e has come down from the beginning of
the Gospel, even before the earlier heretics, and so, of course before
the Praxeas of yesterday, is proved both by the lateness of all heretics
and by the novelty of this Praxeas of yesterday." (Schaff, _Creeds of
Christendom,_ 2, 18.) The following form is taken from Tertullian's _De
Virginibus Velandis:_ "For the rule of faith is altogether one, alone
(_sola_), immovable, and irreformable, namely, believing in one God
omnipotent the Maker of the world, and in His Son Jesus Christ, born of
the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised from the dead
the third day, received into the heavens, sitting now at the right hand
of the Father who shall come to judge the living and the dead, also
through the resurrection of the flesh." Cyprian the Martyr, bishop of
Carthage, who died 257, and who was the first one to apply the term
_symbolum_ to the baptismal creed, in his Epistle to Magnus and to
Januarius, as well as to other Numidian bishops, gives the following as
the answer of the candidate for Baptism to the question, "Do you
believe?": "I believe in God the Father, in His Son Christ, in the Holy
Spirit. I believe the remission of sins, and the life eternal through
the holy Church."

12. Variations of the Apostles' Creed.

While there can be no reasonable doubt either that the Christian
churches from the very beginning were in possession of a definite and
formulated symbol, or that this symbol was an amplification of the
trinitarian formula of Baptism, yet we are unable to ascertain with any
degree of certainty what its exact original wording was. There has not
been found in the early Christian writers a single passage recording the
precise form of the baptismal confession or the rule of truth and faith
as used in the earliest churches. This lack of contemporal written
records is accounted for by the fact that the early Christians and
Christian churches refused on principle to impart and transmit their
confession in any other manner than by word of mouth. Such was their
attitude, not because they believed in keeping their creed secret, but
because they viewed the exclusively oral method of impartation as the
most appropriate in a matter which they regarded as an affair of deepest
concern of their hearts.

It is universally admitted, even by those who believe that the apostles
were instrumental in formulating the early Christian Creed, that the
wording of it was not absolute