There is a mediaeval Italian painting which has long been a favorite of mine and of which copies hang in the studies of many men of my profession. It is a picture of St. Jerome translating the scriptures. The miscellaneous assortment of friendly beasts with which the artist has enlivened an otherwise quiet scene at first attracted my childish mind, but now that I have become a man I find the picture still attractive. It is more than an imaginative picture of an historic figure or an historic event or even of a single profession. It is symbolic, and it means something not merely to the student but also to the preacher and the layman.

No one has ever really doubted the oft-asserted theory that no part of the middle ages can be studied apart from the Christian Church. All-embracing in its influence from the fall of Rome to the Reformation, it is generally conceded to have reached its zenith during the pontificate of Innocent III, not only because of the perfection of its organization at that time but also by reason of its readiness under his leadership to take issue with any or all of the secular powers of Europe over a variety of questions which, in only too many instances, had little obvious connection with the Christian faith. Its ambitions were large but, by methods which were sometimes unscrupulous, they were almost always realized.

The Christian interpretation of the Old Testament was early set upon finding in it a figure corresponding to the Son, or the Word (Logos), in the New Testament, a divine being, intermediary between God the Father and the world in creation, revelation, and redemption. For Christian theology, with its philosophical presumptions, a God who visibly and audibly manifested himself to men in human form and action was necessarily such a being; the Supreme God, in his supramundane exaltation or his metaphysical transcendence, could not be imagined thus immediately to intervene in mundane affairs. In this assumption and to a considerable extent in their particular interpretations the Fathers had a precursor in the Jewish theologian Philo.

It is curious, and perhaps significant, that the two most important volumes on the Iranian religions which have appeared within the last decade should have been written by scholars who were not professed Iranists. Professor James Hope Moulton, the author of the Hibbert Lectures on Early Zoroastrianism (London, 1913), was a theologian and a hellenist; Professor Raffaele Pettazzoni, who has just given us his La Religione di Zarathustra (Bologna, 1920), is a student of comparative religion of the finest and sanest type. Pettazzoni seems not to have had the advantage of consulting Moulton's volume; but while from one point of view this may be regrettable, from another it has worked for good, since two scholars have reached independently results which, when combined, put the genesis of Iranism in an entirely new light and go far toward the solution of many perplexing problems, if, indeed, they may not have solved the riddle as a whole. Of Moulton's work I have expressed an opinion elsewhere, and subsequent reflection has only confirmed that judgement.

Johannes Weiss, Das Urchristentum, Göttingen, 1917.

Alfred Loisy, Les Actes des Apôtres, Paris, 1920.

F. J. Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake, The Beginnings of Christianity, Volume I, London, 1920.

Eduard Meyer, Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums, Stuttgart and Berlin, 1921.

Roland Schütz, Apostel und Jünger, eine quellenkritische und geschichtliche Untersuchung über die Entstehung des Christentums, Giessen, 1921.

B. H. Streeter, ‘Fresh Light on the Synoptic Problem,’ Hibbert Journal, October, 1921.

The purpose of this article is not so much to offer a review of the books mentioned above as to indicate briefly their nature and contents, and to discuss the varied yet similar points of view which they represent toward some of the problems in the story of Christian origins as studied today.