I. NEW SAYINGS OF JESUS

of Log. 2 Logion 2 and the mystic character of Log. 5 Logion 5 were obviously capable of development in Encratite a sect advocating strict asceticism and Gnostic directions, the Sayings as a whole were much nearer in style to the New Testament than to the apocryphal literature of the middle and end of the second century. If these positions have been vigorously assailed, they have also been stoutly defended, and about the second and third no general agreement has been reached; with regard to the first the balance of opinion has been in favour of our view, and the various attempts to trace a connexion of ideas running through the Sayings have met with little acceptance. What answer is to be returned to the corresponding problems in 1?

We will take the third question first. Is there anything in 1 to show that the Sayings originated in or circulated among a particular sect? We should answer this in the negative. There is nothing heretical in the introduction, the 1st, 3rd, and 4th Sayings, or, so far as can be judged, the 5th. The Ascetic leanings which have been ascribed to the 2nd Logion are conspicuously absent in 1; the remains of the 5th Saying in fact rather suggest an anti-Jewish point of view, from which however the 2nd Logion itself was not widely distant, if, as we strongly hold, 'fast' and 'sabbatize' are to be taken metaphorically. The absence of any Jewish-Christian element in 1 is the more remarkable seeing that the 1st Saying also occurs in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. The only Saying that is at all suspicious is the 2nd, which like Log. 5 is sure to be called in some quarters 'Gnostic.' That the profoundly mystical but, as it seems to us, obviously genuine Saying of our Lord recorded in Luke xvii. 21 'The kingdom of God is within you' should have given rise to much speculation was to be expected, and from Hippolytus Refut. v. 7 it is known that this Saying occupied an important place in the doctrines of the Naassenes, one of the most pronounced Gnostic sects of the second or early third century. That there is a connexion between the Sayings and the Naassenes through the Gospel of Thomas is quite possible and this point will be discussed later; but to import Naassene tenets into the 2nd Saying in 1 is not only gratuitous but a ὕστερον πρότερον the latter before the former; an inversion of logical order. Moreover, though the other ideas in the Saying connected with the parallel from St. Luke, the development of the kingdom of Heaven through brute creation up to man (if that be the meaning of ll. 9-16), and the Christian turn given to the proverbial