JESUS AS THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS Some centuries earlier the religion of Israel had reached its high-water mark in the "Second Isaiah" (Is. xl. sqq.), and more especially in the idea of the "Servant of the Lord." To Christians it has always seemed natural to pass from the great figures of that earlier age (Jeremiah and the writers and actors in the Second Isaiah), to Jesus of Nazareth, and this earlier age, like that of Jesus, cannot be isolated from the more or less contemporary events in religion elsewhere. (See HEBREW RELIGION, sec. 9 end, 14 end.) Similarly, the rise of the first great prophets, Amos and Hosea (8th century B.c.), the "Mosaic" age (that of the "Amarna" period) and the age of Abraham (c. 1st Babylonian dynasty and I2th Egyptian dynasty) are part of far-reaching changes in his tory, religion and civilization. Indeed, with Eduard Meyer (Gesch. des Altertums, i. 1, secs. 592 sqq.) and George Foote Moore (Hist. of Religions, i. p. viii. seq.), we may see earlier examples, c. 5o00, and again c. 3000 (more recently confirmed by the dis coveries at Ur) of a simultaneity which the latter has compared to geological epochs. Whatever be the true explanation of these striking facts, here are clearly-marked stages in man's increasing knowledge of himself and of the universe. There is a continuity to the rise of Christianity ; a progressive development runs through the Old Testament (as interpreted by modern biblical criticism); it passes to the New, and subsequently bases itself upon the Bible. This line of development stands in contrast to the religious his tory of lands and peoples which fall outside it ; although the comparative study of religions finds a real relationship among the ideas and beliefs of all peoples, even the most rudimentary. But the development is no mechanical one. At certain periods the clash of conflicting ideas can be very clearly discerned, so that the progressive advance is evidently due to the victory of those tendencies and ideas which, for whatever reason, were most vital and pregnant.
Viewed in the light of the history of Palestine, Jesus is the last of the Hebrew prophets. (See HEBREW RELIGION, sec 21.)
The inability of Judaism to accept him must, therefore, be con trasted with the remarkable reorganization of the religion of Israel through the prophets, at an age (before and in 6th cent. B.c.) when the old empires of Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia, lost or were losing their old creative power. It is also important to observe that the line of development is not narrowly Hebrew, or even Semitic. The influence of non-Semitic peoples upon Palestine can be traced or suspected from ancient times to the rise of Christianity; and this religion was not so distinctively oriental in the way that Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam have been. Even Islam has been indebted in its progress to Greeks and to Persians in the East (cf. articles AVICENNA, FARABI, KINDI), and to intercourse with Spaniards in the West. The spirituality and the fertility of thought of the great non-Christian religions deserve a much more appreciative study than they have often received, but the differences in the rate and the nature of development among all the world's religions are not without significance. At all events, Christianity, utilizing Greek and Latin thought as it grew, has found itself obliged to face problems other and more profound than those of oriental peoples. Judaism, too, though sharing the Old Testament with Christianity, and making impor tant contributions to Western thought in and after the middle ages, has not been compelled to work out those questions, which, arising out of the whole Bible, have directly or indirectly spurred on and directed Western research. Christianity arose in a world which, in a sense, was being prepared for it. If the East had been Hellenized, the West was being orientalized. But it had to re charge, reshape, and revitalize current ideas and beliefs; and if it has progressed it is because it made an exceptionally heavy demand upon the intellectual no less than upon the moral and spiritual life of its adherents, and had to overcome powerful and well-equipped rival or hostile tendencies.