In this paper, delivered as the First Annual Lecture in Patristics of the Centre for Patristic Research (CPO), the author poses the question whether it still makes sense to speak about a Hellenization of Christianity in Antiquity. In contrast to the nineteenth-century understanding, it is shown that many of today's authors claim that we need to avoid any intellectual and ideological narrow-mindedness. The author pleads for a precise manner in defining the term “Hellenization” much more than the scholars of the nineteenth century did. Against the background of these thoughts he refines his own definition of the Hellenization of Christianity as a specific transformation of the Alexandrian educational institutions and of the academic culture that was developed in these institutions in the theological reflection of Early Christianity.

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Pain and Christianity appear to belong together: Christ's pain stands at the centre of God's healing; his pain leads to the salvation of mankind. We can learn from Jesus' example how to bear suffering and pain. In early Christian times, the belief that Jesus Christ suffered pain on the cross was usually not accepted. In line with the "apathy axiom", freedom from emotion was something to strive for at that time. Only after the acceptance of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380 AD did the pain of Christ again stand in the centre of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The memory of the fact that Jesus himself had to undergo the worst pain can still help people to overcome their pain and comfort them.

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