y
so much emphasised.

The Antiochean missionaries seem to have adopted a new word to take the
place of the unintelligible "Messiah" and "Son of Man," and called
Jesus "Lord." It is made tolerably certain by comparing the oldest
strata of the gospels with the more recent that this word was not used
in Jerusalem or in Galilee {69} as a title of Jesus. It may have been
used occasionally in Aramaic-speaking circles, but it became dominant
in Greek. Its extreme importance is that it was already familiar to
the Greek-speaking world in connection with religion. It had become
the typical title for the God of one of the Graeco-Oriental cults which
offered private salvation[11] to individuals. It was therefore
inevitable that whatever the Jews may have meant when they called Jesus
Lord, their Greek converts interpreted it in the sense in which the
word had become familiar to them, and thought in consequence that Jesus
was the divine head of a cult by which each individual might obtain
salvation. The full importance of this became obvious in a purely
Greek centre such as Corinth, but the process began in Antioch.

This change in the significance attached to Jesus had its correlative
effect on the position which the Christians ascribed to themselves.
They came inevitably to regard themselves as the members of a new cult
which was superior to all others. Only by joining their number was
salvation to be found. In this sense they began to interpret the
phrase "Kingdom of God," which in many parts of the gospels very
obviously means the Christian Church. Few things, however, are more
certain than that Jesus had no intention of founding a new society
outside the Jewish Church, and none of these passages can with any
probability be ascribed to him, even {70} though at least one can, on
mechanical grounds, make out a fair case for inclusion in Q.

A correlative change was introduced into the attitude adopted towards
the Old Testament. The Antiochean Christians refused to accept it as
an obligatory law of conduct; but more and more was it interpreted as
prophetic of Jesus, and not only of him but also of the Christian
Church. In this way everything that was said of ancient Israel, and
all the promises made to it, were transferred to the Christians, who
claimed that they, and not the Jews, were the ancient People of God.
The complete fulfilment of this process did not, it is true, take place
in the time of Paul, but it was no