responsibility to God.

So much for what we might expect a priori as to the influence of the
surroundings on the general form of the new Religion. And what about the
kind of creed or creeds which that religion would favor? Here again
we must see that the influence of the surroundings compelled a certain
result. Those doctrines which we have described in the preceding
chapters--doctrines of Sin and Sacrifice, a Savior, the Eucharist, the
Trinity, the Virgin-birth, and so forth--were in their various forms
seething, so to speak, all around. It was impossible for any new
religious synthesis to escape them; all it could do would be to
appropriate them, and to give them perhaps a color of its own. Thus
it is into the midst of this germinating mass that we must imagine the
various pagan cults, like fertilizing streams, descending. To trace all
these streams would of course be an impossible task; but it may be of
use, as an example of the process, to take the case of some particular
belief. Let us take the belief in the coming of a Savior-god; and this
will be the more suitable as it is a belief which has in the past been
commonly held to be distinctive of Christianity. Of course we know now
that it is not in any sense distinctive, but that the long tradition of
the Savior comes down from the remotest times, and perhaps from every
country of the world. (1) The Messianic prophecies of the Jews and the
fifty-third chapter of Isaiah emptied themselves into the Christian
teachings, and infected them to some degree with a Judaic tinge. The
"Messiah" means of course the Anointed One. The Hebrew word occurs some
40 times in the Old Testament; and each time in the Septuagint or Greek
translation (made mainly in the third century BEFORE our era) the word
is translated [gr cristos], or Christos, which again means Anointed.
Thus we see that the idea or the word "The Christ" was in vogue in
Alexandria as far back certainly as 280 B.C., or nearly three centuries
before Jesus. And what the word "The Anointed" strictly speaking means,
and from what the expression is probably derived, will appear later. In
The Book of Enoch, written not later than B.C. 170, (2) the Christ is
spoken of as already existing in heaven, and about to come as judge
of all men, and is definitely called "the Son of Man." The Book of
Revelations is FULL of passages from Enoch; so are the Epistles of Paul;
so too the Gospels. The Book of Enoch believes in a Golden Age th