saints and gave them the seal of baptism. It is remarkable that Hermas, speaking of the apostles, says, ' they went down alive and came up alive,' in contrast witli the OT saints who ' went down dead and came up alive.'
It is difticult to extract much coherency from the rambling visions and paraliles of Hermas, but apparently he conceives of the completion of the tower, the Church, as the moment when the world to come will be ushered in. There will be judg- ment of wicked and righteous, a great tribulation, a resurrection of flesh and sjiirit for the righteous, and apparently eternal death or annihilation for the wicked.
Hence, the survey of the Apostolic Fathers shows us in the main the same lines of cleavage, repre- sented by Ignatius and the Didache respectively. We have too little remaining to us of the literature of the Church of this period to form a compre- hensive judgment. C. H. Turner (Studies in Early Church History, Oxford, 1912, p. Ifl'.) has already entered a weighty protest against regard- ing the Didache as in any way representative of the general thought and practice of the Church at the beginning of the 2nd century. Nor can we infer that the type of eschatology which it repre- sents largely outweighed the more spiritual form of hope characteristic of the Christian experience of Ignatius.
///. COXCLUSIOX. — In closing this examination of the doctrine of the resurrection as held in various circles of the early Church during the Ist cent, of Christianity the same general conclusions meet us as appeared at the close of the survey of the Parousia. There are, however, some important difl'erences in the development of the two concep- tions.
The Parousia — that is, the coming of Messiah with glory to inaugurate a time of bliss— had always formed a somewhat uncertain element in Jewish eschatology. It was not bound up with the future hope of Israel by any moral necessity ; hence we find it absent from various forms of Jewish eschatology, and at various periods.
The resurrection of the righteous, on the other hand, was increasingly regarded by the best Jewish thought as morally bound up with the character and faithfulness of God, and hence appears in nearly every form of eschatological construction, whether strictly Messianic or not.
Thus, when we pass into NT eschatology, we find that the two factors of the belief in the historical resurrection of Christ as the Messiah, and the connexion of this resurrection with His own moral character and God's response to it, operate much more cogently in the development of the resurrection-doctrine of the NT than in that of the Parousia, especially in St. Paul's teaching. Hence we find two lines of thought of unequal strength at work in St. Paul's treatment of the subject.
(1) On the one hand, he seeks to find a place for the resurrection of the believers in the general scheme of eschatology as he had inherited it, and to relate the resurrection of Christ and those who were vitally connected with Him to the whole scheme. The result was a disturbance of the main lines of the Palestinian eschatology and a gradual blurring of its determined sequence of events.
(2) On the other hand, St. Paul is far more inter- ested in working out the nature of the resurrection of believers as a moral implication of the resurrec- tion of Christ. The essential form of his resurrec- tion-doctrine is principally determined by this factor, although his Judajo-Hellenistic psychology, his Rabbinical metaphysics, and his Pharisaic eschatology have a subordinate influence on his modes of thinking. These three last factors con-
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tribute far less to the essence of St. Paul's resur- rection-doctrine than has been {lenerally supposed.
The outstandin;,' results of the development in those circles where the historical resurrection of Christ remained the fundamental fact in the Church's belief were the ^,'radual liberation of the belief in the resurrection of believers from any par- ticular scheme of eschatolojiy and an increasing spiritualization of the resurrection. The strengtli of the belief in the phj'sical resurrection of Christ, however, caused the resurrection of the l)ody or the He.sli to become a lixed element in the belief of the Church as a whole, as w itnessed by the early forms of creed.
The subsidiary results of development were a divergence of opinion between those circles in the Church which held to the Jewish expectation of an earthly kingdom and those which inclined to the Alexandrian view. In the former the millennial scheme prevailed, with a resurrection of the right- eous preceding the Messianic kingdom, and a general resurrection and final judgment following it. This is represented in tlie Apocal3'pse and the Didache, and was perhaps most prevalent in the Palestinian churches and in the country dis- tricts of Asia Minor. In the latter circles the tendency was to regard the righteous as entering upon their glorified state after death, although even here the conception of a final resurrection as necessaiy for the full consummation was retained, and the belief in a final resurrection of both right- eous and wicked for judgment kept its place.
It is not too much to say that the real inward- ness, the essance, of botli the Pauline and the Johannine doctrine of the resurrection failed to be apprehended by the Church as a whole, although individuals such as Ignatius show clear traces of its influence.