A CATALOGUE OF The principal Ecclesiastical Writers, &c. after the Apostolic Age, with the Time when they flourished, chiefly from Cave's Historia Literaria. The different Opinions of Dr. HORSLEY and THAT my readers may more easily form a clear and comprehensive idea of the nature and extent of this controversy, I shall, in this place, briefly state the principal articles on which Dr. Horsley and myself hold different opinions. 1. Dr. Horsley insists upon it that the faith of the primitive christian church must have been trinitarian, because that doctrine appears in the writings of Barnabas and Ignatius. I say that, admitting these works to be genuine in the main, they bear evident marks of interpolation with respect to this very subject, and therefore the conclusion is not just. 2. Dr. Horsley says, that those who are called Ebionites did not exist in the age of the apostles, and also that, though they believed the simple humanity of Christ, they probably held some mysterious exaltation of his nature after his ascension, which made him the object of prayer to them. I say the Ebionites certainly existed in the time of the apostles, and that this notion of their holding such an exaltation of his nature, as to make him the object of prayer, is highly improbable. 3. Dr. Horsley says, that those who are called Nazarenes by the early christian writers believed the divinity of Christ, that they did not exist till after the time of Adrian, and had their name from the place where they settled in the North of Galilee, after they were then driven from Jerusalem. I maintain that these Nazarenes no more believed the divinity of Christ than the Ebionites, and that, together with them, they were supposed by the christian fathers to have existed in the time of the apostles. 4. Dr. Horsley maintains that there was a church of orthodox Jewish christians at Jerusalem after the time of Adrian; for that the body of Jewish christians, who had before observed the law of Moses, abandoned their ceremonies after the destruction of the place, in order to obtain the privileges of the Elian colony settled there by Adrian. Origen, who asserts that the Jewish christians had not abandoned the laws and customs of their ancestors, Dr. Horsley says, must have known the contrary, and therefore asserted a wilful falsehood. I I say that Adrian expelled all the Jews, whether christians or not, from Jerusalem, that the christian church afterwards settled at Jerusalem consisted wholly of Gentile converts, and that the testimony of Origen, agreeing with this, is highly worthy of credit. 5. Dr. Horsley maintains, that though he finds no unitarians in the apostolic age, a censure was intended for them by the apostle John in the phrase Christ came in the flesh. I assert that the unitarians did exist in great numbers in the time of John, but that he did not censure them at all; and that the phrase Christ came in the flesh, relates to the Gnostics only. 6. Dr. Horsley asserts that the unitarians, from the time that they made their appearance, were considered as heretics by the orthodox christians, and not admitted to communion with them, and particularly that they were included by Justin Martyr among those heretics whom he charges with blasphemy. I assert that in Justin's time, and much later, the unitarians were not deemed heretics at all, that Justin did not |