O NE of the difficulties which the mod ern man must meet in his reading of the Bible arises from the necessity of viewing ideas essentially Hebraic through a Greco-Latin perspective. It is like turning a blue light on what should be seen in a white one. The atmosphere is changed. The reader's mind is charged with assumptions which were not in that of the writer. Not only are the original issues confused, but new issues are, in a measure, put in their place. It is no exaggeration to say that between the Christian thought of the twentieth century, largely Greco-Latin in its essence, and that of the New Testament, there is as wide a divergence as between the aspect of the streets of New York and that of Jerusalem or Pompeii. To reach the original intention we must make allowances for this substitution, this coloration, working our way behind it. It is a fact that what we call the Christian Religion passed almost from its inception into Greco-Latin keeping and development. An evolution purely Hebraic up to the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, it was Hellenized and Latinized in the course of two or three generations. By that operation it was moved from the basis on which it was placed at the beginning. What we call the Early Church was no longer the church of the Upper Room or of St. Paul's missionary gatherings. There is no indication in the New Testament that the Founder and His followers expected to separate from the He brew body politic. The Master taught daily in the Temple; wherever the Apostles traveled they spoke in the synagogues first of all. Nothing but excommunication drove them to assemblies of their own. It must be remembered that the word ecclesia, translated church, meant in the New Testament no more than an assembly. The elaborate senses we now attach to it must, in the main, be read into it through what we have developed in later times. Though the question is both too large and too involved to be discussed here, we may reasonably doubt if any such concept, or series of concepts, as we have worked out in the course of the Christian centuries was in the mind of either the Lord or the Apostles. Had it been their intention to establish a unit, or a phalanx of units, so complex as any of our churches has become, their teachings and writings must have rung with it. For the modern man the |