Christianity apparently took its rise among a group of irregular northern Israelites, the Galilæans, separated from the mass of their coreligionists, the Jews, by the intervention of a heretical and doubtfully Israelitish wedge, the Samaritans. The earliest believers in Jesus were thus intermediate between Jews and Syrians. According to their own tradition, they were first described by the name of Christians at Antioch; and they appear on many grounds to have attracted attention first in Syria in general, and particularly at Damascus. We may be sure, therefore, that their tenets from the first would contain many elements more or less distinctly Syrian, and especially such elements as formed ideas held in common by almost all the surrounding peoples. As a matter of fact. Christianity, as we shall see hereafter, may be regarded historically as a magma of the most fundamental religious ideas of the Mediterranean basin, and especially of the eastern {245}Mediterranean, grafted on to the Jewish cult and the Jewish scriptures, and clustering round the personality of the man-god, Jesus. It is interesting therefore to note that in Syria and the north Semitic area the principal cult was the cult of just such a slain man-god, Adonis,--originally, as Mr. Frazer shows, an annually slain man-god, afterwards put to death and bewailed in effigy, after a fashion of which we shall see not a few examples in the sequel, and of which the Mass itself is but an etherealised survival. Similarly in Phrygia, where Christianity early made a considerable impression, the most devoutly worshipped among the gods was Attis, who, as Professor Ramsay suggests, was almost certainly embodied in early times as an annually slain man-god, and whose cult was always carried on by means of a divine king-priest, bearing himself the name of Attis. Though in later days the priest did not actually immolate himself every year, yet on the yearly feast of the god, at the spring equinox (corresponding to the Christian Easter) he drew blood from his own arms, as a substitute no doubt for the earlier practice of self-slaughter. And I may add in this connexion (to anticipate once more) that in all such godslaughtering rites, immense importance was always attached to the blood of the man-god; just as in Christianity “_the blood of Christ_” remains to the end of most saving efficacy. Both Adonis and Attis were conceived as young men in the prime of life, like the victims chosen for other god-slaying rites.