Linguistic Problems in the Early Christian Church

Abstract

distinction of peoples, neither with respect to mankind's guilt, nor to the promise of salvation. Christ was crucified for Greeks and barbarians alike. So, Hellenistic cosmopolitanism, furthered by Alexander and taught by the Hellenistic philosophers, took on in Christianity a new form and a new background. The Sophist-Stoic doctrine of natural law, the preachings of the Cynics concerning human equality, were rationalistic solutions for a problem which grew steadily more acute. They only superficially influenced the conduct of life in late Antiquity. St. Paul had already distinctly declared that the cosmopolitanism of the new doctrine lay on a completely different religious plane, from the theories of the philosophers: more Jew or Gentile, no more slave or freeman, no more male and female, you are all one person in Jesus Christ.1 And: Here is no more Gentile and Jew, no more circumcised and uncircumcised, no one is barbarian or Scythian, no one is slave or freeman; there is nothing but Christ in any of us. You are God's chosen people, holy and well beloved.2 It is thus not accurate to say, as does Dr. Schneider in his learned but often somewhat superficial work, Geistesgeschichte des antiken Christentums, that the Pauline vision is transversed by the Early Christian idea of TO TQirov y1voS, tertium genus.3 This writer interprets yevo; as people in a more or less ethnical sense. From this expression, prompted by the Christian sense of newness he assumes that, alongside the two great Weltvolker, the Jews and the Pagans, the Chiistians formed a new, young race. This is not true, for the