• Incidentally we may regard this feature as one of the reasons why Claristianity in the Roman world vanquished all competitors — Isis or Attis or Mithra or the redeemer-god of Oriental mystery-religions. The Redeemer-God of Christianity was a historical personality.
CHEISTIAN LIFE
CHRISTIAN LIFE
201
with true thankfulness for the gift of life in Christ, morality will take care of itself (Gwatkin, Early Church Hist. i. 55). What results did such a pre- sentation of truth produce on the age to which it was given? This question can be ansAvered only by a study of moral conditions within the Christian Church. We must go for our enlightenment, not to any general studies of Christian ethics, but to the extant authorities of the age, which treat of the Christian life in: (1) the Jewish-Christian period ; (2) the Pauline period ; and (3) the post- Pauline period. In the evolution of the Christian communities, there is a direct connexion between ethical conditions and the official or institutional organization of the churches, which grew naturally out of these conditions ; but it will be necessary to narrow our survey to religious and moral aspects, and to disregard in detail problems of a historical and institutional character, e.g. Baptism, Lord's Supper, ritual and worship in general, bishops and elders, the relation of St. Paul to the Jerusalem Council, and the like (see artt. CHURCH, Baptism, Eucharist, Bishop, etc.).
1. Jewish Christianity. — The followers of Christ at the time of His death were distinguished from the majority of their fellow-Jews by their convic- tion that Jesus was the Messiah. They were thus to their contemporaries a Messianic sect within the pale of Judaism, conforming to the rites and moral code of their religion. Their INIaster, while condemning the defects of representative leaders of religion, like the Pharisees, had never rejected the observances of the Jewish religion — true to the spirit of His mission, which Mas rather to fulfil than to destroy. Weizsacker seems to go too far when he suggests (Apostol. Age, ii. 341) that there is disharmony between the evidence of the Synop- tics and the Acts, on the ground that the latter shows the primitive Church more bound up with Judaism than Jesus Himself was, and the Pharisees actual patrons of the apostolic community. The fact is that both Jesus and the early Church ac- cepted the outward symbols of Judaism, e.(j. the Temple and national festivals, while in spirit they had already advanced beyond the national faitli (cf. Ac 24").
The primitive Christians of Jerusalem, while following the rules of the Jewish religion for everyday life (Ac 15), and for worship and devo- tional observances (3'), come before us in the early chapters of the Acts as a distinctive community, given to prayer (P**). Prayer was at once the source and seal of that unity or spirit of brother- hood which was to find further expression in a common social life characterized by dyaXXtacrts Kal d(pe\6Tr]s Kapdias, and in a community of goods ^244-46j_ -pijg 1,-^tter feature represented merely the socialism of self-sacrifice, its real motive being not a desire for social innovation, but the support of the poor ; and it may have been suggested by Essene models (see Community of Goods). The Christians lived a happy familj'^ life ; the members were ' brethren ' ; new converts were received into the fellowship by baptism (2^*^) ; the practice of charity produced noble examples of generosity like that of Barnabas (4^®), and incidentally provoked unworthy ambition, of which the deceit of Ananias and Sapphira (ch. 5) Avas a dark and memorable result. Women such as Mary, the mother of John Mark, and Sapphira held an independent position in the community, and slowly the influence and aims of the brotherhood broadened out. They were known as 'disciples,' men 'of the Way' (Ac 92 24"), and 'saints.' The appointment of the seven Hellenists (Ac 7) which quelled the internal differences between the Hebrews or pure Jews and the Hellenists, their Greek-speaking brethren of the Dispersion, indicates not only the large-hearted
charity of the Christian apostles, but their gradual alienation from the narrowness of Judaic legalism. This spirit of alienation came to a head in the extreme views of St. Stephen, the leader of the Hellenists, who paid the penalty of his undisguised anti-Judaism in martyrdom. It is easy to see that the ideas of St. Stephen anticipated the essential principles of Pauline Christianity, and further, that they were in advance of minds like that of St. Peter, who still maintained a loyal observance of Jewish law and felt scruples about entering a Gentile house (Ac 10) and joining St. Paul, Barnabas, and other Gentile Christians (Gal 2"). Thus, while the Hellenists were scattered abroad, being found in Samaria and as far north as Antioch, the Petrine section remained at Jerusalem to find a new head in St. James, who in A.D. 51 is associ- ated with St. Peter and St. John and in 58 is sole leader of the Church. The Apostolic Decree (Ac 15), which was intended to solve the difierences of Jewish and Gentile Christianity, was a comijromise which shows at once the strength and the weakness of the Jewish-Christian position : its strength lay in its jealousy for pure morality — Gentile Chris- tians are to abstain from meat offered to idols, blood, things strangled, and fornication ; its weak- ness lay in its cei"emonialism and in its distrust of the Gentile per se. The later factors of Jewish Christianity represented by the Johannine litera- ture and such writings as the Epistle of James are treated below.