ld, Jesus the Christ. The prime exponent of the
spurious religion is Simon Magus. A second protagonist of error, this
time of Gentile philosophic criticism directed against fundamental
Judaism, is Apion, the notorious anti-Jewish Alexandrine grammarian of
Peter's day; while the role of upholder of astrological fatalism
(_Genesis_) is played by Faustus, father of Clement, with whom Peter and
Clement debate at Laodicea. Finally, all this is already embedded in a
setting determined by the romance of Clement and his lost relatives,
"recognition" of whom forms the _denouement_ of the story.

There is no reason to doubt that such, roughly speaking, were the
contents of the Clementine work to which Eusebius alludes slightingly,
in connexion with that section of it which had to his eye least
verisimilitude, viz. the dialogues between Peter and Apion. Now Eusebius
believed the work to have been of quite recent and suspicious origin.
This points to a date about the last quarter of the 3rd century; and the
prevailing doctrinal tone of the contents, as known to us, leads to the
same result. The standpoint is that of the peculiar Judaizing or Ebonite
Christianity due to persistence among Christians of the tendencies known
among pre-Christian Jews as Essene. The Essenes, while clinging to what
they held to be original Mosaism, yet conceived and practised their
ancestral faith in ways which showed distinct traces of syncretism, or
the operation of influences foreign to Judaism proper. They thus
occupied an ambiguous position on the borders of Judaism. Similarly
Christian Essenism was syncretist in spirit, as we see from its
best-known representatives, the Elchasaites, of whom we first hear about
220, when a certain Alcibiades of Apamea in Syria (some 60 m. south of
Antioch) brought to Rome the _Book of Helxai_--the manifesto of their
distinctive message (Hippol., _Philos._ ix. 13)--and again some twenty
years later, when Origen refers to one of their leaders as having lately
arrived at Caesarea (Euseb. vi. 38). The first half of the 3rd century
was marked, especially in Syria, by a strong tendency to syncretism,
which may well have stirred certain Christian Essenes to fresh
propaganda. Other writings than the _Book of Helxai_, representing also
other species of the same genus, would take shape. Such may have been
some of the pseudo-apostolic _Acts_ to which Epiphanius alludes as in
use among the Ebionites of his own day: and such was p