y connection between those described as
Judaising Christians and the Ebionites. That they were identified
off-hand is only a proof that "Ebionitism" was no longer known. That
"Judaising" within Catholicism which appears, on the one hand, in the
setting up of a Catholic ceremonial law (worship, constitution, etc.),
and on the other, in a tenacious clinging to less hellenised forms of
faith and hopes of faith, has nothing in common with Jewish
Christianity, which desired somehow to confine Christianity to the
Jewish nation.[411] Speculations that take no account of history may
make out that Catholicism became more and more Jewish Christian. But
historical observation, which reckons only with concrete quantities, can
discover in Catholicism, besides Christianity, no element which it would
have to describe as Jewish Christian. It observes only a progressive
hellenising, and in consequence of this, a progressive spiritual
legislation which utilizes the Old Testament, a process which went on
for centuries according to the same methods which had been employed in
the larger Christendom from the beginning.[412] Baur's brilliant attempt
to explain Catholicism as a product of the mutual conflict and
neutralising of Jewish and Gentile Christianity, (the latter according
to Baur being equivalent to Paulinism) reckons with two factors, of
which, the one had no significance at all, and the other only an
indirect effect, as regards the formation of the Catholic Church. The
influence of Paul in this direction is exhausted in working out the
universalism of the Christian religion, for a Greater than he had laid
the foundation for this movement, and Paul did not realise it by himself
alone. Placed on this height Catholicism was certainly developed by
means of conflicts and compromises, not, however, by conflicts with
Ebionitism, which was to all intents and purposes discarded as early as
the first century, but as the result of the conflict of Christianity
with the united powers of the world in which it existed, on behalf of
its own peculiar nature as the universal religion based on the Old
Testament. Here were fought triumphant battles, but here also
compromises were made which characterise the essence of Catholicism as
Church and as doctrine.[413]

A history of Jewish Christianity and its doctrines does not therefore,
strictly speaking, belong to the history of dogma, especially as the
original distinction between Jewish Christianity and