with the Phocylidean poem (see Bernays' above work, p. 192 ff.). Later
Taylor, "The teaching of the twelve Apostles", 1886, threw out the
conjecture that the Didache had a Jewish foundation, and I reached the
same conclusion independently of him: see my Treatise: Die Apostellehre
und die judischen beiden Wege, 1886.]

[Footnote 55: It is well known that Judaism at the time of Christ
embraced a great many different tendencies. Beside Pharisaic Judaism as
the stem proper there was a motley mass of formations which resulted
from the contact of Judaism with foreign ideas, customs, and
institutions (even with Babylonian and Persian), and which attained
importance for the development of the predominant church as well as for
the formation of the so-called gnostic Christian communions. Hellenic
elements found their way even into Pharisaic theology. Orthodox Judaism
itself has marks which shew that no spiritual movement was able to
escape the influence which proceeded from the victory of the Greeks over
the east. Besides who would venture to exhibit definitely the origin and
causes of that spiritualising of religions and that limitation of the
moral standard of which we can find so many traces in the Alexandrian
age? The nations who inhabited the eastern shore of the Mediterranean
sea had from the fourth century B.C. a common history and therefore had
similar convictions. Who can decide what each of them acquired by its
own exertions and what it obtained through interchange of opinions? But
in proportion as we see this we must be on our guard against jumbling
the phenomena together and effacing them. There is little meaning in
calling a thing Hellenic, as that really formed an element in all the
phenomena of the age. All our great political and ecclesiastical parties
to-day are dependent on the ideas of 1789 and again on romantic ideas.
It is just as easy to verify this as it is difficult to determine the
measure and the manner of the influence for each group. And yet the
understanding of it turns altogether on this point. To call Pharisaism
or the Gospel or the old Jewish Christianity Hellenic is not paradox but
confusion.]

[Footnote 56: The Acts of the Apostles is in this respect a most
instructive book. It as well as the Gospel of Luke is a document of
Gentile Christianity developing itself to Catholicism; Cf. Overbeck in
his Commentar z Apostelgesch. But the comprehensive judgment of Havet in
the work above mentioned (IV.