The Beginnings of Christianity

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE PRESUPPOSITIONS. CHAPTER III. The Fulness Of The Time. When the early Christians maintained that Jesus had come into the world in the fulness of the time, they were not at all thinking of an especially favourable conjunction of affairs in the world, but simply of the termination of that apocalyptic...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE PRESUPPOSITIONS. CHAPTER III. The Fulness Of The Time. When the early Christians maintained that Jesus had come into the world in the fulness of the time, they were not at all thinking of an especially favourable conjunction of affairs in the world, but simply of the termination of that apocalyptic age?the duration of which was unknown to themselves? which God had determined should precede the end of all things. The historian, too, has to exercise the greatest caution in the use that he makes of such statements as to the necessity of any occurrence in history. Even if he can prove in a general way that the conditions favourable to this or that event were present, he has done no more thereby than to point out that the thing was possible in the abstract. For who can say that these conditions were not already present a few decades earlier, or were present in a still more favourable degree a few decades later ? By the side of the proof that the age was especially favourable to the spread of the Gospel, it would be possible to advance the counter proof with almost equally cogent arguments that the rapid transformation and decay of Christianity was due to the unfavourable circumstances of the age. It is sumcient for our present purpose to draw attention to some especially important characteristics of the position of Judaism in that age, without drawing any conclusions from them beyond what the actual facts warrant. First, then, we have the facts that throughout the Mediterranean countries we find a type of civilization which was on the whole uniform, and that the Jews were affected by it. This is shown above all by the universal supremacy of the Greek language into which the Old Testament was translated, in which the Jews philosophized, which St Paul spoke and underst...