he Gentile Christians had transmitted to
them, as a unanimous doctrine, the message that Christ is the Lord who
is to be worshipped, and that one must think of him as the Judge of the
living and the dead, that is, [Greek: hos peri theou]. But it certainly
could not fail to be of importance for the result that already many of
the earliest Christian writers, and therefore even Paul, perceived in
Jesus a spiritual being come down from heaven ([Greek: pneuma]) who was
[Greek: en morphe theou], and whose real act of love consisted in his
very descent.]

[Footnote 107: The creation of the New Testament canon first paved the
way for putting an end, though only in part, to the production of
Evangelic "facts" within the Church. For Hermas (Sim. IX. 16) can relate
that the Apostles also descended to the under world and there preached.
Others report the same of John the Baptist. Origen in his homily on 1
Kings XXVII. says that Moses, Samuel and all the Prophets descended to
Hades and there preached. A series of facts of Evangelic history which
have no parallel in the accounts of our Synoptists, and are certainly
legendary, may be put together from the epistle of Barnabas, Justin, the
second epistle of Clement, Papias, the Gospel to the Hebrews, and the
Gospel to the Egyptians. But the synoptic reports themselves, especially
in the articles for which we have only a solitary witness, shew an
extensive legendary material, and even in the Gospel of John, the free
production of facts cannot be mistaken. Of what a curious nature some of
these were, and that they are by no means to be entirely explained from
the Old Testament, as for example, Justin's account of the ass on which
Christ rode into Jerusalem, having been bound to a vine, is shewn by the
very old fragment in one source of the Apostolic constitutions (Texte u.
Unters II. 5. p. 28 ff.); [Greek: hote etpsen ho didaskalos ton arton
kai to poterion kai eulogesen auta legon touto esti to soma mou kai to
haima, ouk epetrepse tautais] (the women) [Greek: sustenai hemin ...
Martha eipen dia Mariam, hoti eiden auten meidiosan. Maria eipen ouketi
egelasa]. Narratives such as those of Christ's descent to Hell and
ascent to heaven, which arose comparatively late, though still at the
close of the first century (see Book I. Chap 3) sprang out of short
formulae containing an antithesis (death and resurrection, first advent
in lowliness, second advent in glory: descensus de coelo, ascensus in