, and
there were some who criticised the Old Testament like the Gnostics.
Their contention may have remained as much an internal one, as that
between the Church Fathers and Gnostics (Marcion) did, so far as Jewish
Christianity is concerned. There may have been relations between Gnostic
Jewish Christians and Gnostics, not of a national Jewish type, in Syria
and Asia Minor, though we are completely in the dark on the matter.]

[Footnote 408: From the mere existence of Jewish Christians, those
Christians who rejected the Old Testament might have argued against the
main body of Christendom and put before it the dilemma: either Jewish
Christian or Marcionite. Still more logical indeed was the dilemma:
either Jewish, or Marcionite Christian.]

[Footnote 409: So did the Montanists and Antimontanists mutually
reproach each other with Judaising (see the Montanist writings of
Tertullian). Just in the same way the arrangements as to worship and
organisation, which were ever being more richly developed, were
described by the freer parties as Judaising, because they made appeal to
the Old Testament, though, as regards their contents, they had little in
common with Judaism. But is not the method of claiming Old Testament
authority for the regulations rendered necessary by circumstances nearly
as old as Christianity itself? Against whom the lost treatise of Clement
of Alexandria "[Greek: kanon ekklesiastikos he pros tous Ioudaizontas]"
(Euseb., H. E. VI. 13. 3) was directed, we cannot tell. But as we read,
Strom., VI. 15, 125, that the Holy Scriptures are to be expounded
according to the [Greek: ekklesiastikos kanon], and then find the
following definition of the Canon: [Greek: kanon de ekklesiastikos he
sunodia kai sumphonia nomon te kai propheton te kata ten tou kuriou
parousian paradidomenei diathekei], we may conjecture that the Judaisers
were those Christians, who, in principle, or to some extent, objected to
the allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament. We have then to
think either of Marcionite Christians or of "Chiliasts," that is, the
old Christians who were still numerous in Egypt about the middle of the
third century (see Dionys. Alex, in Euseb., H. E. VII. 24). In the first
case, the title of the treatise would be paradoxical. But perhaps the
treatise refers to the Quarto-decimans, although the expression [Greek:
kanon ekklesiastikos] seems too ponderous for them (see, however, Orig.,
Comm. in Matth. n. 76, ed. Del