Antioch, where Christianity thus took its first feeble steps, was a handsome and bustling commercial city, the capital of the Greek Seleucid kings, and the acknowledged metropolis of the Syrian area. At the time of Paul (if there was a Paul), it probably contained half a million people; it was certainly the largest town in Asia, and worthy to be compared with Rome itself in the splendour of its buildings. Many things about its position are deserving of notice. It stood upon the banks of the Orontes, a sacred stream, ensconced in a rich agricultural plain, fourteen miles from the river’s mouth. Its Ostia was at Selucia, the harbour whence flowed the entire export trade of Syria and the east towards Hellas and Italy. The Mediterranean in front connected it with Rome, Alexandria, Asia Minor, Greece; the caravan routes across the Syrian desert in the rear put it in communication with the bazars of Mesopotamia and the remoter east. It was thus the main entrepôt of the through trade between two important worlds. The Venice of its time, it lay at the focal point where the highroads of Europe and of Asia converged.
Scholars of repute have pointed out the fact that even earlier than the days of Paul, Buddhist ideas from India seem to have dribbled through and affected the Syrian world, as Zoroastrian ideas a little later dribbled through and affected the thought of Alexandria: and some importance has been attached to this infiltration of motives from the mystical east. Now, I do not care to deny that budding Christianity may have been much influenced on its ritual and still more on its ethical side by floating elements of Buddhist opinion: that the infancy of the Christ may have been nursed by the Magi. But on the whole I think the facts we have just been considering as to the manufacture of artificial human gods and the nature and meaning of piacular sacrifices will suffice to show that Christianity was chiefly a plant of home growth. The native soil contained already every essential element that was needed to feed it—the doctrine of the Incarnation, the death of the Man-God, the atoning power of his Blood, the Resurrection and Ascension. So that, while allowing due weight to this peculiar international position of Antioch, as the double-faced Janus-gate of Europe and Asia, I am not inclined to think that points peculiar to Buddhism need have exercised any predominant influence in the evolution of the new religion. For we must remember that Buddhism itself did but subsume into its own fabric ideas which were common to Peru and Mexico, to Greece and India, to Syria and Egypt, and which came out in fresh forms, surging up from below, in the creed of Christendom. If anything is clear from our previous researches it is this—that the world has never really had more than one religion—“of many names, a single central shape,” as the poet phrases it.
The Syrian people, Semites by race and cult, had fallen, like all the rest of the eastern world, under the Hellenic dominion of the successors of Alexander. A quick and subtle folk, very pliable and plastic, they underwent rapid and facile Hellenisation. It was an easy task for them to accept Greek culture and Greek religion. The worshipper of Adonis had little difficulty in renaming his chief god as Dionysus and continuing to practise his old rites and ceremonies to the newly-named deity after the ancestral pattern. The Astarte whom the east had given to Hellas under the alias of Aphrodite, came back again as Aphrodite to Astarte’s old sanctuaries. Identifications of gods and cults were but simple matters, where so many gods were after all essentially similar in origin and function. Thus the easy-going Syrian had few scruples about practising his primitive ceremonies under foreign titles, or admitting to the hospitality of his Semitic temples the Hellenic deities of the reigning Antiochi.
The Seleucids, however, did not fare so well in their attempt to impose the alien gods on the fierce Jehovistic zealots of the southern mountains. Antiochus IV. endeavoured in vain to force the cults of intrusive Hellenism on his new kingdom of Palestine. He reckoned without his hosts. The populace of Jerusalem would not away with his “idolatrous” rites—would not permit the worship of Zeus and Pallas, of Artemis and Aphrodite, to usurp a place in the holy city of Jahweh. The rebellion of the Maccabees secured at least the religious independence of Judæa from the early Seleucid period down to the days of Vespasian and Titus. Lower Syria remained true in her arid hills to the exclusive and monotheistic cult of the God of Israel. And at the same time the Jew spread everywhere over the surrounding countries, carrying with him not only his straw and his basket, but also his ingrained and ineradicable prejudices.
In Antioch, then, after the Roman absorption of Syria, a most cosmopolitan religion appears to have existed, containing mingled Semitic and Hellenic elements, half assimilated to one another, in a way that was highly characteristic of the early empire. And among the popular cults of the great city we must certainly place high those of Adonis and Dionysus, of Aphrodite-Astarte, and of the local gods or goddesses, the Baalim and Ashtareth, such as the maiden who, as we learnt from Malalas, was sacrificed at the original foundation of the city, and ever after worshipped as its Tyche or Fortune. In other words, the conception of the human god, of the corn and wine god, of the death of the god, and of his glorious resurrection, must have all been perfectly familiar ideas to the people of Antioch and of Syria in general.
Let us note here, too, that the particular group of Jah-weh-worshippers among whom the Christ is said to have found his personal followers, were not people of the priestly type of Jerusalem, but Galilæan peasants of the northern mountains, separated from the most orthodox set of Jews by the intrusive wedge of heretical Samaritans, and closely bordering on the heathen Phoenician seaboard—“the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.” Here Judaism and heathenism marched together; here Jahweh had his worshippers among the fishers of the lake, while Hellenism had fixed itself in the statelier villas of Tiberias and Ptole-mais.
Alexandria was another of the great cosmopolitan seaport towns where Christianity made its earliest converts, and assumed not a few of its distinctive tenets. Now, in Alexandria, Hellenism and the immemorially ancient Egyptian religion found themselves face to face at very close quarters. It is true, the town in its historical aspect was mainly Greek, founded by the great Macedonian himself, and priding itself on its pure Hellenic culture. But the mass of the lower orders who thronged its alleys must surely have consisted of more or less mongrel Egyptians, still clinging with all the old Egyptian conservatism to the ideas and practices and rites of their fathers. Besides these, we get hints of a large cosmopolitan seafaring population, among whom strange faiths and exotic gods found ready acceptance. Beside the stately forms of the Greek pantheon, and the mummified or animal-headed Egyptian deities, the imported Syrian worship of Adonis had acquired a firm footing; the annual festival of the slaughtered god was one of the principal holidays; and other Syrian or remoter faiths had managed to secure their special following. The hybrid Serapis occupied the stateliest fane of the hybrid city. In that huge and busy hive, indeed, every form of cult found a recognised place, and every creed was tolerated which did not inculcate interference with the equal religious freedom of others.
The Ptolemaic family represents in itself this curious adaptability of the Græco-Egyptian Alexandrian mind. At Alexandria and in the Delta, the kings appear before us as good Hellenes, worshipping their ancestral deities in splendid temples; but in the Thebaid, the god Ptolemy or the goddess Cleopatra erected buildings in honor of Ptah or Khem in precisely the old Egyptian style, and appeared on their propyla in the guise of Pharaohs engaged in worshipping Amen-Ra or Osiris. The great Alexander himself had inaugurated this system when he gave himself out as the son of “Zeus Ammon”; and his indirect representatives carried it on throughout with a curious dualism which excused itself under the veil of arbitrary identifications. Thus Serapis himself was the dead Apis bull, invested with the attributes of an Osiris and of the Hellenic Hades; while Amen-Ra was Zeus in an Egyptian avatar.
The large Jewish colony at Alexandria also prepared the way for the ultimate admixture of Neo-Platonism in the Christian faith; while the Egyptian belief in Triads of gods formed the groundwork for the future doctrine of the Trinity, so doggedly battled for by the Alexandrian Athanasius. It is true that Ampère and Preller have strenuously denied any Egyptian admixture in the philosophy of Alexandria; and their reasoning may be conclusive enough as to the upper stratum of thought: but it must at least be admitted that popular belief in the city of the Ptolemies must have been deeply coloured by the ideas and creeds of its Egyptian substratum. Now, in the growth of Christianity, it was the people who counted, not the official classes, the learned, or the philosophic. We must not attribute to the population of the East End of London the theology of Pusey or the evolutionism of Herbert Spencer.
Christianity would seem also to have taken part at least of its form in Rome. And as Roman influence extended likewise over every portion of the vast empire, I must say a very few words here about the origin and growth of the Roman religion.