t,
earth"). The old Jewish way of thinking appears in the assumption that
all kinds of sickness and misfortune are punishments for sin, and that
these penalties must therefore be removed by atonement. The book
contains also astrological and geometrical speculations in a religious
garb. The main thing, however, was the possibility of a forgiveness of
sin, ever requiring to be repeated, though Hippolytus himself was unable
to point to any gross laxity. Still, the appearance of this sect
represents the attempt to make the religion of Christian Judaism
palatable to the world. The possibility of repeated forgiveness of sin,
the speculations about numbers, elements, and stars, the halo of
mystery, the adaptation to the forms of worship employed in the
"mysteries", are worldly means of attraction which shew that this Jewish
Christianity was subject to the process of acute secularization. The
Jewish mode of life was to be adopted in return for these concessions.
Yet its success in the West was of small extent and short-lived.

Epiphanius confirms all these features, and adds a series of new ones.
In his description, the new forgiveness of sin is not so prominent as in
that of Hippolytus, but it is there. From the account of Epiphanius we
can see that these syncretistic Judaeo-Christian sects were at first
strictly ascetic and rejected marriage as well as the eating of flesh,
but that they gradually became more lax. We learn here that the whole
sacrificial service was removed from the Old Testament by the Elkesaites
and declared to be non-Divine, that is non-Mosaic, and that fire was
consequently regarded as the impure and dangerous element, and water as
the good one.[441] We learn further, that these sects acknowledged no
prophets and men of God between Aaron and Christ, and that they
completely adapted the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew to their own views.[442]
In addition to this book, however, (the Gospel of the 12 Apostles),
other writings, such as [Greek: Periodoi Petrou dia Klementos,
Anabathmoi Iakobou] and similar histories of Apostles, were held in
esteem by them. In these writings the Apostles were represented as
zealous ascetics, and, above all, as vegetarians, while the Apostle Paul
was most bitterly opposed. They called him a Tarsene, said he was a
Greek, and heaped on him gross abuse. Epiphanius also dwells strongly
upon their Jewish mode of life (circumcision, Sabbath), as well as their
daily washings,[443] and gives s