120 Introduction

Saviour of the whole world rather than the promised Messiah of the Hebrews, and rallied round the Apostle as the foremost champion of Greek freedom in Christ. It was the commencement of a veritable revolution. Hitherto Christianity had been regarded for the most part as a national religion, it was now perceived to be a world-wide revelation, and an irreconcilable antagonist to the narrow formal creed of the Jewish synagogue. Gentiles had indeed been admitted to the Church many years before, when Peter baptised Cornelius and his friends; and the assembled Church had then solemnly ratified his act. The right of believing Gentiles to Christian baptism had thenceforth become a fundamental law of the Church, sealed to them in perpetuity by a divine charter which none could gainsay. But the acceptance of this principle had wrought little visible effect upon the structure or government of the Church, No sudden influx of Gentile converts flooded the existing Churches; they only grew insensibly by continual adhesion of individual Gentiles or groups of Gentiles to older congregations of Jewish Christians. The process of conversion was too silent and gradual to exercise material influence over the prevailing spirit of the community or to remodel its ministry and organisation. Christian teachers retained in those early years the stamp of their Jewish training, partly because the Hebrew Scriptures continued to be the only written Canon of faith and practice (though they had learned to interpret them in a new spirit), but still more because the Apostles and older disciples had grown up to manhood before they had known Jesus, had accepted the Law for their rule of life, and drawn their inspira- tion from the writings of Hebrew prophets; they prided themselves on their descent from Abraham and the patriarchs, rested on God’s ancient covenants with Israel, and fixed their hopes on the future kingdom of the national Messiah, which had a deeper significance for them than for other Jews because their faith was concentrated on the person of a living Lord who had risen irom the dead and ascended into heaven. Again, the outward environment of the Church was no less Jewish than the spirit of its teaching, for the synagogue was still the only centre of public ministry open to Christian teachers. Thither the brethren resorted regularly for reading of the Scriptures, for united prayer and praise, and for religious instruction; there they delivered addresses to mixed con- gregations of Jews and Christians, basing their doctrine on the Jewish Canon. They claimed, in fact, to be a reformed branch of the ancient national Church, and were long regarded by the Greek world as a purely Jewish sect.