But in truth the Hellenistic interpretation of the Bible, so
long as it was genuinely philosophical, remained loyal to Judaism.
Only when it became hardened into dogma, fixed not only as good
doctrine, but as the only saving doctrine, as the tree of life opposed
to the Torah, the tree of death--only then did it become anti-Jewish,
and appear as a bastard offspring of the Hebraic God-idea and Greek
culture. Nor should it be forgotten that the Christian theology and
the Christian conception of religion are a falling away also from the
highest Hellenic ideas; for to Plato as well God was a purely
spiritual unity, and religion "a system of morality based upon a law
of conduct and touched with emotion." In Philo, as we have seen, the
Hebraic and Hellenic conceptions of God touch at their summits in
their noblest expressions; the conceptions of Plato are interfused
with the imagination of the prophets. The Christian theology was a
descent to a commoner Hellenism--or one should rather call it a
commoner syncretism--as well as to an easier, impurer Hebraism.
It must not be put down to the fault of the Septuagint or the
allegorists or Philo that the Alexandrian development of Judaism led
on to Roman Christianity. It is to be ascribed rather to the infirmity
of human nature, which requires the ideas of its inspired teachers and
peoples to be brought down to the common understanding, and causes the
progress towards universal religion to be a slow growth.
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