Christian interest in Jewish literature has always been apologetic or polemic rather than historical. The writers of the New Testament set themselves to demonstrate from the Scriptures that Jesus was the expected Messiah by showing that his nativity, his teaching and miracles, the rejection of him by his people, his death, resurrection, and ascension, were minutely foretold in prophecy, the exact fulfilment of which in so many particulars was conclusive proof of the truth of his claims, and left no room to doubt that his own prediction would be fulfilled in the speedy coming of the Son of Man to judgment, as Daniel had seen him in his vision. In the Pauline Epistles and Hebrews and in the Gospel according to John the aim is not so much to prove that Jesus was the Messiah of Jewish expectation as that the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom Christians believed that they had salvation from their sins and the assurance of a blessed immortality, was a divine being, the Son of God, the Word of God incarnate; and this higher faith also sought its evidence in the Scriptures. The apologetic of the following centuries, especially that which addresses itself to Jewish objections, has the same chief topics: Jesus was the Christ (Messiah), and Christ is a divine being. Others, which also have their antecedents in the New Testament, are accessory to these, particularly the emancipation of Christians from the Mosaic law, or the annulment of the dispensation of law altogether, or the substitution of the new law of Christ; the repudiation of the Jewish people by God for their rejection of Christ, and the succession of the church, the true Israel, the people of God, to all the prerogatives and promises once given to the Jews.

Among the many problems which confront the historian of Christian thought and life in the early centuries one of the most complex and difficult is that of the relations, practical as well as theoretical, between Christianity and asceticism. Since the age of the Reformation there has been incessant controversy over the question whether the anthropological assumptions which underlie ascetic morals—the dualistic conception of the constitution of human nature and the conviction that there is an irreconcilable opposition between body and spirit—are really identical with the principles of Christian anthropology so that there can be no experience of the gospel message apart from a radically pessimistic estimate of the possibilities of good inherent in human nature, and without the acceptance of a scale of ethical values based upon the progressive stages of an ascetic discipline.

After centuries of acrimonious theological controversy fomented by prejudices on both sides, we are now perhaps for the first time in a position to consider objectively the historical relations between the development of ascetic ideas and the propagation of the Christian piety, and consequently to solve satisfactorily the problem of the interaction between asceticism and Christianity.

The problem of the existence and nature of God, remote and oppressive though it is to some minds, to others is of all questions the most urgent and engaging. It has had its fascination for the mind of America, as for that of all intelligent peoples.