aism. In these
Jewish Christian undertakings we have undoubtedly before us a series of
peculiar attempts to elevate the Old Testament religion into the
universal one, under the impression of the person of Jesus; attempts,
however, in which the Jewish religion, and not the Jewish people, was to
bear the costs by curtailment of its distinctive features. The great
inner affinity of these attempts with the Gentile Christian Gnostics has
already been set forth. The firm partition wall between them, however,
lies in the claim of these Jewish Christians to set forth the pure Old
Testament religion, as well as in the national Jewish colouring which
the constructed universal religion was always to preserve. This national
colouring is shewn in the insistence upon a definite measure of Jewish
national ceremonies as necessary to salvation, and in the opposition to
the Apostle Paul, which united the Gnostic Judaeo-Christians with the
common type, those of the strict observance. How the latter were related
to the former, we do not know, for the inner relations here are almost
completely unknown to us.[432]

Apart from the false doctrines opposed in the Epistle to the Colossians,
and from Cerinthus, this syncretistic Jewish Christianity which aimed at
making itself a universal religion, meets us in tangible form only in
three phenomena:[433] in the Elkesaites of Hippolytus and Origen, in the
Ebionites with their associates of Epiphanius, sects very closely
connected, in fact to be viewed as one party of manifold shades,[434]
and in the activity of Symmachus.[435] We observe here a form of
religion as far removed from that of the Old Testament as from the
Gospel, subject to strong heathen influences, not Greek, but Asiatic,
and scarcely deserving the name "Christian," because it appeals to a new
revelation of God which is to complete that given in Christ. We should
take particular note of this in judging of the whole remarkable
phenomenon. The question in this Jewish Christianity is not the
formation of a philosophic school, but to some extent the establishment
of a kind of new religion, that is, the completion of that founded by
Christ, undertaken by a particular person basing his claims on a
revealed book which was delivered to him from heaven. This book which
was to form the complement of the Gospel, possessed, from the third
century, importance for all sections of Jewish Christians so far as
they, in the phraseology of Epiphanius,