SAVIOUE
SAYING AND DOING
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need of salvation. Perhaps also tiie emphasis upon the fact that God as well as Christ is Saviour, thougli perfectly natural from the OT point of view, is specially directed against a system which tended to separate between the Creator-God of the old dispensation and the Saviour-God, Ciirist, of the new. The recent investigations of Friedlander have shown that there existed long before the 2nd cent, of our era a Jewish type of Gnosticism, so that it can no longer be asserted that an anti- Gnostic polemic of this type jjer se militates against the Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles.
In recent times attempts have been made to explain tlie rise and development of the NT conception of o-ary.p and (ruT/,pia. from extra-Biblical sources. Aiu'ich (i'as antike Mysterienwesen in seinem Einjiuss auf das Christenthuin, 1894) pointed out how in the cult of the ' Mysteries ' tlie promise of o-aTy,/>:x, in the sense of immortality, plays a large rule. Similarly Wobbermin (Re- ligiunsgeschichtliche. Studieii, 189G), who asserts that especially in the cult of the subterranean gods the word rrary,/> was com- mon as a name for the Deitv. In two articles published in the ChristUche Welt for 1S99 and 1900, entitled ' Als die Zeit erfiallt war ' and ' Der Heiland,' Harnack calls attention to certain in- scriptions discovered in Asia Minor, at Prieneand Halicarnassus, dating probably from the year B.C. 9, in which the Emperor Augustus is invested with Divine predicates, and called iroiTv,p, the one who has been filled for the good of mankind with gifts, a god whose birthday has brought to the world the evangels connected with his person, the Zeus of the fatherland and the irurr-.p of the human race. Harnack assumes that St. Luke in calling Jesus o-cuTip was influenced by these and similar pagan forms of expression current in the cult of the Emperors, and that the same influence may be seen at work in the frequency with which the Pastoral Epistles and 2 Peter employ the title. He further suggests that St. Paul purposely avoided its use, because of the eudiemonistic, political flavour it had acquired from these pagan associations. St. Luke, in the ' Gospel of the Infancy,' the writer of the Pastorals, the writer of 2 Peter, and the Fourth Evangelist, meant to represent Christ as the true traiTY.p in whom lay the reality of what paganism falsely ascribed to its rulers, dead or living.— Soltau (Die Geburtsyeschichte Jesv Christi, 1902) reaches the same conclusions, independently of Harnack, on the basis of the same and other classical material, and also asserts derivation of the story of the virgin birth from the same pagan circle of ideas.— Wendland (ZNTW v. [1904], p. 335ff.) investigates the use of iTiiTv in antiquity with reference to both gods and deified men— a usage dating back from before the production of the LXX. Up to the time of Alexander the Great, irary.p was not applied to men, because it was still felt to be a cult-name reserved for the gods. The first trace of its application to men appears in Thucydides, where it is given to Brasidas, and in Polybius, where Philip of Maoedon is called (rojTr.p. After that, the custom became quite common among the Ptolemies and the Seleucidse : first the dead, then also the living rulers were honoured with this title. It was also combined with the Oriental idea of the incarnation of the godhead, whence such a term as etii^xv.;,- was applied to rulers. A feast celebrated on the day of such a a-ar/.p was called o-ary.piix.. From the Greek dynasties the custom i>assed over to the representatives of the Roman power, especially to the Emperors. Examples are adduced from Cicero, whose rhetorical exaggerations in speak-- ing of great Romans are believed to have sprung from his knowledge of the Oriental forms of speech. Even a philosopher like Epicurus could be called a-ary.p after a semi-Divine fashion, and that in his lifetime. Finally, in connexion with the recent trend towards explaining Biblical conceptions from Babylonian sources, it has been proposed to find in the NT idea of o-mTfip an embodiment of the Oriental myth of a Saviour-King (Erloser- Kiinitj); cf. A. .Jeremias, Bahijlnninches im A'T (190.5), pp. 27-46.
It is not proposed here to subject the above hypotheses to an exhaustive criticism. To some extent the later forms have effectually criticised the earlier ones. Thus Wendland disposes of much in Anrich, Wobbermin, and Soltau. Wagner (ZXTW vi. [1905]) skilfully attacks the position of Wendland. A few remarks must here surtice. The derivation of the whole idea of (TuTY,p and (TUTniiiot. from the Oriental exi>ectation of the Saviour- King is impossible, because OT prophecy not at all, and Jewish theology very rarely, applies the name yvvs, (ruTY,p, to the Messiah, and yet in eschatological Me.ssianism it would be natural to look first of all for the e\ idence of such Oriental importation. As to the alleged connexion between the Greek mysteries and Christianity, it should be observed that the cult of" the mysteries flourished in the 2nd cent, of the Christian era, and that none of the authorities quoted bv Anrich in sujiport of his view dates further back than this. The Asian inscriptions, of which Harnack and Soltau make so much, offer at the best some striking analogies to the NT mode of representation ; hut a real literarv de))endence cannot be made out, as even Wendland admits. In his second article, ' Der Heiland,' Harnack expresses himself much more guardedly than in the first, after this fashion : 'On the .Icwish and on theCirecian line munerous religious con- cei)tions existed, which covered each other and .so simply could luiss over into each other.' <rary.p in the cult of the Emperors has quite a different sense from what it has in the NT ; in Hellen- ism it never means ' the one who translates from death into life.' It is also exceedingly doubtful whether St. Paul consciously and