me like he connects the eighth day with the eschatological age to come, rather than the
seventh, as the rabbis had, establishing a scheme like this:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 = present | 7 = millennium | 8 = eternity.
24
Barnabas was only of the earliest Christian writers to combine the six days of creation with
Psalm 90:4 to produce a cosmic week of salvation. This was not yet chiliasm in any developed
sense. Barnabas sees only a rest period between the old and new worlds; however, his thinking
falls into the same pattern that would later get fuller treatment.
3.3. Cerinthus (contemporary of St. John, see text at p. 40)
Cerinthus is reported to have depicted Christ's earthly kingdom in terms of sensual
pleasures of eating, drinking, and marriage festivities. (Sometimes the supporters of a doctrine
are its own worst enemies.) This was the very heretic with whom the Apostle John refused to
share a bath house (Hist. eccl. 3.28.6). Certainly his opponents make him sound like the false
prophets of whom Micah warned, "If a lying windbag should come and say, `I'll promise you
wine and beer,' he would be just the right preacher for these people!" (Mic 2:11). So too,
Eusebius castigates Cerinthus:
For the doctrine which he taught was this: that the kingdom of Christ will be an earthly one. As
he was himself devoted to the pleasures of the body and altogether sensual in his nature, he
dreamed that the kingdom would consist in those things which he desired, namely, in the
delights of the belly and of sexual passion; that is to say, in eating and drinking and marrying,
and in festivals and sacrifices and the slaying of victims, under the guise of which he thought he
could indulge his appetites with a better grace. (Hist. eccl. 7.25.23).
This misused liturgical material that spoke of hills dripping with win (Amos 9:13, cf. Lev 26:5;
Joel 3:18 [Heb 4:18]) to claim sensual delights. Indeed, Amos 9:13 and Joel 3:18 were two of
the very passages that Papias and other early chiliasts adapted to describe the millennial period
as a time of increased fecundity on earth. When rightly construed, these material delights were
the delights of an Edenic paradise flowering again after creation had been freed from the curse
of thorns, sweat, and pain.
3.4. Papias of Hieropolis (active A.D. 115
140, see text at p. 40)
11
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24
Taken from Kleist, The Didache the Epistle of Barnabas; The Epistles and the
Martyrdom of St. Polycarp; The Fragments of Papias; The Epistle to Diognetus, 179.