"Nevertheless, hungry for its ancient liberties, and bled by Roman generals, moneylenders, and businessmen skilled in buying cheap and selling dear, Greece joined in Mithridates' revolt and paid the heaviest penalty. Athens suffered a devastating siege, and Delphi, Elis, and Epidaurus were pillaged of their sanctuary hoards.

"A generation later Caesar and Pompey, then Antony and Brutus, fought their duels on Greek territory, conscripted Greek men, requisitioned Greek crops and gold, levied twenty years' taxes in two, and left the cities destitute. Under Augustus Greek Asia recovered, but Greece herself remained poor, ruined not so much by the Roman conquest as by a stifling despotism in Sparta, a chaotic freedom in Athens, a blighting sterility in soil and men.

"Her most enterprising sons deserted her for younger and richer lands. The rise of new powers in Egypt, Carthage, and Rome, and the development of industry in the Hellenistic East, left the homeland of the classic spirit outmoded and forlorn. Rome loaded Greece with compliments and ravaged her art. Scaurus took 3000 statues for his theater. Caligula ordered the husband of his mistress to comb Greece for statuary. Nero alone took half the sculptures of Delphi.

"He liked the great capital and the good manners and honorable life of its new aristocracy. He admired their stoic code, and agreed with Ennius that Rome had been made by morality and character. As he contemplated these living nobles and the noble dead, the thought came to him of comparing the heroes of Rome with those of Greece. He proposed not merely to write history or even biography, but to teach virtue and heroism by historic exemplars. Even his Parallel Lives were in his mind, Moralia.

"He was always a teacher and never lost a chance to tie a moral to a tale, but who has ever done it more gracefully? He warns us in his 'Alexander' that he is more interested in character than in history. He hopes that by pairing and comparing great Romans with great Greeks he will pass on some moral stimulus, some heroic impulse, to his readers.

"Six cities of the Peloponnesus prospered, but contributed little to Greek thought. Western commerce and a busy textile industry kept Patrae alive through Roman and medieval history even to our day. Olympia throve on the leavings of tourists coming to see Pheidias' Zeus or the Olympic games.

"It is one of the pleasantest aspects of Greek history that these quadrennial contests continued from 776 B.C. to A.D. 394, when Theodosius ended them.

"Sparta and Argos were still moderately alive, and Epidaurus grew rich on the visits of sick bodies and souls to the shrine of Aselepius. Corinth, controlling the trade across the isthmus became, within half a century of its re-establishment by Caesar, the wealthiest city in Greece. Its heterogeneous population of Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Jews, and Egyptians, most of them uprooted from their native lands and morals, was notorious for commercialism, epicureanism, and immorality.

"Meanwhile the unrivaled fame of Athens in letters, philosphy, and education brought a stream of rich youths and needy scholars to her schools. The University of Athens consisted of ten professorships endowed by the city or the emperor, and a host of private lecturers and tutors. Instruction was given in literature, philology, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and law -- usually in gymnasia or theaters, sometimes in temples or homes.

"The dominant philosophy had long since been Stoicism. The rigorous perfectionism of its early forms had been softened by Panaetius and Poseidonius, both citizens of Rhodes.

"The Stoic theory of moral discipline moved closer to Cynic asceticism. In the second century A.D. Cynicism, as one observer put it, differed from Stoicism only by a torn cloak.

"In Epictetus, as in Marcus Aurelius, we see both movements advancing toward Christianity. If we sum up Greek thought in the first two centuries of our era, we find it overwhelmingly religious.

"Men had once lost faith in faith and taken to logic. Now they were losing faith in logic and were flocking back to faith.

"Greek philosophy had completed the circuit from primitive theology through the skepticism of the early sophists -- the atheism of Democritus -- the reconciliatory blandishments of Plato -- the naturalism of Aristotle -- and the pantheism of the Stoa back to a philosopy of mysticism, sumission and piety.

"Stocism was ceasing to be the proud and scornful philosophy of aristocrrats, and had found its final most eloquent voice in a slave. Its doctrine of a final conflagration of the world -- its rejection of all pleasures of the flesh -- its humble surrender to the hidden will of God -- were preparing for the theology and ethics of Christianity.

"And yet -- perhaps for these reasons -- 'The Egyptians,' Josephus notes, 'appear never in all their history to have enjoyed one day of freedom.' Their wealth tempted, their semitropical lassitude suffered, one despot or conqueror after another through fifty centuries.

"Rome classed Egypt not as a province but as the property of the emperor, and ruled it through a prefect responsible only to him. Native Greek officials administered the three divisiions -- Lower, Middle, and Upper Egypt, and the thirty-six 'nomes' or counties. The official language remained Greek. No attempt was made to urbanize the population for Egypt's imperial function was to be the granary of Rome.

"Large tracts of land were taken from the priests and returned over to Roman or Alexandrian capitalists to be worked as latifundia by fellaheen accustomed to merciless exploitation. The state capitalists of the Ptolemies was continued in refuced form. Every step in the agricultural process was planned and controlled by the state. Proliferating buraucrats determined what crops should be sown and in what quantities -- annually allotted the requisite seed -- received the product into government warehouses (thesaurai, treasuries) -- exported Rome's quota -- took out taxes in kind -- and sold the rest to the market.

"Corn and flax were state monopolies from seed to sale. So, at least in the Fayum, was the production of bricks, perfumes, and sesame oil. Private enterprise was permitted in other fields, but under ubiquitous regulation. All mineral resources were owned by the state, and the quarrying of marble and precious stones was a governmental privilege.

"Dio Chrysotom describes life there as 'a continuous revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers.' The canals were alive with merry makers in gondolas at night on their five-mile sail to the amusement suburb at Canopus. There were musical contests that rivaled the horse races in raising excitement and claques.

"If we may believe Philo, forty percent of the city's population was Jewish. Most Alexandrian Jews were employed in industry and trade, and lived in great poverty. Many were merchants, a few were moneylenders, some were rich enough to win enviable places in the government.

"Originally confined to one fifth of the city, they had now overflowed to occupy two fifths. They were governed by their own laws and elders, and Rome confirmed the privileges that the Ptolemies had given them to ignore any ordinance that conflicted with their religion. They gloried in their magnificent central synagogue, a colonnaded basilica so vast that a system of signals had to be used to secure proper resonse at proper times from worshipers too distant from the sanctuary to hear the words of the priest.

According to Josephus the moral life of the Alexandrian Jews was exemplary compared with the sexual looseness of the 'pagan' population. They had an active intellectual culture and contributed substantially to philosophy, historiography, and science.

"Racial hostility agitated the city at various times. The Roman prefect, Avillius Flaccus, annulled the Alexandrian citizenship of the Jews and ordered those of them who lived outside the original Jewish section to return to it within a few days. When these had elapsed the Greek populace burned down 400 Jewish homes, and killed or clubbed Jews, outside the ghetto. Thirty-eight members of the Jewish gerousia or senate were arrested and publicly scourged in a theater.

"Thousands of Jews lost their homes, their businesses, or their savings. Flaccus' successor submitted the matter to the Emperor, and two separate delegations -- five Greeks and five Jews -- went to Rome (A.D. 40) to plead their causes before Caligula. He died before he could judge.

"Brought up in a sacerdotal atmosphere, intensely loyal to his people, and yet fascinated by Greek philosophy, he made it the aim of his life to reconcile the Scriptures and customs of the Jews with Greek ideas and above all with the philosophy of 'the most holy' Plato. He adopted for his purpose the principle that all events, characters, doctrines, and laws in the Old Testament have an allegorical as well as a literal meaning and symbolize certain moral or psychological truths. By this method he was able to prove anything.

"God, in Philo, is the essential being of the world, incorporeal, eternal, indescribable. Reason can know his existence, but can ascribe no quality to him, since every quality is a limitation. To conceive him as having human form is a concession to the sensuous imagination of men.

"But he is not everything. Matter is also eternal and increate. However, it has no life, motion, or form until infused with the divine force. To create the world by giving form to matter, and to establish relations with man, God used a host of intermediary beings, called angels by the Jews, daimones by the Greeks, and Ideas by Plato. These, says Philo, may popularly be conceived as persons, although really they exist only in the Divine Mind, as the thoughts and powers of God. Together these powers constitute what the Stoics called the Logos, or Divine Reason creating and guiding the world.

"Fluctuating between philosophy and theology, between ideas and personifications, Philo sometimes thinks of the Logos as a person. In a poetic moment he calls the Logos 'the first-begotten of God,' son of God by the virgin Wisdom, and says that through the Logos God has revealed himself to man.

"Philo's Logos was one of the most influential ideas in the history of thought. Its antecedents in Heracleitus, Plato, and the Stoics are obvious. Persumably he knew the recent Jewish literature that had made a distinct person of the Wisdom of God as creator of the world.

"Philo was a conatemporary of Christ. He apparently never heard of him. But he shared unknowingly in forming Christian theology. The rabbis frowned upon his allegorical interpretations as likely to be used as an excuse for neglecting literal obedience to the Law. They suspected the Logos doctrine as a retreat from monotheism. They saw in Philo's passion for Greek philosophy a threat of cultural assimilation, racial dilution, and consequent disappearance, of the dispersed Jews.

"The Fathers of the Church admired the Jew's contemplative devotion -- made abundant use of his allegorical principles to answer the critics of the Hebrew Scriptures -- and joined with gnostics and Neo-Platonists in accepting the mystical vision of God as the crown of human enterprise.

"Born at Ptolemais on the Nile (whence his name), he lived most of his life at Alexandria, where he made observations from A.D. 127 to 151. The world remembers him chiefly for his rejection of Aristarchus' theory that the earth revolves around the sun. This immortal error was enshrined in Ptolemy's Mathematike Syntaxis, or 'Mathematical Arrangement' of the stars. The Arabs referred to the work with a Greek superlative as Al-megiste, 'The Greatest.' The Middle Ages corrupted the phrase into Almagest, by which the book is known to history.

"It ruled the skies until Copernicus upset the world. And yet Ptolemy did not claim to do more than systematize the work and observation of previous astronomers, Hipparchus above all. He pictured the universe as spherical and as daily revolving around a spherical, motionless earth. Strange as this view seems to us (although there is no telling what some future Copernicus will do to our present Ptolemies), the geocentric hypothesis made it possible to compute the position of the stars and planets more accurately than the heliocentric conception could do in the state of astronomic knowledge at the time.

"Ptolemy suggested further a theory of eccentrics to explain the orbits of the planets, and discovered the evection, or orbital aberration, of the moon. He measured the moon's distance from the earth by the parallax method still in use, and calculated it as fifty-nine times the earth's radius.

"There were famous schools of medicine at Marseilles, Lyons, Saragossa, Athens, Antioch, Cos, Ephesus, Smyrna, and Pergamum. But medical students came to the Egyptian capital from every province. Even as late as the fourth century, when Egypt was in decline, Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that 'it is enough to commend a physician's skill if he can say that he was trained at Alexandria.'

"Said Philostratus (ca. A.D. 225) 'Specialization was progressing. No one can be a universal physician. There must be specialists for wounds, fevers, eyes, consumption.' Dissection of cadavers was practiced at Alexandria, and there seem to have been cases of human vivisection. Surgery was probably as well developed there in the first century A.D. as anywhere in Europe before the nineteenth century.

"He showed that an excised heart can continue to beat outside the body. He proved that the arteries contain blood, not air. He was the first to explain the mechanism of respiration, and brilliantly conjectured that the principal element in the air we breathe is also that which is active in combustion.

"He showed that injujries to one side of the brain produce derangements in the opposite side of the body. He was so skilled in symptomatology that he preferred to diagnose without questioning the patient. He made much use of diet, exercise, and massage, but he was also an expert on drugs and traveled widely to secure rare medicines.

"Galen's teleology and monotheism won him favor with Christians, as later with Moslems. Nearly all his writings were lost to Europe in the chaos of the barbarian invasions, but in the East they were preserved by Arab scholars, and were translated from Arabic into Latin from the eleventh century onward.

"Arabia Deserta knew only Arab nomads, but in the southwest a mountain range and its streams gave milder temperatures and fruitful vegetation to Arabia Felix, the Yemen of today. In those recesses the little kingdom of Saba hid, the Sheba of the Bible, so rich in frankincense and myrrh, cassia and cinnamon, aloes and nard, senna and gum and precious stones that the Sabateans could build at Mariaba and elsewhere cities proud with temples, palaces, and colonnades.

"Arab merchants not only sold Arab products at high prices, but carried on a caravan trade with northwestern Asia and an active commerce by sea with Egypt, Parthia, and India.

"In 25 B.C. Augustus sent Aelius Gallus to absorb the kingdom into the Empire. The legions failed to take Mariaba and returned to Egypt decimated by disease and heat. Augustus contented himself with destroying the Arab port at Adana (Aden) and thereby secured control of the trade between Egypt and India.

"Never again until our own century has urbanization been so pronounced. Lucullus, Pompey, Caesar, Herod, Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors prided themselves on founding new cities and embellishing old ones. So, moving northward along the eastern Mediterranean coast, one could hardly go twenty miles without encountering a city -- Raphia (Rafa) - Gaza -- Ascalon -- Joppa (Jaffa) - Apollonia -- Samaria-Sebaste -- and Caesarea (Kaisaria).

"These cities, although in Palestine, were half Greek in population and predominatntly Greek in language, culture, and institutions. They were Hellenistic bridgeheads in the pagan invasion of Judea. Herod spent large sums making Caesarea worthy of Augustus, for whom it was named. He provided it with a fine harbor, a lofty temple, a theater, an amphitheater, 'sumptuous palaces, and many edifices of white stone.'

"Tyre (Sur) had taller dwellings than Rome's and worse slums. Sidon had probably discovered the art of blowing glass and now specialized in glass and bronze. Berytus (Beirut) was distinguished for its schools of medicine, rheteoric, and law.

"No province of the Empire surpassed Syria in industry and prosperity. Where now 3,000,000 inhabitants find a precarious existence, 10,000,000 lived in Trajan's time. Half a hundred cities here enjoyed the pure water -- the public baths -- the underground drainage system -- the clean markets -- the gymnasia and palaestras -- the lectures and music -- the schools and temples and basilicas -- the porticoes and arches -- the public statuary and picture galleries -- characteristic of the Hellenistic cities in the first century after Christ.

"The oldest of them was Damascus, over the Lebanons from Sidon, fortified by the surrounding desert, and turned almost into a garden by the spreading arms and tributaries of a stream gracefully called 'the river of gold.' Many caravan routes converged here, and poured into the bazaars the products of three continents.

"A similar sight meets the traveler who strikes eastward across the desert from Homs, the ancient Emesa, to Tadmor, which the Greeks translated into Palmyra, City of a Myriad Palms. Its fortunate position and fertile soil around two gushing springs on the roads from Emesa and Damascus to the Euphrates made it grow in affluence until it was one of the major cities of the East. The glory of the city was the Temple of the Sun, dedicated (A.D. 30) to the supreme trinity of Bel (Baal), Yarhibol (the sun), and Aglibol (the moon).

"A main route eastward from Palmyra reached the Euphrates at Dura-Europus. There (A.D. 100) the merchants shared their gains with the Palmyrene trinity by rearing a temple half Greek and half Indian. An eatern painter adorned the walls with frescoes that vividly illustrate the Oriental origin of Byzantine and early Christian art.

"The river Orontes and a great network of roads brought the goods of the East to Antioch, while its Mediterranean port, Selucia Pieria, fourteen miles down the stream, brought in the products of the West.

"Across the Euphrates stood the little realm of Osthoene. Rome fortified its capital, Edessa (Urfa), as a base against Parthia. We shall hear more of it in Christian days.

"Westward from Syria one passed into Cilicia (as now into Turkey) at Alexandria Issi (Alesandretta). This, Cicero's province, was highly civilized along the southern Asia Minor coast, but still barbarous in the Taurus hills. Tarsus (Tersous), the capital, was 'no mean city,' said its son Saint Paul, but was renowned for its school and philosophers.

"North of Cilicia lay arid and mountainous Capppadocia, mining preceious metals, and raising wheat, cattle, and slaves for export. West of it, Lycaonia would enter into history with the visits of Saint paul to Derbe, Lystra, and Iconium.

"Farther north Alexandria Troas was made a Roman colony by Augustus in memory of Rome's supposed Trojan origin -- which gave Rome a convenient claim to all these parts. On a near-by hill (Hissarlik) old Troy was rebuilt, as new Ilium, and became a goal for tourists to whom guides pointed out the exact spot of every exploit in the Iliad, and the cave where Paris had judged Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena.

"On the Propontis Cyzicus built ships and sent out a ubiquitous merchant fleet rivaled only by that of Rhodes. Here Hadrian built a Temple of Persephone which was one of the glories of Asia. Rising from a hill, it towered so high that Aelius counted the harbor's lighthouse superfluous.

"The people themselves had never lost their faith. Most of them accepted in outline the Homeric description of the afterlife, sacrificed religiously before undertaking a voyage, and still placed an obol in the mouth of the dead to pay his passage across the Styx.

"Roman statecraft welcomed the aid of established priesthoods and sought popular support by building costly temples to local gods. Throughout Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor, the wealth of the clergy continued to grow. Hadad and Atagaris were still worshiped by the Syrians and had an awesome shrine at Hierapolis.

"The resurrection of the god Tammuz was still hailed in the towns of Syria with the cry,-'Adonis (i.e. the Lord is risen,' and his ascension into heaven was celebrated in the closing scenes of his festival. Similar ceremonies commemorated in Greek ritual the agony, death, and resurrection of Dionysus.

"From Cappadocia the worship of the goddess Ma had spread into Ionia and Italy. Her priests (called fanatici as belonging to the fanum, or temple) danced dizzily to the sound of trumpets and drums, slashed themselves with knives, and sprinkled the goddess and her devotees with their blood.

"The making of new deities went on assiduously. Caesar and the emperors, Antinous and many local worthies, were deified (i.e. canonized) in life or death. Cross-fertilized by trade and war, pantheons were everywhere in flower, and prayers rose hopefully in a thousand tongues to a thousand gods.

"All sects assumed the possibility of magic. The Magi had disseminated their art through the East and had given a new name to old jugglery. The Mediterranean world was rich in magicians, miracleworkers, oracles, astrologers, ascetic saints, and scientific interpreters of dreams. Every unusual occurrence was widely hailed as a divine portent of future events.

"Preachers claiming divine inspiration traveled from city to city, performing apparently miraculous cures. Alexander of Abonoteichus trained a serpent to hide its head under his arm and allow a half-human mask to be affixed to its tail. He announced that the serpent was the god Asclepius come to earth to serve as an oracle. He amassed a fortune by interpreting the sounds made by reeds inserted in the false head.

"Beside such charlatans there were probably thousands of sincere preachers of the pagan faiths. What were the qualities that won half of Rome, half the empire, to these new faiths? Partly their classless, raceless character. They accepted all nationalities, all freemen, and all slaves, and rode with consoling indifference over inequalities of pedigree and wealth. Their temples were made spacious to welcome the people as well as to enshrine the god.

"Cybele and Isis were mother-goddesses acquainted with grief, who mourned like millions of bereaved women. They could understand what the Roman deities seldom knew -- the emptied hearts of the defeated. The desire to return to the mother is stronger than the impulse to depend on the father. It is the mother name that comes spontaneously to the lips in great joy or distress. Therefore men as well as women found comfort and refuge in Isis and Cybele.

"Even today the Mediterranean worshiper appeals more often to Mary than to the Father or the Son. The lovely prayer that he most frequently repeats is addressed not to the virgin but to the Mother, blessed in the fruit of her womb.

"The new faiths not only entered more deeply into the heart. They appealed more colorfully to the imagination and the senses with processions and chants alternating between sorrow and rejoicing, and a ritual of impressive symbolism that brought fresh courage to spirits heavy with the prose of life.

"The new priesthoods were filled not by politicians occasionally donning sacerdotal garb, but by men and women of all ranks, graduating through an ascetic novitiate to continual ministration. By their help the soul conscious of wrongdoing could be purified. Sometimes the body racked with illness could be healed by an inspiring word or ritual.

"The mysteries at which they officiated symbolized the hope that even death might be overcome.

"Once men hd sublimated their longing for grandeur and continuance in the glory and survival of their family and their clan, and then of a state that was their creation and collective self. Now the old clan lines were melting away in the new mobility of peace. The imperial state was the spiritual embodiment only of the master class, not of the powerless multitude of men.

"Monarchy at the top, frustrating the participation and merger of the citizen in the state, produced individualism at the bottom and through the mass. The promise of personal immortality, of an endless happiness after a life of subjection, poverty, tribulation, or toil, was the final and irresistible attraction of the Oriental faiths and of the Christianity that summarized, absorbed, and conquered them.

"Free Parthians amused themselves with hunting, ate and drank abundantly, and never went on foot when they could ride. They were brave warriors and honorable foes, treated prisoners decently, admitted foreigners to high office, and gave asylum to refugees. Sometimes, however, they mutiliated dead enemies, tortured witnesses, and corrected trifling offenses with the scourge.

"They practiced polygamy according to their means, veiled and secluded their women, severely punished the infidelity of their wives, but permitted divorce to either sex almost at will.

"When the Parthian general Surena led an army against Crassus, he took with him 200 concubines and a thousand camels for his baggage. All in all, the Parthians impress us as less civilized then the Achaemenid Persians and more honorable gentlemen than the Romans.

"They were tolerant of religious diversities, allowing the Greeks, Jews, and Christians among them to practice their rituals unhindered. They themselves, veering from Zoroastrian orthodoxy, worshiped the sun and the moon, and preferred Mithras to Ahura-Mazda, much as the Christians preferred Christ to Yalveh.

"The Magi, neglected by the later Arsacid kings, abetted the overthrow of the dynasty.

"On the death of Vologases IV (A.D. 209) his sons Vologases V and Artabanus IV fought for the throne. Artabanus won, and then defeated the Romans at Nisibis. Three centuries of war between the empires ended in a modified victory for Parthia. On the Mesopotamian plains the Roman legions were at a disadvantage against the Parthian cavalry. Artabanus in turn fell in civil war. His conqueror, Ardashir, feudal lord of Persia, made himself King of Kings (A.D. 227) and established the Sassanid dynastry.

"Herod drove out the Parthians -- protectd Jerusalem from pillage -- sent Antigonus to Anthony for execution -- slew all Jewish leaders who had supported the puppet -- and so auspiciously entered upon one of the most colorful reigns in history (17-4 B.C.)

"Herod's character was typical of an age that had produced so many men of intellect without morals, ability without scruple, and courage without honor. He was in his lesser way the Augustus of Judea. Like Augustus he overlaid the chaos of freedom with dictatorial order -- beautified his capital with Greek architecture and sculpture -- enlarged his realm -- made it prosper -- achieved more by sublety than by arms -- married widely -- was broken by the treachery of his offspring -- and knew every good fortune but happiness.

"Josephus describes him as a man of great physical bravery and skill, a perfect marksman with arrow and javelin, a mighty hunter who in one day caught forty wild beasts, and 'such a warrior as could not be withstood.'

"Herod sought in various ways to appease his subjects, but failed. He forgave taxes in poor years -- persuaded Rome to reduce the tribute it exacted -- secured privileges for Jews abroad -- relieved famine and other calamities promptly -- maintained internal order and external security -- and developed the natural resources of the land. Brigandage was ended, trade was stimulated, the markets and ports were noisy with life.

"At the same time the King alienated public sentiment by the looseness of his morals, the cruelty of his punishments, and the 'acccidental' drowning, in the bath, of Aristobulus, grandson of Hycanus II and therefore the legitimate heir to the throne.

"He surrounded himself with Greek scholars, entrusted to them high affairs of state, and made Nicolas of Damascus, a Greek, his official counselor and historian. He raised at great expense a theater and an amphitheater in Jerusalem, adorned them with monuments to Augustus and other pagans, and introduced Greek athletic and musical contests and Roman gladiatorial combats.

"He beautified Jerusalem with other buildings in what seemed to the people a foreign architectural style, and set up in public places Greek statuary whose nudity startled the Jews as much as the nakedness of the wrestlers in the games. He built himself a palace, doubtless on Greek models, filled it with gold and marble and costly furniture, and surrounded it with extensive gardens after the manner of his Roman friends. He shocked the people by telling them that the Temple which Zerubbabel had set up five centures before was too small, and proposing to tear it down and erect a larger one on its site.

"Meanwhile Jews who traveled brought back news of the completely Greek buildings with which Herod was remaking the other cities of Palestine, and told how he was spending national funds and (rumor said) the gold that had been hidden in David's tomb, in constructing a great harbor at Caesarea, and lavishing gifts upon such foreign cities as Damascus, Byblus, Berytus, Tyre, Sidon, Antioch, Rhodes, Pergamum, Sparta, and Athens.

"Herod, it became clear, wished to be the idol of the Hellenic world, not merely the King of the Jews. But the Jews lived by their religion, by their faith that Yahveh would someday rescue them from the bondage and oppresssion. The triumph of the Hellenic over the Hebraic spirit in the person of their ruler foreboded to them a disaster as great as the persecutions of Antiochus.

"Plots were formed against Herod's life. He discovered them, arrested the conspirators, tortured and killed them, and in some cases put their entire families to death.

"He set spies among the people, disguised himself to eavesdrop on his subjects, and punished every hostile word. He foiled all his enemies except his wives and his children. Of wives he had ten, once nine at a time. Of children, fourteen. His second wife, Marianne, was the granddaughter of Hyreanus II and the sister of Aristobulus, both of whom Herod had slain.

"There was an unpardoning hatred among the women of the royal household. Herod's sister persuaded him that Marianne was plotting to poison him. He accused his wife before the members of his court. They condemned her, and she was executed. Doubtful of her gilt, Herod was for a time mad with remorse. He called out her name repeatedly, sent his servants to summon her, gave up public affairs, went into the desert, afflicted himself bitterly, and was brought to his palace in a state of fever and insanity.

"Marianne's mother joined with others in an attempt to depose him. He suddenly recovered his powers of mind and throne, and put the plotters to death. Soon therafter Antipater, his son by his first wife, laid proofs before him of an attempted conspiracy by Alexander and Aristobulus, his sons by Marianne. He submitted the matter to a council of 150 men, who sentenced the youths to die (6 B.C.).

"Two years later Nicolas of Damascus convicted Antipater himself of scheming to replace his father. Herod had the youth brought before him and 'began to weep, lamenting the misfortunes he had suffered from his children.'

"In a moment of mercy he ordered Antipater jailed.

"Meanwhile the old king was breaking down with disease and grief. He suffered from dropsy, ulcer, fever, convulsions, and loathsome breath. After frustrating so many attempts against his life he tried to kill himself, but was prevented.

"Hearing that Antipater had sought to bribe the guard to free him, Herod had him slain. Five days afterward he too died (4 B.C.) in the sixty-ninth year of his age, hated by all his people.

"Hence that mutual hatred of Jew and gentile which kept the little nation in a kind of undulating fever of racial strife, political turbulence, and periodic war. Moreover, the Jews of Judea scorned the people of Galilee as ignorant backsliders, and the Galileans scorned the Judeans as slaves caught in the cobwebs of the Law.

"Again, a perpetual feud burned between Judeans and Samaritans. The latter claimed that their hill of Gerizim, and not Zion, had been chosen by Yahveh as his home, and they rejected all the Scriptures except the Pentateuch.

"All these factions agreed in hating the Roman power which made them pay a heavy price for the unwelcome privilege of peace.

"There were now in Palestine some 2,500,000 souls, of whom perhaps 100,000 lived in Jerusalem. Most of them spoke Aramaic. Priests and scholars understood Hebrew. Officials and foreigners and most authors used Greek. The majority of the people were peasants, tilling and irrigating the soil, tending the orchard, the vine, and the flock.

"In the time of Christ Palestine grew enough wheat to export a modest surplus:-its dates, figs, grapes and olives, wine and oil were prized and bought throughout the Mediterranean. The old command was still obeyed to let the land lie fallow in each sabbatical year.

"Handicrafts were largely hereditary and were usually organized in guilds. Jewish opinion honored the worker, and most scholars plied their hands as well as their tongues. Slaves were fewer than in any other Mediterranean country. Petty trade flourished, but there were as yet few Jewish merchans of large means and range. Said Josephus:-'We are not a commercial people. We live in a country (eastern Judea) without a seaboard, and have no inclination to foreign trade.'

"Josephus, himself, a Pharisee, defined them as 'a body of Jews who profess to be more religious than the rest, and to explain the laws more precisely.' For this purpose they added to the written Law of the Pentateuch, the oral tradition of interpretations and decisions made by recognized teachers of the Law.

"These interpretations were necessary, in the judgment of the Pharisees, to clarify the obscurities of the Mosaic Code, to specify its applications in particular cases, and to modify its letter, occasionally, in adaptation to the changed needs and conditions of life. They were at once rigorous and lenient, softening the Law here and there as in Hillel's decree on interest, but demanding the full observation of the oral tradition as well as of the Torah.

"Only through this full obedience, they felt, could the Jews escape assimilation and extinction. Reconciled to Roman domination, the Pharisees sought consolation in the hope of a physical and spiritual immortality. They lived simply, condemned luxury, fasted frequently, washed sedulously, and were now and then irritatingly conscious of their virtue. But they represented the moral strength of Judaism, won the middle classes to their support, and gave their followers a faith and role that saved them from disintegration when catastrophe came.

"Possibly they were influenced by Brahmanic, Buddhist, Parsee, Pythagorean, and Cynic ideas that came to the crossroads of trade at Jerusalem. Numbering some 4000 in Palestine, they organized themselves into a distinct order, observed both the written and the oral Law with passionate exactitude, and lived together as almost monastic celibates tilling the soil in the oasis of Engadi amid the desert west of the Dead Sea.

"They dwelt in homes owned by their community, had their meals in common and in silence, chose their leaders by a general vote, mingled their goods and earnings in a common treasury, and obeyed the Chasidic motto:-'Mine and thine belong to thee.' Many of them, says Josephus, 'lived more than a hundred years because of their simple diet and regular life.'

"Each clothed himself in white linen, carried a little hoe to cover his droppings, washed himself like a Brahmin afterward, and considered it a sacrilege to evacuate on the Sabbath.

"A few of them married and lived in towns, but practiced the Tolstoian rule of cohabiting with their wives only to beget children. The members of the sect avoided all sensual pleasure and sought through meditation and prayer a mystic union with God.

"They hoped that by piety, abstinence, and contemplation they might acquire magic powers and foresee the future. Like most people of their time they believed in angels and demons, thought of diseases as possession by evil spiritsk and tried to exorcise these by magical formulas. From their 'secret doctrine' came some parts of the Cabala.

"They looked for the coming of a Messiah who would establish a comunistic egalitarian Kingdom of Heaven (Malchuth Shamayim) on earth. Into that Kingdom only those would enter who had led a spotless life.

"They were ardent pacifists and refused to make implements of war. But when the legions of Titus attacked Jerusalem and the Temple, the Essenes joined other Jews in depending their city and its shrine and fought until nearly all of their order were dead.

"As Josephus describes their customs and their sufferings we enter into the atmosphere of Christianity:--

"'Although they were tortured and racked, burnt and torn to pieces, and went through every torment to force them either to blaspheme their legislator, or to eat what was forbidden them, yet could they not be made to do either of them. No, nor once to flatter their tormentors, or to shed a tear.

"A few of them were priests, some were Sadducees, most were Pharisees. They were in the two centuries before Hillel what the rabbis were after him. They were the iurisprudentes of Judea, whose legal opinions, selected by time and transmitted by word of mouth from teacher to pupil, became part of that oral tradition which the Pharisees honored along with the written Law.

"There were of course many exceptions, of which the pretty story of Susannah may serve as an instance. It tells of a fair Jewess falsely accused of unchastity by two unsatisfied elders, and freed through the skillful cross-examination of witnesses by a youth named Daniel. Even this romance found its way into some editions of the Book of Daniel.

"The book of Joshua, son of Sirach, which we know as Ecclesiasticus, may be as late as this period. It is one of many Apocrypha -- 'hidden' or unauthentic compositions not accepted into the Jewish canon of the Old Testament. Rich in beauty and wisdom, it did not deserve to be excluded from the company of Ecclestiastes and Job.

"In its twenty-fourth chapter we find again, as in the eighth chapter of Proverbs, the doctrine of the Logos or Incarnate Word. 'Wisdom: the first product of God, created from the beginning of the world.' Between 30 B.C. and A.D. 40 an Alexandran Jew - or a number of Hellenistic Jews -- published a Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, which sought, like Philo, to harmonize Judaism and Platonism, and called Hellenizing Jews back to the Law in prose as noble as any since Isaiah.

"The Book of Daniel, written about 165 B.C. to encourage Israel against Antiochus Epiphanes, was still circulating among Jews who could not believe that Yahveh would let them long remain under pagan domination. The Book of Enoch, probably the work of several authors between 170 and 66 B.C., took the form of visions vouchsafed to the patriarch who, in Genesis (v. 24), had 'walked with God.' It recounted the fall of Satan and his cohorts -- the consequent intrusion of evil and suffering into human life -- the redemption of mankind by a Messiah --and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven.

"To many Jews the rule of Rome seemed part of the transient victory of evil. They denounced the greed, treachery, brutality, and idolatry of 'gentile' civilization and the 'atheistic' hedonism of an epicurean world.

"According to the Book of Wisdom:-

"'The ungodly said:-'Our life is short and tedious, and in the death of a man ther is no remedy. Neither was there any man known to return from the grave. For the breath in our nostrls is as smoke, and a little spark in the moving of our heart. Which being extinguished, our body shall be turned into ashes, and our spirit shall vanish as the soft air. And our name shall be forgotten, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, as a mist dispersed by the beams of the sun.

"'Come on, let us enjoy the good things that are present. Let no flower of the spring pass us by. Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they be withered. Let us leave tokens of our joyfulness in every place.'

"These epicureans reason flsely, says the author. They hitch their wagon to a falling star, since pleasure is a vain and transitory thing.

"'For the hope of the ungodly man is as chaff swept away by the wind, and as thin hoar-frost scattered by the tempest. It passeth as the remembrance of a guest who tarrieth but a day. But the righteous shall live forever, and the care of them with the Most High. Therefore shall they receive a glorious kingdom, and a diadem of beauty from the hand of the Lord.'

"The reign of evil will be brought to an end, according to the apocalytptic books, either by the direct intervention of God himself or the earthly coming of his son or representative, the Messiah or Anointed One. Had not the prophet Isaiah, a century back foretold him?

"The philosopher of Proverbs and the poet of the Wisdom of Solomon, perhaps influenced by Plato's Ideas or the Stoic anima mundi, saw him as incarnate Wisdom, the first-begotten of God, the Word or reason (logos) that would soon play so great a role in Philo's philosophy.

"Nearly all the apocalyptic authors thought that the Messiah would triumph speedily. But Isaiah in a remarkable passage had conceived him as --

"'despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows. He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities and with his stripes we are healed. The Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all. He was taken from prison and from judgment, and was cut off out of the land of the living. He bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.'

"All, however, agree that in the end the Messiah would subdue the heathen, free Israel, make Jerusalem his capital, and win all men to accept Yahveh and the Mosaic Law.

"Thereafter a 'Good Time' would come of happiness for the whole world. All the earth would be fertile -- every seed would bear a thousandfold -- wine would be plentiful -- poverty would disappear -- all men would be healthy and vituous -- and justice, good fellowship, and peace would reign over the earth.

"Some seers thought that this joyful age would be interrupted, that the powers of darkness and evil would make a last assault upon the happy kingdom, and that the world would be consumed in chaos and conflagration.

"In the final 'Day of God' the dead would rise and be judged by the 'Ancient of Days' (Yahveh), or by the 'Son of Man,' to whom absolute and everlasting dominion would then be given over a renovated world, the Kingdom of God.

"The poor or bereaved, the oppressed or scorned of the earth, looked for some divine redeemer of their subjection and their suffering. Soon, said the apocalypses, a savior would come, and in his triumph all just men would be lifted up, even out of the grave, into a paradise of eternal bliss. Old saints like Simeon, mystic women like Anna, daughter of Phanuel, passed their lives about the Temple, fasting, waiting, praying that they might look upon the Redeemer before they died.

"When Herod the Great died the nationalists, spurning the pacific counsels of Hillel, declared a revolt against Herod's successor Archelaus, and encamped in tents about the Temple. Archelaus' troops slew 3000 of them, many of whom had come to Jerusalem for the passover festival (4 B.C.).

"At the following feast of Pentecost the rebels gathered again, and once more suffered great slaughter. The Temple cloisters were burned to the ground, the treasures of the sanctuary were plunderd by the legions, and many Jews killed themselves in despair.

"Procurators complained that the Jews were a very troublesome people to oppress. Bands of 'Zealous' and 'Dagger-men' (Sicari) were formed in protest against this misrule. Their members, pledged to kill any disloyal Jew, mingled in street gatherings, stabbed their appointed victims from behind, and disappeared in the chaos of the crowd.

"The old or well-to-do Hebrews counseled patience, arguing that revolt against so powerful an empire would be national suicide. The young or poor accused them of connivance and cowardice. The two factions divided the city and nearly every family. One seized the upper part of Jerusalem, the other the lower, and each attacked the other with every weapon at hand. A rebel force surrounded the Roman garrison at Masada, persuaded it to disarm, and then slaughtered every man of it.

"The approach of the legions brought the defenders to a belated and fanatical unity. Tacitus reckons that 600,000 rebels had gathered in the city. All who were capable of serving appeared in arms and the women were not less martial than the men.

"Josephus, from the Roman lines, called upon the besieged to surrender. They branded him as a traitor, and fought to the last. Starving Jews made desperate sorties to forage for food. Thousands of them were captured by the Romans, and were crucified. Said Josephus:-'The multitude of these was wo great that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses were wanting for the bodies.'

"In the later stages of the five-month siege the streets of the city were clogged with corpses. Ghouls wandered about despoiling and stabbing the dead. We are told that 116,000 bodies were thrown over the walls. Some Jews swallowed gold pieces and slipped out from Jerusalem. Romans or Syrians, capturing them, slit open their bellies, or searched their offal, to find the coins.

"Having taken half the city, Titus offered what he thought were lenient terms to the rebels. They rejected them. The flaming brands of the Romans set fire to the Temple, and the great edifice, much of it of wood, was rapidly consumed. The surviving defenders fought bravely, proud, says Dio, to die on Temple grounds.

"Some killed one another, some fell upon their own swords, some leaped into the flames. The victors gave no quarter, but slew all Jews upon whom they could lay their hands. 97,000 fugitives were caught and sold as slaves. Many of them died as unwilling gladiators in the triumphal games that were celebrated at Berytus, Caesarea Philippi, and Rome.

"The high-priesthood and the Sanhedrin were abolished. Judaism took the form that it has kept until our own time -- a religion without a central shrine, without a dominant priesthood, without a sacrificial service.

"Since fertility was commanded and infanticide sternly forbidden by Jewish piety and law, the expansion of the Jews was due to biological as well as economic causes. Hebrews still played a very minor role in the commerce of the world. Fifty years before the fall of Jerusalem, Strabo, with Anti-Semitic exaggeration, reported that 'it is hard to find a single place on the habitable earth that has not admitted this tribe of men, and is not possessed by it.'

"By A.D. 70 there were thousands of Jews in Seleucia on the Tigris, and in other Parthian cities. They were numerous in Arabia, and crossed thence into Ethiopia. They abounded in Syria and Phoenicia. They had large colonies in Tarsus, Antioch, Miletus, Ephesus, Sardis, Smyrna. They were only less numerous in Delos, Corinth, Athens, Philippi, Patrae, Thessalonica.

"In the west there were Jewish communities in Carthage, Syracuse, Puteoli, Capua, Pompeii, Rome, even in Horace's native Venusia.

"Tannaim -- expositors -- interpreted one or another of the orally transmitted laws (Halaoha) of the Jews, usually supported it with scriptural quotation, sometimes added to it, and illustrated it with stories, homilies, or other material (Haggada).

"The most famous of the Tannaim was Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph. At the age of forty (ca. A.D. 80) he joined his five-year-old son at school, and learned to read. Soon he could recite the whole Pentateuch by heart.

"After thirteen years of study he opened his own school under a fig tree in a village near Jamnia. His enthusiasm and idealism, his courage and humor, even his lusty dogmatism, brought him many students. When, in 95, word came that Domitian was planning new measures against the Jews, Akiba was chosen with Gamaliel and two others to make a personal appeal to the Emperor.

While they were in Rome Domitian died. Nerva heard their plea favorably, and ended the fiscus Iudaicus -- the tax laid upon Jews for rebuilding Rome. On his return to Jamnia Akiba set himself the lifelong task of codifying the Halacha. His pupil Rabbi Meir and their successor Judah the Patriarch (ca. 200) completed the undertaking.

"Even in this classified form the Halacha remained part of the oral tradition, handed down from generation to generation by scholars and professional memorizers -- living textbooks of the Law.

"Akiba's methods were as absurd as his conclusions were sound. He derived liberal principles from a weird exegesis in which every letter of the Torah, or written law, was held to have a ysterious meaning. Perhaps he had observed that men will accept the rational only in the form of the mystical.

"From Akiba came that painstaking organization and exposition of theology and ethics which passed down through the Talmud to Maimonides, and ultimately to the methods of the Scholastic philosophers.

"Resolved to destroy the recuperative virility of Judaism, Hadrian forbade not merely circumcision, but the observance of the Sabbath or any Jewish holiday, and the public performance of any Hebrew ritual.

"A new and heavier poll tax was placed upon all Jews. They were allowed in Jerusalem only on one fixed day each year, when they might come and weep before the ruins of their Temple. The pagan city of Aelia Capitolina rose on the site of Jerusalem, with shrines to Jupiter and Venus, and with palaetras, theaters, and baths. Public instruction in the Law was prohibied on pain of death. Several rabbis were executed for disobeying this injunction.

"Akiba, now ninety-five, insisted on teaching his pupils. He was imprisoned for three years, but taught even in jail. He was tried and condemned, and died, we are told, with the basic tenet of Judaism on his lips:-'Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.'

"The Jews did not for centuries recover from the disaster of Bar Cocheba's revolt. From this moment they entered their Middle Ages, abandoning all secular learning except medicine, renouncing every form of Hellenism, and taking comfort and unity only from their rabbis, their mystic poets, and their Law.

"No other people has ever known so long an exile, or so hard a fate. Shut out from their Holy City, the Jews were compelled to surrender it first to paganism, then to Christianity.

"Scattered into every province and beyond -- condemned to poverty and humiliation -- unbefriended even by philosophers and saints -- they retired from public affairs into private study and worship, passionately preserving the words of their scholars, and preparing to write them down at last in the Talmuds of Babylonia and Palestine.

"Early in the eighteenth century the circle of Bolingbroke, shocking even Voltaire, privately discussed the possibility that Jesus had never lived. Volney propounded the same doubt in his ruins of Empire in 1791.

"Napoleon, meeting the German scholar Wieland in 1808, asked him no petty question of politics or war, but did he believe in the historicity of Christ?

"One of the most far-reaching activities of the modern mind has been the 'Higher Criticism' of the Bible -- the mounting attack upon its authenticity and veracity, countered by the heroic attempts to save the historical foundations of Christian faith. The results may in time prove as revolutionary as Christianity itself.

"The first engagement in this two-hundred-year war was fought in silence by Hermann Reimarus, professor Oriental languages at Hamburg. On his death in 1768 he left, cautiously unpublished, a 1400-page manuscript on the life of Christ.

"Six years later Gotthold Lessing, over the protests of his friends, published portions of it as the Wolfenbuttel Fragments. Reimarus argued that Jesus can only be regarded and understood not as the founder of Christianity, but as the final and dominant figure in the mystical eschatology of the Jews -- i.e. Christ thought not of establishing a new religion, but of preparing men for the imminent destruction of the world, and God's Last Judsgment of all souls.

"In 1796 Heinrich Paulus, summarizing the life of Christ in 1192 pages, proposed a rationalistic interprtation of the miracles -- i.e. accepted their occurrence but ascribed them to natural causes and powers.

"In an epoch-marking Life of Jesus (1835-36) David Strauss rejected this compromise. The supernatural elements in the Gospels, he thought, should be classed as myths, and the actual career of Christ must be reconstructed without using these elements in any form. Strauss's massive volumes made Biblical criticism the storm center of German thought for a generation.

"In 1863 Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus, alarming millions with its rationalism and charming millions with its prose, gathered together the results of German criticism, and brought the problem of the Gospels before the entire educated world.

"The French school reached its climax at the end of the century in the Abbe Loisy, who subjected the New Testament to such rigorous textual analysis that the Catholic Church felt compelled to excommunicate him and other 'Modernists.'

"Meanwhile the Dutch school of Pierson, Naber, and Matthas carried the movement to its farthest point by laboriously denying the historical reality of Jesus.

"In Germany Arthur Drews gave this negative conclusion its definitive exposition (1906).

"In England W.B. Smith and J.M. Robertson argued in a like denial.

"'At that time lived Jesus, a holy man, if man he may be called, for he performed wonderful works, and taught men, and joyfully received the truth. And he was followed by many Jews and many Greeks. He was the Messiah.'

"There may be a genuine core in these strange lines. But the high praise given to Christ by a Jew uniformly anxious to please either the Romans or the Jews -- both at that time in conflict with Christianity -- renders the passage suspect, and Christian scholars reject it as almost certainly an inperpolation.

"There are references to 'Yeshu'a of Nazareth' in the Talmud, but they are too late in date to be certanly more than counterechoes of Christian thought. The oldest known mention of Christ in pagan literature is in a letter of the younger Pliny (ca. 110), asking the advice of Trajan on the treatment of Christians.

"Five years later Tacitus described Nero's persecution of the Chrestiani in Rome, and pictured them as already (A.D.60) numbering adherents throughout the Emire. The paragraph is so Tacitean in style, force, and prejudice that of all Biblical critics only Drews questions its authenticity.

"Suetonius (ca. 125) mentions the same persecution, and reports Claudius' banishment (ca. 52) of 'Jews who, stirred up by Christ (impulsore Chresto), were causing public disturbances. The passage accords well with the Acts of the Apostles, which mentions a decree of Claudius that 'the Jews should leave Rome.'

"These references prove the existence of Christians rather than of Christ. Unless we assume the latter we are driven to the improbable hypothesis tht Jesus wss invented in one generation. Moreover, we must suppose that the Christian community in Rome had been established some years before 52, to merit the attention of an imperial decree.

"About the middle of this first century a pagan named Thallus, in a fragment preserved by Julius Africanus, argued that the abnormal darkness alleged to have accompanied the death of Christ was a purely natural phenomenon and coincidence. The argument took the existence of Christ for granted. The denial of that existence seems never to have occurred even to the bitterest gentile or Jewish opponents of nascent Christianity.

"The Christian evidence for Christ begins with the letters ascribed to Saint Paul. Some of these are of uncertain authorship. Several, antedating A.D. 64, are almost universally accountd as substantially genuine. No one has questioned the existence of Paul, or his repeated meetings with Peter, James, and John. Paul enviously admits that these men had known Christ in the flesh.

"The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are 'synoptic.' Their contents and episodes allow of being arranged in parallel columns and 'viewed together.'

"They were written in the Greek koine of popular speech, and were no models of grammar or literary finish.

"Christian writers before 100 quote the Old, but never the New, Testament. The only reference to a Christian gospel before 150 is in Papias, who, about 135, reports an unidentified 'John the Elder' as saying that Mark had composed his gospel from memories conveyed to him by Peter. Papias adds:-'Matthew transcribed in Hebrew the Logia' -- apparently an early Aramaic collection of the sayings of Christ.

"Probably Paul had some such document, for although he mentions no gospels he occasionally quotes the direct words of Jesus.

"Criticism generally agrees in giving the Gospel of Mark priority, and in dating it between 65 and 70. Since it sometimes repeats the same matter in different forms, it is widely believed to have been based upon the Logia, and upon another early narrative which may have been the original composition of Mark himself.

"Our Gospel of Mark was apparently circulated while some of the apostles, or their immediate disciples, were still alive. It seems unlikely, therefore, that it differed substantially from their recollection and interpretation of Christ.

"Aiming to convert Jews, Matthew relies more than the other evangelists on the miracles ascribed to Jesus, and is suspiciously eager to prove that many Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in Christ.

"Nevertheless, it is the most moving of the four Gospels, and must be ranked among the unconscious master pieces of the world's literature.

"The Gospel according to St. Luke, generally assigned to the last decade of the first century, announces its desire to co-ordinate and reconcile earlier accouants of Jesus, and aims to convert not Jews but gentiles. Very probably Luke was himself a gentile, the friend of Paul, and the author of the Acts of the Apostles.

"Like Matthew he borrows much from Mark. Of the 661 verses in the received text of Mark over 600 are reproduced in Matthew, and 350 in Luke, mostly word for word. Many passages in Luke that are not in Mark occur in Matthew, again nearly verbatim. Apparently Luke borrowed these from Matthew, or Luke and Matthew took them from a common source, now lost.

"In the enthusiasm of its discoveries the Higher Criticism has applied to the New Testment tests of authenticity so severe that by them a hundred ancient worthies -- e.g. Hammurabi, David, Socrates -- would fade into legend. Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed -- the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom -- their flight after Jesus' arrest -- Peter's denial -- the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee -- the references of some auditors to his possible insanity -- his early uncertainty as to his mission -- his confessions of ignorance as to the future -- his moments of bitterness -- his despairing cry on the cross. No one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them.

"That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels.

"He was apparently one of a large family, for his neighbors, marveling at his authoritative teaching, asked:-'Where did he get this wisdom, and the power to do these wonders? Is he not the carpenter's son? Is not his mother named Mary, and are not his brothers named James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? And do not his sisters live here among us?'

"Luke tells the story of the Annunciation with some literary art, and puts into the mouth of Miriam -- Mary -- that Magnificat which is one of the great poems embedded in the New Testament.

"Next to her son, Mary is the most touching figure in the narrative -- rearing him through all the painful joys of motherhood -- proud of his youthful learning -- wondering later at his doctrine and his claims -- wishing to withdraw him from the exciting throng of his followers and bring him back to the healing quiet of his home ('thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing') -- helplessly witnessing his crucifixion -- and receiving his body into her arms. If this is not history it is supreme literature, for the relations of parents and children hold deeper dramas than those of sexual love.

"The tales later circulated, by Celsus and others, about Mary and a Roman soldier are by critical consent 'clumsy fabrication.' Not so awkward are the stories, chiefly contained in the apocryphal or uncanonical gospels, about the birth of Christ in a cave or stable, the adoration of the shepherds and the Magi, the massacre of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt. The mature mind will not resent this popular poetry.

"He was sensitive to the natural beauties of the countryside, to the grace and color of flowers, and the silent fruitfulness of trees.

"The story of his questioning the scholars in the Temple is not incredible. He had an alert and curious mind, and in the Near East a boy of twelve already touches maturity. But he had no formal educaton. His neighbors asked:-'How is it that this man can read when he has never gone to school?' He attended the synagogue, and heard the Scriptures with evident delight. The Prophets and the Psalms above all sank deep into his memory, and helped to mold him.

"Perhaps he read also the books of Daniel and Enoch, for his later teaching was shot through with their visions of the Messiah, the Last Judgment, and the coming Kingdom of God.

"The air he breathed was tense with religious excitement. Thousands of Jews awaited anxiously the Redeemer of Israel. Magic and witchcraft -- demons and angels -- 'possession' and exorcism -- miracles and prophecies -- divination and astrology were taken for granted everywhere. Probably the story of the Magi was a necessary concession to the astrological convictions of the age.

"Thaumaturgists -- wonder-workers -- toured the towns. On the annual journeys that all good Palestinian Jews made to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, Jesus must have learned something of the Essenes, and their half-monastic, almost Buddhistic, life. Ashoka had sent his Buddhist missionaries as far west as Egypt and Cyrene. Very likely, therefore, to the Near East. Possibly he heard also of a sect called 'Nazarenes' who dwelt beyond the Jordan in Peraca, rejected Temple worship, and denied the binding character of the Law.

"He shared the asceticism of the Essenes, but differed from them in holding one baptism to be enough. His name 'the Baptist' may be a Greek equivalent of 'Essene' (bather). To his rite of symbolic purification John added a menacing condemnation of hypocrisy and loose living, warned sinners to prepare themselves for the Last Judgment, and proclaimed the early coming of the Kingdom of God.

"If all Judea should repent and be cleased of sin, said John, the Messiah and the Kigndom would come at once.

"In or shortly after 'the fifteenth year of Tiberius,' says Luke, Jesus came down to the Jordan to be baptized by John. This decision, by a man now 'about thirty years old,' attested Christ's acceptance of John's teaching. His own would be essentially the same. His methods and character, however, were different. He would himself never baptize anyone, and he would live not in the wilderness but in the world.

"Soon after this meeting Herod Antipas, tetrarch ('ruler of four cities') of Galilee, ordered the imprisonment of John. The Gospels ascribe the arrest to John's criticism of Herod's acts in divorcing his wife and marrying Herodias while she was still the wife of his half brother Philip. Josephus attributes the arrest to Herod's fear that John was fomenting a political rebellion in the guise of a religious reformation.

"Mark and Matthew tell here the story of Salome, Herodias' daughter, who danced so alluringly before Herod that he offered her any reward she might name. At her mother's urging, we are told, she asked for the head of John, and the tetrarch reluctantly accommodated her.

"'The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach glad tidings to the poet. He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the down-trodden free.'

"Luke adds:-'The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed upon him. And he began by saying to them, 'This passage of Scripture has been fulfilled here in your hearing today.' And they all spoke well of him, and were astonished at the winning words that fell from his lips.'

"When the news came that John had been beheaded, and his followers sought a new leader, Jesus assumed the burden and the risk, at first retiring cautiously to quiet villages, always refraining from political controversy, then more and more boldly proclaiming the gospel of repentance, belief, and salvation.

"Some of his hearers thought he was John risen from the dead.

"It is difficult to see him objectively, not only because the evidence is derived from those who worshiped him, but even more because our own moral heritage and ideals are so closely bound up with him and formed on his example that we feel injured in finding any flaw in his character.

"His religious sensitivity was so keen that he condemned severely those who would not share his vision. He could forgive any fault but unbelief. There are in the Gospels some bitter passages quite out of key with what else we are told about Christ. He seems to have taken over without scrutiny the harshest contemporary notions of an everlasting hell where unbelievers and unrepentant sinners would suffer from inextinguishable fire and insatiable worms.

"He tells without protest how the poor man in heaven was not permitted to let a single drop of water fall upon the tongue of the rich man in hell. He counsels nobly"-'Judge not, that ye be not judged,' but he cursed the men and cities that would not receive his gospel, and the fig tree that bore no fruit.

"He may have been a bit harsh to his mother. He had the puritan zeal of the Hebrew prophet rather than the broad calm of the Greek sage.

"We gather from stray words that, like other men of that age and land, he wore a tunic under a cloak, had sandals on his feet, and probably a cloth headdress falling over his shoulders to shield him from the sun. Many women sensed in him a sympathetic tenderness that aroused in them an unstinted devotion. The fact that only John tells the story of the woman taken in adultery is no argument against its truth. It does not help John's theology, and is completely in character with Christ.

"Of like beauty, and hardly within the inventive powers of the evangelists, is the account of the prostitute who, moved by his ready acceptance of repentant sinners, knelt before him, anointed his feet with precious myrrh, let her tears fall upon them, and dried them with her hair. Of her Jesus said that her sins were forgiven 'because she loved much.'

"We are told that mothers brought their children to be touched by him, and 'he took the children in his arms, laid his hands upon them, and blessed them.

"Unlike the prophets, the Essenes, and the Baptists, he was no ascetic. He is represented as providing abudant wine for a marriage feast, as living with 'publicans and sinners,' and receiving a Magdalene into his company. He was not hostile to the simple joys of life, though he was unbiologically harsh on the desire of a man for a maid.

"Occasionally he partook of banquets in the homes of rich men. Generally, however, he moved among the poor, even among the almost untouchable Amhaarez so scorned, and shunned by Sadducees and Pharisees alike.

"Realizing that the rich would never accept him, he built his hopes upon an overturn that would make the poor and humble supreme in the coming Kingdom. He resembled Caesar only in taking his stand with the lower classes, and in the quality of mercy. Otherwise what a world of outlook, character, and interests separated them!

"Caesar hoped to reform men by changing institutions and laws. Christ wished to remake institutions, and lessen laws, by changing men. Caesar too was capable of anger, but his emotions were always under the control of his clear-eyed intellect.

"Jesus was not without intellect. He answered the tricky questions of the Pharisees with almost a lawyer's skill, and yet with wisdom. No one could confuse him, even in the face of death. But his powers of mind were not intellectual, did not depend upon knowledge. They were derived from keenness of perception, intensity of feeling, and singleness of purpose.

He did not claim omniscience. He could be surprised by events. Only his earnestness and enthusiasm led him to overestimate his capacities, as in Nazareth and Jerusalem.

"The psychological nature of the miracles is indicated by two features. Christ himself attributed his cures to the 'faith' of those whom he healed. He could not perform miracles in Nazareth, apparently because the people there looked upon him as 'the carpenter's son,' and refused to believe in his unusual powers. Hence his remark that 'a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house.'

"We are told of Mary Magdalene that 'seven demons had been driven out of her,' i.e. she suffered from nervous diseases and seizures (the word recalls the theory of 'possession'). These seemed to abate in the presence of Jesus. Therefore she loved him as one who had restored her to life, and whose nearness was indispensable to her sanity.

"In the case of Jairus' daughter, Christ said frankly that the girl was not dead but asleep -- perhaps in a cataleptic state. In calling upon her to awake he used not his wonted gentleness but the sharp command, 'Little girl, get up!'

"This is not to say that Jesus considered his miracles to be purely natural phenomena. He felt that he could work them only through the help of a divine spirit within him. We do not know that he was wrong, nor can we yet set limits to the powers that lie potential in the thought and will of man. Jesus himself seems to hav experienced a physical exhaustion after his miracles.

"When the Baptist was imprisoned, one of his followers, Andrew, attached himself to Jesus, and brought with him his brother Simon, who Christ called Cephas -- 'the rock.' The Greeks translated the name into Petros. Peter is a thoroughly human figure, impulsive, earnest, generous, jealous, at times timid to the point of a forgivable cowardice. He and Andrew were fisherman on the Lake of Galilee. So were the two sons of Zebedee -- James and John. These four forsook their work and their families to become an inner circle about Christ.

"Matthew was the collector of customs at the frontier town of Capernaum. He was a 'publican' -- i.e. a man engaged in public or state business, therefore in this case serving Rome, and hated by every Jew who longed for freedom.

"Judas of Kerioth was the only one of the apostles who did not come from Galilee. The Twelve pooled their material possessions, and entrusted Judas with their common funds.

"As they followed Christ in his missionary wandering, they lived on the country, taking their food now and then from the fields they passed, and accepting the hospitality of converts and friends.

"In addition to the Twelve, Jesus appointed seventy-two others as disciples, and sent two of them to each town that he intended to visit. He bade them 'carry no purse, nor wallet, nor shoes'. Kindly and pious women joined the apostles and disciples, contributed to their support, and performed for them those solicitous domestic functions which are the supreme consolation of male life.

"He promised hunger and woe to the rich and filled, and comforted the poor with Beatitudes that pledged them the Kingdom. To the rich youth who asked what he should do besides keeping the commandments, Christ answered:-'Sell your property, give your money to the poor, and follow me.'

"Apparently the apostles interpreted the Kingdom as a revolutionary inversion of the existing relationships between the rich and the poor. We shall find them and the early Christians forming a communistic band which 'had all things in common.'

The charge on which Jesus was condemned was that he had plotted to make himself 'King of the Jews.'

"But a conservative can also quote the New Testament to his purpose. Christ made a friend of Matthew, who continued to be an agent of the Roman power. He uttered no criticism of the civil government, took no known part in the Jewish movement for national liberation, and counseled a submissive gentleness hardly smacking of political revolution.

"He advised the Pharisees to 'render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's.' His story of the man who, before going on a journey, called on his slaves,s and put his property in their hands, contains no complaint against interest or slavery, but takes these institutions for granted.

"Christ apparently approves of the slave who invested the ten minas ($600) that the master had entrusted to him, and made ten more. He disapproves of the slave who, left with one mina, held it in unproductive safekeeping against the master's return. And he puts into the master's mouth the hard saying that 'to him who has, more will be given, and from him who had nothing, even that which he has will be taken away' -- an excellent summary of market operations, if not of world history.

"In another parable workers 'grumbled at their employer,' who paid as much to one who had labored an hour as to those who had toiled all day. Christ makes the employer answer:-'Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with my own?'

"Jesus does not seem to have thought of ending poverty. 'The poor ye have always with you.' He takes for granted, like all ancients, that a slave's duty is to serve his master well. 'Blessed is the slave whom his master, returning, finds performing his charge.' He is not concerned to attack existing economic or political institutions. On the contrary, he condemns those ardent souls who would 'take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm.'

"The revolution he sought was a far deeper one, without which reforms could only be superficial and transitory. If he could cleanse the human heart of selfish desire, cruelty, and lust, utopia would come of itself, and all those institutions that rise out of human greed and violence, and the consequent need for law, would disppear.

"These were not rules for ordinary life. They were a semimonastic regimen fitting men and women for election by God into an imminent Kingdom in which there would be no law, no marriage, no sexual relations, no property, and no war. Jesus praised those who 'leave house, or parents, or brethen, or wife, or children,' even those 'who make themselves eunuchs, for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake.'

"Obviously this was intended for a devoted religious minority, not for a continuing society. It was an ethic in purpose but universal in its scope, for it applied the conception of brotherhood and the Golden Rule to foreigners and enemies as well as to neighbors and friends.

"It visioned a time when men would worship God not in temples but 'in spirit and truth' -- in every deed rather than in passing words.

"Were these moral ideas new? Nothing is new exceept arrangement.

"The central theme of Christ's preaching -- the coming Judgment and Kingdom -- was already a century old among the Jews. The Law had long since inculcated brotherhood:-'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself' said Leviticus. Even 'the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself.'

"Exodus had commanded the Jews to do good to their enemies. A good Jew will restore the straying ox or ass even of the 'enemy that hateth thee.' The prophets, too, had ranked a good life above all ritural, and Isaiah and Hosea had begun to change Yahveh from a Lord of Hosts into a God of Love. Hillel, like Confucius, had phrased the Golden Rule.

"When he met the Samaritan woman at the well, he told her:-'Salvation is of the Jews' -- though we must not judge him from words perhaps put into his mouth by one who was not present, and who wrote sixty years after the event. When a Canaanite woman asked him to heal her daughter, he at first refused, saying:-'I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.' He told the leper whom he had cured to 'go to the priest and offer the gift that Moses prescribed.' 'Do everything that the scribes and Pharisees tell you, and observe it all, but do not do as they do.

<"In suggesting modifications and mitigations of the Judaic Law Jesus, like Hillel, did not think that he was overthrowing it. 'I came not to destroy the Law of Moses but to fulfill it.' 'It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle of the Law to fail.'

"Nevertheless, he transformed everything by the force of his character and his feeling. He added to the Law the injunction to prepare for the Kingdom by a life of justice, kindliness, and simplicity.

"He hardened the Law in matters of sex and divorce, but softened it toward a readier forgiveness, and reminded the Pharisees that the Sabbath was made for man. He relaxed the code of diet and cleanliness, and omitted certain fasts. He brought religion back from ritual to righteousness, and condemned conspicuous prayers, showy charities, and ornate funerals.

"The priests of the Temple and the members of the Sanhedrin watched his activity with suspicion. Like Herod with John, they saw in it the semblance or cover of a political revolution. They feared lest the Roman procurator should accuse them of neglecting their responsibility for maintaining social order. They were a bit frightened by Christ's promise to destroy the Temple and not quite sure it was only a metaphor.

"For his part Christ denounced them in sharp and bitter terms:-

'The scribes and Pharisees put heavy loads of the Law upon men's shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. They do everything they do to have men see it. They wear wide Scripture texts as charms, and large tassels, and they like the best places at dinners and the front seats in the synagogues.

'But alas for you hypocritical scribes and Pharisees -- you blind guides -- blind fools! -- You let the weightier matters of the Law go -- justice, mercy, and integrity. You clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.

'You hypocritical scribes and Pharisees are like whitewashed tombs! OUtwardly you appear to men to be upright, but within you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

'You are descended from the murderers of the prophets. Go and and fill up the measure of your forefathers' guilt! You serpents! You brood of snakes! How can you escape being sentenced to the pit? The publicans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of God before you!'

"Was Jesus just to the Pharisees? Probably there were some among them who deserved this castigation, many who, like numberless Christians a few centuries later, substituted outward piety for inward grace.

"But there were also many Pharisees who agreed that the Law should be softened and humanized. Very likely a large number of the sect were sincere men, reasonably decent and honorable, who felt that the ceremonial laws neglected by Jesus should be judged not in themselves but as part of a code that served to hold the Jews together, in pride and decency, amid a hostile world.

"He put them off by saying 'It is not for you to know the times and seasons which the Father has set' and he gave an equally vague answer to emissaries of the Baptist who asked him:-'Art thou he that was to come?' To turn his followers from their conception of him as a political Messiah, he repudiated all claim to Davidic descent.

"Gradually however the intense expectations of his followers, and his discovery of his unusual psychic powers, seem to have persuaded him that he had been sent by God, not to restore the sovereignty of Judea, but to prepare men for the reign of God on earth. He did not (in the synoptic Gospels) identify or equate himself, with the Father.

"He asked:-'Why do you call me good? There is none good but one, that is God.' He prayed in Gethsemane:-'Not as I will but as thou wilt.' He took the phrase 'Son of Man,' which Daniel had made a synonym for the Messiah, used it at first without clearly meaning himself, and ended by applying it to himself in such statements as 'The Son of Man is master of the Sabbath' which seemed high blasphemy to the Pharisees.

"He called God 'Father' at times in no exclusive sense. Occasionally, however, he spoke of 'my Father,' apparently signifying that he was the son of God in an especial manner or degree.

"For a long time he forbade the disciples to call him the Messiah. But at Caesarea Philippi he approved Peter's recongition of him as 'the Christ, the Son of the living God.'

"When, on the last Monday before his death, he approached Jerusalem to make a final appeal to the people, 'the whole throng of his disciples' greeted him with the words, 'Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord,' and when some Pharisees asked him to reprove this salutation, he answered 'I tell you, if they keep silence, the stones will cry out.

"The Fourth Gospel reports that the crowd hailed him as 'King of Israel.' Apparently his followers still thought of him as a political Messiah, who would overthrow the Roman power and make Judea supreme.

"Visiting the Temple on the day after his entry into the city, Jesus was shocked by the clamor and commercialism of the booths. In a burst of indignation he and his followers overthrew the tables of the money-changers and the dove merchants, scattered their coins on the ground, and with 'a scourge of rods' drove the traders from the court.

"For several days thereafter he taught in the Temple, unhindered, but at night he left Jerusalem and stayed on the Mount of Olives, fearing arrest or assassination.

"The agents of the government -- civil and ecclesiastical, Roman and Jewish -- had kept watch on him probably from the time when he had taken up the mission of John the Baptist. His failure to secure a large following had inclined them to ignore him. But his enthusiastic reception in Jerulsalem seems to have set the Jewish leaders wondering whether this excitement, working upon the emotional and patriotic Passover throngs, might flare up into an untimely and futile revolt against the Roman power, and issue in the suppression of all self-government and religious freedom in Judea.

"The high priest called a meeting of the Sanhedrin, and expressed the opinion 'that one man should die for the people, instead of the whole nation being destroyed. The majority agreed with him, and the Council ordered the arrest of Christ.

"Some news of this decision seems to have reached Jesus, perhaps through members of the Sanhedrin minority. On the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan (our April third), probably in the year 30, Jesus and his apostles ate the Seder, or Passover supper, in the home of a friend in Jerusalem.

"They looked to the Master to free himself by his miraculous powers. He, on the contrary, accepted his fate, and perhaps hoped that his death would be received by God as a sacrificial atonement for the sins of his people.

"He had been informed that one of the Twelve was conspiring to betray him. At this last supper he openly accused Judas Iscariot. In accord with Jewish ritual Jesus blessed (in Greek, eucharistisae) the wine that he gave the apostles to drink, and then they sang together the Jewish ritual song Hallel.

"He told them, says John, that he would be with them 'only a little longer. I give you a new command. Love one another. Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God and believe in me. In my Father's house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you.'

"When Caiaphas asked him whether he was 'the Messiah, the Son of God,' Jesus reported to have answered 'I am he.' In the morning the Sanhedrin met, found him guilty of blasphemy (then a capital crime), and decided to bring him before the Roman procurator, who had come to Jerusalem to keep his eye on the Passover crowds.

"Pontius Pilate was a hard man, who would later be summoned to Rome, accused of extortion and cruelty, and removed from office. Nevertheless, it did not seem to him that this mild-mannered preacher was a real danger to the state. 'Are you the king of the Jews?' he asked. Jesus, says Matthew, answered ambiguously:-'You have said it (sic eipas). Such details, reportd presumably from hearsay and long after the event, must be held suspect. If we accept the text we must conclude that Jesus had resolved to die, and that Paul's theory of atonement had some support in Christ.

"John quotes Jesus as adding:-'For this I was born, to give testimony for the truth.' The procurator asked:-'What is truth?' -- a question perhaps due to the metaphysical propensities of the Fourth Gospel, but well revealing the chasm between the sophisticated and cynical culture of the Roman and the warm and trustful idealism of the Jew.

"Whether or not Christ was revolutionist he was obviously condemned as one by Rome. Tacitus, too, understood the matter so. A small crowd, such as could gather in Pilate's courtyard, had called for Christ's execution. Now, however, as he climbed the hill of Golgotha, 'he was followed by a great crowd of the people,' says Luke, and of women who beat their breasts and mourned for him. Quite clearly the condemnation did not have the approval of the Jewish people.

"All who cared to witness the horrible spectacle were free to do so. The Romans, who thought it necessary to rule by terror, chose, for capital offenss by other than Roman citizens, what Cicero called 'the most cruel and hideous of tortures.' The offender's hands and feet were bound (seldom nailed) to the wood. A projecting block supported the backbone or the feet. Unless mercifully killed, the victim would linger there for two or three days, suffering the agony of immobility, unable to brush away the insects that fed upon his naked flesh, and slowly losing strength until the heart failed and brought an end.

"Even the Romans sometimes pitied the victim, and offered him a stupefying drink.

"The cross, we are told, was raised 'at the third hour' -- i.e. at nine in the morning. Mark reports that two robbers were crucified with Jesus, and 'reviled him.' Luke assured us that one of them prayed to him. Of all the apostles only John was present. With him were three Marys -- Christs's mother, her sister Mary, and Mary Magdalene. 'There were also some women watching from a distance.'

"Following the Roman custom, the soldiers divided the garments of the dying men. As Christ had but one, they cast lots for it. Possibly we have here an interpolated remembrance of Psalm xxii, 18. 'They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.' The same Psalm begins with the words:-'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' -- and this is the desperately human utterance that Mark and Matthew attribute to the dying Christ.

"Can it be that in those bitter moments the great faith that had sustained him before Pilate faded into black doubt?

"Luke, perhaps finding such words repugnant to the theology of Paul, substitutes for them:-'Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit' -- which in turn echoes Psalm xxxi, 5 with suspicious accuracy.

"A soldier pitying Christ's thirst, held up to his mouth a sponge soaked in sour wine. Jesus drank, and said;-'It is consummated.' As the ninth hour -- at three in the afternoon -- he 'cried out with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost.' Luke adds -- again revealing the sympathy of the Jewish populace -- that 'all the people that came together to that sight smote their breasts and returned' to the town.

"Peter and others were arrested and questioned by the Sanhedrin. The Sadducees wished to condemn them to death, but a Pharisee named Gamaliel -- probably the teacher of Paul -- advised a suspended judgment. As a compromise the prisoners were flogged and released. A little later (A.D. 30?) Stephen, one of the ordained deacons, was summoned before the Sanhedrin on the charge that he had 'used abusive language about Moses and about God.'

"He defended himself with reckless vehence:-

'You stubborn people, with heathen hearts and ears, you are always opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your forefathers did! Which of the prophets did not your forefthers persecute? They killed the man who foretold the coming of the righteous one, whom you have now betrayed and killed -- you who had the Law given you by angels, and did not obey it!'

"The Sanhedrin, in a rage, had him dragged outside the city and stoned to death. A young Pharisee named Saul aided the attack. Thereafter he went from house to house in Jerusalem, seized adherents of 'the Way,' and put them in jail.

"The Jewish converts of Greek name and culture, who had had Stephen as their leader, fled to Samaria and Antioch, where they established strong Christian communities. Most of the apostles, apparenlty spared in this persecution because they still observed the Law, remained in Jerusalem with the Judaic Christians.

"While Peter carried the Gospel to the towns of Judea, James, 'the Just,' 'the brother of the Lord,' became the head of the now reduced and impoverished church in Jerusalem. James prcticed the Law in all its severity and rivaled the Essenes in asceticism. He ate no meat, drank no wine, had only one garment, and never cut his hair or beard. For eleven years, under his guidance, the Christians were left undisturbed.

"About 41 another James, the son of Zebedee, was beheaded. Peter was arrested, but escaped. In 62 James the Just was himself put to death.

"Four years later the Jews revolted against Rome. The Jerusalem Christians, too convinced of the coming 'end of the world' to care about politics, left the city and established themselves in pagan and pro-Roman Pella, on the farther bank of the Jordan.

"From that hour Judaism and Christianity parted. The Jews accused the Christians of treason and cowardice and the Christians hailed the destruction of the Temple by Titus as a fulfillment of Christ's prophecy.

"Thereafter Judaic Christianity waned in number and power, and yielded the new religion to be transformed by the Greek mind. Galilee, where Christ had lived nearly all his life, and where the Magdalene and the other woman who had been among the first to follow him were now lost in obscurity, turned a deaf ear to the preachers who proclaimed the Nazarene as the Son of God.

"The Jews, who thirsted for liberty, and reminded themselves daily that 'the Lord is One,' were repelled by a Messiah who ignored their struggle for independence, and were scandalized by the announcement that a god had been born in a cave or stable in one of their villages. Judaic Christianity survived for five centuries in a little group of Syriac Christians called Ehionim ('the poor'), who practiced Christian poverty and the full Jewish Law.

"At the end of the second century the Church condemned them as heretics."

"Judaic Christianity?" An interesting combination of words. I am wondering what present day Jews and/or Christians think of that phrase.

"Philip made converts in Samaria and Caesarea.

"John developed a strong church in Ephesus.

"Peter preached in the cities of Syria.

"Like most of the apostles, Peter took a 'sister' with him on his missions to serve as his wife and aide. He healed the sick so successfully that at Samaria a magician, simon Magus, offered him money for a share in his mysterious powers. At Joppa he raised Tabitha from apparent death. At Caesarea he won a Roman centurion to Christianity.

"A vision, says the Book of Acts, convinced him that he should accept pagan as well as Jewish converts. From this time forward, with some amiable vacillations, he contented himself with baptizing, rather than also circumcizing, non-Jewish proselytes.

"We feel some of the ardor of these early missionaries in the first epistle of Peter:--

'Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those Christian Jews who are scatered as foreigners over Pontus, Galatia, Cappaducia, Asia, and Bithynia, God bless you and give you perfect peace. My dearly beloved, I pray you as aliens and exiles, to live upright lives among the gentiles so that they may from observing the uprightness of your conduct come to praise God.

'Submit to all human authority for the Master's sake. Live like free men, but do not make your freedom an excuse for wrong doing. Servants, be submissive to your masters, and perfectly respectful to them. Not only to those who are kind and considerate, but also to those who are unreasonable.

'You married women, likewise, must be submissive to your husbands, so that any who refuse to believe may be won over when they see how chaste and submissive you are. You must not adopt the external attractions of arranging your hair or wearing jewelry. You must be a quiet and gentle spirit.

'You married men also must be considerate to your wives. Show deference to women as the weaker sex, sharing the gift of life with you.

'Return not evil for evil. Above all keep your love for one another strong, for love covers a multitude of sins.'

"We do not know when and by what stages Peter made his way to Rome. Jerome (ca. 390) dates his first arrival there as early as 42. The tradition that he played a leading role in establishing the Christian community in the capaital has survived all criticism. Lactantius speaks of Peter's coming to Rome in Nero's reign. Probably the apostle visited the city on divers occasions.

"He free, and Paul in prison, labored as rivals to win converts there, until both of them suffered martyrdom, perhaps in the same year 64. Origen reports that Peter 'was crucified head downward, for he had asked tht he might suffer that way,' perhaps hoping that in that position death would come sooner, or (said the opinion of the faithful) holding himself unworthy to die in the same manner as Christ. Ancient texts testify tht his wife was killed with him and that he had to see her led to execution.

"Probably the name Paul was the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Saul, so that both names belonged to the apostle from infancy. He did not receive a classical education for no Pharisee would have permitted such outright Hellenism in his son, and no man with Greek training would have written the bad Greek of the Epistles. Nevertheless, he learned to speak the language with sufficient fluency to address an Athenian audience and he occasionally referred to famous passages in Greek literature.

"We may believe that some Stoic theology and ethics passed from the university environment of Tarsus into the Christianity of Paul. So he uses the Stoic term pneuma (breath) for what his English translators call spirit.

"Like most Greek cities, Tarsus had followers of the Orphic or other mystery religions, who believed that the god they worshiped had died for them, had risen from the grave, and would, if appealed to by lively faith and proper ritual, save them from Hades, and share with them his gift of eternal and blessed life.

"The mystery religions prepared the Greeks for Paul, and Paul for the Greeks.

"After the youth had learned the trade of tentmaking, and had received instruction in the local synagogue, his father sent him to Jerusalem, where, Paul tells us, he was 'educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the srict manner of th Law." Gamaliel was reputedly the grandson of Hillel. He succeeded Hillel as president of the Sanhedrin, and carried on the tradition of interpreting the Law with a lenient regard for the frailty of mankind. Stricter Pharisees were shocked to find him gazing appreciately even upon pagan women.

"He was so learned that the Jews, who keenly honor scholarship, called him 'the beauty of the Law,' and gave to him first, as to only six men after him, the title of rabban, 'our master.' From him and others Paul learned that shrewd and subtle, sometimes casuistic and sophistical, manner of Biblical interpretation which was to disport itself in the Talmud.

"Durer imagined him so in one of the greatest drawings of all times. But in truth these representations are literature and art, not history.

"His mind was of a type frequent among Jews -- penetrating and passionate rather than genial and urbane -- emotional and imaginative rather than objective and impartial. He was powerful in action because he was narrow in thought. Even more than Spinoza he was a 'God-intoxicated man,' consumed with religious enthusiasm in the literal sense of this word -- holding 'a god within.'

"He believed himself divinely inspired, and endowed with the ability to work miracles. He was also a practical soul, capable of laborious organization, impatiently patient in founding and preserving Christian communities. As in so many men, his faults and virtues were near allied and mutually indispensable.

"He was impetuous and courageous -- dogmatic and decisive -- domineering and energetic -- fanatical and creative -- proud hefore man and humble before God -- violently wrathful and capable of the tenderest love.

"He advised his followers to 'bless them that persecute you' but he could hope that his enemies -- 'the party of circumcision' -- would get themselves emasculated. He knew his failings, struggled against them, and begged his converts to 'put up with a little folly from me.'

"The postscript to his first epistle to the Corinthians sums him up:-'This farewell I, Paul, add in my own hand. A curse upon anyone who has no love for the Lord! Lord,come quickly! The blessing of the Lord Jesus be with you! My love be with you all.'

"It may be that the fervor of his persecution was due to secret doubts. He could be cruel, but not without remorse. Possibly the vision of Stephen stoned to death, perhaps even some youthful glimpse of Golgotha, troubled his memory and his journey, and fevered his imagination. As his party neared Damascus, says the Acts:--

'a sudden light flashed upon him from heaven, and he fell to the ground. Then he heard a voice saying to him:-'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' He asked:-'Who are you, sir?' The voice said:-'I am Jesus.' Saul's fellow-travelers stood speechless, for they heard the voice but could not see anyone. When he got up from the ground and opened his eyes, he could see nothing. They had to take him by the hand and lead him into Damascus. For three days he could not see.'

"No one can say what natural processes underlay this pivotal experience. The fatigue of a long journey, the strength of the desert sun, perhaps a stroke of heat lightning in the sky, acting by accumulation upon a frail and possibly epileptic body, and a mind tortured by doubt and guilt, may have brought to culmination the half-conscious process by which the passionate denier became the ablest preacher of Stephen's Christ.

"His Greek environment in Tarsus had spoken of a Soter or Savior who redeemed mankind. His Jewish lore had told of a Messiah to come. How could he be sure that this mysterious and fascinating Jesus, for whom men were ready to die, was not the promised one?

"When, weak and still blind at the end of his journey, he felt upon his face the kindly, soothing hands of a converted Jew, 'something like scales dropped from his eyes, and his sight was restored. He got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, regained his strength.'

"They went down to Jerusalem (50?) and fought the matter out with the apostles, nearly all of whom were still faithful worshipers in the Temple. James was reluctant to consent. Peter defended the two missionaries. Finally it was agreed that pagan proselytes should be required only to abstain from immorality and from the eating of sacrificial or strangled animals.

"Apparently Paul eased the way by promising financial support for the impoverished community at Jerusalem from the swelling funds of the Antioch church.

"The issue, however, was too vital to be so easily laid. A second group of orthodox Jewish Christians came from Jerusalem to Antioch, found Peter eating with gentiles, and persuaded him to separate himself, with the converted Jews, from the uncircumcized proselytes. We do not know Peter's side of this episode. Paul tells us that 'he withstood Peter to his face' at Antioch, and accused him of hypocrisy. Perhaps Peter had merely wished, like Paul, to be 'all things to all men.'

"Probably in the year 50 Paul left on his second missionary journey. He had quarreled with Barnabas, who now disappeared from history in his native Cyprus. revisiting his churches in Asia Minor, Paul attached to himself at Lystra a young disciple named Timothy, whom he came to love with a profound affection that had long been starved for an object.

"Together they went through Phrygia and Galatia as far north as Alexandria Troas. Here Paul made the acquaintance of Luke, an uncircumcized proselyte to Judaism, a man of good mind and heart, probably the author of the Third Gospel and the Book of Acts -- both designed to soften the conflicts that from the beginning marked the history of Christianity.

"From Troas Paul, Timothy, and another aide, Silas, sailed to Macedonia, for the first time touchng European soil. At Philippi, where Antony had conquered Brutus, Paul and Silas were arrested as disturbers of the peace, were scourged and jailed, but were freed on the discovery tht they were Roman citiens.

"Passing on to Thesalonica, Paul went to the synagogue, and for three Sabbaths preached to the Jews. A few were convinced, and organized a church. Others roused the town against Paul on the ground that he was proclaiming a new king. His friends had to spirit him away to Beraea during the night.

"Some listeners argued with him. Some laughed at him, and asked;-'What is this ragpicker trying to make out?' Several were interested, and led him up to the Areopagus, or Hill of Mars, for a quieter hearing. He told them how he had noted, in Athens, an altar inscribed 'To an Unknown God.' This dedication, which probably expressed the desire of the donors to thank, appease, or enlist the aid of a god of whose name they were not certain, Paul interpreted as a confession of ignorance concerning the nature of God.

"It was a brave effort to reconcile Christianity with Greek philosophy. Nevertheless, it impressed only a few. The Athenians had heard too many ideas to have much enthusiasm for any.

"Paul left the city in disappointment and went to Corinth, where commerce had gathered a substantial community of Jews. He stayed there eighteen months (51-52?), earning his living as a tentmaker, and preaching every Sabbath in the synagogue. The leader of the synagogue was converted, and so many others that the alarmed Jews indicted Paul before the Roman governor, Gallio, on the charge of 'trying to induce people to worship God in ways that are against the law.'

"Gallio replied:-'As it is only a question of words and titles and your own law, you must look after it yourselves. I will not decide such matters' and he dismissed them from the court. The two parties fell to blows, 'but Gallio paid no attention.' Paul offered his gospel to the gentiles of Corinth, and made many converts among them. Christianity may have seemed to them an acceptable variation of the mystery faiths that had so often told them of resurrected saviors.

"Possibly in accepting it they assimilated it to these beliefs, and influenced Paul to interpret Christianity in terms familiar to the Hellenistic mind."

Again the philosophy-religion clash.

"The manufacturers of the images that pagan worshipers dedicated in the Temple of Artemis found their trade slackening. Perhaps Paul had repeatd here his Athenian indictment of image worship or idolatry. One Demetrius, who made silver models of the great shrine for pious pilgrms, organized a protest against Paul and the new faith, and led to the city theater a crowd of Greeks whose catchword, repeated for two hours, was 'Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!'

"A local official dissolved the gathering, but Paul thought it the better part of valor to leave for Macedonia.

"He spent some happy months with the little congregations he had founded in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Beraea. Hearing that dissension and immorality were disordering the church at Corinth, he not only reprimanded it in several epistles, but went down to it in person (56?) to face his detractors. They had accused him of profiting materially from his preaching, laughed at his visions, and renewed the demand that all Christians should obey the Jewish Law.

"Paul reminded the turbulent community that he had everywhere earned his living with the work of his hands. As to material profit, what had he not suffered from his missions? -- eight floggings, one stoning, three shipwrecks, and a thousand dangers from robbers, patriots, and streams.

"Amid this turmoil word was brought him that the 'party of the circumcision,' apparently violating the Jerusalem agreement, had gone into Galatia and demanded of all converts the full acceptance of the Jewish Law.

"He wrote to the Galatians a wrathful epistle in which he broke comletely with the Judaizing Christians, and declared that men were to be saved not by adherence to the Mosaic Law, but by an active faith in Christ as the redeeming Son of God. Then, not knowing what sharper tribulations awaited him there, he left for Jerusalem, eager to defend himself before the Apostles, and wishing to celebrate in the Holy City the ancient feast of Pentecost.

"From Jerusalem, he hoped, he might go to Rome, even to Spain, and never rest until every province of the Empire had heard the news and promise of the risen Christ."

At previous locations it had been philosophy versus religion. Now it was the world of business versus religion.

'You see, brother, how many thousand believers there are among the Jews, all of them zealous upholders of the Law. They have been told that you teach all Jews who live among the heathen to turn away from Moses, that you tell them not to circumcize their children, nor to observe the old customs. They will be sure to hear that you have come. So do what we tell you. We have four men here who are under a vow. Join them, undergo the rites of purification with them. and pay their expenses. Then everybody will understand that there is no truth in the stories told about you, but that you yourself observe the Law.'

"Paul took the advice in good spirit and went through the rites of purification. But when some Jews saw him in the Temple they raised an outcry against him as 'the man who teaches everybody everywhere against our people and the Law.'

"A mob seized him, dragged him from the Temple and 'were trying to kill him' when a squad of Roman soldiers rescued him by arrest. Paul turned to speak to the crowd, and affirmed both his Judaism and his Christianity. They shouted for his death. The Roman officer ordered him to be flogged but desisted when he learned of Paul's Roman citizenship.

"The next day he brought the prisoner before the Sanhedrin. Paul addressed it, proclaimed himself a Pharisee, and won some support. But his excited opponents again sought to do him violence, and the officer withdrew him into the barrcks. That night a nephew of Paul came to warn him that forty Jews had vowed not to eat or drink until they had killed him.

"The officer, fearing a disturbance that would compromise him, sent Paul in the night to the procurator Felix at Caesarea.

"Five days later the high priest and some elders came up from Jerusalem and accused Paul of being 'a pest and a disturber of the peace among Jews all over the world.' Paul admitted that he was preaching a new religion, but added:-'I believe everything that is taught in the Law.'

"Paul was put on a trading vessel, which sailed so leisurely that it encountered a winter storm before it could reach Italy. Through fourteen days of tempest, we are told, he gave crew and passengers an encouraging example of a man superior to death and confident of rescue. The ship broke to pieces on Malta's rocks, but all on board swam saely to shore. Three months later Paul arrived in Rome (61?).

"The Roman authorities treated him leniently, awaiting his accusers from Palestine, and Nero's leisure to hear the case. He was allowed to live in a house of his choosing with a soldier to guard him. He could not move about freely but he could receive whomever he wished.

"He invited the leading Jews of Rome to come to him. They heard him patiently, but when they perceived that in his judgment the observance of the Jewish Law was not necessary to salvation, they turned away. The Law seemed to them the indispensable prop and solace of Jewish life.

"Said Paul;'Understand, then, that this message of God's salvation has been sent to the heathen. They will listen to it!' His attitude offended also the Christian community that he found in Rome. These converts, chiefly Jews, preferred the Christianity that had been brought to them from Jerusalem. They practiced circumcision and were hardly distinguished by Rome from the orthodox Jews. They welcomed Peter, but were cold to Paul.

"Clement of Rome refers to them in 97. Ignatius and Polycarp soon afterwards. Gradually they entered into the subtlest theology of the Church.

"Moved by his own somber spirit and remorse -- and his transforming vision of Christ -- influenced perhaps by Platonist and Stoic denumciations of matter and body as evil -- recalling, it may be, Jewish and pagan customs of sacrificing a 'scapegoat' for the sins of the people -- Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ -- that every man born of woman inherits the guilt of Adam -- and can be saved from eternal damnation only by the atoning death of the Son of God.

"The ancient Jews shared with the Canaanites, Moabites, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and other peoples the custom of sacrificing a child, even a beloved son, to appease the wrath of Heaven. In the course of time a condemned criminal might be substituted. In Babylonia he was dressed in royal robes to represent the son of the king, and was then scourged and hanged.

"A similar sacrifice took place in Rhodes at the feast of Cronus. The offering of a lamb or kid at the Passover was probbly a civilized mitigation of ancient human sacrifice.

"Says Frazer;-'On the day of atonement the Jewish high priest laid both his hands on the head of a live goat, confessed over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and having thereby transferred the sins of the people to the beast, sent it away into the wilderness.

"Such a conception was more agreeable to the pagans than to the Jews. Egypt, Asia Minor, and Hellas had long since believed in gods -- Osiris, Attis, Dionyusus -- who had died to redeem mankind. Such titles as Soter (Savior) and Eleutherios (Deliverer) had been applied to these deities. The word Kyrios (Lord), used by Paul of Christ, was the term given in Syrian-Greek cults to the dying and redeeming Dionuysus.

"The gentiles of Antioch and other Greek cities, never having known Jesus in the flesh, could only accept him after the manner of their savior gods.

"He is not the Jewish Messiah who will deliver Israel from bondage. He is the Logos whose death will deliver all men. Through these interpretations Paul could neglect the actual life and sayings of Jesus, which he had not directly known, and could stand on an equality with the immediate apostles, who were no match for him in metaphysical speculation. He could give to the life of Christ, and to the life of man, high roles in a magnificnet drama that embraced all souls and all eternity.

"Moreover, he could answer the troublesome qustions of those who asked why Christ, if very god, had allowed himself to be put to death. Christ had died to redeem a world lost to Satan by Adam's sin.

"He had to die to break the bonds of death and open the gates of heaven to all who should be touched by the grace of God.

"Two factors, said Paul, determine who shall be saved by Christ's death:-divine election and humble faith. God chooses from all eternity those whom he will bless with his grace and those whom he will damn. Nevertheless, Paul bestirred himself to awaken faith as a rod to catch God's grace. Only through such 'assurance of things longed for,' such 'confidence in things unseen,' can the soul experience that profound change which makes a new man -- unites the believer with Christ -- and allows him to share in the fruits of Christ's death.

"Good works and the performance of all the 613 precepts of the Jewish Law will not suffice, said Paul. They cannot remake the inner man or wash the soul of sin. The death of Christ had ended the epoch of the Law. Now there should no more be Jew and Greek, slaves and freeman, male and female, for 'in union with Christ Jesus you are all one.'

"As to good works combned with faith, Paul never tired of inculcating them. The most famous words ever spoken about love are his own:--

'Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become a sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.

'And though I have the gift of preaching and understand all mysteries, and have all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I can move mountains, if I have not love I am nothing.

'And though I give away everything that I am, and give myself, but do it in pride, not love, it profits me nothing.

"Love is patient and kind.

'It is not envious or boastful.

"It does not insist on its rights.

"It never fails.

"So faith, hope and love endure. These three, and the greatest of these is love.'

"To sexual love and marrige, Paul gives the most discouraging toleration. One passsage suggests, but does not prove, that he was married. 'Have we not a right to take a Christian wife about with us, like the rest of the apostles, and the Lord's brothers, and Peter?' But in another he calls himself single.

"Like Jesus, he had no sympathy for physical desire. He was horrified when he heard of promiscuity and pervasions. He asked the Corinthinas:-'Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit that is within you? Honor God with your bodies.'

"Virginity is better than marriage, but marriage is better than concupiscence. The marriage of divorced persons is forbidden, except after mixed unions. Women are to be obedient to their husbands -- slaves to their masters.

"Freedom and slavery meant little if the world was soon coming to an end. By the same token national liberty was unimportant. Let 'every soul be in subjection to the higher powers, for there is no power but God, and the powers that be are ordained by God.'

'Do your best to come to me soon for Demas has deserted me for love of the present world. Crescens has gone, and Titus. No one but Luke is with me. At my first appearance in court no one came to help me. Everybody deserted me. But the Lord stood by me, and gave me strength so that I might make a full presentation of the message and let all the heathen hear it. So I was saved from the jaws of the lion. My life is already being poured out and the time has come for my departure. I have had a part in the great contest. I have run my race. I have preserved the faith.'

"He spoke bravely but he was desolate. One ancient tradition said that he was freed, went to Asia and Spain, preached again, and once more found himself a pirsoner in Rome. Probably he was never freed.

"Without wife or children to comfort him, with all friends gone but one, only his faith could support him. Perhaps that too was shaken. Like the other Christians of his age, he had lived in the hope of seeing Christ return. He had written to the Philippians:-'We are eagerly awaiting the coming of a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord is coming soon.' And to the Corinthians:-'The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, those who have wives should live as though they had none and those who buy anything as if they did not own it. For the present shape of the world is passing away.--Marantha! Lord, come quickly!

"But in his second epistle to the Thessalonians he reproved them for neglecting the affairs of this world in expectation of Christ's early advent. The coming will be delayed until the 'Adversary' -- Satan --'makes his appearance and proclaims himself to be God.

"We surmise from his last letters that he had struggled, during his imprisonment, to reconcile his early faith with the long delay in the Parousia or Second Appearance. More and more he put his hope beyond the grave, and made for his own solace the great adjustment that saved Christianity -- the transformation of the belief in Christ's earthly return into the hope of union with him in heaven after death.

"Apparently he was tried again, and convicted. Caesar and Christ came face to face, and Caesar won for a day.

"We do not know the precise charge. Probably now, as at Thessalonica, Paul was accused of 'disobeying the emperor's decrees, and claiming that someone else called Jesus is king.' This was a crime of maiestas, punishable with death. We have no ancient record of the trial but Tertullian, writing about 200, reports that Paul was beheaded at Rome. And Origen, about 220, writes that 'Paul suffered martyrdom in Rome under Nero.' Probably, as a Roman citizen, he had the honor of a distinct execution, and was not mingled with the Christians crucified after the fire of 64.

"Tradition united him with Peter in a simultaneous, though separate, martyrdom. And a touching legend pictured the great rivals meeting in friendship on the road to death.

"Over the place on the Via Ostia, where the Church believed that Paul had found peace, a shrine was raised in the third century.

"From the defeated Paul came the theological structure of Christianity.

"From Paul and Peter the astonishing organization of the Church.

"Paul had found a dream of Jewish eschatology, confined in Judaic Law. He had freed and broadened it into a faith that could move the world. With the patience of a stateman he had interwoven the ethics of the Jews with the mataphysics of the Greeks, and had transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into the Christ of theology.

"He had created a new mystery, a new form of the resurrection drama which would absorb and survive all the rest. He had replaced conduct with creed as the test of virtue and in that sense had begun the Middle Ages.

"It was a tragic change but perhaps humanity had willed it so. Only a few saints could achieve the imitation of Christ but many souls could rise to faith and courage in the hope of eternal life.

"The influence of Paul was not immediately felt. The communities that he had established were tiny isles in a pagan sea. The church at Rome was Peter's, and remained faithful to his memory. For a century after Paul's death he was almost forgotten. But when the first generations of Christianity had passed away, and the oral tradition of the apostles began to fade, and a hundred heresies disordered the Christian mind, the epistles of Paul provided the framework for a stabilizing system of belief that united the scattered congregations into a powerful Church.

"Even so, the man who had detached Christianity from Judaism was still so essentially Jewish in intensity of charcter and sternness of morality that the Middle Ages, adopting paganism into a colorful Catholicism, saw no kindred spirit in him, built few churches to him, seldom sculptured his figure or used his name.

"Fifteen centuries went by before Luther made Paul the Apostle of the Reformation, and Calvin found in him the somber texts of the predestinarian creed.

"Protestantism was the triumph of Paul over Peter.

"Criticism tentatively assigns the Book of Revelation to the year 69-70, and to another John, 'the Presbyter' mentioned by Papias (135). Justin Martyr (135) attributes this powerful Apocalypse to the 'beloved' apostle but as early as the fourth century Eusebius noted that some scholars doubted its authenticity. The author must have been a man of considerable prominence for he addresses the churches of Asia in a tone of menacing authority.

"If the apostle wrote it (and we may provisionally continue to think so), we can understand why, like his brother James, he was called Boanerges, Son of Thunder. In Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Sardis, and other cities of Asia Minor, John, rather than Peter or Paul, was looked upon as the highest head of the Church. Tradition as reported by Eusebius held that John had been banished to Patmos by Domitian and had on that Aegean isle written both the fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse.

"He lived to so great an age that people said he would never die.

"In form Revelation resembles the books of Daniel and Enoch. Such prophetic-symbolic visions were a literary device frequently used by the Jews of the age. There were several other apocalypses ('hidden things revealed'), but this one surpassed all the rest in lurid eloquence.

"Starting from the common belief that the coming of the Kingdom of God would be preceded by the reign of Satan and the heyday of evil, the author describes the principate of Nero as precisely this Satanic age. Satan and his followers, having revolted against God, are defeatd by Michael's angelic hosts, are cast down upon the earth, and there lead the pagan world in the attack upon Christianity.

"Nero is the Beast and Antichrist of the book, a Messiah from Satan as Jesus was from God. Rome is described as 'the harlot who sits on the great waters, with whom the kings of the earth have comitted fornication.' She is the 'whore of Babylon,' the source and center and summit of all iniquity, immorality, perversion, idolatry.

"Another angel will let loose the full heat of the sun upon all unrepentant men. Another will cover the earth with darkness. Four angels will lead 'twice 10,000 times 10,000' knights to slaughter a third of mankind. Four horsemen will ride forth to 'kill the people with sword, famine, death, and the wild animals of the earth.'

"A great earthquake will tumble the planet into ruins. Huge hailstones will fall upon the surviving infidels, and Rome will be utterly destroyed.

"The kings of the earth will come together on the plains of Armageddon to make their last stand against God but they will be overwhelmed in death. Satan and his cohorts, everywhere defeatd, will be plunged into Hell.

"Only true Christians will be saved from these calamities. Those who have suffered for Christ's sake, who hve been 'washed in the blood of the Lamb,' will receive abounding reward.

"After a thousand years Satan will be released to prey again upon mankind. Sin will mount again in an unbelieving world. The forces of evil will make a last effort to undo the work of God. But they will once more be overcome, and this time Satan and his followers will be cast into Hell forever.

"Then will come ther Last Judgment when all the dead will be raised from their graves and the drowned will be drawn up out of the seas. On that dread day all 'whose names are not found in the Book of Life' will be 'flung into a burning lake of fire and brimstone.'

"The faithful will 'gather for God's great banquet, and will eat the bodies of kings, commanders, mighty men -- the bodies of all men, slaves or freemen, high or low, who have not heeded the call of Christ.

"A new heaven and earth will be formed, and a New Jerusalem will come down from the hand of God to be a paradise on earth. It will have a foundation of precious stones, buildings of translucent silver or gold, walls of jasper, and each gate a single pearl. Through it will run a 'river of living water' on whose bank will grow the 'tree of life.'

"For nineteen centuries men have interpreted the events of history as fulfillments of its visions, and in some recesses of the white man's world it still gives its dark colors and bitter flavor to the creed of Christ.

"It seems incredible that the Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel should have come from the same hand.

"The Apocalypse is Jewish poetry.

"The Fourth Gospel is Greek philosophy.

"Perhaps the apostle wrote Revelation in justifiable wrath after Nero's persecution and the Gospel in the mellow metaphysics of his old age (A.D. 90?). His memories of the Master may by this time have faded a bit, so far as one could ever forget Jesus. Doubtless in the isles and cities of Ionia he had heard many an echo of Greek mysticism and philosophy.

"Plato had set a theme by picturing the Ideas of God as the patterns on which all things were formed. The Stoics had combined these ideas into the Logos Spermatikos or fertilizing wisdom of God. The Neo-Pythagoreans had made the Ideas a divine person. Philo had turned them into the Logos or Reason of God, a second divine principle, through which God created, and communicated with, the world.

"If we reread the famous exordium of the Fourth Gospel with all this in mind, and retain the Logos of the Greek original in place of the translation Word, we perceive at once that John had joined the philosophers:-

'In the beginning was the Logos, the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. All things were made by the Logos. Without him nothing was made that was made. It was by him that all things came into existence. So the Logos became flesh and blood, and dwelt amongst us.'

"Just as Philo, learned in Greek speculation, had felt a need to rephrase Judaism in forms acceptable to the logic-loving Greeks, so John, having lived for two generations in a Hellenistic environment, sought to give a Greek philosophical tinge to the mystic Jewish doctrine that the Wisdom of God was a living being, and to the Christian doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah.

"Consciously or not, he continued Paul's work of detaching Christianity from Judaism.

"Christ was no longer presented as a Jew, living more or less under the Jewish Law. He was made to address the Jews as 'you,' and to speak of their Law as 'yours.' He was not a Messiah sent 'to save the lost sheep of Israel,' he was the coeternal Son of God. Not merly the future judge of mankind, but the primeval creator of the universe. In this perspective the Jewish life of the man Jesus could be put into the background, faded almost as in Gnostic heresy. The god Christ was assimilated to the religious and philosophical traditions of the Hellenistic mind.

"Two women, Priscilla and Maximilla, took him at his word and fell into religious trances. Their utterances became the living oracles of the sect. Montanus himself prophesied with such eloquent ecstasy that his Phrygian followers -- with the same religious enthusiasm that had once begotten Dionysus -- hailed him as the Paraclete promised by Christ.

"He announced that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand and that the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse would soon descend from heaven upon a neighboring plain. To the predestined spot he led so large a host that some towns were depopulated.

"As in early Christian days, marriage and parentage were neglected, goods were communistically shared, and an absorbed asceticism anxiously prepared the soul for Christ.

"When, about 190, the Roman proconsul Antonius persecuted Chrisanity in Asia Minor, hundreds of Montanists, eager for paradise, crowded before his tribunal and asked for martyrdom. He could not accommodate them all. Some he executed. Most of them he dismissed with the words:-'Miserable creatures! If you wish to die are there not ropes and precipices?'

"The Church banned Montanism as a heresy and in the sixth century Justinian ordered the extinction of the sect. Some Montanists gathered in their churches, set fire to them, and let themselves be burned alive.

"Of minor heresies there was no end.

"The Encratites abstained from meat, wine, and sex.

"The Abstinents practiced self-mortification and condemned marriage as a sin.

"The Docetists taught that Christ's body was merely a phantom, not human flesh.

"The Theodotians considered him only a man.

"The Adoptionists and the followers of Paul of Samosata thought that he had been born a man, but had achieved divinity through moral perfection.

"The Modalists, Sabellians, and Monarchians recognized in the Father and the Son only one person, the Monophysites only one nature, the Monothelites only one will.

"Nevertheless, the angels of the God of Light had surreptitiously introduced some elements of light into humanity -- mind, intelligence, reason. Even woman, said Mani, has in her some sparks of light.

"But woman is Satan's masterpiece, his chief agent in tempting man to sin. If a man will refrain from sex, idolatry, and sorcery, and lead an ascetic life of vegetarianism and fasting, the elements of light in him can overcome his Satanic impulses, and lead him, like a kindly light, to salvation.

"After thirty years of successful preaching, Mani was crucified at the suggestion of the Magian clergy, and his skin, stuffed with straw, was hung from one of Susa's gates.

"Martyrdoms enflamed the faith to wild enthusiasm. Manicheism spread into western Asia and north Africa, won Augustine for ten years, survived the persecutions of Diocletian and the conquests of Islam, and maintained a declining life for a thousand years until the coming of Genghis Khan.

"The old religions still claimed a majority of the Empire's population. Judaism gathered its impoverished exiles into scattered synagogues and poured its piety into its Talmuds.

"The Syrians continued to worship their Baals under Hellenistic names, and the Egyptian priets tended faithfully their zoological panatheon. Cybele, Isis, and Mithras retained their addicts until the close of the fourth century. Under Aurelian, a modified Mithraism captured the Roman state.

"Votive offerings to the classical divinities still came to the temples, initiates and candidates journeyed to Eleusis, and throughout the Empire aspiring citizens performed the motions of the imperial cult.

"Then, forgetting the results he had heaped upon them, he appealed to the Christians to come back to the old gods, to worship the guardian genius of the emperor, and to join in the defense of the imperiled state. No one paid much attention to him. Pagan literature does not mention him. He would have been forgotten had not Origen undertaken to refute him.

"Constantine was wiser than Celsus and knew that a dead faith could not salvage Rome.

"Celsus was out of step with his time. He asked men to behave like gentlemen skeptics when they were withdrawing from a society that enslaved so many of them into a mystic world that made every man a god. That consciousness of supersensible powers which is the foundation of religion was prevailing universally over the materialism and determinism of a prouder age.

"He restored the repute of philosophy by living like a saint amid the luxuries of Rome. He had no care for his body. Said Porphyry:-'he was ashamed that his soul had a body.' He refused to sit for his portrait on the ground that his body was the least imortant part of him. He ate no meat and little bread, was simple in his habits, kindly in his ways. He avoided all sexual relations, but did not condemn them. His modesty befitted a man who saw the part in the perspective of the whole.

"He was an idealist who graciously recognized the existence of matter. But matter by itself, he argued, is only the formless possibility of form. Every form that matter takes is given it by its inward energy or soul (psyche). Nature is the total of energy or soul, producting the totality of forms in the world. The lower reality does not produce the higher. The higher being, soul, produces the lower -- embodied form.

"The growth of the individual man from his beginnings in the womb, through the slow formation of organ after organ to full maturity is the work of the psyche or vital principle with him. The body is gradually molded by the longings and directives of the soul. Everything has soul -- an inward energy creating outward form. Matter is evil only insofar as it has not received mature form. It is an arrested development. Evil is the possibility of good.

"We know matter only through idea -- through sensation, perception, thought. What we call matter is (as Hume would say) only a bundle of ideas. At most it is an elusive hypothetical something pressing against our nerve ends (Mill's 'permanent possibility of sensation'). Ideas are not material. The notion of extension in space is obviously inapplicble to them. The capacity to have and use ideas is reason (nous). This is the peak of the human triad of body, soul, and mind.

"Plotinus here surrenders discursively to the Gnosticism that he professes to reject, and describes the descent of the soul through various levels from heaven to corporeal man. Generally he prefers the Hindu notion that the soul transmigrates from lower to higher, or from higher to lowers, forms of life according to its virtues and vices in each incarnation.

"Sometimes he is playfully Pythagorean:-those who have loved music too much will becme songbirds in their next avator, and overspeculative philosophers will be transformed into eagles. The more developed the soul is the more persistently it seeks its divine source, like a child strayed from its parent, or a wanderer longing for home.

"If it is capable of virtue, or true love, or devotion to the Muses, or patient philosophy, it will find the ladder down which it came, and will climb it to its God. Let the soul, then, purify itself, let it desire the unseen essence passionately, let it lose the world in meditation. Suddenly, perhaps in some moment when all the noise of the senses is stilled, and matter ceases to pound on the gates of mind, the soul will feel itself absorbed in the ocean of being, the spiritual and final reality.

Wrote Thoreau, idly drifting on Walden Pond:-'Sometimes I ceased to live, and began to be.'