ABSTRACT
The Christian Church arose in a world given to idolatry, but arose out of the Jewish community which maintained, in the midst of that world, its intransigent protest against image-worship. The protest made by the Christian Church in its early days against the pagan idolatry of its environment. 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. According to the Roman Catholic and Orthodox view, the practice of the eighth century in this respect was right and agreeable to the fundamental principles of Christianity: according to Protestants, it was a lapse from the original Christianity into pagan superstition.
