Excerpt from The Evolution of Early Christianity: A Genetic Study of First-Century Christianity in Relation to Its Religious Environment Of Christian origins must first orient himself in the life of the times, if he would understand the genesis of the new religion as well as the literature it produced. The possibility of obtaining this orientation has greatly increased in recent years. Much help may now be derived from the historical study of religions as a whole, which supplies certain broad principles capable of general application. These results emphasize the necessity of taking account of psychological processes in the rise and development of all religions, and they make clear the importance of social and cultural forces for the determination of religious phenomena. But more immediate help comes from Observing the actual historical situation in which the early Christians lived. Within the last half-century various scholars have devoted themselves to the study of later Judaism, with the result that the historian can now know, for the most part, the actual religious situation which conditioned the lives of the first disciples on Jewish soil. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.