After Pentecost

195:2.1The Ro­mans bod­ily took over Greek cul­ture, putting rep­re­sen­ta­tive gov­ern­ment in the place of gov­ern­ment by lot. And pres­ently this change fa­vored Chris­tian­ity in that Rome brought into the whole West­ern world a new tol­er­ance for strange lan­guages, peo­ples, and even re­li­gions.

195:2.2Much of the early per­se­cu­tion of Chris­tians in Rome was due solely to their un­for­tu­nate use of the term “king­dom” in their preach­ing. The Ro­mans were tol­er­ant of any and all re­li­gions but very re­sent­ful of any­thing that sa­vored of po­lit­i­cal ri­valry. And so, when these early per­se­cu­tions, due so largely to mis­un­der­stand­ing, died out, the field for re­li­gious pro­pa­ganda was wide open. The Ro­man was in­ter­ested in po­lit­i­cal ad­min­is­tra­tion; he cared lit­tle for ei­ther art or re­li­gion, but he was un­usu­ally tol­er­ant of both.

195:2.3Ori­en­tal law was stern and ar­bi­trary; Greek law was fluid and artis­tic; Ro­man law was dig­ni­fied and re­spect-breed­ing. Ro­man ed­u­ca­tion bred an un­heard-of and stolid loy­alty. The early Ro­mans were po­lit­i­cally de­voted and sub­limely con­se­crated in­di­vid­u­als. They were hon­est, zeal­ous, and ded­i­cated to their ide­als, but with­out a re­li­gion wor­thy of the name. Small won­der that their Greek teach­ers were able to per­suade them to ac­cept Paul’s Chris­tian­ity.

195:2.4And these Ro­mans were a great peo­ple. They could gov­ern the Oc­ci­dent be­cause they did gov­ern them­selves. Such un­par­al­leled hon­esty, de­vo­tion, and stal­wart self-con­trol was ideal soil for the re­cep­tion and growth of Chris­tian­ity.

195:2.5It was easy for these Greco-Ro­mans to be­come just as spir­i­tu­ally de­voted to an in­sti­tu­tional church as they were po­lit­i­cally de­voted to the state. The Ro­mans fought the church only when they feared it as a com­peti­tor of the state. Rome, hav­ing lit­tle na­tional phi­los­o­phy or na­tive cul­ture, took over Greek cul­ture for its own and boldly adopted Christ as its moral phi­los­o­phy. Chris­tian­ity be­came the moral cul­ture of Rome but hardly its re­li­gion in the sense of be­ing the in­di­vid­ual ex­pe­ri­ence in spir­i­tual growth of those who em­braced the new re­li­gion in such a whole­sale man­ner. True, in­deed, many in­di­vid­u­als did pen­e­trate be­neath the sur­face of all this state re­li­gion and found for the nour­ish­ment of their souls the real val­ues of the hid­den mean­ings held within the la­tent truths of Hel­le­nized and pa­ganized Chris­tian­ity.

195:2.6The Stoic and his sturdy ap­peal to “na­ture and con­science” had only the bet­ter pre­pared all Rome to re­ceive Christ, at least in an in­tel­lec­tual sense. The Ro­man was by na­ture and train­ing a lawyer; he revered even the laws of na­ture. And now, in Chris­tian­ity, he dis­cerned in the laws of na­ture the laws of God. A peo­ple that could pro­duce Ci­cero and Vergil were ripe for Paul’s Hel­le­nized Chris­tian­ity.

195:2.7And so did these Ro­man­ized Greeks force both Jews and Chris­tians to phi­los­o­phize their re­li­gion, to co-or­di­nate its ideas and sys­tem­atize its ide­als, to adapt re­li­gious prac­tices to the ex­ist­ing cur­rent of life. And all this was enor­mously helped by trans­la­tion of the He­brew scrip­tures into Greek and by the later record­ing of the New Tes­ta­ment in the Greek tongue.

195:2.8The Greeks, in con­trast with the Jews and many other peo­ples, had long pro­vi­sion­ally be­lieved in im­mor­tal­ity, some sort of sur­vival af­ter death, and since this was the very heart of Je­sus’ teach­ing, it was cer­tain that Chris­tian­ity would make a strong ap­peal to them.

195:2.9A suc­ces­sion of Greek-cul­tural and Ro­man-po­lit­i­cal vic­to­ries had con­sol­i­dated the Med­i­ter­ra­nean lands into one em­pire, with one lan­guage and one cul­ture, and had made the West­ern world ready for one God. Ju­daism pro­vided this God, but Ju­daism was not ac­cept­able as a re­li­gion to these Ro­man­ized Greeks. Philo helped some to mit­i­gate their ob­jec­tions, but Chris­tian­ity re­vealed to them an even bet­ter con­cept of one God, and they em­braced it read­ily.