I should like to suggest that the rather innocent petition, “ut mittas spiritum tuum sanctum in oblationem,” in the Anaphora of Hippolytus, is not a later interpolation.

In his valuable edition of the Apostolic Tradition, Dom Gregory Dix has argued that the difficulties of the Latin text are satisfactorily solved by deleting this petition. Much of his case rests on the fact that the Testamentum Domini omits the crucial clause; and it is in the light of this document that he attempts to reconstruct what Hippolytus wrote.

“It is not permitted that country bishops should ordain presbyters or deacons, nor, moreover, may city presbyters do so, without the written permission of the bishop in each parish.” This canon, which is still on occasion cited to uphold presbyterian ordination in the early church,1 so bristles with difficulties, that it is perhaps advisable to refrain from using it to prove anything.

There is hardly a point in the whole Quartodeciman question that has not, at one time or another, been vigorously contested. Since the days when the Tübingen school interpreted the struggle to support their separation of the Fourth Gospel from the Johannine Tradition, there has grown up a veritable library of controversial literature on the subject. Perhaps the most judicious statement of the problem in English appeared in Stanton's The Gospels as Historical Documents (Part I, pp. 173–197), which was dependent upon Schürer's De Controversiis Paschalibus (1869). Since that time, however, the question has been re-opened by Schmidt's learned Excursus appended to his text of the Epistola Apostolorum. Dating this work in the 60's of the second century, he claimed that in Chapter 15 there was a reference to the Paschal controversy that confirmed his view. Furthermore, he contended that this section of the Epistola had once for all settled a number of uncertain problems. Chief among these was the significance attached by the Asiatic Church to the 14th of Nisan. Schmidt concluded from the words, “But do ye commemorate my death,” that on this day the Easterners celebrated the Passion. Henceforth it would be impossible to claim that the Quartodeciman rite implied a Christian “Passover” which commemorated the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist (pp. 600–601). Indeed, he went so far as to urge that the whole Asiatic practice was centered in the Passion to the exclusion of the Resurrection. Contrasting the Quartodeciman with the Catholic custom he wrote, “Dort Passah, hier Ostern!” (p. 579).

The condemnation of Origen is one of the saddest episodes in the history of the Christian church. The breadth of his thought, the keenness of his genius and the wide sympathy of his religion, contrast vividly with the narrow obscurantism of his monkish detractors. It is significant that the final defeat of Origen and the closing of the philosophic schools of Athens belong to the same era. It is as if a curtain were then drawn upon the intellectual freedom of the East, and along with certain garbled texts from his works all that was fine and liberal and mature in the faith and thought of Origen had been condemned. He who had striven for a religion truly catholic and had contended that all things were the church's heritage and all things were Christ's, was cast out of the church with imprecations of intolerance and fanaticism. The long controversies over Origen that reach their climax under Justinian mark the passing of much that was noble and enlightened in the early tradition of Greek Christianity.