-Sanctus, a deacon of Vienne; Maturus; Attalus; and Blandina, a slave, whose mistress was also undergoing torture. Pothinus, the bishop of Lyons, a man over ninety, was so maltreated that he died in prison. The final sufferings of Maturus, Sanctus, Attalus, Blandina, Alexander, a physician, and a boy named Ponticus are narrated in some detail-how they were flogged, thrown to wild beasts, hung from stakes, and roasted on an iron chair.

The little letter, as far as can be judged from the portions Eusebius preserves, stands out as one of the classics of martyrological literature. Eusebius included it in his collection of acts of martyrdom, but that work has disappeared.

The third century witnessed a marked rivalry among leading Christian centers regarding their apostolic founders: Rome took pride in the names of Peter and Paul; Ephesus rejoiced in the memory of John or Luke; and Alexandria, probably quite groundlessly, claimed the name of Mark. But the quaintest and boldest of such claims was that of the Syrian church of Edessa, which went straight back to Jesus himself. Syriac Christianity documented this great claim by two letters, believed to have been exchanged between Jesus and Abgar the Black, king of Edessa in A.D. 13-50. Abgar wrote to Jesus as follows:

To this charming letter, Jesus is said to have replied:

Syrian Christianity did not begin until about A.D. 172, with Tatian, and did not reach the stage of ecclesiastical consciousness implied in these letters until the middle of the third century, when they were probably written. Eusebius found them in the archives of Edessa and translated them from Syriac into Greek (Church History 1. 13). They were early embellished with the story that Abgar's messenger painted a portrait of Jesus and took it back to Edessa. The fuller form of the correspondence, the Teaching of Addai, passed into Armenian and Greek. The original story became widely known in the West through Eusebius' account of it, especially in Rufinus' Latin version of Eusebius'. Jesus' letter has been found in a cave inscription at Edessa, and both letters in an inscription at Philippi. The Gelasian Decree stigmatized them as apocrypha.

Gnostic teachers also wrote "open letters" to their disciples, and Clement of Alexandria has preserved three fragments from letters of Valentinus in his Miscellanies. In addition, we possess a whole letter of the Valentinian Ptolemaeus to a certain Flora; in it he explains the nature of the true law of God. Other letters have been discovered among the Gnostic writings found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt: these include two versions of a letter of Eugnostus, a letter of Peter and Philip, and a letter concerning the Father of the Universe and Adam, the First Man.

Beyond "open letters" such as these, there were naturally many private letters written by Christians-and, just as naturally, almost none of them survive. We should, however, mention what is probably the earliest extant letter of this kind, written by a young Christian named Besas to his mother Mary perhaps about the year 200.

To my most honorable mother Mary, from Besas, many greetings in God. Above all, I pray to God the Father of truth and to the Paraclete Spirit that they may preserve you in soul and body and spirit: for the body, health; for the spirit, gladness; and for the soul, eternal life. And please do not hesitate, if you find anyone coming to me, to write me about your health so that when I hear I may rejoice. Do not neglect to send me the coat for the Paschal festival, and send my brother to me. I greet my father and my brothers. I pray that you may long be well.

Scholars have sometimes supposed that this letter reflects Gnostic thought, but it does not. The language is actually characteristic of the early Egyptian liturgy, the origins of which we can therefore place within the second century."

In later Judaism, a favorite type of religious instruction emerged in the apocalypse, which made use of symbols, sometimes grotesque, to interpret the present and forecast the future. The books of Daniel and Enoch were notable examples. Before the end of the first century, one early Christian writer made use of this style in the Revelation of John. This special kind of apocalyptic writing was revived among Christians in the second century when the Jewish collection of apocalypses known to us as II Esdras was given a Christian preface; then, after the middle of the third century, it was given a Christian conclusion and thus adopted into Christian literature.

But, in general, Jewish apocalyptic was not congenial with Greek Christianity, which instinctively found its own paths to apocalyptic expression of various kinds. Indeed, the first book of this more Greek kind followed almost immediately upon the publication of the Revelation of John and dealt not so much with the guilt and doom of empires as with the sense of sin and the need of repentance in the human heart. The Revelation of John was probably well known in Rome in the last years of the first century and no doubt had the general effect of leading Christian prophets to write down and publish their oracles; but its specific influence upon them was singularly slight.

The continued influence of Hebrews upon the Roman church is reflected in the Shepherd of Hermas, perhaps begun in the last years of the first century, A.D. 95-l00. Hermas was a Christian

prophet in Rome, who understood Hebrews to teach that there could be no repentance for serious sins committed after baptism. The real meaning of Hebrews was that if anyone renounced his faith and became an apostate, he could never regain it and re-enter the church. Hermas records his interviews with the angel of repentance, who appeared to him in the guise of a shepherd and taught him that there might be one repentance for sin after baptism, but only one. It is from the prominence of the shepherd in the work that it takes its name.

Hermas was or had been a slave in Rome. His work, which probably grew gradually, begins with five Visions in which repentance is emphasized. In the third, the church appears to him as a woman and shows him a great tower being built, which also symbolizes the church. In the fourth, he is shown a hideous dragon, which foreshadows persecution. In the fifth, which is entitled an apocalypse and formed the introduction to the Commandments and Parables that make up the bulk of the book, the shepherd appears. The shepherd gives Hernias a new series of twelve commandments, diffuse in style and quite unlike the Ten Commandments of the Mosaic Law. In general, they explain how the repentant Christian should live. They are followed by ten parables, with the operations of repentance and its which deal theological bearings.

It is characteristic of the free spirit of the early Christian prophets that Hernias is not deterred by the Jewish Ten Commandments from offering twelve more, or by the parables of Jesus from hazarding ten of his own. Indeed, he shows much less influence of Paul and the early gospels, and even of the Greek Old Testament, than we might expect. The Revelation of John is full of reflections of the Old Testament, but this second Christian apocalypse shows very few indeed. It owes little or nothing to the old Jewish apocalyptic; it is not even pseudonymous; in fact, it possesses a naive freshness and originality that along with its evident sincerity gave it its early influence, which reached not only to Egypt and Abyssinia but in later centuries, through the sect of the Manichees, as far east as Chinese Turkestan.

Hermas is described by the Muratorian writer (ca. A.D. 200) as the brother of Pius, the bishop of Rome, and as having written during his episcopate, A.D. 140-55. But parts of the Shepherd were probably written long before then, in fact, at the very end of the first century, or very early in the second. Since the second vision states that it should be the business of Clement to send copies of the visions to other churches, these first visions may go back as far as the last part of his leadership, or episcopate, which covered the years 88-97. Hermas certainly expected the visions to be widely circulated among the churches, and his book did have a great vogue in the second century. It found its way into more than one early form of the New Testament and, translated into Latin, even influenced Dante, whose guides Beatrice and Vergil evidently reflect Rhoda and the Shepherd.

Although Hermas has come down to us in Ethiopic and in two Latin versions (one from the second century), no complete Greek text of it has come to light. It stood at the end of the New Testament in the Sinaitic manuscript (fourth century), but the last three-fourths of it are lost from that codex. The Athos manuscript of it (fifteenth century), part of which is now at Leipzig, preserves about nine-tenths of the Greek but in an inaccurate and badly written text. The Michigan papyrus (third century) contains almost a fourth of the Greek text but does not include the part missing in the Athos manuscript. More than a dozen smaller pieces, on parchment or papyrus, have come to light, some of them covering parts missing from these more considerable manuscripts. These numerous fragments from Egypt reflect its wide popularity there, already evidenced by its acceptance as scripture by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and the scribe of the Sinaitic manuscript. But Tertullian, at Carthage, though he at first accepted it, later repudiated and condemned it. Irenaeus accepted it as scripture; Eusebius classed it among the rejected writings, and Athanasius excluded it from the New Testament but recommended it for private reading by new converts.

The Shepherd manifestly gathers up the prophetic utterances composed by Herman over a series of years. The Michigan papyrus throws new light upon the literary development of his work, for when complete this manuscript evidently began with what we know as Vision 5 (which is called an "apocalypse" in the manuscripts) and contained the twelve commandments and the ten parables.

At least three stages can be traced in the growth of Hermas' work. He first published Visions 1-4, of which he was told to give one copy to Clement for churches elsewhere, one to Grapte for the widows and orphans, and one to the elders of the local church, with whom he was to read the visions to the congregation. A few years later he completed the Shepherd proper, beginning with Vision 5 and including the twelve commandments and the ten parables. This is the form preserved in the third-century Michigan papyrus. Finally, the earlier work was prefixed to this, and in this longest form the Shepherd appeared in the later Greek manuscripts (Sinai, Athos) and in the various versions. There may have been even more stages in its publication (Parables g and io sound like later additions by Herman), but this much is now certain. The whole makes a work much longer than any single book in the New Testament.

It has been suggested that in view of literary and theological differences among the various parts of the work, it should be assigned to three different authors. Herman himself would have written Visions 1-4 at the beginning of the second century; later on, another author may have composed the very long Parable 9; and finally, the work would have been completed by a third writer, who created Vision 5 to introduce his own twelve commandments and the first eight parables, and then added Parable io as a kind of recapitulation. Although the evidence favoring this view is impressive, it may just as well point not to three authors but to one not very competent author who wrote his book in three stages.

There is conjecture that Herman got his idea of a shepherd as a revealer of truth from the Poimandres, or Shepherd ofMenwritten perhaps toward the end of the first Christian century-the most ancient of the Greek theosophical tracts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, meaning Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom. It is more likely, however, that if Herman knew anything about that Hermetic teaching, it was through hearing it talked about. He was not a great reader, even of the books Christians prized most; but he would hear of shepherds, in the religious sense, just from going to church, where the Psalms ("The Lord is my shepherd") and the prophets would have familiarized him with the idea he utilized in his own work. The Epistle to the Hebrews, well known to the Roman church in his day, spoke of Christ as the great shepherd of the flock. And in I Peter Christ was described as "the shepherd and guardian of your souls." And while Herman identifies his shepherd not with Christ but with the angel of repentance, Christian ministers were already spoken of as shepherds (Eph. 4:11). Moreover, Hermas is not greatly interested in theosophical speculations about the divine wisdom and intelligence. His concern is practical-with his own sins and weaknesses and with those of his wife and children and of his brethren in the Roman church.

The mention of Clement as still being active in the church may carry the first stage of the work back to A.D. 95 or 96, thus making the statement ofthe Muratorian writer that Hermas was the brother of Pius, bishop of Rome in A.D. 140-55, on every account difficult to accept. From his opening words, it is apparent that Hermas was exposed as an infant and picked up and reared for the slave market. It is hard to see how any brother of such a foundling could be identified, although it is not absolutely impossible.

With this work of Hermas the Roman church rounded out its literary contribution to first-century Christianity, the Gospel of Mark, I Peter, 1 Clement, and the Shepherd-a gospel, a church letter, a general letter to a whole province, and a revelation. No wonder Ignatius could write to the Roman church, "You have taught others" (Rom. 3:1). He probably had I Peter and 1 Clement in mind.

Direct divine revelation, or apocalyptic, was an idea familiar to the early church from the Hebrew prophets Ezekiel and Zechariah and from Jewish apocalypses like Daniel and Enoch. The Gospel of Mark, about A.D. 70, contained a striking apocalyptic passage (chap. 13) as did two letters of Paul, II Thessalonians (chap. 2) and I Corinthians (chap. 15). But the Revelation of John, about A.D. 93, was the first Christian apocalypse and was much indebted to Daniel. The Shepherd of Hermas also took the form of a revelation, although it was influenced by Greek literature as well as Jewish.

Sometime between A.D. 125 and 150 a Greek Christian wrote an apocalypse in the name of Peter and introduced, for the first time, the pagan ideas of heaven and hell into Christian literature. The Orphic and Pythagorean religions had much to say about the punishments to be inflicted in the other world upon sinful men and women, and the Christian writer lays hold of these hideous pictures to warn men of the awful personal dangers of sin. Daniel and John had been concerned with the ultimate triumph of the Kingdom of God, but the Revelation of Peter is devoted to the precise punishments to be expected after death by individuals who commit certain sins. He does have something to say of the rewards of the faithful, but he is principally a preacher of hell-fire, a subject on which the teachers of Orphic and Pythagorean religion had had so much to say; indeed, we meet it as early as the Odyssey of Homer, when, in Book 11, Odysseus visits the underworld and sees the punishments endured by Sisyphus and Tantalus.

The Revelation runs somewhat as follows. Peter relates how, as they sat upon the Mount of Olives, he and the other disciples asked Jesus about the signs that would precede his coming and the end of the world. Jesus answers his questions in language taken, for the most part, from the Four Gospels. There is also some use of the Revelation of John, which must have suggested the writing of the Revelation of Peter. The day of judgment and the triumphal coming of Christ are described. The wicked will be punished in ways corresponding to their particular sins. Demons, led by Ezrael and Tartaruchus, will torment them with serpents, worms, and vultures, on fiery wheels, and in rivers of fire. Then follows a briefer description of the perfumed garden, full of beautiful trees and blessed fruits, where the redeemed will be found.

Short as it is, the Revelation of Peter is full of reflections of earlier Christian and Jewish writings. The Ezra Apocalypse in II Esdras (5:33-35), written probably about A.D. 100, is clearly reflected, but an even better terminus a quo is afforded by the writer's use of the Four Gospels, toward A.D. 120. The book cannot therefore be dated earlier than A.D. 125. On the other hand, it is evidently used in the Epistle of the Apostles (chap. 16), which can probably be dated between A.D. 140 and 160, where the coming of the Messiah is described in language much like that in the Revelation of Peter. It is also used in the Acts of Paul, especially in III Corinthians (ca. A.D. 160-70). These literary facts fix the date of the Revelation of Peter in the quarter-century between A.D. 125 and 150.

The Revelation of Peter is first mentioned in the Muratorian fragment, a Roman list of books that may be read in church, from about the end of the second century, where it stands after the Revelation of John, with the warning that "some of our people will not have it read in church." Clement of Alexandria, about the same time, accepted it as the work of Peter: "Peter says in the Revelation... " (Prophetic Extracts 41:2; 48:1). Early in the third century it is quoted or paraphrased at some length in the Acts of Thomas (chaps. 55-57). It stands at the end of the Clermont List, representing Egyptian usage about A.D. 300, which closes with the Revelation of John, the Acts of the Apostles, the Shepherd, the Acts of Paul, and the Revelation of Peter. Early in the fourth century Methodius makes use of it, and Eusebius (A.D. 303) reckons it among the rejected writings (Church History III. 25. 4). Macarius of Magnesia, early in the fifth century, mentions it and puts its words into the mouth of his heathen adversary. Sozomen, in the fifth century, says the Revelation was read every year on Good Friday in some churches of Palestine (Church History vii. 19). In the Stichometry of Nicephorus (ca. A.D. 850) it follows the Revelation of John among the disputed books. It is mentioned again by name in an old Latin sermon of uncertain date on the ten bridesmaids. Its influence continued down the centuries, strongly affecting Dante, in the Divine Comedy, with its accounts of heaven and hell (A.D. 1300); and Gustave Dore's fearful pictures illustrating Dante owe much indirectly to the Revelation of Peter. There is a far-off echo of the high esteem at first enjoyed by this little book in the fact that it finally found refuge in the closing section of the Ethiopic New Testament.

Although the Revelation of Peter is mentioned by this long series of early Christian writers, the book itself had long since disappeared when, in 1886, a part of it was discovered in a small parchment manuscript in a tomb near Akhmim in Upper Egypt, together with a considerable fragment of the Gospel of Peter, in a hand not later than the fifth century. The old stichometrical lists gave the length of the Revelation of Peter as from 270 (in the Clermont List, A.D. 300) to 300 lines (in the Nicephorus list, A.D. 850), so that this discovery put into our hands almost one-half of the little document, which must have been about four-fifths the length of Galatians.

The contents of this fragment were later recognized in the socalled Books of Clement, which form an appendix to the New Testament in Ethiopic manuscripts of it; and it was found that the whole of the Revelation of Peter was actually imbedded in the Ethiopic text, but that in the Greek fragment found at Akhmim the descriptions of heaven and hell had been transposed. The Greek gives the picture of the saved first and then that of the lost, whereas the Ethiopic has them in the reverse order. A comparison of the Ethiopic with the Greek suggests that the Greek fragment is from a condensed form of the book.

We also get some light on what the little book contained from some quotations from it in Clement of Alexandria (Prophetic Extracts), from the Sibylline Oracles, late second or early third century (2:90-338), from Methodius of Olympus, in the third century (Symposium 2:6), and from Macarius of Magnesia, about A.D. 400 (Apocritica 4:6-7). There is also a small parchment leaf in the Bodleian Library containing twenty-six short lines of the Greek text, and a double leaf from the same codex, probably of the fourth century, in the Rainer Collection in Vienna. The discovery of the complete Greek text of this early apocalypse would be a great boon to the study of early Christian literature.

The Sibyl of Cumae (or elsewhere) was a Greek source of revelation mentioned, though with disapproval, as early as Heraclitus of Ephesus (500 B.C.). Early writers knew of but one Sibyl, but gradually a number came to be recognized, and shrewd sayings of a portentous character cast in Greek hexameters floated about the Greek world. Jewish writers took up the idea about the middle of the scond century before Christ, no doubt embodying not a little pagan material with their own, and continued to express themselves in connected Sibylline poetry on into the fourth Christian century.

Hermas, about A.D. 100, was the first Christian writer to mention the Sibyl, and Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and many others did so after him. Christians were already introducing a Christian tone into the Sibylline books by interpolating passages of their own composing, for Celsus, about A.D. 177-78, in his True Account, Origen says, charged them with so doing (Against Celsus vii. 53; cf. v. 61). So the Sibylline books came to be a combination of pagan, Jewish, and Christian materials.

They eventually numbered fifteen, of which Books 9, 10, and 15 are lost. Although Celsus may be right in saying that Christians were already at work upon the Sibylhnes by his day, most of the Christian expansions of and interpolations in them probably be long to the third century-the time when Christian hands, having previously colored the corpus of Jewish apocalypses known to us as II Esdras by providing it with a Christian preface, were adding to it a Christian conclusion.

The exact determination of the Christian additions to the Sibylline books is difficult; Books 1, 2, and 5 have undergone Christian revision and expansion; Books 6, 7, and most of 8 (vss. 217-500) are Christian compositions; the last section begins with the wellknown acrostic "Jesus Christ; Son of God, Saviour" (vss. 2I7-44). Books 11-I4, also show strong Christian coloring.

The Christianized Sibyllines had small claims to literary character, being for the most part crude and unskillful in style-as pagan critics observed. Although learned Christians often mentioned them, their chief public was among the less educated parts of the churches and may be compared to those who relish the prophecies of Mother Shipton and her successors in modern times. They played little part in the progress of Christian literature.

Gnostic writers, naturally enough, played a prominent part in the production of new revelations. The most important example of their work is to be found in the Apocryphon (or secret book) of John, used by Irenaeus in his description of Ophite doctrines (Against Heresies 1. 29-30). Four Coptic versions of this document have been published, one from the Berlin papyri and three more from the books discovered at Nag Hammadi. The Berlin version is similar to the one in Nag Hammadi Codex III, while a consider ably longer version is extant in Codex II and, though often frag mentary, in Codex IV. The book describes a vision of the Father, the Mother, and the Son, which John was given after the ascension of Jesus. It describes the nature of the supreme Being, the process by which the world came into existence and the true history of mankind, "not as Moses said." The longer version contains the names of many of the 360 or 365 angels who made the various parts and activities of human beings, as well as a description of the operations of Pronoia (Wisdom).

The contents of all the Nag Hammadi manuscripts could be called revelations; but Codex V of these books represents the material most relevant to the present discussion. A brief description of four revelations from this codex follows.

In Codex V the first revelation, which follows a fragmentary letter of Eugnostos the Blessed, is called the Apocalypse of Paul. According to this work, Paul met, on the way to Jericho, a little boy who told him that the Mount of Jericho was a place of revelation. Then the boy took him to the third and fourth heavens where the Holy Spirit spoke to him. He went upward to the fifth, sixth, and seventh heavens; in the last he saw an old man (possibly the Ancient of Days) brighter than the sun and told him that he was escaping from the "Babylonian captivity." In the eighth he saw the twelve apostles who went with him into the ninth and finally the tenth heavens.

Two revelations, both of which are called the Apocalypse of James, follow that of Paul. In the first one, the Lord described himself as an "image of the existent one" to his "brother" James. In a discussion of the Hebdomad the Lord said there were seventy-two heavens, and proceeded to delineate their inhabitants, and then predicted his departure. James went to the mountain of Gaugela (Galgale?) with his disciples, and when he prayed, the Lord appeared, kissed him, and explained that he had never suffered nor had the people harmed him; the meaning of the "sufferings" was spiritual. James and the Lord sat on a rock (petra) and the Lord predicted that James would suffer but would pass safely by the customs collectors above, by calling upon Sophia, the mother of Achamoth (cf. Iren. 1. 21. 5). James is designated "The just" because he is a suffering servant. When he leaves Jerusalem war will immediately break out.

The second Apocalypse of James is a record of what James the Just said in Jerusalem to his father Theuda. These things, which were often spoken by James, were written down by Marion, one of the priests. As James was on the fifth step of the temple preparing to die, Jesus came to him and identified himself as his brother. He spoke of the Father and the inferior creator and of James' saving work; then he departed. James called upon his judges to repent and accept Jesus, the Lord of whom he is a helper. All, including the priests, propose to stone him and to cast him down as he expresses his confidence in God and salvation from the flesh.

The Apocalypse of Adam is the final revelation recorded in the fifth codex of the Nag Hammadi discovery. In Seth's sevenhundredth year Adam gave him a revelation describing his own original angelic state, higher than the god who created him and Eve. Their fall was due to the jealousy of this archon of the aeons. The eternal knowledge of the God of Truth was separated from them, and they were instructed in "dead works" in fear and bondage. Then Adam saw three men who told him and Eve, in spite of their creator's opposition, about their true origin and predicted the salvation of Noah, the division of the earth among Noah's sons, the attacks against the true Gnostics, and their salvation by Abrasax, Sablo, and Gamaliel, descending from above. In this context the archon of the aeons is designated as Sakla. Finally the luminary of Gnosis, Phoster, comes and gives fourteen warnings against their opponents. The people repent. A voice speaks against Michev, Michar, and Mnesinus, who are above holy baptism and living water but have misused them. This revelation is then described as "the hidden gnosis of Adam which he gave to Seth, the holy baptism of those who know eternal gnosis through the Logos-born and the eternal Phoster, those who have come forth from the holy Jesseus, [Maz]areus, [Jesse]dekeus... who are holy."

About the middle of the third century some Gnostic in Egypt composed the curious book known to us, through a Coptic recast found in the Askew codex, as the Pistis Sophia or Faith Wisdom. It portrays Jesus living with his disciples for eleven or twelve years after the Resurrection and telling them a great many things about sin and salvation, especially in response to the questions asked him by Mary Magdalene. The work consists of four books, although the fourth should perhaps be given another name as it is evidently earlier than the rest; it deals with matters immediately after the Resurrection.

In the earlier books, especially Books 1 and 2, Jesus' words have to do with the experiences of Pistis Sophia, which evidently typifies the human soul, in her efforts to reach heaven and find salvation. The book recalls passages in Epiphanius' account of certain types of Gnostic teaching, for instance, Heresies xxiv. 3, 6; xxxviixl. The writer was evidently a Valentinian or a Barbelo Gnostic, of the Ophitic-Sethian type. Five of the Odes of Solomon are quoted in his book.

"The church," said Origen, "has four gospels, the sects very many, one of which is entitled 'According to the Egyptians,' another 'According to the Twelve Apostles.' Basilides dared to write a gospel and give it his name.... I know a gospel that is called 'According to Thomas,' and one 'According to Matthias,' and we have read many others."

The gospel is Christianity's first contribution to literary types. The primitive oral gospel may have originated the type, but its first written embodiment was the Gospel of Mark, from which every other gospel inside or outside the New Testament was directly or indirectly descended. To lose sight of this is to miss the originality of the gospel as a literary type, which is the most massive literary fact about the whole gospel literature.

It was not so much the writing of the individual gospels of Mark, Matthew, and John, however, as the grouping of them with Luke in a collection, that stimulated the production of the uncanonical gospels. Luke-Acts was much more than a gospel, and the separation of its first volume from the second not only enriched the gospel corpus but left the Acts by itself, to form the pattern for the Acts literature that was to come. The collection of the Four Gospels showed the immense effectiveness of the gospel as a type of literature, and it seemed almost to invite the production of further gospels by its closing lines: "There are many other things that Jesus did, so many in fact that if they were all written out, I do not suppose that the world itself would hold the books that would have to be written."

Not that the writer of these lines intended to suggest the writing of further gospels; they are part of the epilogue of the Fourth Gospel, perhaps added to anticipate any doubt or opposition that the new gospel might encounter by its very novelty, since few of the prospective readers of the combined gospels would have known more than one or possibly two of them before and might well be suspicious of the new, unfamiliar material another gospel would inevitably offer. But as soon as the churches became familiar with a plurality of gospels, this closing sentence might well suggest that the door was still open to new gospel narratives. Certainly a whole flock of Christian writers soon undertook to write new gospels, and none of them seems to have escaped the influence of one or more of the canonical gospels. Indeed, they were all in some degree imitators of them.

The idea that any early Christian anywhere might at any time have set out independently to write a gospel without ever having seen one loses sight of the fact that a gospel was by no means an inevitable thing, still less a commonplace or a matter of course. It was a definite literary creation for which no adequate literary precedents can be found. This is the distinction of the Gospel of Mark. It was soon improved upon and enlarged by the author of Matthew, and also imitated by Luke in his historical sketch of the beginnings of the movement. Independently — though we do not know how independently — John also made use of the gospel as a literary form. The existence of at least four written gospels obviously called the attention of Christians to the possibility of producing others-as did the words, already quoted, at the end of the Gospel of John. This situation undoubtedly lies behind the production of the uncanonical gospels.

The makers of the uncanonical gospels apparently aimed at unifying the gospels already in existence, ridding them of their repetitions and confusions, and at the same time enriching them from oral traditions and from creative imagination. The question at once arises whether or not they were in possession of any authentic material comparable in historical value with that in the earlier books. This question is hard to answer, for the canonical books necessarily provide the tests for authenticity, and it is therefore unlikely that we could recognize trustworthy materials not paralleled by those in the books generally accepted. Often we can see that the extra materials are based upon traditions already known to us; this is true about most of what we find in the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel of Thomas. Sometimes, as in Egyptians and Thomas, we can see that a Gnostic or proto-Gnostic axe is being ground.

It was in beginning his first Homily on Luke that Origensaid, "The church has four gospels, the sects very many, one of which is called 'According to the Egyptians.' " There seem to have been at least four uncanonical gospels that were well known in Egypt in the second century: the Gospel according to the Egyptians, the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Gospel of Peter, and the Gospel of Thomas.

The Gospel of the Egyptians and the Gospel of the Hebrews were apparently so called because one circulated among the gentile Christians of Egypt and the other among the Jewish. Both were written in Greek, and we know them only from a few fragments. Egyptians was mentioned not only by Origen but, earlier at Alexandria, by Clement, at the very beginning of the third century. In his Miscellanies, Clement says that it was read and accepted by the ascetic sect of the Encratites, and quotes from it a conversation of Jesus with Salome, of a very ascetic character, discouraging the bearing of children: "For when Salome asked when what she had inquired about would be known the Lord said, `When you have trampled on the garment of shame and when the two become one, and the male with the female is neither male nor female’" (III. 92). Again, when Salome inquired, "How long will death prevail?" the Lord replied, "As long as women bear." To this she answered, "Would I have done well, then, in not bearing?" (III. 64, 66). According to the Gospel of Mark, Salome was a witness to the crucifixion (15:40) and to the empty tomb (16:1).She is fairly prominent in other apocryphal gospels.

As early as about A.D. 140 some of these words were quoted in the Roman sermon we know as II Clement, but we do not know whether or not the preacher derived them from Egyptians. It is clear enough, however, that in Rome at that time materials also employed in Egyptians were not regarded as suspect. By the time of Clement of Alexandria, however, some doubt was already arising, perhaps because of the enthusiasm with which Gnostics were viewing this kind of tradition, and a generation later Origen headed his list of heretical gospels with it. Hippolytus of Rome, in his Refutation of All Heresies (v. 7, 9), written about A.D. 235, says, that the Naassene Gnostics support their doctrine of the "flucdity" of the soul by appealing to it. Later still, Epiphanius, toward the end of the fourth century describes the Sabellians as claiming its authority for their teaching that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are "one and the same" (Heresies lxxii. 2). Although this was the central position of their founder Sabellius, it is not likely that he himself appealed to Egyptians.

The Gospel according to the Hebrews is believed to have been so called because of its use by the Jewish Christians of Egypt, but the name may really be no more than an inference from the very Jewish character of some of its contents. Jerome, writing about the end of the fourth century, says that he knew it only m Aramaic and himself translated it into Greek and Latin, but it was certainly current in Greek in the second century and was probably written in that language. We know it only from the quotations made from it by early Christian writers and from a few manuscript fragments which may, with some probability, be assigned to it.

Jerome declared that he found the book in Palestine, in use among the Nazarene Christians in Beroea in Syria, and that it was also preserved in the library of Pamphilus in Caesarea. The book was unfortunately confused with the supposed original Aramaic form of the Gospel of Matthew, and Jerome does not entirely escape this error. The fact is, the Gospel of the Hebrews borrowed so much from the Gospel of Matthew that they naturally had much in common, but such portions as appear in Hebrews are so manifestly elaborated and built up that there can be no doubt that it drew from Matthew, not Matthew from it. The influence of Luke may also be traced in the Gospel of the Hebrews; indeed, it is altogether probable that its writer knew the Fourfold Gospel. That he should have independently struck upon the gospel type of literature and created a written gospel without ever having seen one is in itself extremely improbable, and, when his manifest indebtedness to Matthew and Luke is observed, it becomes impossible.

The Gospel of the Hebrews, like that of the Egyptians, may have been written in the period between the publication of the Fourfold Gospel and its arrival at the status of scripture, that is, the time when it came to be read in church side by side with the Jewish scriptures, about the middle of the second century. Hebrews was about seven-eighths the length of the Gospel ofr~ Matthew, containing 2,200 stichoi, or lines of Homeric length against 2,500 in Matthew. It told of the baptism, the temptation the Lord's Prayer, the man with the withered hand, the rich in quirer, the parable of the talents, and the resurrection. In every, instance its accounts show literary development comparable with those in the Four Gospels. Jesus is reluctant to go to John's baptism; he says he has no consciousness of sin. This carries the account in Matthew a long step further. In Matthew, John sug ; Bests his freedom from sin; in Hebrews, Jesus claims it himself.: Mark's violent representation of the Spirit "flinging" or throwing, Jesus into the wilderness is heightened here: Origen quotes Hebrews as saying, "My mother the Holy Spirit took me by one of my hairs and carried me up to the great mountain Tabor"-, evidently for the temptation. This strange saying is usually explained by the fact that, in Hebrew, "Spirit" is feminine; and the: odd picture recalls the speculations of Jewish Christian theology; to which H. J. Schoeps and J. Danielou have drawn attention.' The vivid picture of Jesus being carried by his hair-indicating his utter helplessness in the grip of the Spirit-recalls Ezekiel, seized by a lock of his hair and carried to Jerusalem by the Spirit (Ezek. 8:3), and Habakkuk, lifted up by his hair by the angel of the Lord and carried from Judea to Babylon with the speed of the wind so that he could take food to Daniel in the den of lions (Bel and the Dragon, 36).

Of the three men entrusted with the talents, in Hebrews the first squanders his upon harlots and flute girls, the second increases his, and the third hides his in the ground. This is evidently an effort to improve upon the simpler story.

In dealing with the resurrection, according to Jerome, Hebrews relates that Jesus said to Peter and those with him, "Feel of me, and see that I am not a bodiless demon" (On Illustrious Men 16). This curious saying, which recalls Jesus' words to the disciples in Luke 24:39, occurs also in Ignatius, Smyrnaeans 3:2, and, according to Origen (First Principles, prologue 8), in the Teaching (perhaps meaning Preaching) of Peter. The question arises: In which of these works did the saying first appear? It is sometimes assumed that Ignatius was quoting the Gospel of the Hebrews. But there are no other traces of Hebrews in Ignatius' letters, and it is equally probable that both Ignatius and the compiler of Hebrews derived the saying from earlier oral tradition. It is also possible that neither Origen nor Jerome knew where the saying came from.

No less singular is the other resurrection incident which Jerome found in this gospel (On Illustrious Men 2). It reads: "After the Lord had given the linen cloth to the servant of the high priest, he went to James and appeared to him, for James had sworn that he would not eat bread from the hour when he had drunk the Lord's cup until he should see him risen again from among those that sleep." A little later it continues: "The Lord said, 'Bring a table and bread,'" and then "He took bread and blessed it and broke it and gave it to James the just and said to him, 'My brother, eat your bread, for the Son of Man is risen from among those that sleep.' " This account is clearly intended to establish a direct relationship between Jesus and James of Jerusalem, the hero of Jewish Christians and of some Gnostic groups. Just as Jesus had sworn not to drink of the fruit of the vine until he drank it new in the kingdom, so James takes a similar oath, and the Jewish Christian eucharist is obviously based on Jesus' command to him. According to I Cor. 15: 7, the risen Lord appeared to James.

Eusebius in his Church History (iii. 39. 17) says that Pa pias, who flourished in Asia Minor early in the second century, "related another story about a woman who was accused of many sins before the Lord, which is contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews:" This may refer to the incident about the adulterous woman that, by the sixth century, had crept into manuscripts of the Gospel of John in the seventh chapter and later found its way into some manuscripts of Luke. On the other hand, the story may have been a variant version of the account preserved in Luke 7:36-50. There is no way of telling.

Clement of Alexandria, writing at the end of the second century, quotes a curious saying of Jesus which, he says, is found in the Gospel of the Hebrews (Miscellanies ii. 45; v. 96): "He will not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be amazed; and when he is amazed he will reign; and when he reigns he will rest." Exactly this saying was found in the papyrus fragments of Jesus' sayings discovered at Oxyrhynchus in 1903; and since these fragments belong to the Gospel of Thomas it is likely that Thomas, at least in part, was based upon Hebrews-or that both made use of common traditions.

One of the gospel fragments from Oxyrhynchus (Oxyrhynchus Papyri v. 840), a tiny parchment leaf, written in the fourth or fifth century, allies itself by its phraseology ("harlots and flute girls") with the Gospel of the Hebrews and, notwithstanding its disregard of temple arrangements and practices, may come from that gospel. Its diffuse style and evidently secondary character accord with this identification; and if, as we have argued, Hebrews was composed in Egypt, such ignorance of temple conditions would be natural enough. That it should have survived that long is not strange, for it seems to have contained nothing definitely heretical. The fragment tells of a conversation between Jesus and a chief priest about spiritual as against ceremonial purification.

The Gospel of the Hebrews, therefore, apparently originated in Egypt, in Greek, perhaps between A.D. 120 and 140. Eusebius implies that it was known to Papias of Hierapolis, about A.D. izo and says that Hegesippus made some use of it in writing his Memoirs, A.D.