er they
are to be traced back to Catholic writers. In either case, they should
not be placed earlier than about the beginning of the third century, but
in all probability one or two generations later still.

9. If we adopt the first assumption, it is most natural to think of that
propaganda which, according to the testimony of Hippolytus and Origen,
Jewish Christianity attempted in Rome in the age of Caracalla and
Heliogabalus, through the medium of the Syrian, Alcibiades. This
coincides with the last great advance of Syrian cults into the West, and
is, at the same time, the only one known to us historically. But it is
further pretty generally admitted that the immediate sources of the
Pseudo-Clementines already presuppose the existence of Elkesaite
Christianity. We should accordingly have to assume that in the West,
this Christianity made greater concessions to the prevailing type, that
it gave up circumcision and accommodated itself to the Church system of
Gentile Christianity, at the same time withdrawing its polemic against
Paul.

10. Meanwhile the existence of such a Jewish Christianity is not as yet
proved, and therefore we must reckon with the possibility that the
remodelled form of the Jewish Christian sources, already found in
existence by the revisers of the Pseudo-Clementine Romances, was solely
a Catholic literary product. In this assumption, which commends itself
both as regards the aim of the composition and its presupposed
conditions, we must remember that, from the third century onwards,
Catholic writers systematically corrected, and to a great extent
reconstructed, the heretical histories which were in circulation in the
churches as interesting reading, and that the extent and degree of this
reconstruction varied exceedingly, according to the theological and
historical insight of the writer. The identifying of pure Mosaism with
Christianity was in itself by no means offensive when there was no
further question of circumcision. The clear distinction between the
ceremonial and moral parts of the Old Testament, could no longer prove
an offence after the great struggle with Gnosticism.[451] The strong
insistence upon the unity of God, and the rejection of the doctrine of
the Logos, were by no means uncommon in the beginning of the third
century; and in the speculations about Adam and Christ, in the views
about God and the world and such, like, as set before us in the
immediate sources of the Romances, the