Early Christianity outside the Roman Empire

To the student of general history Christianity makes its appearance as a Greek religion. The first Christian communities of any considerable size had their home in the great Greek cities on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. In Alexandria, in Antioch, in Ephesus, in Smyrna, in Corinth—all near the sea, and in easy communication with one another—the little Churches came into being and developed their organisation. The whole Ecclesiastical vocabulary is Greek. Bishops, Priests, Deacons, the Laity, Baptism, the Eucharist, all the terms are Greek in origin. It is the same with literature. From the alien religion out of which Christianity had sprung the Church inherited her Sacred Books in a Greek translation, and the writings of Christians that after a time were added on to the Canon of Scripture as a New Volume—these writings were composed in Greek also. In a word, the Church grew up on Greek soil.

The life of the Greek cities reacted on the development of the Churches. The thought and activity of small and progressive bodies must always be largely determined by the atmosphere of the great world outside, whether by way of protest or of assimilation. For this reason early Christian literature, apart from the Jewish controversy, is mainly occupied with an attack upon Greek vices and the Greek Pantheon. With these no terms were possible. But as Christianity advanced an antagonist came on the scene more honourable and therefore more dangerous than Jupiter and his court or even than the Genius of the Emperor. No Religion could establish itself in the Greek-speaking world without coming to a reckoning with Greek Philosophy. Christianity had to face the old problems of the One and the Many, of Mind and Matter, of the infinite Divine Essence and its Manifestation in time and place.

Not that the Church, the main body of Christians, was in any hurry to engage in these difficult studies. They were forced on her from outside, from the borderland between Christianity and Heathendom, where thinkers such as Valentinus and Basilides attempted to unite the science and philosophy of the then civilised world with the life and doctrines of the new religion. The instinct of the Church, rather than her logical power, rejected the early Gnostics and their Ogdoads, but it was not possible to go on for ever with mere refutation. After three centuries a system was elaborated which the Church was able to recognise, and the Christian Faith was enshrined in a fixed symbol, which remains to this day as the accepted Christian account of the nature of God in Himself and of the relations between God and man. The Creeds mark the final Concordat between Christianity and Philosophy.

We all know that this is not the whole truth. The Church may have grown up on Greek soil, but Christianity itself is not Greek in origin. The very earliest stage of all, that stage which it is most important for all of us to know and understand, is not Greek but Semitic. Our Lord was not sent save unto the lost sheep of the House of Israel. He lived the life of a Jew. He spoke in the current dialect of Palestine to His fellow-countrymen, and His conversations with his friends and His controversies with His foes turned on the things which troubled or interested the Jewish community of Palestine in the early part of the first century of our Era. Christ came not to promulgate a Creed, a form of words containing the quintessence of philosophical truth, but to live a life among men; and for us to feel the true force of His words, to appreciate the attitude He took up towards the current hopes and beliefs of those among whom He lived, we must find out and understand those beliefs. We must learn the language that His contemporaries spoke and study their phraseology.