CHAPTER XX.

SYRIAN SECTS—ELKASAÏ.

Whilst the Western Churches, yielding more or less to the influence of the Roman spirit, moved rapidly towards an orthodox Catholicism, and aspired to give to itself a central government excluding the varieties of the sects, the Churches of the Ebionim in Syria were crumbling away more and more, and wasted themselves in all sorts of aberrations. The sect is not the Church; too often, on the contrary, the sect eats away the Church and dissolves it. A veritable Proteus, Judeo-Christianity engaged itself by turns in the most opposite directions. Notwithstanding the privilege enjoyed by the Syrian Christians of possessing the members of the family of Jesus, and of attaching to itself a tradition much closer than those of the Churches of Asia, of Greece, and of Rome, it is not to be doubted that, left to themselves, these little associations would have melted away like a dream at the end of two or three hundred years. On the one hand, the exclusive use of Syriac deprived them of all fertile contact with the works of Greek genius; on the other, a host of Oriental influences, full of danger, acted upon them, and threatened them with a prompt corruption. Their imperfect reasoning powers delivered them over to the seductions of the theosophic follies—of Babylonian, Persian, or Egyptian origin; which, in about forty years, caused the nascent Christianity that grave malady of Gnosticism, which can only be compared to a terrible croup, from which the child barely escapes by a miracle.

The atmosphere in which these Ebionite Churches of Syria, and beyond the Jordan, lived, was exceedingly disturbed. Jewish sects abounded in these districts, and followed an altogether different course 233from that of the orthodox doctors. After the destruction of Jerusalem, Judaism, deprived of the prophetic spur, had only two poles of religious activity—the Casuistic, represented by the Talmud, and the mystical dreams of the new-born Cabbala. Lydda and Jabneh were the centres of the religious elaboration of the Talmud; the country beyond Jordan served as a cradle to the Cabbala. The Essenians were not dead; under the names of Essenes, Ossenes, or Osseens, they were scarcely to be distinguished from Nazarenes or Ebionites, and continued their special asceticisms and fastings with so much the more ardour since the destruction of the Temple had suppressed the ritualism of the Thora. The Galileans of Judah, the Gaulonite, existed, it appears, as a Church apart. It is scarcely known what the Masbotheans were, still less what were the Genisti, the Meristi, and some other obscure heretics.

The Samaritans were divided on their side into a crowd of sects, more or less connected with Simon of Gitton. Cleobius, Menander, the Gorotheans, the Sebueans, are already Gnostics: the Cabbalistic mysticism ran high amongst them. The absence of all authority still permitted the gravest confusions. The Samaritan sects which swarmed by the side of the Church sometimes entered within its limits or sought to force their way in. We may connect with these times the book of the Grand Exposition attributed to Simon of Gitton. Menander and Capharateus had succeeded to all the ambitions of Simon. He, like his master, imagined that he possessed the supreme virtue hidden from the rest of men. Between God and the creation he placed an innumerable world of angels, over whom magic had all power. Of that magic he pretended to know the profoundest secrets. It appears that he baptised in his own name. This baptism conferred the right to the resurrection and to immortality. It was at Antioch that Menander 234reckoned the greatest number of followers. His disciples sought, as it would seem, to usurp the name of Christians, but the Christians vigorously repulsed them and gave them the name of Menandrians. It was the same with certain Simonian sectaries named Eutychites, worshippers of Eons, against whom were brought the gravest accusations.

Another Samaritan, Dositheus or Dosthaï, played the part of a sort of Christ, of Son of God, and sought to pass himself off as the great prophet equal to Moses of whom the promise might be read in Deuteronomy (xviii. 15), and in these feverish times he was constantly expected. Essenism, with its tendency to multiply angels, was at the root of all these aberrations; the Messiah himself was no more than an angel, and Jesus, in the Churches placed under that influence, risked the loss of his beautiful title of Son of God, to become only a great angel—an Eon of the first rank.

The intimate connection which existed between Christians and the mass of Israel, the want of direction which characterised the trans-Jordanic Churches, caused each of these sects to have its counterpart in the Church of Jesus. We do not well understand what Hegesippus endeavours to say when he traces for the Church of Jerusalem a period of absolute virginity, finishing about the time at which we now are, and when he attributes all the evil of the time which followed to a certain Trebuthis, who, out of spite at not having been named bishop, infected the Church with errors borrowed from seven Jewish sects. What is true is that in the lost provinces of the East strange alliances were produced. Sometimes even the mania for incoherent mixtures did not stop at the limits of Judaism; the religions of Upper Asia furnished more than one element to the cauldron in which the most discordant elements fermented together. Baptism is a rite originally from the region 235of the Lower Euphrates; but baptism was the most common feature amongst the Jewish sects which sought to free themselves from the Temple and the priests at Jerusalem. John the Baptist still had disciples. The Essenians, the Ebionites, were almost all given to ablutions. After the destruction of the Temple, baptism gained greater strength. The sectaries plunged into water every day and on any excuse. We heard about the year 80 accounts which appeared to come from this sect. Under Trojan, the fashion of baptism redoubled. This growing favour was due in part to the influence of a certain Elkasaï, who we may suppose to have been in many ways the imitator of John the Baptist and of Jesus.

This Elkasaï appears to have been an Essene of the country beyond Jordan. He had, perhaps, resided in Babylonia, whence he pretended to have brought the book of his revelation. He raised his prophetic standard in the third year of the reign of Trajan, preaching repentance, and a new baptism more efficacious than all these which had preceded it, capable, in a word, of washing away the most enormous sins. He presented, as a proof of his divine mission, a bizarre apocalypse, probably written in Syriac, which he sought to surround with a charlatanesque mystery, by representing it as having come down from heaven at Sera, the capital of the fabulous country of the Serans, beyond Parthia. A gigantic angel, thirty-two leagues in height, representing the Son of God, there played the part of revealer; by his side, a female angel of the same height, the Holy Spirit, appeared like a statue in the clouds between two mountains. Elkasaï, now the depositary of the book, transmits it to a certain Sobiaï. Some fragments of this strange document are known to us. Nothing there rises above the level of a vulgar mystifier, who wishes to make his fortune with pretended formulas of expiation and ridiculous mummeries. Magic formulas composed of Syriac 236phrases read backwards, puerile predictions as to lucky and unlucky days, mad medicine of exorcisms and sortileges, prescriptions against devils and dogs, astrological predictions—such is the Gospel of Elkasaï. Like all the makers of apocalypses, he announced catastrophes for the Roman Empire, the date of which he fixed for the sixth year after Trajan.

Was Elkasaï really Christian? It has sometimes been doubted. He spoke often about the Messiah, but he equivocated concerning Jesus. It may be imagined that, walking in the footsteps of Simon of Gitton, Elkasaï knew and copied Christianity. Like Mahomet, at a later period, he adopted Jesus as a divine personage. The Ebionites were the only Christians with whom he had relations; for his Christology is distinctly that of Ebion. By its example, he maintained the Law, circumcision, the Sabbath, rejected the ancient prophets, hated Paul, abstained from flesh, and turned towards Jerusalem in prayer. His disciples appear to have approached Buddhism; they admitted many Christs, passing one into the others by a sort of transmigration, or rather a single Christ incarnating himself and appearing in the world at intervals. Jesus was one of these apparitions, Adam having been the first. These dreams make one think of the avatars of Vishnu and the successive lives of Krishna

We feel in all this the crude syncretism of a sectary very like Mahomet, who coolly jumbles together and confounds the ideas which he gleans from right and left according to his caprice or interest. The most recognisable influence is that of Persian naturalism and the Babylonian Cabbala. The Elkasaïtes adored water as the source of life, and detested fire. Their baptism administered, “in the name of the Most High God, and in the name of the Son, the great King,” effaced all sins and cured all sickness, when to it was joined the invocation of seven mysterious witnesses, the heaven, water, the holy spirits, the angels of 237prayer, oil, salt, earth. From the Essenes Elkasaï borrowed fasting, the horror of bloody sacrifices. The privilege of announcing the future and of healing the sick by magical operations, was also a pretension of the Essenes. But the morals of Elkasaï resembled those of these good Cenobites as little as might be. He reproved virginity, and, to avoid persecution, he allowed the simulation of idolatry, even to denying with the mouth the faith professed.

These doctrines were more or less adopted by all the Ebionite sects. The living impress of them may be found in the pseudo-Clementine narratives, the work of the Ebionites at Rome, and vague reflections of them in the epistle falsely attributed to John. The book of Elkasaï was, however, not known by the Greek and Latin Churches until the third century, and had amongst them no success. It was, on the other hand, adopted with enthusiasm by the Osseans, the Nazarenes, and the Ebionites of the East. All the region beyond Jordan, Perea, Moab, Iturea, the country of the Nabatheans, the banks of the Dead Sea towards Arnon, were filled with these sectaries. Later they were called Samseans, an expression of obscure meaning. In the fourth century the fanaticism of the sect was such that people caused themselves to be killed for the family of Elkasaï. His family, in fact, still existed and carried on its vulgar charlatanry. Two women, Marthous and Marthana, who claimed descent from him, were almost worshipped; the dust of their feet, their spittle, were treated as relics. In Arabia, the Elkasaïtes, like the Ebionites and the Judeo-Christians in general, lived close to Islam and were confounded with it. The theory of Mahomet as to Jesus is scarcely separable from that of Elkasaï. The idea of the Kibla, or direction for prayer, perhaps comes from the trans-Jordanic sectaries.

It is impossible to insist too strongly on the point that before the great schism of the Greek and Latin 238Churches, equally orthodox and Catholic, there had been another schism—an Oriental, a Syrian schism, if we may so explain it—which put out of the pale of Christianity, or, more exactly, left upon its confines a whole world of Judeo-Christian or Ebionite sects, in no way Catholic (Essenians, Osseans, Samseans, Jesseans, Elkasaïtes), in whose midst Mahomet learned Christianity, and of which Islam was the result. A proof, in some sort still a living proof, of this great fact, is the name of Nazarenes, which Mussulmans have always given to Christians. Another proof that the Christianity of Mahomet was Ebionism of Nazarism is that obstinate docetism which has caused it to be believed by the Mussulmans of all times that Jesus was not crucified in person,—that a ghost alone suffered in his place. We might fancy that we heard Cerinthus, or some of the Gnostics so energetically opposed by Irenæus.

The Syriac name of these various sects of Baptists was Sabiin, the exact equivalent of “baptisers.” This is the origin of the name of Sabiens which serves even now to designate the Mendaïtes, the Nazarenes, or Christians of St John, who drag out their poor existence in the marshy district of Wasith and of Howeysa, not far from the confluence of the Tigris and of the Euphrates. In the seventh century Mahomet treated them with a special consideration. In the tenth the Arab polygraphs called them Elmogtasileh, “those who bathed.” The first Europeans who knew them took them for disciples of John the Baptist, who had quitted the banks of the Jordan before receiving the preaching of Jesus. It is hardly possible to doubt the identity of these sectaries with the Elkasaïtes, when we find them calling their founder El hasih, and, above all, when we study their doctrines, which are a sort of Judeo-Babylonian Gnosticism analogous in many ways to that of Elkasaï. The use of ablutions, the taste for astrology, 239the habit of ascribing books to Adam as the first of revelators, the qualities attributed to angels, a sort of naturalism and of belief in the magical virtue of the elements, the horror of celibacy, are so many features common to the Elkasaïtes and to the sectaries of Bassora.

Like Elkasaï the Mendaïtes believed in water as the principle of life; fire as a principle of darkness and destruction. Although they lived far from the Jordan, that stream is always the baptismal stream. Their antipathy for Jerusalem and Judaism, the dislike which they manifested for Jesus and for Christianity, did not prevent their organisation of bishops, priests, and faithful from recalling in all respects the organisation of Christianity, or their liturgy from being copied from that of a Church, and bordering upon true Sacraments. Their books do not appear to be very ancient, but they seem to have replaced older ones. Of this number was perhaps the Apocalypse or Penitence of Adam, a singular book about the celestial liturgies for every hour of the day and night, and upon the sacramental acts which belong to each.

Does Mendaïsm come from a single source—Essenism and Jewish baptism? Certainly not. In many respects a branch of the Babylonian religion may be seen in it, that religion may have entered into close alliance with a Judeo-Christian sect, itself already impressed with Babylonish ideas. The unbridled syncretism which has always been the rule with Oriental sects, renders an exact analysis of such monstrosities impossible. The ulterior relations of the Sabiens with Manicheism remain very obscure. All that can be said is that Elkasaïsm lasts even in our own days, and represents alone in the marshes of Bassora the Judeo-Christian sects which formerly flourished beyond Jordan.

The family of Jesus which still survived in Syria was undoubtedly opposed to these unhealthy dreams. About the time we are considering, the last nephews 240of the Galilean founder died out, surrounded with the most profound respect by the trans-Jordanic communities, but almost forgotten by the other Churches. After their appearance before Domitian, the sons of Jude, returned to Batanea, were considered martyrs. They were placed at the head of the Churches, and they enjoyed a preponderating authority until their death, under Trajan. The sons of Cleophas during this time appear to have continued to bear the title of presidents of the Church of Jerusalem. To Simeon, son of Cleophas, had succeeded his nephew Judah, son of James, to whom appears to have succeeded another Simeon, the great-grandson of Cleophas.

An important political event occurred in the year 105, in Syria, which had grave consequences for the future of Christianity. The Nabathean kingdom, which, until then, had remained independent, bordered Palestine on the east and included the cities of Petra, of Bostra, and in fact, if not in law, the city of Damascus, was destroyed by Cornelius Palma, and became the Roman province of Arabia. About the same time the little royalties feudatory to the Empire which until then were maintained in Syria, the Herods, the Soëmi of Edessa, the little sovereign of Chalcis, of Arbila, the Solencides of the Comagena, had disappeared. The Roman domination then assumed in the East a regularity which it had never had before. Beyond its frontiers there was only the inaccessible desert. The trans-Jordanic world which until then entered into the Empire only by its most westerly parts, was there swallowed up wholly. Palmyra, which so far had given to Rome only auxiliaries, entered altogether into the Roman domination. The entire field of Christian work is henceforward submitted to Rome, and is about to enjoy the absolute repose which the end of the pre-occupations of local patriotism brings about. All the East adopted Roman manners; the cities until then 241Oriental were rebuilt according to the rules of contemporary art. The prophecies of the Jewish apocalypses were not fulfilled. The Empire was at the height of its power; one single government extended from York to Assouan, from Gibraltar to the Carpathians and to the Syrian desert. The follies of Caligula and of Nero, the wickedness of Tiberius and Domitian, were forgotten. In that immense area there was only one natural protestation—that of the Jews; all bent without murmuring before the greatest force which had ever been seen in the world until then.