Chapter VIII: Summing-Up and Formulation of the Problem . . . 237 (4)

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 [pg 090] 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 [pg 091] 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 [pg 092] 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 [pg 093] 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 [pg 094] 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 [pg 095] 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, [pg 096] 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 psychology_(_83_)_ 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 [pg 097] 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 [pg 098] 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.

[pg 099]

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.

[pg 100]

IV

H. J. HOLTZMANN

_Heinrich Julius Holtzmann._ Lehrbuch der Neutestamentlichen Theologie. 1897. Vol. ii., 532 pp. On Paulinism, 1-225.

_William Wrede._ Über Aufgabe und Methode der sogenannten Neutestamentlichen Theologie. (1897.) (On the Task and the Method of the so-called New Testament Theology.)

HOLTZMANN’S “New Testament Theology” was eagerly awaited on all sides. It was hoped that it would bring about a clearing of ideas such as had been produced in regard to questions of criticism by his “Introduction.”

In the new work the author follows the method which seemed to him to have proved its usefulness in the former work. He lets every writer who has dealt with the subject have his say at the appropriate place, even though he runs the risk of not making his own opinion distinctly heard amid the strife of tongues._(_84_)_

While in the “Introduction” the advantages of the method predominate, in the “Theology” its disadvantages are conspicuous. The former work dealt with a series of questions which are already formulated and can be answered with a clear yes or no. There is therefore some sense in taking the suffrages of the writers, living and dead. It leads up to a verdict which in a certain sense [pg 101] may be given forth as the objective result of the period under survey.

But when it is a question of the content of thought in the New Testament writings, the questions are not so clearly formulated. The continual hearing of opinions has not the same usefulness. On the contrary, the account of the subject becomes thereby only the more complicated and confused.

Here the result of Holtzmann’s threading his own view through those of others is that neither the one nor the other stands out with any clearness. Undoubtedly, he knows the literature as no one else does, and has absorbed into his own mind and worked up all that it has to offer. But a clear view of the state of opinion is what he does not in the end succeed in conveying, since he intentionally omits to give a sketch and criticism of the works cited and contents himself with quoting passages from them.

This unfortunate atomistic method does not even allow the individual problems to appear as clearly as would be desirable. In the post-Baur study of Paulinism, various questions had come up one after another which, taken together, form its fundamental problem. The most natural procedure for one who intended to make critical use of the work already done would have been to sketch these in their full extent and then formulate them more exactly and exhibit their inner connexions.

But that is not the kind of treatment which Holtzmann aims at. He has the feeling that this is no longer necessary, and agrees with contemporary scholars in thinking that assured results have been attained in sufficient number to admit of a simple positive account of the system. In accordance with this view he feels it to be his duty to act as a critical camera, focussing the views on his lens and combining them into a picture.

One looks, therefore, in vain in his work for a fundamental statement and solution of the problems. They are mentioned where they happen to come up, and are [pg 102] there discussed in a fragmentary fashion. In addition to this the author’s peculiarly subtle and delicately shaded method of exposition has to be reckoned with. Any one who is not familiar with it runs the risk of passing too lightly over these passages and failing to appreciate the significance which Holtzmann himself attaches to his remarks. What he intends to give is a General-staff map of the results of investigation. The heights and hollows are not shown as such, but represented by curves which are only later to be carried out in relief.

Holtzmann does not stand above the post-Baur study of the subject, but within it.

That is immediately evident from the fact that, speaking generally, he takes as the plan of his exposition the scheme, partially “Reformation,” partially modern, which the head of the Tübingen school had used in his theology and left as a legacy to his successors. After dealing with the doctrine of man, law, sin, and corruption, he describes the “revolution” (conversion). Then follow Christology, the work of redemption, and the Divine righteousness. The close is formed by the chapters on the “ethical” material, the “mystical,” and “eschatology.”

The difficulties and errors which are involved in this division of the subject have not been escaped by Holtzmann any more than by others. At every step it is evident how unnatural is an arrangement of the material which leaves out of account the connexions inherent in the system. How much art is expended on breaking off the thread at a given moment, in order to take it up again in a later chapter! How many unnecessarily fragmentary representations! How many annoying repetitions! How many references forward and backward! Thus, for example, what Paul has to say of redemption is not developed connectedly but split up among a number of chapters. And the same thing happens with regard to the doctrine of the death and resurrection of Christ.

The division which he has taken over leads Holtzmann [pg 103] to regard the Pauline teaching on redemption from the stand-point of the Reformation doctrine. Involuntarily he always thinks either of the individual man, or humanity, instead of the entity always present to the mind of the Apostle, the group of the elect of the last generation, who have been subjected to the influence of the death and resurrection of Christ. He quotes the acute remark of Schmiedel_(_85_)_ that “the men who had sought (and found) in Jesus before His death forgiveness and peace of soul” are left out of account by the Apostle, but he does not go further into the problem which this suggests. The temporally conditioned character and the general point of view of the Pauline doctrine of redemption is, owing to the faulty division, practically overlooked.

Not less unfortunate is the plan on which the significance of the death and resurrection of Christ is dealt with. Having begun with the psychology of the natural man, and the man in process of conversion, Holtzmann endeavours to explain the facts by which redemption is conditioned from this starting-point. He asks what these two events, the death and resurrection, signified for Jesus and what they signified for the believers. Jesus is thereby proved to be the Messiah; the influence upon believers is described on the basis of the classical passages in the Epistles. But the inner connexion of the two effects is not clear, and it is equally unintelligible wherein the saving significance of the death and resurrection consists.

Holtzmann is, in fact, still straitly confined to the Reformation and modern point of view, from which the twofold event of the death and resurrection of Christ is considered by itself, in isolation, and an attempt is made to get behind it by psychologising, and thus to discover how, according to the statements of Paul, it produced a complete change in God and man, and effected justification and reconciliation. This attempt overlooks the fact that on the Apostle’s view it is primarily a cosmic [pg 104] event which alters the condition of the whole creation and introduces a new Age, and that everything else is only a consequence of this fundamental effect.

As Holtzmann, like his predecessors, has thus omitted to consider the most fundamental aspect of redemption as conceived by Paul, he is not concerned to trace out the most general conception of the effect of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is as much as to say that he, like the rest, is condemned to a mere descriptive treatment, using Pauline phraseology, and is practically unable to give any explanation.

This unfortunate result becomes apparent in regard to the question of the Law. He is unable to make it in any way intelligible how Paul was necessarily led, as a matter of reasoning, to the conviction that it was no longer valid. In the last resort he can only appeal to the unique character of the vision on the Damascus road. He assumes that this “brought to an issue in the zealous Pharisee not only a theoretic, but also an ethical crisis, terminating that painful condition of inner division which Paul pictures out of his own inmost consciousness when he speaks of the experiences which are associated with subjection to the law.” “Previously,” he continues, “the Pharisee had anxiously sought to conceal from himself, or to argue away, the fact that the law was impossible of fulfilment, and was therefore no way of salvation, but rather the contrary. There now rose upon this melancholy scene, strewn with the shattered fragments of attempts to gain righteousness, a new light streaming from the Christ, whom the legalists had delivered to death, whereas His being raised again by God guaranteed the actual presence of another way of salvation. Not only did his former legal service appear to him a life of sin, his Pharisaic rabbinism as foolishness, his attack upon the Messianic community as enmity to God, but even in his inmost being a crisis had taken place in consequence of which a tension, under which he had hitherto groaned, had suddenly been relaxed.”

[pg 105]

How do we know that Paul when he was still a persecutor of the Christians was suffering inward distress from his experiences of the powerlessness of the law? How did the vision of Christ bring about the resolution of this tension? How, exactly, did it reveal a way of salvation by which the abolition of the law was implied?

In themselves the vision of Christ, and the law, have nothing to do with one another. What Paul received in that moment was the conviction of the Messiahship of Jesus. While other believers were content simply to adopt this conviction, he proceeds to draw from it in some way or other the conclusion that the law was henceforth invalidated. Whether he did that at the moment or only later, we do not know. What is certain is only that he does draw this conclusion, though it is not contemplated either in the thoughts of Jesus or in those of the primitive community.

How he came to draw it is not explained by Holtzmann, any more than by the scholars of the post-Baur period generally. The assumption that the Apostle experienced along with the vision an ethical crisis which set him free from the law, is a psychological hypothesis about which the letters have nothing whatever to say. It does not even prove what it professes to prove. Exactly how the abrogation of the law is supposed to be effected by the death and resurrection of Christ is not obvious. It is to be remarked, too, that Paul always treats the abolition of the law as a logical conclusion, not as a psychological experience.

In other connexions, too, Holtzmann often has recourse to Holsten’s expedient of taking what is unintelligible in the Apostle’s statements as accounted for by the Damascus vision.

In this way the doctrine of the “new creature” is made to go back to a “personal experience,” and “a perception so keen as to be apprehended by the senses, of the destruction of the law of sin in the members.”

“The complex of new ethical powers, motives, duties, [pg 106] and aims . . . which formed itself in him has as its centre the risen Christ who had appeared to him in that moment as light, to be henceforth the vital centre and the guiding star of his individual life. . . . Hence the ‘new creation.’ It is a simple generalisation and application of this personal experience to cover all analogous cases, since now all baptized persons appear as, on the negative side, dead to sin, on the positive side as walking in a ‘newness of life’ corresponding to the resurrection.”

So Holtzmann. Paul, however, never speaks of his theory of the new creature as if he were expressing by it the generalisation and objectivation of an inner experience, but represents it as being logically and actually involved in the death and resurrection of the Lord for those who believe in him, and regards his own renewal as only a special case of the general law which operates in all the believing elect.

That is just the characteristic and unintelligible thing about Paulinism, that its creator does not seem to have the faintest consciousness of holding up his personal experiences as something to be imitated, but presents his whole system as something that immediately and objectively grows out of the facts, something which can be examined by the higher, but in its own way logical understanding from which “gnosis” is derived.

To treat his Damascus “experience” as a source of theoretic knowledge, as is done by modern theology, in order to be dispensed from rendering any account to ordinary or philosophic thought, would have been out of the question for an unsophisticated mind such as his, and indeed for the mental attitude of antiquity in general.

Of Paul’s objective statements Holtzmann always, in order to be able to interpret them, makes something subjective.

This error in method—which he shares with scholars of the post-Baur period generally—runs through the whole of his undertaking.

He frequently takes occasion to point to the element of [pg 107] “gnosis” in the Apostle’s doctrine. At bottom, however, he is afraid that his doctrine may be too much considered as an intellectual construction. For that reason he provides a special section on “the religious character of the doctrine.” “Paul’s world of thought,” he there tells us, “is, to put it in a word, not merely a product of intellection, it is antecedently to that a product of experience also; in this it differs fundamentally from any of the artificially excogitated gospels of Gnosticism proper. . . . The first condition for any understanding of Paulinism is that we should not obscure the volcanic character of its origin by any method which implies the gradual addition of one grain of sand to another. The whole system of doctrine means nothing more nor less than the way in which the Apostle objectified to himself the fundamental decisive experience of his life and theoretically explained its presuppositions and consequences. The doctrine fits the experience with a theory.”

How, then, does Holtzmann know that Paul is not after all a Gnostic pure and simple? The whole character of his system makes him appear so. He himself claims to be one,_(_86_)_ and is quite unaware that his doctrine is nothing more than the form given by the constructive imagination to a personal experience.

He knows no distinction between “gnostic” and “religious.” What is religious is for him gnostic, and what is gnostic, religious. Any one who strictly distinguishes the two in him is modernising.

His mission to the Gentiles and his universalism are also, according to Holtzmann, to be explained directly from the vision at his conversion. The Christ who has won through to triumph by way of death, so Holtzmann explains, implies for the Apostle the purification of the Messianic idea from all the carnal elements which in Judaism still cling to it. In the exalted Christ he sees [pg 108] also the head of the Church gathered out from both Jews and Gentiles.

How, exactly, does the vision at the conversion carry with it the elimination of the carnal elements which in Judaism cleave to the Messianic idea? Paul, it is true, sees a glorified Person; but the Jewish Son-of-Man Messiah also belongs to the supernatural world. Further, universalism is provided for in the eschatology of Late Judaism, and in that preached by Jesus, since it is assumed that among those elected to the Kingdom of God others will be revealed who do not belong to the people of Israel. Universalism is therefore involved in the Jewish conception of the Messiah. Whereas, however, Late Judaism and Jesus only represent it as realised in the coming supernatural Age, Paul antedates it and affirms that distinctions are already abolished in consequence of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and infers from this the justification and the duty of preaching to the heathen. The problem has therefore nothing to do with the “purification of the Messianic idea,” and consists simply in the fact that the Apostle assumes this universalism to be already applicable to the present natural era, just as he also asserts that believers are already in a condition of resurrection life.

Holtzmann is not much concerned to show the connexion of the Pauline statements with Jewish theology and eschatology in order to arrive in this way at a new formulation of the problems. In fact he clearly betrays the tendency to make as little use as possible of eschatology in explaining the Pauline system of doctrine.

Kabisch’s work is in the highest degree distasteful to him. He refers to it only occasionally, and with reserve. It is true he cannot avoid acknowledging that, “with all the exaggerations, monstrosities, and inconsistencies which may be pointed out” in its emphasising of the physical character of the conceptions and ideas associated with the dualism of flesh and spirit, the work embodies a sound idea. But he never so much as mentions that this [pg 109] insistance on the “physical” is ultimately due to the fact that all the conceptions and ideas are traced back to eschatology. Any one who is not already acquainted with Kabisch’s fundamental idea will not learn it from Holtzmann.

True to the Baur and post-Baur tradition, Holtzmann postpones the chapter on eschatology to the end. That this arrangement does not contribute to a satisfactory treatment of the ethics is not surprising. The eschatological roots of the conception of predestination discussed in this chapter, or of the designation of believers as “saints” are hardly visible. That the most general ethical maxims of the Apostle are conditioned by the expectation of the nearness of the parousia, and that the ethical implications of the mystical dying and rising again with Christ have also in the last resort an eschatological orientation, is never fairly recognised. Holtzmann finds himself, therefore, rather helpless when he has to deal with points in which the eschatological character of Paul’s ethic comes most clearly to light. In the directions given in I Corinthians vii. about married and unmarried persons, about marrying or remaining single, he finds a certain “hesitation.” In a quite general way, he is willing to assume that “the so closely bounded view of the future explains why in this and other departments there was no complete development of the ethics.”

This halting estimate of the ethical significance of eschatology shows that Holtzmann regards the Pauline ethical teaching from the modern point of view.

He is bound to take this course with regard to eschatology because he agrees with Pfleiderer and the rest in admitting a comprehensive influence of Greek ideas upon Paul, and is well aware that a man cannot serve two masters.

Even in the Apostle’s doctrine of man he finds a Hellenistic factor alongside of the Jewish, and asserts that the “emphasis rests on the former.” Wherever reference is made to the antithesis of flesh and spirit [pg 110] he thinks that the influence of the Greek element is manifest. By regarding sin as implicate in the empirical nature of man “Paul abandons in principle the ultimate basis of the Jewish philosophy and ethic.”

Greek, or to speak more precisely, Alexandrian, is the metaphysical background of his conception of Christ. According to Holtzmann, Paul never really goes back expressly to Daniel or the Apocalyptic Messiah. His own special view grew up, Holtzmann thinks, out of speculations allied to those of Philo about the two accounts of the creation and the heavenly and earthly Adam. The primary point for him is “the metaphysical hypothesis of the two classes of mankind” which stand opposed to each other as the “psychic” and the “pneumatic” creation.

That the “subjective,” ethical interpretation of the work of redemption is based on Hellenistic ideas is for Holtzmann self-evident. It is not less certain for him that the idea of predestination is “borrowed” from the Book of Wisdom, and consequently “in one of the most conspicuous points of the Pauline world of thought its Hellenistic origin” must be regarded as proved. That the idea of predestination is inherent in eschatology, and that Jesus Himself makes use of it, is not taken into account.

The doctrine of baptism “comes to base itself entirely on the Hellenistic side of Paul’s theology.” In general, he transformed the two sacred ceremonies of primitive Christianity after the analogy of the Greek mystery-cults, and thus “opened up for the early Catholic Church a way” into which it was forced by the natural progress of events.

Holtzmann sees in Paul’s system of thought the first, but at the same time a far-reaching Hellenisation of Christianity. The Apostle, so runs his verdict, “by bringing Hellenistic forms of thought to bear for the first time upon Christian conceptions, prepared the way for the passing over of the latter from the Semitic to the Hellenic world, and beyond this again to the modern world.”

[pg 111]

The influx of Greek ideas is thought of, as by Pfleiderer, as coming through the intermediary channel of Jewish Hellenism. The question whether any literary relationship to the latter can be detected in Paul is dismissed in a few lines. Holtzmann admits that “no tangible influence” of Philo’s writings is to be recognised. He is, however, of opinion that Grafe has proved “with all the greater certainty” the Apostle’s dependence on the Alexandrian Book of Wisdom.

Instead of giving a regular proof he confines himself, as his predecessors had done, entirely to general considerations, which he sums up in the following sentences “In any case Paul was by birth and parentage a son of the Diaspora, and from his youth up breathed at any rate at times a Greek atmosphere. His letters show, in regard to vocabulary and rhetoric, sometimes even as regards tone of feeling and mental attitude, not a few surprising affinities with Greek thought. Some kind of communication from this side, and that not merely occasional or accidental, one must certainly assume. The only question which remains is in regard to the extent and intensity of this Hellenistic, or even it may be Hellenic, admixture, which became amalgamated with his Jewish scholasticism. This is certainly the point on which depend all the problems which Pauline study is called on at the present day to face. . . .”

With this the matter is disposed of—on the third page of the work! Gunkel’s and Kabisch’s arguments to show that the doctrine of the Spirit is intelligible apart from Greek influences, are left out of account; that Hatch in his “Influence of Greek Ideas” had nothing to say about any Hellenisation of the Gospel on the part of Paul is not mentioned. On the contrary there follows a profession of faith in Pfleiderer’s doctrine that Paul in the course of his career even advanced to the Hellenisation of his eschatology. Holtzmann cheerfully and courageously defends this theory to its ultimate consequences, and holds that in Paul’s dread of being found unclothed [pg 112] (2 Cor. v. 3) his national mode of feeling and a Greek mode of thought “are combined in a fashion which no one would have dreamed of inventing.”

The usually so cautious scholar goes in this case unhesitatingly forward. The difficulties which arise out of the assumed collocation and opposition of Jewish and Greek ideas fascinate instead of alarming him.

Here, as in some other points, Holtzmann betrays Kantian tendencies and instincts, and is inclined to exhibit the problems as antinomies. Paul’s system of teaching, as it had shaped itself in the course of the study of the subject since Baur, appears to him a unique formation, since in it are combined two worlds of thought and two different sets of religious ideas which are supposed to hold each other in equipoise and mutually interpenetrate one another. He takes it to be his task to lay bare this remarkable construction in its minutest details, and to show how the most diverse thoughts sometimes conflict, sometimes stand in a state of tension, sometimes mutually limit, and sometimes supplement each other. If he succeeds in making clear the position and relation of the various strata of thought, the system, he believes, will become intelligible.

This idea runs through his whole treatment of the subject, and gives him courage to take over all the contradictions and compromises which scholars from Baur onwards have discovered, and even to add new ones in addition. He is especially interested in the questions regarding the juridical and ethical sets of ideas, the relation of the “popular” missionary preaching to the “system of doctrine,” the antithesis between “theory” and “practice” in the ethics, and the inconsistencies of the eschatology.

In these discussions there is much penetrating observation. The picture, however, does not become clearer, but rather more confused.

His predecessors had done their best in their treatment of the subject to conceal its fragmentary character, and [pg 113] when all was said and done had been content to put in the foreground only a few leading ideas, which could be brought under a single point of view. They worked with perspective, light and shade. Holtzmann brings all the detail into one line and places it under the same illumination. The fact that the system becomes in this way much more complicated than it had already been made by the scholarship of the period awakes in him no misgivings, but increases his confidence, since he sees in it one of those offences which needs must come.

Even the objection that so complicated a system of doctrine could not have been understood in primitive Christian times does not alarm him. He anticipates it by declaring that the actual contemporaries and adherents of the Apostle could neither understand nor imitate him, even if they had wished to do so. How, indeed, could they possibly have done so! The whole of Paulinism is a “systematisation of the Christ-vision” and a “generalisation” of that which the Apostle had experienced in his own soul, and consequently ascribed to all who walk in the same way as an experience which they must necessarily undergo. “What this man with his unique spiritual endowment had experienced, felt, and thought amid influences and surroundings which could only once have arisen, could never be exactly in the same way experienced, felt, and thought by any other man.”

Holtzmann, therefore, like Harnack, accepts the saying that no one ever understood Paul, with the sole exception of Marcion . . . who misunderstood him! It is not enough for him to regard the system, as had been usual among scholars since Baur, as a personal creation of the Apostle; he goes the whole way with Holsten in maintaining that the personal creation was nothing else than the interpretation of a unique personal experience.

But that is to admit that no connecting links between Paulinism and primitive Christianity can be discovered; and does not that really imply an abandonment of all attempt to explain the Apostle’s doctrine? Is it [pg 114] understood at all if it is not understood in relation to primitive Christianity?

What right has any one to assert that it was unintelligible to his contemporaries? Paul confidently ascribes to them an understanding of it. And how are we to explain the success which is evidenced by the establishment of the Pauline churches and the victorious struggle for freedom from the law? Can the least understood of all early Christians have exercised the greatest influence? These fundamental questions are not asked by Holtzmann. His confidence in the results already attained left no room for them.

What he aimed at he has successfully accomplished. He has worked up into one great symphony the themes and motifs of the Pauline scholarship of the post-Baur period, a symphony such as he alone, at once critic and artist, could have written. Even one who does not allow himself to be carried away by it will again and again take up the score with its subtle counterpoint and skilful instrumentation, and always find in it new beauties.

Never was Holtzmann so impressive—this was to be observed even in his lectures—as in his treatment of Paulinism. Here he could grip his hearers, because he wished to do so—he who usually showed a certain dread of allowing the feeling, the enthusiasm, which glowed in him, to become perceptible when he was dealing with matters of scholarship. The system as modelled by him lives because he has breathed his own life into it. But it is not historic.

He thinks to sift out and preserve what is of permanent value in the heritage left by Baur and his pupils, of whom he was proud to count himself spiritually one. In reality he leads up to a declaration of bankruptcy, and that especially in the powerful closing chapter entitled “Retrospect and Prospect.”

Here he endeavours forcibly to combine into one whole the results of Pfleiderer, Holsten, and Harnack.

From Pfleiderer he takes over the view of the [pg 115] wide-reaching Greek influence in Paulinism, and from Holsten he takes the theory that the system had its birth in the unique experience of the vision of Christ on the way to Damascus.

Now these two views might at need be combined, though it is not quite easy to show—and this difficulty is constantly coming to light in Holtzmann—how what is in one aspect a purely subjective experience, never exactly to be repeated by any other, appears in another aspect, by a kind of miracle, as Greek religious thought, and thus becomes universally intelligible.

But into this synthesis Holtzmann tries to introduce in addition Harnack’s recognition that Paulinism had no part in the formation of early Greek theology.

Now Holsten and Harnack again, on their part, might be combined. The Pauline teaching, if it is referred to a unique personal experience, might well remain for the Apostle’s contemporaries and successors a book with seven seals.

But Pfleiderer and Holsten and Harnack cannot all be brought together. If Paulinism was largely Greek, it must have had some influence. How is it conceivable that Greeks should not have recognised and understood the Greek spirit? The triumvirate planned by Holtzmann cannot, therefore, be brought to pass, even if Holtzmann is regarded as the connecting-link between Harnack and Pfleiderer. In defiance of all the facts of the history of dogma the last-named must assert an influence of the Pauline system upon the growth of Greek dogma, since he sees in Paul the first step in the Hellenisation of Christianity.

Any one who shares his premisses must also draw his conclusions, and Holtzmann is not bold enough to do that. He agrees with him in asserting the Hellenic character of Pauline doctrine, in other respects he bows to the facts of the history of dogma. But this means that, however he may wrap it up in qualifying clauses, he is asserting the impossible, namely, that Christianity [pg 116] as Hellenised by Paul remained uninteresting and unintelligible to the Greeks.

The edifice which he constructs, therefore, breaks down from within, even though he may be able for a time to maintain it in outward appearance intact.

Thus there met in this universal critical spirit, which examined all things and desired to do justice to all, Baur and the history of dogma which took its rise from Ritschl and was opposed to Baur, and held a new settlement of accounts. Once more it was made manifest that the question of Paul’s relation to primitive Christianity on the one hand, to early Greek dogma on the other, had not been solved, and that his teaching therefore had not been understood.

[pg 117]

V

CRITICAL QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES

_Edward Evanson._ The Dissonance of the four generally received Evangelists. (1792.)

_Bruno Bauer._ Kritik der Apostelgeschichte (1850). Kritik der paulinischen Briefe (Galatians, 1850; I Corinthians, 1851; remaining Epistles, 1852). Christus und die Cäsaren. Der Ursprung des Christentums aus dem römischen Griechentum (1877). (Christ and the Caesars. How Christianity arose out of the Graeco-Roman Civilisation.)

_Albert Kalthoff._ Die Entstehung des Christentums. 1904. (E.T. by J. McCabe, The Rise of Christianity, 1907.)

__Allard Pierson.__ De Bergrede en andere synoptische Fragmenten. (The Sermon on the Mount and other Synoptic Fragments.) 1878.

_A. Pierson and S. A. Naber._ Verisimilia. 1886.

_A. D. Loman._ Quaestiones Paulinae. (Theol. Tijdschrift, 1882; 1883; 1886—written in Dutch.)

_Rudolf Steck._ Der Galaterbrief. 1888.

_W. C. van Manen._ Paulus, 3 vols. Vol. i. deals with the Acts of the Apostles (1890); vol. ii. with the Epistle to the Romans (1891); vol. iii. with the Epistles to the Corinthians (1896). The criticism of the Epistle to the Romans has been translated into German under the title “Die Unechtheit des Römerbriefs,” by G. Schläger. 1906.

_M. Friedländer._ Das Judentum in der vorchristlichen griechischen Welt. (Judaism in the pre-Christian Greek World.) 1897.

_J. Friedrich (Maehliss)._ Die Unechtheit des Galaterbriefs. (The Spuriousness of the Epistle to the Galatians.) 1891.

_J. H. Scholten._ Historisch-kritische Bijdragen. (Contributions to Historical Criticism.) 1882.

_G. Heinrici._ Die Forschungen über die paulinischen Briefe; ihr gegenwärtiger Stand und ihre Aufgaben. (The Critical Study of the Pauline Letters; its Present Position, and the Tasks which await it.) 1886.

_J. M. S. Baljon._ Exegetisch-kritische Verhandeling over den Brief van Paulus aan de Galatiërs. (Exegetic and Critical Essay on the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians.) 1889.

[pg 118]

_Wilhelm Brückner._ Die chronologische Reihenfolge, in welcher die Briefe des Neuen Testaments verfasst sind. (The Chronological Order in which the Epistles of the New Testament were written.) 1890.

_Carl Clemen._ Die Chronologie der paulinischen Briefe. 1893. Die Einheitlichkeit der paulinischen Briefe. (The Integrity of the Pauline Epistles.) 1894. Paulus, 2 vols., 1904.

_Christian Hermann Weisse._ Philosophische Dogmatik (3 vols., 1855; 1860; 1862). Beiträge zur Kritik der paulinischen Briefe. (Contributions to the Criticism of the Pauline Epistles.) Brought out by Sulze in 1867.

_J. M. S. Baljon._ De Text der Breven van Paulus. 1884.

_Daniel Völter._ Die Composition der paulinischen Hauptbriefe. (The Composition of the chief Pauline Epistles.) 1890. Paulus und seine Briefe. 1905.

_Friedrich Spitta._ Untersuchung über den Brief des Paulus an die Römer. (Examination of the Epistle of Paul to the Romans—in his work, Zur Geschichte und Literatur des Urchristentums, vol. iii., 1st half, 1901.)

THOSE critics who reject the Pauline letters as a whole profess to have derived the impulse thereto from Ferdinand Christian Baur, to be his true because logically consistent disciples, and to bear the same relation to him as Schopenhauer did to Kant. This profession, which has always filled the “legitimate” Tübingen school with indignation, is in many points well founded.