The Jerusalem Creed

The baptismal creed of the Church of Jerusalem is one of the most important local symbols of the fourth century, yet no manuscript preserves its text. It survives only because St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in his Catechetical Lectures, expounded it clause by clause to candidates for baptism, never writing it out whole — the disciplina arcani forbade committing the creed to paper. From the lemmata Cyril comments on across Lectures 6–18, scholars have reconstructed the symbol, and around it has grown one of the liveliest debates in the history of the creeds: the question of its relation to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A Creed Reconstructed, Not Quoted

The single most distinctive fact about the Jerusalem creed is that we do not possess it. Unlike the creed of Nicaea (325) or the symbol ratified at Constantinople (381), the Jerusalem baptismal creed was never set down as a continuous text by Cyril or by any contemporary. It was delivered to the photizomenoi — the candidates being illuminated — orally, recited to them by the bishop and committed by them to memory, with an express prohibition against writing it down (Catechetical Lecture 5.12). Cyril instructs them: “this summary I wish you to commit to memory … and not to write it out on paper, but to engrave it by memory upon your heart” (Catechetical Lecture 5.12; trans. Gifford, NPNF II/7). The creed thus belonged to the discipline of the secret, the graduated unveiling that withheld the deepest mysteries — Eucharist, the Lord’s Prayer, and the wording of the symbol — from the unbaptized (Procatechesis 12).

For this reason the Jerusalem creed must be recovered indirectly. Lectures 6 through 18 form a single sustained commentary in which Cyril takes up the articles of the local symbol in sequence and expounds each. The creed is reconstructed by collating the clauses he quotes as lemmata before commenting on them — “and in one Lord Jesus Christ,” “the only-begotten Son of God,” “crucified and buried,” and so forth. The standard modern reconstruction is that of J.N.D. Kelly, who in Early Christian Creeds (3rd ed., 1972) collated Cyril’s citations into a continuous text, building on the earlier work of F.J.A. Hort. Because the method depends on inference from a running commentary rather than on a preserved document, the reconstruction is secure in substance but uncertain in some particulars of wording and order.

The Reconstructed Symbol

As recovered from the Lectures by Hort and Kelly, the Jerusalem creed ran in three articles, structured — like nearly all Eastern baptismal symbols — on the trinitarian baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19. Its substance was approximately as follows.

In the first article, belief in one God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible (cf. Catechetical Lecture 6–9). In the second article, belief in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father true God before all ages, by whom all things were made; who was incarnate and made man, was crucified and buried, rose again on the third day, ascended into heaven and sat down at the right hand of the Father, and shall come in glory to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end (cf. Catechetical Lecture 10–15). In the third article, belief in one Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who spoke in the prophets; and in one baptism of repentance for the remission of sins; and in one holy catholic Church; and in the resurrection of the flesh; and in life everlasting (cf. Catechetical Lecture 16–18).

The order and the choice of clauses can be traced directly to the sequence of the lectures: the eternal generation of the Son occupies Lecture 11, the Incarnation and virgin birth Lecture 12, the Crucifixion and burial Lecture 13, the Resurrection, Ascension, and session Lecture 14, the Second Coming Lecture 15, the Holy Spirit Lectures 16–17, and the Church, the resurrection of the flesh, and the life everlasting Lecture 18 (Catechetical Lecture 18.32 gathers the final clauses). The creed is a Palestinian member of the broad Eastern family of baptismal symbols, sharing its shape with the creeds of Antioch, Caesarea, and the wider Syro-Phoenician region.

The Conspicuous Absence of Homoousios

The most theologically significant feature of the reconstructed creed is what it does not contain: the Nicene watchword homoousios (consubstantial, “of one substance with the Father”). Although Cyril’s exposition of the Son is emphatically high — he is the “only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father true God before all ages,” and “by whom all things were made” — the creed nowhere uses the term that the Council of Nicaea had made the test of orthodoxy in 325 (Catechetical Lecture 11.4–14 expounds the eternal generation without it). This silence is deliberate. Cyril’s Lectures avoid homoousios throughout, confessing the full divinity of the Son in scriptural and traditional language — “true God of true God,” eternally begotten, like the Father in all things — while declining the contested technical term (see Cyril and the Arian Crisis). The creed thus represents a confession substantively orthodox yet pre-Nicene in vocabulary, reflecting the mid-century reluctance of many conservative Easterners to adopt a word they regarded as non-scriptural and as tainted by earlier Sabellian and Samosatene misuse.

The point matters for dating and reconstruction alike: the creed Cyril expounds is plainly an inherited local symbol, older than the controversies of his own day, not a polemical composition framed against Arius. Its archaic, scriptural character is precisely what makes it valuable as a witness to a baptismal tradition predating the Nicene settlement’s penetration of the Eastern liturgy.

The Third Article and the Holy Spirit

The Jerusalem creed’s third article confesses the Holy Spirit as “the Paraclete who spoke in the prophets,” with no developed clause on the Spirit’s divinity or procession. Cyril devotes two full lectures to the Spirit (16–17), insisting on his honor and operation while again avoiding the kind of explicit homoousion of the Spirit that would later be hammered out by the Cappadocians and confessed at Constantinople. His restraint mirrors the wider fourth-century situation, in which the theologia of the Spirit was the last and most cautiously developed front of the trinitarian controversy. The relative brevity of this article in the Jerusalem creed, compared with the expanded third article of the Constantinopolitan symbol of 381, is one of the data on which the debate over the two creeds’ relationship turns.

The Hort–Kelly Debate: Relation to the Creed of 381

The Jerusalem creed’s place in the history of doctrine is dominated by a single major question: what is its relation to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (C-381), the symbol we still recite at the Liturgy? The two are strikingly alike in structure and in much wording, and the resemblance has invited the theory that one stands behind the other.

The classic statement of the connection is F.J.A. Hort’s, in his Two Dissertations (1876). Hort argued that C-381 is a revision of the Jerusalem creed — that the Constantinopolitan symbol was produced by taking a creed of the Jerusalem type and inserting into it the Nicene homoousion clauses on the Son and an expanded third article on the Spirit. Some forms of the thesis go further and propose that the reviser was Cyril himself, who by the early 360s had come to accept homoousios and may have refashioned his own local creed into the Nicene mold (a view Philip Schaff endorsed in substance in his Creeds of Christendom, vol. 2). On this reading the creed of the universal Church descends, by Cyril’s own hand, from the symbol he had expounded to the candidates of Jerusalem.

J.N.D. Kelly, the leading modern authority, is considerably more cautious. In Early Christian Creeds he accepts that C-381 rests on a baptismal creed of the broad Syro-Phoenician family — the same family to which the Jerusalem creed belongs — but he rejects the simple proposition that C-381 is a revision of Cyril’s Jerusalem creed specifically, still less that Cyril personally produced it. Kelly’s view is that the base-text of C-381 was a related but distinct Eastern baptismal symbol, so that the kinship between the two creeds is one of shared family rather than direct descent. The verbal agreements, on this account, reflect a common liturgical stock, not the editing of one named creed into another.

The matter remains genuinely unresolved. [Disputed: Hort/Schaff — C-381 is a revision of the Jerusalem creed, perhaps by Cyril himself; Kelly — C-381 rests on a related Syro-Phoenician baptismal creed, not directly the Jerusalem creed of the Lectures.] What is agreed on all sides is that the Jerusalem creed and the Constantinopolitan symbol are close cousins within the Eastern tradition, and that Cyril’s Lectures are an indispensable witness to the kind of baptismal confession out of which the conciliar creed of the universal Church took shape. The dispute is over the precise genealogy, not over the deep affinity, of the two texts.

Why the Jerusalem Creed Matters

For the history of the creeds, the Jerusalem symbol is a rare window onto an actual local baptismal confession of the mid-fourth century, recoverable in unusual detail because its bishop chose to expound it at length. It documents a confession fully trinitarian and substantively orthodox while standing just outside the Nicene technical vocabulary — a snapshot of Eastern faith in the decades when homoousios was contested rather than received. And through the Hort–Kelly debate it stands at the center of the question of how the creed recited by Orthodox Christians to this day came to be.

References

Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses 5–18 (Katecheseis), PG 33:505–1060 within the corpus at PG 33:331–1181; CPG 3585. The creed is reconstructed from the lemmata of Lectures 6–18; no continuous text survives.
The Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril, Archbishop of Jerusalem, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford, NPNF, 2nd ser., vol. 7 (1894).
Leo P. McCauley and Anthony A. Stephenson, trans., The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, 2 vols., Fathers of the Church 61 and 64 (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1969–1970).
Edward Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2000).
J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1972) — the standard reconstruction and the key authority on the creed’s relations.
F.J.A. Hort, Two Dissertations (Cambridge and London: Macmillan, 1876) — the classic revision thesis.
Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 2: The Greek and Latin Creeds (New York: Harper, 1877).
Jan Willem Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City (Leiden: Brill, 2004).