The teaching and example of Christ as exhibited in the Gospels, and of the apostles in the Acts and Epistles; compared and contrasted with the rabbinical ethics and the state of Jewish society, and with the Greek systems of philosophy and the moral condition of the Roman empire, as described in the writings of Seneca, Tacitus, the Roman satirists, etc.

Literature.

I. The respective sections in the Histories of the Apost. Church by Neander: I.229-283 (Germ. ed.); Schaff: §§ 109-123 (pp.433-492); Lange: II.495-534; Weizsäcker: 647-698.

II The works on the Theology of the Apostolic Age, by Schmid, Reuss, Baur, Weiss, etc.

III. The Systems of Christian Ethics by Schleiermacher, Rothe, Neander, Schmid, Wuttke, Harless, Martensen, Luthardt, and Lecky's History of European Morals (1869), vol I.357 sqq.

IV. A. Thoma (pastor in Mannheim): Geschichte der christlichen Sittenlehre in der Zeit des Neuen Testamentes, Haarlem, 1879 (380 pp.). A crowned prize-essay of the Teyler Theol. Society. The first attempt of a separate critical history of N. T. ethics, but written from the negative standpoint of the Tübingen school, and hence very unsatisfactory. It is divided in three parts: I. The Ethics of Jesus; II. The Ethics of Paul; III. The Ethics of the Congregation.

V. Works which treat of Christian life in the post-apostolic age (Cave, Arnold, Schmidt, Chastel, Pressensé, etc.) will be noticed in the second period.