simply as the Creed,' and in the XLII. Articles of 1553 it is described as 'that which is commonly called the Apostles' Creed.'1

This was perhaps excess of caution and scrupulosity, for even if the Creed cannot claim to have been drawn up by the Apostles, or to be strictly speaking their work, its title may very reasonably be defended. It is the Apostles' Creed in the sense that it contains a summary of the doctrine which the Apostles preached, and that many of the phrases embodied in it became, so to speak, stereotyped in the common form of Apostolic preaching to which the New Testament bears witness. We have already seen that there are traces of something very like formularies of faith in the New Testament, and such expressions as the following seem to have become accepted phrases in the days of the Apostles: One God the Father,' 'Jesus Christ,'' His Son,' 'His only begotten Son,' or 'His only Son,'' Our Lord,' or 'One Lord,' 'under Pontius Pilate,' 'was buried,' 'rose again the third day,' 'sitteth at the right hand of God,'' to judge the quick and the dead." It

1 Not till 1662 was the title, The Apostles' Creed, given a place in the rubrics of the Prayer Book.

and one Lord

2 See e.g. I Cor. viii. 6, 'One God the Father Jesus Christ'; I S. John iv. 9, 14, 15; cf. S. John iii. 16, 18; 'His only begotten Son,' etc.; I S. Tim. vi. 13, 'Who before Pontius Pilate witnessed a good confession'; 1 Cor. xv. 4, 'How that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures'; Col. iii. 1, 'Where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God.' Cf. Rom. viii. 34; Eph. i. 20; Heb. i. 3, viii. 1, x. 12, xii. 2; 1 S. Pet. iii. 22; 2 S. Tim. iv. I, 'who shall judge the quick and the dead'; cf. I S. Pet. iv. 5.

is possible, therefore, that the title was originally given to it as being in this sense the Apostolic Creed, and that when this had passed into common use its origin was forgotten, and the name gave rise to the tradition, the formation of which would have been assisted by the misunderstanding of the name Symbolum into which Rufinus and others fell.1

After the introduction on the origin of the Creed, Rufinus proceeds to comment upon the several Articles in due order, carefully pointing out wherein the Creed of the Roman Church differed from that of his own Church of Aquileia, and (in some cases) from those of the Eastern Churches; telling us also that whereas in other Churches some additions had been made on account of heresies, none had been made in the Church of Rome, partly because no heresy had its origin there, and partly because owing to the great publicity there given to the recitation of the Creed before Baptism, any addition was at once detected and not permitted. We are consequently in a position to say what was the exact form of the Roman Creed in the last quarter of the fourth century. It then consisted of the following articles :

1. I believe in God the Father Almighty;

2. And in Christ Jesus, His only Son, our Lord,

1 Another possible explanation of the name is that the Creed of the Roman Church was originally known as the Apostolic Creed, because that Church of Rome was the only Apostolic See in the West. But this does not appear so probable as the view stated in the text.

3. Who was born of (de) the Holy Ghost, of (ex) the

Virgin Mary,

4. Was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and was buried,

5. Rose again from the dead the third day,

6. Ascended into heaven,

Sitteth on the right hand of the Father,

7. From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead;

8. And in the Holy Ghost,

9. The Holy Church,

10. The forgiveness of sins.

11. The resurrection of the flesh.

Some fifty years earlier we have another authority for the Roman Creed, which confirms what Rufinus tells us of it. In 341 Marcellus, Bishop of Ancyra, who had taken a prominent part in the Arian controversy, and had through Arian influence been deposed from his see and banished, was in Rome. On leaving he addressed a letter to Julius, Bishop of Rome, in defence of his orthodoxy, to which he appended his Creed, speaking of it apparently as the faith which he had been taught by his forefathers in God out of the holy Scriptures, and which he himself had been accustomed to preach in the Church of God. The letter of Marcellus, together with the Creed, is preserved in the work of Epiphanius,1 a Greek writer, and it is not possible to be quite certain whether Greek is the 1 Epiphanius, Har., lxxii.

original language of the Creed, which is acknowledged to be that of the Roman Church, and not an Eastern Creed or a private composition of Marcellus. On the whole, the probability appears to be that Marcellus was really using an original Greek text which had come down from the earlier days when the Roman Church was a Greek-speaking community. However this may be, the Creed which he gives is verbally identical with that given by Rufinus, except that in the text as given by Epiphanius the title "The Father' is wanting in the first article, and at the close there is added another article, 'the life everlasting.' It is generally thought that these two differences are due to the blunders of Epiphanius, or the copyists of his book, and that the form given by Rufinus is the correct one. Anyhow, the agreement between the two is so close that they may be treated as practically identical. This gives us a fixed point from which to work in considering the history of the Creed. We know for certain the form it took before the middle of the fourth century. There, at least, we are on sure ground; and starting from this we may ask the following questions:

(1) How much earlier than Marcellus can the old Roman Creed be traced, and when, and how did it originate?

(2) When, where, and why were the additions made which brought it into the form in which it is familiar to us?

(1) With regard to the former of these questions,

D

recent writers have been able to show that there are allusions to the very words of the Roman Creed in representative writers of the third century, e.g. Felix, Bishop of Rome, 269-274; Dionysius, Bishop of Rome, c. 259, as well as Novatian, a presbyter of the Roman Church about the same time. Even earlier it is thought that traces of an acquaintance with the same form may be found in the writings of the African presbyter Tertullian, c. 200 a.D.; and if so, we must hold that it had passed from Rome to Africa before the close of the second century. An apparent indication of knowledge of it in the writings of the heretic Marcion carries it back to the middle of that century, and it is now generally agreed that it cannot have been composed later than 150. Harnack puts it between 140 and 150, while other good authorities, as Kattenbusch, hold that its composition must be dated still earlier, viz. a little before or after the year 100. We shall thus be on safe ground if we claim for the form an origin in sub-apostolic days, when the leaders of the Church were men who had actually known some of the Apostles, and had lived familiarly with their immediate

successors.

The experts, then, are nearly agreed as to the approximate date of the Creed, but on two points connected with its origin they are more sharply divided. (a) Some are disposed to think that it was a gradual compilation, and that it cannot be assigned to any one author, since it grew up,' as it were, by the crystallisation of floating formulæ in use in the Church.

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