Carl Gustav Adolf von Harnack

“ Tatian's diction is often rough, harsh, and abrupt, his sentences involved and inelegant. He has the art, indeed, of expressing himself with uncommon freedom and independence, and can put things also in a very graphic way, but at the same time he is a careless stylist, or rather, as an apostate from the Greek view of things, he has tried to accentuate his breach with classical traditions by elaborate carelessness and deliberate eccentricity. ”

“ In Marcion’s own view, therefore, the founding of his church—to which he was first driven by opposition—amounts to a reformation of Christendom through a return to the gospel of Christ and to Paul; nothing was to be accepted beyond that. This of itself shows that it is a mistake to reckon Marcion among the Gnostics. A dualist he certainly was, but he was not a Gnostic. For he ascribed salvation, not to “knowledge” but to “faith”; he appealed openly to the whole Christian world ”

“ Once a Christian, he was determined to' be so with all his soul, and to shake himself free of all half measures and compromises with the world. It is not difficult to lay one's finger upon very many obliquities, self-deceptions and sophisms in Tertullian in matters of detail, for he struggled for years to reconcile things that were in themselves irreconcilable; yet in each case the perversities and sophisms were rathercthe outcome of the peculiarly difficult circumstances in which he stood. It is easy to convict him of having failed to control the glowing passion that was in him. ”

“ In many details, and even in the general outline of his philosophy, Tatian the Christian continued without knowing it to be a Platonizing philosopher; but that he had undergone a radical change is shown by his views of history and civilization, his faith in one living God, his conviction that truth is contained nowhere else than in the Christian Scriptures, his attitude of trust towards the Logos, made man in Jesus Christ, and finally by his earnest and world-forsaking expectation of judgment to come. ”

“ At various periods in the history of the middle ages we encounter sudden outbreaks of millennarianism, sometimes as the tenet of a small sect, sometimes as a far-reaching movement. And, since it had been suppressed, not, as in the East, by mystical speculation, its mightiest antagonist, but by the political church of the hierarchy, we find that wherever chiliasm appears in the middle ages it makes common cause with all enemies of the secularized church. It strengthened the hands of church democracy ”

“ The spirit of philosophical and theological speculation and of ethical reflection, which began to spread through the churches, did not know what to make of the old hopes of the future. To a new generation they seemed paltry, earthly and fantastic, and far-seeing men had good reason to regard them as a source of political danger. ”

“ Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla were always recognized as the inspired authorities. At rare intervals a vision might perhaps be vouchsafed to some Montanistic old woman, or a brother might now and then have a dream that seemed to be of supernatural origin; but the overmastering power of religious enthusiasm was a thing of which the Montanists knew as little as the Catholics. Their discipline was attended with equally disappointing results. In place of an intense moral earnestness, we find in Tertullian a legal casuistry, a finical morality, from which no good could ever come. ”

“ The original ethical contrast of “good” and “just” is thus transformed into the cosmological contrast of “spirit” and “matter.” The good God appears as the god of spirit, the Old Testament God as the god of matter. ”

“ One great divergence is manifest: Tertullian never himself deviated from orthodox and vehemently asserts the orthodoxy of all Montanists, but both Montanus (“I am the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost”) and Maximilla (“I am Word and Spirit and Power”) used language which has a distinctly “monarchian” flavour. There were really divided views on the question of the Divine Monarchy among the Montanists as among the Catholics. The orthodox party were known as the Cataproclans, the heterodox as Cataeschinites, and both appealed to the oracles of their prophets. ”

“ The attempts of Methodius of Tyre at the beginning of the 4th century and Apollinarius of Laodicea about 360 to defend chiliasm and assail the theology of Origen had no result. For many centuries the Greek Church kept Revelation out of its canon, and consequently chiliasm remained in its grave. It was considered a sufficient safeguard against the spiritualizing eschatology of Origen and his school to have rescued the main doctrines of the creed and the regula fidei (the visible advent of Christ; eternal misery and hell-fire for the wicked) . Anything beyond this was held to be Jewish. ”

“ Man is, in spirit, soul and body, a creature of the just and wrathful god. This god created man from ὔλη (matter) , [2] and imposed on him a strict law. Since no one could keep this law, the whole human race fell under the curse, temporal and eternal, of the Demiurge. Then a higher God, hitherto unknown, and concealed even from the Demiurge, took pity on the wretched, condemned race of men. He sent his Son (whom Marcion probably regarded as a manifestation of the supreme God Himself) [3] down to this earth in order to redeem men. ”

“ In details much of what Zahn has given as belonging to the text of the Diatessaron remains problematical,—in particular he has not been sufficiently careful in his examination of the work of Aphraates,—but in all the main points his restoration has been successful. The rediscovery of such a work is in a variety of ways of the very highest importance for the early history of Christianity. (1) It is of interest for the history of the canon. It shows that in Tatian's time there was still no recognized New Testament canon, and that the texts of the Gospels were not regarded as inspired. ”

“ At Rome in mature manhood Tertullian became a Christian, under what circumstances we do not know, and forthwith he bent himself with all his energy to the study of Scripture and'of Christian literature. ”

“ The “everlasting gospel” of Joachim of Floris was a different thing from the announcement of Christ’s glorious return in the clouds of heaven; the “age of the spirit” which mystics and spiritualists expected contained traits which must be characterized as “modern”; and the “kingdom” of the Anabaptists in Münster was a Satanic caricature of that kingdom in which the Christians of the 2nd century looked for a peaceful Sabbath rest. ”

“ The distinctive teaching of Marcion originated in a comparison of the Old Testament with the gospel of Christ and the theology of the apostle Paul. Its motive was not cosmological or metaphysical, but religious and historical. In the gospel he found a God revealed who is goodness and love, and who desires faith and love from men. ”

“ It is true that there was no rivalry between the new organization and the old, as in Asia and Phrygia, for the Western Montanists recognized in its main features the Catholic organization as it had been developed in the contest with Gnosticism; but the demand that the “organs of the Spirit” should direct the whole discipline of the congregation contained implicitly a protest against the actual constitution of the Church. ”

“ But his inquiring disposition and his earnest spirit remained unsatisfied alike with the religions and the philosophies he encountered, while the doings of men, their greed for amusement and pleasure, their vanity and treachery, disgusted him. ”

“ From this fact the whole ancient Christian eschatology was known in later times as “chiliasm”—a name which is not strictly accurate, since the doctrine of the millennium was only one feature in its scheme of the future.
1. This idea that the Messianic kingdom of the future on earth should have a definite duration has—like the whole eschatology of the primitive Church—its roots in the Jewish apocalyptic literature, where it appears at a comparatively late period. ”

“ The profound reflections of the apostle on the radical antithesis of law and gospel, works and faith, were not appreciated in the 2nd century. Marcion alone perceived their decisive religious importance, and with them confronted the legalizing, and in this sense judaizing, tendencies of his Christian contemporaries. But the Pauline ideas lost their truth under his treatment; for, when it is denied that the God of redemption is at the same time the almighty Lord of heaven and earth, the gospel is turned upside down.
The assumption of two Gods necessarily led to cosmological speculations. ”

“ There were many who did not become, but who were, and therefore remained, Christians. Then, in addition to this, Christians were already found in all ranks and occupations—in the Imperial palace, among the officials, in the abodes of labour and the halls of learning, amongst slaves and freemen. Should the Church take the decisive step into the world, conform to its customs, and acknowledge as far as possible its authorities? ”

“ He was diligent in the cure of souls, labouring hard and successfully for the conversion of the numerous Gnostic communities and other heretical sects which still maintained a footing within the diocese. He himself claims to have brought more than a thousand Marcionites within the pale of the church, and to have destroyed many copies of the Diatessaron of Tatian, which were still in ecclesiastical use; and he also exerted himself to improve the diocese, which was at once large and poor, by building bridges and aqueducts, beautifying the town, and similar works. ”

“ That a philosopher like Justin, with a bias towards an Hellenic construction of the Christian religion, should nevertheless have accepted its chiliastic elements is the strongest proof that these enthusiastic expectations were inseparably bound up with the Christian faith down to the middle of the 2nd century. ”

“ The same Tertullian who had fortified the Catholic church against Gnosticism was none the less anxious to protect it from becoming a political organization. Being unable to reconcile incompatibles, he broke with the church and became the most powerful representative of Montanism in the West.
Although Tertullian’s extant works are both numerous and copious, our knowledge of his life is very vague. He cannot have been born much later than about 150. His activity as a jurist in Rome must fall within the period of Commodus ”