The Relation of Primitive Christianity to Jewish Thought and Teaching

Extract

Christianity was founded by an historical person who lived in comparatively recent times. Few of us have not seen one or other of our grandparents; some doubtless have looked upon the faces of their great-grandparents. Now Jesus of Nazareth lived, and people were first called Christians, no longer ago than about twenty-five such periods of time as separate a man from his great-grandfather. We speak sometimes of the ‘evolution of Christianity,’ as if Christianity were something coeval with the geologic periods. But the fact is that though there has been a great deal of activity in theological speculation under the name of Christianity, there has been very little evolution of Christianity itself since the days of Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus. However that may be, we need to realize that Christianity appeared in the full light of comparatively recent historical times, and was founded by an historical person of whom we have fairly definite records and under conditions that we may pretend to understand. And if there are some things about the origin of Christianity that we do not know or understand, it is not because of the remoteness of the times, but because of the obscurity and the literary insignificance of its beginnings. The men who launched it were plain men, and we cannot know what they failed to observe and in after years omitted to set down. Yet they set down enough to enable us to study intelligently the circumstances and conditions under which Christianity arose and to which in so large part owed its rise.