NOTE A: THE END OF JEWISH CHRISTIANITY
Although the first Christians were all of them Jews, with every year that passed the influence of the Jewish Christians diminished, once the Greeks, too, came into the Church. The failure of the efforts of one section to enforce within the new religion the observance of the Mosaic Law as such, was a very notable setback. The Gentile converts easily outnumbered the Jewish and by the time of the death of St. Paul the Jewish Christians were already a minority. In 62 they lost the Apostle who seems to have been their especial leader -- James, the Bishop of Jerusalem; and eight years later the armies of Vespasian and Titus, destroying the Holy City and the last vestiges of independent Jewish political organisation, ended inevitably the prestige of the church in which Christianity had first been organised. There would now be no repetition of the danger, which the Church had so recently escaped, that it would present itself to the world as simply another Jewish sect. The Roman soldiery had, in very grim fashion, crowned the work of St. Paul.
But for all that Jerusalem was no more, razed to the very ground as Our Lord had prophesied, with only the camp of the Tenth Legion to mark where it had stood, its Christian population continued to lead a collective life. Some vision had warned the bishop -- Simeon -- of the coming troubles, and the faithful had left the city in time, and settled at Pella, in the pagan country across the Jordan. Here for yet another century and more they survived, isolated from the rest of the Church and increasingly a prey to heretical developments. The belief in the essential divinity of Our Lord changed into what was afterwards called Adoptianism. He was-the child of Joseph and Mary and later, because of his scrupulous fidelity to the Law, permitted to become the Christ. That destiny is open to all his followers. Whence, among these heretical Judeo-Christians -- the Ebionites -- a devotion to the Law unsurpassed by the Pharisees themselves. Of the sacred books which later formed the New Testament they possessed the Gospel of St. Matthew. St. Paul they held in abhorrence as an apostate and a perverter of the truth. The second generation of the Ebionites, through contact with the Jewish sect of the Essenes, added yet other beliefs and practices. They had their own theory of a double creation of good and bad, perpetuated through the centuries in parallel lines of good and of lying prophets, descendants of Adam and of Eve respectively. More accurately, these are re-incarnations of the one prophet, and this one prophet it is who has appeared in Jesus Christ. He is not God. Circumcision is retained along with Baptism, a vegetarian diet is prescribed, a daily bath, and, as a means of avoiding sexual sin, marriage at the very beginning of puberty. In their Eucharist water takes the place of wine. A still later development is that of the Elkasaites of whose distinctive tenets, however, nothing is known with certainty.
Ebionites and Elkasaites were of course heretics. Side by side with them, however, but in ever dwindling numbers the Christian Church survived for yet two centuries at least. St. Jerome writes of these survivors to St. Augustine, and finds them sufficiently orthodox in faith. Though they do not reject St. Paul, they cling steadfastly to all the customs of the Jews. In an earlier generation they had produced at least one writer Hegesippus, who, (c. 150), set himself to travel throughout the world comparing his own faith with that professed by all the bishops he encountered, and endeavouring to construct a pedigree of orthodox teachers, linking the bishops of his day with the Apostles. All the bishops he met agreed in doctrine and the doctrine was that which he himself had been taught. Also he noted the names of the bishops of the Roman Church down to Anicetus. It is evident from the few references to these Jewish Christian Churches of the East, and from the occasional confusion in what references we do possess, that they had ceased to be more than a matter of archaeology to the learned men who wrote about them. By the fifth century they are nothing more than this, and thence on they are entirely lost to view.
Although the first Christians were all of them Jews, with every year that passed the influence of the Jewish Christians diminished, once the Greeks, too, came into the Church. The failure of the efforts of one section to enforce within the new religion the observance of the Mosaic Law as such, was a very notable setback. The Gentile converts easily outnumbered the Jewish and by the time of the death of St. Paul the Jewish Christians were already a minority. In 62 they lost the Apostle who seems to have been their especial leader -- James, the Bishop of Jerusalem; and eight years later the armies of Vespasian and Titus, destroying the Holy City and the last vestiges of independent Jewish political organisation, ended inevitably the prestige of the church in which Christianity had first been organised. There would now be no repetition of the danger, which the Church had so recently escaped, that it would present itself to the world as simply another Jewish sect. The Roman soldiery had, in very grim fashion, crowned the work of St. Paul.
But for all that Jerusalem was no more, razed to the very ground as Our Lord had prophesied, with only the camp of the Tenth Legion to mark where it had stood, its Christian population continued to lead a collective life. Some vision had warned the bishop -- Simeon -- of the coming troubles, and the faithful had left the city in time, and settled at Pella, in the pagan country across the Jordan. Here for yet another century and more they survived, isolated from the rest of the Church and increasingly a prey to heretical developments. The belief in the essential divinity of Our Lord changed into what was afterwards called Adoptianism. He was-the child of Joseph and Mary and later, because of his scrupulous fidelity to the Law, permitted to become the Christ. That destiny is open to all his followers. Whence, among these heretical Judeo-Christians -- the Ebionites -- a devotion to the Law unsurpassed by the Pharisees themselves. Of the sacred books which later formed the New Testament they possessed the Gospel of St. Matthew. St. Paul they held in abhorrence as an apostate and a perverter of the truth. The second generation of the Ebionites, through contact with the Jewish sect of the Essenes, added yet other beliefs and practices. They had their own theory of a double creation of good and bad, perpetuated through the centuries in parallel lines of good and of lying prophets, descendants of Adam and of Eve respectively. More accurately, these are re-incarnations of the one prophet, and this one prophet it is who has appeared in Jesus Christ. He is not God. Circumcision is retained along with Baptism, a vegetarian diet is prescribed, a daily bath, and, as a means of avoiding sexual sin, marriage at the very beginning of puberty. In their Eucharist water takes the place of wine. A still later development is that of the Elkasaites of whose distinctive tenets, however, nothing is known with certainty.
Ebionites and Elkasaites were of course heretics. Side by side with them, however, but in ever dwindling numbers the Christian Church survived for yet two centuries at least. St. Jerome writes of these survivors to St. Augustine, and finds them sufficiently orthodox in faith. Though they do not reject St. Paul, they cling steadfastly to all the customs of the Jews. In an earlier generation they had produced at least one writer Hegesippus, who, (c. 150), set himself to travel throughout the world comparing his own faith with that professed by all the bishops he encountered, and endeavouring to construct a pedigree of orthodox teachers, linking the bishops of his day with the Apostles. All the bishops he met agreed in doctrine and the doctrine was that which he himself had been taught. Also he noted the names of the bishops of the Roman Church down to Anicetus. It is evident from the few references to these Jewish Christian Churches of the East, and from the occasional confusion in what references we do possess, that they had ceased to be more than a matter of archaeology to the learned men who wrote about them. By the fifth century they are nothing more than this, and thence on they are entirely lost to view.
