The Gospel of the Egj-ptians was probably used by the author of the homily ( + A.D. 150) known as 2 Clement. This is not beyond question (cf. Zahn ; Haase, p. 3 ; and Batiffol's plea in his study of the Gospel in Vigouroux's Dictionnaire de la Bible, ii. 162.5-1627), but the evidence points strongly in favour of such a hypothesis. Thus the saying quoted in Strom, iii. 13. 92 reappears in 2 Clem. xii. 2 : 'When questioned by someone when His kingdom would come, the Lord said, " When the two shall be one, the outward as the inward, the male with the female, neither male nor female." ' If this is so, it proves that the Gospel of the Egyptians had a high place, next to the four Gospels, since it is quoted alongside of them. The writer of 2 Clement gives quite an orthodox and moral interpretation of the saying which he cites, and this would again corro- borate the impression that the Gospel of the Egyp- tians was not originally Encratitic, but only that some of its contents lent themselves to such views. It is possible but hazardous to infer that the tliree other uncanonical quotations in 2 Clement are also derived from the Egyptian Gospel, viz. iv. 5 ('The Lord said, "If you are gathered with me in my bosom, and do not my commands, I will cast you out and will say to you. Depart from me, I know not whence you are, you workers of iniquity"'),* V. 2-4 (' The Lord said, "You shall be as lambs in the midst of wolves." And Peter answered and said to him, "Supposing the wolves tear the lambs?" Je.sus said to Peter, " Let not the lambs fear the wolves after death ; and as for you, fear not those who kill you and can do no more to you, but fear him who after deatli has power over soul and body, to cast them into the fiery gehenna"'), and viii. 5 ('The Lord said in the Gospel, " If you did not guard what is small, who shall give you what is great ? For I tell you that he who is faithful in what is least is also faithful in what is much " '). The attempts to identify the Oxyrhynchite fragment (see below, p. 499), the Oxyrhynchite Logia, the Strassburg Coptic fragments (cf. p. 506), the Fayyftm fragment, or the Gospel of Peter, witli this Gospel, have not succeeded in almost any case in establish- ing a proof which is beyond question, although the affinities with the (first series of) Oxyrhynchite Logia perhaps justify us in assigning the latter provisionally to this Egyptian scripture (cf. J. A. Robinson in Expositor, 5th ser., vi. [1897] 417 f.).
The use made of it by men like Julius Cassianus, a leader of the Docetic movement who was tinged with Encratitic tendencies, and Theodotus, the Egj'ptian Valentinian, together with its popular- ity among Christian circles like the Naassenes and the Sabellians,t may have contributed to the dis-
* In the context of a passage like 5It 722f. ? Practically the same Logion occurs among the scholia of the HG (cf. above, p. 492). Does this mean that the Clement quotations go back to NG, or that the scholia borrowed from 2 Clement, or that the Logion lay in both XG and EG? Cf. Schmidtke, p. 297 f.
t According to Hippolytus (Philos. v. 7), it was one of the writings exploited by the Gnostic Kaassenes ; according to Epiphanius (Ixii. 2), the Sabellians used it(ToO KoAov/iieVou Aiyvi- Tt'ou eiiayyeXiov) in support Of their tenets. Both noticea corroborate the Egyptian provenance of the GospeL The Sabellians used it along with the OT and the NT.
496 GOSPELS (UNCANONICAL)
GOSPELS (UNCANONICAL)
favour into which it afterwards fell. Originally its position relative to the canonical Gospels may have resembled that of the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Like the latter and the Gospel of Peter, it circulated for a while without incurring any suspicions or hostility on the part of the authorities.
Unlike the Gospel of the Hebrews, it seems neither to have been a translation nor to have been translated. Ear' Aiyvn-Tiovs does not mean, 'in Coptic'; the most probable explanation is that it denotes a Gospel meant for and used by the native Egyptian converts, just as Ka^'"E,3paioiis meant a Gospel originally designed for the Jewish Christians of Palestine. It is possible that the Gospel of the Hebrews reached the Jewish Chris- tians of Alexandria (Egypt), and that the Gospel of the Egyptians was so named in order to dis- tinguish it from its contemporary ; but this is no more than conjecture, although AlyinrrLos is known to have meant ' provincial ' as opposed to ' Alex- andrian.' Zahn accounts for the title and circula- tion of the Gospel by supposing that already, as in later days, the provincial churches of Egypt did not invariably follow the Alexandrian Chuich, and that, while the latter adhered more closely to the canonical Gospels, the country churches favoured the native product.* This meets the requirements of the situation during the later part of the 2nd cent, as fairly as any other hypothesis, and may be accepted tentatively as satisfactory. But there is no reason to suppose that the Egyptian Gospel only followed in the wake of the four canonical Gospels. Unfortun- ately, our knowledge of the origins of Christianity in Egypt is extremely scanty until the middle of the 2nd century. There is, further, the lack of adequate information about the exact contents of the Gospel of the Egyptians. But if the latter could be used by the author of a non-Egyptian document like 2 Clement by the middle of the 2nd cent., the Egyptian Gospel may have been current c. A.D. 125, if not earlier.