So much, however, is certain, that Attis, the beloved of the Dea

Mater, was represented as having been killed by a boar sent by Zeus,

or by the jealous goddess herself. Every year in the spring-time there

took place at Pessinus the great orgiastic lamentation for him, which,

however, ended with a joyful festival. It seems, therefore, as if a

resurrection of the slain Attis was assumed to have taken place,

although the myth had nothing to say about that, but only in some of

the versions related that he was changed into an evergreen fir tree.

At bottom it is a form of nature-worship, which shows a close

relationship with that of the Thracian Dionysus-Sabazios and with that

of Adonis as worshipped at Byblos in Syria, and it has in some

respects undergone modification due to contact with these. The primary

idea underlying both myth and cultus is the decay and revival of

vegetable life.

The worship of Cybele and Attis penetrated to Rome as early as the

year 204 B.C. In the previous year the Sibylline books had given the

oracle that Hannibal would not be driven out of Italy until the sacred

stone from Pessinus was brought to Rome. This was done; [pg 183] and

the Carthaginians vacated the country. The foreign divinities had a

temple assigned to them on the Palatine. But when the Senate came to

know of the orgiastic feast which was associated with their worship,

it forbade the citizens to take part in it and placed the cult under

strict control. Thus, in spite of its official recognition, it led a

somewhat obscure existence until Claudius, by the public festival

which he established for it—which lasted from the 15th to the 27th

March—gave it a high position in public esteem.

In the deepening of its religious character which it underwent in

becoming associated with Greek religious feeling of the decadence

period, the worship of Attis was brought into connexion with the

thought of immortality. In the “Agape,” in which the partakers were

handed food in the “tympanon” and drink in the “cymbalon,” they were

initiated as “mystae” of Attis and thereby became partakers of a

higher life.

Mysteries were also celebrated in which a dying and rising again was

symbolised; and there were others based upon the thought of a union

with the divinity in the bridal chamber.

From the middle of the second century onward the “taurobolium” appears

in connexion with the service of Cybele and Attis. This is a kind of

blood-baptism. The “mystes” lies down in a pit, which is covered with

boards. Through the interstices there trickles down on him the blood

of a bull offered in sacrifice. The lamentation for the dead Attis

sounds forth; the “mystes” applies it to himself. Then when the hymn

of jubilation follows, he rises out of the grave as one who is now

initiate and deified._(_149_)_

The process by which the worship of Attis was transformed into a

mystery-religion which gave guarantees of immortality remains for the

most part shrouded in obscurity. In view of the scantiness of our

information [pg 184] we are thrown back upon hypothetical

reconstruction for the details of the development and the significance

of the mysteries._(_150_)_

The worship of Serapis was a creation of Ptolemy Soter, who desired to

unite the Greek and Egyptian populations of his empire by the bond of

a common worship. The derivation of the word Serapis is uncertain.

Whether it arose from Osiris-Apis or from the Chaldaean Sar-Apsî is a

debated point. The cultus language was Greek. Serapis was doubled with

Osiris. The new cult went forth into the world as the religion of

Serapis and Isis. In Rome it was vehemently opposed as being immoral;

the temples of Isis, who was identified with Venus, justified this

reputation. It was not officially recognised until the time of

Caligula. By this time it was, however, widely diffused wherever the

Greek language was spoken. Its adherents were found chiefly among the

slaves and freedmen. From the third century onwards it is

over-shadowed by the worship of Mithra.

The myth, which was represented annually, makes the mourning Isis seek

out the scattered fragments of the corpse of Osiris and raise a lament

over it. Then the limbs are laid together and wound round with

bandages, whereupon Thoth and Horus raise the slain Osiris to life

again, and this is announced amid jubilant outcries.

In the service of Osiris-Serapis the worshipper gains assurance of

eternal life. Therein consisted the attraction of this religion.

The early Egyptian doctrine was simple enough. After his resurrection

Osiris became lord of the world [pg 185] and at the same time judge of

the dead. Those who at their trial before him are not approved fall a

prey to destruction; others have eternal life with him in a realm

below the earth.

Life—and this was the tremendously serious feature of this

religion—was therefore regarded as a preparation for death. This is

the thought reflected in the mysteries, no doubt modelled on those of

Eleusis,_(_151_)_ which were attached to the Egyptian cultus after the

worship of Serapis-Osiris had been ordained by authority. They

represent the esoteric element. By means of the tests which he

undergoes in the Serapeum, of the ecstasy which he experiences and the

ceremonies of initiation in which he takes part the believer wins his

way, along with Osiris, from death to life, and acquires the assurance

of eternal being.

Distinct from these mysteries is the exoteric religion with its daily

acts of worship. These consist in the unveiling, awaking, clothing,

and feeding of the statues of the gods. The “liturgy,” which was

everywhere punctiliously followed, is derived from the primitive

Egyptian religion. Speaking generally, the exoteric form of the

worship of Osiris could come to terms with any, even the lowest, forms

of paganism.

The Syrian Baal-cults had no doubt from the second century onwards

become widely diffused, and in the third century enjoyed the favour of

the Emperors. For the development of popular religion, however, they

were of less significance than the religions of Attis and Osiris,

because they were not capable of becoming ennobled and deepened by the

religious yearnings of the Greek spirit.

Mithra was the father of the sun-god._(_152_)_ The origin of [pg 186]

the cult is obscure. It first became known through the pirates who

were taken prisoners by Pompey. It spread through the Roman armies

which in the first century advanced towards the Euphrates; they took

it over from their opponents. Thus Mithra was primarily a soldiers’

god. With the legions he penetrated to the utmost bounds of the Roman

Empire. He therefore passed direct from the barbarians into the Roman

world without previously becoming at home in the Greek world. From the

middle of the third century onwards the new cult spread so vigorously

that it was regarded as the strongest rival of Christianity.

In the intervening period, from the first century onward, it adopted

in growing measure elements from all the other cults, and in this way

became the universal “worship.”

Regarding the myth, little is known; and in the cultus it played no

special part. As the “slayer of the bull” Mithra doubtless belongs to

the class of star-gods, and represents the supreme sun-god.

The characteristic feature of this religion is its dualism. Mithra, as

the supreme, good god, is opposed by the powers of the evil

under-world. Hence the earnest character of its ethic, which is not

contemplative as in the Osiris cult, but active.

The secret of the power of this new faith lies indeed mainly in the

impulse to action which essentially belongs to it, and in the large

and simple ethical life to which this conception of the divinity gives

rise. The Mithra-religion, differing in this from the Egyptian cults,

places the scene of eternal life in an upper realm of light and not in

the under-world. The supreme divinity himself guides the souls of

departed believers through the seven planetary spheres to the land of

the blessed, and thus becomes their “Redeemer.”

As Mysteries there are observed here, as in other cults, sacred meals

and baptismal rites. Above these again there was, according to

Dieterich, a supreme initiation, [pg 187] which represented a progress

to the throne of Mithra. The actions and the formulae used in this

ceremony are, he thinks, preserved almost complete in the great

Parisian “magic” papyrus. Dieterich, who is opposed on this point by

Cumont and Reitzenstein, denominates this document a “Mithra-liturgy,”

and supposes the prayers to be used in the course of the ascent which

conducts the “mystes” from the world of the four elements through the

stars to the realm of the gods, where, under the guidance of the

sun-god, he passes through the heaven of the fixed stars and attains

to the presence of the highest god._(_153_)_

This process he conceives as having been represented, as part of the

cultus, in the Mithra-grottos, which is rendered not improbable by the

discoveries of objects which might have to do with a _mise en scène_

corresponding to this conception. In any case there was some

sacramental representation of the heavenward journey of the soul

towards the attainment of immortality. It remains questionable

whether, as the supreme mystery which the religion possessed, it was

“experienced” by the believers only once, or had its regular place in

the cultus.

The prayers extol in lofty language re-birth from the mortal to the

immortal life. The invocation with which the “mystes” approaches

Mithra is highly impressive. “Hail to thee, lord, ruler of the water;

hail to thee, stablisher of the earth; hail to thee, disposer of the

spirit. Lord, I that am born again take my departure, being exalted on

high, and since I am exalted, I die; born by the birth which engenders

life, I am redeemed unto death, [pg 188] and go the way which thou

hast appointed, as thou hast made for a law and created the sacrament

. . .”_(_154_)_ Here the text breaks off. Perhaps later on the return

of the initiate to earth was described. Dieterich, however, thinks

this improbable.

According to Dieterich the liturgy arose in the second century, and

belongs to the Graeco-Egyptian Mithra-cult; about 200 A.D. it was

annexed by the “magians” and from that time forward was preserved

among them; about 300 it was embodied in the Paris manuscript which

has come down to us.

A valuable insight into the feelings and impressions associated with

the Mysteries is given by the Hermetic writings, preserved mainly in

“Poimandres.”_(_155_)_ They profess to be derived from Hermes, who in

the thought of later times became the god of revelation, and in the

prominence which they give to the philosophico-religious element they

mark a stage in the development of Greek religious thought from the

Mystery-religions to Neo-Platonism. In their present form the

documents of this later Hermetic religion, which is marked by a

certain profundity, doubtless belong to about the third century; but

the original form dates, perhaps, from before the beginning of the

second century.

These are the cults and religions which have to be taken into account.

They are parallel to Christianity in so far that they, like it—though

in general doubtless somewhat later—make their appearance in the

ancient world as religions of redemption. Certain analogies are not to

be denied. The only question is how far these go, and how far the

Mystery-religions really exercised an influence upon the views and the

[pg 189] cultus-forms of the early, and especially of the primitive,

church._(_156_)_

The first to examine the facts with any closeness was Anrich in his

work, “The Ancient Mysteries and their Influence on

Christianity.”_(_157_)_

He comes to the conclusion that both the Pauline and the Johannine

views of Christianity “are to be understood as in the main original

creations of the Christian spirit on the basis of genuine Judaism,”

and if they show the influence of Greek thought, it is at most in a

secondary fashion. There is, he asserts, “no apparent reason to refer

the views on baptism and the communion-meal which meet us in the two

cases to influences of the latter character.” It is only at a later

time that a real influence comes into question.

[pg 190]

This negative conclusion has since been much disputed. That the

author, in accordance with the position of Pauline scholarship at that

period, did not sufficiently take into account the “physical” element

in the mystical doctrine of redemption and in the conception of

baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and consequently does not give

sufficient weight to the analogy between the religion of the Apostle

of the Gentiles and that of the Mysteries, is certain. But it ought to

be recognised as equally certain that to many points he has given the

prominence which they deserved, and that the students of Comparative

Religion would have in many respects done better if they had allowed

their bold advance to be somewhat checked by his prudent warnings, and

had learned something from him in regard to the formulation of the

problems.

A point which ought to be more clearly grasped than it has hitherto

been, in the investigation of Paul’s relation to the

Mystery-religions, is that for purposes of comparison Paulinism must

be regarded as a distinct entity; very often Paul’s doctrine has been

included in the “Religion of the New Testament” or taken together with

the Johannine and the Early Greek theology. On this method only false

results can be looked for. Paulinism, and therein lies the special

problem which it offers to scholarship, is an original phenomenon

which is wholly distinct from Greek theology.

This implies, too, that only the literal sense of the language of the

Epistles must be considered, and that it is not permissible to

interpret it through the Johannine theology, as is almost always done.

It is nothing less than incredible that, to take the most flagrant

example, philologists like Dieterich and others in discussing

Paulinism, always calmly talk about “Re-birth,” although in the

Epistles which rank as certainly genuine, this word and the

corresponding verb never occur._(_158_)_ That [pg 191] many

theologians fall into the same confusion is no excuse._(_159_)_

The surprising thing is precisely that Paul, when he is speaking of

the transformation of the man into a new creature, always makes use of

the two words death and resurrection, and describes the new thing that

comes about as an already experienced resurrection, without ever

introducing the conception of re-birth which seems to lie so near at

hand. In this limitation lies his as yet unexplained peculiarity, and

therewith the problem of his relation to Greek theology and, in

general, to everything that can be called Greek religious life.

The Johannine doctrine, that of the earlier Greek Fathers, and the

Mystery-religions, have this in common, that they make use of the

conception of re-birth. In that, they show themselves to be growths of

the same soil, and stand together over against Paulinism. Any one who

interprets the language of the Apostle of the Gentiles in accordance

with the conception of re-birth, has, by the aid of the Johannine

theology, first conformed it to the Mystery-religions, and has himself

introduced the conception which forms the common basis.

The same procedure has been followed in regard to other points also.

The Paulinism which the students of Comparative Religion have in view

is mainly an artificial product which has been previously treated with

the acids and reagents of Greek theology.

Another point which calls for close attention is the chronological

question in connexion with the history of the Mystery-religions. It is

from the beginning of the [pg 192] second century onwards that these

cults become widely extended in the Roman empire. It is only at this

period—the worship of Serapis as an artificial Graeco-Egyptian

creation is perhaps an exception—that they come under the influence of

late Greek religious thought and feeling, which developed with the

decline of the Stoa, and become transformed from imported cults into

universal Mystery-religions. The dates and the inner course of this

development are for us obscure. So much, however, is certain, that

Paul cannot have known the mystery-religions in the form in which they

are known to us, because in this fully-developed form they did not yet

exist. Assuming the most favourable case, that from his youth up he

had had open eyes and ears for the heathen religions by which he was

surrounded, he can only have known the cults as they were in their

uncompounded state, not as what they passed into when they became

filled with the Greek yearning for redemption, and mutually influenced

one another.

Considerations of this kind lead an authority like Cumont to insist

again and again upon the difficulties which stand in the way of

assuming an influence of the Mystery-cults on the earliest

Christianity._(_160_)_ Especially does he hold it to be quite

impossible that the Mithra-religion should have had any point of

contact with Paul.

Another point which should be mentioned is that those who are engaged

in making these comparisons are rather apt to give the

Mystery-religions a greater definiteness and articulation of thought

than they really possess, and do not always give sufficient prominence

to the distinction between their own hypothetical reconstruction and

the medley of statements on which it is based. Almost all the popular

writings fall into this kind of inaccuracy. They manufacture out of

the various fragments of information a kind of universal [pg 193]

Mystery-religion which never actually existed, least of all in Paul’s

day._(_161_)_

In particular, these works aim at getting hold of the idea of a “Greek

Redeemer-god” who might serve as an analogue to Jesus Christ. No

figure deserving of this designation occurs in any myth or in any

Mystery-religion; it is created by a process of generalisation,

abstraction, and reconstruction. Before using the phrase Redeemer-God,

one should remember that it means a God who for the sake of men came

into the world, died and rose again. Having realised that, one may

then try how far the Mystery-religions supply anything corresponding

to this—the only adequate—definition._(_162_)_

[pg 194]

It is also to be remarked that, on the other hand, there is no

“Redeemer-god” in Primitive Christianity. Jesus is, it cannot be

sufficiently emphasised, not thought of as a god, but only as a

heavenly being, who is entrusted with the mission of bringing in the

new world. It was only later in the Greek and Gnostic theology that He

was deified. For Paul he is “Son of God” in the simple, Old-Testament

and Apocalyptic sense.

We may further recall Cumont’s warning that analogies do not

necessarily imply dependence. “Resemblances,” he writes in the preface

to his _Religions orientales,_ “do not always imply imitation, and the

resemblance of views or usages must often be explained by community of

origin, not by any kind of borrowing.” In the same essay he points out

that analogies are sometimes exaggerated, if not actually created, by

the use of language chosen by the critic.

And Dieterich expresses himself in the following terms against this

mania for finding analogies. “It is,” he writes, in his edition of the

“Mithra-liturgy,” “one of the worst faults of the science of

Comparative Religion, which is at present becoming constantly less

cautious, to overlook the most natural explanations, not to say ignore

and avoid them, in order to have recourse to the most far-fetched,

and, by the most eccentric methods, to drag out analogies which, to

the unsophisticated eye, are absolutely invisible.”

These are the principles by which it has to be decided, whether

Comparative Religion has hunted down its game according to fair

forest-law, or whether its “bag” is poached.

The chief point to which research was at first directed was the

discovery of relationships between the two sets of sacramental views.

It seemed so easy to discover common conceptions [pg 195] here, in

view of the fact that in both cases cultus-meals and lustrations

played a part and had a sacramental value. But, on closer examination,

it appears that it is very difficult to get beyond the simple fact of

resemblance of a very general character.

Dieterich, in his commentary on the “Mithra-liturgy,” is obliged to

admit that we have very little exact knowledge regarding the sacred

meals of the Mystery-religions._(_163_)_ That they were supposed to

convey supernatural powers is about the only thing that can be said

with safety. Regarding the special conceptions and actions which made

this eating and drinking sacramental no information has been

preserved. A comparison—not to speak of the establishment of a

relation of dependence—is therefore impossible.

As soon as the students of Comparative Religion attempt to bring

forward concrete facts, they are obliged to leave the domain of the

mystery-religions and draw their material from the primitive

Nature-religions. Here they find the primary conception—a man believes

that he unites himself with the divinity by eating portions of him,

or—this is a secondary stage of the conception—by consuming some

substance which has been marked out for this purpose as representative

of the divinity and has had his name attached to it.

The following series of examples recurs in all the books:—

The dead Pharaoh, when he enters heaven, causes his servants to seize,

bind, and slay the gods, and then devours them in order thus to absorb

into himself their strength and wisdom, and to become the strongest of

all.

In Egypt anyone who wishes to become truthful swallows a small image

of the goddess of truth.

In the Thracian orgiastic worship of Dionysos Sabazios [pg 196] the

sacrificial ox is torn to pieces by the participants while yet alive,

and swallowed raw.

A Bedouin tribe in the Sinai peninsula slaughters, amid chanting, a

camel bound upon the altar, and then eagerly drinks its blood and

immediately devours the still bloody flesh half raw.

The Aztecs, before sacrificing and eating their prisoners of war, give

them the name of the deity to whom the sacrifice is offered.

Now, by the round-about way of this primitive conception the connexion

between Paul’s cultus-feast and that of the Mystery-religions—which

cannot be directly shown—is supposed to be established.

It is suggested that this primitive conception of union with the god

in the cultus, by an act of eating performed with this special

purpose, after it had in the normal development of the various

religions been transformed or completely laid aside, came to life

again in the mysticism of the Mystery-religions and of Paulinism.

Mysticism, according to Dieterich’s view, draws its nourishment from

the lowest strata of religious ideas. The belief in the union of God

and man which, among the cultured classes, was no longer anything but

a metaphor, rises up again from below with irrepressible power.

“Rising from below, the old ideas acquire new power in the history of

religion. The revolution from beneath creates new religious life

within the primeval, indestructible forms.”_(_164_)_

That we have here a combination of two still unproved hypotheses is

not sufficiently emphasised. In the Mystery-religions ancient cults

certainly enter into direct union with higher religious conceptions,

so that the general presupposition on which this hypothesis of

Comparative Religion is based is to a certain extent admissible. But

whether precisely this primitive conception of the mystic fellowship

created by eating and drinking the god awakened to new life in them,

must remain an open question, since our information does not suffice

to prove [pg 197] it. Of an eating of the god there is nowhere any

mention. And the primitive Mysteries were not founded on this idea.

Rather, they consist essentially in the representation of the actions

performed by the divinity, and rest on the thought that the

reproduction of these events will create in the participant some kind

of corresponding reality. It is a symbolism which is charged with a

certain energy, a drama which becomes real.

This being so, the significance of the cultus-meal comes much less

into view than that of the pattern actions which had to be further

developed and interpreted. If we possess so few typical statements

about the Mystery-feasts, is it not partly because they had no very

remarkable features and did not take a very exalted position in the

hierarchy of cultus-acts? If in the Paris Magic-papyrus we really

possess a Mithra-liturgy, and if the inferences and explanations which

Dieterich has attached to it are sound, then we have proof that in

this developed cultus of the second century the highest sacrament was

a pictorial mystery in which the “mystes” believed that he in some way

experienced the heavenly journey of the soul which he, along with

others, enacted.

In any case, the assertion that in the Mystery-religions the ancient

cultus-conception of a union with the divinity effected by a meal,

came to life again, goes far beyond what can be proved. That union is,

even in its secondary forms, always closely connected with a

sacrificial feast, and cannot properly be detached from it. The

sacrificial feast, however, is not a feature in the Mystery-religions,

and so far as we can get a glimpse of their beginnings never had any

supreme importance in them. The interpretation of these cults on the

analogy of the primitive religions of various races, ancient or

modern, who devoured oxen, camels, or prisoners of war as substitutes

for the divinity, cannot therefore be established.

The vestiges of this ancient conception are to be found, not in the

Mystery-religions, but in the ordinary heathen sacrificial worship, in

cases where the sacrificial [pg 198] feast has been retained in

connexion with it. Here there certainly exists in some form or other

the conception of a fellowship with the god set up by eating. It is to

be noted that Paul in I Cor. x. draws a parallel between the Lord’s

Supper, which unites us to Christ, and these feasts. How expositors

have arrived at the idea of making him refer here to the cultus-meal

of the Mystery-religions is quite inexplicable.

The hypothesis that the earliest Christian conception of the Lord’s

Supper in some way represented the surviving influence of an ancient

cultus idea, is at first sight much more plausible than the

corresponding hypothesis in the case of the Mystery-religions. At any

rate the existence of the desiderated fact is here proved. The

conception of the sacramental eating stands in the centre of the

belief; by this act, fellowship with a divine Being who has died and

risen again is maintained; and what is eaten and drunk is brought into

relation to the person of Christ, inasmuch as it is called, in some

sense or other, His body and blood.

Nevertheless in the decisive point the alleged facts break down.

Paul knows nothing of an eating and drinking of the body and blood of

the Lord. When Dieterich gives it as the Apostle’s view that “Christ

is eaten and drunk by the believers and is thereby in them,” and adds

that nothing further need be said about the matter, what he has done

is, instead of taking Paul’s words as they stand, to interpret Paul

through John—and through a misunderstanding of John at that.

It is not of an eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ that

Paul speaks in the First Epistle to the Corinthians; he always speaks

only of eating and drinking the bread and the cup. He assumes, no

doubt, that this somehow or other maintains a communion with the body

and blood of Christ (I Cor. x. 16-17), and that anyone who partakes

unworthily sins against the body and blood of the Lord (I Cor. xi.

27). He quotes, too, the words [pg 199] in which the Lord, on the

historic night, after the Supper, speaks of bread and wine as His body

and His blood. But the conception which seems inevitably to arise out

of this, that the participant partakes of the body and blood of the

Lord, is not found in him.

The recognition of this fact does not make his sacramental doctrine

any clearer. It is a question of fulfilling the demand of sound

scholarship that we should respect the text, and not interpret it on

the basis of inferences which the Apostle neither drew nor could draw.

His fundamental view that the feast effects or maintains fellowship

with the exalted Christ is perfectly clear. What is not clear is how

he brought this view into relation with the historic words of Jesus

about the bread and wine as being His body and blood, and interpreted

it in accordance therewith. Did it arise out of these words, or did he

receive it from some other quarter and afterwards make use of it for

the interpretation of the historic words?

The difficulty lies in the fact that for Paul the body and blood of

the historic Christ no longer exist, and that, on the other hand,

while the glorified Christ has, indeed, a body, it is not a body

through which blood flows and which is capable of being consumed on

earth. To speak of the body and blood of Christ is, from the

stand-point of the Apostle’s doctrine, an absurdity. He cannot in his

doctrine of the Supper bring the historic words into harmony with his

Christology, and yet is obliged to do so. The compromise remains for

us obscure.

It is certain, however, that neither he nor the primitive Christian

community held that the body and blood of Christ was partaken of in

the Supper. That is evident from the fact that the historic words of

Jesus did not form part of the service, and this is the case down to a

later date. No kind of consecration of the elements as the body and

blood of the Lord occurred in the liturgy.

If there is anything which may be considered as a definite result of

recent research, it is that the view of primitive and early

Christianity regarding the Lord’s [pg 200] Supper was not arrived at

by way of inference from the words of Jesus about bread and wine and

flesh and blood, but, strange as it may appear, arose from a different

quarter. The Church’s celebration was not shaped by the “words of

institution” at the historic Supper; it was the latter, on the

contrary, which were explained in accordance with the significance of

the celebration.

It is a no less serious error when Dieterich asserts that the Gospel

of John in chapter vi. proclaims the Pauline doctrine “only in a still

more corporeal fashion.”

In the Evangelist, bread and wine are—as is evident to anyone who will

take the trouble to acquaint himself with his presuppositions in the

spiritually related works of Ignatius, Justin, and Tertullian—not the

body and blood of Christ, but the flesh and blood of the Son of Man.

In this change in the expression lies the logic of the thought. The

elements of the Lord’s Supper perpetuate the appearance of the Son of

Man in the world inasmuch as they, as being the flesh and blood of

that historic Personality, possess the capacity of being vehicles of

the Spirit. As a combination of matter and Spirit which can be

communicated to the corporeity of men, they execute judgment. The

elect can in the sacrament become partakers of that spiritual

substance, and can thus be prepared for the resurrection; others who

are not from above, and are not capable of receiving the Spirit,

receive simply earthly food and drink, and fall a prey to corruption.

Therefore the Evangelist makes the Lord close His discourse about the

eating and drinking of the flesh and blood of the Son of Man with the

words, “It is the spirit that giveth life.”

This is the language of the early Greek theology, which explains the

working of the sacraments by the combination of the Spirit with matter

which takes place therein. The Fourth Evangelist projects this later

view back into the discourses of the historic Jesus, and makes Him

prophetically announce that after His exaltation a time will come when

the Spirit which is now in Him will unite itself [pg 201] with the

bread which, by the miracle of the loaves, has just been raised in a

significant way out of the category of simple earthly elements, and

will subsequently manifest its power in preparing men for the

resurrection.

In this sense, as vehicles of the Spirit, the elements carry on the

manifestation of the Son of Man; in this sense it is possible to speak

of eating and drinking His flesh and blood, and to regard this as

necessary to life. But all this is not thought of “corporeally” in the

naïve sense of an eating and drinking of the body and blood of Jesus,

but can only be understood on the basis of the doctrine of the working

of the Spirit in the sacraments. Apart from the Spirit, there is in

the Supper no body and no blood of Christ.

That is for the Fourth Evangelist so much a fixed datum that he is

obliged to omit the account of the historic Last Supper of Jesus with

His disciples. That the Lord could have so designated the bread which

was eaten and the wine which was drunk on that occasion, is for him

unthinkable. As long as He Himself is alive there is certainly no

Spirit; it is only on His exaltation that the Spirit is liberated from

the historic personality of the Son of Man and becomes separated from

the Logos as the Holy Spirit, in order in the sacraments to lead a new

existence—and this time an existence capable of being communicated to

others. From this moment onwards bread and wine become, in the

Church’s celebration of the sacrament, the flesh and blood of the Son

of Man in the sense explained above. Previously this had by no means

been the case, any more than there had been a Christian baptism which

effected regeneration. The Spirit who associates Himself with the

water and produces this effect, did not as yet exist in this form of

being. Jesus cannot, therefore, on this view, have baptized, any more

than He can celebrate the Supper with His disciples. Therefore, the

Fourth Evangelist, in order to guard against possible

misunderstandings, definitely asserts that even if the disciples did

baptize—a mere baptism with water [pg 202] which is incapable of

working regeneration—the Master Himself made no use of water in this

fashion._(_165_)_ His task consisted only in marking out water for

this use by the miracle at Cana of Galilee, and, by His discourses

about the water of life and regeneration by water and the Spirit,

pointing men’s minds to the thought that in the future, water, in

association with the Spirit, would be necessary to life and

blessedness. In that day “out of his body shall flow rivers of living

water” because the Spirit will be present (John vii. 37-39).

The students of Comparative Religion are so far in the right as

against ordinary theology that they make an end of the unintelligent

spiritualising of the Johannine doctrine, and try to give due weight

to the “physical” element in its conception of redemption. They are

mistaken, however, in regarding this “physical” element as something

primitive, and in thinking to explain it by analogies drawn from the

primitive nature-religions.

The Fourth Gospel represents the views of a speculative religious

materialism which concerns itself with the problem of matter and

spirit, and the permeation of matter by Spirit, and endeavours to

interpret the manifestation and the personality of Jesus, the action

of the sacraments and the possibility of the resurrection of the

elect, all on the basis of one and the same fundamental conception.

According to this theory, Christ came into the world in order to

accomplish in His own Person the as yet non-existent union of the

Spirit with the fleshly substance of humanity. In consequence of this

act the elect among mankind can in the future become partakers of the

Spirit. Jesus Himself, however, cannot as yet impart this to them

either as the Spirit of knowledge—that is why the disciples are

portrayed as so “unintelligent”—or as the Spirit of life. The Spirit

always needs, in the world of sense, to [pg 203] be connected with

material vehicles. He cannot work directly, in the sense of

communicating Himself from Jesus to believers. He must, therefore, in

order to enter into the elect, be received by them in combination with

some material element. The material media chosen for this purpose are

made known by Jesus by means of miracles and by references to the

future.

The naïve—and unhistorical—conception that Jesus instituted the

sacraments is not recognised by the Johannine gnosis. According to it

He did not establish them, but created and predicted them.

By His incarnation the possibility of the union of humanity and Spirit

upon which the working of the sacraments depends, is provided. By His

action in regard to the food and wine and the words He spoke in

connexion therewith, He pointed to a mystery which was to be revealed

in connexion with these substances; by His death, resurrection, and

exaltation He abolished His earthly mode of existence and set the

Spirit free for the new method of working, in virtue of which He was

able to prepare men for the resurrection. Jesus, according to this

view, came into the world to introduce the era of effectual

sacraments. It was thus that He became the Redeemer.

The teaching of the Johannine theology, therefore, rests upon the two

principles, that the Spirit can only work upon men in combination with

matter, and that it only becomes present in this state as a

consequence of the exaltation of the Lord. Anyone who has once

recognised these presuppositions will give up once for all the search

for a primitive element which is to be explained from the

nature-religions. On the other hand, it is certain that Christianity

here presents itself as the most highly developed Greek

Mystery-religion which it is possible to conceive.

Now for Paul again. Anyone who ascribes to him the conception of a

sacramental eating and drinking of the body and blood of Christ does

violence to his words. [pg 204] But admitting that he really thought

in this way, that would prove nothing. It would first need to be shown

that it really was a cultus-conception drawn from the primitive

nature-religions which came to life again in him. Now, for the

Mystery-religions the necessary presuppositions might appear to be

present, since they arise out of ancient cults which sprouted and grew

up again in later times. Paul, however, is a Jew, and even as a

believer in Christ he stands, in spite of his polemic against the law,

wholly and solely on the basis of the absolute, transcendent Jewish

conception of God. Any relation on his part to the nature-cults cannot

be proved and ought not to be assumed. By what wind were the seeds of

this primitive conception wafted to his mind? And how could they

suddenly sprout and grow in the stony soil of a Jewish heart? The

Apostle would certainly be the first and the only Jewish theologian to

fall under the spell of the primitive conception of eating the god!

And where was such a conception at that time to be found?

But what matter such prosaic considerations when it is a question of

great ideas, of ideas, moreover, fathered by Comparative Religion?

When Heitmüller in the spring of 1903 appeared before the members of

the Clergy Theological Society_(_166_)_ in Hanover to give them the

latest information about baptism and the Lord’s Supper, he led them

abroad, after an introduction on the “physico-hyperphysical” in Paul,

first to the Aztecs, then in the clouds of night, by the torch’s

gleam, to the Thracian mountain sides, and thence to Sinai._(_167_)_

And when they had assisted at the slaughtering and devouring of the

prisoners of war, the ox, and the camel, he expressed himself to the

following effect: “Little as the _δεῖπνον κυριακόν_ of Paul might seem

to have in common with these . . . proceedings, and [pg 205] loth as

we at first are even to name the Lord’s Supper in the same breath with

them, as little is it to me a matter of doubt that, when looked at

from the point of view of Comparative Religion, the Lord’s Supper of

primitive Christianity has the closest connexion with them. Those

pictures supply the background from which the Lord’s Supper stands

out; they show us the world of ideas to which the Lord’s Supper

belongs in its most primitive, and therefore perspicuous, form.”

Entering more into detail, this “Hylic”_(_168_)_ of the Comparative

method explains that the primeval concrete and sensuous conception of

the _communio_ established by partaking of the flesh and blood of the

animal in which the divinity itself dwelt, comes to light again in the

primitive Christian Lord’s Supper, at the highest stage of the

development of religion, and under this new form acquires a new

life._(_169_)_ It would be precarious, he further observes, in view of

the fragmentary condition of the sources to attempt to prove a direct

dependence on definite phenomena—on the cultus feast of the

Mithra-mysteries, for example: “It will be safer to point to the

general characteristics of the time, which abounded with ideas of that

kind. The infant Christianity lived in an atmosphere which, if I may

be allowed the expression, was impregnated with Mystery-bacilli, and

grew up on a soil which had been fertilised and made friable by the

decay and intermixture of the most various religions, and [pg 206] was

specially adapted to favour the upgrowth of seeds and spores which had

been long in the ground.”

Now, there is no such thing as an atmosphere impregnated with

bacteria. Medical science has long since shown that this conception

rests on an error, the air being practically free from germs. In

theology it is more difficult to get rid of fantastic imaginations,

since historical proofs are only available for those who are capable

of thinking historically.

It must not be overlooked that the eating and drinking which

establishes communion with Christ is only one side of the Pauline

conception of the Supper. Alongside of it there exists the other,

which sees in the feast a confession of faith in the death and the

parousia of the Lord, and is quite as significant as the former. It

is—in I Cor. xi.—developed in connexion with the repetition of the

historic words of Jesus; on it is based the argument that a careless

partaking is a transgression against the body of the Lord. And on the

basis of this conception, cases of illness and death in the church are

to be understood as a warning chastisement pointing to the Last

Judgment. This conception must be somehow or other eschatologically

conditioned.

The communion which is established in the Lord’s Supper is a communion

of the eagerly-waiting man with the coming Lord of Glory. The only

thing which remains obscure is how this is brought about. The

confession of faith in the death and parousia which is combined with

the act of eating and drinking does not suffice to explain this

further effect. Further, it remains inherently obscure how by eating

and drinking the dying and return of the Lord can be shown forth,

especially as the Early Christian celebration consisted only in a

common meal, and in no way reproduced, as present-day celebrations do,

the actions and words of Jesus at the Last Supper.

What are the results to which the students of Comparative Religion

have to point in regard to the Lord’s Supper? They are obliged at the

outset to give up the [pg 207] attempt to explain it from the

Mystery-religions, or even to point out in the latter any very close

analogies. In place of this they attempt to make intelligible both the

meal which formed part of the mystery-cults, and that of Pauline

Christianity, as growths which, from scattered seeds of ancient

conceptions of the cultus-eating of the divinity, spring up from the

soil of syncretism in two different places at the same time. Neither

in the one case nor the other, however, can they render this even

approximately probable. Up to the present, therefore, neither a direct

nor an indirect connexion between the cultus-meal of Paul and those of

the Mystery-religions has been shown. The only thing which is certain

is that in both cases a cultus-meal existed. About that of the

Mysteries we know almost nothing; about that which Paul presupposes we

have more information, but not such as to enable us at once to

understand it.

The question regarding baptism took from the first a simpler form,

since the hypothesis of a renascence of primitive cultus-conceptions

has not to be considered.

Both Paul and the Mystery-religions attach a religious significance to

washings. That, however, does not suffice to establish a peculiarity

which would connect them together, since the attachment of this

significance to lustration is bound up with the elemental symbolism of

cleansing and is found more or less in all religions.

The real question is whether Paulinism and the Mystery-religions, when

they go beyond the most general notions, and advance from the symbolic

to the effectively sacramental, follow the same lines and present the

same views.

Once again, Paul’s view is the more fully, that of the

Mystery-religions the less fully known. Developed baptismal doctrines

and rites seem only to have been present in the Egyptian cults. These

distinguish between the bath of purification and baptism, the latter

consisting [pg 208] in a sprinkling with a few drops of a consecrated

and consecrating fluid._(_170_)_

The advance beyond the idea of purification, where it is to be

observed, moves in the direction of the idea of Re-birth,

Regeneration. A clear formulation of this developed view—comparable in

definiteness with the Early Christian reference to the “bath of

regeneration” _(_171_)_ —does not occur. The thought remains hovering

between purification and renewal.

That is as much as to say that, so far as our information goes, no

typical points of contact with Paulinism present themselves.

The Apostle implies a baptism in the name of a divine person. Of a

baptism performed in the name of Osiris, Attis, or Mithra we know

nothing, though no doubt the assumption naturally suggests itself that

the lustrations and baptisms practised in these cults were considered

to be at the same time acts of confession of faith in the divinity

with whose worship they were associated. But this character was by no

means so distinctly stamped on them as was the case in Christian

baptism—as is, indeed, readily intelligible. In the Mystery-religions

the confession of the god is naturally implied; in Christianity there

is the special confession of faith in the Messiahship of Jesus. To

this there was nothing analogous.

As regards the utterance of the name of the divinity and the magical

efficacy attaching thereto according to ancient conceptions, many

illustrations can be adduced from Comparative Religion. But the really

important point, the association of the utterance of the name with a

baptismal rite, cannot be directly shown to have existed in the

Mystery-religions._(_172_)_

[pg 209]

In order to arrive at his sacramental view Paul does not follow the

natural method of advancing by way of the thought of purification to

that of renewal by regeneration, but follows a different route, which

leads him to an estimate of it that has nothing to do with the

fundamental conception of purification, and therefore remains without

analogy in the Mystery-religions. This is a fact of great

significance.

The Mystery-religions speak, as Paul also does, of the _pneuma_ and

its workings, but the possession of the _pneuma_ is never represented

as an immediate and inevitable consequence of baptism.

With the Mystery-religions are associated speculations about the

renewal of man’s being, represented as taking place in regeneration,

which they bring into some kind of relation, closer or more remote,

with baptism. But when Paul speaks of the new creature which comes

into being in the sacrament, the thought of regeneration does not for

him come into view, for he makes no use of it at all. Instead of that

he asserts in Rom. vi. that in baptism there is an experience of death

and resurrection in fellowship with Christ, from which results newness

of life and the new ethic associated therewith. How the act and the

result are logically connected he does not explain. He is content to

place them side by side.

[pg 210]

So far as we know, there exists in the Mystery-religions no analogue

to this dying and rising again effected solely by the use of water. To

interpret Rom. vi., as Dieterich does, as referring to a spiritual

death and “new birth” is not permissible, since the text says not a

word about that. The post-Pauline theology, that is the Johannine and

Early Greek theology, explain baptism as regeneration, and seek to

find a logical basis for this effect in the doctrine that the Spirit

unites with the water as the generating power. Paul has nothing of all

this.

Nor does he show any knowledge of the idea that Christian baptism

arose out of the baptism of Jesus as an imitative reproduction of it.

He never, in fact, mentions the baptism of Jesus. Nowhere does he

suggest that in baptism the new man, the “Child of God,” is born in

the believer, as Jesus was in this act raised to His Messianic office.

There is in fact no evidence from the earlier literature which

suggests the existence of views of that kind regarding the origin and

significance of Christian baptism. In early Christianity it is as far

from being an imitative reproduction of the baptism of Jesus as the

Church’s Lord’s Supper was from being an imitative reproduction of the

historic Last Supper. The conception of an “imitative reproduction”

was first introduced by modern theology.

To cite the _taurobolium_ as an analogue of Paul’s baptism, with the

death and resurrection which it effects, is not admissible. In the

first place, the _taurobolium_ is a baptism of blood; in the next

place it is closely connected with a sacrifice; in the third place,

the burial and rising again are actually represented. The sacramental

significance is thus derived from the many-sided symbolism. In Paul

there is no trace of all this. “Plain water” effects everything.

One point in regard to which great hopes had been placed on the

Mystery-religions was the solution of the enigma of I Cor. xv. 29.

Wernle regarded it as self-evident that the Apostle in permitting and

approving [pg 211] baptism for the dead had allowed himself to become

infected by the heathen superstition of his Corinthian converts, and

took him to task for this lapse in his book on the “Beginnings of

Christianity.” In his zeal he forgot to enquire whether the heathen

had any superstition of the kind._(_173_)_

Those who tried to supply this omission did not meet with much

success. The heathen showed themselves better than their reputation

and less “superstitious” than the Christians! Of a baptism for the

dead, or anything at all of this nature, they show no trace.

Failing more relevant evidence, some have quoted Plato, who in the

_Republic_ (ii. 364-5) makes Adeimantos say, appealing in confirmation

to the Orphic writings, that by means of offerings and festivals,

atonement and purification for past misdeeds is effected for whole

towns as well as for single individuals, for the living and also for

the dead.

This passage, however, does not refer at all to personal dedications

with a view to “renewal,” such as the baptism practised in the

Mystery-religions and in Christianity, but to expiatory sacrifices in

the ancient Greek sense._(_174_)_

In the _Taurobolia_, representation of one living person by another is

supposed to have been possible, but there is no mention of a

representation of the dead._(_175_)_

[pg 212]

The baptism _of_ the dead which is attested by a papyrus is not a

baptism _for_ the dead._(_176_)_

That living persons went through the ceremonies of initiation for the

dead is not known.

Thus baptism for the dead has not, so far at least, proved susceptible

of explanation from heathen sources, but must be regarded as a

peculiarity of Christianity!

The outcome of the study of the sacraments from the point of view of

Comparative Religion is a very curious one. The Apostle thinks

sacramentally; in fact his doctrine is much more “mysterious” than

that of the Mystery-religions. But the nature of the sacramental

conception is quite different in him from what it is in them; it is as

if they had grown up on different soils.

The difference relates both to the conception of the supernatural

working of the sacraments, and also to the position which the

sacramental element takes in the doctrine as a whole.

In the Mystery-religions the sacramental idea arises by way of an

intensification and materialisation of the symbolic. The act effects

what it represents. The result can in a sense be logically understood

when once the thought is grasped that the world of appearance and the

world of reality stand in mysterious connexion with one another.

In Paul we have an unmediated and naked notion of sacrament such as is

nowhere else to be met with. Symbolism is no doubt involved in the

most general significance of the act. In this sense baptism is a

“cleansing” and a “consecration,”_(_177_)_ and the sacred feast

establishes [pg 213] fellowship among the partakers. But the

assertions which go beyond this show not the faintest connexion with

the outward significance of the rite. Contact with the water is

supposed to effect a dying and rising again with Christ, a partaking

in His mystical body, and the possession of the Spirit. The eating and

drinking at the Lord’s Supper is a confession of faith in the death

and the parousia of Christ, and is also fellowship with Him.

The sacramental is therefore non-rational. The act and its effect are

not bound together by religious logic, but laid one upon the other and

nailed together.

With that is connected the fact that in Paul we find the most prosaic

conception imaginable of the _opus operatum._ In the Mystery-religions

there is a mysterious procedure surrounded by imposing accessories.

The impressive appeal of symbolism is brought to bear in every part.

Every detail is significant, and lays hold upon the attention.

In Paul everything is flat and colourless. While some of his

references might suggest the impression that his conception of

Christianity bore some kind of analogy to the Mystery-religions, yet

as a whole it entirely lacks the corresponding atmosphere. There is

nothing of the effective _mise en scène_ characteristic of the Greek

sacramental beliefs. How lacking in solemnity must have been the

method of celebrating the Lord’s Supper, when it could degenerate into

an ugly and disorderly exhibition of gluttony! How little does the

Apostle think of the external act of baptism, when he founds a church

in Corinth and himself performs the rite only in the case of one or

two individuals!_(_178_)_ He preaches sacraments, but does not feel

himself to be a mystagogue; rather, he retains the simplicity in

regard to forms of worship which belongs to the Jewish spirit.

There were no long preparations for the cultus ceremonies, and nothing

is known of a distinction between higher and lower grades of

initiation, such as form an [pg 214] essential part of the

Mystery-religions. The first ceremony of initiation confers at once

final perfection. Among those who are admitted there prevails the most

complete equality. The conception of the “mystes” does not exist.

In the Mystery-religions everything centres in the sacred ceremonies.

They dominate thought, feeling, and will. If they are removed the

whole religion collapses.

In Paulinism it is otherwise. The doctrine of redemption is no doubt

closely connected with the sacraments, but the latter are not its

be-all and end-all. If baptism and the Lord’s Supper are taken away

the doctrine is not destroyed, but stands unmoved. It looks as though

the weight of the building rested upon these two pillars, but in

reality it does not totter even if these supports are withdrawn.

The Johannine and the early Greek doctrine are conceived as real

Mystery-religions. The Fourth Evangelist and Ignatius know no other

redemption than that which is bound up with the sacraments. In Paul

the redemption can be thought of apart from them, since the whole

mystical doctrine of fellowship with Christ rests upon the single

conception of faith. Nevertheless he allows it to be closely bound up

with the external ceremonies, and seems to have no consciousness of

the fact that this connexion is unnecessary and illogical.

The remarkable duality in Paulinism lies, therefore, in the fact that

the sacramental idea is intensified to an extreme and unintelligible

degree, while at the same time the necessity of the sacred ceremonies

does not logically result from the system as a whole, as this would

lead us to expect.

The sacramental views of the Apostle have thus nothing primitive about

them, but are rather of a “theological” character. Paul connects his

mystical doctrine of redemption with ceremonies which are not

specially designed with reference to it. It is from that fact, and not

from a specially deep love for Mysteries, [pg 215] that the

exaggeratedly sacramental character of his view of baptism and the

Lord’s Supper results. It is in the last resort a question of

externalisation, not of intensification.

It is therefore useless to ransack the history of religions for

analogies to his conceptions. It has none to offer, for the case is

unique. The problem lies wholly within the sphere of early Christian

history, and represents only a particular aspect of the question of

Paul’s relation to primitive Christianity. The fact is, he did not

introduce the sacramental view into the sacred ceremonies, but found

already existing a baptism and a Lord’s Supper which guaranteed

salvation on grounds which were intelligible from early Christian

doctrine. He, however, transformed the primitive view of salvation

into the mystical doctrine of the dying and rising again in fellowship

with Christ. Since the connexion between redemption and the sacraments

was given _a priori_, he draws the inference that the sacraments

effect precisely that wherein, according to his gnosis, the inner

essence of redemption consists. How far they are appropriate to the

effect which, on the ground of his mystical doctrine, he holds to take

place, does not for him come into question.

In the sacraments the believer becomes partaker in salvation.

Therefore, he concludes, in them that happens which constitutes

redemption, namely, the dying and rising again with Christ.

Paul therefore takes the sacraments by storm. He does not theorise

about the ceremony, but ascribes to it without more ado the postulated

effect. That is not a procedure which could have been followed either

by a Greek or by a modern mind.

Paulinism is thus a theological system with sacraments, but not a

Mystery-religion.

This may be confirmed by a further observation. The Apostle occupies a

strongly predestinarian stand-point. Those who are “called” inevitably

receive salvation; those who are not, can never in any way obtain it.

There [pg 216] is no analogue to this in the Mystery-religions. They

can only conceive of election in the sense and to the extent of

holding that there is a calling and predestination to the receiving of

the initiation which confers immortality. And there are actually some

beginnings of such a conception._(_179_)_

But Pauline predestination is quite different. It is absolute, and

seems inevitably to abolish the necessity and meaning of the

sacraments. Anyone who belongs to the number of the elect becomes

_ipso facto_ partaker of the resurrection. At the end of all things a

great company from the generations of long-past times will arise to

life without ever having received baptism or partaken of the Lord’s

Supper. That being so, what becomes of the sacraments? In what respect

are they necessary?

A good deal of energy has been expended in seeking analogies from

other religions for the Corinthian baptism for the dead; it would

really have been much more to the point to enquire why baptism for the

dead was considered desirable. If the dead are among the elect, they

have no need of it; if not, they could not have inherited life, even

if they had received the sacrament during their sojourn on earth. To

what end, then, is this baptism for the dead?

The most important point to notice is that everywhere in the Pauline

sacraments the eschatological interest breaks through. They effect,

not re-birth, but resurrection. That which in the near future is to

become visible reality, they make in the present invisibly real by

anticipation. The Greek Mysteries are timeless. They reach back to

primitive antiquity, and they profess to be able to manifest their

power in all generations. In Paul the sacraments have temporal

boundaries. Their power is derived from the events of the last times.

They put believers in the same position as the Lord, in that they [pg

217] cause them to experience a resurrection a few world-moments

before the time, even though this does not in any way become manifest.

It is a precursory phenomenon of the approaching end of the world.

Separated from the eschatology, the Pauline sacraments would become

meaningless and ineffectual. They are confined to the time between the

resurrection of Jesus and His parousia, when the dead shall arise.

Their power depends on the present, and also on the future, fact. In

this sense they are “historically” conditioned.

While therefore in the Mystery-religions and in the Johannine theology

the sacraments work of themselves, in Paul they draw their energy from

a universal world-event, from which it is, as it were, transmitted.

It now becomes clear why the Apostle cannot describe as a “Re-birth”

the condition brought about by baptism. The renewal consists in the

fact that the coming resurrection-life is, for the short period which

remains of the present course of the world, received by anticipation.

Re-birth, on the other hand, implies an uneschatological system of

thought in which the individual reckons more or less on a normal span

of life, for which he seeks an inner divine being which shall subsist

alongside of or above the earthly. It is only at a period when

eschatology is falling into the background that the Greek conception

of re-birth, such as is associated with the Mysteries, can supersede

the old mystico-eschatological conception of the proleptic

resurrection. Accordingly it presently appears in Justin and the

Fourth Evangelist. From that point onwards baptism brings re-birth. In

Paul it produced only an antedated dying and rising again.

The sacramental conception of the Apostle is therefore derived from an

entirely different world of thought from that of the

Mystery-religions.

It is a different question, however, in what relation his

“physical”_(_180_)_ mysticism in itself, apart from the [pg 218]

sacraments, bears to the world of ideas associated with the Greek

Mystery-religions.

To this question Reitzenstein, the “pneumatic”_(_181_)_ among the

students of Comparative Religion, devotes a careful study. He avoids

conventional catchwords and rash conclusions, and endeavours to

discover the conceptions and ideas which are common to both, and to

follow them out in detail.

With this purpose he brings together everything which he can find in

the language of the Mysteries and the Hermetic literature relating to

such ideas as “service” and “military service” of God,

“justification,” “pre-existence,” “gnosis,” “spirit,” “revelation,”

“pneumatic,” “heavenly garment,” and “transformation.”

For the first time the material for a study of Paul from the point of

view of Comparative Religion is brought together with a certain

completeness, and the impression which it makes is very powerful. The

theologian who reads these passages with an open mind will be lifted

out of the ruts of conventional interpretation. It is as if a flood of

new thought had streamed into the channels of ordinary exegesis,

whether critical or otherwise, and swept away the accumulations of

rubble.

Whether all the explanations are sound, and whether many expressions,

such as _e.g._ “servant” and “prisoner” of Christ, and imagery—for

example, that taken from the military life—could not be just as well

explained directly as by the roundabout way of their use in the

Mystery-religions, may be left an open question. What is certain is,

that Reitzenstein has made an end of the cut-and-dried conception that

Paul simply translated his theology from Jewish thought into Greek

language, and proves that [pg 219] he knows the scope and exact

application of the words of the religious vocabulary, and along with

the terms and expressions has taken over suggestions for the

presentation of his ideas. Without the possibilities and

presuppositions supplied by the religious language of the Greek Orient

it would have been more difficult for him to create his mysticism. He

found in existence a tone-system in which the modulations necessary

for the development of his theme offered themselves for his

disposal._(_182_)_

Reitzenstein remarks with much justice that particular words and

phrases do not of themselves prove very much, but that what is really

of importance is the connexion of the passages. Are there sets of

ideas in Paul which are allied with those of the Mystery-religions?

What realities stand in the two cases behind the references to the

mystical doctrine of the miraculous new creation of the man while in

his living body?

The description and paraphrasing which commentaries and New Testament

theologies bestow upon the Apostle’s assertions do not suffice for

Reitzenstein. He wants to understand and come to grips with the

thought, and to arouse in others the same discontent.

The possibility that the Pauline mysticism might be capable of being

explained from within appears to him excluded. With all the reserve

which he imposes upon himself he nevertheless believes himself to have

proved that the central conception of “the deification and [pg 220]

transfiguration of the living man is derived from the Mysteries.” The

conviction of a miracle of transformation taking place in his own

person, is, he pronounces, not Jewish. Therefore he thinks that Paul

represents a kind of ancient Jewish prophetism modified by the

influence of the Hellenistic Mystery beliefs.

The “history of the development” of Paul’s thought he conceives as

follows: The influence of Greek mysticism, with which he had already a

literary acquaintance, helped to prepare the way for that momentous

inner experience which eventually caused a rupture between the Apostle

and his ancestral religion. “This influence,” he thinks, “increased in

the two years of solitary struggle for the working out of a new

religion.” A renewed study of Greek religious literature became

necessary “from the moment when the Apostle dedicated himself to, and

began to prepare for, his mission to the _Ἕλληνες_.”

By the method which he applies, Reitzenstein is necessarily driven to

adopt this far-reaching view. He makes no effort to take into the

field of his argument the Late-Jewish eschatology, as preserved in the

post-Danielic literature, in the discourses of Jesus, and the

Apocalypses of Baruch and Ezra. Whatever is not self-explanatory, and

cannot be explained from the Old Testament, is, according to him,

derived from the world of thought associated with the

Mystery-religions.

The proper procedure would really have been to examine the conceptions

drawn from apocalyptic thought and those from the Mystery-religions

independently, and then to decide which of them rendered possible the

better explanation. The best way would have been for Reitzenstein to

discuss the matter step by step with Kabisch, who had sought to derive

the fundamental conceptions of the Pauline mysticism from eschatology.

The total neglect of eschatology forces him to some curious

conclusions. After showing, in opposition to a canonised confusion of

thought, that there is not the slightest connexion between Paul’s

doctrine of the first [pg 221] and second Adam in I Cor. xv. 45-49 and

Philo’s theory about the two accounts of the creation in Genesis,

since in that case the pneumatic heavenly man would be the first, and

the psychic earthly man the second,_(_183_)_ he comes to the

conclusion that the view set forth in I Corinthians must have

underlying it “the belief in a god ‘Anthropos,’” who came to be

identified with Christ.

This hypothesis naturally suggests itself to Reitzenstein, because in

_Poimandres_ he believes himself to have discovered a myth about

Anthropos._(_184_)_ But is this, even if it were held to be proved, of

such a character that the Pauline conception of the first and second

Adam could without more ado be derived from it? Is the complicated

hypothesis necessary?

Paul’s conception can be explained without the least difficulty on

eschatological grounds. The first Adam brought mankind under the

dominion of death. Christ is the Second Adam because He by His

resurrection becomes the founder of a new race, which in virtue of

that which has taken place in Him becomes partaker of an imperishable

life, and acquires a claim to the future possession of the pneumatic

heavenly body which He already bears. The Second Man comes from heaven

because the pre-existent Christ, in order to become the founder of the

“humanity of the resurrection,” must appear upon earth and assume

fleshly corporeity. He is “life-giving spirit” because the _pneuma_

which goes forth from Him as the glorified Christ, works in believers

as the power of the resurrection. This being so, what purpose is

served by bringing in the very doubtful myths about the god Anthropos,

especially as Paul, though he certainly thinks of his Second Adam as a

heavenly being, never anywhere speaks of Him as God.

[pg 222]

This is typical of a series of similar cases._(_185_)_

On the other hand, it is just this one-sidedness which makes the charm

and the significance of the book. Reitzenstein shows, both positively

and negatively, how far the analogies from the Mystery-religions will

take us. Ordinary theologians—since Kabisch had remained without

influence—had simply designated as Greek everything which they could

not understand from Late Judaism, and described as Late-Jewish

whatever they could not understand as Greek. Reitzenstein,

the—unconscious?—antipodes of Kabisch, would like to make an end of

this simple game and compel people to choose one horn or other of the

dilemma. Instead of entering on theoretic discussions, full of “not

only, but also,” and “either . . . or,” he goes straight forward as

far as he thinks he can feel firm ground under his feet, and has thus

contributed, to an extraordinary degree, to the clearing up of the

situation.

Contrary to his intention and conviction, however, the outcome is not

positive but negative.

Like Dieterich and others, Reitzenstein takes it for granted that

Paulinism makes use of the conception of Re-birth, and he feels that

that is in itself a sufficient reason for not regarding it as a

product of Judaism._(_186_)_

The assumption being unsound, all the discussions and arguments based

on it fall to the ground. In particular, the fine parallels from the

Hermetic literature must be given up. Further, it is not legitimate to

treat the [pg 223] mysticism of the Mystery-religions and that of Paul

as directly corresponding to one another. The former is a

God-mysticism, the latter a Christ-mysticism. The resulting

differences are greater than at first sight appears. In the

Graeco-Oriental conception, what is in view is the “deification” of

the individual man. As the divinity of the particular Mystery which is

being celebrated is always thought of as the highest divinity, the

mortal enters into union with the being of God as such.

The Pauline Christ, however, even though He is called the Son of God,

is not God, but only a heavenly Being. The renewal which is effected

by fellowship with Him is not a deification—the word never occurs in

the Apostle’s writings—but only a transference into a state of

super-sensuous corporeity, which has to do with a coming new condition

of the world.

Greek thought is concerned with the simple antithesis of the divine

world and the earthly world. Paulinism makes out of this duality a

triplicity. It divides the super-earthly factor into two,

distinguishing between God and the divine super-earthly, which is

personified in Christ and made present in Him. God, and therein speaks

the voice of Judaism, is purely transcendent. A God-mysticism does not

exist for the Apostle—or, at least, does not yet exist. A time will

come no doubt in the future, after the termination of the Messianic

Kingdom, when God will be “all in all” (I Cor. xv. 28). Until then

there is only a Christ-mysticism, which has to do with the

anticipation of the super-earthly life of the Messianic Kingdom.

To treat Graeco-Oriental and Pauline mysticism as corresponding

factors, is to perform a piece in two-four time and a piece in

three-four time together, and to imagine that one hears an identical

rhythm in both.

Another point of difference is that Graeco-Oriental mysticism works

with permanent factors; the Pauline with temporal and changing ones.

The Messianic-Divine drives out the super-earthly angelic powers which

[pg 224] previously occupied a place between God and the world. It is

in the very act of coming. But in proportion as it advances, there

passes away not only the super-sensuous angelic element, but also the

earthly and sensuous. Christ-mysticism depends upon the movement of

these two worlds, one of them moving towards being, the other towards

not-being, and it continues only so long as they are in touch with one

another as they move past in opposite directions. The beginning of

this contact is marked by the resurrection of the Lord, the end by His

parousia. Before the former it is not yet possible to pass from one to

the other, after the latter it is no longer possible. A mysticism

which is thus bound up with temporal conditions can hardly be derived

from the Greek timeless conceptions.

The act, moreover, by which the individual becomes partaker in the new

being is in the two cases quite different. The Mystery-religions

represent the “transfiguration” of the living being as effected by his

receiving into himself a divine essence, by means of the gnosis and

the vision of God. It is thus a subjective act. According to Paul’s

teaching the “transfiguration” is not brought about by the gnosis and

vision of God. These are rather the consequence of the renewal, the

efficient cause of which is found, not in the act of the individual,

and not in the inherent efficacy of the sacrament, but in a

world-process. So soon as the individual enters by faith and baptism

into this new cosmic process he is immediately renewed in harmony

therewith, and now receives spirit, ecstasy, gnosis, and everything

that these imply. What according to the Greek view is the cause, is

for Paul the consequence. Thus, even though the conceptions show a

certain similarity, they do not correspond, because they are connected

with the central event of the mysticism in each case by chains which

run in opposite directions.

A figure which exactly illustrates one’s meaning may claim pardon even

for somewhat doubtful taste. In the Mystery-religions, individuals

climb up a staircase step [pg 225] by step towards deification; in

Paulinism they spring in a body into a lift which is already in motion

and which carries them into a new world. The staircase is open to all;

the lift can only be used by those for whom it is especially provided.

So far as Comparative Religion is concerned, therefore, the case is

exactly the same in regard to the “physical” element in the mystical

doctrine of redemption as it was in regard to that of the sacramental

doctrine. On close examination the historico-eschatological character

of the Pauline conception is in both cases so all-pervading that it

invalidates any parallel with the Mystery-religions, and leaves them

with nothing in common but the linguistic expression. The mystical and

sacramental aspects of the “physical” element in redemption do not for

him stand on the same footing with the eschatological, which is

immediately given with the conceptions of transformation and

resurrection, but must be in some way capable of being derived from

it. Only when that is done will the Pauline doctrine of redemption be

explained.

It is to be noted that Reitzenstein tries in vain to render

intelligible either the connexion of the soteriological mysticism with

the facts of the death and resurrection, or the fellowship which is

therein presupposed between the believer and the Lord. In his

exposition of Rom. vi. the parallels with the Mystery-religions force

him into a wrong line, and compel him to think of the objective

process as a subjective one. He assumes that everything becomes clear

and simple if once the Apostle is understood to speak of a _voluntary_

dying, which is neither purely physical nor merely metaphysical, but

is based upon the thought that we must not sin any more because we

have taken upon us Christ’s person and lot, and have crucified our

natural man.

But in Paul it is not a question of an act which the believer

accomplishes in himself; what happens is that in the moment when he

receives baptism, the dying and [pg 226] rising again of Christ takes

place in him without any cooperation, or exercise of will or thought,

on his part. It is like a mechanical process which is set in motion by

pressing a spring. The minute force employed in pressing the spring

bears no relation to that which thereon comes into play; only serves

to release a set of forces already in existence.

In the Mystery-religions the thought is: We desire not to sin any

more, therefore we will undergo initiation. Paul’s logic is the

converse of this, and takes the objective form: Christ’s death and

resurrection is effectually present in us; therefore, we are no longer

natural men and cannot sin any more.

The whole distinction lies in the fact that the mysticism of the

Apostle of the Gentiles is based on historico-eschatological events,

whereas the Mystery-religions are in their nature non-historical.

Where they make use of myths they use them in the last resort merely

as pictures of that which the “mystes” performs or undergoes, not as

events charged with a real energy, as the death and resurrection of

Jesus are for Paul.

But the fact of the far-reaching outward and inward resemblances of

language between the Graeco-Oriental and the Pauline mysticism are not

affected by that. As though by a pre-established harmony in the

history of religion, it came about that the mysticism which developed

out of eschatology was able to find complete representation in the

language of the Mystery-religions, and found there ready to its hand

conceptions and expressions which facilitated, suggested, and in some

cases were even indispensable to its fuller development.

Reitzenstein’s merit is that of having determined exactly and

unmistakably the meaning of Paul’s language, and having at the same

time shown that Jewish Hellenism and Greek philosophy had practically

no part in him.

Of course, it is not possible to decide how much of this [pg 227]

religious language Paul found already in existence, and how much he

created for his purpose. It must not be forgotten that the Oriental

Mystery-religions did not receive their complete development under

Greek influence until a considerable time after the appearance of the

Apostle of the Gentiles. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that

he and they found in existence the same Greek religious vocabulary,

laid hold of it, and perfected it.

One error of the students of Comparative Religion deserves particular

mention, for it is typical. In consequence of the parallelism which

they maintain between the Mystery-religions and Paulinism, they come

to ascribe to the Apostle the creation of a “religion.”_(_187_)_

Nothing of the kind ever entered into his purpose. For him there was

only one religion: that of Judaism. It was concerned with God, faith,

promise, hope and law. In consequence of the coming, the death, and

the resurrection of Jesus Christ, it became its duty to adjust its

teachings and demands to the new era thus introduced, and in the

process many things were moved from the shadow into the light and

others from the light into the shadow. “Christianity” is for Paul no

new religion, but simply Judaism with the centre of gravity shifted in

consequence of the new era. His own system of thought is certainly for

him no new religion. It is his belief, as fully known and worked out

in its implications, and it professes to be nothing else than the true

Jewish religion, in accord both with the time and with the Scriptures.

Another remark that has to be made is that the students of Comparative

Religion are inclined to make an illegitimate use of the word

eschatology when it suits their purpose. They think themselves

justified in applying it wherever in the Mystery-religions there is

mention of death, judgment, and life after death, but they forget that

in doing so they are using it in a much more general sense than that

which we have to reckon with in the Pauline [pg 228] doctrine. The

term eschatology ought only to be applied when reference is made to

the end of the world as expected in the immediate future, and the

events, hopes, and fears connected therewith. The use of the word to

designate the subjective future end of individuals, in connexion with

which no imminent catastrophe affecting all mankind is in question,

can only be misleading, since it creates the false impression—_exempla

docent_—that the Pauline eschatology can be paralleled and compared

with an eschatology belonging to the Mystery-religions. Of eschatology

in the late Jewish or early Christian sense there is not a single

trace to be found in any Graeco-Oriental doctrine._(_188_)_

Therefore, the Mystery-religions and Paulinism cannot in the last

resort be compared at all, as is indeed confirmed by the fact that the

real analogies both in the mysticism and the sacramental doctrine are

so surprisingly few. Reitzenstein’s attempt has not succeeded in

altering this result, but only in confirming it. What remains of his

material when the circle of ideas connected with the thought of

“re-birth” is eliminated, and the all-pervading eschatological

character of the fundamental ideas and underlying logic of Paulinism

are duly considered in making the comparison?

Finally, the question may be permitted, What would have been the

bearing of the result if Dieterich and Reitzenstein had really proved

the dependence of the Apostle’s doctrine upon the Mystery-religions?

The simple declaration of the result would have been only [pg 229] the

beginning of things, for immediately the problem whether, understood

in this way, the Apostle’s doctrine could still have belonged to

primitive Christianity would have arisen and called aloud for

solution. The theory that Paul personally transformed the Gospel on

the analogy of the Graeco-Oriental Mystery-religions is menaced by the

same difficulties which previously brought about the downfall of the

theory held by the Baur and post-Baur theology, that he Hellenised the

Gospel. The hypothesis advanced by the students of Comparative

Religion is only a special form of that general theory, and can do

nothing to minimise the _a priori_ difficulties, or those raised by

the history of dogma in connexion with it.

How does Paulinism as understood by Dieterich and Reitzenstein fit

into the history of the development of Christianity?

If the Apostle during the first generation had introduced such a

tremendous innovation as the Greek “physical” mysticism of redemption

and the sacraments into primitive Jewish Christianity, could the

latter have permitted this and continued to keep him in its midst? How

was it possible for it to admit without a struggle, indeed unnoticed,

something so entirely alien, and to raise no objections either to the

Christology or to the mysticism or to the sacramental doctrine of the

Apostle, but simply and solely to his attitude towards the law?

And how, on the other hand, could the later Hellenising theology pass

over in silence the man who had been its precursor in uniting the

conceptions of Graeco-Oriental religion with the Gospel? The

inexplicable fact that Paulinism played no part in the subsequent

development, but is left to lie unused and uncomprehended, becomes

still more inexplicable if Dieterich and Reitzenstein are right. They

assert that the Hellenising force did not issue from philosophy but

from the Graeco-Oriental religious movement, and found expression in

Paul not less than in the Johannine and early Greek theology. [pg 230]

Why, then, are the results so different in the two cases that they

have no kind of outer or inner relation to one another? If the same

force is applied at different times to the same object and in the same

line, can the resultant movement vary so much in direction? How is it

possible that Paul represents a Hellenisation of Christianity which is

so unique in character and so unnoticed by others? How could two

different types of Greek transformation of the Gospel come into

existence, and in such a way, moreover, that the second discovered

nothing Hellenic in the first?

According to the theory of Dieterich and Reitzenstein, Paulinism ought

to be detached from early Christianity and closely connected with

Greek theology. The contrary is the case. It stands in undisturbed

connexion with the former, whereas it shows no connexion whatever with

the latter.

Any one who thinks of the Apostle’s doctrine as in any sense a

Hellenisation of the Gospel, whether he owes allegiance to ordinary

theology or to Comparative Religion, has gone over to the radicalism

of the Ultra-Tübingen party, and must, like it, go forth with his Paul

out of primitive Christianity into a later period, unless, indeed, as

the Comparative method admits, he is prepared to consider the faith of

the early Church as Graeco-Oriental, or Paul as the founder of

Christianity.

In any case the hypothesis of a Hellenising of the Gospel in early

Christianity carried out by Paul as an individual is a historic

impossibility. From the dilemma, either early Christian or Greek,

there is no escape, however one may twist and turn.

If the students of Comparative Religion had been better acquainted

with the attempt of the Ultra-Tübingen critics, and had had a more

accurate understanding of the difference between Paulinism and the

Johannine and early Greek theology, they could hardly have retained

the open-mindedness necessary to the commencement of their

undertaking; for in that case they would have been [pg 231] forced to

reflect on the inconvenient consequences of their possible victory.

Since they did not enter on such considerations it was difficult for

them to do justice to Harnack. Here and there they took occasion to

accuse him of being behind the times and reproach him with having

given too much importance to the influence of philosophy in relation

to the Hellenising of Christianity, and too little to that of the

Mystery-religions. They are not wholly wrong in this. He does not give

sufficient recognition to the “physical” and sacramental elements in

Paulinism, and does not work out sufficiently fully the parallel

between the Mystery-religions and the Johannine and early Greek

theology. In laying the foundations of his history of dogma he is too

exclusively interested in the development of the Christology, instead

of starting from the curious complex of Christology, soteriology, and

sacramental doctrine which is characteristic of the Pauline as well as

of the Johannine and early Greek theology, and determines the course

of the history of dogma.

But this somewhat one-sided view of primitive and early Christianity

is far from affording the complete explanation of his attitude of

reserve in regard to the results arrived at by the students of

Comparative Religion. If he forms a low estimate of the influence of

the Mystery-religions upon Paul and the earliest period of

Christianity, he is led to that result by pressing considerations from

the history of dogma, by which the consequences of the theory put

forward by the students of Comparative Religion are made clear to him.

Like Anrich, he recognised from the beginning the weaknesses of the

theory, which remained hidden from the champions of the method.

It is not possible for any one who holds that Paulinism shows the

influence of the Mystery-religions to stop half-way; he has to carry

his conclusion back into primitive Christianity in general and to

explain even the genesis of the new faith as due to syncretism. The

latter [pg 232] stand-point is taken up by Hermann Gunkel_(_189_)_ and

Max Maurenbrecher._(_190_)_

They hold that the belief in a redeemer-god, such as was present in

Jewish Messianism, was also widely current in the Graeco-Oriental

religions, and that subsequently, in consequence of the historic

coming of Jesus, these two worlds of thought came into a contact which

generated a creative energy. From the process thus set in motion

primitive Christianity arose. This account of its genesis also

explains, they think, why it goes much beyond the “teaching of Jesus”

and the religious ideas which formed the content of Late Judaism, and

includes mystical and sacramental beliefs.

The historic Jesus did not, according to Gunkel and Maurenbrecher,

hold Himself to be the “Redeemer.” Therefore, the real origin of

Christianity does not lie with Him but with the disciples. They,

having been laid hold of by the power of His personality, and finding

themselves compelled to seek a solution of the problem of His death,

referred to Him the already existing myth of the Saviour-God, and

thereby gave to the set of ideas which had hitherto only existed as

such a point of historical attachment, both for Orientals and Jews.

From this time forward the religious ideas which attached themselves

in the one case and the other to the conception of a redeemer-god

flowed into a common bed and formed the stream which, as Christianity,

overflowed the world.

Maurenbrecher, who seeks to work out the hypothesis in rather fuller

detail, holds that in Galilee, which in view of its history had

certainly not always been a purely Jewish country, the Messianic idea

and the non-Jewish belief in redemption were already present and had

to some extent intermingled, and that it was, therefore, no accident

that the new religion which after the death of Jesus took [pg 233] its

rise in the revelation made to Peter should have gone forth from

Galilee. The advantage, he goes on to explain, which the young

Christianity possessed among a purely heathen population in comparison

with the other competing Oriental religions, arises from the Jewish

element, “which in consequence of the peculiar intermixture of which

Christianity was the outcome had entered into the universal Oriental

religion of redemption.” “Conversely, however, it was precisely the

non-Jewish element in the Christian faith which for the Jews made this

new religion a really new and higher stage of their religious life.”

This hypothesis is unable to recognise any unique character in Paul.

What Dieterich and Reitzenstein claim for him, it finds already

completely realised in the primitive community. The result is that

Maurenbrecher hardly knows what to make of him, and emphasises his

Jewish side much more strongly than his Graeco-Oriental aspect.

The solution of the problem worked out by Gunkel and Maurenbrecher is

not based purely on Comparative Religion, but, as the latter writer

justly points out, is a kind of synthesis between the views of liberal

theology and that of its opponents. The fundamental idea comes from

the latter; but in agreement with the former the existence of a

historical Jesus is retained.

The retention of this remnant of critical history is, however,

unnecessary and illogical. If the origin of Christianity essentially

depends on the intermixture of an Oriental belief in a redeemer with

the Jewish expectation of the Messiah, and, given a contact and

interpenetration between the two, must necessarily have arisen, it is

not obvious why the rôle of a historical Jesus should be—or whether it

can be—retained in connexion with it.

In Gunkel and Maurenbrecher it is only a stop-gap, which is brought

into a wholly external connexion with the growth of the new religion.

They retain His coming as the phenomenon by which the contact of the

two religious worlds is set up, but not as a fructifying element.

[pg 234]

There is no obvious reason for continuing to take into account this by

no means indispensable auxiliary force. If the Oriental belief in a

redeemer and the Jewish Messianic hope were inherently adapted to one

another, and destined to produce by their fruitful union a new

religion, then, after all, any kind of impulse, even a mere train of

thought, might have set the process in motion. The assumption of the

existence and the death of the Galilaean Rabbi becomes superfluous if

once it ceases to supply the efficient cause for the arising of

Christianity. Since Comparative Religion finds the latter in the

mutual interpenetration of Jewish and Graeco-Oriental elements, it can

get along just as well with myth as with the questionable history of

the Synoptists. Such is the teaching of William Benjamin

Smith,_(_191_)_ and Arthur Drews.

Both these writers make a rather extravagant use of the privilege of

standing outside the ranks of scientific theology. Their imagination

leaps with playful elegance over obstacles of fact and enables them to

discover everywhere the pre-Christian Jesus whom their soul desires,

even in places where an ordinary intelligence can find no trace of

him.

Smith takes it for granted that the “Naasenes, whose origin goes back

to the most remote antiquity, worshipped a Jesus as a divinity.” How

Christianity grew out of this cult he does not tell us, but consoles

us with the promise of later revelations. In the preface he betrays

the fact that he is now only publishing “the first quarter of the

evidence which he has collected,” and intends to go on quietly

collecting and arranging his material “until [pg 235] the whole

irresistible host can take the field together,” and further, that it

is not the—inevitable—victory which is his main concern, but the

stimulus imparted to others.

Drews_(_192_)_ does not play the amateur quite so completely, but

endeavours on the basis of his belief in the pre-Christian Jesus to

present a coherent picture of the way in which Christianity arose; and

he makes Paul its creator. “The Jesus-faith,” so runs his thesis, “had

long existed in numerous Mandaean sects in Western Asia, in many

respects distinct from one another, before the belief in the

Jesus-religion acquired a fixed form and its adherents became

conscious of their religious _differentia_ and their independence of

the official Jewish religion.” This ancient faith first meets us as a

new religion in the letters ascribed to Paul. The citizen of Tarsus,

trained as a Pharisee, heard of a sect-god named Jesus, and brought

this conception into connexion with the belief in the death and

resurrection of Adonis and the thought of the suffering “servant of

the Lord” in Isaiah liii., and thus arrived at the idea that a god had

appeared in human form, and had by his death and resurrection become

the Redeemer, and had enabled men “to become God.” This was the

birth-hour of Christianity. For a historic personality, “to serve, so

to speak, as the living model for the God-man,” there was no need in

order to produce this Jesus-religion, which then entered on its

world-wide career of victory.

Drews’ thesis is not merely a curiosity; it indicates the natural

limit at which the hypothesis advanced by the advocates of Comparative

Religion, when left to its own momentum, finally comes to rest.

Paulinism, in the judgment of the adherents of this much-vaunted

method, is to be regarded as a synthesis between primitive

Christianity and the conceptions current in the Mystery-religions. If

this be taken as the starting-point, it is necessary to proceed to the

conclusion—since the synthesis cannot be conceived as [pg 236]

accomplished by an individual—that Christianity itself is a product of

syncretism. And if the constitutive factor in the new faith is seen in

the combination of the Jewish Messianic expectation with a

Graeco-Oriental belief in a redeemer-god who dies and rises again, the

assumption of the existence of a historic Jesus who was not Himself

touched by Hellenic ideas becomes a worthless subsidiary hypothesis.

It becomes quite a natural step to leave it on one side and to regard

the synthesis as either developing gradually, by an impersonal

process, or as coming to birth in the brain of the author of the

Pauline Epistles, who thus becomes the creator of early Christianity.

Drews is justified in appealing to Gunkel, and asserting that he is

only offering his ideas with a logically necessary correction.

Of course, every further logical step in this direction involves

further sacrifice of historical understanding and an increasing

necessity to indulge in imaginary constructions. But all these

consequences are already present in germ in the mere assertion that

Paul is to be understood from the Mystery-religions, even though those

who maintain this view do not want to proceed any further than the

facts which have to be explained seem to them to warrant. As between

the students of Comparative Religion and Drews the relation is similar

to that between the legitimate and illegitimate Tübingen schools.

Here, too, the alternative lies between “scientific and inconsistent,

and consistent and unscientific.” That means that an absolute antinomy

appears between the logic of the attempted solution and that of the

data of fact; which is as much as to say that the problem has been

wrongly grasped, and that this way, whether it be followed for a

certain distance only, or right to the end, can never lead to the goal

of a satisfactory solution.

[pg 237]

VIII

SUMMING-UP AND FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM

THE study of Paulinism has nothing very brilliant to show for itself

in the way of scientific achievement. Learning has been lavishly

expended upon it, but thought and reflection have been to seek.

Writers went to work with an almost inconceivable absence of plan, and

wanted to offer solutions before they had made clear to themselves the

scope of the problem. Instead of seeking a definite diagnosis, they

treated the symptoms separately, with whatever means happened to come

to hand.

It was inevitable, therefore, that the study of the subject should

move along intricate and continually recrossing paths, and engage in

long and devious wanderings, only, in some cases, to arrive back again

at the point from which it started. That Paul’s doctrine of redemption

was thought out on the lines of a physical nature-process had been

asserted by Lüdemann as long ago as the year 1872. Nevertheless,

theology hit on the plan of “spiritualising” it, and took very nearly

thirty years to get back to this discovery.

The account which we have given of the history of the subject has

revealed the structure of the problem and given it room to develop

itself. The inner connexion of the questions determines in advance

what the individual solutions can and cannot effect, and at the same

time [pg 238] shows what must be provided for in any solution which

professes to offer a really historical explanation.

To neglect this structure, this schematism of the problem is not

permissible. It has not been independently invented and imposed from

without upon the past history of research, but represents its actual

results, and points the way for all subsequent attempts at a solution.

The problem consists in the two great questions: what Paul’s doctrine

has in common with primitive Christianity, and what it has in common

with Greek ideas.

It is complicated by the fact that our only information about the

beliefs of the primitive Church comes from Paul. His writings are the

first—and indeed the only—witnesses which we possess upon the point,

since the First Epistle of Peter and the Epistle of James give us

information at best about a non-Pauline, certainly not about a

pre-Pauline Christianity.

The standard by which the primitiveness of Paul’s Christianity has to

be measured and tested has, therefore, in the first place to be

arrived at by the method of arguing backward from itself.

Nevertheless, the difficulty is not so great as it appears when thus

theoretically stated. The most general features of the earliest dogma

can be found without difficulty in the Epistles. These consisted in

the belief in the Messiahship of the Jesus who had died and risen

again, and in the expectation of His parousia in the immediate future.

Moreover, the problem as a whole is simplified by the fact that the

second of the fundamental questions has been clearly answered by the

history of Pauline study. The answer is this: Paulinism and Hellenism

have in common their religious terminology, but, in respect of ideas,

nothing. The Apostle did not Hellenise Christianity. His conceptions

are equally distinct from those of Greek philosophy and from those of

the Mystery-religions.

The affinities and analogies which have been alleged cannot stand an

examination which takes account of their real essence and of the

different way in which the ideas [pg 239] are conditioned in the two

cases. Neither Baur nor the theology which owes allegiance to him, nor

the students of Comparative Religion, have succeeded in proving their

assertions. It is also interesting to observe that those who undertake

to explain Paul by the aid of the Graeco-Oriental Mystery-religions,

entirely deny the philosophic Hellenism which a more conventional

theological opinion has found in him; so that it is a case of Satan’s

being driven out by Beelzebub. On the other hand, the Comparative

study of Paulinism has the merit of having made an end of the

“spiritualising” and “psychologising” which were practised for a whole

generation.

The impossibility of anything in the nature of a Hellenic gospel being

present in Paul appears from the fact, that every view of this kind

when thought out in its logical implications must arrive at a point

where it has to do violence to historical tradition. It became

apparent that it is impossible for a Hellenised Paulinism to subsist

alongside of a primitive Christianity which shared the Jewish

eschatological expectations. One must either, as the Ultra-Tübingen

critics did, transplant the Epistles and the doctrine from the

primitive period to the second century, or, as some of the votaries of

Comparative Religion have endeavoured to do, explain primitive

Christianity as a product of Graeco-Oriental syncretism.

That only a very few investigators have drawn these inferences is not

due to the fact that they are not justified. It was want of courage,

of logical consistency, and of the necessary contempt for the rest of

the facts which prevented them from making the venture. So they

offered compromises, imposingly dressed out in words but inwardly

untenable, and talked themselves and others into believing the

impossible, namely, that a Hellenisation of the primitive Christian

belief effected by Paul as an individual is really conceivable.

The half-and-half theories which represent Paulinism as consisting

partly of Greek, partly of Jewish ideas, are [pg 240] in a still worse

case than those which more or less neglect the former element.

Encumbered with all the difficulties of the Hellenising theory they

become involved in the jungle of antinomies which they discover or

imagine, and there perish miserably.

The solution must, therefore, consist in leaving out of the question

Greek influence in every form and in every combination, and venturing

on the “one-sidedness” of endeavouring to understand the doctrine of

the Apostle of the Gentiles entirely on the basis of Jewish primitive

Christianity. That implies, in the first place, that the Pauline

eschatology must be maintained in its full compass, as required by the

utterances of the letters. But merely to emphasise it is not

everything. The next point is to explain it. What was the scheme of

the events of the End, and what answer was given by eschatological

expectation to the fundamental questions which could not be avoided?

Are there two resurrections or one; one judgment or two? Who are to

rise again at the parousia? Does a judgment take place then? On whom

is it held? What are its standards and its subject? Wherein do reward

and punishment consist? What happens to the men of the surviving

generation who are not destined to the Messianic kingdom? What is the

relation between judgment and election? What is the fate of believers

who are elect and baptised but who have fallen from grace by unworthy

conduct? Can they lose their final blessedness, or are they only

excluded from the Messianic kingdom? Does Paul recognise a general

resurrection? If so, when does it take place? Is it accompanied by a

judgment, or do only the elect rise again? When does the judgment take

place at which the elect judge the angels?

Not until Pauline eschatology gives an answer to all the “idle”

questions of this kind which can be asked will it be really understood

and explained. And it must be somehow possible, by the discovery of

its inner logic, to reconstruct it from the scattered statements in

the documents. [pg 241] We have no right to assume that for Paul there

existed in his expectation manifest obscurities, much less that he had

overlooked contradictions in it.

Is there, then, any possibility of explaining the mystical doctrine of

redemption and the sacramental teaching on the basis of the Jewish

eschatological element?

The attempt is by no means so hopeless as it might seem in view of the

general consideration that Judaism knew neither mysticism nor

sacraments. It is not really a question of Judaism as such, but of

apocalyptic thought, which is a separate and independent phenomenon

arising within Judaism, and has special presuppositions which are

entirely peculiar to it.

We saw in analysing the “physical” element in the doctrine of

redemption and the sacraments that the conceptions connected therewith

are conditioned by the underlying eschatology which everywhere shows

through._(_193_)_ It needs no special learning to make this discovery.

Any one who ventures to read the documents with an open mind and pays

attention to the primary links of connexion will soon arrive at this

conclusion. That Paul’s mystical doctrine of redemption and his

doctrine of the sacraments belong to eschatology is plain to be seen.

The only question is in what way, exactly, they have arisen out of it.

The future-hope, raised to the highest degree of intensity, must

somehow or other have possessed the power of producing them. If the

impulse, the pressing need to which they were the response, is once

recognised, then Paulinism is understood, since in its essence it can

be nothing else than an eschatological mysticism, expressing itself by

the aid of the Greek religious terminology.

Theoretically, too, it is possible to form an approximate idea how the

intensified expectation of the future might take a mystical form. In

apocalyptic thought sensuous and super-sensuous converge, in such a

manner that the former is thought of as passing away into the latter.

Thus [pg 242] there is present in it the most general presupposition

of all mysticism, since it is the object of the latter to abolish the

earthly in the super-earthly. The peculiarity of the mysticism which

arises out of Apocalyptic is that it does not bring the two worlds

into contact in the mind of the individual man, as Greek and medieval

mysticism did, but dovetails one into the other, and thus creates for

the moment at which the one passes over into the other an objective,

temporally conditioned mysticism. This, however, is only available for

those who by their destiny belong to both worlds. Eschatological

mysticism is predestinarian.

That a mysticism of this kind existed before Paul is not known. It may

be conjectured that the conditions under which it could develop were

not present until after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

But sacramental tendencies already make their appearance in the

future-hope which was to lead up to Christianity. The usual view is to

the effect that Paul was the first to introduce the mystical element

into baptism and the Lord’s Supper. There is nothing to prove that.

How can we possibly tell that these ceremonies were previously purely

symbolic acts? Any one who reads with an open mind the Synoptic

accounts of John’s baptism must recognise that it was not only a

symbol of purification on repentance, but is thought of as in some way

or other guaranteeing salvation._(_194_)_ A transaction, however,

which itself gives and effects such a result is to be regarded as a

sacrament.

The manner in which Paul speaks of early Christian baptism and of the

Lord’s Supper does not make the impression that he is asserting for

the first time the effectual working of the ceremony; it is rather as

if he took it for granted as something given and self-evident. This

would agree with the observation noted above that the baptism of John,

from which primitive Christian [pg 243] baptism was derived, was

already thought of as a sacrament.

Whether the Lord’s Supper in the intention of Jesus Himself directly

conveyed something to the partakers, or whether it only became a

sacrament in primitive Christian times, must be left undecided.

That the intensified eschatological expectation should go so far as to

produce sacramental conceptions is in itself intelligible. Those who

stood on the threshold of the coming glory must have been eagerly

anxious to gain an assurance that they themselves would be partakers

therein and to obtain tangible guarantees of “deliverance” from the

coming judgment. The conception of “marking out” and “sealing” plays

in apocalyptic thought a very important part. Similar provisions are a

characteristic product of any intense expectation of the future.

It is, therefore, highly probable that the Baptist, and primitive

Christianity, created eschatological sacraments which, as already

established and accredited, Paul had only to take over.

The bearing of these statements and considerations must be shown from

the Epistles. How far it is possible to trace the genesis of the

mysticism and the sacramental doctrine from the eschatological beliefs

of the Apostle cannot be determined _a priori_. The one thing certain

is that no other way of explanation is possible than that which leads

from the circumference of his future-hope to the central idea of his

“theology.” All other interpretations hang in the air.

Theology has heretofore found itself rather helpless in presence of

the votaries of Comparative Religion. It could not accept their

results as correct, but on the other hand it was not in a position to

explain Paul’s sacramental views, because it had never taken into

consideration the possibility that they might have arisen out of the

Jewish and primitive Christian future-hope. There was thus no course

open to it but to engage in an inglorious guerilla warfare with the

new science and skirmish with [pg 244] it over particular passages and

statements. It is only the acceptance of the fact that the Apostle’s

doctrine is integrally, simply and exclusively eschatological, which

puts it in a position to assume the offensive in a systematic way and

with good prospect of success.

The Apostle’s most general views must be taken as the starting point

from which to explain how he arrives at the paradox that the believer

is united with Christ, experiences along with Him death and

resurrection, and becomes a new creature, emancipated from fleshly

corporeity. The assertion that these statements are meant in a

“physical” sense does not carry us very far. The reason which explains

their “reality” must be shown. Simply in and by themselves they are

not explicable. What has been advanced regarding the solidarity of

Jesus with the human race is far from sufficing to make it in any

degree intelligible, especially as Paul has not in view Christ and

humanity, but Christ and the elect.

The mistake in the attempts at explanation hitherto made consists in

the fact that they seek to argue from the facts of the death and

resurrection of Jesus, simply as such, directly to that which takes

place in the believer. In reality, it can only be a question of a

general event, which in the time immediately preceding the End brings

about this dying and rising again in Jesus and believers as together

forming a single category of mankind, and thus antedates the future

into the present. For that which happens both to the Lord and to the

elect it must be possible to find some kind of common-denominator

which exactly contains the factors, the forces which are at work in

the two cases. Since those which produce their effect in Christ are

the first to become manifest, Paul can cast his theory into the form

that the believers have died and risen again with Him.

The general fact which comes into question must result from the

condition of the world between the death of Jesus and His parousia.

The Apostle asserts an overlapping of the still natural, and the

already supernatural, [pg 245] condition of the world, which becomes

real in the case of Christ and believers in the form of an open or

hidden working of the forces of death and resurrection—and becomes

real in them only. The doctrine of the death and resurrection of Jesus

and the mystical doctrine of redemption are alike cosmically

conditioned.

It is not sufficient, however, to explain the mystical doctrine and

the sacramental doctrine which is bound up with it. To the problem of

Paulinism belong other distinct questions which have not yet found a

solution. The primary questions are the relation of the Apostle to the

historical Jesus, his attitude towards universalism_(_195_)_ and

towards the law, and the nature of his compromise between

predestinarian and sacramental doctrine.

Will his views on these points, which it has hitherto been impossible

to grasp clearly, similarly admit of explanation on the basis of the

unique cosmic conditions obtaining between the death of Christ and the

parousia? It is to be noticed that the Apostle does not advance his

assertions with reference either to earlier or to subsequent times,

but simply and solely for this short intervening period. Their

explanation is therefore doubtless to be looked for here.