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The phrase, 'the Hellenisation of Christianity, might almost be taken as the motto of the work to which he owes his fame. Adolf Harnack was born in 1851 in Dorpat, in one of the Baltic provinces of Russia. His father, Theodosius Harnack, was professor of pastoral theology in the University of Dorpat. Harnack studied in Leipzig and began to teach there in 1874.
Countess Perponcher, her lady in waiting, took me up through the Long Corridor, past the entrance to the Queen's rooms on one side, and Gordon's Bible, in its glass case, on the other, till we turned to the left, and I was in a small sitting-room, where a lady, gray-haired and in black, came forward to meet me.... We talked for about 50 minutes: of German books and Universities Harnack Renan, for whom she had the greatest admiration Strauss, of whom she told me various interesting things German colonies, that she thought were "all nonsense" Dreyfus, who in her eyes is certainly innocent reaction in France the difference between the Greek Church in Russia and the Greek Church in Greece, the hopes of Greece, and the freeing of Crete.
The question of Luke's having been a physician is an extremely valuable one, and no one in our time is better fitted by early training and long years of study to elucidate it than Professor Harnack. He began his excursions into historical writing years ago, as I understand, as an historian of early Christian medicine.
It is not the first time that men have fetched from afar what they might have got just as well or better at home. Harnack has made complete the demonstration, then, that the third gospel and the Acts were written by St. Luke, who had been a practising physician.
There can be religious life only where there is faith in him who is the truth and the life. Liberal theology has failed because it has nothing to offer." Dr. Harnack, its great high priest, found it an unsatisfying portion, and, doubtless influenced by its failure, has resigned and turned his energies into other channels.
It seems more probable that there was more than one Aramaic source, and that it was often changed and interpolated by the editor. Harnack skilfully tries to distinguish two main lines of tradition, that of Antioch and that of Jerusalem. He also thinks the Jerusalem tradition existed in two forms, which can be distinguished as doublets in Acts i.-v.
On it lay an open copy of the Modernist, with a half-written "leader" of Meynell's between the sheets. Beside it was a copy of Thomas a Kempis, and Father Tyrrell's posthumous book, in which a great soul, like a breaking wave, had foamed itself away; a volume of Sanday, another of Harnack, into the open cover of which the Rector had apparently just pinned an extract from a Church paper.
Harnack somewhere, in discussing the comparative success or failure of various early Christian sects, makes the illuminating remark that the main determining cause in each case was not their comparative reasonableness of doctrine or skill in controversy for they practically never converted one another but simply the comparative increase or decrease of the birth-rate in the respective populations.
And Athanasius had the supreme audacity of faith, that of asserting things mutually contradictory: "The complete contradiction that exists in the homoousios carried in its train a whole army of contradictions which increased as thought advanced," says Harnack. Yes, so it was, and so it had to be.
This is the aspect of the contention which gave hostile critics opportunity to say that we have before us the history of the loss of Christianity. Harnack himself has many sentences which superficially will bear that construction.
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