the word happens to be) the "easternmost" of the Gospels, and presents Jesus, emphatically not as the bringer of the final and total revelation, but as the second envoy, who is to be followed by a third (the Comforter, Paraclete, of John xiv, 16, 26; xv, 26). This is the astounding doctrine that Jesus himself proclaims, and the decisive note of this enigmatic book. Here is unveiled, quite suddenly, the faith of the Magian East. If the Logos does not go, the Paraclete[1] cannot come (John xvi, 7), but between them lies the last Æon, the rule of Ahriman (xiv, 30). The Church of the Pseudomorphosis, ruled by Pauline intellect, fought long against the John Gospel and gave it recognition only when the offensive, darkly hinted doctrine had been covered over by a Pauline interpretation. The real state of affairs is disclosed in the Montanist movement (Asia Minor, 160) which harked back to oral tradition and proclaimed in Montanus the manifested Paraclete and the end of the world. Its popularity was immense. Tertullian went over to it at Carthage in 207. About 245 Mani,[2] who was intimately in touch with the currents of Eastern Christianity,[3] cast out the Pauline, human Jesus as a demon and confessed the Johannine Logos as the true Jesus, but announced himself as the Paraclete of the fourth Gospel. In Carthage, Augustine became a Manichæan, and it is a highly suggestive fact that both movements finally fused with Marcionism.
To return to Marcion himself, it was he who carried through the idea of "John" and created a Christian Bible. And then, verging on old age, when the communities of the extreme west recoiled from him in horror,[4] he set out to build the masterly structure of his own Redeemer-Church.[5] From 156 to 190 this was a power, and it was only in the following century that the older Church succeeded in degrading the Marcionites to the rank of heretics. Even so, in the broad East and as far out as Turkestan, it was still important at a much later date, and it ended, in a way deeply significant of its essential feeling, by fusing with the Manichæans.[6]
Nevertheless, though in the fullness of his conscious superiority he had underestimated the vis inertiæ of existing conditions, his grand effort was not in vain. He was, like Paul before him and Athanasius after him, the deliverer of Christianity at a moment when it threatened to break up, and the grandeur of his idea is in no wise diminished by the fact that union came about in opposition to, instead of through, him. The early Catholic Church — that is, the Church of the Pseudomorphosis — arose in its greatness only about 190, and then
- ↑ Vohu Mano, the Spirit of Truth, in the shape of the Saoshyant.
- ↑ See the article bv Harnack and Conybeare "Manichæism," Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.
- ↑ Bardesanes, too, and the system of the "Acts of Thomas" are very near to him and to "John." [See the articles "Bardaisan," "Thomas," and "Gnosticism," Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.]
- ↑ Harnack, p. 24. The break with the established Church occurred at Rome, in 144.
- ↑ Harnack, pp. 181, et seq.
- ↑ It had, like each of the other Magian religions, a script of its own, and this script steadily came to resemble the Manichæan more and more closely.
