tunately
Origen was rejected by the Catholic Church.

[10] See Additional Note on p. 141.

{98}

V

ROME AND EPHESUS

Corinth as portrayed in the Epistles of Paul gives us our simplest and
least contaminated picture of the Hellenic Christianity which regarded
itself as the cult of the Lord Jesus, who offered
salvation--immortality--to those initiated in his mysteries. It had
obvious weaknesses in the eyes of Jewish Christians, even when they
were as Hellenised as Paul, since it offered little reason for a higher
standard of conduct than heathenism, and its personal eschatology left
no real place for the resurrection of the body. The Epistles of Paul
to the Corinthians are in the main protests against this Hellenic
weakness, and the real monument to Paul in the first two, or perhaps
even four, centuries is the success which he had in driving home these
protests. Owing to later controversies we are apt to treat
Justification by Faith as Paul's greatest contribution to the Church.
Possibly that is true, if the whole of Church history be taken into
account, but the attempt to reconstruct "Paulinism" on this principle
produces the result that the effect of Paul's teaching cannot be traced
in any of the {99} Christian writings of the next two centuries. This
is obviously absurd: if Paul's writings were preserved so carefully his
teaching on some great points must have been regarded as central. Nor,
if we succeed in forgetting the emphasis introduced by later
controversies, is it hard to see what these points were. As against
the Jews, Paul, the Greek, insisted on Freedom from the Law. That
stood. As against the Greek, Paul insisted on Jewish morality and on
the Resurrection of the body. These also stood. And these three
points, if we may judge from subapostolic writings, were those which
influenced the Church most. No doubt Paul preached Jesus as the
crucified but risen and glorified Lord, and no doubt regarded Baptism
and the Eucharist as sacraments, but so did all Hellenic Christians.
Probably he would have regarded his doctrine of Faith and Justification
as of primary importance, but all the existing evidence seems to show
that it failed to convince the Jews, or to be remembered by the
Gentiles, until it was rediscovered by Augustine.

Sacramental Christianity with an emphasis on morality was henceforward
the true characteristic of the Church. But it had yet to give a more
detailed account of t