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IBS EELLEHISTIO BAOKCr^OBS OF BBW SlSIAMPtT, THOWHI, as=sa=asss3=3ss33asssss3sas3asia:5aaaaa3aaaa*aaaaaniaa Thcanas H arper, B.D., S,T.] ProQuest Number: 27535000 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 27535000 Published by ProQuest LLO (2019). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLO. ProQuest LLO. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.Q. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 On© of the most pressing questions in the religious world today is to determine what constitutes the essence of Ohristianity. The advance of the sciences, physical and mental, the application of scientific methods to the study of Scripture, the growth of the spirit of modem individualism, rebelling against external authority and demanding the right of unfettered enquiry, - these are the factors that lie behind the present wide demand for a clearer exposition of the Christian faith. Formerly the great historic creeds of the Church afforded ready and authoritative answers to religious questionings, but as these can no longer be regarded as the source whence faith conducts its enquiries, men, to find the things that are vital to the Christian religion, are going more and more to the New Testament itself, to the record of the beginnings of Christianity. The expression of the faith of past ages has been based always upon the New Testament, but today the New Testament is, in a manner of speaking, a new book. Men have learned to read and study it in a new spirit, critical and historical, and to find within it a growth and development of religious thought that formerly was not recognized. Its language is better known; many of its words and phrases, for long inter- Ipreted in the light of the creeds, are now seen to possess a - 2 - different meaning* The age that gave it birth is better known; the classics, formerly the only source of information, are now recognized to reflect the life only of a part, and a small part, of the inhabitants of the Graeco-Roman world, the cultured and aristocratic classes, while new sources of infor- ; mat ion, monuments, inscriptions, and papyri dug from the âands and mbbish-heaps of Egypt, have brought before us the life of the common people of the first centuries, among whom Ohristianity arose* The New Testament then is to our age a new book* It grew up neither in a religious nor intellectual vacuum, nor did it speak a language of its own* It was b o m in an age which was keenly alive to spiritual things, and it spread among men whom it had to woo from competing faiths. It gave its message, it expressed its invitation, in a language and in concepts of thought that they would understand. It borrowed whatever might be useful for its salient need of interpretation, transmuting and impressing what was borrowed with a new meaning, finding at the same time that these new vehicles of thought were even more fitted to express the fulness and depth of the new spiritual power that had come to the world in Jesus Ohrist. Ohristianity went out to conquer the Hellenistic world. To accomplish this missionary purpose, it had in a manner to cast — 3 "" aside the Jewish form in which its thought was clothed, and express itself in a different way. Greek philosophy. Eastern mysticism, the general categories of religious thought floating, as it were, in the spiritual atmosphere of the day, - to all of these Christianity made itself heir. It was the necessity of obeying its inherent missionary im- !pulse, allied to the feeling of the inadequency of Jewish thought to express the significance of its Lord for the world, that drove Christianity, within a few years of its birth, greatly to alter its fom. Between the faith which St. Peter preached in the streets of Jerusalem and the faith which the leaders of the church promulgated towards the close of the first century there is seemingly a wide difference. At first presented as, and seeming to be no more than, a Jewish sect marked by certain distinctive beliefs concerning the Messiah, and holding to a particular custom, the new religion has now become a faith with intricate theological implications and sacramental associations. The Hellenistic world is now generally recognized to have exerted a powerful influence during this process of development. There is, however, a tendency prevailing in many quarters to attribute too much to this influence, to affirm that Ohristian- jity is a syncretism of the general religious thought of the first centuries which has grown round a few simple ethical — 4 truths that were taught by Jesus. **The simple Gospel", it is said, has been buried and lost beneath the mass of foreign material that has been supe3>-imposed upon it‘in historic Christianity. According to M# Loisy, for example, the teaching, work and personality of Jesus do not constitute the essence of catholic Ohristianity but are only the nucleus of a great corpus of Graeco-Roman religious and philosophical thought. He writes of St. Paul’s conception of Christ, ^"He was a saviour-god, after the manner of an Osiris, an Attis, a Mithra. Like them, he belonged by his origin to the celestial world; like them, he made his appearance on the earth; like them he had accomplished a work of universal redemption, efficacious and typical; like Adonis, Osiris, and Attis, he had died a violent death, and like them, he had been restored to life; like them he had prefigured in his lot that of the human beings who should take part in his Tf or ship, and commemorate his mystic enterprise; like them he had predestined, prepared and assured the salvation of those who became partners in his passion". The implication is that the Christianity of Paul has no vital connection with the historic Jesus, but is more closely related to, and dependent on, the religious cults of the East. Of a somewhat similar nature is the verdict of %ibbert Journal Oct.1911, p.51. - 5 - Professor Kirsopp Lake, ^"Christianity had been originally the worship of God, as He was understood by the Jews, ocmbined with the belief that Jesus was he whom God appointed, or would appoint as His representative at the day of judgment. To this were now joined the longings for private salvation of the less fortunate classes in the Roman Empire, and their belief that this salvation could come from sacraments instituted by a Lord who was either Divine by nature or had attained apotheosis. It thus became, partly indeed, the recognition of the Jewish God as supreme, but chiefly the recognition of Jesus as the Divine Lord who had instituted saving mysteries for those who accepted him. Christianity became the Jewish contribution to the Oriental cults, offering as the sjmagogue never did, private salvation by supernatural means to all who were willing to accept it". The relation of New Testament thought to its Hellenistic background is therefore a question of first importance. Its answer must determine whether historic Christianity faithfully conserves the new spiritual factors which were b o m in the world with Jesus Christ or whether it is merely an accretion of the general religious tendencies of the Graeco-Roman world. Might the name of yf Seropis have taken the place of the name of Christ and the resultant faith have been the same? Was Christianity in the ^Lake;- "Landmarks of Early Christianity", p.8. - 6 growth of its expression governed by vital, distinctive, and selective principles whereby it was enabled to preserve its identity among the many and more complex forms it assumed, or by contact with the world’s thought was the original gospel overlaid by elements alien to itself and so transformed into something different? Waa its growth organic or mechanical? How did Christianity react to the larger envir onment into which it speedingly was cast? Were the Pauline and Johannine doctrines of the person of Christ and His signif- jicance true to spiritual reality, disclosing the larger meanings inherent from the beginning: in the person and work of Jesus, or by recasting the message of the primitive Church in different moulds have they so altered its essential content as to make of it something new? Did Christianity in its many forms offer to the world something that was essentially its own, something new, or is it the result of the syncretism of the thought and life of many peoples which took place in the centuries preceding and succeeding the birth of the Church of Ohrist? These are the issues which today confront modem thought and to which it is proposed to turn our attention. ^ 1 ^ GENTILE INFLUENCES OH JUDAISM. When Ohristianity went out to evangelize the world of the first century, there had already taken place a mingling of the civilisations of the world. Babylon, Egypt, Italy, Greece, the lands of Syria and Asia-Minor - each had played its part in building up a type of civilisation that was to a certain degree common to the world. When Alexander broke down the barriers which separated the nations of the world, then customs and beliefs which fomerly had been the exclusive possession of a people became the possession of the world.

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