The Christian Faith Under Modern Searchlights

by William Hallock Johnson

2. The famous Priene inscription, dated about the year 9 b. c., has shown that the titles given to the Emperor Augustus were strikingly similar to those addressed by Christians to Christ. The day of the Emperor's birth was of great significance for the human race; he is called Saviour of men, he is to abolish war and bring general happiness; and the inscription declares that "the birthday of the god was for the world the beginning of tidings of joy on his account."[227] Both religions again, the worship of Christ and the Emperor-cult, were universal religions, the essential difference being that the former excluded, while the latter tolerated, other forms of worship. Did the Christian Church derive its worship of Christ as Lord, or even such titles as "Saviour" and "Lord," from the Emperor-worship of the time?

The deification of a king was by no means an unfamiliar thing in the ancient and especially in the oriental world. The kings of Egypt are said to have worshipped themselves. To the offer of Alexander the Great to rebuild the burnt temple of Diana at Ephesus, the shrewd reply of the priests, not wishing to offend either Persia or Greece, was that it was not fitting for one deity to build the temple of another. The ascription of divine honours to the Emperor was a victory of eastern influences over Roman thought. Emperor worship was (1) a compliment to the ruler; (2) a kind of personification of the genius of the Empire, as perhaps in the case of the Mikado to-day; and (3) a convenient neutral religion, since no existing cult could be universal, binding all peoples together in a necessary religious bond. While not taken very seriously by the astute rulers themselves, it may also have been to many minds "an actual breaking out of religious longing," such as seems to be expressed in Vergil's "Fourth Eclogue," for a heaven-sent deliverer and saviour.

To Jews and Christians alike, however, the idea of the worship of the Emperor was in the highest degree abhorrent. This is shown by the fierce opposition to the setting up of the statue of Caligula in the Temple, by the refusal of the early Christians to worship the genius of the Cæsars under pain of death, and by the parallel accounts in the Acts and Josephus of the death of Herod, both Jewish and Christian authors describing his sudden death as a judgment upon his impiety in accepting divine honours. With Paul the "setting himself forth as God" was a mark of the man of sin (2 Thess. ii. 3, 4). It is then improbable in the highest degree that an idea so repellent alike to Jewish and Christian thought could have been in any way responsible for the worship of Christ as divine.

But was it not possible that such titles as "Lord" and "Saviour" should on Gentile soil have been unconsciously taken over by the Christians, suggested to them by the growing use of these terms as addressed to the Emperor and their free ascription to heathen deities? This position has been defended by Bousset, who says that "it was in the air that the first Hellenistic Christian community should give to its cult-hero the title Kyrios (Lord)."[228] Even this theory of an unconscious verbal influence exerted on Gentile soil is full of difficulty. To maintain that the title "Lord" originated in the Gentile-Christian church it is necessary, of course, to discard the evidence of all the documents, the Gospels, the Acts and the Epistles. It must be denied that Jesus called Himself Lord, or that the title was given Him in the Jerusalem church. Doubt must be thrown upon the whole record of the apostolic days in the Acts; and the evidence, in Paul's allusion to "James, the Lord's brother" (Gal. i. 19), of the use of the title in the Jerusalem church must be ignored.

Bousset's theory is that Paul did not originate the title but found it already in use by the Gentile church. But there is no evidence that at the time of Paul's conversion there was any church on Gentile soil that was not composed, in the main, of former Jews and of Jews who had come from Jerusalem. When it is said that "between Paul and the primitive church of Palestine stand the Hellenistic churches in Antioch, Damascus, Tarsus,"[229] it must be remembered that the church at Damascus was composed primarily of Jerusalem Christians who were persecuted to foreign cities; that the church at Antioch was founded by those from Judea, and grew under the leadership of Barnabas, a priest and leader of the Jerusalem church (Acts xi. 19 f.; Gal. ii. 1, 12); and that there is no evidence that there were any Christians at Tarsus until the time of Paul's visit (Acts ix. 30; Gal. i. 21). It is hard to see how there can be any question of an entirely new title spontaneously arising from the heathen environment, and free from the influence of the church at Jerusalem.

If it be asked how Jews could dare to apply the name Kyrios, "the holy cult-name of the Old Testament Jahwe," to Jesus, the answer is suggested by Bousset himself when he says: "Therein lay a piece of monotheistic feeling: God alone should be prayed to and worshipped. This powerful religious feeling, free from all reflection, has once and again in the history of Christological dogma asserted itself."[230] The essence of the matter is that Christian converts both Jewish and Gentile called upon the name of the Lord, and worshipped Him; but it is evident that Jesus was first worshipped on Jewish soil as King of Israel, and Lord in the sense made familiar in the Old Testament (Rom. x. 9-13; Acts ii. 17, 21), before He was worshipped on Gentile soil as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Aside from all else it is highly improbable that in the time of Paul's conversion the use of the title Lord (Kyrios, Dominus) as applied to the Emperor was so wide-spread as to have exercised any appreciable influence upon Christianity. "It would after all," Bousset himself acknowledges, "in spite of all analogies in substance and words, be an erroneous and over-hasty inference, were we to bring the Christian Kyrios-cult and its origin into immediate connection with the cult of the Cæsars. In the time and in the regions in which the Kyrios-Jesus cult arose, the worship of the ruler scarcely as yet had possessed so dominating a rôle that the worship of Jesus as Lord must be regarded as having arisen in conscious opposition to it."[231]

The conscious opposition no doubt came later, as Deissmann has suggested, when the cult of the Christ went forth into the Roman world and endeavoured to reserve for itself words which had just been transferred to the deified emperors, or had been invented for that worship. "Thus there arises," he says, "a polemical parallelism between the cult of the emperor and the cult of Christ, which makes itself felt where ancient words derived by Christianity from the treasury of the Septuagint and the Gospels happen to coincide with solemn concepts of the Imperial cult which sounded the same or similar."[232] It was inevitable that, as Paul preached Jesus Christ as Lord, the contrast between the Christian worship and the worship of the Cæsars should suggest itself, together with their irreconcilable antagonism. This "polemical parallelism" is probably expressed in such titles as "our only Master and Lord" (Jude 4), "Every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord" (Phil. ii. 11), and "King of Kings and Lord of Lords" (Rev. xix. 16).

3. The relation of Paul to the Mystery Religions of his time is a topic which has of late been actively discussed. A thesis now widely maintained has been expressed by Loisy in an epigrammatic form: "The mystery of Paul's conversion is his conversion to the mysteries." To discuss the question in all its bearings, one would need a general acquaintance with classical literature, a special knowledge of religious conditions in the early Roman Empire, and, most important of all, a first-hand exegetical knowledge of Paul's epistles.

A marked feature of the age in which the Apostle lived was a merging of deities, and the practice of oriental cults side by side with the official Roman religion and the worship of the Cæsar. This syncretism was promoted by the tolerance of an official religious indifferentism, and by a pantheistic philosophy which was hospitable to the worship of a multiplicity of deities as aspects of the One and the All. At a time when the Orontes was pouring its waters into the Tiber, the mysteries of the oriental religions were actively propagated in the West and coalesced with the mysteries practiced among the Greeks.