Poor poor Christianity?

[zeek]

Arnold Toynbee, the 20th century historian who coined the term Industrial Revolution, observed that the germ of creative power in Christianity was not of Hellenic but of Syriac origin. (A Study of History page 36) According to Toynbee, "In Christianity we are aware of Hellenic elements drawn from Hellenic mystery religions and Hellenic philosophy." However, Toynbee finds that Christianity is "a universal church originating in a germ that was alien to the society in which it played its part." (ibid p37)

"In the disintegration of the Hellenic world the unsuccessful rivals of Christianity all sought to promote the success of their missionary enterprises on Hellenic ground by recasting the visual representations of their divinity's informs likely to prove agreeable to Hellenic eyes. But none of them made any appreciable move toward taking the further step of Helenizing itself inwardly as well as outwardly.

It was Christianity alone that went the length of expressing its creed in the language of Hellenic philosophy." In the history of Christianity the intellectual Hellenization of a religion whose creative essence was of Syriac origin was foreshadowed in the employment of the attic Koine instead of the Aramaic as the linguistic vehicle of the New Testament for the very vocabulary of this sophisticated tongue carried with it a host of philosophic implications." ibid pgs 542-543

In support of this assertion, Toynbee cites historian PE More's "Christ the Word: the Greek tradition from The Death of Socrates to the Council of Chalcedon" volume IV, page 298.

"In the synoptic gospels Jesus is regarded as the Son of God and this belief is carried on and deepened in the body of the Fourth Gospel but also in the prologue to the Fourth Gospel the idea is thrown out that the savior of the world is the Creative Logos of God implicitly then though the statement is not made explicitly the Son of God and the Logos of God are one and the same the Son as the Logos is identified with the creative wisdom and purpose of Deity the Logos as the Son is hypostatized into a person beside the person of the Father. At one bound the philosophy of the Logos has become a religion."