Homilies and Hymns, Volume 2

origin, that it was revealed in the land of the Semites, namely, the Middle East, to Semitic, Aramaic speaking prophets; that Christ himself spoke Aramaic and that the apostles recorded his message in the same tongue to an Aramaic speaking people, is so overwhelming that here we are merely recording a few of the facts to help the reader in his own independent search of the truth.

Furthermore, not only the language of the Bible but the very thought of the Messianic faith were totally alien to the Greeks and the Latins and, therefore, liable of misinterpretations which eventually gave rise to the numerous heresies and divisions in the Western Church. This fact has also been recognized by distinguished Western scholars.

George Santanyana, the noted Roman Catholic philosopher, says:

"The Old Testament abound with poetry and metaphor: The Jews who composed it did not take their figures literally, but when European people more literal and less imaginative, mistook these poems for science, our Occidental theology was born. Christianity was at first a combination of Greek theology and Jewish morality; it was an unstable combination, in which one or the other element would eventually yield; in Catholicism (Roman) the Greek and Pagan Triumphed."12

Edward Chiera says: . . .

"Finally Christian people formerly examined passages from Bible wholly apart from their Oriental background and gave them for interpretation to pious theologians who knew nothing about Oriental ideas and little about the language that explained them. The theologians in the Middle ages built up theories and interpretations which are very ingenious but which have so completely distorted the meaning of many passages that, when their true significance is pointed out to us, it causes great surprise."13

Toynbe says: . . .

"More than that, he would have found that the triumphant Church and the Barbarians were, after all, not external powers, but were really Children of the Hellenic household who had morally alienated from the dominant minority in the course of the troubles which had intervened between the Periclean breakdown and the Augustan rally" . . . Among the former we need only mention the violent breakup of the Churches into a number of rival Churches each renouncing the other as a gang of Antichrist and setting in motion a whole cycle of wars and persecutions. Among the latter may be placed the usurpation of the 'divine right' supposedly inherent in the Papacy, a 'divine right' which is still working havoc in the Western World in the grim shape of a pagan worship of sovereign national states."14

But beyond and above all these witnesses we have the witness of the gospels themselves as will be seen from the following which we quote from a sermon 15 we preached on the occasion of the consecration of two bishops