eachers to exclude everything outward
and ceremonial is no longer met with to the same extent in Irenaeus and
Tertullian, at least when they are arguing and defending their position
against the Gnostics. This has to be explained by two causes. In the
first place Judaism (and Jewish Christianity) was at bottom no longer an
enemy to be feared; they therefore ceased to make such efforts to avoid
the "Jewish" conception of the Old Testament. Irenaeus, for example,
emphasised in the most naive manner the observance of the Old Testament
law by the early Apostles and also by Paul. This is to him a complete
proof that they did not separate the Old Testament God from the
Christian Deity.[631] In connection with this we observe that the
radical antijudaism of the earliest period more and more ceases. Irenaeus
and Tertullian admitted that the Jewish nation had a covenant with God
and that the literal interpretation of the Old Testament was
justifiable. Both repeatedly testified that the Jews had the right
doctrine and that they only lacked the knowledge of the Son. These
thoughts indeed do not attain clear expression with them because their
works contain no systematic discussions involving these principles. In
the second place the Church itself had become an institution where
sacred ceremonial injunctions were necessary; and, in order to find a
basis for these, they had to fall back on Old Testament commandments
(see Vol. I., chap. 6, p. 291 ff.). In Tertullian we find this only in
its most rudimentary form;[632] but in the course of the third century
these needs grew mightily[633] and were satisfied. In this way the Old
Testament threatened to become an authentic book of revelation to the
Church, and that in a quite different and much more dangerous sense than
was formerly the case with the Apostolic Fathers and the Apologists.

With reference to the second point, we may remark that just when the
decay of antijudaism, the polemic against Marcion, and the new needs of
the ecclesiastical system threatened the Church with an estimate of the
Old Testament hitherto unheard of, the latter was nevertheless thrust
back by the creation and authority of the New Testament, and this
consequently revived the uncertain position in which the sacred book was
henceforth to remain. Here also, as in every other case, the development
in the Church ends with the _complexus oppositorum_, which nowhere
allows all the conclusions to be drawn, but offers