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It had become the typical title for the God of one of the Graeco-Oriental cults which offered private salvation to individuals.
But as above, the influence of Christianity upon Islam was considered, so now the reverse process must be outlined. In either case it was the heir to the late classical age, to the mixed Graeco-Oriental culture, which influenced Islam at first in Christian guise.
Religious systems result from the interaction of this impulse with pre-existing capacities for civilisation. The highest attainments of human life are dependent upon circumstances of time and place, and environment often exerts a more powerful influence than creative power. The teaching of Jesus was almost overpowered by the Graeco-Oriental culture of later Hellenism.
There is nothing to show that Christians originally desired to break away from Judaism or to approach the Greeks; yet they did both. When their fellow-countrymen refused to hear they turned to the Gentiles, and there ensued rapidly the abandonment of Jewish practice and the assimilation of Greek and Graeco-Oriental thought.
The only alternative to large concessions to the position of the Dutch radicals is to admit that in the Diaspora the Hellenising of Jews had proceeded more rapidly and far deeper than has as a rule been supposed. The result is clear, however obscure the process may be; Christianity became a Graeco-Oriental cult, offering salvation, just as did the other mystery religions.
This series of revelations, one behind the other, is a characteristic of all these mixed Graeco-Oriental religions. Most of the Hermetic treatises are put in the form of initiations or lessons revealed by a 'father' to a 'son', by Ptah to Hermes, by Hermes to Thoth or Asclepios, and by one of them to us.
In accordance with the general spirit of the Graeco-Oriental mysteries, there existed a belief that through sacraments men could change their nature, be born again, and as Irenaeus puts it become the children of the eternal and unchangeable God instead of the children of mortal man.
Just as Alexander found for his Graeco-Oriental empire an appropriate capital in the Hellenic, Jewish, Egyptian, and above all cosmopolitan, Alexandria, so the capital of the new Romano-Hellenic universal empire, situated at the meeting-point of the east and the west, was to be not an Italian community, but the denationalized capital of many nations.
In this way the critical use of the gospels, the Acts, and Pauline epistles enable us to trace the general outline of the early stages of the synthesis between primitive Jewish Christianity and the spirit of Graeco-Oriental mysteries.
From that time on the history of Christianity might be written as a series of syntheses with the thought and practice of the Roman world, beginning with the circumference and moving to the centre. The first element which was absorbed was the least Roman, the Graeco-Oriental cults.
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