2 THE RISE OF MAN. 



orthodox rabbi would have scorned the idea of attributing 

 to God offspring in any sense of the word.* 



Mohammed who had imbibed similar traditions under 

 similar circumstances in opposition to the Christian idea 

 of divine sonship, declared, for the same reason, most 

 emphatically that ' ' God is neither begotten nor a begetter. ' ' 

 The Apostle Paul, however, being born and raised in 

 Tarsus, was accustomed to the Gentile ways of thinking, 

 more than he himself knew, and so he was not offended at 

 the Gentile belief that claimed a divine origin for man. 

 But to prove it according to the method of the age by 

 quoting Scriptures, he had to fall back on a Gentile au- 

 thority. Paul quotes not the Bible but a pagan poet. 



Thus it came to pass in the Gentile Christian Church 

 that the legend of the creation of man from the clay of 

 the ground was given a Gentile interpretation. The whole 

 creation, it was thought, had been made by God, but now 

 we are told that man is the offspring of God. The story 

 in Genesis is now interpreted to mean that the human 

 body was especially formed by God himself, and that God 

 himself blew into the nostrils of the clay figure the breath 

 of life. Whatever the rabbinical meaning of the legend 

 may have been, it was interpreted by Christian exegetists 

 after the precedence of St. Paul in the spirit of the Gentile 

 conception, to denote a unique or separate and indeed a 

 divine origin of man. The idea that man had been made 

 of dust and that finally he should return to dust was now 

 limited to his body, as Longfellow says : 



"Dust thou art, to dust returnest, 

 Was not spoken of the soul. 1 ' 



And the passage in Ecclesiastes (iii, 18-20) where we 



* The expression " sons of God" (C""t '?$ ^3) occurs only in a passage (Gen. 



vi, 4) which is quite ancient, reflecting the conception of an age in which the faith 

 of Israel did not as yet differ in any essential point from the religion of the Gentiles. 

 It has always been felt to be out of place in the Old Testament and has continued 

 to be a stumbling block to the orthodox and an acknowledged difficulty to inter- 

 preters. 



