n the Apostolic age there were attempts in
Samaria to found new religions, which were in all probability influenced
by the tradition and preaching concerning Jesus. Dositheus, Simon Magus,
Cleobius, and Menander appeared as Messiahs or bearers of the Godhead,
and proclaimed a doctrine in which the Jewish faith was strangely and
grotesquely mixed with Babylonian myths, together with some Greek
additions. The mysterious worship, the breaking up of Jewish
particularism, the criticism of the Old Testament, which for long had
had great difficulty in retaining its authority in many circles, in
consequence of the widened horizon and the deepening of religious
feeling, finally, the wild syncretism, whose aim, however, was a
universal religion, all contributed to gain adherents for Simon.[334]
His enterprise appeared to the Christians as a diabolical caricature of
their own religion, and the impression made by the success which
Simonianism gained by a vigorous propaganda even beyond Palestine into
the West, supported this idea.[335] We can therefore understand how,
afterwards, all heresies were traced back to Simon. To this must be
added that we can actually trace in many Gnostic systems the same
elements which were prominent in the religion proclaimed by Simon (the
Babylonian and Syrian), and that the new religion of the Simonians, just
like Christianity, had afterwards to submit to be transformed into a
philosophic, scholastic doctrine.[336] The formal parallel to the
Gnostic doctrines was therewith established. But even apart from these
attempts at founding new religions, Christianity in Syria, under the
influence of foreign religions and speculation on the philosophy of
religion, gave a powerful impulse to the criticism of the law and the
prophets which had already been awakened. In consequence of this, there
appeared, about the transition of the first century to the second, a
series of teachers, who, under the impression of the Gospel, sought to
make the Old Testament capable of furthering the tendency to a universal
religion, not by allegorical interpretation, but by a sifting criticism.
These attempts were of very different kinds. Teachers such as Cerinthus,
clung to the notion that the universal religion revealed by Christ was
identical with undefined Mosaism, and therefore maintained even such
articles as circumcision and the Sabbath commandment, as well as the
earthly kingdom of the future. But they rejected certain part