connection between the two faiths. But what relation did this Messiah hold to the Mosaic institutions? That was a more difficult problem. The difficulty of it is appreciated when we consider that a large section of the Christian Church judged the old to be irreconcil!- able with the new, and went so far as to maintain that the God of the Old Testament was antagonistic to the God who revealed Himself in Christ. And even the more moderate section of the Church found difficulty in answering the questions: What was to be thought of the Jewish ordinances and of the Jewish Scriptures which enjoined them? Ifthe ordinances were set aside, could the Scriptures which contained them be retained? In what sense had Christ fulfilled the law, the ceremonial? He had not been a Priest. He had not as- sumed the Priest's function,but the Rabbi’s. He had not been born in a priestly family. A sacrifice, perhaps, in some sense, He had been.
To the Jew, in short, Christ must have created as many problems as He solved. The unquestioning faith that is guided by healthy in- stincts and can relegate to the future all intellectual explanations and reconcilements is not given to every one; and many a Jewish Christian must have passed those first days in painful unrest, drawn to trust Jesus by all that He knew of His holiness and truth and yet sorely perplexed and hindered from perfect trust by the unexpected spirituality of the new religion, by the contempt of his old co-re- ligionists, by the enforced relinquishment of all outward garnishing and glory, and by the apparent impossibility of fitting the gorgeous- ness of the old and the bareness of the new into one consistent whole. To this miserable and weakening condition of spirit the writer appeals and aims at removing it by giving them a fuller insight into the relation of Christianity to Mosaism, and especially by illus- trating the unique supremacy of Christ and the finality of His work. He makes it his aim to show that every name, every institution, every privilege, which had existed under the old economy survived in the new, but invested with a higher meaning and a truer glory—a meaning and a glory, new indeed in themselves, but yet for the first time fulfilling the great purpose of God which from the first had been dimly shadowed forth. “The first was taken away only in order that the second might be introduced.” }
To this task he necessarily brought his own philosophical pre- suppositions. Trained in Alexandrian thought he cherished the Platonic? conception of the relation of the seen to the unseen. It
“1 Das Christenthum bringt nichts, was nicht schon im A. T. angelegt, ver- heissen und vorgebildet gewesen ware” (Holtzmann, N. T. Theol., ii., 287). 3 Timaeus, 28 C.; Rep. 597; Philo, Mundt Op., 4; De Vita Mosis, p. 146.