Letters and Gospels.

With the letters of Paul and the earliest gospels a new and extraordinary force began to find written expression, a force destined powerfully to affect the life of mankind as a whole. From small and obscure beginnings, mere personal letters, for the most part, long left unpublished, this literary phase of Christianity gradually gathered strength, until it became a great tide not only potent in itself but influencing other literatures as well.

Its beginnings were in the Greek world, as far as we know, and for a century Greek seems to have been its sole vehicle; then it spread and appeared in Latin and Syriac and, in the third century, in Coptic, although at first the Christian literature of these languages consisted of translations made from Greek. Many of the earliest Christians were bilingual; but they wrote in Greek.