2. 5) how great were the diversities of Jewish
sects, and that there was in the Diaspora, as well as in Palestine
itself, a Judaism which, on the one hand, followed ascetic impulses, and
on the other, advanced to a criticism of the religious tradition without
giving up the national claims. It may even be said that in theology the
boundaries between the orthodox Judaism of the Pharisees and a
syncretistic Judaism were of an elastic kind. Although religion, in
those circles, seemed to be fixed in its legal aspect, yet on its
theological side it was ready to admit very diverse speculations, in
which angelic powers especially played a great role.[431] That
introduced into Jewish monotheism an element of differentiation, the
results of which were far-reaching. The field was prepared for the
formation of syncretistic sects. They present themselves to us on the
soil of the earliest Christianity, in the speculations of those Jewish
Christian teachers who are opposed in the Epistle to the Colossians, and
in the Gnosis of Cerinthus (see above, p. 246). Here cosmological ideas
and myths were turned to profit. The idea of God was sublimated by both.
In consequence of this, the Old Testament records were subjected to
criticism, because they could not in all respects be reconciled with the
universal religion which hovered before men's minds. This criticism was
opposed to the Pauline in so far as it maintained, with the common
Jewish Christians, and Christendom as a whole, that the genuine Old
Testament religion was essentially identical with the Christian. But
while those common Jewish Christians drew from this the inference that
the whole of the Old Testament must be adhered to in its traditional
sense and in all its ordinances, and while the larger Christendom
secured for itself the whole of the Old Testament by deviating from the
ordinary interpretation, those syncretistic Jewish Christians separated
from the Old Testament, as interpolations, whatever did not agree with
their purer moral conceptions and borrowed speculations. Thus, in
particular, they got rid of the sacrificial ritual, and all that was
connected with it, by putting ablutions in their place. First the
profanation, and afterwards, the abolition of the temple worship, after
the destruction of Jerusalem, may have given another new and welcome
impulse to this by coming to be regarded as its Divine confirmation
(Presupp. Sec. 2). Christianity now appeared as purified Mos