Zacharias. For on this account the priest was commanded by the lawgiver himself to wear bells, that when he enters in to do his priestly office, he whom they worship may hear the sound of the bells and hide himself, that the likeness of his shape may not be detected.
This is the vulgarest expression of the hatred of the Old Covenant of which Marcion was the noblest exponent. I need not dwell here upon the prevalence of the belief among heathens that Jews and Christians worshipped a deity in the form of an ass. The Palatine graffito of the crucified figure with an ass's head will occur to many readers.
Another Gospel (?) of similar tendency was that which was used by the nameless 'Adversary of the Law and the Prophets' whom Augustine refutes, and from which the following is quoted:
The apostles having asked the Lord what they were to think about the Jewish prophets, who were thought in the past to have foretold his coming, he was troubled that they even yet had such thoughts, and answered: Ye have given up (let go) the living one who is before your eyes, and talk idly of the dead.
Epiphanius in Her. xxvi. 8 quotes the Lesser Questions of Mary: but I must be excused from repeating the passage.
In Her. xxx. 16 he tells of a book used by the Ebionites called the Ascents of James:
Certain supposititious Ascents, and Discourses, so called, do they produce in the Ascents of James, representing him as speaking against the Temple and the sacrifices, and the fire on the altar; and many other things full of empty sound. And there, too, they are not ashamed to indict Paul, with forged discourses full of the malice and error of their false apostles: calling him a man of Tarsus (which he confesses and does not deny), but asserting that he came of the Greeks; taking their occasion from the place, because of the words truthfully spoken by him: I am a man of Tarsus, a citizen of no mean city; they then say that he was a Greek, the child of a Greek mother and a Greek father, and that he went up to Jerusalem and remained there some time, and desired to take the daughter of the high priest to wife, and on that account became a proselyte and was circumcised, and when he failed to secure the maiden he was enraged, and wrote against circumcision and against the sabbath and the Law.
The book, as Lightfoot (Galatians, 330, n. 2) says, 'was so called doubtless as describing the ascents of James up the Temple stairs, whence he harangued the people'. Relics of it may probably be discerned in the latter chapters of the first book of the Clementine Recognitions. Lightfoot also suggests, very ingeniously (l.c. 367, n. 1), that the account of the death of James, quoted by Eusebius from Hegesippus, in which James is cast down from the pinnacle of the Temple, 'was the grand finale of these ascents'. In the Recognitions he addresses the people from the Temple steps, and is
