ird's eye view of the forces at work in
later Hellenistic and Roman times will be the best preparation for a
sane conception of the origin and trend of Christianity.

In Tarsus, a Greek city of Cilicia, Paul, or Saul, was born and
educated. Now Tarsus was, after Alexandria, the chief seat of late
Greek philosophy in the near-orient. Many of the more noted Stoic
thinkers and teachers of the day came from Cilicia and had semitic
blood in their veins. Athenodorus, the teacher of Cicero and Augustus,
came from Tarsus, itself; and it is said that his grateful and admiring
fellow citizens made him a hero upon his death and annually celebrated
him in a memorial feast, a procedure very characteristic of the age.
There is the strongest evidence in Paul's epistles that he was well
acquainted with the doctrines of Stoicism. The larger intellectual
world of Philo of Alexandria and Seneca of the Imperial City lies
behind these epistles. The Hellenistic Jew of the Dispersion differed
widely from the Jew of Palestine, no matter how desirous he might be to
identify himself with the worship at the Temple.

But Greek philosophy was not the only element with which the inhabitant
of Tarsus would come in contact. When Paul speaks of mysteries, he is
referring to the various secret cults which permeated the Roman world.
How few Christians are aware that the ancient world {68} was, at this
time, in a religious ferment almost without parallel. _The Greek
civilization had lost its nerve_. It had shot its bolt and been
overwhelmed by autocratic powers and sheer barbarism. The conditions
of a progressive and broadly based civilization had not yet been
achieved. "Any one who turns from the great writers of classical
Athens, say Sophocles or Aristotle," writes Gilbert Murray, "to those
of the Christian era must be conscious of a great difference in tone.
There is a change in the whole relation of the writer to the world
about him. The new quality is not specifically Christian: it is just
as marked in the Gnostics and Mithra-worshipers as in the Gospels and
the Apocalypse, in Julian and Plotinus as in Gregory and Jerome. It is
hard to describe. It is a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a
sense, of pessimism; _a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life
and of faith in normal human effort_; a despair of patient inquiry, a
cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the
state; a conversion of the soul to God.