I The Beginnings of the Scientific Method
Hugo Grotius. Annotationes in Novum Testamentum. 1641-1646.
Johann Jakob Rambach. Institutiones hermeneuticae sacrae. 1723.
Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten. Unterricht der Auslegung der heiligen Schrift. (Instructions in the art of Expounding Holy Scripture.) 1742.
Johann Christoph Wolf. Curae philologicae et criticae. 1741.
Johann August Ernesti. Institutio interpretis Novi Testamenti. 1762. (Eng. Trans., Biblical Interpretation of the New Testament, Edinburgh, 1832-1833.)
Johann Salomo Semler. Vorbereitung zur theologischen Hermeneutic. (Introduction to Theological Hermeneutic.) 1760-1769.
Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canons. (Essay on the free Investigation of the Canon.) 1771-1775.
Neuer Versuch die gemeinnützige Auslegung und Anwendung des Neuen Testaments zu befördern. (A New Attempt to Promote a Generally Profitable Exposition and Application of the New Testament.) 1786.
Latin Paraphrases of the Epistles to the Romans (1769) and Corinthians (1770, 1776).
Johann David Michaelis. Einleitung in die göttlichen Schriften des Neuen Bundes. (Introduction to the Divine Scriptures of the New Covenant.) 1750. (Eng. Trans. by H. Marsh, Cambridge, 1793.)
Übersetzung des Neuen Testaments. (Translation of the New Testament.) 1790.
Anmerkungen für Ungelehrte zu seiner Übersetzung des Neuen Testaments. (Notes for Unlearned Readers on his Translation of the New Testament.) 1790-1792.
Friedrich Ernst David Schleiermacher. Über den sogenannten ersten Brief des Paulus an den Timotheus. (On the so-called First Epistle of Paul to Timothy.) 1807.
Johann Gottfried Eichhorn. Historisch-kritische Einleitung in das Neue Testament. (Historical and Critical Introduction to the New Testament.) 3 vols. 1814.
Gottlob Wilhelm Meyer. Entwicklung des paulinischen Lehrbegriffs. (The Development of the Pauline System of Doctrine.) 1801.
Leonhard Usteri. Entwicklung des paulinischen Lehrbegriffs. (The Development of the Pauline System of Doctrine.) 1824.
August Ferdinand Dähne. Entwicklung des paulinischen Lehrbegriffs. (The Development of the Pauline System of Doctrine.) 1835.
Karl Schrader. Der Apostel Paulus. 1830-1836.
J. A. W. Neander. Geschichte der Pflanzung und Leitung der christlichen Kirche durch die Apostel. (History of the Planting and Guidance of the Christian Church by the Apostles.) 1832. (Eng. Trans. by J. E. Ryland, 1851.)
W. M. Leberecht De Wette. Erklärung der Briefe an die Römer, Korinther, Galater und Thessalonicher. (Exposition of the Epistles to the Romans (2nd ed., 1838), Corinthians, etc. (1841).)
H. E. G. Paulus. Des Apostels Paulus Lehrbriefe an die Galater-und Römer-Christen. (The Apostle Paul’s Doctrinal Epistles to the Galatian and Roman Christians.) 1831.
THE Reformation fought and conquered in the name of Paul. Consequently the teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles took a prominent place in Protestant study. Nevertheless the labour expended upon it did not, to begin with, advance the historical understanding of his system of thought. What men looked for in Paul’s writings was proof-texts for Lutheran or Reformed theology; and that was what they found. Reformation exegesis reads its own ideas into Paul, in order to receive them back again clothed with Apostolic authority.
Before this could be altered, the spell which dogma had laid upon exegesis needed to be broken. A very promising beginning in this direction was made by Hugo Grotius, who in his Annotationes in Novum Testamentum2 rises superior to the limitations of ecclesiastical dogma. This work appeared in 1641-1646. The Pauline Epistles are treated with especial gusto. The great Netherlander makes it his business to bring out by patient study the simple literal meaning, and besides referring to patristic exegesis, cites parallels from Greek and Roman literature. He does not, however, show any special insight into the peculiar character of the Pauline world of thought.
In the ensuing period the principle gradually became established that exegesis ought to be independent of dogma. Pietism and Rationalism had an equal interest in promoting this result. The accepted formula was that Scripture must be interpreted by Scripture. This thought is common ground to the two famous works on exegesis which belong to the first half of the eighteenth century, the Institutiones hermeneuticae sacrae3 of Johann Jakob Rambach, which is written from the stand-point of a moderate pietism, and Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten’s rationalistically inclined “Instruction in the art of expounding Holy Scripture.”4
On the soil thus prepared by pietism and rationalism it was possible for a philologically sound exegesis to thrive. One of the most important attempts in this direction is Johann Christoph Wolf’s Curae philologicae et criticae.5 This was regarded as authoritative for several decades, and even later is frequently drawn on by exegetes, either with or without acknowledgment. The merit of having gained the widest recognition for the principles of philological exegesis belongs to Johann August Ernesti, the reformer of the St. Thomas’s School at Leipzig and the determined opponent of its famous “Preceptor,” Johann Sebastian Bach. His Institutio interpretis Novi Testamenti appeared in 1762.6 It is on the plan of the “Hermeneutics” of Rambach and Baumgarten, and deals with grammar, manuscripts, editions, translations, patristic exegesis, history and geography as sciences ancillary to exegesis.
But Ernesti’s work suffices to show that the undogmatic philological method did not in itself lead to any result. Its author is in reality by no means free from dogmatic prepossessions, but he skilfully avoids those questions which would bring him into conflict with Church doctrine. In fact the use he makes of philology is more or less formal. He does not venture to treat the books of the New Testament without prepossession as witnesses from the literature of a distant period, and to show the peculiar mould in which Christian ideas are there cast in comparison with subsequent periods and with the period for which he writes. He did not realise that the undogmatic, philological method of exegesis must logically lead to a method in which philology is the handmaid of historical criticism.
His great contemporary, Johann Salomo Semler, ventures to give expression to this truth, and so becomes the creator of historical theology. In his theoretical works on the Scriptures and on exegesis—“Introduction to theological Hermeneutics” (1760-1769),7 “Essay on the free Investigation of the Canon” (1771-1775),8 “A new attempt to promote a generally profitable Exposition and Application of the New Testament” (1786)9—the Halle professor explains again and again what is to be understood by a “historical” method of exegesis. He demands that the New Testament shall be regarded as a temporally conditioned expression of Christian thought, and examined with an unprejudiced eye. In making this claim he does not speak as a disinterested representative of historical science, but makes it in the name of religion. If religion is to develop progressively and purify itself into an ethical belief, the special embodiments which it has received in the past must not lay the embargo of a false authority upon its progress. We must acknowledge to ourselves that many conceptions and arguments, not only of the Old Testament but also of the New, have not the same significance for us as they had for the early days of Christianity. In his work of 1786, Semler even demands that “for present day Christians there should be made a generally useful selection from the discourses of Jesus and the writings of the Apostles, in which the local reference to contemporary readers shall be distinguished or eliminated.”
This theory of historical exegesis is carried out in dealing with the great Pauline Epistles. Semler points the way to the critical investigation of the Apostle’s thought. He gives paraphrases of the Epistle to the Romans and the Epistles to the Corinthians, and attempts to make clear the content and the connection of thought by a paraphrastic and expanded rendering of each individual verse.10 Exegesis is no longer to be encumbered with a panoply of erudition; it is no longer to be interpenetrated with homiletic and dogmatic considerations, and to defer to the authority of the old Greek expositors, who, “when it is a question of historical arguments, had no better or clearer knowledge than we have ourselves.” It must let the Scriptural phrases say openly and freely what they mean in their literal sense, and devote itself simply to that dispassionate, objective study of facts which has hitherto been too much neglected.
The importance of the paraphrases does not however consist, as might be supposed, in their exhibiting the distinctive character of the Pauline trains of thought in comparison with the views of the other New Testament writers. By his use of a paraphrastic rendering of the text Semler puts an obstacle in the way of his gaining an insight into the specifically Pauline reasoning, and unconsciously imports his own logic into the Apostle’s arguments.
On the other hand, his brilliant powers of observation enable him to call attention to some fundamental problems of literary criticism. He is the first to point out that we do not possess the Pauline Epistles in their original form, but only in the form in which they were read in the churches. The canonical Epistle is therefore not, as a matter of a priori certainty, identical with the historical letter. It is quite possible, he argues, that the letters as read in the churches were produced by joining together, or working up together, different letters, and also that written directions and messages, which originally existed in a separate form, were attached in later copies to the Epistles in order that no part of the heritage left by the Apostle might be lost.
On the basis of considerations of this kind Semler arrives at the result that the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of Romans did not belong to the original Epistle. The sixteenth is, in his view, a series of greetings which Paul—who, it is assumed, was writing from Ephesus—gave to the bearers of the Epistle to be conveyed to the churches which they would visit on their way through Macedonia and Achaia. In the ninth chapter of 2 Corinthians there is preserved, he thinks, a writing intended for another city in Achaia, which was only later welded into the Epistle to the Corinthians. From the fourteenth verse of the twelfth chapter of 2 Corinthians to the close of the thirteenth chapter we have to assume the presence of a separate writing, of later date than the original Second Epistle to the Corinthians. Thus Semler takes the first steps upon the road of literary hypothesis. Theology at first took little notice of these investigations. In the third edition of his “New Testament Introduction” (1777),11 the great Göttingen philologist and theologian J. D. Michaelis treats the letters of the Apostle in a quite uncritical spirit, and does not enter at all into the literary problems; in his “Translation” and “Exposition” of the New Testament12 he follows the old tracks and makes no attempt to carry out the task which Semler had assigned to historical exegesis. In general the eighteenth century, after Semler, contributed very little to the investigation of Paulinism. Schleiermacher was the first to take a step forward, when, in a letter to Gass, he expressed his doubts as to the genuineness of I Timothy.13
Shortly before the battle of Jena—so he recounts in the preface—he had communicated his doubts to his friend, but had not got the length of setting them forth in a reasoned argument. “The battle—though indeed it ended all too quickly—the consequent unrest in the town, and even in the house, the confused hurrying to and fro, the sight of the French soldiers, which was interesting in so many ways... the still incomprehensible blow which struck our University even before you left, and the sad sight of the students saying their farewells and taking their departure,—these were certainly not the surroundings in which to set up a critical judgment-seat. Although, on the other hand, you would perhaps have been more ready then, when all seemed lost, to give up a New Testament book, than you are now.” The verbal promise then given but not fulfilled is now discharged in writing.
Schleiermacher bases his argument against I Timothy upon 2 Timothy and Titus. While the same general conceptions are present in the longer letter as in the two shorter ones, they are not there found in the natural connections in which they occur in the others. It makes the impression of being a composite structure, and in its vocabulary, too, shows remarkable differences from the remaining letters taken as a whole.
Strictly speaking it was not Schleiermacher the critic, but Schleiermacher the aesthete who had come to have doubts about 2 Timothy. The letter does not suit his taste. He fails to perceive that, so far as the language goes, the two other letters diverge from the rest of the Pauline Epistles in the same way as I Timothy, and that they also show the same looseness and disconnectedness; only that, in consequence of their smaller extent, it is not so striking. And, most important of all, it escapes him that as regards their ideas all three letters agree in diverging from the remainder of the Pauline Epistles.
Schleiermacher’s omissions are supplied by Eichhorn in his well-known Introduction.14 He lays it down that the three Epistles are all by the same author, and are all spurious. His criticism deals first with the language and thought of the letters, which he shows to be un-Pauline; then he argues that the implied historical situations cannot be fitted into the life of the Apostle, as known to us from the remaining letters and the Acts of the Apostles; finally, he points to the unnaturalness of the relation between Paul and his helpers as it is represented by these Epistles.
The Apostle, he points out, gives them in writing exhortations and directions which on the assumption of a real personal acquaintance and a long period of joint work with them are in any case unnecessary, and become much more so from the fact that the letters look forward to an early meeting. From this Eichhorn concludes that “some one else has put himself in Paul’s place,” and he sees no possibility of the success of any attempt to defend the genuineness of the Epistles against the arguments which he has brought forward. In particular he gives a warning against the seductive attempt to save the genuineness of 2 Timothy by the assumption of a second imprisonment. No hypothesis, he declares, can in any way help the Pastorals, since they must be pronounced from internal evidence—because of their divergence from the remaining Epistles—not to be by the Apostle. This was a long step forward. The circle of writings which have come down under the name of Paul had undergone a restriction which made it possible to give an account of his system of thought without being obliged to find a place in it for ideas which already have a quite early-Catholic ring.
Ten years after Eichhorn’s literary achievement, in the year 1824, the Swiss theologian Leonhard Usteri, a pupil of Schleiermacher’s, published his “Development of the Pauline System of Doctrine,”15 which is generally regarded as the starting-point of the purely historical study of Paulinism, the first attempt to give effect to the demands of Semler.16
Usteri wishes to show the subjective imprint and enrichment which ordinary Christianity received at the hands of the Apostle, and he sees in the Epistle to the Galatians the outline of his whole doctrine. He does not, however, venture to give full recognition to the idea of a real antithesis between the Pauline conceptions and those of the primitive Apostles, and consequently is led to soften down the peculiarities of the former so far as possible. The spirit of Schleiermacher, which tended to level down everything of a historical character, influences the book more than the author is aware.17 A peculiar interlude in the investigation of Paulinism was due to the Heidelberger H. E. G. Paulus.18 He published, in the year 1831, a study of the Epistles to the Galatians and Romans, which was in reality an essay on the Apostle’s system of doctrine. The work is undertaken entirely in the interests of a rationalism bent on opposing the reaction to orthodoxy.
According to the arguments of Paulus it is not the case that the letters speak of expiatory suffering and imputed righteousness. Paul cannot have upheld “legality” as against “morality” and have maintained an “unpurified conception of religion.” The “chief sayings,” the characteristic terms, are to be given a purely moral interpretation. The Apostle means that “faith in Jesus” must become in us “the faith of Jesus,” and the narrower conception of righteousness must be enlarged into the conception of “the righteousness of God.” The “righteousness of God” betokens righteousness such as it exists in God, and is demanded by Him in man’s spirit as its “true good,” “the only real atonement which brings us into harmony with the Deity.” Thus a proper interpretation enables us to discover in these writings “the agreement between the Gospel and a rational faith.”
The book appeared two or three decades too late. The rationalism which it represents had had its day. But there is something imposing in this determined wresting of the Apostle’s views. It is parallel to that which was practised by the Reformation. The latter interpreted the whole of Paulinism by the passages on the atoning death, and ignored the other thoughts in the Epistles. The Heidelberg rationalist starts from the conceptions connected with the “new creature,” which were later to be described as the ethical system of the Apostle, and interprets everything else by them.
The fact that the two views—the only ones which endeavoured to grasp Paulinism as a complete, articulated system—thus stand over against each other antithetically is significant for the future. Critical study in the course of its investigations was to come to a point where it would have to recognise both views as justified, and to point out the existence in Paul of a twofold system of doctrine—a juridical system based on the idea of justification, and an ethical system dominated by the conception of sanctification—without at first being able to show how the two are interrelated and together form a unity.