which jeopardised his position, when he maintained that Paulinism
represents a Hellenisation of the Gospel.
Is it probable that a single individual belonging to the primitive
Christian community, immediately after the death of Jesus, by himself
achieved this result? Historical analogy is uniformly in favour of the
view that developments of that kind have a gradual beginning, and are
only accomplished in the course of two or three generations. It would
therefore be inherently much more probable that Paulinism should be
the work of a school which sought to reconcile Christianity with
Hellenism. In any case a writer who regards it as Greek ought to face
the difficulty of explaining it as at the same time belonging to
primitive Christianity, and ought not to regard this hypothesis as
self-evident, but as standing in need of proof.
These theoretic considerations regarding the basis of the views of
Baur and his successors are so obvious that they were bound to come up
sooner or later. The fact was that in one particular point the
Tübingen master had held back from unprejudiced criticism and had
foisted upon critical science the traditional belief. In doing so he
had obeyed an instinct of caution. Those who proceeded further along
the path of questioning and investigation arrived, some with
satisfaction and some with dismay, at the result of declaring all the
epistles to be spurious.
It was Bruno Bauer who about the middle of the nineteenth century
opened the ball with his criticism of the Pauline letters._(_87_)_
[pg 121]
This work is not on the same level as his criticism of the
Gospels._(_88_)_ The objections which have to be brought against F. C.
Baur’s views are not clearly developed nor completely stated. In what
sense Paulinism is to be considered the work of a school with Greek
sympathies within Christianity is not explained.
In addition to this, Bruno Bauer complicates his task by regarding not
merely the doctrine of the Apostle of the Gentiles, but Christianity
in general, as a creation of the Greek mind. It was not, however,
until twenty-five years after the appearance of his criticism of the
Pauline letters that he attempted to prove this in the confused work
on “Christ and the Caesars.”_(_89_)_
It was not Palestine, according to his thesis, but Rome and Alexandria
which cradled Christianity. Palestine merely supplied the background
for the picture which the first Evangelist undertook to create of the
beginnings of a movement which really originated with Seneca and [pg
122] his adherents. Whether there ever was a Jesus or a Paul may be
left an open question. It is in any case certain that the one did not
utter the sayings which the Gospels put into his mouth, and that the
other is not to be regarded as the author of the letters.
The Christian “community” arose among the oppressed, the slaves and
Jews, of the great city. They formed associations and fostered in one
another a yearning for the End of the Age, developed the
Platonico-Stoic thoughts of Seneca into the sayings of the Sermon on
the Mount, and invented for themselves their hero, Christ. The spirit
of the new creation came from the West; its framework was furnished by
Judaism.
Judaism brought with it a tendency towards legalism. In the Flavian
period the Greek ethical philosophy struck up an alliance with the
law. This movement was opposed by the freedom-loving Gnosis. In the
last years of Hadrian and the first half of the reign of Marcus
Aurelius matters came to an issue. So far as the struggle took a
literary form we have the evidences of it in the Pauline letters and
the Acts of the Apostles. Galatians is the last of the letters, issued
at the crisis of the struggle, and was directed against Acts, which
appeared at the same time.
“The figure of this champion of a universal Church and freedom from
the law of ordinances” must have been already known to the Church.
What was new was the association with his name of an epistolary
literature, the production of which occupied a series of earnest and
able men for some forty years.
In the Acts of the Apostles Paul is co-ordinated with or subordinated
to Peter, the representative of the Judaeo-Roman hierarchic tendency.
That reflects the issue of the struggle. The freedom-loving party was
defeated; in the last quarter of the second century Catholicism became
supreme in the Church.
No attention was paid to Bauer, and in part he himself was responsible
for the neglect. The bitterness and the [pg 123] carelessness of his
writing, the contradictions in which he becomes involved, the
fantastic imagination which he allows to run riot, made it impossible
for the few who read him to regard him seriously.
Nevertheless, in detached observations, and in some of the incidental
ideas, he displays a critical acumen which has something great about
it.
After dismissing him with a few sharp words, the Tübingen school and
their successors enjoyed a respite of thirty years, so far as radical
scepticism was concerned. At the end of that time Bauer reappeared,
like a _Nero Redivivus,_ in peaceful Holland._(_90_)_
In a critical introduction to his study of the Sermon on the Mount,
Allard Pierson examined the earliest witnesses for the existence of
Christianity, and in doing so threw out the question whether the
historicity of the main Pauline epistles was so completely raised
above all doubt that they could be treated with perfect confidence as
archives from the earliest period of the new faith._(_91_)_
In the year 1886 he published, in association with the philological
scholar, Samuel Adrian Naber, the _Verisimilia._ The book was not
adapted to make a deep impression. It was too much the ingenious essay
for that.
The two friends combined their efforts in order to show New Testament
exegetes how much they had left unexplained in the Epistles to the
Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, and how many
problems, incoherencies, and contradictions appear when one reads
these writings with an open mind._(_92_)_
[pg 124]
But instead of making a thorough examination of the problems and
laboriously arguing the case with the other students of Paulinism, the
authors at once proceed to suggest what appears to them a possible
solution. They claim to have discovered that the inconsistencies are
due in the main to the presence of two strata of thought which have
been worked together. The one is of a sharply anti-Jewish character;
the other consists of milder and more conciliatory ideas.
If it be assumed, so runs their argument, that Christianity was in its
real origin a Jewish sect which had liberal ideas in regard to the law
and directed its expectation towards the Messiah, the antinomian
sections of the Epistles represent documents of that period.
The present form of the letters is due to the fact that a later
“Churchman”—the authors call him _Paulus episcopus,_ and think that he
may have served as model for the Paul of Acts—worked into them the
second, milder set of ideas.
At the time when Pierson and Naber launched this hypothesis, A. D.
Loman had just finished the series of “Quaestiones Paulinae” which he
threw out in the [pg 125] _Theologisch Tijdschrift_ of
1882-1886._(_93_)_ The battle began in earnest.
Loman confines himself to dealing with the external arguments, and
only proposes to examine how far the assumption that these letters
were written by the Apostle in primitive Christian times can or cannot
be proved from the early witnesses. His decision is negative.
But his calmly written yet wonderfully living study shook two other
thinkers out of their security, and compelled them to carry on the
work of destruction to a further point.
Steck_(_94_)_ and van Manen_(_95_)_ undertook the task of
supplementing the external arguments, of presenting the internal
arguments by means of an analysis of the letters, and of offering a
detailed hypothesis regarding the origin of the Pauline literature.
[pg 126]
In respect of external arguments the three scholars combine to urge
the following considerations:—
Acts, they argue, knows nothing of any literary activity of Paul; and
it tells us nothing of the conflicts which these letters, if we are to
believe their own evidence, called forth.
When the Tübingen school set up the axiom that Acts is less
trustworthy than the Epistles, they made things easy for themselves.
There are weighty arguments to support the opposite opinion.
That the moment a mission to the heathen was undertaken the question
of the observance of the law must come up is clear. The most natural
thing to happen would be that it should come up for discussion on
purely practical lines and should take the form: how much must the
Gentile Christians take over of the Commandments in order that the
Jewish believers might have table-fellowship and social intercourse
with them?
This is the form of the problem which Acts presupposes, and it gives
us in the account of the so-called Apostolic Council a decision in
accordance therewith.
The Epistle to the Galatians, on the other hand, asserts that the
question of the validity of the law as such was raised at that time,
and that Paul and the original apostles agreed to divide the spheres
of their mission work into Gentile and Jewish. About the most pressing
need, the establishment of a _modus vivendi_ in mixed churches,
nothing was done. This representation is much less natural than the
other.
Nor is the case different in regard to the picture of Paul which these
two sources give us. In Acts everything is clear and simple. The
Apostle appears at first rather as an assistant to Barnabas, but
afterwards makes himself independent, and maintains his position in
relation to the original apostles by the force of his personality, in
a free but not a hostile fashion.
In the letters, on the other hand, everything is unintelligible.
Stress is laid on the fact that the Apostle of [pg 127] the Gentiles
after his conversion has no intercourse with the original apostles and
the Church, receives nothing whatever of the doctrinal tradition about
Jesus, and draws his gospel entirely from revelation.
The statements regarding the external facts of his life are extremely
confused. After his conversion he is said to have first spent three
years in “Arabia” and then to have gone to Damascus, and from there,
three years after his conversion, to have paid his “visit of ceremony”
to the Church at Jerusalem, during which, however, he says that he saw
only Peter, and James the Lord’s brother. After that he spent fourteen
years in Syria and Cilicia.
Who can form a clear picture of the journeys implied in the letters,
or of the relation of Paul to his churches?
Who can understand the character here presented? Sometimes the Apostle
is radical, sometimes conservative, sometimes bold, sometimes
despairing; in small things firm, in great things weakly yielding; now
violent, then again mild; in all ways full of uncertainties and
contradictions.
Far from arousing belief, the statements of the letters about the
Apostle create difficulty upon difficulty and doubt upon doubt, if
once one ventures to read them with an open mind. On the one side it
seems as if a certain tendency to bring him into opposition with the
original apostles made itself felt throughout, while on the other hand
the traits are thrown together without any reference to an integral
psychologically intelligible picture.
The most natural view is, therefore, that Acts represents what is
historically most authentic, while in the letters an imaginary picture
is drawn, exhibiting throughout the same tendency, but composed by
various hands.
The external attestation in the early literature of a Pauline
collection of letters, which is in any case not too brilliant, is
further reduced by the radicals. The Ignatian letters are held—as they
also are by the Tübingen [pg 128] school—to be spurious; and they
endeavour to bring down the first epistle of Clement from the time of
Domitian to the middle of the second century._(_96_)_ If all this is
admitted, the first attestation of the letters is that of Marcion.
What, then, is there to oppose to the view that they had their origin
in Gnostic circles and were only later forced upon the Church?
With this agrees, too, the fact that the Second Epistle of Peter,
which alone in the New Testament makes mention of Paul’s literary
activity,_(_97_)_ and which itself certainly belongs to the period of
the struggle with Gnosticism, treats it as something in the nature of
a “gift from the Greeks.”_(_98_)_
In any case, in view of the silence of Justin, the _Shepherd_ of
Hermas, the _Didache,_ and the _Epistle of Barnabas,_ the attestation
of the Pauline letters is no better than that of the Johannine
literature._(_99_)_
Great stress is laid on the fact that among the Gnostics the Epistles
existed in a shorter form than in the Church, as appears from the
reckoning which Tertullian holds with Marcion._(_100_)_ If this
shorter text can be reconstructed [pg 129] and proves to be the
better, this would show that the Epistles passed from the hands of the
Gnostics into that of the Church, and underwent in the process an
expansion of a certain “tendency.”
In the hope of showing this, van Manen in the year 1887 reconstructed
the Marcionite text of the Epistle to the Galatians._(_101_)_ In
regard to the other Epistles he does not attempt this, as Tertullian’s
indications are insufficient.
The examination of the internal arguments takes the following form.
These “Ultra-Tübingen” critics analyse the letters and point out all
the difficulties which come to light in the course of exegetical
study. They triumphantly establish the fact that there are many seams
and divisions between the various verses and sections, that an
ethico-mystical doctrine is found alongside of the juridical doctrine
of justification, that the view of the law is subject to remarkable
vacillations, and that it is not possible to weld together the
different parts of the Epistles to the Romans and Corinthians, to
determine the proper address of the Epistle to the Galatians, whether
to the district or the province, to decide whether Romans presupposes
Jewish-Christian or Gentile-Christian readers, and various questions
of that kind.
The next point is to discover, if possible, some kind of system in the
difficulties, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Steck and van Manen
profess to be able to show that there is such a system.
What the letters tell us regarding the conversion, the life and work
of Paul is not, according to them, to be considered earlier and more
authentic than Acts, but is [pg 130] based on information which either
coincides with the reports there given or points to an earlier common
source. The material supplied by Acts is worked up in the letters
under the influence of a tendency.
The existence of a written Gospel is also implied. All the passages in
the Epistles which recall sayings of the Lord, and what the Epistles
to the Corinthians in particular have to tell us about the institution
of the Lord’s Supper and the resurrection of Jesus, make, they think,
the impression of having been drawn from Luke, or an earlier Gospel
which is one of his sources. Steck and van Manen are even inclined to
hold that in Rom. ii. 16 and xvi. 25 the words “my Gospel” refer to a
written Gospel, as indeed the Church Fathers also thought.
That the four main Epistles cannot all be from the same hand is, they
think, manifest from the differences between them. Further, the order
in which they were written can, these writers think, be recognised.
This order does not agree with that generally accepted, since the
Epistle to the Galatians is not placed before Corinthians and Romans,
but concludes the series. Steck endeavours to give a detailed proof
that it was written after Romans and presupposes the latter. Wherever
in Galatians there appear gaps and obscurities, a glance at Romans
always, he affirms, gives the desired explanation. The more strongly
the opposition to the law comes to expression, the later is the
writing in question to be placed in the series of the Pauline
writings, in which a development is traceable.
Another point to which the “Ultra-Tübingen” critics attach importance
is to discover criteria by which various strata can be distinguished
in the main Epistles themselves. They propose to regard the Epistles
to the Corinthians as fragments of Pauline literature which have
gradually been worked up together into letters. In regard to the
letter to the Romans, van Manen holds that it originally consisted,
roughly speaking, of chapters [pg 131] i.-viii., and was only
gradually extended to its present form._(_102_)_
It is also, these critics consider, certain that a number of hands
have been at work on the letters, and that the increasingly
anti-Jewish tendency shows us the direction followed by the efforts of
the Pauline school.
Steck and van Manen assume that the teaching represented in the
Epistles is of a Greek character. They think they can show that the
Pauline school were influenced by Philo and Seneca, and seek to
explain Paulinism as an “attempt to spiritualise primitive
Christianity.”
Essentially, they think, it belongs to Gnosticism, since it sets aside
the “authority of tradition” and derives all knowledge, without
historical mediation, from the revelation of the Spirit, and conceives
of this knowledge as a system. The deification of Jesus Christ which
is represented in the letters is also to be regarded as Greek and
Gnostic.
By these observations Steck and van Manen are inevitably led to the
decisive consideration regarding “time and space.”
Could a Christology of this kind come into being a few years only
after the death of the historical Jesus? Is an intense anti-Judaism in
primitive Christian times intelligible? Can Greek, Gnostical ideas be
assumed to have existed in the first generation?
Steck and van Manen deny that this is possible and demand a longer
period for the transformation of which the evidence lies before us.
Therefore the historic Paul, [pg 132] if there ever was such a man, as
is almost certainly the case, was not the creator of the Paulinism
represented by the Epistles.
How, then, is the origin of the letters and the doctrine to be
explained?
On the basis of the facts which they observe in the documents, and the
consideration regarding the necessity of time and space, the
“Ultra-Tübingen” critics throw out the following hypothesis.
Christianity, they hold, remained at first Jewish. But as time went
on, and as it spread beyond Palestine, two different tendencies
manifested themselves within it. One, as the result of contact with
Gentiles, and no doubt in consequence of the destruction of the Jewish
State, moved in the direction of attaching less and less importance to
the law, while the other maintained the older stand-point.
In general the development, due to the influence of Graeco-Roman
ideas, proceeded without a struggle. Its goal was a “catholicism” such
as meets us in Justin.
Within this “Gnostic” party, however, there appeared a school which
put the question of the relation to Judaism and the law in its most
trenchant form, as a question of principle, and sought to bring it to
a decisive issue.
Somewhere or other—perhaps in the Roman Church, perhaps in several
places at the same time—where Gnostics and representatives of the
older view were at odds, an open conflict broke out. The former party
fought with literary weapons, dating back the controversy by means of
an epistolary literature specially created for the purpose into
primitive Christian times.
In the course of the struggle the antithesis became more and more
acute. The climax is marked by the Epistle to the Galatians. Here a
“Gnostic” endeavours, with the aid of the already existing Pauline
literature, and depending more particularly on Romans, to defend the
stand-point of liberal Gentile Christianity against a “Jewish
Christianity” which, as it seems, was “making [pg 133] headway.” “With
all the force of his intellectual superiority” he scourges the
tendencies of a period which was endeavouring to make Christianity
once more Jewish.
The form of a letter to the Galatians was given to the work, according
to Steck’s hypothesis, “because the literary _genre_ of Apostolic
letters held an established position; and since the churches at Rome
and Corinth already had their Epistles, the Galatian province,
familiar in connexion with the first missionary journey in Acts,
suggested itself as the appropriate scene of the struggle, since it
was there that the Apostle had first had to suffer from the
persecutions of the Jews. As the Epistle to the Galatians followed on
the three other main epistles, and the Epistle to the Romans had
already selected as its time and place the last visit of the Apostle
to Corinth, shortly before his arrest at Jerusalem, the time of the
Roman imprisonment suggested itself as the situation of the writer to
be implied in the Epistle. During his imprisonment Paul receives news
of the threatened, and in part already accomplished, falling away of
the Galatian churches from his Gospel, and feeling himself about to
take leave of the world he directs to the wavering churches this
letter as the purest and most intense expression of his heart and
mind.”
The main Epistles originated about the years 120-140. The elements
from which they are worked up may be ten or twenty years earlier. A
final redaction may have taken place even subsequently to 140.
Why, exactly, the school of thought which created this literature took
Paul as its patron, it is, according to van Manen, impossible to
explain. He holds that the historic Apostle had as little to do with
Paulinism as John the Apostle with the theology of the Fourth Gospel.
Steck, on the other hand, is inclined to admit the historical
justification of this connexion. For him, it is to be held as certain
that Paul was the first to “open the door of the Christian salvation
freely to the Gentiles.” The doctrine [pg 134] of justification by
faith must therefore already in some shape or other have formed part
of his preaching. Only the strictly systematic and sharply anti-Jewish
development of the doctrine was supplied by the later school.
Steck is therefore here, as on some other points, more conservative
and less “critical” than van Manen. Nevertheless the differences are
not very noticeable in comparison with the extent of the views which
they share.
Theology of the post-Baur period generally had ignored Bruno Bauer; it
would willingly have treated in the same way those who took up his
work again. Since this was not possible, and references to “wild
hypotheses” and “rash, wrong-headed critics” did not completely
suffice to dispose of them, the authorities great and small had
necessarily to undertake a refutation, which they prudently confined
to the most pressing and the easiest points.
The discussions were for the most part carried on in periodicals. A
work on the other side of an importance at all corresponding to those
of Loman, Steck, and van Manen was not forthcoming._(_103_)_
[pg 135]
How far is it possible to refute their view?
In the domain of the external arguments, the main strength of the
revolutionaries, the position is not so favourable to them as Loman
wished to represent it. The transference of the first Epistle of
Clement to the middle of the second century is not possible._(_104_)_
The fact that Justin knew and used Paul’s writings, while he does not
name him, is not explained by the hypothesis that they did not rank
for him as Church writings._(_105_)_
The Marcionite text of Galatians reconstructed by van Manen is not
better but worse than the canonical text._(_106_)_ If the Ignatian
letters, as is now generally held, are genuine, the attestation of the
Pauline Epistles is in much better case than was formerly supposed.
That Acts says nothing about the literary activity of the Apostle has
at most the value of an _argumentum e silentio._ It is not otherwise
in regard to the fact that Acts has nothing to say of the conflicts
between him and his churches. In regard to the question of priority as
between its narrative and that of Galatians there is at least nothing
certain to be said.
The position of matters is therefore that the Epistles to the Romans
and Corinthians are witnessed to by the first Epistle of Clement at
the end of the first century, but that neither the legitimate nor the
illegitimate [pg 136] representatives of the Tübingen tradition can
explain why Justin and the remaining writers of the beginning of the
second century are not under the influence of these Epistles, and,
with the exception of Clement, do not even mention them.
The hypothesis brought forward by Steck and van Manen in regard to
different strata within the Epistles and the development which
culminates in the antinomianism of the Epistle to the Galatians cannot
be proved from the texts; the evidence is read into them by the
exercise of great ingenuity.
But the negative observation which formed their starting-point holds
its ground. Ordinary exegesis has not succeeded in getting rid of the
illogical transitions and contradictions and making Paul’s arguments
really intelligible. The impression of a certain disconnectedness is
not to be denied. But Steck and van Manen have not succeeded in
discovering the law and order which ought to prevail in it, and
showing how the chaos arose in connexion with the creation of this
literature.
Against the hypothesis of the origin of Paulinism in the second
century there lies the objection that it is built on purely arbitrary
assumptions. Whence do Steck and van Manen know anything about
anti-Jewish conflicts taking place at that time? There is no evidence
of any such thing in the contemporary literature; and the writings of
the apostolic Fathers make quite in the contrary direction.
On the other hand, the general considerations which led them to adopt
this hypothesis have not been in any way invalidated. The illegitimate
Tübingen critics share with the legitimate school the presupposition
that Paulinism signifies a Hellenisation of the Gospel; they are also
at one with their adversaries in regarding this unproved and
unprovable assumption as proved. The difference is that they do not
follow the others in their second exhibition of naïveté—that of
regarding this Greek religious faith as being coincident with
primitive [pg 137] Christianity, but demand space and time for a
development of this character. But the two wrestlers have the same
chain about their feet; whichever of them throws the other into the
water must drown along with him.
That they are both involved in the same fundamental view of Paulinism
sometimes comes to the consciousness of the post-Baur theology and its
radical opponents. In a momentary aberration of this kind Heinrici
ventures to praise Bruno Bauer for having discovered the relationship
of Paul to the religious life of the ancient world, and is prepared to
see his weakness only in the inferences which he draws from this
discovery._(_107_)_
Steck, on his part, praises Heinrici’s commentary on the Epistles to
the Corinthians, in which the Hellenistic element is so excellently
traced, and expresses the hope that the exegete and his party will
consider carefully whether the composition of this work “does not
stand in an even much closer relationship to Hellenism than had
previously been supposed.”
The more the theologians who derive from Baur emphasise the Greek
element in Paulinism the more helpless they are against the
“Ultra-Tübingen” critics. For it is after all merely a matter of
clearness and courage of thought whether they venture to raise the
question about space and time. The moment they take this step they are
lost. Nevermore can they find the way which leads back through the
green pastures of sound common-sense theology, but are condemned to
wander about with the revolutionaries in the wilderness of flat
unreason. Wearied with problems, they come at last, like Steck and van
Manen, to a condition of mind in which the wildest hypothesis appeals
to them more than rational knowledge, if the latter demands the
suppression of questioning.
How is it conceivable that a man of the primitive Christian period
could, in consequence of a purely practical controversy regarding the
observance or non-observance of the law by Gentile believers, go on,
as Baur and [pg 138] his successors represent—to reject the law on
principle? How could it be possible that, at that time, doctrine
should take a frankly Gnostic shape, and in deliberate contempt of the
tradition of the historic Jesus, should, under the eyes of the men who
had been His companions, appeal only to revelation?
That is the element of greatness in the “Ultra-Tübingen” critics, that
they did not forget the duty of asking questions, when it had fallen
out of fashion among other theologians. To show that their hypothesis
is untenable is by no means to get rid of it, as accredited theology
wished to persuade itself. A few squadrons of cavalry which were
skirmishing in the open have been cut off; the fortress has not been
taken, indeed the siege has not even been laid.
The chronicle of the discussion between contemporary theology and the
revolutionaries is quite without interest. As soon as the refutation
on points of detail was finished, and the fundamental questions
regarding time and place came on the scene, there remained nothing for
it to do but to stammer, with an embarrassed smile, something about
tradition, intuition, an unmistakable impression, the stamp of
genuineness, and the like, and to break off the conversation as
quickly as might be.
What it could or could not refute, and what the other party could or
could not prove, followed necessary from the form which the problem
had assumed. The construction of the illegitimate Tübingen critics
answers, in reverse, to that of the legitimate school, like the
reflection in a mirror to the object reflected. The presuppositions
and the difficulties are the same in the two cases; the two solutions
correspond except that they go in opposite directions. Both recognise
that not only a conflict of practice, but one involving theory and
principle, for and against the law, is fought out in the letters. The
legitimate school place it in primitive Christian times, but cannot
show how it was possible at that period, and how it could break off so
suddenly that in the post-Pauline [pg 139] literature there is not an
echo of it, and it seems as though it had never been.
The illegitimate school represent the struggle as having occurred in
the course of the second century, but can cite no evidence for this
from the remaining literature, can point to no traces of the gradual
growth of the opposition, or show how a struggle of that kind could
break out at that time.
Both explanations labour in vain at the problem of the inexplicable
neglect of Paulinism in the post-Apostolic literature.
Both parties assume as a datum that the doctrine of the letters is to
be considered as a Hellenised Christianity. The one party represents
the process which leads to this result as taking place in primitive
Christian times, without being able to show how such a thing is
possible, or how the Greek and the Jewish-eschatological elements
mutually tolerated and united with one another.
According to the other party, the Hellenisation came about in the
course of a long development. But they cannot explain why Paulinism
shows an entirely different character from that of the Greek
Christianity which appears elsewhere in the literature of the second
century. They assert that it belongs to Gnosticism; and are right in
this so far as regards the form of the system. On the other hand they
cannot allow themselves to consider seriously the difference between
the doctrine of the letters and the fundamental views of the known
Gnostic schools, or the hypothesis flies in pieces. The Gnostics were
real spiritualists, opposed to eschatology, and denying a corporeal
resurrection; Paul is an eschatologist, looking for the parousia and
the transformation of the body. Therefore the “Ultra-Tübingen” critics
must either explain the Jewish eschatological element in the system in
such a way as to spiritualise it, or else drop it out of sight.
And as a matter of fact the ominous word eschatology is, one might
almost say, never mentioned in their works.
[pg 140]
The parallel between what the one and the other construction can and
cannot make intelligible goes through to the last detail. For both it
is true that the ostensible solution in each case introduces openly or
otherwise a new problem which arises out of the solution itself. The
sum of what is explained and unexplained is the same for both.
At first sight the position of the legitimate successors of the
Tübingen school is more favourable than that of the other party. They
have tradition and natural impression on their side, and are able to
regard the situation implied in the Epistles as historic, whereas
their opponents are bound to show that it is fictitious. When
subjected to critical examination, however, they are no better off,
for they cannot give any proof that the main epistles can belong to
primitive Christianity and to it only. When they declared again and
again that the attacks of the radicals had served a useful purpose in
inciting them to examine anew their results, and to make corrections
where necessary, that was the mere cant of criticism. If they had
dared to make an effort to understand the objection which Loman,
Steck, and van Manen constantly repeated, and to consider whether they
could really prove the Pauline origin of the main epistles, or whether
they did not really by their conception of the doctrine make it
improbable, they would have been bound to perceive that nothing could
be done by revising and correcting; it was a case of mutually
exclusive alternatives.
As matters stood, they had to choose between being consistent but
irrational, or rational but inconsistent. They chose the latter form
of the dilemma and left the other to the radicals.
The Ultra-Tübingen critics on their part cannot escape the blame of
raising the question in a one-sided purely literary form, and not
concerning themselves with the thought contained in the Epistles,
because they felt that herein lay the weak point of their undertaking.
Instead of analysing the system, they made play with the [pg 141]
catchwords Greek and Gnostic, and thought to have got rid in that way
of the question regarding the essential character of Paulinism. If
contemporary theology did not grasp the problem which was presented to
it in its full significance, that was partly due to the pettifogging
way in which it was formulated. The representatives of radical
criticism were like criminals who cannot rise to the height of their
crime!
For a time it almost looked as if a _modus vivendi_ had been found
between the successors of Baur’s school and the radicals. Steck, who
stood on the right wing of the revolutionaries, refused to give up the
belief that the historic Paul had in some way or other fought a battle
for freedom from the law, and might be indirectly claimed as the
starting-point of the theology which reaches its full development in
the Epistles. From this it was only a short step to the hypothesis
that the Epistles were not wholly spurious but combined thoughts of
the Apostle with later views.
A criticism based on the distinction of original and interpolated
elements did not need to be now for the first time called into being.
It already existed, and had indeed made its appearance
contemporaneously with Bruno Bauer’s. Like the latter it had been
either talked down or left to die of neglect.
In the first volume of his “Philosophic Dogmatic” (1855), when
speaking of the documentary sources of our knowledge of Christianity,
Christian Hermann Weisse defines his attitude towards the Pauline
Epistles and offers the results of a study extending over many years,
which he had undertaken in opposition to the conservatives on the one
side and the Tübingen school on the other._(_108_)_
His method he himself describes as criticism based on style. A man
like Paul, he argues, has so characteristic a literary style that it
will serve one who has made himself [pg 142] thoroughly familiar with
it as an unfailing criterion of what is genuine and what is not. Such
a method of criticism must of course be prepared to be accused of
arbitrariness and subjectivity. But that is no great matter. The
fruits will vouch for the goodness of the tree.
The standard of indubitably genuine Pauline style is furnished,
according to Weisse, by the First Epistle to the Corinthians. It bears
in all its parts the stamp of the most complete integrity and
genuineness. The eye which has acquired due fineness of perception by
the study of this writing discovers that only the Second Epistle to
the Corinthians, the First to the Thessalonians, and that to Philemon,
“can boast of preserving in the same purity the original apostolic
text.” The Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, Philippians, and
Colossians “have interwoven in them a regular series of
interpolations, which so far efface the genuine apostolic character of
the style in many places as to render it unrecognisable, and have
given rise to that difficulty of disentangling the meaning which has
made Romans especially a _crux interpretum,_ and by the forced
artificiality, intrinsic falsity, and unnaturalness of these
interpretations has made this Epistle the bane of theological study;
of which, in virtue of the character of its fundamental ideas, it was
fitted to be the most precious treasure.”_(_109_)_
The whole of these interpolations are, he thinks, from one and the
same hand, and go back to a time previous to the ecclesiastical use of
the writings. The redactor cherished withal the most respectful awe of
the Apostle’s words, and has hardly deleted a single one of them.
What remains after the elimination of the secondary stratum in the
Epistles to the Romans and Philippians [pg 143] does not prove to be
an integral whole. The latter consists of two letters to this church,
the second beginning with iii. 3. With the former there has been
worked up a letter to a church in Asia Minor, consisting of ix.-xi.
and xvi. 1-20._(_110_)_
Weisse did not get the length of publishing the reconstructed text of
the Epistles. When his pupil Sulze carried it through after his
death,_(_111_)_ the prophecy which the author had put on record in his
“Dogmatics” regarding his undertaking was fulfilled. It met with
“universal disbelief.”
In part the cause of this ill-success lay in the one-sidedness of the
principle maintained by the author. Weisse confines himself entirely
to “stylistic criticism.” While he recognises the possibility of a
distinction between genuine and spurious based on the contents, the
trains of thought, of the letters, he will have nothing to do with it.
With the controversy about the genuineness of the main Epistles there
began a new era of “interpolation criticism.” Daniel Völter, rendered
confident by the professedly “assured results” of the criticism of the
Apocalypse in regard to the distinction of sources, thinks to find in
a similar procedure the solution of the Pauline problem, and hopes
that it will be possible by “careful criticism” to separate the
genuine from the spurious._(_112_)_
He differs entirely from Weisse in seeking the criterion for the
distinction of what is genuine from what is spurious in the
subject-matter. What is simple and “plain”—the [pg 144] latter
expression recurs again and again—is to be regarded as
primitive-Christian and Pauline, but anything which has the appearance
of being complicated or having the character of a speculative system
is to be regarded as of later origin.
Thus wherever we find a highly developed Christology, speculations
regarding the Spirit, and eschatology, strongly predestinarian views,
and an advanced estimate of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, we are,
according to Völter, in the presence of interpolations. A further mark
by which these may be recognised is an advanced antinomianism.
The doctrine of the historic Paul includes, according to this author,
the following points: The central point in it is the death of Christ,
regarded as an atoning death appointed by God and ratified by the
resurrection. Man becomes partaker of its fruits by faith, and thus
obtains justification by the forgiveness of sins, of which he is given
assurance by the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Faith also includes
within it, however, a “mystico-ethical partaking in the death of
Christ.” Therefore in the act of faith there takes place at the same
time an inner conversion to a life well-pleasing to God, which causes
the believer “to appear blameless on the day of Christ and makes him a
partaker in the resurrection.”
As regards the relation of the Epistle to the Galatians to Acts Völter
takes over the conclusions, unfavourable to the former, of the radical
critics. Consequently this work is spurious throughout. It only
reproduces the ideas of the interpolators of the letters to the Romans
and Corinthians, and pushes to an extreme the antinomianism there
represented. It dates from near the end of the first century.
[pg 145]
In the Epistles to the Corinthians—we are still following Völter—the
interpolations are not very extensive. The most important is the
correction applied to the original Pauline doctrine of resurrection,
in 2 Corinthians 4 and 5, where the redactor has worked in his
Platonico-Stoic doctrine of immortality.
The Epistle to the Romans has been very extensively
interpolated._(_113_)_ The original writing was addressed to Gentile
readers. The interpolator, on the other hand, has in view readers “who
occupy an Old Testament stand-point.” That is connected with the
far-reaching development which began at Rome after the Neronian
persecution. At that time, as is proved, Völter thinks, by the Epistle
to the Hebrews and the Epistle of Barnabas, together with the first
Epistle of Clement and the _Shepherd_ of Hermas, the Church at Rome
“fell back upon a religious stand-point determined by Old Testament
ideas.” It is this “reduction of Christianity to Jewish Old Testament
religion, modified by Christianity,” that the interpolator is
concerned to combat. In doing so he is forced to enter upon general
speculations regarding the flesh, sin, and the law; in order “to
defend the independence and superiority of Christianity” he develops
an antinomianism, according to which the law had as its sole purpose,
“by intensifying the misery of sin, to prepare men for deliverance
from sin and the law, by the redemption which is in Jesus
Christ.”_(_114_)_
Völter’s work is one of the adroitest performances in the whole field
of Pauline study. It is not only that it represents what is in its own
way a brilliant synthesis between Weisse and the radicals; its main
significance [pg 146] lies in the fact that it breaks off the barren
literary-critical logomachy, and directs attention once more to the
subject-matter.
Steck and van Manen had failed, once they went beyond the simple
registration of inconcinnities in the text; Völter lets the
theological problems have something to say for themselves. He observes
more clearly than any one had stated it before exactly wherein the
complexity of the question of the law consists, and rightly refers it
to the fact that some passages take for granted its observance by the
Jews as unquestionably right and proper, and only seek to maintain the
freedom of the Gentiles in regard to it, whereas others reject it in
principle, in such a way that Paul would be obliged to maintain also
the emancipation of the Jews . . . if the rules of logical inference
are to be applied. As it is, however, there is a want of congruence
between the negative theory and the limitation of the practical
demand.
In an equally thoroughgoing fashion Völter deals with the problems of
Christology and of the doctrine of the Spirit, and eschatology.
His solution is ingenious and elegant. Of the hypothesis which places
the controversies about the law in the post-apostolic period only so
much is taken over as is absolutely necessary. The connexion between
Paulinism and Gnosticism is made as loose as possible. The eschatology
has a certain importance given to it. Hellenic elements are not
assumed to be present in the primitive doctrine; on the other hand, a
knowledge of the Book of Wisdom, Philo, Seneca and the Graeco-Roman
philosophy in general is ascribed to the interpolators.
The criterion by which to distinguish what is genuine from what is not
is ingeniously chosen. It is not particularly difficult to separate in
the letters the parts which are mainly plain and practical from those
which relate to an antinomian speculative system. The resulting
division between original text and interpolations has a [pg 147] more
natural and simple air than is the case in any of the other attempts
to draw the line between them.
Nevertheless, it was scarcely possible that this work should
contribute anything to the solution of the Pauline problem. It is
built upon sand, for the argument on which everything is based is
unsound.
Völter asserts that “simplicity” is the mark of what is genuinely
apostolic and Pauline. Since when? How does he know this? How, if it
were just the other way round, and the strange, the abstruse, the
systematic, the antinomian, the predestinarian represented the
original element, and what is simple came in later!
What he describes as the doctrine of the historic Paul has not a very
convincing look. It has not the ring of what we find elsewhere in
early Christian literature, but has a suspicious resemblance to the
Good Friday and Easter-day meditations of the _Christliche
Welt.__(_115_)_
What does not strike the modern man and his theology as distinctly
peculiar is gathered together and receives the stamp of approval as
historic Paulinism! Völter, like every one else, has failed to
consider, or to grasp, that fundamental question as to what is
primitive-Christian in the Apostle’s teaching, which, since the
encounter between Baur and Ritschl, had tacitly dominated the
discussion and had been again forced on the theological centre-party
by the radicals. Otherwise it would have been impossible that he,
after promising a “cautious criticism,” should have so incautiously
decided that what is simple is what is primitive-Christian.
Apart from Völter, the criticism which claims to distinguish various
sources and detect interpolations is of a more innocent and guileless
description. It does not plunge into the depths of the Pauline
problems in the attempt to reach the firm ground that has never yet
been reached, but amuses itself by determining what and how many
original writings of the Apostle may have been worked up into the
canonical Epistles to the [pg 148] Corinthians, Romans, and
Philippians. This work, at which Semler had already made a beginning,
is in itself necessary and interesting. The results, however, prove to
be uncertain and contradictory, because the criteria by which the
deletions, dissections, and combinations are determined, are always
derived from subjective impression.
The one consolation in regard to them is that any importance which
attaches to these results concerns almost exclusively the
pre-canonical literary history of the Epistles and does not affect our
knowledge of the Pauline system. The supposed interpolations are of a
subsidiary character. The text as a whole is hardly seriously affected
by them. The sense is scarcely altered by the dislocations and
conflations by which one critic or another restores the original
letters and releases the present-day reader from the tutelage of the
so inconceivably astute redactor.
It remains to remark that most of the scholars who have occupied
themselves with this work do not trouble themselves very much about
the meaning and the connexion of Paul’s statements, but are like
surgeons who think more of their skill in handling the knife than of
being quite sure about the diagnosis which is to direct the incision,
and therefore not seldom fall victims to the temptation of having
recourse to an operation in cases where it turns out to have been
unnecessary or even injurious._(_116_)_
As a work which stands much above the average of [pg 149] the usual
cutting-up hypotheses we may mention Spitta’s work on Romans._(_117_)_
He distinguishes in the canonical Epistle two writings, a longer one
consisting of, in the main—allowing for incidental
interpolations—chapters i.-xi. with fragments from xv. and xvi., and a
shorter writing which is made up of chapters xii., xiii. and xiv.,
with fragments of xv. and xvi. The longer one, which is the older, is
supposed to have been preserved entire, the shorter is of later
origin, and it lacks the introduction.
The problem of the composite character of the main epistle in
connexion with the address and similar questions, is solved by
supposing that it is a working up of an earlier general treatise
intended for Jewish Christians into a letter addressed to the Roman
Gentile Christians.
The controversy about the much-discussed series of greetings in Rom.
xvi. is disposed of by attaching this to the shorter epistle, which is
held to have been written between the first and second imprisonment.
It is true this solution can only find favour with those who have made
up their minds to take upon them the burdensome hypothesis of the
second imprisonment along with the complete or partial acceptance of
the genuineness of the Pastoral epistles.
In working them up, the redactor is supposed to have followed the
method of bringing in the arguments of the second letter in those
places in the first where they seemed most appropriate. That he showed
no remarkable address in this process is credited to him as a proof of
his historical existence.
Holtzmann has nothing very complimentary to say about the
representatives of the dissection and interpolation criticism. In his
New Testament Theology he reproaches them with “straining out the
gnat,” and indulging in critical vivisection, instead of studying the
[pg 150] currents and undercurrents of Jewish and Hellenistic thought
which run side by side through Paul’s work, and so becoming cured of
their mania.
In connexion with this, it is, however, curious that he himself, when
he was asked why he never lectured on the Epistle to the Romans, used
to say that the composition of Romans was, in his opinion, too
problematical for him to venture to deal with the Epistle, so long as
he was not obliged to do so.
[pg 151]
VI
THE POSITION AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
1899. _Paul Feine._ Das gesetzesfreie Evangelium des Paulus nach
seinem Werdegange dargestellt. (Paul’s Gospel of Freedom from the Law:
a Study of its Growth.)
_Paul Wernle._ Paulus als Heidenmissionar. (Paul as a Missionary to
the Gentiles.)
_Heinrich Weinel._ Paulus als kirchlicher Organisator. (Paul as a
Church Organiser.)
_Hermann Jakoby._ Neutestamentliche Ethik. (New Testament Ethics.)
1900. _Arthur Titius._ Der Paulinismus unter dem Gesichtspunkt der
Seligkeit. (Paulinism with Special Reference to Final Salvation.)
_A. Drescher._ Das Leben Jesu bei Paulus. (The Life of Jesus in Paul’s
Writings.)
_Karl Dick._ Der schriftstellerische Plural bei Paulus. (The Literary
Use of the First Person Plural in Paul’s Writings.)
_Adolf Harnack._ Das Wesen des Christentums. (Translated under the
title “What is Christianity?”)
1901. _Paul Wernle._ Die Anfänge unserer Religion. (Translated under
the title “The Beginnings of Christianity.”)
1902. _Otto Pfleiderer._ Das Urchristentum, seine Schriften und
Lehren. (Primitive Christianity, its Documents and Doctrines.) Second,
revised and extended edition. (Translated, 4 vols., London,
1906-1911.)
_Paul Feine._ Jesus Christus und Paulus.
_G. F. Heinrici._ Das Urchristentum. (Primitive Christianity.)
1903. _Georg Hollmann._ Urchristentum in Corinth. (Primitive
Christianity in Corinth.)
_Emil Sokolowski._ Die Begriffe Geist und Leben bei Paulus in ihrer
Beziehung zu einander. (The Conceptions of “Spirit” and “Life” in
Paul, in their Relations to one another.)
_Wilhelm Bousset._ Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen
Zeitalter. (The Religion of Judaism in New Testament Times.) Die
jüdische Apokalyptik, ihre religionsgeschichtliche Herkunft und ihre
Bedeutung für das Neue Testament. (Jewish Apocalyptic: its Origin as
indicated by Comparative Religion, and its Significance for the New
Testament.)
[pg 152]
_Paul Volz._ Jüdische Eschatologie von Daniel bis Akiba. (Jewish
Eschatology from Daniel to Akiba.)
_W. Heitmüller._ Taufe und Abendmahl bei Paulus. (Baptism and the
Lord’s Supper in Paul’s Teaching.)
_Martin Brückner._ Die Entstehung der paulinischen Christologie. (How
the Pauline Christology arose.)
1904. _Heinrich Weinel._ Paulus. (E. T. St. Paul: The Man and his
Work, 1906.)
_Ernst von Dobschütz._ Die Probleme des apostolischen Zeitalters. (The
Problems of the Apostolic Age.)
_Maurice Goguel._ L’Apôtre Paul et Jésus-Christ.
_Alfred Juncker._ Die Ethik des Apostels Paulus.
_William Wrede._ Paulus. (E. T. by E. Lummis, 1907.)
1905. _Hugo Gressmann._ Der Ursprung der israelitisch-jüdischen
Eschatologie. (The Origin of the Israelitish-Jewish Eschatology.)
1906. _Paul Feine._ Paulus als Theologe. (Paul as a Theologian.)
_P. Kölbing._ Die geistige Einwirkung der Person Jesu auf Paulus. (The
Spiritual Influence of the Person of Jesus upon Paul.)
_Eberhard Vischer._ Die Paulusbriefe. (The Pauline Epistles.)
_Wilhelm Karl._ Beiträge zum Verständnis der soteriologischen
Erfahrungen und Spekulationen des Apostels Paulus. (Contributions
towards the Understanding of the Soteriological Experiences and
Speculations of the Apostle Paul.)
_W. Bousset._ Der Apostel Paulus.
1907. _Adolf Jülicher._ Paulus und Jesus.
_Arnold Meyer._ Wer hat das Christentum gegründet, Jesus oder Paulus?
(Who founded Christianity, Jesus or Paul?)
_A. Schettler._ Die paulinische Formel “Durch Christus.” (The Pauline
Formula “through Christ.”)
_J. Wellhausen._ Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte (6th ed.).
1908. _Carl Munzinger._ Paulus in Corinth.
_Hans Windisch._ Die Entsündigung des Christen nach Paulus. (The
Purification of the Christian from Sin in Paul’s Teaching.)
_Reinhold Seeberg._ Dogmengeschichte. (History of Dogma.) 2nd edition.
_Wilhelm Walther._ Pauli Christentum, Jesu Evangelium.
1909. _Adolf Harnack._ Dogmengeschichte. 4th edition.
_Martin Dibelius._ Die Geisterwelt im Glauben des Paulus. (The World
of Spirits according to Paul’s Belief.)
_Johannes Weiss._ Paulus und Jesus. (E. T. by H. T. Chaytor, 1909.)
Christus: Die Anfänge des Dogmas. (Christ: The Beginning of Dogma. E.
T. by V. D. Davis, 1911.)
_Johann Haussleiter._ Paulus.
_R. Knopf._ Paulus.
_W. Olschewski._ Die Wurzeln der paulinischen Christologie. (The Roots
of Pauline Christologie.)
1910. _A. Schlatter._ Neutestamentliche Theologie.
[pg 153]
_R. Drescher._ Das Leben Jesu bei Paulus.
_Eberhard Vischer._ Der Apostel Paulus und sein Werk.
_Julius Schniewind._ Die Begriffe Wort und Evangelium bei Paulus (The
Meaning of the Terms “Word” and “Gospel” in Paul’s Writings.)
1911. _Adolf Deissmann._ Paulus, eine kultur- und
religionsgeschichtliche Skizze. (Paul, A Sketch with a Background of
Ancient Civilisation and Religion.)
_Johannes Müller._ Die Entstehung des persönlichen Christentums der
paulinischen Gemeinden. (How the personal Christianity of the Pauline
Churches arose.)
THE dawn of the twentieth century found Pauline scholarship in a
peculiar frame of mind. The criticism of the Ultra-Tübingen critics
had not succeeded in disquieting it, nor Holtzmann in reassuring it.
That the problems by which Loman, Steck, and van Manen were tormented
were mere cobwebs of the imagination was so completely taken for
granted that in dealing with the Pauline teaching no further attention
was paid to them. On the other hand, however, the problems previously
recognised by critical scholarship had not been so completely solved
by Holtzmann that they could be considered as done with.
The disquisitions in which in his “New Testament Theology” he resumed
the results of the whole study of the subject since Baur, did not have
the effect which he had expected. They were much discussed and much
praised; the massive learning and wide reading, the art of the
literary treatment and the subtlety of the dialectic compelled
admiration. But behind all this chorus of appreciation, a certain
sense of depression made itself felt. People were dismayed to find
that Paulinism was so complicated, and that the web of Paul’s thought
must be so delicately and cautiously handled if it was to be
disentangled. Was the doctrine of the Apostle of the Gentiles really a
product of such extremely intricate mental processes as it was here
represented to be?
The process of disillusionment did not go so far as to lead to the
calling in question of the fundamental view there offered. But results
were not put forward with [pg 154] the same confidence as before;
effort was directed rather to strengthen them by revision and
correction.
It was in this frame of mind that Pfleiderer prepared the second
edition of his “Primitive Christianity.”_(_118_)_ Whereas he had
formerly taken for granted the influence of the Greek world upon Paul,
as being something self-evident, he now feels obliged to offer proof
of it, in a newly inserted chapter upon Hellenism, Stoicism, and
Seneca, in order to arrive at the result . . . that his Greek
education was in any case “a problematical possibility.” While he had
previously held that the combination of the Alexandrian Platonic
doctrine of immortality with eschatology was the great work
accomplished by the Apostle of the Gentiles, he now is inclined to see
a spiritualisation of the future-hope already prepared for in Judaism,
and quotes the Apocalypse of Ezra and Jewish Hellenistic literature in
testimony of this._(_119_)_
Fate willed that about the same time theology should be seized by the
impulse of popularisation, and now found itself in the position of
being obliged to offer assured, absolutely assured, results in
reference to Paulinism. The most important works of this character are
Paul Wernle’s “Beginnings of Christianity” and Heinrich Weinel’s
“Paul.”_(_120_)_
[pg 155]
The efforts of these writers are directed to bring the author and his
thoughts into close relations with our time. It is not his theology in
its subtleties and its contradictions that they seek to grasp and to
portray, but his religion—what lies behind the system and the formula.
In this way they hope to escape many difficulties over which Holtzmann
had laboured, and to be able to bring out the fundamental and
intelligible elements which in him had been rather to seek.
Wernle makes Paul discourse in the character of the great missionary
apologist; Weinel draws him as the preacher of the religion of
inwardness, who as “Pharisee,” “Seeker after God,” “prophet,”
“apostle,” “founder of the Church,” “theologian,” and “man,” was all
things in one.
The lively portraiture, quite different from the conventional works on
the subject, found a ready welcome, and incited others to imitation.
In consistently emphasising the apologetic aspect of Paul’s teaching
Wernle brought up many ingenious ideas for discussion. Weinel, on his
part, brought again to the consciousness of both theologians and
laymen the poetic and emotional element in the Apostle’s world of
ideas.
But they found no new way of grasping and understanding him.
They walk in a shady path which runs parallel to the main road. But
its pleasantness is associated with certain dangers, which they
themselves, and those who followed them, have not always escaped.
When earlier writers on the subject modernised, they did so
unconsciously. Wernle and Weinel, however, do [pg 156] so on
principle, and have no scruple about throwing light on what is obscure
in Paulinism by the use of more or less appropriate catchwords of the
most modern theology.
Not seldom they imagine they are explaining something when they are in
reality only talking round the subject. In this way there enters into
their treatment a kind of forced ingenuity, one might almost say
flimsiness.
Their love of graphic description also sometimes becomes a temptation
to them. They do not always remember to keep it within bounds, and
sometimes allow themselves to fall into a kind of artificial naïveté.
Wernle in particular delights to wield a pre-Raphaelite brush. He
pictures the Apostle, for instance, in the evening at his inn,
receiving visitors, exhorting and consoling them, weaving tent-cloth,
busy with a letter, all at the same time. “Sometimes stones would come
flying into the room as he was dictating—the Jews had set on the city
mob to attack him. Many an abrupt transition in his letters may have
had its origin in a violent interruption of this kind.”_(_121_)_
Feine and Titius begin with a critical examination of previous views.
They are not in this wholly disinterested, being in search of a
Paulinism which has more to offer to modern religion, as they apprehend
it, than the one-sidedly historical post-Baur liberalism. The result
is that while they show themselves free from many of the
presuppositions and prejudices which are common to the others, they
are at the same time not in a position to put Paulinism on a new
historical basis. They agree [pg 157] in opposing the separation of
Paulinism from Primitive Christianity which is practised by Holsten
and Holtzmann. They refuse to be converted to the unsatisfactory view
that Paulinism, as being a so unique personal creation, must have
remained unintelligible even to Paul’s contemporaries. Before making
up their minds to derive the whole of Paul’s doctrine from the vision
at his conversion and the influence of Greek ideas, they propose to
examine it in reference to the conceptions which connect it with
Jesus, with primitive Christianity, and with Judaism.
Consequently they are loth to admit Greek elements and the resulting
duality in the Apostle’s thought. Feine maintains that in the
Apostle’s mind before his conversion, Greek ideas were only present in
so far as they had already been adopted by Pharisaism. Titius “will
not deny that there is a touch of Hellenism in the great Apostle,” but
is far from seeking to explain the doctrine of flesh and spirit and
the mysticism connected with the “new creation” purely from this point
of view. On the other hand both of them assign a large part in the
formation of Paul’s doctrine to his Jewish consciousness, and
consequently are led to a comprehensive recognition of eschatology.
In his examination of the individual views Titius always takes the
future-hope as his starting-point—indeed his book begins with chapters
on God and eschatology. He shows that redemption, in the most general
conception of it, is a liberation from the present evil world and a
deliverance looking to the world which is to come, and that
justification was originally bound up with the thought of the judgment
at the parousia. Instead, however, of systematically carrying out the
analysis in this fashion, he breaks off and begins to work up the
historical material which he has brought to light on the lines of the
problems, definitions, and distinctions of modern theology, because,
as the very title of his book shows, he undertakes his investigation
with a view [pg 158] to showing the significance of New Testament
teaching for the present day. In order to portray the “religious life”
he makes it a principle “not to hesitate to turn aside from the
highway, to which the technical terms serve as sign-posts.” Thus he
comes finally to discover everywhere that Paul clarified the doctrines
which he took over and transformed them into ethico-religious teaching
and subjective experience. From “the edifice of
eschatologico-enthusiastic thought, most closely connected with it but
unmistakable in its distinctive character,” he sees, to his
satisfaction, “the spiritual life of the new religion” showing forth.
Here also, therefore, as with Wernle and Weinel, there is conscious
and intentional modernisation, in order to discover the religion of
Paul behind his theology.
One difference there is, however. The others brought to this
undertaking a certain naïveté and enthusiasm which enabled them to see
the modern and the historical the one in the other. Titius is an
observer with a keen eye for the really historical. He holds past and
present side by side but separate, and must apply a mighty effort of
will and understanding and do violence to his feelings in order to
bring them into connexion. Out of these inner pangs a book has come to
the birth which in matters of detail is full of just and suggestive
remarks, but as a whole is unsatisfactory.
The problem of the relation of Paul to Jesus stands for Titius and
Feine as the foreground of the interest. Both hold the view that the
connexion is a much closer one than criticism had hitherto been
prepared to admit. The indifference which the Apostle professes
regarding “Christ after the flesh” is not to be understood in the
sense that he had no concern with His teaching. In his detailed
monograph Feine endeavours to prove that Paul shows himself familiar
with the words and thoughts of the historic Jesus, and in his
eschatology, doctrine of redemption, ethics, attitude towards the law,
and conception of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, only carries to a
further [pg 159] point of development what is already present or
fore-shadowed in the teaching of Jesus. Titius set himself the same
task, and believes himself to have proved “to how great an extent the
Apostle bases his views on the thoughts of Jesus, attaches himself to
them, and further develops them.”_(_122_)_
This result is opposed by Maurice Goguel,_(_123_)_ who offers a
thoroughgoing defence of the usual view. He is prepared to admit that
Paul knew more of the life and teaching of Jesus than his Epistles
show; but a fundamental difference in doctrine is, he thinks, not to
be denied, and he finds that it consists in the fact that the one
preaches “salvation,” the other the way of obtaining it. In his
utterances about redemption through the death and resurrection of
Christ, the parousia, Christology, Church and sacraments, Paul
expresses, according to Goguel, views which go much beyond the horizon
of the historical Jesus. A point of contact is only to be found in the
simple ethical teaching. In reference to the law, Jesus prepared the
way for what the Apostle of the Gentiles accomplished, without fully
measuring the far-reaching consequences of his attitude.
The problem which theology since the time of Baur had always avoided
now therefore came at last to discussion. Goguel’s essay did not
indeed greatly elucidate the matter. That the thesis of Feine and
Titius goes far beyond what the material warrants was not difficult to
prove. On the other hand, it had, in justice, to be conceded to them
that they had shown that there was [pg 160] something in common
between the fundamental conceptions of Jesus and Paul on which
sufficient stress had not previously been laid.
Goguel’s sharp antitheses are at first sight more convincing than the
somewhat involved argument of Feine, because he has the direct
evidence of the text on his side. The difficulty, however, immediately
makes itself felt when he endeavours to make it intelligible exactly
why Paul was forced to create new conceptions. He cannot point to any
objective factors to account for this development, and is consequently
reduced to explaining everything psychologically.
From this exceedingly complicated controversy one thing results with
certainty, namely, that the problem, in the form in which it is
stated, is an unreal one. The statement of the problem which is here
presupposed leaves out of account the middle term, primitive
Christianity.
The credit of having expressed this clearly, and thus put an end to
the unprofitable wrangling about “Jesus and Paul” and “Jesus or Paul,”
belongs to Harnack._(_124_)_ If, he writes in the 1909 edition of his
“History of Dogma,” even in the first generation the religion of Jesus
underwent a change, it must be said that it was not Paul who was
responsible for this but the primitive Christian community. He is not,
however, able to explain why the Apostle of the Gentiles goes still
further than the primitive community.
The question of the peculiarly inconsistent attitude of the Apostle
towards the law is not elucidated by Titius and Feine.
The ethics are treated in monographs by Jakoby and Juncker._(_125_)_
The former gives a detailed description. [pg 161] The latter tries to
discover the fundamental principle, and naturally finds himself
obliged to deal with the whole doctrine of redemption. In the method
which he applies he recalls Titius. With historical insight he
recognises, in his fine chapter upon the origin of the new life, that
all the ethical conceptions of Paul are in one way or another of an
eschatological and “physical” character. Later on he falls a victim to
the temptation to modernise.
Thus he tries, for instance, to show that Paul did not think of the
influence of the Spirit in man as analogous to a physical process,
but, on the contrary, “regarded the feeling of thankful love towards
God and Christ as the subjective root of the new way of life.” So that
we find here, too, the dread of recognising anything objective in the
Apostle’s views and the tendency, not indeed to fall into the
“one-sidedly intellectual view,” but to bring into the foreground the
“specifically religious estimate of the Apostle’s person and gospel.”
It is no accident that the scholars of this period are so anxious to
distinguish between theology and religion. This expedient covers
dismay and apprehension.
Meanwhile the study of Late Judaism had been going its own way. The
further it advanced the more evident it became that this was the soil
on which the theology of Paul had grown up. Holtzmann’s New Testament
Theology had not availed to render theological science proof against
the assaults which it was to experience in the next few years from
this direction. The impression was too strong to be escaped. And when
the results [pg 162] of the study were presented, with a certain
provisional completeness, in Bousset’s powerful book on “Jewish
Religious Life in New Testament Times,” it became certain that the
apprehension had not been unfounded._(_126_)_
The naïve spiritualisation of the theology as practised by Holsten,
Pfleiderer, and Holtzmann—by the latter no longer quite naïvely,—was
over and done with._(_127_)_ The recognition of a “physical”_(_128_)_
aspect in Paul’s expectations of the future was no longer sufficient.
It had to be [pg 163] admitted that his doctrine of redemption as a
whole bore this character, and that the fundamental strain in his
mysticism was not ethical but physical, as Lüdemann had declared as
long ago as 1872 without suspecting the far-reaching consequences of
his observation.
The only question now was how much had to be conceded to this alien
system of thought which was endeavouring to draw Paul within its
borders, and how much could be saved from it.
In this quandary theologians had recourse to the expedient of applying
the distinction between “theoretical” (theological) and “religious” to
the doctrine of the Apostle, as Holtzmann had already tried to do when
he could no longer refuse to recognise its Gnostic, intellectualistic
character.
The position became especially critical in view of the concessions
which had to be made regarding the Pauline conception of baptism and
the Lord’s Supper. Up to this time, that chapter had given little
trouble to theological science. It had been taken for granted that at
bottom it could only be a question of symbolism. The doctrine of
redemption on its ethical side found, it was thought, in the sacred
ceremonies its cultual expression.
Holtzmann, too, in the section on “Mystical Conceptions”_(_129_)_
_(Mysteriöses)_ had still to all intents and purposes taken the same
ground. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are, he explains, in the first
place, acts of confession by which the death of the Lord is
proclaimed. To this has to be added, in the case of the Lord’s Supper,
the significance of a communion meal, and in the case of baptism the
value of a symbolic act. It creates, according to Romans vi., a
mystical fellowship with the buried and risen Christ. “The outward
symbol of complete immersion signifies and represents the
disappearance of the old, fleshly man, the coming forth out of the
water represents the forthgoing of a new, spiritual man.”
Paul, Holtzmann thinks, puts the content of his [pg 164] “experience”
into this ceremonial act, and thereby cuts it loose from the earlier
view which had arisen from its connexion with John the Baptist.
Strictly speaking, he transforms both the cultus-acts, by bringing his
new conception of Christianity into connexion with them in order to
give it cultual expression.
Probably—we are still following Holtzmann—he did this under the
guidance of analogies which he found in the Mystery-religions of the
period. The expressions which he uses at any rate remind us sometimes
of the language which is associated with them. This, then, was the
point from which the later transformation began. “It was, in fact,
Paul who from an outlying, one might almost say a remote point of his
system of thought, opened up for the early Catholic Church a road
which it would, indeed, most probably have followed even without this
precedent, which was given, as it were, merely incidentally and
casually.”
It is interesting to observe precisely what views are intended to be
excluded by these guarded explanations. Holtzmann is concerned to
emphasise the view that baptism and the Lord’s Supper have in the
Apostle’s doctrine a rather subordinate importance, and that they are
not real sacraments but quasi-sacramental acts. He deliberately avoids
the plain issue, on which after all everything really depends, whether
baptism and the Supper effect redemption or only represent it.
But those who came after him were obliged to raise this question, and
so far as they were willing to respect the documents were obliged to
answer that the sacraments not only represent but effect redemption.
Wernle remarks regretfully that the cultus-acts have in Paul a much
greater importance than one would be inclined to expect, and that in
certain passages he tolerates or even suggests “pagan” views. Weinel
is obliged to admit that alongside of the religion of inwardness which
he has discovered in the Apostle’s teaching, a sacramental religion,
which is inherently opposed to it, from time to [pg 165] time appears.
“Sometimes,” he writes, “it is faith that brings the Spirit, sometimes
baptism, sometimes it is faith that unites with Christ, sometimes the
Lord’s Supper.” Titius feels himself obliged to give up the symbolical
interpretation of Romans vi., which for Holtzmann still forms a fixed
datum, and admits that the atmosphere of this chapter is
“supranaturalistic,” and that the baptism there referred to is a real
baptism into the death of Christ and an equally real partaking in His
resurrection. Feine, in _Jesus Christus and Paulus,_ insists that the
sacramental character of the cultus-acts described by Paul should be
universally acknowledged.
Heitmüller, in his work on “Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Paul’s
Writings,”_(_130_)_ gives the old and the new view side by side, and
shows that it is the latter which alone is justified by the documents.
The mystical connexion which in baptism and the Lord’s Supper is set
up between the believer and Christ is a “physico-hyperphysical one,”
and has as its consequence that the believer shares _realiter_ in the
death and resurrection of Christ.
For the liberal conception of Paulinism this was a blow at the heart.
If redemption is effected through the sacraments, these are no longer
an “outlying point” in the Apostle’s doctrine, but lie at its centre.
And at the same time the distinction between “theoretical”
(theological) and “religious” is rendered impossible. A doctrine of
redemption which is thus bound up with Mysteries which work in a
physico-hyperphysical way is in its essence purely
supernaturalistic._(_131_)_
[pg 166]
The courage of theological thinkers was put to a severe test. When
Baur and his followers made their profession of faith in unbiassed
free investigation they could have had no inkling that it would become
so difficult for a later generation to remain true to this principle.
To give up the distinction between “theoretical” and religious and to
follow a purely historical method meant, as things stood at the
beginning of the twentieth century, to be left with an entirely
temporally conditioned Paulinism, of which modern ways of thought
could make nothing, and to trace out a system which for our religion
is dead.
At this crisis theology encountered in William Wrede a candid friend
who sought to keep it in the path of sincerity. His _Paulus,_ short
and written in such a way as to be universally intelligible, appeared
in the year 1904._(_132_)_
The “theology,” he writes, is in Paul not to be separated from the
“religion.” His religion is through and through theological; his
theology is his religion.
The theory which Holtzmann introduced in his “New Testament Theology,”
and which Wernle, Weinel, Heitmüller, Titius, and the rest had
developed, thus came to an untimely end before it had left its nonage.
It survived only seven years.
And then the second expedient—that Paul had thought out no system, but
just put down his thoughts in any kind of fortuitous order—is set
aside. The framework of the doctrine of redemption, Wrede declares, is
very closely articulated. Further, it is not really complicated, but
is at bottom quite simple, if once we take account of the
thought-material out of which it is constructed and take the most
general conceptions as the starting-point.
Redemption—this is, according to Wrede, Paul’s train [pg 167] of
thought—is not something which takes place in the individual as such,
as the later Christian view was, but signifies a universal event in
which the individual has a part.
It consists in the deliverance of mankind from the dominion of the
powers which hold sway over this world. These powers have been
destroyed by the death and resurrection of Jesus, as will become
manifest at the parousia. Thus redemption is essentially an insurance
for this future.
But it is even in the present real, though not visible. Christ is the
representative of the human race. What happened to Him, happened to
all.
“All men are therefore from the moment of His death set free, as He is
Himself, from the hostile powers; and all are by His resurrection
transferred into a condition of indestructible life.” The proof of
this change is given by the Spirit. He represents in the redeemed the
super-earthly life, as a “gift of the last times in which the powers
of the world to come already exercise an influence upon the present
existence.”
This wholly “objective” conception of redemption is, Wrede admits, for
our modern modes of thought rather impersonal and cold. “It takes
place in a way which is wholly external to the individual man, and the
events seem, as it were, to be only enacted in Christ.”
Redemption is effected in the sacraments. “The ‘physical’
transformation is effected by physical processes.” Paul’s thought
moves, therefore, among crude, unsubtilised conceptions.
His statements about justification by faith and about the law are
based upon this fundamental view, and represent merely the
“controversial teaching” to which he was forced in order to maintain
the cause of freedom from the law.
The material of his world of thought was, therefore, Jewish. What was
the transformation by which it became Christian?
[pg 168]
Paul’s conception of the Christ_(_133_)_ was fully formed before he
came to believe in Jesus. At his conversion, by the vision on the road
to Damascus, the only new element that he took up into his conception
was that this heavenly being had temporarily assumed a human form of
existence in order by His death and resurrection to redeem mankind and
to bring in the new order of things. An influence of the teaching of
Jesus upon the theology of the Apostle to the Gentiles is not to be
recognised. Wrede makes the gap between the two as wide as possible,
and insists that Paul’s gospel must be considered as independent of,
and essentially different in character from, that of Jesus.
The Apostle’s adoption of the view that the end of the law had come,
is, according to Wrede, partly due to his experiences at his
conversion, partly to the exigencies of the mission to the Gentiles.
Of the value and the remarkable literary beauty of the book it is
impossible to say too much. It belongs, not to theology, but to the
literature of the world.
But one must not, in one’s admiration, forget justice. What is here
set forth is not absolutely new. A view of a similar character, and
more closely reasoned, had been put forward by
Kabisch—Kabisch,_(_134_)_ whom theologians had passed over in complete
silence, because they did not know what to make of him. Wrede does
nothing else than to give to the presentation of the latter’s
discoveries the advantage of his literary skill, while at the same
time showing that the separation of “theory” (theology) and “religion”
which had barred the way to their acceptance is not tenable. There is
one thing which is to be regretted in Wrede’s book, and that is that
the terse popular method of presentation forbids any detailed
discussion of the problems. If the author had worked [pg 169] out his
arguments thoroughly, and replied to his opponents and predecessors,
he would have been obliged to face many questions which, as it was,
did not force themselves upon him.
What are the points that remain obscure?
Wrede proposes to conceive the possibility of redemption in such a way
that “mankind,” in view of Christ’s solidarity with the race by virtue
of His earthly life, has a part in His death and resurrection. This
view is, in this form, untenable. In Paul, salvation has not reference
to mankind as a whole, but only to the elect. It is also questionable
whether the idea of racial solidarity suffices to explain how the
death and resurrection of Jesus can realise themselves in other men.
What is the basis of the mystical union with Christ? To this question
Wrede has given no answer.
Then, too, the inconsistent attitude of Paul towards the law was not
explained by him. He does not even succeed in showing how the Apostle
arrived at the idea that the law was no longer valid. The suggestion
that it was in part through his experience at his conversion, in part
through the exigencies of the mission to the Gentiles, is a mere
expedient. Unless it is possible to explain Paul’s attitude, with all
its inner contradictions, as a logical and necessary conclusion from
his system as a whole, it remains for us practically
unexplained._(_135_)_
Again, Wrede gives no scheme of the events of the End, although such a
scheme obviously belongs to the “system.”
It is not explained, either, how the death of Jesus can be interpreted
at the same time as taking place for the forgiveness of sins. In
general, the relation between the essential theology, as laid down in
the mystical doctrine of redemption, and the “controversial doctrines”
is not clear.
[pg 170]
In regard to the question of the relation of Paul to Jesus, Wrede
holds that they lived in two wholly different worlds of thought. This
is connected with his view that the Galilaean Master made no claim to
the Messiahship, but was first raised to Messianic dignity after His
death, and that this claim was then projected back into the Gospels in
the form that Jesus had made His rank known to His disciples only, and
had enjoined upon them to keep silence until after His death._(_136_)_
His preaching was, above all things, ethical. So far as concerns
eschatology and the meaning to be attached to His death, the Apostle
of the Gentiles received no impulse of a theological character from
Him.
Paul, therefore, created something essentially new, which has, one
might almost say, nothing to do with the thought of Jesus, and also
goes far beyond the conceptions of primitive Christianity._(_137_)_
Thus for Wrede, as for Holsten and Holtzmann, the doctrine of Paul is
an isolated entity without connexion in the past or influence upon the
future. And he, too, finds himself unable to explain why the system
thus remained without influence. That the “controversial theology,”
with its insistence on the atoning death, lost its significance when
the question of the law ceased to be actual may appear plausible. But
why did the mystical doctrine of redemption get pushed aside instead
of being further developed? Its presuppositions—if Wrede’s account of
[pg 171] matters is correct—could hardly have been much altered in the
next generation.
A valuable supplement in many respects to Wrede’s views is offered by
Martin Brückner’s study of the origin of the Pauline
Christology._(_138_)_
The author offers a detailed proof that the Pauline Christology arose
by the insertion of the earthly episode of the incarnation, dying and
rising again into the already present conception of a pre-existent
heavenly Personality._(_139_)_ Incidentally he gives an admirably
clear account of the Jewish eschatology and its formation._(_140_)_
He shows that the Jewish eschatology itself, in the Apocalypses of
Ezra and Baruch, distinguished between the temporally limited
Messianic Kingdom and the subsequent complete renewal of the world,
and that, in conformity with this, two resurrections have to be
recognised. One, in which only a limited number have a part, takes
place at the appearance of the Messiah; the other, the general
resurrection, only follows at the end of the intervening Kingdom. The
scene of the latter was pictured, he thinks, by Paul, as by his Jewish
predecessors, as the land of Palestine, with the New Jerusalem as its
centre.
It is interesting to notice how Wrede and Brückner, without themselves
remarking it, have refuted one of the weightiest objections of the
Ultra-Tübingen critics. [pg 172] The latter had asserted that it was
impossible that the process of deification of the Person of Jesus
could have reached its completion within a few years, and had claimed
for it at least two generations. Now, however, it is shown that it is
not this process at all, but another, which could take place in a
moment, which has to be considered, since it is only a question of the
taking up of the episode of the incarnation, death, and resurrection
into the already present and living conception of the Messiah.
The immediate effect of Wrede’s presentation of matters was that
writers ventured more confidently to accept the “physical” view of the
Pauline doctrine of redemption, and that the distinction between
“theory” (theology) and religion, where writers could not make up
their minds to do without it, was applied with moderation._(_141_)_
[pg 173]
But he did not succeed in forcing on a thorough revision of previous
views. Harnack, for instance, in the 1909 edition of the “History of
Dogma” stands by his account of 1893, unshaken._(_142_)_
Reinhold Seeberg_(_143_)_ undertook in 1908 a very interesting attempt
to walk in new paths, but does not deal with Wrede and his problems.
He holds to the view that the Apostle did not create “a unified
system,” but that his thought moved amid a number of different sets of
ideas, which for him were held together by “religion as an
experience.”
This neglect of Wrede’s work does not mean anything; it was simply
that the history of dogma could make nothing of his view. It is
significant, however, that among those who accepted his view in
substance, no one made the attempt to carry it to victory by a
comprehensive presentation of it on an adequate scale.
The cause of this lies in the peculiar difficulties which lie
concealed in the scheme which he sketched out.
The fact is that the “physical” element which is to be recognised in
Paul’s doctrine is neither all of one piece nor wholly to be explained
from Late Judaism. Strictly [pg 174] speaking, it takes three
different forms, of which one is peculiar to the eschatology, another
to the mystical doctrine of redemption, and the third to the
sacraments.
The “materialism” of the conception of redemption which is directed
towards the future has to do with super-earthly powers, with judgment,
bodily resurrection and transformation.
Somewhat different is the “realism” of the mystical doctrine of the
new creation, which asserts that believers here and now experience
death and resurrection in fellowship with Christ, and so put on,
beneath the earthly exterior which conceals it, a nature essentially
immune from corruption.
Different from this conception again is the sacramental, inasmuch as
it represents in some inexplicable fashion an externalisation of it.
What, according to the mystical doctrine, seemed to take place by
itself without being connected with an external act, is here to be
thought of as the effect of eating and drinking, and cleansing with
water. The sacramental conception is a magical conception.
Of these three varieties of the “physical,” only the first can be
immediately explained from Late Judaism. For the two others it offers
no analogy. Late Judaism remained true to its Judaic character in
knowing nothing of either mysticism or sacraments.
On the other hand, these three varieties of the “physical” in Paul’s
doctrine of redemption do not stand side by side unrelated, but seem
to be somehow connected in such a way that the eschatological element
dominates and supplies the basis of the other two. The most obvious
procedure would have been to attempt to derive the mystical and
sacramental conceptions from the eschatological, as being the
root-conception.
A beginning in this direction had been made by Kabisch when he
attempted to exhibit the connexion between eschatology and the
mystical doctrine of the real dying and rising again with
Christ._(_144_)_
[pg 175]
But in doing so he did not take into account the sacraments. It was
just these, however, which seemed to make it _a priori_ impossible to
explain Paulinism exclusively on the basis of Late Judaism. Therefore
Wrede and his followers seek other sources. They try to explain the
system, not solely from the side of eschatology, but from that of
“Comparative Religion,” and hold that it betrays the influence not
only of Late-Jewish but also of Oriental ideas generally, such as are
found in the Mystery-religions.
No doubt the first question which here arises is whether the methods
of Comparative Religion are essentially applicable to the explanation
of Paulinism.
To apply the methods of Comparative Religion means to study the
individual religions, not in isolation, but with the purpose of
investigating the mutual influences which they have openly or covertly
exercised on one another.
At bottom, therefore, it is a necessary outcome of the application of
scientific methods generally, and it only received a special name
because theological scholarship so long shut its doors against it.
Under this distinctive name the method attained to influence and
honour in connexion with the critical study of the Old Testament and
the Graeco-Oriental cults. In the former department of study it made
an end of the prepossession that Judaism had developed entirely by its
own inner impulses, and showed how much material of a generally
Oriental character it had adopted. In particular it showed that
Late-Jewish Apocalyptic is full of conceptions from the Babylonian and
the Irano-Zarathustrian religions, and represents a combination of
universal cosmological speculations with the future-hope of the
ancient Jewish prophetism._(_145_)_
In the comparative study of the heathen religions it became apparent
that the Mystery-religions, which [pg 176] entered on their conquering
progress westwards about the same time as Christian Gnosticism,
combined Greek religious feeling and a Greek cosmogony with Oriental
cultus-ideas.
In both these cases it is a question of contacts and influences which
were due to political and cultural relations, and produced their
effect in the course of extended periods of time and under favourable
historical circumstances. The method cannot simply be applied without
more ado to the explanation of the ideas of an individual man, since
most of its presuppositions would not here be valid. In the case of
religions, syncretism can work its way in and develop; in the case of
individuals it can only be recognised in a very limited degree. The
taking over and remoulding of foreign conceptions is a process
requiring numbers and time. The individual comes into question only so
far as he is organically united with a community which is active in
this way, and allows its instincts to influence him.
Paul belongs to Late Judaism. Whatever he received in the way of
influences such as Comparative Religion takes account of came to him
mainly through this channel. The suggestion that apart from this he
might be personally and directly affected by “Oriental” influences
calls for very cautious consideration. In particular we ought to be
very careful to guard against raising this possibility to a certainty
by general considerations regarding all that the child of the Diaspora
might have seen, heard, and read. The question can only be decided by
what we actually find in the Epistles.
It is further to be remarked that Late Judaism was no longer in his
time so open to external influences that any and every kind of
religious conception which was floating about anywhere in the Orient
could necessarily impose itself on Paul’s mind through this medium.
The period of assimilation was, speaking generally, at an end. The new
material had been—before Paul’s day—worked up along with the old into
a set of Apocalyptic conceptions, [pg 177] which, in spite of the
elbow-room which the heterogeneous ideas necessarily claimed for
themselves, did form a system, and appeared from without as relatively
complete and self-sufficing. The Oriental material has been poured
into Jewish moulds and received a Jewish impress.
A still further point is that any one whose thought moves in the
Apocalyptic system created by the books of Daniel and Enoch is not so
much exposed to, as withdrawn from, the action of free Oriental
influence. He is already saturated with those elements in regard to
receptivity which the Jewish mind possesses and the tendency to
assimilation, and possesses it not as something foreign to himself but
as Jewish. Apocalyptic tends to produce in him immunisation as against
further syncretistic infection.
This assertion is susceptible of historical proof. Late Judaism
stands, even before the beginning of our era, apart from the Oriental
religious movements. And it continues unaffected by them. Not one of
its representatives was concerned in the syncretistic movement. Philo
seeks to rationalise Judaism by the aid of Platonico-Stoic philosophy,
but he gives no place to the religious and cultural ideas by which he
was surrounded in Egypt. It is as though they had no existence for
him.
To apply the comparative method to Paul would, therefore, generally
speaking, mean nothing more or less than to explain him on the basis
of Late Judaism. Those who give due weight to the eschatological
character of his doctrine and to the problems and ideas which connect
it with works like the Apocalypse of Ezra are the true exponents of
“Comparative Religion,” even though they may make no claim to this
title. Any one who goes beyond this and tries to bring Paul into
direct connexion with the Orient as such commits himself to the
perilous path of scientific adventure.
Considerations of that kind were not taken into account by Wrede and
his followers. But even if they had become conscious of the
difficulties in the way of the application of the method to Paul, they
could not have acted otherwise. [pg 178] In spite of all theoretical
warnings this path had to be followed.
If once the mystical doctrine of the dying and rising again with
Christ is recognised to be “physical,” and the view of baptism and the
Supper to be sacramental, and if it is a further datum of the question
that Late Judaism knows nothing of mysticism or sacraments; and if one
is not content to assume that the Apostle has created or invented this
non-Jewish element out of his inner consciousness; there is at first
sight no alternative but to make the attempt to explain it from
conceptions and suggestions which are supposed to have come into it
from without, from some form or other of Oriental syncretism.
[pg 179]
VII
PAULINISM AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION
_Gustav Anrich._ Das antike Mysterienwesen in seinem Einfluss auf das
Christentum. (The Ancient Mysteries in their Influence on
Christianity.) 1894.
_Martin Brückner._ Der sterbende und auferstehende Gottheiland in den
orientalischen Religionen und ihr Verhältnis zum Christentum. (The
Saviour-God who dies and rises again in the Oriental Religions; and
their Relation to Christianity.) 1908.
_Karl Clemen._ Religionsgeschichtliche Erklärung des Neuen Testaments.
(An Explanation of the New Testament on the basis of Comparative
Religion.) 1909.
_Franz Cumont._ Les Mystères de Mithra. 1899. (E. T. by T. J.
McCormack, 1903.) Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain.
1906.
_Adolf Deissmann._ Licht vom Osten. 1908. (E. T. by L. R. M. Strachan,
“Light from the Ancient East,” 1910.) Die Urgeschichte des
Christentums im Lichte der Sprachforschung. (The Early History of
Christianity in the Light of Linguistic Research.) 1910.
_Albrecht Dieterich._ Abraxas. 1891. Nekyia. 1893. Eine
Mithrasliturgie. 1903.
_Arthur Drews._ Die Christusmythe. 1909. (E. T. by C. D. Burns.)
_Albert Eichhorn._ Das Abendmahl im Neuen Testament. (The Lord’s
Supper in the New Testament.) 1898.
_Johannes Geffken._ Aus der Werdezeit des Christentums. (From the
Formative Period of Christianity), 2nd ed., 1909.
_P. Gennrich._ Die Lehre von der Wiedergeburt . . in der
dogmengeschichtlichen und religionsgeschichtlichen Betrachtung. (The
Doctrine of Regeneration . . . from the point of view of the History
of Dogma and of Comparative Religion.) 1907.
_Otto Gruppe._ Die griechischen Kulte und Mythen in ihrer Beziehung zu
den orientalischen Religionen. (The Greek Cults and Myths in their
Relation to the Oriental Religions), vol. i., 1887. Griechische
Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte. (Greek Mythology and Comparative
Religion), 2 vols., 1906.
_Hermann Gunkel._ Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des Neuen
Testaments. (Contributions to the Understanding of the New Testament
from the point of view of Comparative Religion.) 1903.
[pg 180]
_Adolf Harnack._ Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den
ersten drei Jahrhunderten, vol. i., 1906. (E. T. by J. Moffatt, “The
Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries,”
2nd ed., 1908.)
_Hugo Hepding._ Attis, seine Mythen und sein Kult. (Attis, his Myths
and Cultus.) 1903.
_W. Heitmüller._ Taufe und Abendmahl bei Paulus. (Baptism and the
Lord’s Supper in Paul’s Teaching.) 1903.
Im Namen Jesu. Eine sprach- und religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung
zum neuen Testament, speziell zur altchristlichen Taufe. 1903. (In the
Name of Jesus. A Study of the New Testament from the point of view of
the History of Language and of Comparative Religion, with Special
Reference to Early Christian Baptism.)
_Adolf Jacoby._ Die antiken Mysterienreligionen und das Christentum.
(The Ancient Mystery-religions and Christianity.) 1910.
_Georg Mau._ Die Religionsphilosophie Kaiser Julians in seinen Reden
auf König Helios und die Göttermutter. (The Emperor Julian’s
Philosophy of Religion as shown in his Orations on King Helios and the
Dea Mater.) 1908.
_Max Maurenbrecher._ Von Jerusalem nach Rom. (From Jerusalem to Rome.)
1910.
_Salomon Reinach._ Cultes, mythes et religions. (1905-1906-1908.)
Richard Reitzenstein. Poimandres. 1904.
Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen. Ihre Grundgedanken und
Wirkungen. (The Hellenistic Mystery-Religions. Their fundamental Ideas
and their Influence.) 1910.
_E. Rohde._ Psyche. 1894. 3rd ed. 1903, 2 vols.
_H. R. Roscher._ Lexikon der griechisch-römischen Mythologie. (Lexicon
of Graeco-Roman Mythology.) 3 vols. 1884-1909.
_Ernst Eduard Schwartz._ Paulus. Charakterköpfe aus der antiken
Literatur. (Character Sketches from Ancient Literature.) 1910.
W. B. Smith. Der vorchristliche Jesus nebst weiteren Vorstudien zur
Entstehungsgeschichte des Urchristentums. (The pre-Christian Jesus,
with other Preliminary Studies for a History of the Origin and Growth
of Christianity.)
_Wilhelm Soltau._ Das Fortleben des Heidentums in der altchristlichen
Kirche. (The Survival of Paganism in the Early Christian Church.)
1906.
_Hermann Usener._ Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen. (Studies in
Comparative Religion.) 1889; 1899.
_Paul Wendland._ Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur in ihren
Beziehungen zu Judentum und Christentum. (Hellenistic-Roman
Civilisation in Relation to Judaism and Christianity.) 1907.
_Paul Wernle._ Die Anfänge unserer Religion. 1901. (E. T. by G. A.
Bienemann, “The Beginnings of Christianity,” 1903.)
_Georg Wobbermin._ Religionsgeschichtliche Studien zur Frage der
Beeinflussung des Urchristentums durch das antike Mysterienwesen.
(Studies in Comparative Religion with reference to the Question of the
Influence of the Ancient Mysteries on Primitive Christianity.) 1896.
[pg 181]
TO the Bonn philologist Hermann Usener belongs the credit of having
been the first to bring the Comparative Study of the pagan religions
as they existed at the beginning of the Christian era into contact
with theological science._(_146_)_ In E. Rohde’s _Psyche_ the Greek
and late-Greek conceptions regarding ghost-worship and immortality
were introduced to a wider circle of readers.
A generally intelligible survey of the cults which come into question
is offered by Franz Cumont in his work on the Oriental religions in
Roman paganism._(_147_)_
It was Phrygia in Asia Minor which gave to the world the worship of
Attis and the Dea Mater; from Egypt came that of Isis and Serapis;
Syria supplied the great sun-god whom Heliogabalus and Aurelian, for
reasons of [pg 182] state, proclaimed as the supreme divinity. The
religion of Mithra is of Persian origin.
Of these cults, ancient literature, both pagan and Christian, has
preserved some records, but it is only since discoveries of
inscriptions and papyri have supplemented this information_(_148_)_
that any real understanding of the character and history of these
religions has become possible.
The myth on which the worship of Cybele and Attis is based has been
handed down in various and conflicting versions.