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380 Gerald Hawtingthird person (the Holy Spirit) were often talked of using the language appropriate.to angels, and in some Jewish groups a particular, named angel (Metatron, Y ahoel, ·etc.) came to be understood as God's equivalent or doppelganger. Among Jewishand Christian groups often described as Gnostic, the creation of the world is sometimesascribed to one or more of these angels and thus God was removed from thecreation of matter, which they regarded as evil.It is in the context of these types of ideas, then, that Qur'anic material pertainingto angels should be placed. Specifically here, when the opponents of the messengerreject him because he is merely a human being, and bemoan the fact that an angelhas not come with, to, or upon him, we should be aware not only of the extendedconcept of an angel but also of the application of the idea of angel to other spiritualentities such as the spirit and holy spirit, traditionally understood to be theentity that inspires the Prophet. 20It is in the surviving evidence for Jewish Christianity that we find the strongestlinking of the ideas of prophet, spirit and angel. That evidence naturally presentsconsiderable problems of evaluation and interpretation. A large part of our informationderives from heresiographers and historians of the Church who reflect"orthodox" viewpoints, the best known probably being the Ecclesiastical History(Panarion, "medicine chest"), or Adversus Haereses ofEpiphanius (d. 403). Suchsources sometimes supply quotations from texts attributed to the sect or sectsunder discussion, for example the so-called Gospel of the Ebionites. Anyonefamiliar with Islamic heresiography will be aware of the problems posed by suchsources: not merely the hostile viewpoint, but also the copying of informationfrom one author to another, the difficulty of ascertaining the sources of somecrucial details, and the tendency among writers to reconcile, by various stratagems,inconsistent information from the texts available to them and sometimesfrom personal knowledge. 21There are, however, a few surviving texts that appear to reflect, in places atleast, ideas accepted as those of Jewish-Christian circles. The most substantialare the so-called Pseudo-Clementine Literature (the Homilies and Recognitionsattributed to Peter's successor as bishop of Rome), although the dating andcomposition histocy of such works, and the relationship between them, presentfurther difficulties. Both the Homilies and the Recognitions are probablyfourth-centucy elaborations of a third-centucy core text (often called the20 In the work generally known as the Ascension of Isaiah, probably compiled in the form in which weknow it in the second century and including material ofboth Jewish and Christian origin, the holy spiritis assimilated to Gabriel and referred to as the angel of the holy spirit (Danielou, Theo/ogie, 177-80).At one point (9:32) the text speaks of"the angel of the holy spirit who speaks in you (i.e. in Isaiah) andthe other righteous men." Another second-century text, the Christian Shepherd of Hennas, refers -apparently uniquely in early Christian texts- to "the angel of the spirit of prophecy" (mandate II,verse 9).21 For an analysis of the evidence about Jewish Christianity to be found in Patristic writings, and apresentation of the relevant passages in their original languages and in English translation, seeA.F.J. Klijn and G.J. Reinink, Patristic Evidence for Jewish Christian Sects, Lei den: Brill 1973.Messengers and angels in the Qur ·an 381Gnmdschrift and described as a romance or novel) that may itself have beencompiled from earlier Jewish-Christian sources.ZZWe are not concerned here with whether what we are told about the ideas of anyparticular secfis or is not accurate or true. The information provided by the heresiographersand other writers is significant for us as a body of concepts and beliefsknown in the first four Christian centuries. Some of them may have been falselyascribed to a particular group but there is evidence that they were commoncurrency in Jewish-Christian and Gnostic circles and some are attested in the literaturethat comes from them.It is chiefly in ideas about Jesus, prophecy and revelation that material relevantto the notions of the opponents of the messenger of the Qur'an appears, It is·. impossible to generalize about Jewish-Christian Christology, but Christ, calledfrequently the True Prophet in the Homilies and Recognitions, often is referred toas an angel or spirit.'The attribution by Epiphanius of three understandings of Christ among theEbionites is perhaps not to be taken literally but will be a convenient starting pointfor the following discussion.a. Some identified him with Adam, created when God blew his breath (epipnoias,not pneuma) into him. 23b. Others said he is from above, created first, a spirit (pneuma) above all theangels, lord of all [scil. of the angels],.called Christ and chosen for all eternity;he entered into Adam (en ti5i Adam elthe), has appeared in human form(clothed in a body: endoumenos to soma) to various patriarchs, and finallycame at the end of time clothed with the body of Adam to be crucified, raisedup and to return on high.c. The third opinion is that the spirit who is Christ descended on Jesus. 24The sources of this information are not obvious, but Epiphanius had access tosome Jewish-Christian literature (all of which he assumed to be Ebionite) as wellas the works of some of his predecessors. 25The second position among the Ebionites recorded by Epiphanius identifiesChrist as a spirit who rules the angels, a sort of archangel but greater: "He was notbegotten by God the Father, but created like one of the archangels, being greater22 On the Pseudo-Clementines, see F.S. Jones, "Clementines, Pseudo-," in The Anchor BibleDictionary, 5:1061-62, and idem, "The Pseudo-Clementines" in Jackson-McCabe (ed.), JewishChristianity Reconsidered: Rethinking Ancient Groups and Texts, Minneapolis: Fortress Press,2007, 285-304. How far the Homilies and the Recognitions in the form in which we have them areJewish-Christian documents is a disputed issue, but Jones argues that the Grundschriji, theso-called Periodoi Petrou, uses Jewish-Christian sources and reflects Jewish-Christian doctrines.23 Cf. Q 3:59, which explicitly compares Jesus and Adam but refers to the creation of the latter fromdust and the utterance of the divine fiat. Q 15:29 and 38:72, however, do allude to the creation ofAdam when God breathed His spirit into him, while 21:91 and 66:12 talk of the conception ofJesus when God breathed His spirit into Mary, and 4:171 refers to Jesus as a spirit from God.24 See the excerpt from the Panarion at Klijn and Reinink, Patristic Evidence, 176-79.25 Klijn and Reinink, Patristic Evidence, 30-33.