Slowly and steadily now the great Churches moved to fulfilment. It had been decided — the most important religious result of the second century — that the outcome of the teaching of Jesus was not to be a transformation of Judaism, but a new Church, which took its way westward while Judaism, without loss of inward strength, turned itself to the East. To the third century belong the great mental structures of theology. A modus vivendi with historical actuality had been reached, the end of the world had receded into the distance, and a new dogmatic grew up to explain the new world-picture. The arrival of mature Scholasticism presupposes faith in the duration of the doctrines that it sets itself to establish.
Viewing the results of their efforts, we find that the Aramæan motherland developed its forms in three directions. In the East, out of the Zoroastrian religion of Achæmenid times and the remains of its sacred literature, there formed itself the Mazdaist Church, with a strict hierarchy and laborious ritual, with sacraments, mass, and confession (patet). As mentioned above, Tanvasar made a beginning with the collection and ordering of the new Avesta; under Sapor I (as contemporaneously in the Talmud) the profane texts of medicine, law, and astronomy were added; and the rounding-off was the work of the Church magnate Mahraspand under Sapor II (309-379). The immediate accretion of a commentary in Pehlevi was only what was to be expected in the Magian Culture. The new Avesta, like the Jewish and the Christian Bibles, was a canon of separate writings, and we learn that amongst the Nasks (originally twenty-one) now lost there was a gospel of Zarathustra, the conversion-story of Vishtaspa, a Genesis, a law-book, and a genealogical book with trees from the Creation to the Persian kings, while the Vendidad, which Geldner calls the Leviticus of the Persians, was — most significantly — preserved complete.
A new religious founder appeared in 242, in the reign of Sapor I. This was Mani, who, rejecting "redeemerless" Judaism and Hellenism, knit together the whole mass of Magian religions in one of the most powerful theological creations of all times — for which in 276 the Mazdaist priesthood crucified him. Equipped by his father (who quite late in life abandoned his family to enter a Mandæan order) with all the knowledge of the period, he unified the basic ideas of the Chaldeans and Persians with those of Johannine, Eastern, Christianity — a task which had been attempted before in the Christian-Persian Gnosis of Bardesanes, but without any idea of founding a new church.[1] He
- ↑ It is reasonable to suppose that he must through oral tradition have had a very accurate knowledge of the fundamental doctrines of the John Gospel. Even Bardesanes (d. 254), and the "Acts of St. Thomas" that originated in his circle, are very far removed indeed from Pauline doctrines, an alienation that in Mani rose to downright hostility and to the historical Jesus's being described as an evil demon. We obtain here a glimpse into the essence of the almost subterranean Christianity of the East, which was ignored by the Greek-writing churches of the Pseudomorphosis and for that reason has hitherto escaped the attention of Church history. But Marcion and Montanus also came from eastern Asia Minor; here originated the Naasene book, basically Per-
