Roman axe during the reign of Nero.

'There is hardly any fact' (says Harnack) 'which deserves to be turned
over and pondered so much as this, that the religion of Jesus has never
been able to root itself in Jewish or even upon Semitic soil.' This
extraordinary result is the judgment of history upon the life and work
of St. Paul. Jewish Christianity rapidly withered and died. According to
Justin, who must have known the facts, Jesus was rejected by the whole
Jewish nation 'with a few exceptions.' In Galilee especially, few, if
any, Christian Churches existed. There are other examples, of which
Buddhism is the most notable, of a religion gaining its widest
acceptance outside the borders of the country which gave it birth. But
history oilers no parallel to the complete vindication of St. Paul's
policy in carrying Christianity over into the Graeco-Roman world, where
alone, as the event proved, it could live. This is a complete answer to
those who maintain that Christ made no break with Judaism. Such a
statement is only tenable if it is made in the sense of Harnack's words,
that 'what Gentile Christianity did was to carry out a process which had
in fact commenced long before in Judaism itself, viz. the process by
which the Jewish religion was inwardly emancipated and turned into a
religion for the world.' But the true account would be that Judaism,
like other great ideas, had to 'die to live,' It died in its old form,
in giving birth to the religion of civilised humanity, as the Greek
nation perished in giving birth to Hellenism, and the Roman in creating
the Mediterranean empire of the Caesars and the Catholic Church of the
Popes. The Jewish people were unable to make so great a sacrifice of
their national hopes. With the matchless tenacity which characterises
their race they clung to their tribal God and their temporal and local
millennium. The disasters of A.D. 70 and of the revolt under Hadrian
destroyed a great part of the race, and at last uprooted it from the
soil of Palestine. But conservatism, as usual, has had its partial
justification. Judaism has refused to acknowledge the religion of the
civilised world as her legitimate child; but the nation has refused also
to surrender its life. There are no more Greeks and Romans; but the Jews
we have always with us.

St. Paul saw that the Gospel was a far greater and more revolutionary
scheme than the Galilean apostles had dreamed of. In principle he
committed himself fr