hristianity, these Jewish Christian
communities appear as rudimentary structures which now and again, as
objects of curiosity, engaged the attention of the main body of
Christendom in the East, but could not exert any important influence on
it, just because they contained a national element.

The Jewish Christians took no considerable part in the Gnostic
controversy, the epoch-making conflict which was raised within the pale
of the larger Christendom about the decisive question, whether, and to
what extent, the Old Testament should remain a basis of Christianity,
although they themselves were no less occupied with the question.[407]
The issue of this conflict in favour of that party which recognised the
Old Testament in its full extent as a revelation of the Christian God,
and asserted the closest connection between Christianity and the Old
Testament religion, was so little the result of any influence of Jewish
Christianity, that the existence of the latter would only have rendered
that victory more difficult, unless it had already fallen into the
background, as a phenomenon of no importance.[408] How completely
insignificant it was is shewn not only by the limited polemics of the
Church Fathers, but perhaps still more by their silence, and the new
import which the reproach of Judaising obtained in Christendom after the
middle of the second century. In proportion as the Old Testament, in
opposition to Gnosticism, became a more conscious and accredited
possession in the Church, and at the same time, in consequence of the
naturalising of Christianity in the world, the need of regulations,
fixed rules, statutory enactments etc., appeared as indispensable, it
must have been natural to use the Old Testament as a holy code of such
enactments. This procedure was no falling away from the original
anti-Judaic attitude, provided nothing national was taken from the book,
and some kind of spiritual interpretation given to what had been
borrowed. The "apostasy" rather lay simply in the changed needs. But one
now sees how those parties in the Church, to which for any reason this
progressive legislation was distasteful, raised the reproach of
"Judaising,"[409] and further, how conversely the same reproach was
hurled at those Christians who resisted the advancing hellenising of
Christianity, with regard, for example, to the doctrine of God,
eschatology, Christology, etc.[410] But while this reproach is raised,
there is nowhere shewn an