[Footnote 158: The word "life" comes into consideration in a double sense, viz., as soundness of the soul, and as immortality. Neither, of course, is to be separated from the other. But I have attempted to shew in my essay, "Medicinisches aus der ältesten Kirchengesch" (1892), the extent to which the Gospel in the earliest Christendom was preached as medicine and Jesus as a Physician, and how the Christian Message was really comprehended by the Gentiles as a medicinal religion. Even the Stoic philosophy gave itself out as a soul therapeutic, and Æsculapius was worshipped as a Saviour-God; but Christianity alone was a religion of healing.]
[Footnote 159: Heinrici, in his commentary on the epistles to the Corinthians, has dealt very clearly with this matter; see especially (Bd. II. p. 557 ff.) the description of the Christianity of the Corinthians: On what did the community base its Christian character? It believed in one God who had revealed himself to it through Christ, without denying the reality of the hosts of gods in the heathen world (1 VIII. 6). It hoped in immortality without being clear as to the nature of the Christian belief in the resurrection (1 XV.) It had no doubt as to the requital of good and evil (1 IV. 5; 2 V. 10; XI. 15: Rom. II. 4), without understanding the value of self-denial, claiming no merit, for the sake of important ends. It was striving to make use of the Gospel as a new doctrine of wisdom about earthly and super-earthly things, which led to the perfect and best established knowledge (1 I. 21: VIII. 1). It boasted of special operations of the Divine Spirit, which in themselves remained obscure and non-transparent, and therefore unfruitful (1 XIV.), while it was prompt to put aside as obscure, the word of the Cross as preached by Paul (2. IV. 1 f). The hope of the near Parousia, however, and the completion of all things, evinced no power to effect a moral transformation of society We herewith obtain the outline of a conviction that was spread over the widest circles of the Roman Empire "Naturam si expellas furca, tamen usque recurret."]
[Footnote 160: Nearly all Gentile Christian groups that we know, are at one in the detachment of Christianity from empiric Judaism; the "Gnostics," however, included the Old Testament in Judaism, while the greater part of Christians did not. That detachment seemed to be demanded by the claims of Christianity to be the one, true, absolute and therefore oldest religion, foreseen from the beginning. The different estimates of the Old Testament in Gnostic circles have their exact parallels in the different estimates of Judaism among the other Christians; cf. for example, in this respect, the conception stated in the Epistle of Barnabas with the views of Marcion, and Justin with Valentinus. The particulars about the detachment of the Gentile Christians from the Synagogue, which was prepared for by the inner development of Judaism itself, and was required by the fundamental fact that the Messiah, crucified and rejected by his own people, was recognised as Saviour by those who were not Jews, cannot be given in the frame-work of a history of dogma; though, see Chaps. III. IV. VI. On the other hand, the turning away from Judaism is also the result of the mass of things which were held in common with it, even in Gnostic circles. Christianity made its appearance in the Empire in the Jewish propaganda. By the preaching of Jesus Christ who brought the gift of eternal life, mediated the full knowledge of God, and assembled round him in these last days a community, the imperfect and hybrid creations of the Jewish propaganda in the empire were converted into independent formations. These formations were far superior to the synagogue in power of attraction, and from the nature of the case would very soon be directed with the utmost vigour against the synagogue.]