it was in self-defence against the Church of Marcion and with the aid of an organization taken from that Church. Further, it replaced Marcion's Bible by another of similar structure — Gospels and apostolic Epistles — which it then proceeded to combine with the Law and the Prophets in one unit. And finally, this act of linking the two Testaments having in itself settled the Church's attitude towards Judaism, it proceeded to combat Marcion's third creation, his Redeemer-doctrine, by making a start with a theology of its own on the basis of his enunciation of the problem.
This development, however, took place on Classical soil, and, therefore, even the Church that arose in opposition to Marcion and his anti-Judaism was looked upon by Talmudic Jewry (whose centre of gravity lay entirely in Mesopotamia and its universities) as a mere piece of Hellenistic paganism. The destruction of Jerusalem was a conclusive event that in the world of fact no spiritual power could nullify. Such is the intimacy of inward relationship between waking-consciousness, religion, and speech that the complete severance after 70 of the Greek Pseudomorphosis and the Aramaic (that is, the truly Arabian) region was bound to result in the formation of two distinct domains of Magian religious development. On the Western margin of the young Culture the Pagan cult-Church, the Jesus-Church (removed thither by Paul), and the Greek-speaking Judaism of the Philo stamp were in point of language and literature so interlocked that the last-named fell into Christianity even in the first century, and Christianity and Hellenism combined to form a common early philosophy. In the Aramaic-speaking world from the Orontes to the Tigris, on the other hand, Judaism and Persism interacted constantly and intimately, each creating in this period its own strict theology and scholastic in the Talmud and the Avesta; and from the fourth century both these theologies exercised the most potent influence upon the Aramaic-speaking Christendom that resisted the Pseudomorphosis, so that finally it broke away in the form of the Nestorian Church.
Here in the East the difference, inherent in every human waking-consciousness, between sense-understanding and word-understanding — and, therefore between eye and letter — led up to purely Arabian methods of mysticism and scholasticism. The apocalyptic certainty, "Gnosis" in the first-century sense, that Jesus intended to confer,[1] the divining contemplation and emotion, is that of the Israelite prophets, the Gathas, Sufism, and we have it recognizable still in Spinoza, in the Polish Messiah Baal Shem[2] and in Mirza Ali Mohammed, the enthusiast-founder of Bahaism, who was executed in Teheran in 1850. The other way, "Paradosis," is the characteristically Talmudic method of word-exegesis, of which Paul was a master;[3] it pervades all later Avestan works, the Nestorian dialectic,[4] the entire theology of Islam alike.
- ↑ Matthew xi, 25, et seq., on which see Eduard Meyer, Urspr. u. Anf. d. Christ., pp. 286, et seq.; here it is the old and Eastern (i.e., the genuine) form of gnosis that is described.
- ↑ See further, below, p. 321.
- ↑ As a drastic instance, Galatians iv, 24-26.
- ↑ Loofs, Nestoriana (1905), pp. 176, et seq.
