The history of early Christianity reveals the struggle which took place between the primitive purity of the Gospel message and the numerous philosophies and pagan cults of the ancient world. These cults held sway for centuries; in fact, they constituted the science, theology, and medicine of mortal, material thinkers.
When Christ Jesus appeared, to proclaim man's sonship with God and to prove his words by works, a death knell was sounded to all philosophical abstractions. Jesus' spiritual origin gave him unique authority. He was so clearly conscious of man's sonship with God that the processes of moral reformation through which the average mortal must pass in his spiritual evolution became superfluous for Jesus. He was described by the Apostle Paul as "in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin" (Hebr. 4:15). His inherent knowledge of God and of his sonship with God did not include any philosophical abstraction. He stated the truth concerning God and man and immediately followed his statements by proofs of their correctness. His healings were proofs of the truth of his teachings.
The exponents of pagan religions, Grecian philosophies, and Oriental mysticism, who abounded at that period, could not easily accept the revolutionary ideas of the new teacher, but struggled hard against him in order to retain their own theories. They rested on no proof, but adhered to a belief in the influence of the human mind, hypnotism, mesmerism, and necromancy. A philosophical and pseudoreligious community opposed Jesus on every side by its popular traditions. The spiritual fact proclaimed by Jesus that man is the son of God, and that this is always capable of proof, belittled their worldly wisdom and pride of intellect. Mary Baker Eddy, referring to Christ Jesus' God-given mission to establish a higher Christianity, states (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 162): "From this dazzling, God-crowned summit, the Nazarene stepped suddenly before the people and their schools of philosophy; Gnostic, Epicurean, and Stoic. He must stem these rising angry elements, and walk serenely over their fretted, foaming billows."
