e
Gnostics in various ways transformed it into a Hellenic religion for the
educated. The Apologists used it--we may almost say inadvertently--to
overthrow polytheism by maintaining that Christianity was the
realisation of an absolutely moral theism. The Christian religion was
not the first to experience this twofold destiny on Graeco-Roman soil. A
glance at the history of the Jewish religion shows us a parallel
development; in fact, both the speculations of the Gnostics and the
theories of the Apologists were foreshadowed in the theology of the
Jewish Alexandrians, and particularly in that of Philo. Here also the
Gospel merely entered upon the heritage of Judaism.[345] Three centuries
before the appearance of Christian Apologists, Jews, who had received a
Hellenic training, had already set forth the religion of Jehovah to the
Greeks in that remarkably summary and spiritualised form which
represents it as the absolute and highest philosophy, i.e., the
knowledge of God, of virtue, and of recompense in the next world. Here
these Jewish philosophers had already transformed all the positive and
historic elements of the national religion into parts of a huge system
for proving the truth of that theism. The Christian Apologists adopted
this method, for they can hardly be said to have invented it anew.[346]
We see from the Jewish Sibylline oracles how wide-spread it was. Philo,
however, was not only a Stoic rationalist, but a hyper-Platonic
religious philosopher. In like manner, the Christian Apologists did not
altogether lack this element, though in some isolated cases among them
there are hardly any traces of it. This feature is most fully
represented among the Gnostics.

This transformation of religion into a philosophic system would not have
been possible had not Greek philosophy itself happened to be in process
of development into a religion. Such a transformation was certainly very
foreign to the really classical time of Greece and Rome. The pious
belief in the efficacy and power of the gods and in their appearances
and manifestations, as well as the traditional worship, could have no
bond of union with speculations concerning the essence and ultimate
cause of things. The idea of a religious dogma which was at once to
furnish a correct theory of the world and a principle of conduct was
from this standpoint completely unintelligible. But philosophy,
particularly in the Stoa, set out in search of this idea, and, after
furt