As yet the papyri bear no clear witness to Quirinius as governor of Syria before 6 A.D., but they have yielded decisive information touching the Roman census (Luke ii, 3), from which U. Wilcken has shown (Hermes, 1893) that the regular registration fell on each 14th year from 20 A.D., and possibly from 6 A.D., or even 8 a.c. The enrolment was by households, and naturally all metnbers of a family were ex pected to be at hotne at the talcing. An order to this effect, in No. 408 of the Greek Papyri in the British Museum, reads thus (trans lations of the supplied portions of the mutilated text being inclosed in brackets, and the initials of the lines capitalized) : 0G(aius Vibiu)s Maximus (pref)ec(t) (Of) Egypt (says) Be cause of the (im)min(ent census by) house (holds) Necessary (it is for all tha)t any time for a(ny) rea(son have departed from their own) Nomes to be no(tifi)ed to r(etu)Rn unto their ow (n he) arth stones tha(t) Also the accus tomed (dis)pensation of th(e en)Rolment they may fulfil and to the farmland be(lon,;) ing to them may firmly adher(e).p— This edict recalls to their own present homes the peasants that have gone out (barram). In spite of learn ed attempts to wrest its meaning into the exact opposite, it gives not the slifhtest hint of going to *ancestral abodes') (Lu e ii, 4),— as if a Kansas farmer should return to Vermont to register! In t also the symbolism of the Good ShepheFrEppears, the ancient burial rites were christianized and preserved, the figure and functions of Osiris are supplanted by similar ones of the Saviour, the two being sometimes indistinguishable, and Isis nursing Horus is transformed into the Madonna with the Child. The venerable swastika, welfare symbol of the Age of Bronze, is everywhere sanctified, and even Anubis and Apuat adorn the sldrts of a Christian burial-robe. So tenacious of life were the mythologic motifs, and so they have remained. If one may trust the inscriptions, it was in Asia Minor, and mainly in Phrygia, that Christianity took its firmest and widest hold! A region largely inhabited by Jews, many of them wealthy and prominent, descend ants (says the Talmud) of the Ten Lost Tribes, 2,000 having been imported from Babylon by Antiochus Magnus (ca. 200 a.c.), who had become in large measure paganized and so were open to the universalism of the Gospel. Here, too, flourished the mystery-cults of Atys, Adonis and others, whose deep imprints on New Testament phra seology as well as ecclesiastic dogma and ritual are daily becoming more visible. This region has been the favorite haunt of exca vators, conspicuous among whom, at least for zeal and production, is Sir William M. Ramsay, whose intense pursuits led him to the famous South Galatian Theory in answer to the puzzling query, Who were Paul's "foolish Galatians"? — a theory zealously advocated by archaeol ogists and as earnestly rejected by linguists in favor of the North Galatian Theory. In northern Syria, also, numerous cities have been exhumed, as well as the extensive Christian cemeteries of Salona, the ancient Adriatic port of Dalmatia, but their revelations are more important in artistic and sociologic than in biblical bearings. Great interest has attached to explorations, notably the Austrian (1897 1913), at especially because of the uproar narrated in Acts. The title there (xix, 35) given to the city, "temple-warden of ... Artemis)) (rewkopov . .. 'Aprtludoc). is confirmed by a dedication exhumed, and Dr. Hicks (half-supported by Ramsay) fancies he finds the Demetrius of Acts xix, 24 at the head of Ephesian magistrates; an official in scription speaks of Julius Caesar as made manifest . . . saviour of human life"; a Christian tablet tells of a "deceiving image of the demon Artemis" and of a "God that ban ishes idols," where the identification of ((demon" with heathen god sheds light on the Gospel "demons"; neither is it strange, in a city given to the worship of the "Great Mother" and the chaste Artemis, that many inscriptions attest an early reverence for the Virgin Mary.
Touching the moot question, Was any altar at Athens inscribed "To an Onknown God"? answered negatively by E. Norden in (Agnos tos Theos) (1913), Deissmann has published (1911) a picture of an altar uncovered (1909) in Pergamon, "To Gods Unk[nownj," where the added "s" makes a difference; but endless explorations at Athens have discovered nothing Christian of importance. At Delphi, however, a fragment (found 1908), inscribed with a letter of the Emperor Claudius, dates the Achaian proconsulship of Gallio from the summer of 51; Paul then would seem to have left Corinth the autumn of 51 and to have reached it early in 50 (Acts xviii, 11, 12) : an important synchronism, throwing back the beginning of his mission almost to the received date of the Pentecostal wonder. Remembering
that Paul did not inaugurate the Gentile mis sion, but found it in full flood and was up borne by its current (Bousset, Chris p. 93), one sees that this mission dates practically from the first dawn of Christianity.
At Antioch (in Syria) some well-diggers exhumed (1910) a silver chalice or communion bowl of rude workmanship but covered with a silver sheet on which amid exquisite grape vine decorations are wrought "portrait of Christ and 10 Apostles, said to be of exceeding excellence. Pious imagination has dated this sheet between 57 and 87 and has even thought to recognize in the central figure a genuine portrait of the head of Christ. From numberless other excavated cities various glints are cast upon the New Testament and Protochristiauity, as when' "life" and "light° are found on the door-post of Artemis' temple at Sardis, or at Assos an inscription of the soldiers' sacrament to Caligula (37) : "We swear by the Saviour and God, Caesar Augus tus, and by the Pure' Virgin," i.e., Athena Polias (Cityguard), to whom the temple was built. Very interesting and important are the revelations of the life and soul of the empire, which make plain that former notions of its depravity were gross exaggerations. Many centuries of war and conquest had indeed hardened the Roman in his native cruelty and bloody-mindedness,— much less time has suf ficed in other cases,— and licentious self-in dulgence flourished then perhaps even more than now in the ruling and predatory classes; but the heart of the people was still sound, the homely virtues were still prized and honored and cultivated, and public benefactors were not less numerous or generous than to-day. Civic spirit and social charity were indeed at their height, and almost a frenzy of philan thropy seemed to possess the empire under the Antonines, when philosophy sat upon the throne Under a slight scarcity of provisions, in time of great national danger and endeavor, profiteering has run' amuck among us, prices have doubled or even tripled, and ships offered earlier for sale at $65,000 and $60,000 have been patriotically sold to the government for $650. 000 and $800,000. Compare herewith the Ephesian public inscription in honor of three wealthy men who had sold their stores of wheat at cost during a famine. Undoubtedly the Grxco-Roman consciousness furnished a soil not unfit for the sowing of the Gospel.* Linguistically, it has come clearly to light that the language of the New Testament was not, as so long imagined, a more or less sacred tongue or dialect, but was the all-prevalent Koine, the every-day speech of the people, not untinctured with the mystic phraseology of the mystery-cults, and soaring at times into solemn sublimity on the wings of a missionary spirit of religious zeal. The net result of these ex humations, which future researches are sure to enlarge and confirm, putting a quietus on all nationalistic attempts to derive Christianity from "The Carpenter of Nazareth," has been to delocalize and depersonalize our conception of the origin and early progress of the Chris tian movement. In the words of Professor Gurlitt, "The rapid spread of Christianity, hitherto an insoluble riddle, receives a start lingly simple explanation, and indeed the whole speech of the New Testament becomes now, for the first time, understandable?' The setting now supplied for the world-revolution is nothing less titan the Judeo-Grmco-Roman world. The religion of the Jew, the art, science and philosophy of the Greek, the law and administration of the Roman,— the ethical monotheism of the cultured, the mysticism of the Asiatic cults, the passionate longing for union with God in the Mysteries, the sense of Brotherhood fostered in the guilds and thiasoi,. the seething cauldron of hopes and fears, of superstitions and sufferings in the multitude,— all these and far more mingled their elements in the mighty Birth of 19 cen turies ago. In this new (Light from the East" the Palestinian portrait bursts its miniature frame and spreads away into the measureless canvas of the circummediterranean world.
For bibliography see article BIBLE.