especially to the second; for even the later Syrian Church was fundamentally dependent on the Greek. But we begin with a thoroughly Oriental situation. Christianity sprang up out of the soil of an ancient Semitic religion. The Judaism of the rabbis only represented the faded glory of the superb faith proclaimed by the ancient prophets, and the gospel realised one of those prophets' predictions by appearing as "a root out of a dry ground." Still, it needed its soil, impoverished by neglect and ill-usage as this was We cannot regard the fact that Jesus was a Jew as due to a freak of nature or a caprice of Providence. Then, all the apostles were Jews; so apparently were all the writers of the New Testament except one, and probably he was a proselyte. The gospel of the kingdom of heaven was first preached in Aramaic, in the local Syrian dialect spoken at the time by our Lord and His disciples. The earliest record of the teachings of Jesus Christ of which we have any knowledge was written in Hebrew, or Aramaic.[1] The Scriptures used by the primitive Churches and appealed to for the authentication of their message consisted of Hebrew writings; and although the Old Testament was commonly read in a Greek translation, its Semitic ideas and imagery coloured the whole presentation of Christian truth. In the present day, not only our theology, our sermons, our prayers and hymns, but our literature and political oratory are steeped in Biblical Orientalism. When, as is often the case in his most pathetic scenes, Sir Walter Scott adopts the language of the Bible, or when one of our statesmen graces his diction by drawing from that "well of English undefiled," the Authorised Version of the English Bible, it is generally some Semitism that gives its choice flavour to the passage.
Directly we pass on to the second stage of development, the Greek, we have an immensely enlarged field of observation. The Semitic period was quite temporary and provincial, although, as the earliest, it left its
- ↑ Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. iii. 39.
