CHAPTER II

WHEN THE TIME WAS RIPE

IN A FAMOUS PHRASE, PAUL DECLARES that Christianity appeared on earth when the time was ripe for it: “when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son.”14

Whether we look at the Jewish people or the Greco-Roman world of the first century A.D., we can understand something of what he meant. Politically and religiously the world was ready for the gospel at that time as it had not been before. The greater part of the civilized world was politically united, but the old classical religions were bankrupt. Many people had recourse to the popular mystery cults in their search for liberation from evil powers and assurance of well-being in the after-life. Others, as we have seen, were attracted to the Jewish religion, but it laboured under the disadvantage of being too closely tied to one nation. When the Christian message began to be proclaimed among the peoples of the Roman Empire, it showed a capacity to satisfy both the craving for salvation which the mystery cults professed to meet and the ethical ideals which, as many Gentiles believed, were realized in the Jewish way of life even more than in Stoicism.15

The one writer above all others in the New Testament who is concerned to set the story of Christian origins in the context of contemporary history saw this plainly, and expresses it in the words with which he begins the story of Jesus. “In those days the Emperor Augustus issued a decree for the enrolment of the whole world.”16 Augustus, after long-lasting civil strife, had attained supreme power in the Roman Empire and imposed the Roman peace on a war weary world. And in consequence of the decree which he issued and the particular way in which it was carried into effect in a petty vassal principality on the Asiatic fringe of the Empire, the birth of Jesus took place in the Judaæn city of Bethlehem. Augustus never heard of Jesus, who was scarcely out of His teens when Augustus died. But the achievement of Augustus played no small part in the ripeness of time for the work of Jesus and His followers. And the successors of Augustus were destined to hear more and more of Jesus, until after three centuries had gone by, one of those successors acknowledged His supremacy. “When you see this orb set under the cross, remember that the whole world is subject to the power and empire of Christ, our Redeemer.”17

Yet the birth of Jesus was as obscure as anyone’s birth could be, and His days were not passed in the blaze of world publicity. He spent His life in a remote and unimportant province of the Empire, and only rarely did He cross the frontiers of that province. He did not court the attention of the world. He concentrated His activity on the Jewish people in Palestine, and it was only for two or three years at the end of His life that He played any public part among them.

What then was His world significance? How did the faith which He fostered