Note 33 — Chapter IV · THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

The whole doctrine of “the Son” was in conflict with any purely monotheistic idea. Nowhere in the synoptics or the Epistles is the Christ doctrine so stated as really to serve monotheism: the “I and the Father are one” of the fourth gospel is late; and the opening verses of that gospel show tampering, telling of a vacillation as to whether the Logos was God or “with God”—or rather “next to God,” in the strict meaning of πρὸς. Here we have a reflex of Alexandrian philosophy,33 not the evangel of the popular cult. Formally monotheistic the cult always was, even when it had become actually Trinitarian; and all along, doubtless, the particularist monotheism of the Jews was at work against all other God-names in particular and polytheism in general; but that cannot well have been the moving force in a cult which was professedly beginning by establishing an ostensibly new deity, and was ere long to make a trinity.