(2) Greek influence.—The tide of Hellenism, which began to flow over the whole civilized world after the brilliant conquests of Alexander the Great, affected Palestine as well as other countries. During the period of the Ptolemies and the Seleu- cide the Greek spirit took possession of the land ; native customs and traditional ways of thinking everywhere yielded to this subtle overmastering force. In the purely Judean district, however, the Hellenistic spirit was so far kept at bay... No new Greek cities sprang up within that essentially Jewish area, and when the rising wave of Hellenism dashed up against the rock of Judaism the latter was strong enough to withstand the shock. Only its sharper corners were worn off in the process, and this was necessary in order to the fulfilment of the function assigned in providence to the Heb. faith as the historic preparation for the world- wide religion of Christ. The influx of Greek cul- ture was met by afresh and resolute devotion to the legalistic ideal developed by the scribes. Such was the result of the conflict epigrammatically re- ferred to by Zechariah in the words: ‘Thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece’ (9"). Proudly conscious of their privileged position as the chosen people, and punctilious to the last degree with regard to their observance of the temple worship, the Jews gained rather than lost in national senti- ment. But if the Hellenistic spirit was denied an entrance into the religious citadel of Judaism, it crept insidiously into every other department of life (1 Mac 1%, 2 Mac 4°14),
Alexandria, and not Athens, was now the proud ‘mother of arts and eloquence,’ and it was in this Egyptian city that non-Palestinian Judaism came into closest contact with Hellenistic thought and culture. The spiritual atmosphere of the place was altogether peculiar, and charged with elements derived alike from the East and the West. Twosuch powerful and opposite streams of tendency could not meet without mutually influencing each other, and the world has profited by their fusion. The translation of the Heb. Scriptures into Greek made them the property of all nations, while the Greek language and philosophy provided the Jewish re- ligion with splendid weapons for apologetic and missionary purposes. Judaism and Hellenism were thus complementary factors in creating a type of thought and life wider and fuller than either of them could have produced of itself. A distinctly religious conception of the universe had hitherto been as foreign to the Greek as the rules and ab- stractions of metaphysics had been to the Hebrew. But the Greeks were now provided with a direct Divine revelation, capable of filling with life every groove of their languishing philosophical systems ; and the Jews, besides appropriating certain Greek conceptions, found the means of giving scientific expression to the contents of their religious con- sciousness. The result of this union of two great forces was seen in the rise and development of the Jewish- Alexandrian philosophy of religion. In this system, unfortunately, the literal meaning of Scripture was discarded in favour of allegorical interpretations. From the time of Aristobulus (2nd cent. B.C.), who maintained that the Greek philosophy had been borrowed from Moses, to that of Philo Judzus (c. 20 B.c.-50 A.D.), who still further developed the allegorical method, philoso- phers used the Bible largely as a prop for their own speculations. To Judaism the results were sufficiently serious, but it emerged at last from the keen battle which had to be waged as the price of its partnership with ‘the wisdom of men,’ if not without wounds, yet also enriched with spoil.
There were thus two great streams of influence flowing in upon the Jewish theology of this period,
DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE
an Eastern and a Western, a Persian and a Greek. Of these by far the stronger was the Greek, though the Persian is as distinctly traceable. The one may be likened to an ordinary under-current, and the other to the Gulf Stream. ‘The Persian current was that of Zoroastrianism ; the Greek cannot be associated with a single name. Out of these two forces, which were new, or newly felt, acting upon the native Judaism of Palestine, which was old, was formed that third which we meet within the home Jewish theology of the period. But there was also, as we have seen, a Jewish theology outside of Palestine altogether. Not only did foreign influences flow in upon Judaism; but Judaism, now no longer confined to Palestine, went out to meet them. Thus the hitherto un- broken river of OT ideas and doctrines divided itself at this pomt into three separate streams. One, the main current, continued to flow on in Palestine ; while on the east and west of it ran two other streams—the one through Persian ter- ritory, and the other through Greek. The tribu- taries of Persian and Greek ideas by which these streams respectively were fed necessarily caused their waters to be of a composite character, exceed- ingly difficult to analyze so as to say definitely, ‘This is Jewish, that is Persian,’ or ‘This is Jewish, that is Greek.’ These currents, however, into which Judaism was divided, and through which it was widened, were destined in some degree to find a meeting-point again in the re- ligion of Christ, which assimilated what was good not only in Judaism, but also in the splendid creations of foreign philosophical and theological thought.