ABSTRACT
The encounter of Christianity with ancient culture and the unification of the JudaeoChristian and the Greco-Roman tradition-perhaps the most important event in the history of Western culture-is a process stretching over approximately three centuries, and when all is said and done, it is hardly meaningful to ask which of the two sides won out. They fought each other, adapted themselves to each other, and learned from each other, and the encounter meant that something new was created. Actually, it is only a half truth to speak of a cultural battle between two clearly defined opponents. To the dramatis personae it was certainly a confrontation where one had to choose sides. But one cannot choose one’s own culture, and the Judaism from which Christianity sprang was already a mixed culture at the time of Jesus. The fact that the writings of the New Testament were written and thought in Greek and not in the native tongue of Jesus, Aramaic, shows that almost from the beginning the Christian message was ‘translated’ into and formulated in a common cultural conceptual world. Subsequently the process often pursued the opposite path-the late Neoplatonists, for example, are in no small measure influenced by Christian thought. It was not until the second and third century that philosophical thinking on a Christian basis began, and the debilitating Christological disputes of the fourth century are understandable only as attempts at a philosophical formulation of a nonphilosophical faith. It is important to keep in mind that Christian thought and Christian philosophy are secondary to Christian religion, that Christian thinkers do not simply express the thought of the ordinary man and that Christian thought is no unambiguous concept. Christianity is new thinking, but not a new thinking formulated in a void.
