This "gospel," so far as it found visible expression, was embodied, after the manner of ancient religion, not in books but in symbolic ritual. Christianity consisted in the ordinances and their interpretation. When Saul the persecutor was called upon to identify his victims he did not search for writings. It is not even likely that as a Jew he would think of cross-examination on points of doctrine. Jewish orthodoxy is guaranteed not by acceptance of a statement of belief, but by a sacramentum, an oath of loyalty to Jehovah the one God, in whose service every capacity of man's nature should be united. Its "creed" is the so-called Shema, the same "yoke of the divine sovereignty" which Jesus, like many another Jewish martyr, took on him when he went to his death. What Saul the persecutor saw and resented in the spreading sect was a new loyalty. It was attested by baptism, a new sacramentum, a ritual act of selfdedication whose significance was renewed by a fre quently repeated memorial act of fellowship.

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The Nazarenes, or Christians, were the people who practiced the rites of baptism and the Supper. The lat ter, a token of their "communion" or "partnership (Kowovía), as they called it, came from the very hand and voice voice of Jesus himself on the night of his delivering up to the cross. The Church repeated his farewell message to the disciples in his own words, it reënacted the supreme parable by which he had sealed his meaning on their hearts. In substance the supper was an act of self-dedication in which Jesus" covenanted" (Luke 22: 29, diationμi vμiv) that the life he was willingly surrendering in the cause ever sweeping seems to me historically justified: "Christianity is forgiveness," and he adds, "there is no forgiveness dissociated from the cross." That also I believe to be a fact as descriptive of the special message of the primitive evangelist, or missionary. Of course it is not true of Jesus' own preaching in Galilee. 8 Mk. 12: 28-30.

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of the Kingdom should be a sacrifice to God on Israel's behalf. As other Jewish martyrs had done before his time, he offered his body and blood to God as a 4 propitiation" (iλaoμós) on behalf of his people, and in a faith which not even the shadow of the cross could darken he gave tryst to those who had been with him in his trials at the banquet of the redeemed. He would meet them again at his table in his Kingdom. This "covenant" (dialnкn) is the essence of the rite. As II. Macc. 7:36 says of the martyrs who "offered up both body and life for the laws of their fathers, entreating God that He would speedily be propitiated for their nation," Jesus also "died under a God-given 'covenant' of everlasting life."

The initial observance which marked the Christian of Paul's day was baptism; not instituted by Jesus himself during his earthly life, but adapted by his disciples from the practice by which his predecessor John had symbolized repentance from all the evil past in preparation for Jehovah's coming to inaugurate his reign on earth. The disciples of Jesus adopted it almost coincidently with the awakening of their belief in the Master's victory over death and his exaltation to the throne of heavenly glory to await a prompt return. And in adopting it they were convinced that they were acting -under the direction of his Spirit. To them the rite was the believer's logical response to the "covenant in the blood of the Master. The Supper symbolized Jesus' self-dedication unto death in their behalf. “My life. . . for you," those are its keywords. Baptism signified their participation in this death, an answering

4 IV Macc. 6: 27-29; 17: 8-22.

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5 Save for the vague generalization of Mt. 28: 19, the Gospels leave us in the dark as to the occasion of this significant adoption of the Johannine rite; for Jno. 3: 22 has reference to preChristian baptism only.

penitent renunciation of all the evil past and a self-dedication under this God-given Christ. Taking upon them his name, and invoking him as "Lord," they gave themselves to the same cause for which he had given his life, and in which he had also received it back again with eternal glory. In baptism men became "votaries" of the glorified "Lord" who for their sakes had "devoted " himself. They were buried together with Christ that they might participate also in his resurrection. And their faith and loyalty received as it were the seal of a divine approval; for ecstatic powers and manifestations followed upon the act, marking every assembly of the "brethren" of this "Way" as men who (in their own estimation at least) had experienced that "outpouring of the Spirit" which according to the prophets was to characterize the opening of the messianic age. 6

Not books, then, but these two observances form the true Ur-evangelium. "As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup," says Paul, "ye do tell the story (KaTayуÉMETE) of the Lord's death until he come." If he had been thinking of the Greek mysteries instead of the Jewish Redemption feast with its ritual "telling of the tale" (haggada) of Jehovah's deliverance, he might have said "ye do reenact the drama." But it is only the coloration of the primitive rites which is Hellenistic, the basis is Jewish. The primitive "teachings of baptisms" are less certainly identifiable, but they undoubtedly had to do with the putting off of the old man with his sinful deeds, and the putting on of the new man endowed with a new and heaven-sent life.

Such, then, was the true "beginning of the Gospel." The sacraments came first, the literature came afterward. It grew up around the sacraments, interpreting and enforcing their lessons. The first disciples did not

Rom. 6:1-11; I Cor. 10: 1–22.

appeal, as we do, to two witnesses, the Spirit and the Word, but to three: the Spirit outpoured from heaven; and the water; and the blood.

The proof of it, if we needed proof, is the manner in which Epistles and Gospels alike concentrate about these two foci. In the great doctrinal Epistles of Paul there are always just these two central ideas: Justification and Sanctification, or (as we might better say) Life in the Spirit. But justification is simply an expansion of the theme of the new covenant in the blood of Christ shed for many for the remission of sins, and Life in the Spirit is an expansion of the teaching of baptism, which was a "bath of regeneration," a birth into the eternal life, the life of the risen Christ. Not the great Epistles only, but Gospel narrative also in its general outline falls into just the same two divisions. It has a Galilean ministry which tells the story of how Jesus received the Spirit of Adoption to Sonship at his baptism, and thereafter went about manifesting its powers against temptation, disease, and all the opposition of evil. It has for its second part a Judean ministry which tells how he took up the cross and achieved the redemption, making "propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world." There is a third literary type of the Christian canon, the recorded utterance of contemporary "prophecy," or (as we call it) "apocalypse." This third type has not the polarity of the other two, but it manifestly develops that factor of the Supper observance which is represented in the Gospels by the saying: "Ye shall sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." These three: Epistles, the utterance of Apostles; Gospels, the utterance of evangelists and teachers; Apocalypse, the utterance of "prophets," form the material of our study.

Because Christianity did not come into the chaotic religious world of the Empire as a ready-made system

from without, impervious to the feeling and thought of the time, nor as a book, or theology, but only as a free and germinant idea, capable of drawing into itself and adapting every serviceable element from its environment, we should expect to find, and do find, the ebb and flow of the tides of religious thought leaving their mark in the structure of this literature, and not outside alone. As some of those exquisite flower-like forms of ocean's bed build themselves up out of material carried on the currents that sweep in and out through their pores, so the literature of Christianity's formative age retains within its structure watermarks of the conflict of religious forces pouring now from the Jewish, now from the Hellenistic world; and while the more vital consciousness subdues and assimilates the weaker, yet the weaker finds a place and reappears, though in transfigured form. National religion in even its proudest development, the worship of the genius of Rome, disappeared before the new universal religion. But its best elements were not destroyed. They were fulfilled in the transfigured doctrine of the kingdom of God. Nature-worship, in its Hellenistic adaptation to the hope of immortality by participation in the divine nature, went down before the gospel of the risen Christ. But the Hellenistic doctrines of personal immortality had their resurrection. In conflict with them the crude Jewish eschatology of a restoration of all things in a kingdom inherited by flesh and blood underwent a change so complete as to leave scarce a trace of its earlier form. Little remains of it in the fourth Gospel beyond the assurance that departing we shall be "with Christ." The doctrine of raising from among the dead (ἀνάστασις ἐκ νεκρῶν) is transformed into a doctrine of participation in the eternal life that is "hid in God."

It is the purpose of this introductory lecture to classify the successive types of New Testament literature