meaning of the inchoate forces and tendencies of an earlier age, even as the grown plant exhibits the potencies and represents the normal evolution of the sprouting seed. Josephus: and Jewish War. Midway between Christian and pagan writings stand the works of Flavius Josephus, contemporary of men like Timothy, Titus, and Clement of Rome. An educated Jew, and a prominent actor in the tragic war which ended with the destruction of the Holy City, he spent his last years in compiling voluminous works of an apologetic character on the history and institutions of his race. Especially valuable for an understanding of the Jewish framework of early Christian history are his Jewish War, written before 79 A.D., and his Antiquities of the Jews, written about 93-4 A.D. They illustrate especially the fortunes of the Palestinian Church, and the Jewish side of the providential preparation of the world for the Gospel. Pagan writers. Pagan contemporary writers, both Latin and Greek, play also their part in the matter. In a sense the whole brilliant circle of the Augustan writers is relevant, as painting a vivid picture of the Roman aspect of the world into which Christ was born. But the historians contemporary with our period, who give us specific data of interest, are Tacitus (born c. 54 Tacitus, A.D.) and Suetonius (c. 74 A.D.), both of whom, though their works were written after 115 and 120 A.D., are sound and wellinformed authorities on the early empire. These refer to the Christians of the first century, throwing Suetonius, Pliny. light on the persecutions of Nero and Domitian and on the popular pagan conception of Christianity. Nor can we fail to recognise the importance of Pliny's Letters to Trajan, written in 112 A.D., i.e. about the same time as Tacitus' Annals and the Epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp. Later writers like Dio Cassius, who wrote in the third century, are occasionally useful in default of other evidence, as embodying earlier documents. These exponents of the Roman point of view serve as complements to Josephus, giving us the Gentile and imperial framework of early Christian history. Summary: of the evidence. Thus the documentary sources for the history of the Church of the Apostles are, in their way, both numerous and varied. The documents emanating from within the Church range fulness from the formal historical work of St. Luke, and to the personal and private letters of variety St. Paul to Philemon and of St. John to Gaius. Their authors include such divers personalities as a Galilean fisherman, a learned Jewish. rabbi, a Gentile man of science: their themes range from the mysteries of divine redemption and the theory of the Universal Church, to the method of dressing a woman's hair and the use of wine as an article of diet. Their evidence is partly formal and direct, partly of the most pronouncedly incidental character. Their atmosphere and tendency is sometimes Judaistic, as in the Epistles of James and Jude (a tendency carried further in the non-canonical Barnabas and Didache), sometimes emancipated and Gentile, like the writings of St. Luke and St. Paul, Yet of these diverse elements may be composed a single living whole. C It must be confessed, indeed, that the evidence is not continuous, nor evenly distributed. It is fullest. for the period between 50 and 60 A.D., when we have the double thread of the Acts and the Epistles side by side; while for the thirty years or so that followed the death of St. Paul-the time when the First and Third Gospels and the Acts were assuming literary shape, and when Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny, Clement and Ignatius were growing up to manhood-the direct evidence from within the Church is more than scanty. But the central event of that period-the destruction of Jerusalem-is fully and vividly described by Josephus, and the temporary silence of Christian writers is largely compensated by the richness of our material for the last decade of the century. CHAPTER 1 THE PREPARATION Prepara tion in history Christian anyone who believes in the divine ordering of history, it would be surprising indeed, if so unique an event as the Incarnation of the Son of God, and the founding of that Church which was to be His Mystical Body perpetuating the Incarnation throughout succeeding ages, should not have been prepared for in a special way. That this was also the view of the Apostolic Age itself is evinced by such phrases as St. Paul's "When the fulness of the time was come." And, as a matter of fact, it is possible to trace certain marked features of such a providential preparation of the world for Christ, notably in the history of the Jewish, Greek, and Roman peoples, their development, influence upon the world, and interaction. upon one another. These display a movement towards the "Divine Event," largely unconscious, yet (even in the Gentile world) finding utterance in voices of expectation. And, though each of the three races has its characteristic obstacles and hindrances also to oppose to the progress of the nascent Church, these obstacles themselves turn out to be fraught with blessing, and to help on, in each case, some aspect of that development which they seemed born to obstruct. 1 Gal. iv. 4. The Jewish people, who were to be the cradle of the New Teaching and the New Life, had undergone a process of divinely ordered preparation, the record of which is spread over the whole of the Old Testament. The Jewish preparation. Their religious and theological training, with its revelation of a God at once One and Personal, the almighty Creator, ever-present Sustainer, and righteous Ruler of the universe; with its doctrine of Man made in God's image, fallen through wilfulness, yet capable by divine help of restoration to holinesstheir national discipline of painful self Inheritance of O.T. theology. realisation in conquest and in self-development (in success alternated with failure and humiliation) culminating in a series of experiences which made for ever impossible any further relapse into idolatry—and, finally, that co-ordination of theological revelation and national discipline which had orientated the highest of their literature and the hearts of their most devoted saints towards the coming of a divine yet human Messiah,1-all this is but the meagrest outline of the process of preparation. The proclaiming voice of John the Baptist is just the summary of what has gone before; and the pious souls whom St. Luke describes as "looking for the consolation and the redemption of Jerusalem "2 are representatives of that holy "remnant "3 which typifies the yearnings of the entire Hebrew race. 1 Thus, the vision of the "Suffering Servant" of Isaiah liii., etc., is the product of the discipline of the Babylonian exile. 2 Luke ii. 25, 38. 3 Isa. x. 20-22; xxxvii. 4, 32; Jer. xxiii. 3; xxxi. 7, etc. |