The Greeks were convinced (and perhaps rightly so) that they were more intelligent and better educated than their neighbors and they felt rather sorry for those unfortunate barbarians. But they never quite reached the point at which they began to consider themselves as a race that had been set apart from all others because it was the chosen people of Zeus.
Christianity on the other hand was never able to escape from its own antecedents. When the Christians adopted the Old Testament as one of the Holy Books of their own faith, they fell heir to the incredible Jewish doctrine that their race was “different” from all others and that only those who professed a belief in certain officially established doctrines could hope to be saved while the rest were doomed to perdition.
This idea was, of course, of enormous direct benefit to those who were lacking sufficiently in humility of spirit to believe themselves predilected favorites among millions and millions of their fellow creatures. During many highly critical years it had turned the Christians into a closely-knit, self-contained little community which floated unconcernedly upon a vast ocean of paganism.
What happened elsewhere on those waters that stretched far and wide towards the north and the south and the east and the west was a subject of the most profound indifference to Tertullian or St. Augustine, or any of those other early writers who were busily engaged in putting the ideas of their Church into the concrete form of written books. Eventually they hoped to reach a safe shore and there to build their city of God. Meanwhile, what those in other climes hoped to accomplish and to achieve was none of their concern.
Hence they created for themselves entirely new conceptions about the origin of man and about the limits of time and space. What the Egyptians and Babylonians and the Greeks and the Romans had discovered about these mysteries did not interest them in the least. They were sincerely convinced that all the old values had been destroyed with the birth of Christ.
There was for example the problem of our earth.
The ancient scientists held it to be one among a couple of billion of other stars.
The Christians flatly rejected this idea. To them, the little round disk on which they lived was the heart and center of the universe.
It had been created for the special purpose of providing one particular group of people with a temporary home. The way in which this had been brought about was very simple and was fully described in the first chapter of Genesis.
When it became necessary to decide just how long this group of predilected people had been on this earth, the problem became a little more complicated. On all sides there were evidences of great antiquity, of buried cities, of extinct monsters and of fossilized plants. But these could be reasoned away or overlooked or denied or shouted out of existence. And after this had been done, it was a very simple matter to establish a fixed date for the beginning of time.