574 NEW TESTAMENT 



Jewish literature down to II Esdras and the Talmud. Pfleiderer, chief 

 of our modern students of Paulinism, revises his Geschichte des Ur- 

 christenthums , largely to make use of Cumont's Textes et Documents 

 relatifs au Mithracisme, and shows how mystery-religion not only 

 paved the way for Paul, but furnished him with forms of thought and 

 even of ritual. 



Still deeper must we penetrate for the origins of the religious 

 dualism which colors the non-Pauline books. The mixed and seething 

 chaos of Syrian magic, theosophy, and mysticism, out of which 

 appears that gnosticism which soon rivals Christianity in its claims 

 upon the religious thought of the Graeco-Roman world, seems almost 

 to defy analysis. But Friedlander's Vorchristliche Gnosticismus has 

 obtained now a wider and sounder basis of fact from Brandt's schol- 

 arly study of the Mandaean Religion with its astonishing survivals of 

 the mythology and legend-lore of the mixed peoples of the East. 

 Nor are there wanting investigators of the more doubtful analogies of 

 Buddhistic and Egyptian religious thought and literature. 



There will be pursuit of false clues, and premature conclusions, 

 among which I must venture to reckon our own lamented L. L. 

 Paine's resort to Philo and the Alexandrian school as ultimate source 

 of Paul's Logos doctrine; as if Philo himself were not rendering into 

 the language of the schools that older Palestinian form of cosmological 

 speculation which he, as well as Paul, found already reflected in the 

 Hochmah literature with its Hebraized Stoicism, and its hypostasis 

 of creative and redemptive Wisdom. No; the Evolution of Trin- 

 itarianism was a far less simple matter than a patch of Philo and a 

 patch of Paul. Still, like the other great racial religious ideas, it was 

 an evolution and all the more divine for that. It belongs to the 

 phenomenology of religion. Therefore, Gunkel and Bousset and 

 Charles seem to me to be working the richer lodes of our day, and 

 certainly our Congresses and Conventions are " religionsgeschicht- 

 lich." At Stockholm in 1897 it was Chante'pie de la Saussaye who 

 discussed Religious Research by the Comparative Method, and he 

 was followed by Arnold Meyer, who reported the progress of our 

 science under the title Die moderne Forschung uber die Geschichte des 

 Urchristenthums; but the burden of his admirable summary must be 

 given in his own language: " Es gilt, das Urchristentum hineinzustel- 

 len in einen grosseren Zusammenhang, seine Geschichte als einen 

 Teil der Religions-, Kultur- und Menschheitsgeschichte iiberhaupt 

 zu begreifen, sein Werden und Wachsen zu beobachten, innere und 

 aussere Vorgange in ihrer Wechselwirkung zu betrachten." Or, 

 to borrow Meyer's own quotation from Sabatier, "To understand 

 Christianity, implies a clear and comprehensive grasp both of the 

 bond which unites it with the religious development of mankind, and 

 of the vital element which distinguishes it; also of the sequence and 



