To these currents of thought the relation of the earliest Christianity, entirely absorbed in the one great fact of the manifestation of God in Christ crucified, risen, and soon to return in glory, was for the most part hostile, when it was not merely superficial. With the spirit of the scribes Jesus had openly joined issue. In the legal tradition of the elders he and saw the commandment of God annulled (Matt, xv.) It was His part not to destroy but to fill up into spiritual completeness the teaching of the old dispensation (Matt, v.); and herein He attached himself directly to the prophetic conception of the law in Deuteronomy (Matt. xxii. 37, /.} And not only in His ethical teaching but in His personal sense of fellowship with the Father, and in the inner con sciousness of His Messianic mission, Jesus stood directly on the Old Testament, reading in the Psalms and Prophets, which so vainly exercised the unsympathetic exegesis of the scribes, the direct and unmistakable image of His own experience and work as the founder of the spiritual king dom of God (cf. especially, Luke xxiv. 2 5, /.) Thus Jesus found His first disciples among men who were strangers to the theological culture of the day (Acts iv. 13), cherishing no literature but the Old Testament witness to Christ, and claiming no wisdom save the knowledge of Him. At first, indeed, the church at Jerusalem was content to express its new life in simple exercises of faith and hope, without any attempt to define its relation to the past dispensation, and without breaking with the legal ordinances of the temple. But the spread of Christianity to the Gentiles compelled the principles of the new religion to measure themselves openly with the Judaism of the Pharisees. In the heathen mission of Paul the ceremonial law was ignored, and men became Christians without first becoming pro selytes. The stricter Pharisaically-trained believers were horror-stricken. The old apostles, though they could not refuse the right hand of fellowship to workers so manifestly blessed of God as Paul and Barnabas, were indisposed to throw themselves into the new current, and displayed considerable vacillation in their personal conduct. Paul and his associates had to fight their own battle against the constant efforts of Judaizing emissaries, and the rabbinical training acquired at the feet of Gamaliel enabled the apostle of the heathen to meet the Judaizers on their own ground, and to work out the contrast of Christianity and Pharisaism with a thoroughness only possible to one who knew Pharisaism from long experience, and had learned the gospel not from the tradition or teaching of men but by
revelation of Jesus Christ (Gal. i. 12).
The relation of the first Christians to the current apoca lyptic was of a different kind. The Messianic hopes already current among the first hearers of the gospel were unquestionably of apocalyptic colour. And though the contents of Christian hope, were new, and expressed themselves in a revival of prophetic gifts (1 Cor. xii. 10; Acts xi 97, &c.), it was not a matter of course that apocalyptic forms should be at once dropped, especially as Old Testament prophecy itself had inclined in its later stages towards an increasing concreteness in delineating the Messianic kingdom, and so had at least formed the basis for many apocalyptic conceptions. The apocalyptic books continued to be read, as appears from the influence of the book of Enoch on the epistle of Jude ; and after the new spirit of prophecy had died away a Christian apocalyptic followed the Jewish models. But the way in which a genuine Christian prophecy, full of " the testimony of Jesus " (Rev. xix. 10), retained not a little of the apocalyptic manner (mainly, it is true, in dependence on the book of Daniel), appears clearly in the Pievelation of John, which, whether we accept the prevalent tradition of its apostolic authorship, or, with some ancients and many moderns, ascribe it to a different John, is at least an undisputed monument of the prophecy of the apostolic age (according to modern critics, earlier than the fall of Jerusalem).
The influence on Christianity of Hellenistic philosophy, and, in general, of that floating spirit of speculation which circulated at the time in the meeting-places of Eastern and Western thought, was for the most part later than the New Testament period. Yet the Alexandrian education of a man like Apollos could not fail to give some colour to his preaching, and in the epistle to the Hebrews, whose author, a man closely akin to Paul, is not a direct disciple of Jesus (Heb. ii. 3), the theological reflection natural to the second generation, which no longer stood so immediately under the overpowering influence of the manifestation of Christ, is plainly affected in some points by Alexandrian views. In the case of other books the assertion of foreign speculative influences is generally bound up with the denial of the authenticity of the book in question. That the gospel of John presents a view of the person of Christ dependent on Philonic speculation is not exegetically obvious, but is simply one side of the assertion that this gospel is an unhistorical product of abstract reflection. In the same way other attacks on the genuineness of New Testament writings are backed up by the supposed detection of Orphic elements in the epistle of James, and so forth.
Motives and Origin of the first Christian Literature.—We have seen that the earliest currents of Christian life and thought stood in a very secondary relation to the intellectual activity of the period. The only books from which the Apostolic Church drew largely and freely were those of the Old Testament, and the Christian task of proclaiming the gospel was not in the first instance a literary task at all. The first writings of Christianity, therefore, were of an occasional kind. The care of so many churches compelled Paul to supplement his personal efforts by epistles, in which Tl the discussion of incidental questions and the energetic tl( defence of his gospel against the Judaizers is interwoven with broad applications of the fundamental principles of the gospel to the whole theory and practice of Christian life. In these epistles, and generally in the teaching of Paul and his associates, Christian thought first shaped for itself a suitable literary vehicle. It was in Greek that the mission to the Gentiles was carried on, for that language was everywhere understood. Already in the mouths of Hellenistic Jews and in the translation of the Old Testa ment the KOLV-TI, or current Greek of the Macedonian period, had been tinctured with Semitic elements, and adapted to express the ideas of the old dispensation. Now a new modification was necessary, and soon in the circle of the Pauline churches specifically Christian ideas became inseparably bound up with words which to the heathen had a very different sense. Whether the epistolary way of teaching was used upon occasion by the older apostles before the labours of Paul is not clear ; for most scholars have declined to accept the ingenious view which sees in the epistle of James the earliest writing of the New Testa ment. The other epistles are certainly later, and the way in which several of them are addressed, not to a special com munity in reference to a special need but to a wide circle of readers, seems to presuppose a formed custom of teach ing by letter which extended from Paul not only to so like- minded a writer as the author of Hebrews (Apollos or Barnabas T) but to the old apostles and their associates.
Besides epistles we have in the New Testament a solitary book of Christian prophecy and a fourfold account of the gospel history, with a continuation of the third gospel in the Acts of the Apostles. The origin and mutual relations of the gospels form at the present moment the field of numerous controversies which can only be dealt with in separate articles. We must here confine ourselves to one or two points of general bearing.
