Church History (Vol.1-3). J. H. Kurtz
of their writers, they were composed for the most part in the form of epistles. The old traditional view that the authors of these treatises had enjoyed the immediate fellowship and instruction of the Apostles is at once too narrow and too wide. Among these writings must be included first of all the recently discovered “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.” About A.D. 130, when Christianity was making its way among the ranks of the cultured, Christian writers began to feel themselves called upon to engage with paganism in a literary warfare defensive and offensive, in order to repel the charges and calumnies raised against their religion and to demonstrate its inner worth in opposition to the moral and religious degradation of heathenism. These writings had a more theological and scientific character than those of the Apostolic Fathers, which had more of a practical and hortatory tendency. The works of these Apologists still extant afford interesting and significant glimpses of the life, doctrine, and thinking of the Christians of that age, which but for these writings would have been almost unknown.
§ 30.1. The Beginnings of Patristic Literature.—According to the established rule of the church we have to distinguish between New Testament and Patristic literature in this way: to the former belongs those writings to which, as composed by Apostles or at least under Apostolic authority, the ancient church assigned an objectively fundamental and regulative significance for further ecclesiastical development; while in the latter we have represented the subjective conception and estimation which the Church Fathers made of the Christian message of salvation and the structure they reared upon this foundation. The so-called Apostolic Fathers may be regarded as occupying a position midway between the two and forming a transition from the one to the other, or as themselves constituting the first fruits of Patristic literature. Indeed as regards the New Testament writings themselves the ancient church was long uncertain and undecided as to the selection of them from the multitude of contemporary writings;54 and Eusebius still designated several of the books that were subsequently definitely recognised ἀντιλεγόμενα; while modern criticism has not only repeated such doubts as to the genuineness of these writings but has extended these doubts to other books of the New Testament. But even this criticism cannot deny the historical significance assigned above to those New Testament books contested by it, even though it may feel obliged to reject the account of them given by the ancient church, and to assign their composition to the Post-Apostolic Age.—When we turn to the so-called Apostolic Fathers, on closer examination the usual designation as well as the customary enumeration of seven names as belonging to the group will be found too narrow because excluding the New Testament writings composed by disciples of the Apostles, and too wide because including names which have no claim to be regarded as disciples or contemporaries of the Apostles, and embracing writings of which the authenticity is in some cases clearly disproved, in other cases doubtful or at least only problematical. We come upon firm ground when we proceed to deal with the Apologists of the age of Hadrian. It was not, however, till the period of the Old Catholic Church, about A.D. 170, that the literary compositions of the Christians became broadened, deepened and universalized by a fuller appropriation and appreciation of the elements of Græco-Latin culture, so as to form an all-sided universal Christian literature representative of Christianity as a universal religion.
§ 30.2. The Theology of the Post-Apostolic Age.—By far the greater number of the ecclesiastical writers of this period belong to the Gentile Christian party. Hence we might suppose that it would reflect the Pauline type of doctrine, if not in its full depth and completeness, yet at least in its more significant and characteristic features. This expectation, however, is not altogether realised. Among the Church Fathers of this age we rather find an unconscious deterioration of the original doctrine of Paul revealing itself as a smoothing down and belittling or as an ignoring of the genuine Paulinism, which, therefore, as the result of the struggle against the Gnostic tendency, only in part overcome, was for the first time fully recognised and proved finally victorious in the Reformation of the 16th century. On the one hand, we see that these writers, if they do not completely ignore the position and task assigned to Israel as the chosen people of God, minimise their importance and often fail to appreciate the pædagogical significance of the Mosaic law (Gal. iii. 24), so that its ceremonial parts are referred to misunderstanding, want of sense, and folly, or are attributed even to demoniacal suggestion. But on the other hand, even the gospel itself is regarded again as a new and higher law, purified from that ceremonial taint, and hence the task of the ante-mundane Son of God, begotten for the purpose of creating the world, but now also manifest in the flesh, from whose influence upon Old Testament prophets as well as upon the sages of paganism all revelations of pre-Christian Judaism as well as all σπέρματα of true knowledge in paganism have sprung, is pre-eminently conceived of as that of a divine teacher and lawgiver. In this way there was impressed upon the Old Catholic Church as it grew up out of Pauline Gentile Christianity a legalistic moral tendency that was quite foreign to the original Paulinism, and the righteousness of faith taught by the Apostle when represented as obedience to the “new law” passed over again unobserved into a righteousness of works. Redemption and reconciliation are indeed still always admitted to be conditioned by the death of Christ and their appropriation to be by the faith of the individual; but this faith is at bottom nothing more than the conviction of the divinity of the person and doctrine of the new lawgiver evidencing itself in repentance and rendering of practical obedience, and in confident expectation of the second coming of Christ, and in a sure confidence of a share in the life everlasting.—The introduction of this legalistic tendency into the Gentile Christian Church was not occasioned by the influence of Jewish Christian legalism, nor can it be explained as the result of a compromise effected between Jewish Christian Petrinism and Gentile Christian Paulinism, which were supposed by Baur, Schwegler, etc., to have been, during the Apostolic Age, irreconcilably hostile to one another. This has been already proved by Ritschl, who charges its intrusion rather upon the inability of Gentile Christianity fully to understand the Old Testament bases of the Pauline doctrine. By means of a careful analysis of the undisputed writings of Justin Martyr and by a comparison of these with the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, Engelhardt has proved that anything extra-, un-, or anti-Pauline in the Christianity of these Fathers has not so much an Ebionitic-Jewish Christian, but rather a pagan-philosophic, source. He shows that the prevalent religio-moral mode of thought of the cultured paganism of that age reappears in that form of Christianity not only as an inability to reach a profound understanding of the Old Testament, but also just as much as a minimising and depreciating, or disdaining of so many characteristic features of the Pauline doctrinal resting on Old Testament foundations.
§ 30.3. The so-called Apostolic Fathers.55—
1 Clement of Rome was one of the first Roman bishops, probably the third (§ 16, 1). The opinion that he is to be identified with the Clement named in Phil. iv. 3 is absolutely unsupported. The sameness of age and residence in some small measure favours the identifying him with Tit. Flav. Clemens [Clement], the consul, and cousin of the Emperor, who on account of his Christianity (?) was executed in A.D. 95 (§ 22, 1). Besides a multitude of other writings which subsequently assumed his well-known name (§ 28, 3; 43, 4), there are ascribed to him two so-called Epistles to the Corinthians, of which however, the second certainly is not his. The First Epistle which in the ancient church was considered worthy to be used in public worship, was afterwards lost, but fragments of it were recovered in A.D. 1628 in the so-called Codex Alexandrinus (§ 152, 2), together with a portion of the so-called “Second Epistle.” Recently however both writings were found in a complete form by Bryennius, Metropolitan of Serrä in Macedonia, in a Jerusalem Codex of A.D. 1056 discovered at Constantinople and published by him.56 In the following year a Codex of the Syrian New Testament at Cambridge was more closely examined,57 and in it there was found a complete Syriac translation of both writings inserted between the Catholic and the Pauline Epistles, while in Codex Alexandrinus they are placed after the Apocalypse. The “First” Epistle, the date of which is generally given as A.D. 93–95, does not give the author’s name, but is assigned to Clement of Rome by Dionysius of Corinth in A.D. 170, as quoted in Eusebius, and by Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, and described as written from Rome in name of the church of that place to the church of Corinth, counselling peace and unity. In the passage c. 58–63, formerly wanting but now restored, the exhortation passes into a long prayer with intercessions for those in authority and for the church according to what was perhaps already the