ut, though certain parts of it have been woven into the polemic
against Simon. But probably the Pauline features of the magician are
merely an appearance. The Pseudo-Clementines may, to some extent, be
used, though with caution, in determining the doctrines of syncretistic
Jewish Christianity. In connection with this we must take what
Epiphanius says as our standard. The Pantheistic and Stoic elements
which are found here and there must of course be eliminated. But the
theory of the genesis of the world from a change in God himself (that is
from a [Greek: probole]), the assumption that all things emanated from
God in antitheses (Son of God--Devil; heaven--earth; male--female; male
and female prophecy), nay, that these antitheses are found in God
himself (goodness, to which corresponds the Son of God--punitive
justice, to which corresponds the Devil), the speculations about the
elements which have proceeded from the one substance, the ignoring of
freedom in the question about the origin of evil, the strict adherence
to the unity and absolute causality of God, in spite of the dualism, and
in spite of the lofty predicates applied to the Son of God--all this
plainly bears the Semitic-Jewish stamp.

We must here content ourselves with these indications. They were meant
to set forth briefly the reasons which forbid our assigning to
syncretistic Jewish Christianity, on the basis of the Pseudo-
Clementines, a place in the history of the genesis of the Catholic
Church and its doctrine.

Bigg, The Clementine Homilies (Studia Biblica et Eccles. II. p. 157
ff.), has propounded the hypothesis that the Homilies are an Ebionitic
revision of an older Catholic original (see p. 1841: "The Homilies as we
have it, is a recast of an orthodox work by a highly unorthodox editor."
P. 175: "The Homilies are surely the work of a Catholic convert to
Ebionitism, who thought he saw in the doctrine of the two powers the
only tenable answer to Gnosticism. We can separate his Catholicism from
his Ebionitism, just as surely as his Stoicism"). This is the opposite
of the view expressed by me in the text. I consider Bigg's hypothesis
well worth examining, and at first sight not improbable; but I am not
able to enter into it here.

[Footnote 403: The attitude of the recently discovered "Teaching of the
twelve Apostles" is strictly universalistic, and hostile to Judaism as a
nation, but shews us a Christianity still essentially uninfluenced by
philoso