There is seen too, even on the face of the Pauline epistles, a superimposing of the new Greek terms and concepts on the vocabulary of Jewish theology--terms of metaphysic and religion such as immortality, conscience, providence, natural, corruptible, invisible--and in the language of the gospels and the Acts the Grecising influence becomes more and more marked, increasing in the Acts and in the third gospel, and becoming paramount in the fourth. The very conception of religious as distinct from temporal salvation is Hellenistic or Persian rather than Judaic; and the title of Saviour, which becomes the special epithet of the Christ, is constituted as much by pagan usage as by the original significance of the name Jesus. Gentile also, rather than Judaic--though common to the pre-Judaic Semites and the idolaters among the Hebrews--was the idea expressed in the Pauline epistles that the Christist who partakes of the mystic rite suffers with and henceforth is one with the slain demigod, being "crucified with Christ." That conception is precedented generally in all the cults of ritual mourning, notably in that of Osiris, and particularly in that of Attis, in which the worshippers gashed themselves and punctured their hands or necks; some of the priests even mutilating themselves as the God was mutilated in the myth. The Pauline expression is to be understood in the light of the passage in which a bitter censure, for having taken up a false Christism, is passed on the Galatians, "before whose eyes Christ had been openly depicted, crucified" (cp. 1 Cor. xi, 26, Gr. and A.V.). In some but not in all MSS. are added the words "among you," words which may either have been omitted by late transcribers whom they embarrassed, or added by some one desirous of accentuating the already emphatic expression of the original. When we connect with these the further passage, usually taken also without inquiry as purely metaphorical, in which Paul says he "bears branded on his body the marks of Jesus," we find reason to surmise that, even as the ministrant in the Dionysian college was called by the God's name, Bacchus; as the Osirian worshipper spread himself on the cross and became one with Osiris; and as the priest of Attis personated Attis in his mysteries--so Paul or another personated Jesus in the mysteries of his sect; that what has so long passed for verbal metaphor stood originally for a process of acted symbolism; and that the theory of the mystery was that he who personated the crucified demigod became specially assimilated to him. The Pauline language on this head coincides exactly with the general and primordial theory of theanthropic sacrifice: "I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me." (Cp. Phil. iii, 11.) Obscure and violent if understood as sheer metaphor, such expressions fall into line with much ancient religious belief when read as describing a symbolic rite.