“Scholarship is almost universally agreed that the Christian movement created by the disciples of Jesus would have disappeared in a generation if St. Paul had not grafted on to it the essential substance of Hellenic philosophy. Christianity was in effect saved from extinction in embryo when it incorporated in its scriptures those documents known as the Epistles of St. Paul, which enabled it to rationalize its Messianic tenets. Later, under the massive pressure of an ignorant population that flocked into its fold by the third century, the Greek influence was suppressed. But still later, finding that it would have to meet the problem of exegesis at the level of a more learned society, the church was happy enough to accommodate its doctrines to the fundamentals of the much-despised Hellenic systemization, and by the twelfth century it had taken refuge entirely in the shadow of Aristotelianism. St. Paul was eulogized as the divinely appointed instrument for the conversion of the pagan world to Christianity; it was he who, to make the Gospels acceptable to the Greek cast of thought, recast the figure of the Christian’s personal Christ in the character of the Greek Christos, for the concept of the Messiah personalized in a man of flesh was totally alien to the Hellenic ideology.”

--Alvin Boyd Kuhn, A REBIRTH FOR CHRISTIANITY, p.21 (Quest Books,  a Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, IL, Madras, India: 2005)