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REGENERATION.—Of all theological ideas, regeneration is probably that which has had the most unfortunate history. The figure is an apt and obvious one to express the completeness of the change which takes place when the non-Christian becomes a Christian; but it is tempting to press it, and it has been pressed in the most inconsiderate fashion. As the beginning of Christian life (it is argued), it must be antecedent to every Christian experience; faith, justification, conversion are, strictly speaking, its fruits. As a new birth, man can no more contribute to it than to his first birth, and hence must be regarded in it as purely passive, not acting or co-operating with God. As there is no middle state between being dead and being alive, it must be conceived as instantaneous; and so on. We can see the motives in such a mode of thought, but it is full of delusions. Perhaps they have influenced Reformed theology more than Lutheran; yet, while the Lutherans were more conscious of the figure in regeneration, the Reformed were guided by the justifiable desire to give faith a real basis in the believer,—to lay an act of God, as the only sure foundation, at the basis of the whole experience of salvation.

The word ‘regeneration’ occurs in Authorized Version only in Matthew 19:28, Titus 3:5 (παλινγενεσία), and the figure of a new or second birth is most distinctly expressed in our Lord’s conversation with Nicodemus, John 3 (γεννηθῆναι ἄνωθεν). But as the first of these passages is eschatological, and refers to the new world which is introduced with the παρουσία of the Son of Man, while the two others belong to the latest in the NT, it is not convenient to start with them. To see the real basis for the figure of the new birth, it is necessary to go back to the teaching of Jesus in the Synoptics, and to look at it in its substance and not merely in its formal expression. What the figure conveys, vividly and truly, is the idea that somehow a man has become another man: he has entered into a new order of being; things once real to him have lost reality; things once unknown are now alone real. If we find this idea in the teaching of Jesus, we find what is meant by regeneration, even though that figure should not expressly appear.

1. Our Lord’s teaching.—It cannot be questioned that the idea of the newness or originality of His work, and of all that depended upon it, was familiar to Jesus. Without accepting the doctrine that the Kingdom of God, as He conceived it, was purely transcendent,—a new world not spiritually evolved from the present, but supernaturally descending upon it,—we must believe that however it came, and however it was related to the present, the Kingdom introduced an order of things which was entirely new. It was itself, in a comprehensive sense, a παλινγενεσία (Matthew 19:28). (On this word see the excellent article on ‘Regeneration’ in Hasting's Dictionary of the Bible , by Dr. Vernon Bartlet). But everything connected with it, involved in it, or leading up to it, awoke in the mind the same sense of newness. In spite, for example, of our Lord’s feeling of the continuity of His work with the OT (‘I came not to destroy, but to fulfil,’ Matthew 5:17), He has the equally strong feeling that with the time of fulfilment a new era has dawned (‘The law and the prophets were until John: from that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every one presses into it,’ Luke 16:16). The newness is so complete, the distinction is so great, that the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than the greatest in the old dispensation (Matthew 11:11). The same truth underlies all the passages in which Jesus claims for Himself absolute significance in determining the relations of God and man. Of these the most explicit is Matthew 11:27. Jesus alone reveals the Father, and the man who knows the Father is no longer the same man. No words could be too strong to tell how completely he is another. This absolute significance of Jesus is the sum and substance of His self-revelation (cf. Matthew 16:13 ff.); and the truth of ‘regeneration’ is an immediate inference from it. Further, though it is not put expressly in this form in the Synoptics, the ‘newness,’ which is the point to be emphasized, does break through in various ways. We see it in the parables of the New Patch on the Old Garment and the New Wine in the Old Bottles (Mark 2:21 f. ||). We see it in the new spiritual liberty which Jesus in Matthew 17:24-27 claims for Himself and those who through Him become children of the Kingdom. We see it especially in the words at the Supper; for there is no doubt that Mt. and Lk. give at least the thought that was in His mind when they speak of the new covenant based on His blood (Matthew 26:28 D, Luke 22:20). It deserves special mention, too, that in all the Synoptics (Mark 14:25, Matthew 26:29, Luke 22:16-18) the thought of the new covenant carries the mind forward to the new world in which it is to be consummated; the new religious relation to God, determined by Christ and His death, cannot be fully realized apart from immortality. The inward regeneration of the soul (so to speak) is part of the ἀποκατάστασις πάντων, or of the παλινγενεσἰα in the sense of Matthew 19:28. But to use the term ‘regeneration’ here is to anticipate. We have not found any suggestion of it in the words of Jesus, and, in point of fact, the only such suggestion to be found in the Synoptics is Matthew 18:3 ‘Verily I say unto you, Except ye turn (ἐὰν μὴ στραφῆτε), and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven’ (cf. Mark 10:15). To become as a little child is really to be born again; it is what this figure of a new birth properly means, and it is the only key to it which the words of Jesus yield. In the words of Jesus, evidently, it describes a moral requirement; it is something He demands from those who would be His disciples and enter the Kingdom, and it is achieved through ‘turning.’ The context defines what ‘turning’ means. It means giving up ambition, pride, self-seeking, by ends in religion, and other unchildlike tempers; it is, in short, identical with what is elsewhere in the Synoptics called μετάνοια, or repentance. It is through this moral change, the responsibility for which is laid upon man, that he becomes as a little child, that is, is born again.

It should be remarked, in passing, that John never uses μετάνοια or στρέθεσθκι in the moral sense (except in the quotation from LXX Septuagint at John 12:40), and that the Synoptists never use ‘regeneration’ of the individual, or speak of a new birth (except by the allusion in Matthew 18:3); but it is one and the same experience which they respectively describe by these terms. When thar experience is regarded from the side of God, as something due to His grace or Spirit, it is called regeneration, a being born again, from above, of God; when it is regarded from the side of man, as an experience the responsibility for which lies with him, it is called repentance. But we have no meaning or substance to put into either of these terms which does not equally belong to the other.

Perhaps another approach to the figure of regeneration (though that of resurrection is equally obvious) may be recognized in the passages in which Jesus speaks of the sinful life as death, and of recovery from it as a return to or entrance into life. There are two of these in the Synoptics (Matthew 8:22 || Luke 15:24; Luke 15:32): obviously the emphasis in both is moral, not metaphysical. A change of character is in view, which, however deep and far-reaching, raises none but moral problems. More important, however, than these are the passages in which our Lord teaches that the new or higher life—the regenerate life, to call it so—can be won only through the sacrifice of a lower life. In other words, to have the life which is life indeed, we must surrender the other; we must die to nature in order to live to God. We must renounce self (ἀπαρνήσασθαι ἑαυτόν: a new and radical idea, without formal analogy in the OT) if we are to share in the life of the Kingdom. The man who refuses to do so, who cannot find it in him to do violence to nature, is incapable of discipleship and of the life which is life indeed. This is the burden of our Lord’s teaching in such passages as Matthew 16:24 ff. || Matthew 10:39, Matthew 18:8 f. ||, Luke 14:25 ff. It contains all that is meant by regeneration, but it does not use that figure to express it. And again it is all within ethical limits.

2. Pauline Epistles.—The Book of Acts is a picture of the regenerate life in its workings in the Church, but it is not specially so conceived. At Pentecost what we see is rather a new birth than the new birth of the Apostles. The Spirit is not so much the author of regeneration as the source of the peculiar gifts and powers of believers. But the newness of Christianity is nowhere more strongly felt and expressed than in this book. It brings us directly to St. Paul. The Apostle of the Gentiles became a Christian in a way which must have impressed him profoundly with the difference between the Christian life and that of the pre-Christian state. No one could say with greater truth than he, ‘I am now another man.’ But in him the change took place in a way which was in the highest degree startling and abnormal; it could not possibly suggest to him anything so natural as being born; and it agrees with this that, though no one has a more adequate sense than St. Paul of the absolute newness of the Christian life, he never uses the figure of regeneration to convey this. He speaks of the new covenant of which he is a minister (2 Corinthians 3:6), of the new creature (καινὴ κτίσις, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Galatians 6:15) which he has become, of the new world in which he lives (2 Corinthians 5:17), of the new man who has been created according to God in righteousness and holiness of truth (Ephesians 4:24), and who is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of Him that created him (Colossians 3:10); he speaks also of being transformed by renewal of the mind (Romans 12:2), and (if Titus 3:5 be his) of a renewal wrought by the Holy Spirit at baptism; of walking in newness of life (Romans 6:4), and serving God in newness of spirit (Romans 7:6); but he never speaks formally of being born again. Even when he contrasts the past and the present as death and life, the life is not conceived as coming by birth, but either by a creative act of God analogous to that by which at first He commanded light into being out of darkness (2 Corinthians 4:6), or by an exercise of the same almighty power with which God wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places (Ephesians 1:20 ff; Ephesians 2:1; Ephesians 2:5): when we were dead in trespasses He quickened us together with Him. It is essentially the same change which Paul represents elsewhere as translation from the tyranny of darkness to the Kingdom of God’s dear Son (Colossians 1:13), or from the state of condemnation to that of justification, or from life after the flesh to life after the Spirit (Ro. Gal. passim), or, in more mystical or metaphysical fashion, from being in Adam to being in Christ: see esp. Romans 5:12-21, 1 Corinthians 15:45 ff. It is not necessary here to discuss what is called Paul’s psychology, as though he had such a thing in the sense of modern mental philosophy; he has really no psychology; he knows what he was, and he knows what he is, in the way of moral experiences, and he generalizes his past and his present into the conceptions of the natural and the spiritual man, the ψυχικός and the πνευματικός. Every man in himself is ψυχικός, a descendant and representative of Adam; every man has through the gospel the opportunity of becoming πνευματικός, a child of God and representative of Christ. But, as has been already pointed out, Paul never uses the figure of a birth to elucidate or make intelligible the process of this change. He approaches the figure indeed in two different ways. On the one hand, he speaks of himself as the father of those who receive the new life of the gospel through his ministry: ‘in Christ Jesus have I begotten you through the gospel’ (1 Corinthians 4:15; cf. Galatians 4:19, 1 Timothy 1:2 ‘my true child in the faith’). On the other, he speaks of the spirit in virtue of which men are πνευματικοί, and walk in newness of life, as specifically the spirit of sonship (υἱοθεσία), by which men are made to be, and are identified as, children of God. It is usually the dignity and privileges of this relation to God on which Paul lays stress, and these are suggested by υἱός; but he has also the sense of the kinship to God which it involves, and this is expressed by τέκνον. The latter, though relatively infrequent, occurs in passages so characteristic that we can say that Paul was no stranger to that intimate sense of kinship to God which is so notable in the Johannine type of Christianity (Romans 8:16-21, Ephesians 5:1).

There are two points of contact between the Pauline presentation of truth on this subject, and that which we have found in our Lord’s teaching, which require to be emphasized. (1) There is in both the same outlook to immortality; the Spirit in Paul which makes men children of God is also the earnest of a life which vanquishes death (Romans 8:11, 2 Corinthians 5:4 f., Ephesians 1:13 f.). Indeed, the new life is often identified with the resurrection life of Jesus in such a way that the present spiritual experience of it seems rather a deduction from that transcendent possession than something having an independent existence of its own. This applies, e.g., to Romans 6:1-11, Ephesians 2:1-5. In the gospel, and in the experience of the Christian, there is the revelation at once of ζωή and ἀφθαρσία (2 Timothy 1:10). (2) There is in both our Lord and St. Paul the same idea that the new life is entered on through a death. ‘Our old man was crucified with Christ’ (Romans 6:6), and it is through that crucifixion that the new man comes into being (compare what is said above, § 1 ad fin.). It is one process, one experience, in man, in which the Adam dies and the Christ comes to be. In Paul the process is normally connected with baptism, and in view of Romans 6:2 ff., Colossians 2:11-13 it is not easy to maintain that Paul could not have written ‘the laver of regeneration, and of renewing wrought by the Holy Spirit’ (Titus 3:5). No doubt it is against the Pauline origin of the last phrase that it introduces the figure of regeneration which is so conspicuously wanting in the undoubted Epistles. When St. Paul spoke of baptism, however, as involving men in the death and resurrection of Jesus,—making them mysteriously participant in all that was meant by both, a death to sin and a life to God, with the assurance of immortality at the heart of it,—he was not thinking of baptism as a sacrament which produced these effects as an opus operatum. He could think of it only as he knew it, that is, as an ordinance administered to people confessing their sins and accepting the love of God in Christ,—an ordinance that gathered into it the whole meaning of Christianity, and in a high and solemn hour raised to its height the Christian’s sense of what it is to be a Christian. He says expressly in Colossians 2:12 that in this ordinance we are raised with Christ ‘through faith in the working of God who raised him from the dead.’ The same holds of Romans 6:2 ff. Baptism there is a picture of what is meant by the faith which looks to a dead, buried, and risen Saviour as its one object; in faith we identify ourselves with Christ in all these aspects, and so are taken out of the region to which sin belongs: this is what baptism shows even to the malignant or unintelligent persons who carped at Paul’s gospel of salvation by faith alone. The sacrament, as St. Paul was accustomed to it, shut the mouth of anybody who denied that the Christian life rested on a death to sin; and in guarding this fundamental truth it guarded (as we have seen) one of the primary teachings of Jesus. It is an immediate inference from all this that when we ask whether any particular passage in Paul—say Romans 7:14-25—applies to the regenerate or the unregenerate man, we are asking a question which the Apostle himself does not formally enable us to answer. He does not think of his experience in terms of regenerate and unregenerate. He can speak of the old man and the new, of the natural and the spiritual, of being under law and under grace, in Adam and in Christ, dead to sin and alive to God, and so on; but the distinction between the states is moral rather than metaphysical, and it is in doctrine rather than experience that it is absolute. One personality subsists through all experiences, all changes of state; nature, or the old man, is not extinct even in those who are in Christ and have the earnest of the Spirit; and though St. Paul, like all religious teachers, often speaks absolutely, not telling his converts to be what they should be, but to be what as Christians they are, he does not allow the religious interest to engulf the moral. It is to men dead in Christ, whose old man has been crucified with Him, that he says, ‘Put to death your members that are on the earth’ (Colossians 3:5), ‘Reckon yourselves to be dead unto sin’ (Romans 6:11). Experience is not a quantum but a process, and in the life of a spiritual being it cannot be dated; the things that in a sense happened twenty years ago are also present experiences, and it may be only now that we are discovering their real meaning. This holds especially of such generalized experiences as are embodied in the passage referred to. Only the new man, who by becoming such has learned what the life of the old man meant, could have written it, but it is unreal to say that it is the experience of either, to the exclusion of the other. The new man understands it better than anybody, but the fact that everybody understands it in some degree is the evidence that all men are capable of the experience it describes.

3. Catholic Epistles.—We find the idea of regeneration both in James and 1 Peter. In Ja. (James 1:18) God is the author of it, Christians its subjects, and ‘the word of truth’ the instrument. We are reminded here of the parables in which the word of God—that is, the gospel—is spoken of as a seed, and of 1 Corinthians 4:19, though in James it is the will of God and not the ministry of an Apostle to which the new birth is referred. When James contemplates Christians thus begotten as a kind of first-fruits of God’s creatures, he has apparently in view the universal παλινγενεσία of Matthew 19:28. The regeneration of individual men has the promise in it of new heavens and a new earth. There is a similar connexion of ideas in Romans 8:21 ff. Peter, who uses twice (1 Peter 1:3; 1 Peter 1:23) the word which is exactly rendered by regenerate (ἀναγεννᾶν), connects the experience which he so describes first with the resurrection of Christ, and then with the incorruptible seed which he identifies with the word of God—the gospel message which has been delivered to his hearers. The first brings him closely into line with Paul: the new life is distinctively life in the power of Christ’s resurrection, a living hope which has an incorruptible inheritance in view (cf. 1 Peter 1:3 and Romans 6:4 f.). This resurrection life is, of course, ethical, because it is Divine, but its ethical character is more explicitly secured by reference to the incorruptible seed from which it springs. ‘Love one another from the heart fervently, having been born again,’ etc. (1 Peter 1:22 f.). The figure is continued in 1 Peter 2:1 f., where the readers are exhorted (precisely as in Ephesians 4:22) to ‘put off’ all that was characteristic of their former life, and as ‘newborn babes’ to desire the spiritual milk which is without guile. Another parallel to Paul (and to our Lord) in making the new life rest on death to the old is found in 1 Peter 4:1 f.; but though the reality is the same, the figure differs.

4. Johannine writings.—It is in the Fourth Gospel and 1 Jn. that the figure of a new birth is most frequent and explicit. John does not indeed use ἀναγεννάω, but he says γεννηθῆναι ἄνωθεν (John 3:3; John 3:7); he speaks nine times in the 1st Ep. of being born of God (ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ), and twice in the Gospel and four times in the 1st Ep. of children of God (τέκνα θεοῦ). The fundamental passage here is that in John 3, in which Jesus explains the new birth to Nicodemus. No experience is described or demanded in it which has not already come before us independently; the new birth is only a new figure which gives vivid and suggestive expression to a truth which Jesus Himself in the Synoptic record, and the Apostles in their writings, have already expressed in other forms. It may fairly be argued, when we look to the general relation of the discourses in the Fourth Gospel to the indisputable words of Jesus, that the real text of this discourse is Matthew 18:3. The Evangelist is guided by the Spirit of truth into all the truth of this apparently simple saying (John 16:13); he universalizes it, and sets it in the various relations which bring out its meaning; he shows the necessity of the new birth, the method of it (so far as experience enabled him to do so), and the seat of the power which produced it. But he gives no description of its contents—no analysis of it as an experience—which enables us to put more into it than we put into ‘turning and becoming as little children,’ or into ‘dying to sin and living to God,’ or into ‘putting off the old man and putting on the new.’ He does indeed put in the most general form the necessity for the new birth when he says, ‘that which is born of the flesh is flesh.’ This does not mean that human nature is essentially or totally depraved; it means that that which is natural is not ipso facto spiritual; it is not what we get from our fathers and mothers which enables us to appreciate Christ, or to enter God’s Kingdom; it is something which we can get only from God. This is the same truth as St. Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 15:45 ff. ‘That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.’ The birth by which man enters into relations with the natural world has an analogue in the experience by which he enters into relations with the spiritual world. It, too, is a birth—which is variously described as a second birth, or a birth from above, a being born of God, or of the Spirit, or of water and spirit. It cannot be denied that in generalizing the necessity for the second birth, the Evangelist passes from the safe and intelligible moral ground of Matthew 18:3 into a more metaphysical region (as St. Paul also does in 1 Corinthians 15:45 ff.); but in the circumstances this is not of much consequence. What St. Paul means by τὸ ψυχικόν and St. John by τὸ γεγεννημένον ἐκ τῆς σαρκός is not any metaphysical abstraction, but human beings as they are encountered in the world; and it needs no argument that they must become other than they are, through and through, if they are to dwell with God. It needs no argument, either, that they cannot make themselves other than they are. To be born again they must be born of a power which comes from above, and that power—as the whole experience of his life taught St. John, and had taught St. Paul before him—was the power of the Spirit. To be born again is to be born of God. When the truth is put in this way—in what we may call without offence the onesidedly religious way—its mysteriousness is apparent. The action of God through which the new life emerges in men cannot be prescribed or calculated; it is as unquestionable in its effects as His action in nature, but there is something in it which eludes control. The sense of this underlies all the predestinarian passages in both St. John and St. Paul, but, of course, these are not to be read alone. We should completely misrepresent both Apostles if we supposed that their sense of dependence upon God for being the new men they were impaired their sense of responsibility in this relation. The mind is apt, and perhaps the feeble or insincere mind is glad, to escape from the moral to the metaphysical, from Matthew 18:3 to John Joh_3:6; there is more to talk about and less to do; but there is no ground for bringing this charge against the Apostles. St. John’s interest in this passage is not in the earthly truth (John 3:12) of the necessity of regeneration—it needs no revelation from above to make that plain; bitter experience teaches it to all men; his interest is in the possibility and the method of regeneration, the heavenly truths which only Jesus can reveal. The new birth is a birth of water and spirit (John 3:6): in other words, it is a birth which is realized through Christian baptism. That the Spirit is the important matter appears from the fact that the water is mentioned only once, and then the Spirit alone (John 3:6; John 3:8). Here, as in the case of St. Paul (see above), baptism must be taken in the whole circumstances and conditions in which it was familiar to the Evangelist. It was not the baptism of unconscious infants, but that of penitent and confessing believers. The importance of it in this passage is seen when we look on to John 3:14 f. The heavenly truth (John 3:12) of the passage is that the power through which men are born again is lodged in the Son of Man lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. The baptism through which the new birth comes is baptism in His name—baptism, as in Romans 6, into His death and resurrection—baptism which means the believing abandonment of the soul to the love of God revealed in that strange ‘uplifting’ which includes both the cross and the throne, a believing abandonment for which man’s responsibility is complete, and the refusal of which is the only fatal sin (John 3:36). When we realize that this is the connexion of ideas in the conversation with Nicodemus, we see that it falls into line with the teaching of St. Paul, entirely so far as its substance is concerned, and even in form more nearly than is at first apparent; while the teaching of both Apostles is securely based at once on their experience as Christians and on thoroughly attested words of Jesus.

It is as easy with regard to St. John as with regard to St. Paul to ask questions connected with his doctrine of regeneration to which he himself does not afford any answer. Thus the new birth is made dependent somehow on baptism; but it has been argued that in John 1:12 f. ‘children of God’ are spoken of, who were ‘born of God,’ before the Incarnation, and that in John 11:52 ‘children of God’ are spoken of as ‘scattered throughout the world’ who are to be gathered into one by the death of Jesus. As to the first of these passages, the interpretation which refers it to the ages before the Incarnation seems to the writer more than doubtful, but in any case the Logos doctrine is a way of expressing the truth that the meaning and power of the Incarnation and Passion are independent of time. In the second passage ‘children of God’ is probably prophetic; there are men everywhere who will yet gather round the cross of Jesus, and by the power which descends from it into their souls be born again as τέκνα θεοῦ. Another kind of question with regard to those who are born of God is raised by some passages in the 1st Epistle. In 1 John 1:8 it is said of Christians, ‘If we say that we have not sin, we deceive ourselves,’ and in 1 John 1:10 ‘If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar.’ But in 1 John 3:9 we read, ‘Every one that is born of God doth not sin, for his seed remaineth in him; and he cannot sin, because he has been born of God.’ This is in another form the same difficulty as we encounter in St. Paul when he says in one breath, ‘Ye are dead,’ and in the next, ‘Put to death, therefore’; or when we try to tell whether any given spiritual experience is that of the regenerate or the unregenerate man. The regenerate and the unregenerate man, for better or worse, cannot be separated in this summary way. The practical interest of the Apostles compels us to interpret them everywhere through experiences that we can understand; hence it is vain to seek in them any suggestion of what regeneration can mean in the case of baptized infants. There is no indication in the NT that they ever contemplated any such case. Regeneration is a moral experience regarded as the work of God, and repentance is the same moral experience regarded from the side of man; but in neither the one aspect nor the other can we speak of it in the case of beings who have as yet no moral experience at all.

Regeneration is not an exclusively NT idea, and those who regard NT Christianity as a kind of religious syncretism have sought the key to some of its ideas, its terminology, and its rites, especially where this doctrine and its sacramental connexions are concerned, in the Greek and Oriental mysteries which were so popular in the Roman Empire during the first two or three centuries of our era. That powerful influences from these sources—especially, perhaps, from the religion of Mithras—did at a certain period tell upon popular Christianity, cannot be questioned; but the period was not the creative one for Christianity, and the channel of these influences was not Jewish Apostles who held every kind of pagan religion in horror. The writer is convinced that there is nothing in the NT, either about the new birth or about baptism, which cannot be explained from experiences specifically and exclusively Christian; and that to drag in the Taurobolium, and the renatus in œternum of Mithraic monumental inscriptions, to explain NT ideas, while ignoring the historical connexions which these ideas assert for themselves, is mere wantonness.

Literature.—The works on NT Theology (Holtzmann, Weiss, Stevens); books mentioned under the article Holy Spirit; Gennrich, Die Lehre von der Wiedergeburt; Kaftan, Dogmatik, §§ 54, 55; Kähler, Die Wissenschaft der christlichen Lehre, 493 ff.; Orr, God’s Image in Man, 278 f.; Ritschl, Rechtfertigung u. Versöhnung, iii. § 61; W. N. Clarke, Outline of Chr. Theol. 395; Laidlaw, Bible Doct. of Man, chs. xiii. xiv.; Denney in Expositor, Oct. and Dec. 1901. For kindred ideas in other religions, see Anrich, Das antike Mysterienwesen in seinem Einfluss auf das Christentum; Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie; Reitzenstein, Poimandres (s.v. παλιγγενεσία in Index).

James Denney.