ABSTRACT
The Christian Church arose in a world given to idolatry, vbut arose out of the Jewish community which main tained, in the midst of that world, its intransigent protest against image-worship.1 When the new community of those who believed in Jesus became loosed from its original Jewish connexions, when it consisted mainly of those drawn in from the pagan world, it abandoned much of the Jewish tradition-Sabbaths and circumcision and the distinction between clean and unclean meats, and it adopted a number of things from its Greek environment —“baptized” them into its own system, in Professor Percy Gardner’s phrase. From the point of view of an unconverted pagan, the Christians seemed to retain a great deal of irrational Jewish prejudice; from the point of view of Jews they seemed to be assimilated to the sinners, the Gentiles. At the outset the image-worship which the Christians had to consider was the pagan worship of many gods. With regard to that, the Christians continued the Jewish protest with undiminished emphasis. Then, if we look on seven centuries, when the Roman Empire has long been professedly Christian and pagan idolatry in the Mediterranean countries is a thing of the past, we see the Christian Church making images and
pictures to which it offers religious homage as freely as the pagans had done to the images of their gods. But we find also a protest against this image-worship raised in the Christian Church itself, the charge brought by a section of the Church that Christian image-worship is so similar to the old pagan image-worship, as to come, like that, under the category of idolatry, and, from the side of the Church, an answer made which seeks to draw a sharp line of distinction between this image-worship and that, to show that one is rightly called idolatry and the other not. Here the abandonment of the old Jewish code, the adoption-can we say baptism?—of something that looks very like the practice of the old pagan environment is conspicuous. That is the remarkable sequence of things which we have to study.
