ABSTRACT
As the inheritor of Judaism and like it the beneficiary of divine promise and covenant, Christianity was from the first opposed to every form of Greco-Roman paganism which, to use the phrase of the epistle to the Ephesians, left men ‘strangers from covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world’. Jesus himself seems to have taken the attitude as is shown both by his opposition to political Messianism and his reply to Pharisees when they asked him about the tribute money. Towards the other kinds of Christianity it showed systematic hostility and used all the means at its disposal, both direct and indirect, to exterminate them. The year 70 marks the end of the period after which there could remain no illusion that Christianity could develop and live within the framework of Judaism. Christians only began to offer a defence of their ideological position to pagan public opinion in the second quarter of the first century.
