reeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God (I Cor. 1:22-24).
In all its manifestations, says Robinson, second-century Christianity represented an alternative to Greco-Roman intellectual tradition. Christianity, he explains, was a "radical movement" vis-a-vis the Greco-Roman mainstream.
Jesus called for a full reversal of values, announcing the end of the world as we have known it and its replacement by a quite new, utopian kind of life in which the ideal would be the real. He took a stand quite independent of the authorities of his day . . . and did not last very long before they eliminated him (Robinson 3).
After Paul, as history overtook the myth of the apocalypse that emerged after the elimination of Jesus, Christian and Jewish tradition began to fuse vis-a-vis Hellenistic tradition, making a virtue of necessity given the secularism of Greco-Roman philo sophy. What began to emerge is now commonly called Jude
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