5. Christianity. The message of Jesus of Nazareth
is summarized in Mark 1:14 as: “The time is fulfilled,
and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent.” This
summary is significant, for it shows how thoroughly
the mission of Jesus was set in the context of contem-
porary Jewish eschatological belief. Jesus called upon
his fellow Jews to prepare themselves, by repenting
of their sins, for God's intervention in the existing
world order, to save His people and punish their
oppressors. According to the Gospels, Jesus was con
cerned with the deeper causes of sin, and was impatient
with preoccupation about ritual offences. Thus he
taught that “what comes out of the mouth proceeds
from the heart, and this defiles a man. For out of the
heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication,
theft, false witness, slander” (Matthew 15:18-19;
R.S.V.). But, by exhorting his hearers to repent, Jesus
evidently believed that the individual could by his own
volition, rectify his evil disposition and merit member-
ship of God's kingdom. It would appear also that Jesus
and his original Jewish disciples accepted the contem-
porary demonology, and believed that the Devil, as
the Adversary of God, tempted men and women to
commit evil (e.g., Luke 22:3, 53).
It was Saint Paul, an Hellenistic Jew, who trans-
formed the original Jewish movement centered on Jesus
as the Messiah of Israel into a universalist savior-god
religion. Paul believed that God had specially commis-
sioned him to present Jesus to the Gentiles in a manner
suited to their needs (Epistle to Galatians 1:15-16,
2:7-8). Consequently, drawing unconsciously on his
knowledge of Greco-Roman culture, Paul developed
a soteriology of a very esoteric kind. It had two themes,
each of which envisaged mankind as being in a fatal
condition and needing a divine savior to deliver them.
One theme is briefly outlined in the First Epistle to
the Corinthians, 2:6ff., which presupposes a form of
astralism similar to that in Gnosticism and Hermeti-
cism, namely, that mankind is in a state of hopeless
subjection to the daemonic powers (archontes) that
inhabit the planets. Paul explains how God planned,
before the eons, to save mankind by sending into this
sublunary world a preexistent divine being, called the
Lord of Glory. Incarcerated in the person of Jesus, the
archontes did not recognize him and crucified him
(verse 8). Their error cost them their control over
mankind; for they could not hold in death the divine
Lord of Glory who had assumed human nature (Epistle
to Colossians 2:15, 20).
Paul's other soteriological theme was based on a
summary philosophy of history. He views mankind as
divided between Gentiles and Jews. The former, he
maintains, had failed to live according to the natural
law, which God had given, and so had fallen into deep
moral corruption (Epistle to Romans 1:18ff.). The Jews,
to whom God had given a special Law (Torah), had
also failed to keep its precepts, and thus stood even
more condemned (Romans 2:17ff.). And, so Paul con-
cluded, “there is no distinction; since all have sinned
and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified
by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which
is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expia-
tion by his blood, to be received by faith” (Romans,
3:22-25; R.S.V.). In this context, Paul uses the imagery
of the Jewish sacrificial system, regarding Christ as
“our paschal lamb,” that has been sacrificed (I Corin-
thians 5:7). Through Christ's vicarious sacrifice man-
kind is reconciled to God, being “saved by his life”
(Romans 5:10). Paul also reinterpreted the purifica-
tory rite of baptism as a ritual death and rebirth. The
neophyte is ritually identified in baptism with Christ
in his death, so that he might be raised to a new life
in Christo, as Christ was raised by God from death (Ro-
mans 6:3ff.).
Owing to the disappearance of the original Jewish
Christian community of Jerusalem in the Roman de-
struction of that city in A.D. 70, Paul's interpretation,
which that community had rejected, survived to be-
come the basis of Catholic Christianity. In the subse-
quent elaboration of his soteriology, another of Paul's
ideas was effectively utilized, particularly by Saint
Augustine of Hippo. In his Epistle to the Romans
(5:12-13), Paul had written with reference to Adam,
“sin came into the world through one man and death
through sin, and so death spread to all men because
all men sinned” (R.S.V.). From this idea developed the
doctrine of Original Sin, according to which every
child through seminal identity with Adam, inherits the
guilt of Adam's original act of disobedience and also
a disposition to sin. From the stain of this inherited
sin the newborn infant is deemed to be purged by
baptism. An essential emphasis was thus placed upon
baptism, and the Church did not hesitate to declare
that the unbaptized, even if they had committed no
actual sin, were doomed to perdition.
The Church has never formally defined the manner
in which the death of Christ operates to save mankind
from the consequences of sin, both original and actual.
Three main lines of interpretation have been developed
by theologians: that Christ's death was the price paid
to the Devil to redeem mankind; that his dying, as
the sinless representative of mankind, propitiated the
just anger of God the Father towards his sinful
brethren; that the exemplary effect of Christ's willing-
ness to die on behalf of mankind is calculated to move
sinners to contrition, and open the way to their recon-
ciliation with God.
Despite this lack of formal definition, the pres-
entation of Christ as the divine savior of mankind,
who saves through his sacrificial death, constitutes the
basic doctrine of Christianity, in both its Catholic and
Protestant forms. It led, in the Middle Ages, to the
formulation of an elaborate eschatology, which en-
visaged two forms of post-mortem judgment. After
death, the individual soul was to be judged by God;
unless its character was such that it deserved either
the immediate award of Heaven or immediate con-
signment to Hell, it was sent to Purgatory, where it
expiated the guilt of its actual sin. When Christ even
tually returned for the Last Judgment (an idea inherited
from Judaism), all the dead would be resurrected with
their physical bodies. To them, in this resurrected form
of being, their eternal destinies would then be decreed.
If their faith in Christ so merited, they would pass to
the eternal beatitude of the Vision of God; if they were
condemned, they were doomed to eternal torment in
Hell. This belief in ultimate salvation or damnation
was taught also by the Protestant Reformers, although
they rejected the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory.
