on from the very beginning. This conviction had to be immediately
tested by the Old Testament, that is, the task was imposed on the
majority of thinking Christians, by the circumstances in which the
Gospel had been proclaimed to them, of making the Old Testament
intelligible to themselves, in other words, of using this book as a
Christian book, and of finding the means by which they might be able to
repel the Jewish claim to it, and refute the Jewish interpretation of
it. This task would not have been imposed, far less solved, if the
Christian communities in the Empire had not entered into the inheritance
of the Jewish propaganda, which had already been greatly influenced by
foreign religions (Babylonian and Persian, see the Jewish Apocalypses),
and in which an extensive spiritualising of the Old Testament religion
had already taken place. This spiritualising was the result of a
philosophic view of religion, and this philosophic view was the outcome
of a lasting influence of Greek philosophy and of the Greek spirit
generally on Judaism. In consequence of this view, all facts and sayings
of the Old Testament in which one could not find his way, were
allegorised. "Nothing was what it seemed, but was only the symbol of
something invisible. The history of the Old Testament was here
sublimated to a history of the emancipation of reason from passion." It
describes, however, the beginning of the historical development of
Christianity, that as soon as it wished to give account of itself, or to
turn to advantage the documents of revelation which were in its
possession, it had to adopt the methods of that fantastic syncretism. We
have seen above that those writers who made a diligent use of the Old
Testament, had no hesitation in making use of the allegorical method.
That was required not only by the inability to understand the verbal
sense of the Old Testament, presenting diverging moral and religious
opinions, but, above all, by the conviction, that on every page of that
book Christ and the Christian Church must be found. How could this
conviction have been maintained, unless the definite concrete meaning of
the documents had been already obliterated by the Jewish philosophic
view of the Old Testament?

This necessary allegorical interpretation, however, brought into the
communities an intellectual philosophic element, a _gnosis_, which was
perfectly distinct from the Apocalyptic dreams, in which were beheld
angel hosts on whit