Francis Crawford Burkitt

“ The language of the Acts of Judas Thomas is quite other than this. Not philosophy but ethics is here the essence of Christianity: the chief aim of the writer is to produce a change of conduct, not spiritual enlightenment. St Thomas knows that the mysteries of life cannot be rightly uttered in human speech, but so far as may be he expounds them to all the people. There is no intentional concealment of doctrine, no inner circle of Illuminati. ”

“ The earth—on what is it pillowed, or the deep—in what is it fixed? We are of Adam, and here with our senses we perceive little. Only this we know: that God is one, and His Messiah one, and one the Spirit, and one the Faith, and one Baptism. ”

“ But if asceticism grows so naturally and inevitably on Eastern soil it must be a fact of human nature with which we have to reckon—to direct and educate, it may be, but not altogether to repress. Even if the heathen 'ascetic' of modern India has often more points in common with the Friar of the later middle ages than with St Francis of Assisi or Judas Thomas, yet he represents an ideal not wholly alien to the teaching of the New Testament. ”

“ But the present generation is too much accustomed to the serious religious novel not to be in sympathy with a doctrinal work cast in narrative form. That the Acts of Thomas is the work of a man very much in earnest there can be no manner of doubt. The style is simple, as becomes the narrative setting, but it is as truly a book of religious philosophy as the Pilgrim's Progress, and it demands from us serious study. ”

“ It is always necessary to make so much provision for the flesh that it is impossible to aim at forgetting its requirements. Even at Marseilles, in Cassian's day, it provoked merely ridicule when some of the monks attempted to live as the Egyptians lived in the warm, dry deserts. But the British Empire covers many lands and many climates, and it is the simple fact that in the land where Judas Thomas is fabled to have lived and taught the natural instincts of the people still identify true religion with the life of the wandering mendicant. ”

“ For when a man will fast from all that is abominable and will take the Body and Blood of the Messiah, let him take heed to his mouth whereby the King doth enter in. Thou hast no right, O man, through that same mouth to give out unclean words! Hear what our Saviour saith: That which entereth into a man doth not defile him; but that which cometh forth from the mouth, that defileth him [2] ." The fast here enjoined is metaphorical, but there can be no doubt that Aphraates teaches the doctrine that our Lord is physically present in the consecrated elements. ”

“ Faith, then, according to Aphraates, is like a building made of various materials of various colours. But the foundation of our faith is Jesus Christ, the Rock upon which the whole is built, as said the prophets (§2) . First a man believes, then loves, then hopes, then is justified and perfected, and he becomes a Temple for the Messiah to dwell in, as Jeremiah said: The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord—ye are the Temple of the Lord, if ye will make fair your ways and your works [7] , and as said our Lord Himself Ye are in Me, and I am in you (§3) . ”

“ I do not think we shall do justice to the fundamental idea unless for the Sun and the Moon, the Sea and the Winds, we substitute in thought the forces of nature which make up our modern universe, such properties of matter I mean as Gravitation and Electricity. ”

“ The one thing which historically justifies us in breaking with the Catholic tradition is this breach of continuity at the earliest period. We are entitled to criticise the Greek Gospels freely, to suggest on due evidence that phrases or figures have been wrongly or imperfectly apprehended, in a word we have a right privately to revise the judgments of the Church, mainly because the Church of the second century was so far removed in spirit and in knowledge from the life of Judaea in our Lord's day. ”

“ The other day a lady, the wife of a missionary who has spent many years with her husband at a mission station in Southern India, told me that when Christianity really takes possession of a native of India, when he becomes really converted, he is frequently anxious to take up the wandering ascetic life. I shewed my friend the Acts of Judas Thomas, and she was interested to find in it so much of the ethical type which an Indian convert would naturally be disposed to admire. ”

“ The main object of the dialogue is to expound the doctrine of the three influences which are at work upon man. These are his Nature, his Fate, and his Free-will. By Nature men are born, they grow to maturity and age, and they die: so far all men are alike. ”

“ As in the case of his doctrine of the Trinity and the person of Christ, it is not so much the orthodoxy or heterodoxy as the utter independence of Aphraates which strikes the modern reader. The good bishop goes on in his easy simple style with a tone of assured authority and unconsciousness of serious opposition, and it is only when we pause and try to fit his utterances into the schemes of doctrine and practice with which we are familiar that we realise that we are moving in another world. ”

“ In the treatise, On Virginity against the Jews (xviii 10 = Wright 354) , he says: "We have heard from the law that a man will leave his father and his mother and will cleave to his wife, and they will be one flesh; and truly a prophecy great and excellent is this. What father and mother doth he forsake that taketh a wife? This is the meaning: that when a man not yet hath taken a wife, he loveth and honoureth God his Father, and the Holy Spirit his Mother, and he hath no other love. ”

“ In the conception of the Church—that is, the organised body of believers,—as a thing in itself to be worked for and fostered, lies, I think, the point of difference between Catholicism and Gnosticism, between Aphraates and the Acts of Thomas. To the convert of Judas Thomas there was literally nothing left on this earth to live for. ”

“ We all know that this is not the whole truth. The Church may have grown up on Greek soil, but Christianity itself is not Greek in origin. The very earliest stage of all, that stage which it is most important for all of us to know and understand, is not Greek but Semitic. ”

“ We also have no part nor lot in the Empire, and our philosophy is not in bondage to the Greeks. Upon us will come, sooner or later, the task of adjusting our Faith and our Science, of reconciling the Catholic Religion with Christian Verity, as the Athanasian Creed puts it. In the Christian Verity—that is, Theological Science,—of the 4th century there was much that was temporary, ignorant, Greek, as indeed there is in the science. Christian or otherwise, of our own day. ”

“ To the north and west it is obvious that Greek-speaking Christianity could have no competitors. Marcion of Pontus to all intents and purposes counts as a Greek. The few Christians of Armenia used Syriac until the 4th century. The Latin Christianity of the West and of N. Africa is wholly the child of Greek Christianity. At a much later period it also developed distinctive characteristics, but it inherited nothing of primitive Christianity which it did not get through Greek Christianity. The language, the laws, the customs of the Latins are all utterly foreign to Palestine and Semitic thought. ”

“ From the alien religion out of which Christianity had sprung the Church inherited her Sacred Books in a Greek translation, and the writings of Christians that after a time were added on to the Canon of Scripture as a New Volume—these writings were composed in Greek also. In a word, the Church grew up on Greek soil.
The life of the Greek cities reacted on the development of the Churches. The thought and activity of small and progressive bodies must always be largely determined by the atmosphere of the great world outside, whether by way of protest or of assimilation. ”

“ So also, I suppose, Buddhism is a community of monks: the people are adherents, not members of the body.
It is very difficult to pass a true judgement upon Aphraates' conception of the Christian life. So much depends on the amount of influence which the inner community had upon the mass of the people, or, looking at the matter from another point of view, how much the unbaptised lay Christian felt himself to be a member of Christ. ”

“ These are not wholly in our power and come, at least partly, by Fate; for the doctrine that misfortunes are all sent as punishments for sin is expressly rejected [2] . But in addition to their Nature and their Fate men are moved by their Free-will, which has been given to them as a gift from God's bounty. It is in respect of this gift of Free-will that man was made in the image of God [3] . By his Free-will a man can modify his Fate to some extent, and with regard to his Free-will, and that alone, will he be judged at the Last Day. ”

“ The interest of the author of the Acts of Thomas lay in the workings of human nature, not in the conflicting claims of rival religions—in a word, it lay in the conversion of individual souls rather than in the establishment of a Church. ”

“ When Judas Thomas is about to go away with Ṣîfûr the General to cure his wife and daughter he bids farewell to his converts, and says to them: "Be ye holding to us and looking at us as the ministers of God; though we also, if we do not take pains that we may be worthy of this name, punishment we shall receive, and for judgment and requital it will be to us" (Wright, Syriac Text 23711—14 = Bonnet, Acta Thomae 4813—16) . ”

“ And remember and see, my beloved, that it is well that a man should cleanse his heart and keep his tongue and cleanse his hands of evil; for it is not fitting to mix honey and wormwood. For if a man would fast from bread and water, let him not mix with his fasting abuse and cursing. ”

“ But we speak of God and of our Lord Jesus, and of Angels and Watchers and Holy Ones, and of the New World, and of the incorruptible food of the tree of Life, and of the draught of the water of Life; of what Eye hath not seen, nor Ear heard, nor hath it entered into the Heart of man to conceive,—what God hath prepared from of old for those who love him [11] . ”

“ According to Bardaisan the world was not brought into being out of nothing, nor formed of matter naturally inert, but it is a beautifully balanced combination of independent and often antagonistic forces. ”

“ We are so accustomed to the solemnisation of weddings that we may easily come to think of the act as natural and inevitable, but the words of Aphraates teach us that it was not always so regarded. It is surely no light gain to Christian society that the bridal feast has been hallowed with the blessing of the Church. ”

“ To seize the full meaning, or meanings, we must be able to retranslate the Greek words into the original Aramaic expression. It is well known that in some circumstances the Aramaic dialects use the phrase 'a son of man' for 'a human being '; moreover, there is an undoubted connexion of some kind between our Lord's use of 'The Son of Man' and the very similar phrase in Daniel's Vision [8] which itself was written in Aramaic. For many reasons, therefore, we turn to the Syriac renderings of ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου with some justifiable expectation of obtaining help. ”

“ It will be noticed even from this short summary that the Acts of Thomas form a work complete in itself. From the moment that St Thomas starts for India we hear no more of the other Apostles. He is absolutely independent of every one except his Lord. The word Church occurs only once and that by mistake [5] . Moreover the whole framework of the tale is Eastern, and Eastern of a very decided type. The proper names are such as would occur to a Syriac-speaking Christian, but they could hardly have been invented by a Greek. ”

“ Nowhere in Christian literature do the merchant's goods appear so little in comparison with the Pearl of great price. "As long as we are in the world," says St Thomas, "we are unable to speak about that which all the believers in God are going to receive. For if we say that He hath given us Light, we mention something which we have seen; and if we say that He hath given us Wealth, we mention something that is in the world ”

“ In Semitic languages there is no neuter, and Rûḥ, the word for wind or spirit, is feminine; in the older Syriac literature, therefore, before the influence of Greek theology made itself felt, the Holy Spirit also is feminine. ”

“ But these are mere allusions by the way: it is not so much against the gods that St Thomas preaches as against the evil nature in man. Contrast this with the elaborate polemic against the Jews in Aphraates, and the long sermons against idolatry in the Doctrine of Addai. So much indeed is it the rule that the 'Acts' of martyrs should contain a testimony against the worship of idols that in the Latin version of the Acta Thomae there is an extended interpolation, telling how St Thomas refused to worship the Sun-god when he was brought before King Mazdai. ”

“ The flames of the Arian controversy are consuming the vitals of the Empire. Christianity is divided up into rival camps, each anathematising the other, while according to one authority the public posting system is quite thrown out of gear by the troops of eager bishops hastening from synod to synod [3] . What then has Aphraates to say about the crisis in the Church? ”

“ In a time of transition, such as he lived in, the art of saying nothing in a great many words must have been exceedingly useful, and the saint who preferred to glue together the pages of Apollinaris's book rather than attempt to confute the writer must have been aware that argument was not his strong point. ”

“ The Aramaic of Edessa was more than a mere local dialect: it was the medium of commerce throughout the Euphrates valley, while the Aramaic of Palmyra and of Palestine hardly differed from it more than Lowland 'Scots' differs from the standard English. Edessa, in one word, was situated on the confines of two great civilisations, the Greek and the Persian, while at the same time it had not been robbed of its own Semitic culture. The extant remains of Syriac literature are almost wholly the product of later ages and less fortunate conditions ”

“ Apart from intentional paraphrase the translation is fairly done: so well, in fact, that we cannot think of it as the work of Gentiles. It seems to me not improbable that it is a monument of Jewish learning of the great age of translations, the age of Aquila and Symmachus, which has been taken over by the Christian Church. Had it been wholly the work of Christians, I cannot but think that we should have heard of the singular erudition of the translators and of their courage in breaking away from the Greek tradition. ”