Christianity originated first of all among the Jewish, Syrian, or Semitic population of these great towns of the empire, at the very moment of its full cosmopolitanisation; it spread rapidly from them, no doubt at first with serious modifications, to the mixed mass of sailors, slaves, freedwomen, and townspeople who formed apparently its earliest adherents. Hence, we must look in it for an intimate blend of Judaism with the central ideas of the popular religions, Aryan or Hamitic, of the Mediterranean basin. We must expect in it much that was common in Syria, Asia Minor, Hellas, and Egypt,--something even from Gaul, Hispania, Carthage. Its first o w great {364}apostle, if we may believe our authorities, was one Saul or Paul, a half-Hellenised Jew of Semitic and commercial Tarsus in Cilicia, and a Roman citizen. Its first great churches sprang up in the busy ports and marts of the Levant. _Its very name of Christian was given to it first in the crowded and cosmopolitan city of Antioch_. It is here, then, in these huge slave-peopled hives of Hellenised and Romanised commerce, that we must look for the mother-ideas of Christianity. Antioch was quite undoubtedly in the earliest times the principal cradle of the new religion. _I do not mean that Jerusalem was not very probably the place where men first began to form a small sect of esoteric Christ-worshippers, or that Galilee was not the region where the Christ himself most largely lived and taught, if indeed such a person ever really existed_. In those matters the traditions handed down to us in the relatively late Gospels may be perfectly correct: and again, they may not. But Christianity as we know it, the Christianity of the Pauline epistles and the later writings, such as the Gospels and the works of the Fathers, must have been essentially a cult of wider Syrian and Gentile growth. It embraces in itself elements which doubtless lingered on in secluded corners more or less among the mass of the people even in Judæa itself, though discountenanced by the adherents of the priestly and official Jahweh-worship; but which were integral parts of the popular and even the recognised religion throughout the whole of northern Syria.