apostolicfathers0201clem - Carmel Apologetics

THE GENUINENESS.
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must preserve the unity of the Church. The follower of heretical
teachers has no part in the passion (§ 2, 3).
Therefore let them all
partake of one eucharist, as there is one flesh of Christ (§ 4). For
himself, he takes refuge in the Gospel as the flesh of Christ and in the
Apostles as the presbytery of the Church, though at the same time he
loves the prophets who believed on Christ by faith and so have been
saved (§ 5).
'But if,'
he continues, 'any one propound Judaism to
you, hsten not to him.' Then after denouncing Judaism and condemning
the arts of the false teachers as a breach of unity, he goes on to
describe a conflict which he had with these people at Philadelphia.
They had appealed to the archives, that is, the Old Testament
writings ; and, when he adduced these scriptures on his own side, they
questioned the interpretation. For himself, he says, his archives are
the cross, the death, the resurrection, of Christ. The priests of the
old dispensation are good but the — ; High-priest of the new is better.
The Gospel has this pre-eminence the advent, the passion, the resurrection
of Christ'.
Here the stress laid on the flesh of Christ, on the cross and passion
of Christ— which again and again break in upon his denunciations of
— the Judaizing teachers coupled with the opening congratulation to the
Philadelphians on their firm conviction on these points, shows that the
false teachers, whom he is denouncing, impugned the reality of these
facts. In other words t\\Q\x
Judaism was Docetic or Gnostic'^.
In the Epistle to the Colossians (ii.
8— 23) we have a description
of certain heretical teachers. — There is both a Judaic and a Gnostic
side to their teaching the distinction of meats and the observance of
days on the one hand, the 'philosophy,' the angelolatry, and the asceticism
on the other. Critics have attempted by violent and arbitrary
dealing to separate the one element from the other, and thus have
found two distinct heresies in this one passage. But the sequence of
1
See also the notes on the passage, 11. sq). All these writers are agreed in rep.
256 sq. garding the heresy attacked in the Igna-
-
T'hQyudcEO-Gitostic character of this tian letters as one. On the other hand
heresy was discerned by Bull, who how- Hilgenfeld {Apost. Vdter p. 231 sq,
ever wrongly connected it with Cerinthi- Zeitschr, f.
IViss. Theol. xvii. p. in
anism (see below, p. 386, note 3). Among sq, 1874) supposes that the Judaism is a
the more important investigations of this distinct heresy from the Docetism, thus
question in recent times are those of treating the Ignatian letters in the same
Uhlhorn [Zeitschr. /. Hist. Theol. 1851, way in which he treats S. Paul's Epistle
p. 283 sq), Lipsius [Ueber die Aechthcit to the Colossians. Zahn's investigation of
etc. p. 31 sq), and Zahn (/. v. A. p. 356 the Docetic element is the best.