The Christians, finding ecstasy, prophecy, trance, and glossolaly among their own members, and having before them the parallel of Greek priestesses and Hebrew prophets, and making moreover the same very slight distinction as their pagan neighbours between matter and spirit, and, finally, possessing all the readiness of unscientific people in propounding theories,—they assumed an "effluence" from God, a spirit which entered into a man, just as in ordinary life evil demons did, but here it was a holy spirit. This they connected with God after the manner familiar to Jewish thinkers, and following the same lead, began to equate it with God, as a separate being. It is not at first always quite clear whether it is the spirit of God or of Jesus—or even a manifestation of the risen Jesus.[[44]]
When we pass to the early explanations of Jesus, we come into a region peculiarly difficult. A later age obscured the divergences of early theory. Some opinions the church decisively rejected—Christians would have nothing to do with a Jesus who was an emanation from an absolute and inconceivable Being, a Jesus who in that case would be virtually indistinguishable from Asclepios the kindly-natured divine healer. Nor would they tolerate the notion of a phantom-Jesus crucified in show, while the divine Christ was far away—like Helen in Euripides' play.[[45]] "Spare," says Tertullian, "the one hope of all the world."[[46]] They would not have a "daimonion without a body." But two theories, one of older Jewish, and the other of more recent Alexandrian origin, the church accepted and blended, though they do not necessarily belong to each other.
Paul
The one theory is especially Paul's—sacred to all who lean with him to the Hebrew view of things, to all who, like him, are touched with the sense of sin and feel the need of another's righteousness, to all who have come under the spell of the one great writer of the first century. A Jew, a native of a Hellenistic city—and "no mean one"[[47]]—a citizen of the Roman Empire, a man of wide outlooks, with a gift for experience, he passed from Pharisaism to Christ. The mediating idea was righteousness. He knew his own guilt before God, and found that by going about to establish his own righteousness he was achieving nothing.
At the same time a suffering Messiah was a contradiction in terms, unspeakably repulsive to a Jew. We can see this much in the tremendous efforts of the Apologists to overcome Jewish aversion by producing Old Testament prophecies that Christ was to suffer. Pathetós (subject to suffering) was a word that waked rage and contempt in every one, who held to contemporary views of God, or even had dabbled in Stoic or similar conceptions of human greatness. But it seems that the serenity and good conscience of Christian martyrs impressed their persecutor, who was not happy in his own conscience; and at last the thought came—along familiar lines—that Christ's sufferings might be for the benefit of others. And then he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. What exactly happened is a matter of discussion, but Paul was satisfied—he was "a man in Christ."
Much might be said in criticism of Paul's Christology—if it were not for Paul and his followers. They have done too much and been too much for it to be possible to dissect their great conception in cold blood. Paul's theories are truer than another man's experiences—they pulse with life, they have (in Luther's phrase) hands and feet to carry a man away. The man is so large and so strong, so simple and true, so various in his knowledge of the world, so tender in his feeling for men—"all things to all men"—such a master of language, so sympathetic and so open—he is irresistible. The quick movement of his thought, his sudden flashes of anger and of tenderness, his apostrophes, his ejaculations—one feels that pen and paper never got such a man written down before or since. Every sentence comes charged with the whole man—half a dozen Greek words, and not always the best Greek—and the Christian world for ever will sum up its deepest experience in "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world."
Close examination reveals a good deal of Judaism surviving in Paul,—a curious way of playing with the text of Scripture, odd reminiscences of old methods, and deeper infiltrations of a Jewish thought which is not that of Jesus. Yet it does not affect our feeling for him—he stands too close to us as a man, too much over us as the teacher of Augustine, Calvin and Luther—a man, whom it took more genius to explain than the church had for fifteen centuries, and yet the man to whom the church owes its universal reach and unity, its theology and the best of the language in which it has expressed its love for his master.
Explanation of Jesus
Paul went back to the Jewish conception of a Messiah, modified, in the real spirit of Jesus, by the thought of suffering. But when we put side by side the Messiah of Jesus and the Messiah of Paul, we become conscious of a difference. The latter is a mediator between God and man, making atonement, transferring righteousness by a sort of legal fiction, and implying a conception of God's fatherhood far below that taught by Jesus. At the same time Paul has other thoughts of a profounder and more permanent value. It is hard, for instance, to imagine that any change, which time and thought may bring, can alter a word in his statement that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself"—here there is no local or temporal element even in the wording. It may be noted that Paul has his own names for Jesus, for while he uses "Messiah" (in Greek) and "Son of God," he is the first to speak of "the Lord" and "the Saviour." Paul held the door open for the other great theory of the early church, when he emphasized the pre-existence of the heavenly Christ and made him the beginning, the centre and the end of all history.
The Logos, as we have seen, was not an original idea of the Christian world. It was long familiar to Greek philosophy, and Philo and the Stoics base much of their thought upon it. It must have come into the church from a Greek or Hellenistic source, perhaps as a translation of Paul's "heavenly Christ." As it stands, it is a peculiarly bold annexation from Philosophy. No Stoic would have denied that the Spermaticos Logos was in Jesus, but the bold identification of the Logos with Jesus must have been "foolishness to the Greek." Still in contemporary thought there was much to dispose men to believe in such an incarnation of the Logos in a human being, though there is no suggestion that a spiritual being of any at all commensurate greatness was ever so incarnated before. But the thought appealed to the Christian mind, when once the shock to Greek susceptibilities was overcome. Once accepted, it "solved all questions in the earth and out of it." It permitted the congenial idea of Greek theology to remain—the transcendence of God being saved by this personification of his Thought. It was a final blow to all theories that made Jesus an emanation, a phantom or a demi-god, and it kept his historic personality well in the centre of thought, though leaving it now comparatively much less significance.