By the Apostolic Age it had become the practice for promising students to supplement their school education by seeking out and attending the lectures of eminent teachers in what we should call the great universities. Eoman Emperors like Claudius and Nero had done much to encourage Greek culture and to introduce it into Rome itself, where the Athenaeum was a great centre of learning. At this epoch Athens and Rome had famous schools, but even they had to yield to Rhodes, Alexandria, and Tarsus ; and Marseilles, which had been from the very early days of Greek history a centre of Greek influence, was in the time of Strabo more frequented than Athens. The idea that Barnabas of Cyprus and Saul of Tarsus had met in early life at the university of Tarsus is by no means fanciful, and it was to his education at Tarsus that St. Paul owed the power to ' move in Hellenic Society at his ease' (W. M. Ramsay, Pictures of the Apostolic Church, 1910, p. 346). That St. Luke had received a medical education and was familiar with the great medical writers of the Greek world is now almost universally ad- mitted ; his literary style and the frequent echoes of Greek authors, at least in the Acts of the Apostles, prove him to have been a well-educated and cultured Hellenist. Of the various philosophic schools then exercising an influence upon thought in the Greek world two are expressly mentioned in the Acts (17^^) — the Stoics and the Epicureans. St. Paul must have received Stoic teaching at Tarsus, where the school flourished, and he knew and quoted at least one Stoic poet (Ac 17*^). A century later Marcus Aurelius endowed the four great philosophical schools of Athens — the Aca- demic, the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic. Justin Martyr, a little earlier, in the ac- count he gives of his conversion to Christianity {Dial, cum Tryph. 2 If.), shows how the representa- tives of the Stoic, the Peripatetic, the Pythagorean,
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educatio:n"
EDUCATION
and the Academic (Platonic) Schools in turn failed to satisfy his yearning after trutli, and satisfaction came to him when lie found Christianity to be the only philosophy sure and suited to the needs of man. Christianity, brought into contact with tiie society in which this philosophical habit of mind had established itself, modified, stimulated, and elevated it, and in turn was modified by the habit of mind of those who accepted it, ' It was impossible for Greeks, educated as they were with an education which penetrated their whole nature, to receive or to retain Christianity in its primitive simplicity. Their own life had become complex and artificial : it had its fixed ideas and its perma- nent categories : it necessarily gave to Christianity something of its own form' (E. Hatch, Influence of Grade Ideas and Usages tipon the Christian Church [Hibbert Lectures, 1888], 1890, ch. IL p. 48 f.).
LiTERATtTRE. — T. DavidsoH, Aristotle (in Great Educators), 1892 ; S. S. Laurie, Hist. Survey of Pre-Christian Education, 1895: 'The Hellenic Race'; J. P. "Mahaffy, The Greek World under Roman Sway, 1890; art. 'Education (Greek)' by W, Murison in ERE v. 185 and Literature there cited.
3. Christian. — The sentiment which caused education to be so prized among the Jews must in course of time have caused it to be greatly desired among the followers of Christ. To the first Chris- tians, as to the Lord and His apostles, the OT Scriptures were the Bible, and, outside the Holy Land at least, the Bible in the LXX translation. No doubt it was a roll of this translation which the Ethiopian eunuch was carrying back with him to his home far up the Nile, when Philip the Evangelist joined him in his chariot on the Gaza road (Ac 8'^^^-). It was the same Scriptures wherein the youthful Timothy was instructed from infancy in the home of his Greek father, under the guidance of Eunice and Lois (2 Ti 3'*). St. Paul, in the many quotations he makes from the OT, quotes from the LXX rather than from the Hebrew original. ' The LXX was to him as much " the Bible " as our English version is to us ; and, as is the case with many Christian writers, he knew it so well that his sentences are constantly moulded by its rhythm, and his thoughts incessantly coloured by its expressions' (Farrar, St. Paul, 1879, i. 47). It was not till the second half of the 2nd cent, that most of the NT books were recog- nized in the Church as the Oracles of God, and on the same level of authority as the books of the OT. ' Among the Jewish Christians,' as Harnack points out, ' the private use of the Holy Scriptures simply continued ; for the fact that they had become believers in the Messiahship of Jesus had absolutely no other eti'ect than to increase this use, in so far as it was now necessary to study not only the Law but also tiie Prophets and the Kethubim, seeing that these afforded prophetic proofs of the Messiah- ship of Jesus, and in so far as the religious inde- pendence of the individual Christian was still greater than that of the ordinary Jew' (Bible Beading in the Early Church, p. 32).
That tiie private study which had been devoted to the OT came in due course to be given to the books of the NT may be seen from the use of them in the writings of the Apostolic Fatliers. The OT, the Gospels, and the Epistles of St. Paul had a wide circulation at an early period, in all the provinces of the early Church, and were perused and applied to their spiritual needs by multitudes of Cliristians, not clerical only, but lay ; not men only, but women. ' Ye know tlie Holy Scriptures,' writes Clement of Rome to the Corintliian Chris- tians (1 Clem. liii. 1), 'Yea, your knowledge is laudable, and ye have deep insiglit into the Oracles of God.' 'What are tliese articles in your hand- bag?' asks the proconsul Saturninus when ex-