ato arisen to control the phantasy of the
oriental mind, the result would not have been far different from
Christianity.

It was only natural that Gnosticism with its belief in a savior-god
should feel itself drawn to Christianity with its similar teaching.
Jesus was regarded by the Christian gnostics as divine, as an eternal
being who had manifested himself historically in fulfillment of his
function of mediator. The Christian congregations were thus forced to
take another step in the deification of Jesus. For Paul, he was still
a man, the second or spiritual Adam who began a new dispensation. For
the earlier Christians, he was the God-selected Messiah. He now became
a god who was also the son of God. The evolution was inevitable in the
intellectual environment of the time. But the Christian congregations,
as represented by their clearest thinkers, wished to avoid gnostic
extremes and to keep near the historical basis and the ethical
monotheism of the best Hebrew {90} tradition. Jesus was God, but he
was also man. In this way, arose the doctrine of the incarnation.
Instead of being a monument of mystical insight as theologians tell us,
it was the consequence of a problem forced upon the Church. In other
words, the doctrine of the Trinity is the attempt to combine gnostic
polytheism and monotheism. The only way three can be made one is by a
mystery, so a mystery it became. It is a bit of verbal gymnastic or a
formal solution of an impossible problem which the pressure of events
had forced upon the Church.

Christianity was now on the high-road to a theology. To enter the
Hellenistic world and not be forced to develop a theology was simply
impossible. The first fruit of this entrance into the intellectual
world of the time was the Fourth Gospel or the so-called Gospel
according to John. Scholars have begun to interpret this gospel as an
attempt to combine the older Christian tradition with the theological
speculations of the age. The beginning of the gospel strikes a new
note which separates it immediately from the synoptics. "In the
beginning was the Word (Logos) and the Word was with God and the Word
was God." What is this Word or Logos with which the historical Jesus
was identified? For Philo, the Alexandrian Jew who played such an
important part in the theological speculation of the time, the Logos
was a second God, the reflection of his glory, the only begotten Son,
the actual creator of the worl