On "Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity" by Kirsopp Lake ****

This short book based on a series of lectures tells the story of the early Christians in five cities--Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome. Most of the book is about the development of Christology in the early church. Lake falls in line with a number of more secular-type scholars (not that he was a secularist) in pushing forward the theory that Jesus himself never identified himself as the son of God or the Messiah. This was, according to Kirsopp, a later development. Instead, Jesus was mostly a preacher in the tradition of John the Baptist, one who preached repentance and most important about the soon-coming Kingdom of God. The church then made his message about himself.

Lake believes this largely happened as Jewish Christianity came into contact with the Hellenist project. The hellenization of Christianity, in other words, turned Jesus divine. It did this through the intermixture of the faith with the mystery religions of ancient Greece. Many scholars believe such religions weren't really a thing until the late first or early second century, but Lake thinks of them as quite well developed with their man becoming a God and their promise of immortal life via one's soul wafting off after death. I'm inclined, after reading a few other books about the Artemis cult, to think that mystery religions were already a thing by the first century and well before that, though they did change with time. In this sense, the parallels that Lake draws up are intriguing.

In his final chapter, he turns to Ephesus and Rome. The former he sees as taking an adoptionist view of Jesus's divinity, one backed up by a reading of the Shepherd of Hermas. By contrast, Ephesus had a high view of Jesus's divinity, as a preexistent being, as seen in the Fourth Gospel. These two views, he contends, merged to forge the trinity a couple centuries later, largely through the efforts of Origen of Alexandria.

He makes some good arguments, though the simplicity and lack of depth with which he takes such big stands--he does after all accomplish all this in just one hundred pages--belies the fact that many of the ideas are actually not as sound as they sound.