Again and again individuals and groups turn back to the Semitic cycle of hopes and ideas, while the reconciliation of the two systems, Jewish and Graeco-Roman, becomes the task of exegetes and theologians.
And this is true not only of the dogmatic parties; solitary monks and ambitious priests, hard-headed critical exegetes,' allegorists, mystics, all found something congenial in his writings.
But, though this method has been applied in its fullness, and that by the keenest exegetes, there remains a consciousness that it has failed to solve many of the problems of the book.