supposes, "there never was any such by Justin Martyr, who wrote some heresy as that of the Albgi, or rather that those to whom Epiphanius gave that name, were unjustly charged by him with rejecting the writings of the apostle John, since no other person before him makes any mention of such a thing, and he produces nothing but mere hearsay in support of it. It is very possible, however, that he might give such an account of them, in consequence of their explaining the Logos in the introduction of John's gospel in a manner different from him and others, who in that age had appropriated to themselves the name of orthodox. years before him, and who, indeed, is the first writer extant, of the gentile Christians, after the age of the apostles. And it cannot be supposed that he would have treated them with so much respect, if their doctrine had not been very generally received, and on that account less obnoxious than it grew to be afterwards. He expresses their opinion concerning Christ, by saying that they made him to be a mere man, (λos aveрwπоs,) and by this term Irenæus, and all the ancients, even later than Eusebius, meant a man descended from man, and this phraseology is frequently opposed to the doctrine of the miraculous conception of Jesus, and not to that of his divinity. It is not therefore to be inferred that because some of the ancient writers condemn the one, they meant to pass any censure upon the other. Equally absurd is the conjecture of Epiphanius, that those persons and others like them, were those that the apostle John meant by Antichrist.2 It is a much more natural inference that, since this writer allows these Unitarians to have been contemporary with the apostles, and that they had no peculiar appellation till he himself gave them this of Alogi (and which he is very desirous that other writers would adopt after him), that they had not been deemed heretical in early times, but held the opinion of the ancient Gentile church, as the Nazarenes did that of the Jewish church; and that, notwithstanding the introduction, and gradual acknowledge him" (Jesus) "to be the prevalence of the opposite doctrine, they were suffered to pass uncensured and consequently without a name, till the smallness of their numbers made them particularly noticed. } It is remarkable, however, that those who held the simple doctrine of the humanity of Christ, without asserting that Joseph was his natural father, were not reckoned heretics by Irenæus, who wrote a large work on the subject of heresies; and even those who held that opinion are mentioned with respect • Hist. of Heretics, p. 446. (P.) Works, IX. p.516. Lardner's words are ". My own opinion is that this is a fictitious heresy, and St. John's Gospel and First Epistle, and yet received the other books of the New Tes that there never were any Christians who rejected tament." 2 Hær. 51, Sect. iii. Opera, I. p. 424. (P.) 3 Ibid. p. 423. (P.) The manner in which Justin Martyr speaks of those Unitarians who believed Christ to be the son of Joseph, is very remarkable, and shows that though they even denied the miraculous conception, they were far from being reckoned heretics in his time, as they were by Irenæus afterwards. He says, "there are some of our profession who Christ, yet maintain that he was a man born of man. I do not agree with them, nor should I be prevailed upon by ever so many who hold that opinion; because we are taught by Christ himself not to receive our doctrine from men, but from what was taught by the holy prophets and by himself."4 This language has all the appearance of an apology for an opinion contrary to the general and prevailing one, as that of the humanity of Christ (at least with the belief of the miraculous conception) probably was in his time. This writer even speaks of his own opinion of the pre-existence of Christ, (and he is the first that we certainly * Dial. Edit. Thirlby, pp. 234-5. (P.) 66 more ancient writer, whose sentiments 4 know to have maintained it, on the principles on which it was generally received he adopts, treat the Unitarians, as to afterwards,) as a doubtful one, and by say that Theodotus, who appeared no means a necessary article of Chris- about the year 190, and who was contian faith. Jesus," says he, "may demned by Victor the predecessor of still be the Christ of God, though I Zephyrinus, was the first who held should not be able to prove his pre- that our Saviour was a mere man ;* existence, as the Son of God who made when in refuting their pretensions to all things. For though I should not antiquity, he goes no farther than to prove that he had pre-existed, it will Irenæus, Justin Martyr and Clemens; be right to say that, in this respect in whose second and spurious epistle only, I have been deceived, and not to only it is to be found, and the ancient deny that he is the Christ, if he hymns, not now extant, but in which, appears to be a man born of men, and being poetical compositions, divinity to have become Christ by election." was probably ascribed to him, in some This is not the language of a man very figurative and qualified sense; though confident of his opinion, and who had Eusebius in his own writings alone the sanction of the majority along might have found a refutation of his with him. assertion. Epiphanius, speaking of the same Theodotus, says, that his heresy was a branch (añoσлaσμa) of that of the Alogi, which sufficiently implies that they existed before him. The reply of Trypho the Jew, with whom the dialogue he is writing is supposed to be held, is also remarkable, showing in what light the Jews will always consider any doctrine which makes Christ to be more than a man. He says, "They who think that Jesus was a man, and, being chosen of God, was anointed Christ, appear to me to advance a more probable opinion than yours. For all of us expect that Christ will be born a man from men, (av6poros *£ avdpamwv,} and that Elias will come to anoint him. If he therefore be Christ, he must by all means be a man born of man. 192 In The Alogi, therefore, appear to have been the earliest gentile Christians, and Dr. Berriman supposes them to have been a branch of the Ebionites. fact, they must have been the same among the Gentiles, that the Ebionites were among the Jews. And it is remarkable that, as the children of Israel retained the worship of the one true God all the time of Joshua, and of those of. his contemporaries who outlived him; so the generality of Christians retained It is well known, and mentioned by the same faith, believing the strict unity Eusebius, that the Unitarians in the of God, and the proper humanity of primitive church, always pretended to Christ, all the time of the apostles and be the oldest Christians, that the apos- of those who conversed with them, but tles themselves had taught their doc- began to depart from that doctrine pretrine, and that it generally prevailed sently afterwards; and the defection till the time of Zephyrinus, bishop of advanced so fast, that in about one cenRome, but that from that time it was tury more, the original doctrine was corrupted; and as these Unitarians generally reprobated and deemed hereare called Idiota (common and ignorant tical. The manner in which this corpeople) by Tertullian, it is more natural ruption of the ancient doctrine was into look for ancient opinions among troduced, I must now proceed to exthem, than among the learned who are plain. more apt to innovate. With such manifest unfairness does Eusebius, or a 1 Dial. Edit. Thirlby, pp. 233-4. (P.) 2 Ibid. p. 235. (P.) Hist. L. v. C. xxviii. p. 252. (P.) As the greatest things often take their rise from the smallest beginnings, so the worst things sometimes proceed from good intentions. This was certainly the case with respect to the origin of Christian Idolatry. All the eariy heresies arose from men who wished well to the gospel, and who meant to recommend it to the Heathens, and especially to philosophers among them, whose prejudices they found great difficulty in conquering. Now we learn from the writings of the apostles themselves, as well as from the testimony of later writers, that the circumstance at which mankind in general, and especially the more philosophical part of them, stumbled the most, was the doctrine of a crucified Saviour. They could not submit to become the disciples of a man who had been exposed upon a cross, like the vilest malefactor. Of this objection to Christianity we find traces in all the early writers, who wrote in defence of the gospel against the unbelievers of their age, to the time of Lactantius; and probably it may be found much later. He says, "I know that many fly from the truth out of their abhorrence of the cross.' We, who only learn from history that crucifixion was a kind of death to which slaves and the vilest of malefactors were exposed, can but very imperfectly enter into their prejudices, so as to feel what they must have done with respect to it. The idea of a man executed at Tyburn, without anything to distinguish him from other malefactors, is but an approach to the case of our Saviour. 991 The apostle Paul speaks of the crucifixion of Christ as the great obstacle to the reception of the gospel in his Lactantii Epitome (Divinarum Institutionum), 1718. C. li. p. 143. (P.) "Scio equidem multos, dum abhorrent nomen cruris, refugere a veritate." Opera, 1748, II. p. 38. time; and yet, with true magnanimity, he does not go about to palliate the matter, but says to the Corinthians (some of the politest people among the Greeks, and fond of their philosophy), that he was determined to know nothing among them but "Jesus Christ and him crucified :" for though this circumstance was "unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness," it was to others "the power of God and the wisdom of God." 1 Cor. i. 23, 24. For this circumstance at which they cavilled, was that in which the wisdom of God was most conspicuous; the death and resurrection of a man, in all respects like themselves, being better calculated to give other men an assurance of their own resurrection, than that of any super-angelic being, the laws of whose nature they might think to be very different from those of their own. But, "since by man came death, so by man came also the resurrection of the dead." 1 Cor. xv. 21. Later Christians, however, and especially those who were themselves attached to the principles of either the Oriental or the Greek philosophy, unhappily took another method of removing this obstacle; and instead of explaining the wisdom of the divine dispensations in the appointment of a man, a person in all respects like unto his brethren, for the redemption of men, and of his dying in the most public and indisputable manner, as a foundation for the clearest proof of a real resurrec tion, and also of a painful and ignominious death, as an example to his followers who might be exposed to the same, &c., &c., they began to raise the dignity of the person of Christ, that it might appear less disgraceful to be ranked amongst his disciples. To make this the easier to them, two things chiefly contributed; the first was the received method of interpreting the Scriptures among the learned Jews, and the second was the philosophical opinions of the heathen world, which had then begun to infect the Jews themselves. It has been observed that after the translation of the Old Testament into Greek, which was done probably in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, King of Egypt, in consequence of which the Jewish religion became better known to the Greeks, and especially to the philosophers of Alexandria, the more learned of the Jews had recourse to an allegorical method of interpreting what they found to be most objected to in their sacred writings; and by this means pretended to find in the books of Moses, and the prophets, all the great principles of the Greek philosophy, and especially that of Plato, which at that time was most in vogue. In this method of interpreting Scripture, Philo, a learned Jew of Alexandria, far excelled all who had gone before him; but the Christians of that city, who were themselves deeply tinctured with the principles of the same philosophy, especially Clemens Alexandrinus and Origen, who both believed the pre-existence of souls, and the other distinguishing tenets of Platonism, soon followed his steps in the interpretation of both the Old and the New Testament.1 One method of allegorizing, which took its rise in the East, was the personification of things without life, of which we have many beautiful examples in the books of Scripture, as of wisdom by Solomon, of the dead by Ezekiel, and of sin and death by the apostle Paul. Another mode of allegorizing was finding out resemblances in things that bore some relation to each other, and then representing them as types and antitypes to each other. The apostle Paul, epecially if he be the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, has strained very much, by the force of imagination, to reconcilo the Jews to the Christian religion, by pointing out the analogies which he imagined the rites and ceremonies of the Jewish religion bore to something in Christianity. Clemens Romanus, but more especially Barnabas, pushed this 1 "Lo Platonisme dovoilé, ou Essai touchant Je verbe Platonicien." 1700, p. 145. (P.) method of allegorizing still farther. But the fathers who followed them, by employing both the methods, and mixing their own philosophy with Christianity, at length converted an innocent allegory into what was little better than Pagan idolatry. It had long been the received doctrine of the East, and had gradually spread into the western parts of the world, that besides the supreme divine mind, which had existed without cause from all eternity, there were other intelligences, of a less perfect nature, which had been produced by way of emanation from the great original mind, and that other intelligences, less and less perfect, had, in like manner, proceeded from them: in short, that all spirits, whether demons, or the souls of men, were of this divine origin. It was supposed by some of them that even matter itself, which they considered as the source of all evil, had, in this intermediate manner, derived its existence from the Deity, though others supposed matter to have been eternal and self-existent. Eor it was a maxim with them all, that "nothing could be created out of nothing." In this manner they thought they could best account for the origin of evil, without supposing it to be the immediate production of a good being, which the original divine mind was always supposed by them to be. In order to exalt their idea of Jesus Christ, it being then a received opinion among the philosophers that all souls had pre-existed, they conceived his soul not to have been that of a common man (which was generally supposed to have been the production of inferior beings), but a principal emanation from the divine mind itself, and that an intelligence of so high a rank either animated the body of Jesus from the beginning, or entered into him at his baptism. There was, however, a great diversity of opinion on this subject; and, indeed, there was room enough for it, in a system which was not founded on any observation but was the mere creature of fancy. But all was that, whereas the earliest of these these philosophizing Christians had philosophizing Christians supposed, in the same general object, which was to general, that the world was made by make the religion of Christ more re- some superior intelligence of no benevoputable, by adding to the dignity of lent nature, and that the Jewish reour Lord's person. ligion was prescribed by the same being, or one very much resembling him, and that Christ was sent to rectify the imperfections of both systems; those who succeeded them, and whose success at length gave them the title of orthodox, corrupted the genuine Christian principle no less, by supposing that Christ was the being who, under God, was himself the maker of the world, and the medium of all the divine communications to man, and therefore the author of the Jewish religion. Thus, according to Lardner, Oerinthus, one of the first of these philosophizing Christians* "taught one Supreme God, but that the world was not made by him, but by angels;" that Jesus " was a man born of Joseph and Mary, and that at his baptism, the Holy Ghost, or the Christ, descended upon him;" that Jesus "died and rose again, but that the Christ was impassible." On the other hand, Marcioh held that Christ was not born at all, but that "the son of God took the exterior form of a man, and appeared as a man; and without being born, or gradually growing up to the full sta ture of a man, he showed himself at once in Galilee; as a man grown.' " All the heretics, however, of this class, whose philosophy was more properly that of the East, thought it was unworthy of so exalted a person as the proper Christ to be truly a man, and most of them thought he had no real flesh, but only the appearance of it, and what was incapable of feeling pain, &c. These opinions the apostles, and especially John, had heard of, and he rejected them, as we have seen, with the greatest indignation. However, this did hot put a stop to the evil, those philosophizing Christians either having ingenuity enough to evade those censures, by pretending these were not their Opinions, but others somewhat different from theirs, that properly fell under them, or new opinions really different from them, (but derived in fact from the same source, and having the same evil tendency,) rising up in the place of them; for they were all calculated to give more dignity, as they imagined, to the person of their master. The most remarkable change in these opinions 1 Hist. of Heretics, p. 150. (P.) Works, IX. p. 825. 2 Ibid. p. 227. (P.) Works, IX. pp. 378-9. As Plato had travelled into the East, it is probable that he there learned the doctrine of divine emanations, and got his ideas of the origin of this visible system. But he sometimes expresses himself so temperately on the subject, that he seems to have only allegorized what is true with respect to it; speaking of the divine mind as having existed from eternily, but having within itself ideas or archetypes of whatever was to exist without it, and saying that the immediate seat of these ideas, or the intelligence which he styled Logos, was that from which the visible creation immediately sprung. However, it was to this principle in the divine mind, or this being, derived from it, that Plato, according to Lactantius, gave the name of a second God, saying, "the Lord and maker of the universe, whom we justly call God, made a second God, visible and sensible." 8 By this means, however, it was, that this Logos, originally an attribute of the divine mind itself, came to be represented, first by the philosophers, and then by philosophizing Christians, as an intelligent principle or being, distinct from God, though an emanation from him. This doctrine was but too convenient for those who wished to re 3 Epitome, C. xlii. p. 106. (P.) "Dominus et factor univevsorum, quem Deum vocari existimavimus, secundum fecit Deum, visibilcm et scnsibilem." Opera, II. p. 30. |