flexibly, a kind of ecclesiastical mothering which, together, have birthed and
nurtured Western intellectual life down to the present age. I want to support
and, indeed, extend the thesis of Robert Wilken when he says that any notion
that there was a‘hellenization of Christianity’should by now be regarded as
having outlived its usefulness—indeed,‘that a more apt expression would
be the Christianization of Hellenism, though that expression does not capture
the originality of Christian thought nor the debt owed to Jewish ways
of thinking and to the Jewish Bible’.^8 But how, we may ask, through the
centuries-old and ongoing diaspora of the Jewish peoples whose ancestors
wrote the texts, and despite their minimal demographic presence throughout
Western Europe in particular, did this Hebraic influence become so pervasive?
The subject is massive and fundamental; here there is time for only a few
cryptic though indicative observations.
It is obligatory to note, at least, the decisive role of St Paul. As apostle to the
gentiles, he proclaimed the teaching of Jesus and the twelve in an overwhelm-
ingly Hellenistic context. While at times he would accommodate his message
to his audience, as in the Areopagus speech in Athens or in the rhetorical
shape of his letters to the churches, in his views of the nature of God, the role
and place of human potential as reflective of God’s image in God’s world, he
remained fundamentally Jewish. This shaped the ways he discussed not only
the resurrection of the body, but his wider views of the relation of body and
spirit and the nature of human sexuality far more profoundly than did any
norms of Hellenistic culture. That these Jewish views had an inner logic that
proved coherent, cogent, and compelling for centuries of gentile readers of
St Paul is now evident. Though relatively few converts after thefirst gener-
ations would have been conscious of the degree of it, Mediterranean, European,
and North Africans learned to think in a Jewish way about fundamental
theological, social, and moral matters, and it soon showed up in their own
writings.
Nor can we trace adequately the shaping of Western intellectual culture in
the humane disciplines without considering a certain North African bishop, in
particular through his enormously influentialOn Christian Doctrine.^9 It may
be, in fact, that the prominence of Augustine’s text in the Western history both
of hermeneutics and educational theory has, as much as any other influence,
helped to shape the way in which the Bible has come to be institutionalized in
Western culture—even when invisibly. To be sure, what Augustine set out to
accomplish in this book was probably much less: really, just a broad guide to(^8) Wilken,Spirit of Early Christian Thought, xvi. Wilken is, of course, correcting the attempt at
‘de-judification’of the Bible by Adolf von Harnack.
(^9) Augustine,On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr (New York: Bobbs-Merrill,
1958). All subsequent references are to this edition. For useful commentary, see Edward
B. English,Reading and Wisdom: The De Doctrina of Augustine in the Middle Ages(Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
Scripture in theStudiumand the Rise of the Humanities 165