RELATIONS OF NEW TESTAMENT SCIENCE 573 



ye have eternal life; and these are they that testify of me; but ye 

 will not come unto me that ye may have life." That is a just and 

 genuine reflection; for to Jesus even the written revelation of his 

 own people, the divine Torah of Moses, was secondary to that "in the 

 creation of God," in nature's bounty and beauty, and in the sense of 

 fatherhood and sonship. To Jesus the life was the revelation; Scrip- 

 ture was a means of approach to it, and was tested by it. 



But as symptoms of the times, let us survey rather some results 

 of recent scholarship that are ours only as they belong to Christen- 

 dom. The trend will be found unmistakably " religionsgeschichtlich." 

 We appreciate the splendid contributions which have come of late to 

 Hellenistic grammar and philology, from the study of papyri and 

 inscriptions and the scanty literature of Palestinian Aramaic. 

 Instead of " Hebraisms " we hear now of " Aramaisms," " Septuagint- 

 isms," and "Semiticisms." We are even called upon to surrender 

 our belief that there is such a thing as Semitic Greek, distinguishable 

 from the KOLVTJ, and that style and idiom are not philologically the 

 same in the preface as in the ensuing two chapters of Luke. This 

 demand belongs with the statements classified by the newspapers as 

 "important if true." After all the main advance is along other lines, 

 intersecting those of explorers from other fields. We do not forget 

 Deissmann and Dalman, Moulton, Redpath, or Blass. Ramsay's 

 studies of the political, geographical, and social relations of Asia 

 Minor make us feel less crippled by the loss of Mommsen, however 

 much we desiderate Mommsen 's historico-critical judgment. Percy 

 Gardner brings to bear his knowledge of Greek religious thought and 

 institutions to present an Historical View of the New Testament, and 

 as a third contribution from a like quarter Jane Harrison's Prole- 

 gomena to the Study of Greek Religion puts in its true light the great 

 reversion to the mythology of the ancient dithonic divinities which 

 accompanies the decay of Greek national life and the spread of 

 religious mysticism in the rites of mystery-religion. Frazer's Golden 

 Bough sets the example of a study in comparative religion, disproving 

 the notion that the conception of a deliverer-god, incarnate, dying 

 and rising again, effecting the redemption of humanity by sacra- 

 mental union with himself, is the monopoly of any race or tribe. Can 

 the student of Paulinism and its development on Greek soil be indif- 

 ferent to such research as this? 



Years ago Lightfoot's essay on St. Paul and Seneca made the 

 existence in both of a common element of Stoic doctrine indisputable. 

 Grafe now helps to set us on the right track by demonstrating Paul's 

 affinity with and employment of the Jewish-Stoic Book of Wisdom, 

 and Tennant strengthens the chain by tracing the development of 

 the Doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin, that seems so strange an 

 innovation on the teaching of Jesus, through the post-canonical 



