III From Baur to Holtzmann
Monographs Upon Paul
Adolf Hausrath. Der Apostel Paulus (1865, 172 pp.; biographical. 2nd ed., 1872, 503 pp.).
Ernest Renan. St. Paul (1869, 570 pp.; biographical and theological).
Auguste Sabatier. L’Apôtre Paul (1870, theological). (E.T. by A. M. Hellier, 1891.)
Otto Pfleiderer. Der Paulinismus (1873; 2nd ed., 1890; theological). (E.T. by E. Peters, 1877.)
Carl Holsten. Das Evangelium des Paulus (1st pt., 1880; 2nd pt., 1898).
NEW TESTAMENT INTRODUCTIONS
Eduard Reuse. Geschichte der heiligen Schriften Neuen Testamentes (5th ed., 1874). (E.T. History of the Sacred Scriptures of the New Testament, by E. L. Houghton. Edin. 1884.)
Christian Karl von Hofmann. Pt, ix. of “Die Heilige Schrift.” 1881.
Heinrich Julius Holtzmann. Einleitung in das Neue Testament. 1885.
Bernhard Weiss. (Same title.) 1886. (E.T. by A. J. K. Davidson, 1887).
Frédéric Godet. Introduction au Nouveau Testament. 1893.
Adolf Jülicher. Einleitung in das Neue Testament. 1894. (E.T. by J. P. Ward, 1904.)
Theodor Zahn. (Same title.) 1897. (E.T. of 3rd ed. 1909).
WORKS ON NEW TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
Eduard Reuss. Histoire de la théologie chrétienne au siècle apostolique. 3rd ed., 1864. (E.T. by A. Harwood, 1872.)
Bernhard Weiss. Lehrbuch der biblischen Theologie des Neuen Testaments. 1st ed., 1868; 6th ed., 1895. (E.T. Edin. 1882.)
Christian Karl von Hofmann. Pt. xi. of “Die Heilige Schrift.” 1886.
Willibald Beyschlag. Neutestamentliche Theologie. 1891. 2nd ed., 1896. (E.T. Edin. 1895.)
GENERAL WORKS ON PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY
Ernest Havet. Le Christianisme et ses origines (4 vols., 1884).
Karl von Weizsäcker. Das apostolische Zeitalter. 1886. (E.T. The Apostolic Age, 1894.)
Otto Pfleiderer. Das Urchristentum. 1887. (E.T. of 2nd. altered ed., see later.)
STUDIES ON SPECIAL POINTS
Carl Holsten. Zum Evangelium des Paulus und Petrus. 1868.
Fr. Th. L. Ernesti. Die Ethik des Apostels Paulus. 1868.
Emmanuel Friedrich Kautzsch. De Veteris Testamenti locis a Paulo apostolo allegatis. 1869.
Franz Delitzsch. Paulus des Apostels Brief an die Römer in das Hebräische übersetzt und aus Talmud und Midrasch erläutert. 1870. (The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans translated into Hebrew and illustrated from Talmud and Midrash.)
Hermann Lüdemann. Die Anthropologie des Apostels Paulus. 1872.
Albrecht Ritschl. Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. ii., 1874. (The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation.) (E.T. of vols. i. and iii. only).
H. H. Wendt. Die Begriffe Fleisch und Geist bei Paulus. 1878. (The Meaning of the Terms Flesh and Spirit in Paul’s Writings.)
Louis Eugène Ménégoz. Le Péché et la redemption d’après St Paul. 1882.
Eduard Grafe. Die paulinische Lehre vom Gesetz. 1884. (The Pauline Teaching about the Law.)
Gustav Volkmar. Paulus von Damaskus zum Galaterbrief. 1887. (Paul, from Damascus to Galatians). A biographical study, with a critical comparison between the data of Galatians and Acts.
Alfred Resch. Agrapha. Ausserkanonische Evangelienfragmente. 1888. On the Question whether Sayings of Jesus have been preserved in Paul’s Writings.
Otto Everling. Die paulinische Angelologie und Dämonologie. 1888.
Johann Gloël. Der Heilige Geist in der Heilsverkündigung des Paulus. 1888. (The Holy Spirit in Paul’s Preaching of Salvation.)
Hermann Gunkel. Die Wirkungen des Heiligen Geistes nach der populären Anschauung der apostolischen Zeit und nach der Lehre des Apostels Paulus. 1888. (The Manifestations of the Holy Spirit according to the Popular View of the Apostolic Age and according to the Teaching of Paul.)
Eduard Grafe. Das Verhältnis der paulinischen Schriften zur Sapientia Salamonis. 1892. (The Relation of the Pauline Writings to the Book of Wisdom.)
Adolf Deissmann. Die neutestamentliche Formel “in Christo Jesu.” 1892. (The New Testament Formula “in Christ Jesus.”)
Richard Kabisch. Die Eschatologie des Paulus in ihren Zusammenhängen mit dem Gesamtbegriff des Paulinismus. 1893. (Paul’s Eschatology in Relation to his General System.)
W. Brandt. Die evangelische Geschichte und der Ursprung des Christentums. 1893. (The Gospel History and the Origin of Christianity.)
Ernst Curtius. Paulus in Athen. 1894.
E. Bruston. La Vie future d’après St Paul. 1894.
Hans Vollmer. Die alttestamentlichen Zitate bei Paulus. 1895.
Ernst Teichmann. Die paulinischen Vorstellungen von Auferstehung und Gericht und ihre Beziehung zur jüdischen Apokalyptik. 1896. (The Pauline Views of Resurrection and Judgment and their Relation to the Jewish Apocalyptic.)
Theodor Simon. Die Psychologie des Apostels Paulus. 1897.
Paul Wernle. Der Christ und die Sünde bei Paulus. (The Christian and Sin in Paul’s Writings.) 1897.
CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS
Bruno Bauer. Kritik der paulinischen Briefe. 1850-1851-1852.
Christian Hermann Weisse. Beiträge zur Kritik der paulinischen Briefe. 1867. (Contributions to the Criticism of the Pauline Epistles.)
H. J. Holtzmann. Kritik der Epheser und Kolosserbriefe. 1872. Die Pastoralbriefe. 1880.
Eduard Reuss. Les Épîtres pauliniennes (“La Bible,” pt. iii.). 1878.
Georg Heinrici. Das erste Sendschreiben des Apostels Paulus an die Korinther. 1880. Das zweite, etc. 1887.
P. W. Schmiedel. Auslegung der Briefe an die Thessalonicher und Korinther in Holtzmann’s “Handkommentar.” 1891. (Exposition of the Epistles to the Thessalonians and Corinthians in Holtzmann’s “Handkommentar.”)
R. A. Lipsius. Auslegung der Briefe an die Galater, Römer und Philipper in Holtzmann’s “Handkommentar.” 1891.
WORKS OF A GENERAL CHARACTER, OR DEALING WITH COGNATE SUBJECTS
Emil Schürer. Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte. 1873. From the 2nd ed. (1886) onwards the work bears the title: Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi. (E.T. History of the Jewish People in the time of Jesus Christ. Edin. 1885.)
Karl Siegfried. Philo von Alexandrien als Ausleger des alten Testaments an sich selbst und nach seinem geschichtlichen Einfluss betrachtet. 1875. (Philo of Alexandria as an Expositor of the Old Testament, considered both in himself and in regard to his historical influence.)
Ferdinand Weber. System der altsynagogalen palästinenschen Theologie. 1880. The second edition (1897) bears the title Jüdische Theologie auf Grund des Talmud und verwandter Schriften. (Jewish Theology exhibited on the basis of the Talmud and allied writings.)
W. Gass. Geschichte der christlichen Ethik. 1881.
Theobald Ziegler. Geschichte der christlichen Ethik. 1886.
Edwin Hatch. The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church (Hibbert Lectures for 1888).
Theodor Zahn. Der Stoiker Epiktet und sein Verhältnis zum Christentum. 1894.
Adolf Harnack. Dogmengeschichte, 3rd ed., 1894. (E.T. History of Dogma, 1894-1899). Die Chronologie der altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius. Vol. i., 1897.
PROBLEMS many and various confronted theological science when it attempted to carry forward Pauline studies from the position in which they had been left by Baur.
It was needful to clear up once for all the questions of literary criticism, to examine in detail the individual conceptions and trains of thought, to make clear the unity and inner connexion of the system, to show what rôle Paulinism had played in the development of early Catholic theology, and how far it was at one with primitive Christianity, and to solve the question whether the material employed in its construction was of purely Jewish, or in part of Greek origin.
In regard to the literary question a certain measure of agreement was in course of time attained. Baur had distinguished three classes of Epistles. In the first he placed, as beyond doubt genuine, Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans; Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, Thessalonians, and Philemon formed the second class, being considered uncertain; the Pastoral Epistles formed the third class, and were regarded as proved to be spurious.
The views of the Tübingen master regarding the first class and the third were adopted by the majority of scholars of the next generation. No doubts were raised against the great Epistles; the Pastoral Epistles were rejected. Holtzmann, in his work on the Letters to Timothy and Titus,26 supplied a detailed argument in favour of this conclusion.
Of the letters of the intermediate class, the first to the Thessalonians and that to the Philippians were by many rehabilitated as Pauline. The second to the Thessalonians was rejected with increasing confidence. A special problem was presented by the letters to the Colossians and Ephesians, both because of their evident mutual relationship and particularly in regard to certain parts of the Epistle to the Colossians which made a strong impression of genuineness. Holtzmann offered a solution which gave general satisfaction. He adopted the hypothesis that Colossians was based upon a genuine Pauline letter which had been worked over by a later hand.27 The redactor he identified with the author of the Epistle to the Ephesians.
While there was this general consensus in the critical camp, which was ratified in Holtzmann’s “Introduction,”28 the most diverse opinions on special points are found. Some attempts were made to save the genuineness of the second Epistle to the Thessalonians. For some, the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians are genuine throughout and represent a later phase of the Pauline theology. Nor were there lacking attempts of all kinds to rehabilitate the Pastoral Epistles. Those who did not venture to defend them as wholes make a point of retaining at least the “personal references.”
The presentation of the Pauline teaching was, however, hardly affected by the literary divergences. Not even the most conservative of the critics had the boldness to place all the letters which have come down under the name of Paul on a footing of equality. Even those who regarded the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians as genuine did not fuse ideas of these Epistles with the system extracted from the four main Epistles, but presented them separately; and any who were not converted to the rejection of the Pastorals at all events took the precaution to give a separate chapter to the Pauline theology of these writings.29 If only the personal references might be saved, these Epistles were as completely excluded from the presentation of the Pauline system as if they had been pronounced wholly spurious.
Thus it continued to be the case, as it had been with Baur, that, generally speaking, only the four main epistles were taken into account in describing the Pauline system. The only significant change was that the epistle to the Philippians began to be put on the same footing, and, with a few exceptions, scholars no longer hesitated to regard as Pauline the conception of the pre-existence of Christ which is expressed in the section on the incarnation and obedience unto death. It was realised that the main epistles also presuppose this view, even if they do not state it so explicitly.
There were, of course, as time went on, attempts to explain the composition of the four main epistles and Philippians as arising by the working up together in each single epistle of two or more originals, but these were not of any real importance for the study of the Pauline doctrine. It was only a carrying out of the task suggested by Semler, when he pointed out that we have not got the letters in their original form but only as prepared for public reading by the early Church. But the constitution of the Pauline material is scarcely affected by the attempts to reconstruct these originals. They have a purely literary interest.
Theology, so far as it was occupied with the study of the Pauline system, did not allow itself to be at all disquieted by the rejection of the whole of the Epistles proposed by Bruno Bauer in his “Criticism of the Pauline Letters.”30 Nor was its confidence shaken by the hypothesis that the letters have been worked over to a very large extent and in a very thoroughgoing fashion. Christian Hermann Weisse’s “Contributions to the Criticism of the Pauline Epistles,”31 which appeared in 1867, where he sets forth the justification and the principles of this method, scarcely attracted any attention, as was indeed the case with almost all the theological work of this writer.
The elucidation of the details of the Pauline doctrine is vigorously pursued. An empirical definition is attempted of the terms sin, law, conscience, justification, redemption, election, and freedom. A special interest attaches to the study of the terms flesh and spirit. After Holsten had endeavoured to trace the significance of the word flesh, Lüdemann—in a brilliant work published in 1872—endeavoured to arrive at a clear idea of the Apostle’s anthropology and its place in his doctrine of salvation.
There are, so runs his thesis, two conceptions of “flesh” in Paul. The one agrees with the naive, simple Jewish linguistic usage, and means only the natural being of man. The other is much more precise and belongs to a dualistic system of thought. In it the flesh is defined as the necessary cause of sin and corruption and as the absolute antithesis to spirit. On close examination it appears that not merely two conceptions of “the flesh” existing side by side, but two different doctrines of man’s nature, and consequently two different conceptions of redemption, are found in Paul.
According to the system which connects itself with the simpler, broader conception of the flesh, sin springs from the freedom of the will; the law is assumed to be inherently possible of fulfilment; redemption consists in a judgment of acquittal pronounced by God which has its ground solely in His mercy; righteousness is imputed; the act which brings redemption consists in faith. This circle of ideas, which forms a self-consistent whole, is described by Lüdemann as the “Jewish-religious,” the “juridical-subjective,” doctrine of redemption. It has its source in reflection on the death of Jesus.
The other system of ideas is defined as the “ethico-dualistic.” In contradistinction to the former it makes use of an “objectively real” conception of redemption. It presupposes the more precise, narrower conception of “the flesh,” and regards sin as proceeding from it by a natural necessity. The law is the ferment of sin; death the natural outcome of the flesh. Redemption can therefore only consist in the abolition of the flesh. It is based on the communication of the Spirit, which produces in the man a new creature and a real righteousness. The redemptive act takes place in baptism. The ideas of this second system are based on the Lord’s resurrection.
The coexistence of a juridical and an ethical system of thought in Paul had been held by others before Lüdemann. What he did, however, was to follow out each separately into its details, and to endeavour to prove that all the contradictions and obscurities which are to be observed in the conceptions and statements of the Pauline theology find their ultimate explanation in the coexistence of two different doctrines of man’s nature and two different doctrines of redemption.
Hitherto the doctrine of redemption which appears alongside of the juridical had been described as “ethical.” He remarks that it is conceived not merely ethically, but actually physically, and therefore defines it as ethico-physical. Further, he is of opinion that the two theories are not co-equal in importance. He holds that in the ethico-physical “the real view of the Apostle” is set forth, which only tolerates the other alongside of it, and more and more tends to push it aside wherever in the discussion Paul can count upon a thorough understanding of the real essence of the matter.
In the Epistles the development, he thinks, takes the following course. The Letter to the Galatians knows only the primitive Jewish system of thought with reference to Christ’s vicarious suffering and righteousness by faith; it does not advance to the bolder realistic doctrine of righteousness.
In the Epistles to the Corinthians, according to Lüdemann, the Apostle does not make much use of dogma. “The less advanced position of the church there may have been one cause of this.” But the fundamental conceptions of the ethico-physical series of ideas begin to appear in them. Later on they attain to “constitutive importance” and “force their way into the leading dogmatic statements.” In the first four chapters of Romans the old view still finds expression. From the fifth onwards the new tenets are developed fully and clearly.
This second series of ideas is not Jewish but Greek. Lüdemann’s view is that Paul, “in the attempt to give dogmatic fixity to the doctrine of salvation, presses on beyond the horizon of the Old Testament consciousness and is carried in the direction of Hellenism.”32 The latter offered him a clearly-thought-out doctrine of man, in which the dominant idea was the antithesis of flesh and spirit, and made it necessary for him to think out a physically real doctrine of redemption.
Pfleiderer33 also works out the two series of ideas, separating them scarcely less sharply than Lüdemann does. But he prefers to describe the series which runs parallel to the juridical, not as physico-ethical, but as mystico-ethical. Moreover, he does not admit that the ethical series expresses Paul’s view more adequately than the other. He is of opinion also that the two sets of conceptions held an equal place in the consciousness of the Apostle from the first. By logically thinking out the Jewish idea of the atoning death, Paul was led—according to Pfleiderer—to the anti-Jewish conclusion that redemption is for all mankind, and that the law is consequently invalidated. With this view there is united another, the source of which lies in the Hellenistic anthropology. This is that redemption consists in the influence exercised by the Holy Spirit upon the fleshly creatureliness, in consequence of which sin and death are abolished. The beginning of this process is to be sought in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the close connexion of the Pharisaic and Hellenistic elements “lies the characteristic peculiarity of the genuine Pauline theology, which can only be rightly understood when these two sides of it both receive equal attention.”
That in Paulinism two lines of thought go side by side is recognised by almost all the investigators of this period. But in the importance assigned to each of them great divergences appear. Reuss makes the juridical ideas entirely subordinate to the ethical; in Ménégoz the former are more strongly emphasised than the latter. No one except Pfleiderer holds them to be on an exactly equal footing. In general the ethical set of ideas is regarded as the original creation of the Apostle, and is assumed to represent the deepest stratum in his thought. Accordingly, it is generally also held that the doctrine of the abolition of the flesh by the Spirit comes to its full development later than the other, which is based upon the atonement and imputed righteousness. Lüdemann’s theory of a development within the Pauline doctrine is adopted by the majority, though only in a less pronounced form.
It should be mentioned that the first important attempt to prove the existence of different phases in the thought and life of Paul was made by Sabatier.34 His work L’Apotre Paul appeared in 1870, two years before Lüdemann’s study. At first the Apostle held, according to the French scholar, a simple doctrine which can be psychologically explained from his rabbinic training and his conversion. At the time of his great controversies he was compelled to work out for himself a philosophy of history which would enable him to prove that the law was only a passing episode in the history of salvation, and that justification by faith had always lain in the purpose of God. This doctrine takes a dominant position in the Epistles to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans. In the letters written during his imprisonment the Apostle advances to a speculative, gnostic development of his ideas. The coexistence of the juridical and ethical series of ideas does not receive the same prominence in Sabatier as in the later writers, who were influenced by Lüdemann and Pfleiderer.
When all is said and done, there is in the works of this period much assertion and little proof regarding the development within Paulinism. One almost gets the impression that the assumption of different stages of thought was chiefly useful as a way of escaping the difficulty about the inner unity of the system. This problem is, however, rather instinctively felt than clearly grasped. The scholars of this period do not feel it incumbent upon them to trace out the connexion in which these disparate sets of ideas must have stood in the view of Paul. They show no surprise at his passing so easily from the one to the other and arguing from each alternately, and they do not ask themselves how he conceived the most general ultimate fact of redemption which underlies both of them. They do not seek to arrive at a really fundamental view of the essence of Paulinism.
Their method of procedure in their presentation of the doctrine is itself significant. They do not trace its development from one fundamental conception, but treat it under dogmatic loci, as Baur had done in his New Testament Theology. The scheme is more or less closely based on that of Reformation dogmatics. It is therefore assumed a priori that the Pauline theology can be divided into practically the same individual doctrines as that of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. Really, however, a preliminary question arises whether this arrangement of the material does not introduce a wrong grouping and orientation into the Apostle’s system, and whether it does not destroy the natural order and relative importance of the thoughts, falsify the perspective, tear asunder what ought not to be disjoined, and render impossible the discovery of the fundamental idea in which all the utterances find their point of union. This procedure is innocently supposed to be scientific; as a matter of fact it leads to the result that the study of the subject continues to be embarrassed by a considerable remnant of the prepossessions with which the interpretation of Paul’s doctrine was approached in the days of the Reformation.
It is not less prejudicial when others, as for example Holsten,35 adopt an arrangement of the material suggested by modern dogmatics. As the Pauline theology has, if possible, less affinity with the latter than with the Reformation theology, the error is almost more serious.
In general these scholars are quite unconscious of the decisive importance which attaches to the arrangement and articulation of the material. It has, indeed, always been weakness of theological scholarship to talk much about method and possess little of it.
Otto Pfleiderer, alone, is not entirely in this state of innocence. He has an inkling that the usual way of approaching the subject is not wholly free from objection. In the first edition of his Paulinism (1873)36 he raises the question whether the “genetic method” is not demanded by the task of tracing out the organic progress of the development of dogma in its Pauline beginnings. Practical considerations, however, determine him “to arrange the matter very much according to the customary dogmatic loci,” while, however, at the same time giving as much attention as possible to the position of the dogma in the Pauline system.” He fears that the carrying out of the genetic principle would lead to many repetitions, and would make it more difficult to get a general view of “the way in which the separate doctrines were connected with their bases.”
In order to salve his conscience he gives at the beginning, “by way of an introductory outline,” a sketch of the “organic development of the Pauline gnosis from its single root.” This general view—it occupies twenty-seven pages—is the most important part of the whole book. The succeeding chapters treat of sin, flesh, character of the law, aim of the law, Christ’s atoning death, Christ’s death as a means of liberation from the dominion of sin, the resurrection of Christ, the Person of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of God and heavenly Christ, the appearing of Christ in the flesh, faith, justification, sonship, the beginning and the progress of the new life, the Christian Church, the Lord’s Supper, the election of grace, the parousia, and the end of the world.
Lüdemann was prevented by the task which he had set himself from adopting the division according to loci. His object was only to investigate Paul’s conception of the fleshly man in its relation to his doctrine as a whole. In this way he was led to arrange the ideas in their natural order and, without strictly intending to do so, to give a general account of Paulinism, which is almost entirely free from the defective arrangement of other works, permits something of the logical articulation of the Apostle’s circle of ideas to appear, and certainly penetrates more deeply than the rest into the Apostle’s world of thought.
As the works of Reuss, Weiss, Pfleiderer, Holsten, Renan, Sabatier, Ménégoz, Weizsäcker, do not aim at understanding and showing the development of this doctrine from a single fundamental thought, there are no real divergences in the general view which they take of the system. The differences of opinion with their predecessors which the authors express in their text and notes relate, in point of fact, only to details and minutiae, surprising as this may at first sight appear. The plan and design of the system are in general everywhere the same; the differences regard only the mixing and application of the colours, and the question how far Greek influences are to be recognised.
In going through these works one after another, one is surprised to observe how great is their fundamental resemblance. At the same time there is something curiously “elusive” about them. At a given point one might be inclined to think that one of the authors was formulating a thought more clearly, or giving it more exclusive importance than the others; and one is just about to note this as a special characteristic of his view. A few pages later, however, or in a following chapter, one finds additions or reservations which show that he does not really think differently from the rest. The differences lie not so much in the actual conception as in the literary presentation, and in the manner in which the material, which is essentially a whole, is parcelled out among the different loci. There is thus nothing to be gained by analysing the various conceptions one by one and comparing them with one another. Since there is no real difference of fundamental view, the comparison would lose itself in endless and unessential detail.
To the general impression of monotony is to be added that of complexity. At the end of each of these works one is inclined to inquire whether the author really means to ask the reader to regard what is here offered as representing a system of thought which once existed in the brain of a man belonging to early Christianity, and was capable of being understood by his contemporaries. All the arts of literary presentation are employed to subtilise the conceptions, to describe the thoughts with exactitude, and to bring connexion and order into the chaos of ideas. But the result gives no satisfaction. No real elucidation and explanation of Paulinism is attained. The resulting impression is of something quite artificial.
The welcome which these authors’ works received from their contemporaries shows that the latter saw in them an advance in the knowledge of Paulinism. They felt them to be satisfactory. That only means that the readers’ presuppositions and requirements lay within the same limitations as those of the authors.
What had been the result arrived at? A description of the Pauline doctrine, a remarkably detailed description, but nothing more. That doubtless implied a certain progress. It did not, however, extend so far as the authors and their readers assumed. Both innocently supposed that in the description they possessed at the same time an explanation—as though the descriptive anatomy of this organism sufficed to explain its physiology. They were unconscious that they had so far only looked at Pauline thought from without, and had never gained any insight into the inner essence of the system.
In these works the Apostle’s statements are quoted one after another, and developed in his own words. The authors think they have discharged their task when they have so arranged the course of the investigation that all important passages can be respectably housed.
The odd thing is that they write as if they understood what they were writing about. They do not feel compelled to admit that Paul’s statements taken by themselves are unintelligible, consist of pure paradoxes, and that the point that calls for examination is how far they are thought of by their author as having a real meaning, and could be understood in this light by his readers. They never call attention to the fact that the Apostle always becomes unintelligible just at the moment when he begins to explain something; never give a hint that while we hear the sound of his words the tune of his logic escapes us.
What is his meaning when he asserts that the law is abolished by the death of Jesus—according to other passages, by His resurrection? How does he represent to himself the process by which, through union with the death and resurrection of the Lord a new creaturehood is produced in a man, in virtue of which he is released from the conditions of fleshly existence, from sin and death? How far is a union possible between the natural man, alive in this present world, and the glorified Christ who dwells in heaven; and one, moreover, of such a kind that it has a retrospective reference to His death? The authors we have named do not raise questions of this kind. They feel no need to trace out the realities which lie behind these paradoxical assertions. They take it for granted that Paul has himself explained his statements up to a certain point—so far, in fact, as this is possible in the world of feeling to which religion belongs.
This self-deception is made the more easy for them by the fact that they are accustomed to clothe their own religious views in Pauline phraseology, and consequently they come to treat as the authentic logic of Paul, arguments which they have unconsciously imported into their account of his teaching. They fail to reckon with the possibility that the original significance of his utterances may rest on presuppositions which are not present to our apprehension and conception. For the same reason they all more or less hold the opinion that what they have to do with is mainly a psychological problem. They assume that the Pauline system has arisen out of a series of reflexions and conclusions, and would be as a whole clear and intelligible to any one who could succeed in really thinking himself into the psychology of the rabbinic zealot who was overpowered by the vision of Christ on the road to Damascus.
The writer who goes furthest in this direction is Holsten. In his work on the “Gospel of Paul and of Peter”37 he describes how Paul, while he was persecuting the new faith, was, as a Jewish thinker, occupied with the thought of the offence of the cross and the alleged resurrection. While still a fanatical zealot “he constantly carried with him in his consciousness the elements of the Messianic faith, even though as negative and negated.” By the keenness of his theological dialectic he was compelled to imagine what the alleged facts would really signify if the belief of the disciples were justified. The “principle of the Messianic faith” was, in him, “alive in greater definiteness than even in the consciousness of the followers of the Messiah whom he persecuted.” The Messiahship of Jesus could not for him take its place as a hope and faith within the Jewish system of thought and religious life, but necessarily implied the destruction of what he had hitherto held to be true. Thus the persecutor had in principle thought out for himself to its ultimate consequences the revolution which would result from the acceptance of the Messiahship of Jesus. And this he translated into word and deed after he had experienced the vision on the Damascus road.
Other writers take as the starting-point for their psychological arguments the passage in Romans vii., where Paul depicts the despair of the man who recognises that the law, although it is spiritual and was given with a view to life, can only in the fleshly man produce sin, condemnation, and death. What we there read concerning the struggle between the natural, powerful will of the flesh and the law, is, they think, written from the point of view of the pre-Christian consciousness of the Apostle. He had experienced this agony of soul, and it was by this that the Jewish religious attitude had been broken down in him. Therefore in his Gospel he does not desire to retain anything from the faith of his fathers.
These two main lines of psychological theory are followed for a longer or shorter distance in all the works of this period. Hand in hand with this psychologising goes a tendency to modernisation. The scholars of this period spiritualise Paul’s thought. The transformation varies in extent for the different ideas. The statements about the atonement and imputed righteousness are the least affected by it. What is unintelligible in these is put down to the account of the Jewish Rabbinic mode of thought in which Paul is supposed to be held prisoner. On the other hand, the conceptions regarding union with Christ in his death and passion, and the new life in Him through the Spirit, are subjected to paraphrase and explanation until nothing of the realistic sense is left remaining. The question is not faced why Paul, if he wanted to say anything so “spiritual” and general as this, should have adopted so exaggerated, paradoxical, and materialistic a method of expression.
Whatever remains unexplained after the psychologising, the depotentiation, and modernisation, is referred to the peculiar character of the religious experience which the Apostle is supposed to have undergone in the vision on the Damascus road. What essential difference there was between this appearance of the Lord and those experienced by the other disciples is nowhere clearly worked out, not even by Holsten, who makes the most extensive use of this vision. It is simply taken for granted by them all that in the vision itself is to be found the explanation, not only of Paul’s conversion, but also in some way or other of his call to be a missionary to the Gentiles and of the peculiar character of his doctrine.
All these accounts of his teaching agree in assuming that Paul’s system of doctrine was in the main a purely personal creation of his own, and is in some way to be explained by the special character of his religious experience. The question whether in this way his integral connexion with primitive Christianity is sufficiently preserved receives but little attention. In none of these works is the investigation of the doctrinal material common to Paul and his opponents seriously taken in hand. The writers are content with the affirmation that both parties took as their starting-point the fact of the death and resurrection of Jesus, without entering into any consideration of the question how far Paul’s reasonings, which they refer back to his inner personal experience, reproduce generally current ideas of primitive Christianity and simply carry them out to their logical issue.
The question which Ritschl had formerly forced on the consideration of Baur has therefore not been faced or solved. It is true the author of “Justification and Reconciliation”38 thinks that he has not only raised the question but also answered it. He undertakes to explain all the Pauline doctrinal passages on the basis of Old Testament conceptions. In this way he hopes to work out the Apostle’s real conception of the atoning death of Jesus, and of “righteousness,” and believes that these will then, since they have been gained from the Old Testament, coincide with the primitive Christian views in all essential points.
Speaking generally, Ritschl’s tendency is to make the differences between Paulinism and primitive Christianity as small as possible, and to find them, as he had already done in the “Origin of the early Catholic Church,” not so much in his doctrine proper as in his attitude to certain practical questions. Ritschl employs the dialectical skill with which nature had richly endowed him to transform and shade off the doctrine of the Apostle of the Gentiles until it harmonises with the fundamental Christian teaching which he assumes for the earliest period and finds necessary for his dogmatics.
He entirely depotentiates the juridical series of ideas. Moreover, he refuses to admit that Paulinism constitutes a speculative system. He assumes that the Apostle moved in a free, untrammelled fashion among the various sets of ideas and felt no real need to combine them into a unity.
In addition to Ritschl, Bernhard Weiss39 and Willibald Beyschlag,40 in their New Testament Theologies, endeavour to make clear the relations between Paul and primitive Christianity from the stand-point of critical conservatism. In order to secure a broad basis for the primitive form of apostolic doctrine, they pronounce I Peter and the Epistle of James to be documents of the pre-Pauline period.
The writer who makes things easiest for himself is Von Hofmann.41 For him there is no “Pauline system of doctrine.” The Apostle never uttered anything that did not belong to the common doctrine of Christianity, but “according to the difference of the occasion” brought into prominence this or that aspect of the saving acts of God or of the condition of salvation, and what he thus brought forward, now under one designation now under another, he sets forth now in this relation and now in that one. Therefore this writer, who was vaunted by the orthodox as a brilliant opponent of Tübingen errors, has no scruple in working up together the Pauline ideas along with those of the other New Testament Epistles into a single whole, which he offers as apostolic doctrine.
Another problem which is hardly apprehended in its full difficulty by the scholars of this period is that of the total neglect in the Pauline gospel of the proclamation of the kingdom of God and His righteousness which Jesus committed to His followers. They seem to feel no surprise at the fact that the Apostle, even where it would be the most natural thing in the world, never appeals to the sayings and commands of the Master. Many of them never touch on this question at all.
Resch, however, in his collection of extra-canonical Gospel-fragments, even undertakes to show that in the Pauline letters a whole series of otherwise unrecorded sayings of Jesus are embodied, and defends the hypothesis that the Apostle had taken them from a pre-canonical Gospel which ranked for him as an authority of equal value with the Old Testament. The enigma of the untraced quotation, “What eye hath not seen, neither hath ear heard,” etc., in I Cor. ii. 9 ff., is solved by referring the “as it is written” to the written Gospel on which Paul draws.42
It is curious that most of these authors believe that they reduce the acuteness of the problem by pointing out in the Epistles as many reminiscences of Synoptic sayings as possible. That, of course, only makes the matter more complicated. If so many utterances of Jesus are hovering before Paul’s mind, how comes it that he always merely paraphrases them, instead of quoting them as sayings of Jesus, and thus sheltering himself behind their authority?
As for those who have some inkling of the problem, their one thought is to dispose of it as rapidly as possible, instead of first exposing it in its full extent. Among them is Ritschl, who here employs all the arts and artifices of his exegesis and dialectic. That Jesus and Paul did not at bottom teach the same thing is to this undogmatic dogmatist unthinkable.
In general the writers of this period are involved in the most curious confusions regarding the problem of “Jesus and Paul.” They fail to perceive that these two magnitudes are not directly comparable with one another because they think of Paul in complete isolation, and not as a feature of primitive Christianity. The differences and oppositions which reveal themselves between the teaching of Jesus and that of Paul exist also as between the teaching of Jesus and that of primitive Christianity itself. The momentous development did not arise first with Paul, but earlier, in the community of the first disciples. Their “religion” is not identical with the “teaching of Jesus,” and did not simply grow out of it; it is founded upon His death and resurrection. The “new element” was not brought into Christianity by Paul; he found it there before him, and what he did was to think it out in its logical implications. The difference of teaching between Paul and Jesus is not a difference between individuals, it is—in almost its whole extent—due to the fact that the Apostle belongs to primitive Christianity.
In its false statement of the problem of Jesus and Paul the scholarship of the period after Baur shows that it has not yet succeeded in understanding the Apostle of the Gentiles as a phenomenon, an aspect, of primitive Christianity.
There is frequent mention, in all these studies, of the Jewish roots of the Pauline thought. They attempt to explain his views, so far as possible, from the materials given in the Law and the Prophets. Some authors had been inclined to assume that in regard to his conception of the Law he did not stand wholly upon Old Testament ground, in the sense that he sometimes means by it a narrower ceremonial code of temporary validity, and sometimes a universal ethical law which has not been invalidated by the death of Christ. These confusions were put an end to by a study of Edward Grafe.43 He shows that Paul when he speaks of the law, alike when he uses the article or does not use it, always has in mind the whole legal code, and never varies from the conviction that this has been set aside by the death and resurrection of Christ.
That in Galatians the ritual aspect of the law, in Romans the ethical, is the more prominent, does not alter this fact. Nor is the consistency of the Apostle’s view annulled by the fact that in many places he formulates the negative judgment quite definitely, while in others he softens it by an admission of the historical and ethical significance of the law.
That Paul’s thinking follows the lines of Old Testament conceptions is self-evident. The only question is whether the motive forces which make their appearance in his gospel are derived in some way or other from the Old Testament Scriptures.
That is not the case. In working up the primitive Christian views he does not have recourse to the ideas of the ancient Judaism. Nowhere does Paul attach himself to these. He takes no ideas from the Old Testament with a view to giving them a new development, but uses only what he can take from it ready formed. His new discovery rests on a different basis. The Law and the Prophets serve only to supply him with the Scriptural arguments, positive and negative, of which he stands in need.
On the essential nature of the distinctively Pauline world of thought the Old Testament therefore throws no light. This negative result is not, indeed, everywhere clearly formulated. There are some students of Paulinism who simply ignore it. Heinrici, in the preface to his study of 2 Corinthians (1887), ventures on the assertion that in Paul the “spirit of Old Testament prophecy” triumphs over contemporary Judaism.
And he is not the only one who clings to the illusion that much help is to be gained from the Old Testament for the understanding of the Apostle’s world of thought. By way of proof they cite every possible parallel, even the most remote. But the disproportion between the amount of the material offered and the smallness of the result established tells against them.
That Paul is a child of late Judaism only began to be generally taken into account when its world of thought was made known to theology by Schürer’s “History of New Testament Times,”44 and Weber’s “System of Palestinian Theology in the Early Synagogues.”45 But even after this most scholars shared a certain disinclination to recognise a real connexion between the Apostle’s world of thought and that of late Judaism. Heinrici, who in his study in the Corinthian Epistles gives great attention to the question regarding the source of his ideas, definitely denies that “the intellectual and religious forces of Late Judaism exercised a dominant influence” on the Apostle. He holds, like many others, that Paul, passing over his own time, grasped hands with the classical Judaism of the prophets, and that one source of his strength is to be found in this fact. This prejudice is to be explained by the low estimation in which late Judaism had always been held by theologians. It was identified, without examination, on the one hand with “fantastic apocalyptic views,” and on the other with a “soulless Rabbinism.”
The admission, however, that Paul in the principles of his exegesis was in agreement with Rabbinism was made by theologians with comparative readiness. This did not carry with it the surrender of anything that had been much valued, since the verbal comparison and contrast of passages which he practises, and the illogical and fantastic reasoning which appears in his arguments, had always been distasteful to theological science. It was therefore rather welcome to it than otherwise, to find, in consequence of the increased knowledge of parallel products of late Judaism, an explanation of a weakness which did not properly harmonise with the greatness of this heroic spirit, in the influences to which he had been subjected by reason of his theological education.46
Along with this was accepted the fact that, in common with his contemporaries, he naively treats the Haggadic embellishments of Old Testament stories as on the same footing with the Scripture itself. His assumption that the Law was given by the angels (Gal. iii. 19), and his reference to the rock that followed the children of Israel in the wilderness and poured out water (I Cor. x. 4), are to be explained from passages in the Rabbinic literature. No thoroughgoing investigation was undertaken with a view to determining whether the Rabbinic principles suffice to explain Paul’s method of scriptural argument. In general the view prevails that his “typological” and “spiritualising” (pneumatisch) interpretation goes beyond what can elsewhere be shown in Palestinian theology. It is true these two methods of exegesis, going beyond the simple literal sense, are not wholly unknown, but they only came to their full development in contemporary Alexandrian Biblical scholarship. For this reason it is proposed to assume that Paul had also received an influence from this side.
As examples of Alexandrian exegesis are quoted the interpretation of Hagar and Sarah as representing the earthly and the heavenly Jerusalem (Gal. iv. 22 f.), that of the water-giving rock as representing Christ (I Cor. x. 4), and the argument from the threshing oxen to the preachers of the gospel (I Cor. ix. 9 ff.).
One of the greatest problems of the Pauline use of Scripture is not mentioned in these works. It is assumed that the Apostle attached special importance to proving the Messiahship of the crucified Jesus. How then can we explain the fact that he never makes any use of the passage about the Suffering Servant of the Lord in Isaiah liii? This fact is the more surprising because it may be taken as certain that the apologetic of the primitive Christian community gave this passage a most prominent place in its plan of operations.
A scientific attempt to adduce from the Rabbinic literature explanatory parallels to Pauline thought was made by Franz Delitzsch in 1870 in connexion with his Hebrew translation of the Epistle to the Romans.47 The net result is not great. The parallels adduced are so uncharacteristic that they throw no new light on the Apostle’s ideas.
No further considerable attempts were made in this direction. Nor did Weber’s “Theology of the Early Synagogue” lead to any other important works being undertaken in that department. On the contrary, his sketch of the Rabbinic world of ideas makes it apparent that Pauline thought does not become any more intelligible by its aid than it is in itself, even though one parallel or another may be unearthed. Moreover, it is to be remarked that the discovery of such parallels would only become of importance if proof could be given that they really date from the beginning of the first century. Such proof is, however, quite impossible.
Of the “Rabbinism” of Paul’s day we know practically nothing. Even the earliest strata of the literature which is at our disposal were not formed before the beginning of the third century A.D.48 It consists of a codification of tradition carried out by the later Rabbinic scholasticism. How far it offers us a faithful representation of the ideas and character of Rabbinic thought at the beginning of the first century must remain an open question.
Even if Paul, in virtue of his dialectic and certain external characteristics, belongs to the world which this literature reveals to us, in regard to the content of his ideas and his creative force as a thinker he is not to be understood by its aid. To register this fact is, however, by no means to deny that he has his roots in the Jewish theology of his time, but only to say that he shows no affinity as regards the inner essence of his problems and ideas with what a later age offers us as the Rabbinism of the first century. It is possible, indeed it is in the highest degree probable, that many of his ideas for which no “Rabbinic” parallels can be adduced, nevertheless have their origin in the Jewish theology of his time. Who is to guarantee that the later scholasticism has faithfully preserved for us the Jewish theology which was contemporary with Christianity? It may well have been more living in thought and more profound than the men of the after-time could understand, or their tradition preserve. The picture which they draw for us shows only a sun-scorched plain, but this yellow, wilted grass was green and fresh once. What did the meadows look like then?
It is to be remembered that the Apocalypse of Ezra, which shows in its own way such depth, while it is derived from the Scribal theology of the first century, is as little to be explained from what on the basis of the later literature we think of as the Rabbinism of the period as are the Pauline Epistles. Had this writing not been preserved, it would never have occurred to anyone that at that time men belonging to the circle of the Scribes had been tormented in this way by the primary problems of religion, and had brought the questions arising out of them into such close relations with eschatology.
Further, it is to be taken into account that Palestinian Scribism, even though it was an independent entity, did not, at the time when it has to be considered in connexion with Paul, exist in absolute exclusiveness, but maintained relations with Jewish Hellenism. The latter worked on a basis of ideas which it had in large measure taken over from Rabbinism and held in common with the latter. This relationship becomes in the case of Philo clearly apparent. With him one can never tell where the “Rabbinist” ends and the Hellenist begins. But if the theology of the Scribes stood in any kind of relation with Jewish Hellenism, it cannot have been so poor in ideas and unspiritual as it appears in the later tradition.
Even the discourses of Jesus, in spite of the polemical picture which they give of it, create the impression that He had to do with a Rabbinism which was interested in really religious questions, even though it showed itself incapable of rising to the height of the simple piety to which His preaching of the Kingdom of God and the repentance necessary thereto made its appeal.
It seems therefore probable that the Epistles of Paul and the Apocalypse of Ezra, along with its satellite the Apocalypse of Baruch, are witnesses to a Rabbinism, or a movement within its sphere, of which the Rabbinic tradition which later became fixed in written form gives us no information.
What should we know of the moving forces of the Reformation as they manifest themselves in Luther’s works of the year 1521, if we were dependent for our information on the Lutheran scholasticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How would we think of the Reformation as a whole if we possessed only these witnesses? With all due respect to the vaunted faithfulness of Rabbinic tradition, which after all we are not in a position to check, was it capable of preserving the record of a period of living thought? Is an oral tradition ever capable of doing so?
The historical examples in which we are able to test the tradition of later generations by the reality which has subsequently come to light, are calculated to shake our faith in the assumption that it can do so. What did Beethoven’s time know of the achievements of the period of Bach? Mention is made of the elaborate fugues which had their origin at that time; but that the eighteenth century had produced choral works of deep feeling and an elevation secure against change of fashion, was entirely unknown to the second generation after Bach, although there had been nothing to interrupt tradition.
Moreover, it ought not to be forgotten that we possess the history of Judaism only in fragments. As regards the political events of the first century we are comparatively well informed, but of the religious movements we know little, and what does come to our knowledge is so disconnected and self-contradictory that it cannot be combined into a single picture. The Baptist, Jesus, Philo, Paul, Josephus, and the authors of the Apocalypses of Ezra and Baruch cover together about two generations. They are at first sight as entirely different as if they belonged to widely separated periods.
The destruction of Jerusalem interrupts the continuity of development of the Jewish people and of its thought. Its life is extinguished. Hellenism dies out. There arises a Rabbinism which is no longer borne on the tide of great national and spiritual movements. It becomes ossified, and confines itself to mere unproductive commentating upon the law. From the past its tradition takes only what lies within the field of its own narrow interests. The problems and ideas which moved the earlier, many-sided period no longer come into view, but fall into as complete oblivion as if they had never occupied Jewish religious thought.
The scholarship of the period after Baur is indeed far enough from embarking on reflexions of this kind. It takes scarcely any notice of what remains of the Late-Jewish non-Hellenistic literature. Even the commentators make scarcely any use of the parallels to Pauline ideas and conceptions which are found in Enoch, the Apocalypse of Baruch, the Apocalypse of Ezra, and here and there in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.
It is nothing less than astonishing that the close affinities with the Apocalypse of Ezra do not receive any recognition. In this work there are elaborate discussions of the problems of sin, the Fall of our first parents, Election, the wrath, long-suffering, and mercy of God, the prerogative of Israel, the significance of the law, the temporal and the eternal Jerusalem, of the prospect of dying or surviving to the Parousia, the tribulation of the times of the End, and the Judgment. The close affinity between this writer and Paul strikes the eye at once. Writers on Paulinism are, however, so obsessed by the idea that the teaching of Paul is a “personal creation” that they cannot bring themselves to accept the view that the religious problems which struggle for solution in his letters had also occupied his Jewish contemporaries or at least a section of them.49
The claims of Late Judaism on Paul were therefore taken to be discharged when his Rabbinic dialectic and exegesis, and to a certain extent his eschatology also, had been ascribed to it.
The chapter on the future-hope which connected Paul on the one hand with Judaism and on the other with primitive Christianity, is never omitted in any account of his teaching given by the scholars of the post-Baur period. In it is collected all that the Epistles have to say regarding the parousia, the resurrection, the judgment, and the Kingdom of the Last Times. The treatment, however, is by no means thorough. Scarcely anywhere is there an attempt to arrange the scattered notices in an orderly way and bring them into relation with one another. It is taken for granted that they are inconsistent with one another, as a necessary consequence of the fantastic character of the material. That Paul may have had a clear plan of the events of the End in which all his statements can find a place, is not taken into account. These writers therefore set no limit to the admission of inconsistencies, and draw a picture which is, to put it plainly, meaningless.
So far, it occurs to no one that the want of connexion may perhaps result from the fact that the separate statements have not been carefully examined in regard to what they actually mean, and to their mutual relations. It is taken as quite certain that the “simple” eschatology of I Thessalonians is superseded by the more complicated view of the Corinthian letters; and these in turn are not the last stage in this “development” of the Apostle’s thought. No attempt is made to get a clear idea in what order he thinks of the judgment and the resurrection of the dead, or as to whether he holds that there is one resurrection and one judgment, or a resurrection of the “righteous,” and another besides, and whether he assumes this to be accompanied by one judgment or two.
The authors regard with a certain amount of self-satisfaction the way in which they have emphasised the importance given to the eschatology by Paul. In the chapter devoted to it they have certainly emphasised again and again, “with the utmost energy,” the fact that he really “shared” the eschatological expectations of his time and admitted them to an important place in his creed. The chapter in question, however, only gets its turn after the whole “system of doctrine” has been safely housed in the earlier chapters without seeking any aid from the eschatology or even saying a word about it. As in the Church prayers of to-day, one catches an echo of it only at the end. This means that, when all is said and done, these writers regard it only as a kind of annexe to the main edifice of Pauline doctrine. That is a fact which their brave words about the importance attributed to it in their account do not alter in the slightest. None of these students of Paulinism asks himself whether there is an organic connexion between the eschatological expectations and the system as such, and whether the fundamental conceptions and concatenation of ideas are not somehow or other conditioned by the hope of the final consummation. It is simply taken as self-evident that eschatology can only form an incidental chapter in Paul’s teaching.
The most natural course to follow in the investigation would have been to begin with the eschatology as the most general and “primitive-Christian” element, and then to have tried to find a path leading from here to the central doctrine of the new life in union with the dying and resurrection of Christ. This course is nowhere followed.
That is the more surprising as it is generally assumed that the “missionary preaching” of the Apostle took an almost purely eschatological form, and was scarcely distinguishable from the primitive-Christian preaching of repentance, the judgment, and the parousia. The point to examine would therefore have been precisely how the “Pauline theology” grew out of the eschatology which Paul shared with primitive Christianity. Instead of that, these writers begin with the “doctrinal system,” and attach to that by way of appendix an account of the eschatology. It here first becomes fully apparent what a misfortune it was for Pauline study in the post-Baur period that it kept to the method of presentation under loci, and consequently accorded eschatology, in principle, no greater importance for Paulinism than it had had for Reformation theology.
Bernard Weiss, agreeing in this with Havet, lays strong emphasis on the eschatology, and makes a beginning in the direction of an intelligent presentation of Paulinism. Instead of beginning, like the others, with the “doctrine of man,” or with “sin and the law,” he first sets forth “the earliest preaching of Paul as Apostle of the Gentiles,” which he makes to consist of nothing but the proclamation of the judgment and the parousia. But having got this length, he does not feel any need to point out the paths which lead from here to the “teaching of the four great doctrinal and polemical epistles.” He simply puts the two sections side by side, and even falls into the inconsistency of devoting another chapter to the eschatology at a later point. The doctrine of Paul consists therefore for these scholars of a theology of the present and a theology of the future which have no inner connexion with one another. It is indeed cited as an achievement on his part that he turned the eye of faith from the exclusive contemplation of the “hereafter” to take in the present also. How he came to do so—he alone of this first Christian generation—to point to present “blessings of salvation” in addition to those of the future, is not explained. The co-existence of the two is simply noted as a fact.
How far the scholars of this period were from taking the Pauline eschatology seriously, is evident from the fact that they neglected to enquire into its connexion with that of Late Judaism. Otto Everling, who in 1888 took in hand to give an account of one of its main features, its angelology and demonology, was not able to refer to any previous work in this department.50 A theologian to whom he spoke of his design answered that “one ought not to examine the birth-marks of a genius like the Apostle.”
Everling brings forward the passages which speak of Satan, the angels, and the demons, one after another, and adduces parallels from Enoch, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Book of Jubilees, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Apocalypse of Baruch. His review of the material shows in what a step-motherly fashion it had been treated by previous commentators of all shades of opinion.
In the result it appears that the Pauline statements about angelology and demonology have not sprung from his own imagination, but all have their earlier analogues in the Late-Jewish theology, or at any rate can be understood as inferences from the conceptions there laid down. It further appears that his statements stand in systematic connexion and mutually supplement one another.
In its main lines the Pauline doctrine of the angels shows us the following picture. Spiritual beings who, in accordance with the hierarchic arrangement adopted in Late-Jewish theology, are divided into various classes, played a prominent part at the giving of the law. From that time forward they acted as overseers of the chosen people, and also as the real powers behind the gods of the heathen. By the death and resurrection of Christ their power has been in principle abolished, although it continues to be still in some way exercised upon those who offer sacrifices to idols or submit themselves to the law.
Believers in Christ, however, stand over against them as a class of men who are liberated from their sway, and who possess a wisdom which understands better than their own the great events in which the history of the world is about to close.
These angelic existences feel that their domination is threatened, and fight with all the weapons at their command. It is at their instigation that the attempt is made to corrupt the Gospel by legalism; all the difficulties which the Apostle encounters, all the corporeal sufferings which he has to bear, are to be attributed to them. It is on their account that women must be veiled when attending the services of the Church, since otherwise they run the risk of becoming the victims of their lust, as of old their mother Eve was seduced by the devil. Most dangerous of all is their skill in deception: Satan can disguise himself as an angel of light.
With the appearance of the Lord begins the decisive struggle which is to lead to the destruction of these powers. They are to be delivered up to judgment, to receive their sentence at the mouth of the saints, whom, until the parousia, they have still the power to harass with cunning and cruelty, though not to destroy.
“In its proper historical surroundings Christianity shows up in its true majesty,” said Richard Rothe once. Everling drew from these words, which he placed at the beginning of his book, courage to make a thorough investigation of matters which had previously been timidly avoided because of their strangeness.
How wide-reaching was the significance of his synthetic study he had hardly realised. His intention was to depict clearly and in vivid colours the imposingly fantastic Late-Jewish background of Pauline theology. The theology of his time took the same view. It accepted the offered gift somewhat constrainedly, but on the whole gratefully enough. If it had the impression that the background as thus restored, while no doubt “interesting,” was somewhat too glaring and obtrusive, it remained confident that the “doctrinal system” which it throws into relief is not otherwise affected by it. The appendix-chapter on eschatology grows in size and acquires a certain connectedness. But there seemed no reason to fear that it might grow so vigorously as to overpower those into which the Pauline theology proper is neatly parcelled out.
In reality, however, there was quite sufficient reason for anxiety. Everling had shown that angelology and demonology were, as a matter of fact, component parts of Paul’s cosmology. That they consequently also entered into his fundamental conception of redemption was a point which he had not especially emphasised. But the fact was written in giant characters across his work. From the moment when Paul’s statements regarding God, the devil, the angels, and the world are apprehended in their organic connexion, it becomes abundantly evident that for him redemption, in its primary and fundamental sense, consists in a deliverance from the powers which have their abode between heaven and earth. It is therefore essentially a future good, dependent on a cosmic event of universal scope.
It at once becomes evident that the investigation of Paulinism must take as its starting-point these ideas as being of the most general character, and endeavour to show how the other statements regarding redemption are derived from them. Theological science was thus forced into the road which it had hitherto sedulously avoided. The deceptive character of the division of Paulinism under loci, by which it had long been kept in an unhappy state of subservience to Reformation and modern prejudices, now became apparent. But for all that theology held to the old way and was determined to cast out anyone who set foot upon the new. That is the explanation of the fate which befel Richard Kabisch’s “Eschatology of Paul.”51 Kabisch had been considering the plan of a work on the Pauline Ethic, and in doing so had become aware that it was to a large extent conditioned by the eschatological expectations. Thereupon he resolved to begin with a preliminary study of the eschatology.52
“Salvation,” so runs his argument, is thought of by Paul as “deliverance” from judgment and destruction. “Justification” and “reconciliation” are subservient to this deliverance and do not describe a state of salvation independent of it. The spiritual goods which are characterised by many theologians as the object of the Apostle’s wrestling and striving are in reality only the anticipatory first-fruits of the blessedness which the future has in store. This blessedness consists in the believer’s being freed at the parousia from the fleshly body in order to put on the heavenly robe of glory. Thus eschatology is the foundation both of the dogmatics and ethics of the Apostle.
Life and death are for him physical conceptions. Spiritual death and spiritual life in the modern religious sense are unknown to him. Even where, as in Rom. vi., he speaks of a dying and rising again which are not accompanied by any change in the outward and visible existence of the individual, he does not mean a spiritual dying and rising again but, inconceivable as it may appear, a physical occurrence. Everything spiritual goes back to something corporeal. That is true also as regards the ethics. It is not from the consciousness of the “ideal possession of eternal life” that he infers the duty of walking in newness of life, but from the fact that one who shares the death of Christ must also share His resurrection. Both events have reference to the present. It is “a simple logical consequence” that we should walk in accordance with this physical newness of life in order to show that the fleshly, sarkic, body has been put off.
The new life of which Paul speaks as a present spirit is therefore based on the “repetition” of Christ’s bodily resurrection, which is rendered possible by the unio mystica with him. It guarantees to the individual his indestructibility even though the corruptible world, to which his fleshly corporeity belongs, falls a prey to destruction. The believer will then have a part in the new world-substance.
Paul’s soul is therefore thrilled with the eager desire for life, shaken with the dread of destruction. His faith, hope, and fear all revolve about one centre—the abolition of corruption and the bestowal of incorruption. His religion is a “will-to-live” in a large elemental sense. He yearns for redemption from the creaturehood which is under the sway of Satan and his powers, and from the body which they hold in thrall. The moment in which the relative positions of the world of spirits and the world of men are to be reversed, and a great final renewal of all things is to be brought in—that moment cannot come quickly enough for him. Therefore he seeks in some way to antedate it.
The future condition of existence is that of “glory.” It is anticipated in the present life by the possession of the “Spirit” which belongs essentially to the heavenly light substance.
Thus Kabisch endeavours to explain the Pauline doctrine of the Spirit purely on the ground of the Late-Jewish metaphysic. A super-earthly substance enters into the corporeity of those who in virtue of the unio mystica with Christ have entered into the experience of His death and resurrection. It produces in them a new being, and gives them a claim to the future perfected glory, and this while their fleshly existence still continues to the outward eye unaltered.
The great paradoxes of Paulinism are here for the first time clearly pointed out and so described that their real eschatological essence appears.53 But Kabisch did not succeed in explaining them. In what sense is a “repetition” in the believer of the dying and rising again of Christ possible? How can it produce a reconstitution of their creaturely being while their fleshly existence continues outwardly as before? To these questions Kabisch gives no answer.
In the account of the eschatological events and their issue it is shown that the blessings and anticipations referred to by Paul are also present in the Late-Jewish theology. That the Apostle expresses his views about the future world in disconnected fragments, apparently distributed fortuitously through the text, does not show that it was not clear and consistent in his own mind, but exactly the opposite. The eschatological remarks come in so naturally and without appearing to need explanation just because this whole set of conceptions was to the Apostle so long familiar and self-explanatory, that he can draw on it whenever he wishes as easily as an educated European uses the multiplication table.
Strangely, however, Kabisch does not succeed in giving a clear and simple picture of the order and relation of the final events presupposed in the letters. He gets confused over the various resurrections and judgments, and finds the sole way of escape in attributing to the Apostle a resurrection of the righteous only, and not a general resurrection in addition. In consequence he is forced to the conclusion that the righteous enter the Kingdom without passing through a judgment, and that what is meant by the judgment is always the destruction of the wicked at the parousia.
That is to make the Apostle contradict not only Jewish apocalyptic, but his own utterances, since it is certain that the Epistles frequently make mention of believers appearing at the judgment.
The difficulties which Kabisch here encounters are significant. They show that it is not possible to understand the Pauline statements simply by the light of the Late-Jewish eschatology. What for the Apostle composed a simple picture remains for the writer who endeavours to describe his apocalyptic full of obscurities and contradictions. It is as if one or two conceptions were lacking which would have enabled him to “get out” his game of patience satisfactorily.
It is true Kabisch has not done everything possible in order to attain clearness. He has neglected to adduce for comparison the eschatology of the Baptist and of Jesus, and to examine how far the Pauline simplification of apocalyptic is here prefigured. He thus falls into the universal but none the less unintelligible error of failing to call the two most important witnesses to the Late-Jewish eschatological expectations. Are they the less so because they belong to the New Testament? Further, he neglects, as do all the other writers, to consider what are the primary questions which the theory of the events of the End had to answer.
What happens at the parousia to the non-elect? And what to the elect who have not become believers because the Gospel message has not reached them? The ultimate fate of these two classes of men can surely not be the same? Do those who at the parousia do not enter into glory suffer “death” or “destruction”? What is the relation between these two conceptions?
According to I Cor. xv. 26, death is only to be vanquished at the end of the Messianic kingdom. Is a general resurrection before that conceivable? Does it follow as a consequence of this triumph over death?
Since Kabisch does not raise these and similar questions, he does not find the path which alone can lead to the understanding of the logic of the events of the End. Undoubtedly, in the eschatology of a thinker like Paul, all these problems must have been considered and thought out. They form the implicit presuppositions which guarantee and make clear the inner logic of his scattered and seemingly disconnected statements.
Although he has not explained the paradoxes of the Pauline mysticism, nor succeeded in making clear the ground-plan of his eschatology, Kabisch’s book is one of the most striking achievements, not only in the department of Pauline study, but in historical theology as a whole. For the first time since Lüdemann’s investigation of the Apostle’s doctrine of man, in 1872, the problem of the Pauline doctrine of redemption receives a new formulation.
The two works show a curious analogy. Their authors have a consciousness of the fact that the theology of the Apostle is a living organism, and are preserved by some good genius from splitting it up into Reformation or modern loci. They endeavour to grasp the thoughts and connecting links of the doctrine of redemption from a single point of view. Lüdemann makes the “anthropology” his starting-point, Kabisch the eschatology. Both are led, almost contrary to their intention, to give a general account of Paulinism. Both see in the paradoxical statements about the abolition of the flesh in the union with the death and resurrection of Christ the centre of his doctrine; both arrive at the result that what is in view is a really physical redemption.
In the explanation of the facts which they agree in observing they diverge widely. Lüdemann claims the Pauline doctrine of redemption as Hellenistic; Kabisch endeavours to understand it on the basis of Late Judaism. Theological science cast out the innovator and held to the conviction that the Apostle’s system of thought was Greek. It was acknowledged that he had made the eschatology of the Apostle intelligible; but in the attempt to pass from the eschatology to the centre of the Apostle’s system of doctrine, contemporary scholarship saw only an extreme onesidedness for which there was no justification in the documents, which deserved neither examination nor refutation, but simply rejection.
On what lines had theology developed and defended the theory of Greek elements in Paulinism? In the first place, it is to be remarked that in regard to the extent and importance of the influence which is supposed to have been exercised, various groupings are to be observed among the different writers. Pfleiderer, Holsten, Heinrici,54 Havet, and others see in Paulinism the actual first step in the Hellenisation of Christianity. They assume, as Baur also had taken for granted before them, that the ethical series of ideas, the series dominated by the antithesis of flesh and spirit, is derived from Greek influences.
Schmiedel,55 in his commentaries, and Harnack56 express themselves with more reserve. According to the latter, Hellenism, no doubt, “had its share” in Paul. The Apostle of the Gentiles “prepared the way for the projection of the Gospel upon the Graeco-Roman world of thought,” but he never gave to Greek ideas “any influence upon his doctrine of salvation.” Lipsius,57 Bernhard Weiss, and Weizsäcker do not take much account of borrowings from Greek sources, but are concerned to explain Paul from and by himself so far as possible.
It is not so easy as might be supposed to determine the attitude of the various authors towards the problem of the Hellenic influence in Paul. This is partly due to want of accuracy in the terminology. “Hellenistic” is used to mean both Jewish-Hellenistic and Greek in the strict sense. The authors frequently express themselves in such a way that it is not obvious whether they mean the one, or the other, or both together. Attempts to establish an accurate terminology, to confine “Hellenistic” to the meaning “Jewish-Hellenistic,” and to use Hellenic for Greek in the full sense, have not succeeded.
But the want of clearness is not wholly to be put down to the account of the language; it is partly due to the mental attitude of the writers. The problem really includes two questions. First, Was Paul under the influence of Jewish Hellenism? Secondly, Did Greek thought in itself, apart from the alliance into which it had entered with Judaism, exercise any influence upon his views? Instead of keeping these questions separate these writers constantly confuse them, and assume that they have proved the existence of Greek ideas in the Apostle’s system of doctrine when they have only discussed his relations with Jewish-Hellenism.
Sometimes one actually gets the impression that in this difficult question they intentionally make their discussions a little obscure and inconsistent, and are more concerned to conceal than to reveal their views, in order not to lay themselves open to attack.
The discovery and the grouping of their opinions is therefore associated with difficulties, and can never be carried out in a way entirely free from objection. Fortunately the discussion and decision of the question does not depend on drawing them up in three divisions, each under the banner of its particular view, and so putting them through their facings.
It suffices to note the fact that in the study of the subject from Baur onward the greatly predominating opinion is that Paul was not only influenced by Jewish Hellenism but also derived some of his ideas directly from Greek thought. It is also safe to assert that of all the writers in question—even though some of them take up an attitude of reserve to Pfleiderer’s more thoroughgoing views, none of them denies the influence of Jewish Hellenism on Paul. The difference between them consists rather in the fact that some assume in addition to this what may be called “free” Greek influence, while others are sceptical on this point and think that the facts can be explained without this assumption.
It is to be expressly remarked that the latter do not try to arrive at an understanding of the essence of Paul’s thought by a different method, but only to clothe the usual explanations in different words. This is the case with Weizsäcker.
The well-known account of Paulinism in his “Apostolic Age”58 neither offers any new idea nor raises any new problem. Though he is in some respects more cautious than Pfleiderer, because he feels the difficulty of proving Greek influence more strongly than the latter, in other respects he is less exacting than Pfleiderer with his logical development of Baur’s ideas, since he is content with explanations which do not satisfy Pfleiderer.
That Bernard Weiss in dealing with Pauline theology dispenses with the assumption of Greek influence is due to the fact that his investigation holds strictly to the lines of “Biblical theology,” and on principle takes no account of anything beyond the borders of the Canon.
It is interesting to note that both Weiss and Weizsäcker deliberately avoid a discussion of Greek and Hellenistic influence on Paul, and confine themselves to an objective account of Paul’s doctrine. Indeed, it may be remarked that in the study of the subject between Baur and Holtzmann the problem is never thoroughly discussed.
The question how far the alleged influences are proved or provable may be held over for the present, and in the first place we may interrogate Holsten, Pfleiderer and their followers as to what their view really means, and what they think they can explain by means of it.
At bottom the question turns on the antithesis of flesh and spirit. In the clearly defined form in which this antithesis presents itself in Paul, it is held that it must be regarded as Greek. This view had been expressed by Lüdemann, who was the first to develop it clearly. Independently of him, Holsten59 and Pfleiderer brought it into general currency.
It is universally taken for granted that the dualism is derived from Platonism. Whether Paul took it direct from Greek sources or from Jewish Hellenism is not clearly explained. Lüdemann seems to assume the former, Holsten to imply the latter; Pfleiderer is doubtless to be understood in the sense that both possibilities have to be taken into account, separately and in combination.
The psychological process is differently conceived by Holsten and by Pfleiderer. The former holds that Greek ideas were already in his pre-Christian period present to the mind of the Apostle, who had been in touch with Jewish Hellenism, but they had as yet played no part in his thinking. By his religious experience at the vision of Christ on the Damascus road they were called into activity and helped him to give form to his new knowledge. In this way Holsten thinks it possible to understand Paulinism as both a personal creation of the Apostle and at the same time a product of the influence of Greek ideas. The emphasis lies, however, on the personal creation; the influence of the Greek ideas is thought of as subsidiary.
For Pfleiderer the process was more largely determined from without. Paul’s conversion creates as it were a void in his Jewish consciousness. The thought-forms which he has hitherto used prove incapable of dealing satisfactorily with the implications of his new faith. So the Apostle is driven to have recourse to another system of ideas. He no longer remains indifferent to the ideas which stream in upon him from Jewish Hellenism and Greek thought. They become significant to him; he allows them to exercise their influence upon him. In this way there arises a remarkable duality in his thought. Pharisaic and Hellenistic trains of ideas form two streams “which in Paulinism meet in one bed without really coalescing.” By way of conjecture Pfleiderer several times advances the suggestion that Apollos the Alexandrian may have introduced the Apostle to the Alexandrian Platonism.
Heinrici, again, in his commentaries on the Corinthian Epistles suggests that the Apostle’s doctrine is a synthesis of elements taken on the one hand from the Jewish prophets and on the other from Greek thought.60 Paul, he thinks, reached back beyond Late Judaism to join hands with the ancient prophetism, and similarly rose superior to Alexandrianism and drew direct from Greek thought. In both cases what he seeks is an ethical force. That he possessed the insight and the power to find this in the thought of the ancient world and to apply it to the formation of a Christian system of thought was a great spiritual achievement, pregnant with consequences for the future development of Christianity.
One might have expected that these various views would be worked out in detail. That is not the case. In the last resort none of these writers gets beyond the general and simple assertion that the antithesis of flesh and spirit is Greek. But even this is not further explained by means of parallels from Greek literature. There is no attempt to show in what sense Paul’s utterances become more intelligible in the light of these analogies than they are in themselves.
“The Greek dualism,” writes Holsten, “underlies all the decisive elements of his thought, and makes itself apparent in a series of individual traits.” Any one who goes through his work in the expectation of finding evidence adduced in support of this statement will be disappointed. It is as though the author had forgotten as he went on writing what he had set out to do.
It is also matter for astonishment that no serious attempt is made to extend the range of the Greek elements beyond the single antithesis of flesh and spirit. The suggestion is no doubt met with that the pessimism, the longing for death, and the ethical teaching of the Apostle, belong essentially to the tone of thought prevalent in the Hellenic world. But these remain mere obiter dicta which are not worked out in any way.
It is as though these writers one and all had an instinctive feeling that their thesis, so long as it is kept quite general, has an admirable air of credibility and admits of being nicely formulated, but that when any attempt is made to follow it out into detail it yields little in the way of tangible results. Paulinism is deceptive. Its outward appearance is such that the assertion that here Greek influences have been at work seems the most self-evident possible, but when this has to be shown in detail it leaves the investigator whom it has drawn on by its specious appearance completely in the lurch.
The curious thing is that Holsten, Pfleiderer, and their followers do not venture to formulate the unwelcome admission which may be read between their lines, but keep up the game with one another as if everything was going as well as heart could wish. They overdo their air of unconcern, as though from an uncomfortable sense that they might in the end lose confidence in their assertion, and so find themselves unable to explain how Paul arrived at his dualistic antithesis between flesh and spirit.
For this is what it all ultimately comes to. The assertion of Greek influence is a kind of pillared portico behind which they construct the edifice of Paulinism as they understand it. The style, however, is only maintained as regards the front. What lies behind that is styleless, neither Greek nor Jewish, without plan, without character, without proportion. Those writers who wholly or partially dissent from the assumption of Greek influences carry out the same plan with the same materials, and with the same unconcern as regards the style. The only difference is that they do not conceal it by building a special façade in front of it, whether it be that, like Harnack, they have a fuller sense of the difficulties, or, like Weiss and Weizsäcker, persuade themselves that Paulinism, according to their construction of it, looks sufficiently well as it is.
There is, however, one point on which Pfleiderer and his followers think that they can point to definite results of the influence of Greek ideas. They maintain that the Apostle’s eschatological expectations have been transformed by them. This has reference to the passage in 2 Cor. v. I ff. in which Paul gives expression to his desire not to be “unclothed” but to be “clothed upon.” The natural interpretation which is given by Bernard Weiss and others understands the Apostle as speaking of his eager desire to experience the parousia while still alive in the body, in order to share that transformation in which “what is mortal will be swallowed up by life,” and not to have to pass through a time of waiting in an intermediate state of non-being or death.
Pfleiderer in his “Primitive Christianity” does not accept this explanation, but maintains that this passage and two others—Phil. i. 21 f. and iii. 8 f.61—imply a departure from the Pharisaic eschatological hope in which the Apostle’s thought elsewhere moves. In this later period of his life, represented by 2 Corinthians and Philippians, he turns away—so runs the theory—from the primitive view of an intermediate state of death, followed by a subsequent resurrection, and comes to hold that his soul, immediately after his departure, will pass into the presence of Christ in order to dwell with Him. And Paul is more and more driven to adopt this view in proportion as his life is daily exposed to greater danger, and he has to reckon with the possibility of dying before the parousia takes place. Under the pressure of this inward anxiety, guided by Platonising Alexandrianism, illuminated by the Greek spirit, he creates—we are still following Pfleiderer—a spiritualising hope of future blessedness, which in the sequel becomes of the utmost value to Gentile Christianity by enabling it to reconcile itself to the delay of the parousia.
Pfleiderer believes also that he can show the course of the development by which the new conception was arrived at. In I Thessalonians, he thinks, the Apostle still rested unquestioningly in that notion of a corporeal resurrection which primitive Christianity shared with Judaism. But in the explanations in I Cor. xv. the influence of the Greek ideas becomes observable, while in 2 Corinthians and Philippians it becomes dominant.
This construction of the course of events is defended by Pfleiderer and his followers—Holsten here stands apart—with fanatical energy, as though they wished to make noise enough to distract attention from the fact that they have so very little else to point to in the shape of positive evidence of Greek influence in Paul.
What are the difficulties which are raised by the assumption of Greek ideas in Paul’s doctrine? They are many and various, and they grow greater in proportion as the new element in Paul is more strongly emphasised. Take the problem of explaining the dualism of flesh and spirit. It is assumed that this has been done when it has been declared to be Greek. But in doing so a duality has been introduced into Paul himself which creates many more difficulties than the dualism it was invoked to solve.
The Apostle is made to think Judaically with one-half of his mind and Hellenically with the other, and nevertheless is supposed to be capable of being conceived as a single integral personality. In the writings of Lüdemann and Holsten the difficulty does not yet appear in its full magnitude. They understand by the Jewish element especially the juridical series of ideas referring to the atonement and imputed righteousness. Holsten is, moreover, in a specially favourable position, because in the last resort he ascribes the origin of the system not so much to the influence of Greek ideas as to the inward experience on the Damascus road, which of course eludes analysis. If they are thus referred exclusively to the separate but coexistent juridical and mystical sets of ideas, a Jewish and a Greek element can at need be thought of as in some way or other combined in a single consciousness.
But for Pfleiderer the conception of the Jewish element has become much more comprehensive and vital, because he appreciates the significance of the eschatological ideas. The result of that is to make the opposition which has to be recognised much more acute. And, nevertheless, it must continue to be asserted that Paul was unconscious of the inconsistencies!
If the difficulty could be got over by pointing to an opposition of which the Apostle was conscious, and which he had made an effort to reconcile, the position of the theory would be much more favourable. But for that it would be a necessary condition that he should somewhere have expressed the consciousness that he bore two souls within his breast,62 and that the marks of compromise should appear in his work as they do, for example, in that of Philo. That, however, is not the case. He is conscious of no opposition, and steps unconcernedly from the one world into the other, turns back again to the first, and keeps on doing this over and over again. Where, according to Pfleiderer’s view, he is venturing a leap over the abyss, he has all the air of putting one foot calmly before the other on a level road. We must, therefore, take it to be the case that he had not the slightest inkling of the opposition.
This conclusion seems to negate psychology and render a historical comprehension of the Apostle impossible, but Pfleiderer hardens his heart and boldly accepts it. There remains, he says, “no alternative but to admit that Paul kept the two different kinds of conceptions in his consciousness side by side but unrelated, and jumped from one to the other without being aware of the opposition between them.”
There is, however, a further complication in the question. Pfleiderer holds that in 2nd Corinthians and Philippians a Greek spiritualising future-hope has displaced the Jewish Pharisaic hope. In the last period of his life, he maintains, the Apostle no longer believes in a corporeal resurrection, but in a presence of the soul with Christ which begins immediately after death.
But the new conception does not in fact displace the old, although it is diametrically opposed to it. Pfleiderer has to admit that Paul, even in the writings of the latest period, advances without misgiving the doctrine of the “awakening of the whole man from the sleep of death,” just as if the new doctrine of “the presence with the Lord beginning immediately after death” were not in existence, although it is the outcome of long years of mental struggle.
Pfleiderer, however, is prepared to accept even this portentous fact also, and to go on contentedly believing that Paul lived in a kind of mental twilight which is at once Jewish-eschatological and Greek-spiritualistic. He expresses this euphemistically by speaking of the Pauline eschatology as “hovering between the Pharisaic hope of the here and the Greek hope of the hereafter.” The way to a scientific understanding of Paulinism lies, therefore, for Pfleiderer through a credo quia absurdum.
By his assertions about 2 Cor. v. I ff. he had brought the assumption of Hellenistic ideas in Paul into a dangerous position. Previously when a student of the subject had stated it to be his view that the sharp antithesis of flesh and spirit was Greek, there was no way in which this belief could be countered. If he was, further, convinced that the Apostle’s brain was so organised that he could at the same time think consistently along two separate lines, Greek-spiritualistic and Jewish-eschatological, without noticing their divergence and without ever mingling the two sets of ideas, a mind accustomed to work by the methods of historical criticism was similarly powerless against views arrived at as if by revelation.
Pfleiderer, however, makes the mistake of referring to a matter of fact when he asserts that the Apostle’s conception of a life after death became Hellenised. Thereupon controversy about the Greek element in Paul rages furiously over 2 Cor. v. I ff.—it was only now that controversy had become possible. The simple wording of the passage is against Pfleiderer, for its subject is not the soul’s being “at home with Christ,” but the Apostle’s longing for the parousia. Pfleiderer himself would never have arrived at his exposition had it not been for the laudable desire to produce at last some tangible example of the influence of Greek thought upon the Apostle’s ideas.
The point which Pfleiderer raised here was after all only a particular case in relation to the general question whether a Hellenistic influence is to be recognised in the Apostle’s conceptions of the final state and the times of the End. It was in this wider aspect that Kabisch dealt with the problem in his work on the Pauline eschatology. His decision is in the negative. The much-discussed “development” of the views of I Thessalonians into those of I Corinthians xv., and of these again into those of 2 Corinthians and Philippians, is, he maintains, a delusion. The conception of the things of the End is a unity, and remains the same throughout.
To oppose this view Teichmann entered the lists.63 In his over-confident zeal he plays the part of Polos in Plato’s Gorgias.
He goes much further than Pfleiderer, and seeks to show that Greek ideas actually superseded the whole Jewish Eschatology of Paul. In consequence of the influx of new thoughts one antinomy after another arises in the Apostle’s conception of the things of the End. To trace out and exhibit these in detail is the goal of Teichmann’s endeavour.
He arrives at the following conclusions:—In I Thessalonians Paul still assumes that Christians will enter the kingdom of heaven with their earthly bodies. Not before I Corinthians xv. does he introduce the idea of a “transformation.” He is then led to do so by the development of the Greek doctrine of flesh and spirit. In the second Epistle to the Corinthians he carries out this new conception to its logical issue. “The compromise which he had attempted in I Cor. is abandoned, and the result is that the conception of the resurrection of the dead is set aside.” Along with the resurrection of the dead the Apostle also strikes out from his programme of the future the parousia. “For the expectation of the descent of Christ to earth he substitutes the entry of the believer into the heavenly world. A resurrection of the dead, a descent of Christ to earth, was now no longer necessary.”
Not only so, but the conception of the judgment is also abolished. In the first place, Paul draws this inference “at least so far as Christians are concerned.” That subsequently, in following out his ideas, “he should also arrive at the conception of universal blessedness, can in view of his universalism cause no surprise.” “As all men were included in Christ at His resurrection, so all must receive the Spirit, they must all be made alive.” The End does not, therefore, mean blessedness for some and destruction for others, but eternal life for all. But since eternal life depends on the possession of the Spirit, it must be assumed that those who are not believers at their death “come to faith in Christ in the period between the parousia and the delivery of all authority into the hands of God, and in consequence of this the Spirit is given to them.”
Teichmann professes to have demonstrated the Hellenisation of the Pauline eschatology. What he actually shows is what it would have become if it had really undergone Greek influence.
Not one of his “results” can be proved from the Apostle’s letters. Where is there a single word to suggest that the Apostle abandoned the conception of the judgment and that of predestination to life or to damnation? Where does he ever speak of universal blessedness? Where does he hint at the possibility that mankind as a whole is to be converted to belief in Christ between the parousia and the delivery of all authority into the hands of God, and will thereupon receive the Spirit? What grounds are there for supposing that he gives up the idea of the parousia as superfluous? In his zeal to discover antinomies and trace developments, Teichmann forgets to take account of the most elementary facts. He asserts, for instance, that in I Thessalonians those who arise from the dead enter the kingdom of God in their earthly bodies. But from the Jewish Apocalyptic and from the teaching of Jesus it clearly appears that the resurrection included within itself a transformation of this creaturely corporeity into a glorified corporeity. It would not do for Teichmann to remember this. He is bound, even where he represents the Apostle as still wholly under the sway of Jewish conceptions, to bring him into an inconceivable opposition to these in order that the transformation which is taught in I Corinthians xv.—entirely in accordance with Jewish eschatology—may be represented as derived from the Greek doctrine of the Spirit.
Without intending it, he thus supplies the most brilliant refutation of the theory of the Hellenisation of the Pauline eschatology. He engaged battle on ground on which Pfleiderer and his school had incautiously ventured forth in the heat of action, and he has to find by experience that he is unable to make good a single position. A Hellenisation of the eschatology is quite impossible to prove. Kabisch turns out to have been right. The Apostle holds on this point too vigorous and too clear a language.
But if that be so, the theory that the doctrine of flesh and spirit is Greek is itself most seriously imperilled. Teichmann felt, and therein he was more logical and consistent than the rest, that if there were any Hellenistic ideas in Paulinism they must necessarily have attacked and displaced the Jewish eschatology. Pfleiderer’s view that the two could have subsisted side by side without—except in the case of 2 Corinthians v. I ff.—influencing and interpenetrating one another is an untenable theoretical hypothesis. From the whole range of the history of thought no analogy could be produced for this harmonious coexistence of two different worlds of thought.
A further difficulty of the theory of the Hellenisation of Paulinism arises from the fact that the Apostle’s views have to be more and more spiritualised in proportion as the Greek element is emphasised. Lüdemann, overpowered by the impression of the documents, had expressly characterised the doctrine of redemption which is bound up with the dualism of flesh and spirit as not ethical but physical. Holsten and Pfleiderer do not venture to follow him in that. The Platonism which they seek to discover in Paulinism cannot be brought into connexion with a physical doctrine of redemption, but is thought of as the antithesis of the “crude Jewish ideas.” The whole of the mystical teaching about dying and rising again with Christ, about the new creature and the influence of the Spirit, has therefore to be spiritualised.
This brings them into conflict with the natural, literal meaning of the Apostle’s statements, in which the materialistic character of his conceptions maintains itself against all the arts of exegesis. The interpretation given by Pfleiderer and his school deprives them of their original meaning to an even greater extent than the modern interpretation in general does.
Most unfortunately for those who seek to spiritualise Paul, his doctrine of the Spirit in particular shows no trace of Greek influence. As though from an apprehension that they might be deprived of one of their most indispensable illusions, for thirty years after Baur the students of Paulinism had neglected to deal with this subject. At last in the year 1888 Gunkel undertook the task.64 He investigates the influence of the Holy Spirit as conceived by the popular view of the Apostolic age, and according to the doctrine of the Apostle, and is obliged to come to the conclusion that a Greek element in the latter is not to be assumed.
The Apostle, according to Gunkel’s exposition, takes over the primitive Christian view and accepts it in all points. His own doctrine merely represents an elevation, a development of what he found already present. He introduces—I Cor. xii.-xiv.—an ethical judgment and valuation of spiritual gifts, which was new to the Christian community. While the latter had regarded “speaking with tongues” as the highest manifestation of supernatural power, he puts all the charismata on a lower footing than love. He gives a further development to the primitive Christian doctrine by attributing to the influence of the Spirit a large number of the characteristics of the Christian life which were not so regarded by the primitive community. Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, kindness, faithfulness, meekness, chastity are, according to Gal. v. 22, fruits of His power. He generalises, therefore, in such a way that all Christian willing, feeling, knowledge, hope, and action proceed from the pneuma, which for the common view was only thought of in connexion with revelations and miracles.
There is a further point in which, according to Gunkel, Paul raises to a higher level the view which he took over. By the possession of the Spirit the primitive Church was made certain that the end of the present age was at hand and the new age was about to dawn. For the Apostle the temporal relation becomes an inner one. The Spirit is for him the earnest of the coming kingdom of God. Already in the present he calls into being the future life in believers and gives them the certainty, and to some extent even the reality, of the life which is about to dawn for them.
The Pauline doctrine of the Spirit is therefore simply a development of the primitive Christian doctrine. That it was so long regarded as Greek is due, according to Gunkel, to the fact that scholars never examined it as a whole, but always confined themselves to the discussion of the dualism of spirit and flesh. This prevents the relation of the doctrine to the views of the primitive community, and especially its relation to the doctrine of the future age, from becoming apparent.
One very weighty theoretic objection to the admission of Greek elements in Paulinism is passed over by its defenders in complete silence. If the thoughts developed by the Apostle of the Gentiles had grown up upon the soil of Hellenism, the original apostles and those closely associated with them would certainly have been aware of this and attacked them on that ground. From the records, however, as we have them in the letters, it appears certain that they only reproached him with his attitude towards the law, and found no other point to object to in his teaching. The primitive Christian community at Jerusalem accused him of keeping back something from his churches; it did not discover anything new and essentially foreign in his thought. In spite of the keenness of the struggle, it was never made a charge against him that he had “heathenised” the Gospel. That shows how completely out of the question the assumption of Greek influences was for his opponents. But the fact that his contemporaries discovered nothing of the kind in him forms a strong presumption against any such theory when brought forward in later times.
The objection which arises from the side of the history of dogma tends to the same result. Those who hold the theory of Greek elements in Paul must, if they are to be consistent, assert that he pioneered a path for the Gospel into the Hellenic world and prepared the way for the early Greek theology. And they do so most emphatically. Pfleiderer explains65 that the Greek Church-theology arose by the expulsion from Paulinism of its specifically Jewish elements, and by the free development of its “universally intelligible Hellenistic side.” The noble Platonic idealism had a place in the doctrinal system of the Apostle of the Gentiles, “and conferred on it its capacity to win the Graeco-Roman world for Christianity.” “The understanding of Paulinism is therefore a fundamental condition for the understanding of the Early Church.” And all the adherents of the theory, whatever their precise shade of opinion, express themselves to the same effect.
But the history of dogma holds a different language. It has to record the fact, inconceivable as it may appear, that on the generations in which Greek dogma was taking shape Paul exercised no influence whatever. Even the external literary influence is very slight. If one sets aside the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians it is not even possible to speak of a deutero-Pauline literature. The Pastoral Epistles and the second letter to the Thessalonians profess to be written by the Apostle, but contain not a single thought which is characteristic of his teaching. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, in 1 Clement, in the Epistle of Barnabas, in the writings of Ignatius, in the works of Justin, expressions occur which show acquaintance with the Epistles of Paul, and may have been influenced by him in respect to their wording; but beyond that they show no trace of his conceptions or his spirit.
The remarkable point, therefore, is that the post-Apostolic writers, though they are acquainted with the works of the Apostle of the Gentiles, make no real use of them. His ideas remain foreign, lifeless, so far as they are concerned.
That is also shown by the fact that early Greek Church-theology is quite independent of him. It is concerned with the incarnation and resurrection of Christ and with regeneration; Paul’s speculations deal with the death and resurrection of the Lord, and he never speaks of regeneration. The underlying logic is in the two cases so different that the representatives of Greek theology, even if they wished to do so, could not appeal to the Apostle. No community of thought between him and Justin is to be discovered.
Even Baur had to learn how little Greek theology attached itself to Paul,66 although he wished to derive it from a compromise between the Pauline and the Petrine Gospel. So long as he is carrying out his theory on the lines of the history of the Church and its literature, the mistake does not become so apparent, because the universalism and freedom from the law which gradually establish themselves are set down as Graeco-Pauline. In treating the history of dogma, however, where he is dealing exclusively with the development of the Greek conception of the Person of Christ and of the redemption effected through Him, he can, as a matter of fact, make nothing of Paul. He hardly mentions him.
What Baur was unwilling to acknowledge to himself, Harnack has irrefutably proved.67 According to his showing there is no bridge leading from the Pauline Gospel to the doctrine of the Early Greek Church. The “history of dogma,” strange as it may appear, only begins after Paul. The forces which are there at work have not been set in motion by him.
The same result is arrived at by Edwin Hatch in his work on Hellenism and Christianity.68 A trained philological scholar possessing great knowledge of and insight into the late Greek and early Christian literatures, he endeavours to describe in detail the process by which Christianity became Hellenised. In doing so he does not find it necessary to deal with Paul. For the points of contact which he finds to exist between the two worlds no examples are to be discovered in the letters of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Hatch’s observations lead him to make the process of Hellenisation only begin with the second century.
The history of dogma cannot, therefore, accept the suggestion that Paul recast the Gospel in the moulds of Greek thought. The process began later, and of its own motion. It did not derive its impulse from a single great personality, but began gradually and on all sides. It was the Greek popular mind as represented by the members of the Gentile churches which Hellenised the Gospel for itself. Men like Ignatius and Justin bring this work to a provisional completeness by combining the current ideas into a primitive but in its own fashion impressively clear and living system, and creating a connexion between Christology, the conception of redemption and the doctrine of the sacraments; the Fourth Evangelist carries this system of doctrine back into the preaching of the historic Jesus. These men received no kind of impulse from Paul. Of the work which he did they make no use. They know it, but it seems as if it were impossible for them to use it.
The recognition of the true state of the case begins when one gets rid of the seemingly so natural but in reality unjustified assumption that the universalism69 and freedom from the law for which Paul fought his battles, imply a Hellenisation of Christianity and form the Greek element in his doctrine.
Ritschl and Harnack, in opposing this assumption of Baur and his successors, went to the other extreme. They maintained that universalism and freedom from the law were purely practical and separable views, which had, properly speaking, nothing to do with the fundamental ideas of the doctrine of redemption. In this way they succeeded, no doubt, in liberating the history of dogma from the prejudices of the Tübingen school; but they did less justice to the Apostle’s statements than those whom they were attacking, since on every page of his writings he implies an actual connexion between his doctrines and the practical views which he is defending. It is to be noted that Ritschl and Harnack never clearly explain why Paul holds a different view on these points from that of the primitive community.
Truth here appears as the synthesis of a thesis and antithesis. Universalism and freedom from the law do in fact belong to the history of dogma, but not in the way Baur thought. And they are in themselves practical views, but at the same time they claim to be logically derived from the system of doctrine. The presuppositions on which they are based have nothing to do with Greek thought; it was purely by systematically thinking out to its conclusions the primitive Christian doctrine that Paul was led to his theories of the universal destination of the Gospel and of emancipation from the law.
These are the facts as they lie clearly before us in the letters. But to register them is not to explain them. How, exactly, do these conclusions result from the logic of the primitive Christian belief as rightly worked out in the Apostle’s mind? That is the form which the question takes as the next stage, after Baur, Ritschl, and Harnack.
The negative result that the Pauline attitude in regard to these points is not Greek is in any case established. And so too is the other result that the creators of Greek dogma did not take him as their starting-point, and cannot therefore have discovered anything Hellenic in him. They had no consciousness that he had already quarried and shaped the material which they needed for their edifice.
But if they did not recognise in him one who had made a beginning in their direction, it is more than questionable whether modern historical criticism is right in professing to find Greek elements in him. If so, it must be supposed to have a better instinct for what is Hellenic than the men who Hellenised Christianity.
In any case it has no right to talk at large about the significance of Paulinism for Greek Christianity, as though the history of dogma was not there to prove the contrary.
How do the Debit and Credit of the theory stand at this point? For the credit side, it claims that the dualism of flesh and spirit is of Greek origin, but it does not get beyond the general assertion. No serious attempt has been made to demonstrate the existence of Greek conceptions in the particular aspects of the doctrine, and to explain the pessimism, the desire for death, and the ethical teaching of the Apostle as derived from the non-Jewish world of thought. That the Pauline universalism and doctrine of freedom from the law are directly inspired by the Greek spirit it no longer has the right to assert.
In a single instance its defenders venture to point to the influence of Greek religious thought on the Apostle’s views. They seek to show that his Jewish, eschatological conception of the future life and his view of the events of the End were in time entirely transformed by it, if not actually cancelled. But the attempt to prove this from the documents has not been successful.
Meanwhile the following difficulties appear. The theory is obliged to assume a dualism between Jewish and Greek elements in Paul, and to assert that on the one hand he never allowed the two systems of thought to coalesce, while on the other he never became conscious of their disparity; it has to attribute to him a capacity for combining contradictions, which allows him to maintain alongside of one another a spiritualistic doctrine of immortality and a crudely materialistic notion of resurrection without becoming aware of their incompatibility; it is logically forced to the conclusion that he set aside the Jewish eschatology, with its conceptions of judgment and condemnation, in favour of a doctrine of universal blessedness, whereas there is in the Epistles not a single hint pointing in this direction; it is forced, in order to make his statements appear “Platonic,” so to spiritualise them that the natural sense of the words disappears; it must ignore the proved fact that his doctrine of the spirit, when taken in its full compass and not confined to the antithesis of spirit and flesh, is most naturally explained as a mere development of the primitive Christian view; it must meet the objection—which it never can do—that the original apostles never discovered anything of an essentially foreign, Greek character in Paul’s views; it must, when confronted with the history of dogma, bend itself with what grace it may to the admission that Paulinism exercised no influence upon the formation of early Greek theology, and cannot therefore have been felt by the men who were concerned in that process as itself representing a first stage in the Hellenisation of Christianity.
The theory therefore explains nothing, but creates difficulty upon difficulty.
In view of this relation of its assets to its liabilities it would have no alternative but to declare itself bankrupt, had it not astutely refrained from keeping any accounts.
And so far we have considered the mere for and against. Even if the balance had here inclined in favour of the theory, that would not have proved anything. The ideas in question ought not to be considered as Greek until it had been shown that they actually were so. But this would require it to be shown that exactly corresponding ideas were to be found in the preceding or contemporary Greek literature, and that Paul betrayed some kind of acquaintance with this literature. The possibility that it was a mere case of analogy would have to be systematically excluded, so far as that is possible.
But such a method of proof has never been seriously contemplated by the adherents of the theory. In going through their works one is astonished to see how lightly they have treated their task. They have never properly collected the material; it is much if here and there a point is thoroughly considered.
The assumption of Greek elements in Paulinism appeared something so self-evident, and indeed, if one desired to arrive at any understanding of him, so necessary, that from the first it came forward with an assurance which secured credit for it everywhere without its needing to produce adequate guarantees.
When Lüdemann in the year 1872 worked out clearly the dualism of flesh and spirit, he added, as a thing to be taken for granted, that it was Greek in character. His successors show a similar absence of misgiving.
In order to bring the question once for all to an issue, let us gather up and put to the test, along with the poor fragments of attempted proof, every consideration that can be cited in favour of the assumption of Greek elements in Paulinism.
The Apostle was born and grew up in Tarsus, the “Athens of Asia Minor” as Ernest Curtius has called it.70 In his native city, as Heinrici expresses himself, “rhetoric and Stoic philosophy were to be met with in the market-place.”71
No limits are set to the estimate of what the child of the Diaspora may have absorbed, retained, and laid up in his mind from the intellectual life by which he was surrounded.
But just as large a place might be claimed for the contrary argument, which would lay stress upon the exclusiveness of strictly Jewish circles of the Diaspora in regard to the Greek culture by which they were surrounded.
Neither argument proves anything. A thousand possibilities on the one side do not produce a certainty any more than on the other.
The greater probability, however, is on the side of the assumption of exclusiveness. Although he lived in the middle of Hellenism, it is possible that Paul absorbed no more of it than a Catholic parish priest of the twentieth century does of the critical theology, and knew no more about it than an Evangelical pastor knows of theosophy.
The decision lies solely with his works.
The case is similar as regards the argument from his language. It is inconceivable, so writers like Heinrici and Curtius urge, that a language like Greek could be familiar to a man like Paul without causing a flood of ancient conceptions and ideas to stream in upon him. Heinrici, indeed, is prepared to decide the question on this ground alone, and concludes his exposition of the Corinthian Epistles with a close analysis of their vocabulary. This shows, he thinks, that Greek concepts and expressions far outweigh in number and importance the “specifically Christian” and those which show the influence of the Old Testament or the language of the synagogue. But in opposition to this, Schmiedel,72 a not less thorough commentator, expresses himself as follows: “We must be on our guard against concluding too hastily from the predominantly Hellenistic character of Paul’s language to a Hellenistic mode of thought. With a language of which one learns colloquially the current use, one does not by any means necessarily assimilate all the thought-forms of which it contains, so to speak, the geological record.”
Here too, therefore, one argument is balanced by another.
A fact which seems to carry us a little further is the Apostle’s exclusive use of the Greek version of the Old Testament. In a detailed study, of the year 1869, Kautzsch73 showed that out of eighty-four quotations which occur in the Epistles thirty-four agree exactly with the Septuagint, thirty-six show small deviations, and ten depart from it more widely. Two others show a considerable difference, without, however, throwing doubt upon the author’s acquaintance with the wording of the ordinary translation; two others, again, from Job, differ from it entirely.
This investigation was carried further by Hans Vollmer74 and brought to a provisional conclusion. According to him the deviations are to be explained by the fact that Paul did not use a single complete recension of the LXX, but had recourse to different editions for different books. In Job he had before him a version which shows affinity with the later Jewish translations. To explain the remaining peculiarities Vollmer brings forward a hypothesis. He is inclined to assume that the Apostle used Greek Scriptural anthologies in which separate passages were collocated, or freely combined with one another. In such collections—their existence is not demonstrable—various versions were, he thinks, used promiscuously. Perhaps the passage quoted as Scripture in I Corinthians ii. 9, which is not traceable in the Old Testament,—“As it is written, what eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, hath God prepared for them that love Him”—may be derived from an anthology of this kind.
It is in any case certain that the Apostle always makes use of Greek translations; and it is further certain that he argues from peculiarities in their wording which for one who knew Hebrew, as he also certainly did, must have been recognisable as mistranslations. He therefore goes so far as to ignore the original.
Nevertheless these facts do not warrant us in drawing conclusions of a too far-reaching character. If he wrote in Greek at all he could not do otherwise than use the Greek translations which were familiar to him, and in the synagogues of the Diaspora were regarded as “authentic,” as the Vulgate is for the Latin Church according to the decrees of the Council of Trent. That being so, it was out of the question for him, in making quotations, to introduce renderings of his own from the original.
In all historical cases of theological bilingualism the same fact is to be observed. Scripture is never “personally” translated, but always cited in accordance with a recognised version.75
That Paul should turn to account the mistakes of the version need not, in view of his exegetical principles, cause us any surprise. Whether he forces his thought directly upon the original, or gets it expressed by the Greek version, comes to much the same thing. The fact that he adopts the errors of the LXX and finds his account in them does not make him a Greek. It only shows that he belongs to the Jewish Diaspora. But does this imply that he has his place in the Jewish-Hellenistic movement?
This assumption is often taken as so self-evident that any examination of it appears superfluous. The defenders of the theory of Greek influence in Paul, therefore, feel themselves dispensed from this duty and act accordingly.
Even those who, like Harnack, do not admit a more far-reaching direct influence of Greek ideas upon the Apostle, do not feel any doubt about his relations with Jewish Hellenism.
But the sceptics of the self-evident, with whom science can never dispense, must dare to be tactless enough to put the question here also, “What is really proved?” As we have to do with a characteristic literature which lies before us with some measure of completeness, the verdict cannot be difficult to arrive at.
Pfleiderer and his followers had all along asserted that Paul in his eschatology and anthropology showed dependence on the Wisdom of Solomon, which doubtless dates from the first century before Christ. Others denied this. In an essay which appeared in 1892, Grafe sought to sift the material and decide the question.76
As “crucial” instances for the relationship he thinks the following may safely be taken: Romans ix. shows affinity with Wisdom xii. and xv. in regard to what is said of the Divine omnipotence and mercy; in their references to heathen idolatry the two authors coincide in a remarkable way; the views regarding the relationship of body and soul which are implied in 2 Cor. v. I ff. find a parallel in Wisd. ix. 15, where there is a reference to the earthly tabernacle which weighs down the thinking soul. The facts do not, according to Grafe, justify the conclusion that Paul is dependent on the pseudo-Salamonian Book of Wisdom, but he does regard it as having been made highly probable that the Apostle knew and had read the book.
It is not a clear “yes” that one hears in Grafe’s essay. When it is quoted, however, by writers on Paulinism it gets a push towards the positive side which makes it say exactly what Grafe did not venture to assert.
Scarcely more productive is Vollmer’s cast of his net into the works of Philo.77 He thinks that, in view of the affinities pointed out by him, “the acquaintance of the Apostle with the works of the Alexandrian writer will have become less improbable to others besides himself.”
But that is not the point at all. That Paul, a scholar of the Diaspora, would have been aware of the existence of so important a work as the Wisdom of Solomon, and would not have been wholly ignorant of its contents, is really self-evident. And is it likely that none of the writings of his older Alexandrian contemporary—Philo died probably about the beginning of the forties—would have come to his knowledge? On the contrary, the most probable assumption is that he was acquainted with the whole of the earlier and later Hellenistic literature. Whether this can be more or less clearly proved by certain real or supposed parallels does not really matter.
The important point is that he does not use the ideas which are here offered to him. Jewish-Hellenistic theology is so characteristic a product that it can never be overlooked even where it is only a subsidiary element. But in Paul no trace of it can be shown. Its problems, its speculations regarding the Logos, Spirit, and Wisdom, its ethics, do not interest him; he makes no use of its theories. On the other hand he is concerned with eschatology and with the person of the Messiah, which for it seem to have no existence.
The characteristic mark of Jewish Hellenism is that it brings the different ideas into an external juxtaposition without effecting their interpenetration. Whether it is a question of philosophical or other writings, of problems of ethics, or of the doctrine of God and the Divine administration of the world, the Greek element always shows up plainly in contrast with the Jewish, and can be clearly recognised as Platonic or Stoic. It is a case of mosaic work, better or worse executed as the case may be.
Any one who proposes to show that Paul was influenced by Jewish Hellenism ought, therefore, to begin by recognising that the union of the two worlds of thought which is supposed to have taken place in him is of an entirely different order from that found in other cases, inasmuch as a real synthesis is effected, and the problems involved are such as do not elsewhere occupy Jewish Hellenism, while on the other hand those which interest it are here left out of account. How much is left then by way of a common element?
Paul’s attitude towards Jewish Hellenism is one of indifference. From his letters, written as they are in Greek, we should never learn that in his time there existed a literature in which the old Jewish theology, using the universal language of the period, entered into discussion with Greek philosophy and religious thought, and formed an external combination with them.
All the proofs which are offered of his acquaintance with this literature only serve to render more unintelligible the fact that he is not in the slightest degree influenced by it.
The phrase-making by which theologians of the post-Baur period disposed of Paul’s independence in regard to Jewish Hellenism—so far as they became aware of it—is quite inept. Heinrici, as we have seen, maintained that he had risen superior to Alexandrianism.
It is to be remarked that the theoretic question whether he was never influenced by this movement, or whether the influence only ceased when he became a Christian, must remain open. In the latter case he must have put off along with what was specifically Jewish also what was Jewish-Hellenistic. It would then belong to the things which, according to Philippians, were formerly gain to him, but which now he counted dross, and had cast aside in order to gain Christ.
This latter view is inherently possible if one is prepared to take literally what the Apostle says about that radical breach with the past to which we can apply no standard of measurement, and which we are unable to conceive. But the other alternative—that he had never been influenced by it—is the more probable.
Practically both come to much the same thing. We know only the Christian Paul, and we find it to be a fact that in his letters no specifically Jewish-Hellenistic conceptions are to be found.
The “self-evident” is therefore once more negated by the facts.
We may call attention to a curious parallel. A priori the assumption might appear justified that the Apostle of the Gentiles would have taken from Jewish Hellenism material wherewith to Hellenise Christianity. In reality he did not do so. A priori it was to be expected that the creators of Greek theology would have taken from Paulinism material for the construction of their doctrines. In reality they did not do so. The three points which it seemed would allow themselves to be joined to form a triangle, lie, in reality, in different planes, belong to different systems, and have no natural relation to one another.
If Paul stands solitary, without receiving or exercising influence, between these two factors in which Greek characteristics are manifest, it follows that he does not exhibit their common element. If he did not adopt Platonism and Stoicism in the convenient compound which Jewish Hellenism had mixed ready for him, it is antecedently little probable that he made use of the uncompounded substances in the form in which they are to be met with in Greek life and literature.
What are the possibilities of direct influences which have to be taken into account?
It is to be remarked that Paul never gives the slightest hint that he is making use of something which is familiar to and valued by the Greeks in his churches. The Acts of the Apostles indeed pictures him as a preacher who in the Areopagus at Athens takes as his starting-point an inscription upon an altar, and quotes from the Greek poet Aratus the pantheistic saying that men are of the Divine race (Acts xvii. 28). But for this Paul, the author of Acts, must take, all responsibility.78
The Apostle of the Gentiles who is made known to us by the Epistles wears a different aspect. In this sense he never became a Greek to the Greeks. We find in him no trace of any high estimation of heathenism and its thought. It is for him idolatry, nothing less nor more. His estimate is purely negative.
He can therefore hardly have intentionally taken over anything from Greek thought. It is possible, however, that he did so unconsciously.
The most obvious suggestion is to assume that this was the case in regard to ethics. What he says in Rom. ii. about conscience, which in the heathen takes the place of the law, might be based on ideas derived from Greek rationalism. But on close examination what we find here is not so much a positive valuation of natural ethical feeling, but rather the creation for dialectic purposes of something to serve as an analogue to the law. Paul’s purpose is to prove that Jew and Greek are alike delivered over to sin; consequently the position in the two cases, if an injustice on the part of God is not to be suggested, must be made as similar as possible.
The assumption of Greek ideas here is rendered improbable by the fact that Paul’s ethic as a whole is not to be explained as Hellenic. Neither Gass nor Ziegler in their works on the history of Christian ethics have ventured any attempt in this direction.79 In general the Pauline ethic has been little treated by the students of Paulinism of the post-Baur period. The only monograph dedicated to the subject took a form that was purely biblico-theological and without interest.80 It is interesting to note that Kabisch, when he planned to work up the ethical material, found it necessary first to deal with the eschatology. That does not suggest the presence of Hellenic influences.
It has also been maintained with a certain confidence that the pessimism of the Apostle is Greek, because it recalls the view of the world which we find in the writings of Seneca and Epictetus.
Seneca was his contemporary. That the Apostle knew the works of this writer is not held by any one to be proved.81 Epictetus worked at the end of the first century, was himself acquainted with Christianity, and was doubtless influenced by it, even if unconsciously.82
All that could come into question, even as a possibility, is that the Apostle might have adopted the same generally current ideas of his period which are expressed by these two writers.
The expressions which are quoted as parallel have only an external resemblance. They are not really analogous. The roots from which the pessimism springs are entirely different in the two cases.
In the philosophers it is purely a result of reflection on the conditions of the present life. Existence appears to Seneca a burden which one may at any time cast off—by suicide. For Paul the present world is evil because it is sinful, lies under the dominion of the angel powers, and is subject to corruption. He judges it, not in itself, but with reference to a new and perfect world which is soon to appear. The idea of suicide does not enter into his thoughts, indeed he dreads that he might be released from the present earthly existence before the parousia occurs.
Seneca’s religion is resignation, Paul’s is enthusiasm. The two may show verbal similarities, but no affinity of thought exists between them.
Further, the anthropology and psychology83 of the Apostle are claimed as Greek. Pfleiderer lays great stress upon this point. He does not, however, offer any proofs.
What Paul has to say about man rests in the first place on ordinary observation and is of a self-evident character. The special features of his view which go beyond this are to be explained from eschatology and not from Greek thought. Anthropology and psychology, in the development which he gives them, have reference not to the natural man but to the redeemed man, who is risen with Christ, endowed with the Spirit, and already living in a supernatural condition. His conception of the natural condition of man is determined by reference to its actual abolition, and therefore has quite a different orientation from that of the Greek thinkers.
How do matters stand in regard to the assertion that his system contains Platonic elements?
What comes into question is not Platonism proper, but the religious modification and popularisation of it which later on, in the third century, came to completion in Neo-Platonism. What this philosophy has in common with Paul is the general desire for deliverance from corporeity. When it is more closely considered, however, characteristic differences appear.
Platonism as a religion has to do with the deliverance of the soul from its imprisonment in the body, Paul looks for the deliverance of the whole human personality. In the one case the antithesis is between soul and body, in the other between the supernatural body and the corruptible flesh. Platonic religious feeling desires release from all corporeity, what Paul hopes for is a different kind of materiality. He believes in a resurrection, Platonism in mere immortality. For him the fate of the individual is so bound up with cosmical, eschatological events that the new state of existence can only result from a cosmical revolution. Platonism knows nothing of a temporally conditioned redemption of this kind, but represents it as coming to pass immediately after death.
The materialism which is implicate in eschatology thus opposes a barrier to the Platonising of Paul’s religious thought.
For his conception of spirit a parallel might be sought in Stoicism, which teaches that a spiritual substance proceeding from God permeates the universe, including corporeal organisms, and manifests itself in man as the rational soul. Common to this philosophy and to Paul is the material conception of spirit. But the differences which it exhibits are of such a kind that there can be no question of the Apostle’s dependence upon it. In the Stoic philosophy the spirit is identical with the rational soul; in Paul it is introduced as something new alongside of the latter, and ends by displacing it.
According to the philosophic conception it is active in the world from all eternity; according to the doctrine of the Apostle it first appears in the times of the End, and is only bestowed upon a limited section of mankind. The one view is a pantheistic monism, the other is a theistic dualism.
The Book of Wisdom and Philo are Stoic in their mode of thought, but Paul is not so.
It is inconceivable how the Stoic heimarmene can have been brought into connexion with the Pauline doctrine of predestination.
The philosophic conception of fate thinks of the world-process as an unbroken chain of cause and effect in which also the actions of living beings have their place. Pauline foreordination is a pure will-act of God, non-rational and non-moral, and has to do with the ultimate issues of existence, not with the vicissitudes of life. To see a connexion between the two doctrines of predestination is as unjustifiable as it would be to identify the cosmic conflagration of the Pauline eschatology with that of the Stoic theory.
Paulinism has, in general, a different spirit from that of the Stoa. Its author is moved by the fear of death and corruption and yearns for a new being. To the Stoic such ideas are, as “passion,” contemptible. He reckons—as you may read in Marcus Aurelius—with the present world as the only one there is, and with the present life as the only one which he has to live.
Whatever views and conceptions are brought up for comparison, the result is always the same—that Paulinism and Greek thought have nothing, absolutely nothing, in common. Their relation is not even one of indifference, they stand opposed to one another. Had the Apostle been influenced by Hellenism in any shape or form, he could never have conceived his system in the way he did.
Nevertheless it is possible to understand how theology came to class his doctrine as Greek. The mysticism which enters into it bears a certain analogy to that which springs from Greek religious thought and feeling. Since Judaism, itself guileless of any mysticism, produced nothing of the kind, could not create out of itself anything of the kind, the only possible alternative seemed to be to explain it as due to Greek influences, and to explain the essential character of Paulinism in accordance with this hypothesis.
But this road leads to an impasse. In this way it is possible only to misinterpret the mysticism of the Apostle, not to understand it. Critical theology is confronted with the at first apparently inexplicable fact that there has arisen on Jewish-Christian soil a system of thought which externally has all the air of being a twin formation to that of Greek religious mysticism, but inwardly has nothing whatever to do with it.
The actual result of the study of Paulinism in the post-Baur period is therefore wholly negative, and it must become evident that it is so the moment any one attempts to substitute references and proofs for mere assertions. This the scholars of that period avoided doing; they were prevented from making the attempt by the scientific instinct of self-preservation.