soul therapeutic, and AEsculapius
was worshipped as a Saviour-God; but Christianity alone was a religion
of healing.]

[Footnote 159: Heinrici, in his commentary on the epistles to the
Corinthians, has dealt very clearly with this matter; see especially
(Bd. II. p. 557 ff.) the description of the Christianity of the
Corinthians: On what did the community base its Christian character? It
believed in one God who had revealed himself to it through Christ,
without denying the reality of the hosts of gods in the heathen world (1
VIII. 6). It hoped in immortality without being clear as to the nature
of the Christian belief in the resurrection (1 XV.) It had no doubt as
to the requital of good and evil (1 IV. 5; 2 V. 10; XI. 15: Rom. II. 4),
without understanding the value of self-denial, claiming no merit, for
the sake of important ends. It was striving to make use of the Gospel as
a new doctrine of wisdom about earthly and super-earthly things, which
led to the perfect and best established knowledge (1 I. 21: VIII. 1). It
boasted of special operations of the Divine Spirit, which in themselves
remained obscure and non-transparent, and therefore unfruitful (1 XIV.),
while it was prompt to put aside as obscure, the word of the Cross as
preached by Paul (2. IV. 1 f). The hope of the near Parousia, however,
and the completion of all things, evinced no power to effect a moral
transformation of society We herewith obtain the outline of a conviction
that was spread over the widest circles of the Roman Empire "Naturam si
expellas furca, tamen usque recurret."]

[Footnote 160: Nearly all Gentile Christian groups that we know, are at
one in the detachment of Christianity from empiric Judaism; the
"Gnostics," however, included the Old Testament in Judaism, while the
greater part of Christians did not. That detachment seemed to be
demanded by the claims of Christianity to be the one, true, absolute and
therefore oldest religion, foreseen from the beginning. The different
estimates of the Old Testament in Gnostic circles have their exact
parallels in the different estimates of Judaism among the other
Christians; cf. for example, in this respect, the conception stated in
the Epistle of Barnabas with the views of Marcion, and Justin with
Valentinus. The particulars about the detachment of the Gentile
Christians from the Synagogue, which was prepared for by the inner
development of Judaism itself, and was required by the fundamental fact
t