Bousset. Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judenthum, 1892.

C. Holtzman. Die Offenbarung durch Christus und das Neue Testament (Zeitschr. f. Theol. und Kirche I. p. 367 ff.) The special literature in the above work of Weiss, and in the recent works on the life of Jesus, and the Biblical Theology of the New Testament by Beyschlag. (T.T. Clark)

§ 3. The Common Preaching concerning Jesus Christ in the First Generation of Believers.

Men had met with Jesus Christ and in him had found the Messiah. They were convinced that God had made him to be wisdom and righteousness, sanctification and redemption. There was no hope that did not seem to be certified in him, no lofty idea which had not become in him a living reality. Everything that one possessed was offered to him. He was everything lofty that could be imagined. Everything that can be said of him was already said in the first two generations after his appearance. Nay, more: he was felt and known to be the ever living one, Lord of the world and operative principle of one's own life. "To me to live is Christ and to die is gain;" "He is the way, the truth and the life." One could now for the first time be certain of the resurrection and eternal life, and with that certainty the sorrows of the world melted away like mist before the sun, and the residue of this present time became as a day. This group of facts which the history of the Gospel discloses in the world, is at the same time the highest and most unique of all that we meet in that history; it is its seal and distinguishes it from all other universal religions. Where in the history of mankind can we find anything resembling this, that men who had eaten and drunk with their Master should glorify him, not only as the revealer of God, but as the Prince of life, as the Redeemer and Judge of the world, as the living power of its existence, and that a choir of Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and Barbarians, wise and foolish, should along with them immediately confess that out of the fulness of this one man they have received grace for grace? It has been said that Islam furnishes the unique example of a religion born in broad daylight, but the community of Jesus was also born in the clear light of day. The darkness connected with its birth is occasioned not only by the imperfection of the records, but by the uniqueness of the fact, which refers us back to the uniqueness of the Person of Jesus.

But though it certainly is the first duty of the historian to signalise the overpowering impression made by the Person of Jesus on the disciples, which is the basis of all further developments, it would little become him to renounce the critical examination of all the utterances which have been connected with that Person with the view of elucidating and glorifying it; unless he were with Origen to conclude that Jesus was to each and all whatever they fancied him to be for their edification. But this would destroy the personality. Others are of opinion that we should conceive him, in the sense of the early communities, as the second God who is one in essence with the Father, in order to understand from this point of view all the declarations and judgments of these communities. But this hypothesis leads to the most violent distortion of the original declarations, and the suppression or concealment of their most obvious features. The duty of the historian rather consists in fixing the common features of the faith of the first two generations, in explaining them as far as possible from the belief that Jesus is Messiah, and in seeking analogies for the several assertions. Only a very meagre sketch can be given in what follows. The presentation of the matter in the frame-work of the history of dogma does not permit of more, because as noted above, § 1, the presupposition of dogma forming itself in the Gentile Church is not the whole infinitely rich abundance of early Christian views and perceptions. That presupposition is simply a proclamation of the one God and of Christ transferred to Greek soil, fixed merely in its leading features and otherwise very plastic, accompanied by a message regarding the future, and demands for a holy life. At the same time the Old Testament and the early Christian Palestinian writings with the rich abundance of their contents, did certainly exercise a silent mission in the earliest communities, till by the creation of the canon they became a power in the Church.

I. The contents of the faith of the disciples,⁷² and the common proclamation which united them, may be comprised in the following propositions. Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah promised by the prophets. Jesus after his death is by the Divine awakening raised to the right hand of God, and will soon return to set up his kingdom visibly upon the earth. He who believes in Jesus, and has been received into the community of the disciples of Jesus, who, in virtue of a sincere change of mind, calls on God as Father, and lives according to the commandments of Jesus, is a saint of God, and as such can be certain of the sin-forgiving grace of God, and of a share in the future glory, that is, of redemption.⁷³

A community of Christian believers was formed within the Jewish national community. By its organisation, the close brotherly union of its members, it bore witness to the impression which the Person of Jesus had made on it, and drew from faith in Jesus and hope of his return, the assurance of eternal life, the power of believing in God the Father and of fulfilling the lofty moral and social commands which Jesus had set forth. They knew themselves to be the true Israel of the Messianic time (see § 1), and for that very reason lived with all their thoughts and feelings in the future. Hence the Apocalyptic hopes which in manifold types were current in the Judaism of the time, and which Jesus had not demolished, continued to a great extent in force (see § 4). One guarantee for their fulfilment was supposed to be possessed in the various manifestations of the Spirit,⁷⁴ which were displayed in the members of the new communities at their entrance, with which an act of baptism seems to have been united from the very first⁷⁵, and in their gatherings. They were a guarantee that believers really were the εκκλησια του θεου, those called to be saints, and, as such, kings and priests unto God⁷⁶ for whom the world, death and devil are overcome, although they still rule the course of the world. The confession of the God of Israel as the Father of Jesus, and of Jesus as Christ and Lord⁷⁷ was sealed by the testimony of the possession of the Spirit, which as Spirit of God assured every individual of his call to the kingdom, united him personally with God himself and became to him the pledge of future glory⁷⁸.

2. As the Kingdom of God which was announced had not yet visibly appeared, as the appeal to the Spirit could not be separated from the appeal to Jesus as Messiah, and as there was actually nothing possessed but the reality of the Person of Jesus, so in preaching all stress must necessarily fall on this Person. To believe in him was the decisive fundamental requirement, and, at first, under the presupposition of the religion of Abraham and the Prophets, the sure guarantee of salvation. It is not surprising then to find that in the earliest Christian preaching Jesus Christ comes before us as frequently as the Kingdom of God in the preaching of Jesus himself. The image of Jesus, and the power which proceeded from it, were the things which were really possessed. Whatever was expected was expected only from Jesus the exalted and returning one. The proclamation that the Kingdom of heaven is at hand must therefore become the proclamation that Jesus is the Christ, and that in him the revelation of God is complete. He who lays hold of Jesus lays hold in him of the grace of God, and of a full salvation. We cannot, however, call this in itself a displacement: but as soon as the proclamation that Jesus is the Christ ceased to be made with the same emphasis and the same meaning that it had in his own preaching, and what sort of blessings they were which he brought, not only was a displacement inevitable, but even a dispossession. But every dispossession requires the given forms to be filled with new contents. Simple as was the pure tradition of the confession: "Jesus is the Christ," the task of rightly appropriating and handing down entire the peculiar contents which Jesus had given to his self-witnessing and preaching was nevertheless great, and in its limit uncertain. Even the Jewish Christian could perform this task only according to the measure of his spiritual understanding and the strength of his religious life. Moreover, the external position of the first communities in the midst of contemporaries who had crucified and rejected Jesus, compelled them to prove, as their main duty, that Jesus really was the Messiah who was promised. Consequently, everything united to bring the first communities to the conviction that the proclamation of the Gospel with which they were entrusted, resolved itself into the proclamation that Jesus is the Christ. The διδασκειν τηρειν παντα 'οτα ενετειλατο 'ο Ιησους (teaching to observe all that Jesus had commanded), a thing of heart and life, could not lead to reflection in the same degree, as the διδασκειν 'οτι ουτος εστιν 'ο χριστος του θεου (teaching that this is the Christ of God): for a community which possesses the Spirit does not reflect on whether its conception is right, but, especially a missionary community, on what the certainty of its faith rests.

The proclamation of Jesus as the Christ, though rooted entirely in the Old Testament, took its start from the exaltation of Jesus, which again resulted from his suffering and death. The proof that the entire Old Testament points to him, and that his person, his deeds and his destiny are the actual and precise fulfilment of the Old Testament predictions, was the foremost interest of believers, so far as they at all looked backwards. This proof was not used in the first place for the purpose of making the meaning and value of the Messianic work of Jesus more intelligible, of which it did not seem to be in much need, but to confirm the Messiahship of Jesus. Still, points of view for contemplating the Person and work of Jesus could not fail to be got from the words of the Prophets. The fundamental conception of Jesus dominating everything was, according to the Old Testament, that God had chosen him and through him the Church. God had chosen him and made him to be both Lord and Christ. He had made over to him the work of setting up the Kingdom, and had led him through death and resurrection to a supra-mundane position of sovereignty, in which he would soon visibly appear and bring about the end. The hope of Christ's speedy return was the most important article in the "Christology," inasmuch as his work was regarded as only reaching its conclusion by that return. It was the most difficult, inasmuch as the Old Testament contained nothing of a second advent of Messiah. Belief in the second advent became the specific Christian belief.

But the searching in the scriptures of the Old Testament, that is, in the prophetic texts, had already, in estimating the Person and dignity of Christ, given an important impulse towards transcending the frame-work of the idea of the theocracy completed solely in and for Israel. Moreover, belief in the exaltation of Christ to the right hand of God, caused men to form a corresponding idea of the beginning of his existence. The missionary work among the Gentiles, so soon begun and so rich in results, threw a new light on the range of Christ's purpose and work, and led to the consideration of its significance for the whole human race. Finally, the self-testimony of Jesus summoned them to ponder his relation to God the Father, with the presuppositions of that relation, and to give it expression in intelligible statements. Speculation had already begun on these four points in the Apostolic age, and had resulted in very different utterances as to the Person and dignity of Jesus (§ 4).⁷⁹

3. Since Jesus had appeared and was believed on as the Messiah promised by the Prophets, the aim and contents of his mission seemed already to be therewith stated with sufficient clearness. Further, as the work of Christ was not yet completed, the view of those contemplating it was, above all, turned to the future. But in virtue of express words of Jesus, and in the consciousness of having received the Spirit of God, one was already certain of the forgiveness of sin dispensed by God, of righteousness before him, of the full knowledge of the Divine will, and of the call to the future Kingdom as a present possession. In the procuring of these blessings not a few perceived with certainty the results of the first advent of Messiah, that is, his work. This work might be seen in the whole activity of Christ. But as the forgiveness of sins might be conceived as the blessing of salvation which included with certainty every other blessing, as Jesus had put his death in express relation with this blessing, and as the fact of this death so mysterious and offensive required a special explanation, there appeared in the foreground from the very beginning the confession, in 1 Cor. XV. 3: παρεδωξα 'υμιν εν πρωτοις, 'ο και παρελαβον, 'οτι χριστος απεθανεν 'υπερ των 'αμαρτιον 'ημον. "I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins." Not only Paul, for whom, in virtue of his special reflections and experiences, the cross of Christ had become the central point of all knowledge, but also the majority of believers, must have regarded the preaching of the death of the Lord as an essential article in the preaching of Christ⁸⁰, seeing that, as a rule, they placed it somehow under the aspect of a sacrifice offered to God. Still, there were very different conceptions of the value of the death as a means of procuring salvation, and there may have been many who were satisfied with basing its necessity on the fact that it had been predicted, (απεθανεν κατα τας γραφας: "he died for our sins according to the scriptures"), while their real religious interests were entirely centered in the future glory to be procured by Christ. But it must have been of greater significance for the following period that, from the first, a short account of the destiny of Jesus lay at the basis of all preaching about him (see a part of this in 1 Cor. XV. 1-11). Those articles in which the identity of the Christ who had appeared with the Christ who had been promised stood out with special clearness, must have been taken up into this report, as well as those which transcended the common expectations of Messiah, which for that very reason appeared of special importance, viz., his death and resurrection. In putting together this report, there was no intention of describing the "work" of Christ. But after the interest which occasioned it had been obscured, and had given place to other interests, the customary preaching of those articles must have led men to see in them Christ's real performance, his "work."⁸¹

4. The firm confidence of the disciples in Jesus was rooted in the belief that he did not abide in death, but was raised by God. That Christ had risen was, in virtue of what they had experienced in him, certainly only after they had seen him, just as sure as the fact of his death, and became the main article of their preaching about him.⁸² But in the message of the risen Lord was contained not only the conviction that he lives again, and now lives for ever, but also the assurance that his people will rise in like manner and live eternally. Consequently, the resurrection of Jesus became the sure pledge of the resurrection of all believers, that is of their real personal resurrection. No one at the beginning thought of a mere immortality of the spirit, not even those who assumed the perishableness of man's sensuous nature. In conformity with the uncertainty which yet adhered to the idea of resurrection in Jewish hopes and speculations, the concrete notions of it in the Christian communities were also fluctuating. But this could not affect the certainty of the conviction that the Lord would raise his people from death. This conviction, whose reverse side is the fear of that God who casts into hell, has become the mightiest power through which the Gospel has won humanity.⁸³

5. After the appearance of Paul, the earliest communities were greatly exercised by the question as to how believers obtain the righteousness which they possess, and what significance a precise observance of the law of the Fathers may have in connection with it. While some would hear of no change in the regulations and conceptions which had hitherto existed, and regarded the bestowal of righteousness by God as possible only on condition of a strict observance of the law, others taught that Jesus as Messiah had procured righteousness for his people, had fulfilled the law once for all, and had founded a new covenant, either in opposition to the old, or as a stage above it. Paul especially saw in the death of Christ the end of the law, and deduced righteousness solely from faith in Christ, and sought to prove from the Old Testament itself, by means of historical speculation, the merely temporary validity of the law and therewith the abrogation of the Old Testament religion. Others, and this view, which is not everywhere to be explained by Alexandrian influences (see above p. 72 f.), is not foreign to Paul, distinguished between spirit and letter in the Mosaic law, giving to everything a spiritual significance, and in this sense holding that the whole law as νομος πνευματικος was binding. The question whether righteousness comes from the works of the law or from faith, was displaced by this conception, and therefore remained in its deepest grounds unsolved, or was decided in the sense of a spiritualised legalism. But the detachment of Christianity from the political forms of the Jewish religion, and from sacrificial worship, was also completed by this conception, although it was regarded as identical with the Old Testament religion rightly understood. The surprising results of the direct mission to the Gentiles would seem to have first called forth those controversies (but see Stephen) and given them the highest significance. The fact that one section of Jewish Christians, and even some of the Apostles, at length recognised the right of the Gentile Christians to be Christians without first becoming Jews, is the clearest proof that what was above all prized was faith in Christ and surrender to him as the saviour. In agreeing to the direct mission to the Gentiles the earliest Christians, while they themselves observed the law, broke up the national religion of Israel, and gave expression to the conviction that Jesus was not only the Messiah of his people, but the redeemer of humanity.⁸⁴ The establishment of the universal character of the Gospel, that is, of Christianity as a religion for the world, became now, however, a problem, the solution of which, as given by Paul, but few were able to understand or make their own.

6. In the conviction that salvation is entirely bound up with faith in Jesus Christ, Christendom gained the consciousness of being a new creation of God. But while the sense of being the true Israel was thereby, at the same time, held fast, there followed, on the one hand, entirely new historical perspectives, and on the other, deep problems which demanded solution. As a new creation of God, 'η εκκλησια του θεου, the community was conscious of having been chosen by God in Jesus before the foundation of the world. In the conviction of being the true Israel, it claimed for itself the whole historical development recorded in the Old Testament, convinced that all the divine activity there recorded had the new community in view. The great question which was to find very different answers, was how, in accordance with this view, the Jewish nation, so far as it had not recognised Jesus as Messiah, should be judged. The detachment of Christianity from Judaism was the most important preliminary condition, and therefore the most important preparation, for the Mission among the Gentile nations, and for union with the Greek spirit.

Supplement 1.—Renan and others go too far when they say that Paul alone has the glory of freeing Christianity from the fetters of Judaism. Certainly the great Apostle could say in this connection also: περισσοτερον αυτων παντων εκοπιασα, but there were others beside him who, in the power of the Gospel, transcended the limits of Judaism. Christian communities, it may now be considered certain, had arisen in the empire, in Rome for example, which were essentially free from the law without being in any way determined by Paul's preaching. It was Paul's merit that he clearly formulated the great question, established the universalism of Christianity in a peculiar manner, and yet in doing so held fast the character of Christianity as a positive religion, as distinguished from Philosophy and Moralism. But the later development presupposes neither his clear formulation nor his peculiar establishment of universalism, but only the universalism itself.

Supplement 2.—The dependence of the Pauline Theology on the Old Testament or on Judaism is overlooked in the traditional contrasting of Paulinism and Jewish Christianity, in which Paulinism is made equivalent to Gentile Christianity. This theology, as we might a priori suppose, could, apart from individual exceptions, be intelligible as a whole to born Jews, if to any, for its doctrinal presuppositions were strictly Pharisaic, and its boldness in criticising the Old Testament, rejecting and asserting the law in its historical sense, could be as little congenial to the Gentile Christians as its piety towards the Jewish people. This judgment is confirmed by a glance at the fate of Pauline Theology in the 120 years that followed. Marcion was the only Gentile Christian who understood Paul, and even he misunderstood him: the rest never got beyond the appropriation of particular Pauline sayings, and exhibited no comprehension especially of the theology of the Apostle, so far as in it the universalism of Christianity as a religion is proved, even without recourse to Moralism and without putting a new construction on the Old Testament religion. It follows from this, however, that the scheme "Jewish Christianity"-"Gentile Christianity" is insufficient. We must rather, in the Apostolic age, at least at its close, distinguish four main tendencies that may have crossed each other here and there,⁸⁵ (within which again different shades appear). (1) The Gospel has to do with the people of Israel, and with the Gentile world only on the condition that believers attach themselves to the people of Israel. The punctilious observance of the law is still necessary and the condition on which the messianic salvation is bestowed (particularism and legalism, in practice and in principle, which, however, was not to cripple the obligation to prosecute the work of the Mission). (2) The Gospel has to do with Jews and Gentiles: the first, as believers in Christ, are under obligation as before to observe the law, the latter are not; but for that reason they cannot on earth fuse into one community with the believing Jews. Very different judgments in details were possible on this stand-point; but the bestowal of salvation could no longer be thought of as depending simply on the keeping of the ceremonial commandments of the law⁸⁶ (universalism in principle, particularism in practice; the prerogative of Israel being to some extent clung to). (3) The Gospel has to do with both Jews and Gentiles; no one is any longer under obligation to observe the law; for the law is abolished (or fulfilled), and the salvation which Christ's death has procured is appropriated by faith. The law (that is the Old Testament religion) in its literal sense is of divine origin, but was intended from the first only for a definite epoch of history. The prerogative of Israel remains, and is shewn in the fact that salvation was first offered to the Jews, and it will be shewn again at the end of all history. That prerogative refers to the nation as a whole, and has nothing to do with the question of the salvation of individuals (Paulinism: universalism in principle and in practice, and Antinomianism in virtue of the recognition of a merely temporary validity of the whole law; breach with the traditional religion of Israel; recognition of the prerogative of the people of Israel; the clinging to the prerogative of the people of Israel was not, however, necessary on this stand-point: see the epistle to the Hebrews and the Gospel of John). (4) The Gospel has to do with Jews and Gentiles: no one need therefore be under obligation to observe the ceremonial commandments and sacrificial worship, because these commandments themselves are only the wrappings of moral and spiritual commandments which the Gospel has set forth as fulfilled in a more perfect form (universalism in principle and in practice in virtue of a neutralising of the distinction between law and Gospel, old and new; spiritualising and universalising of the law).⁸⁷

Supplement 3.—The appearance of Paul is the most important fact in the history of the Apostolic age. It is impossible to give in a few sentences an abstract of his theology and work; and the insertion here of a detailed account is forbidden, not only by the external limits, but by the aim of this investigation. For, as already indicated (§ 1), the doctrinal formation in the Gentile Church is not connected with the whole phenomenon of the Pauline theology, but only with certain leading thoughts which were only in part peculiar to the Apostle. His most peculiar thoughts acted on the development of Ecclesiastical doctrine only by way of occasional stimulus. We can find room here only for a few general outlines.⁸⁸

(1) The inner conviction that Christ had revealed himself to him, that the Gospel was the message of the crucified and risen Christ, and that God had called him to proclaim that message to the world, was the power and the secret of his personality and his activity. These three elements were a unity in the consciousness of Paul, constituting his conversion and determining his after-life. (2) In this conviction he knew himself to be a new creature, and so vivid was this knowledge that he was constrained to become a Jew to the Jews, and a Greek to the Greeks in order to gain them. (3) The crucified and risen Christ became the central point of his theology, and not only the central point, but the one source and ruling principle. The Christ was not in his estimation Jesus of Nazareth now exalted, but the mighty personal spiritual being in divine form who had for a time humbled himself, and who as Spirit has broken up the world of law, sin, and death, and continues to overcome them in believers. (4) Theology therefore was to him, looking forwards, the doctrine of the liberating power of the Spirit (of Christ) in all the concrete relations of human life and need. The Christ who has already overcome law, sin and death, lives as Spirit, and through his Spirit lives in believers, who for that very reason know him not after the flesh. He is a creative power of life to those who receive him in faith in his redeeming death upon the cross, that is to say, to those who are justified. The life in the Spirit, which results from union with Christ, will at last reveal itself also in the body (not in the flesh). (5) Looking backwards, theology was to Paul a doctrine of the law and of its abrogation; or more accurately, a description of the old system before Christ in the light of the Gospel, and the proof that it was destroyed by Christ. The scriptural proof, even here, is only a superadded support to inner considerations which move entirely within the thought that that which is abrogated has already had its due, by having its whole strength made manifest that it might then be annulled,—the law, the flesh of sin, death: by the law the law is destroyed, sin is abolished in sinful flesh, death is destroyed by death. (6) The historical view which followed from this begins, as regards Christ, with Adam and Abraham; as regards the law, with Moses. It closes, as regards Christ, with the prospect of a time when he shall have put all enemies beneath his feet, when God will be all in all; as regards Moses and the promises given to the Jewish nation, with the prospect of a time when all Israel will be saved. (7) Paul's doctrine of Christ starts from the final confession of the primitive Church, that Christ is with the Father as a heavenly being and as Lord of the living and the dead. Though Paul must have accurately known the proclamation concerning the historical Christ, his theology in the strict sense of the word does not revert to it: but springing over the historical, it begins with the pre-existent Christ (the Man from heaven), whose moral deed it was to assume the flesh in self-denying love, in order to break for all men the powers of nature and the doom of death. But he has pointed to the words and example of the historical Christ in order to rule the life in the Spirit. (8) Deductions, proofs, and perhaps also conceptions, which in point of form betray the theology of the Pharisaic schools, were forced from the Apostle by Christian opponents, who would only grant a place to the message of the crucified Christ beside the δικαιοσυνη εξ εργων. Both as an exegete and as a typologist he appears as a disciple of the Pharisees. But his dialectic about law, circumcision and sacrifice, does not form the kernel of his religious mode of thought, though, on the other hand, it was unquestionably his very Pharisaism which qualified him for becoming what he was. Pharisaism embraced nearly everything lofty which Judaism apart from Christ at all possessed, and its doctrine of providence, its energetic insistence on making manifest the religious contrasts, its Messianic expectations, its doctrines of sin and predestination, were conditions for the genesis of a religious and Christian character such as Paul.⁸⁹ This first Christian of the second generation is the highest product of the Jewish spirit under the creative power of the Spirit of Christ. Pharisaism had fulfilled its mission for the world when it produced this man. (9) But Hellenism also had a share in the making of Paul, a fact which does not conflict with his Pharisaic origin, but is partly given with it. In spite of all its exclusiveness the desire for making proselytes, especially in the Diaspora, was in the blood of Pharisaism. Paul continued the old movement in a new way, and he was qualified for his work among the Greeks by an accurate knowledge of the Greek translation of the Old Testament, by considerable dexterity in the use of the Greek language, and by a growing insight into the spiritual life of the Greeks. But the peculiarity of his Gospel as a message from the Spirit of Christ, which was equally near to and equally distant from every religious and moral mode of thought among the nations of the world, signified much more than all this. This Gospel—who can say whether Hellenism had already a share in its conception—required that the missionary to the Greeks should become a Greek and that believers should come to know, "all things are yours, and ye are Christ's." Paul, as no doubt other missionaries besides him, connected the preaching of Christ with the Greek mode of thought; he even employed philosophic doctrines of the Greeks as presuppositions in his apologetic,⁹⁰ and therewith prepared the way for the introduction of the Gospel to the Græco-Roman world of thought. But, in my opinion, he has nowhere allowed that world of thought to influence his doctrine of salvation. This doctrine, however, was so fashioned in its practical aims that it was not necessary to become a Jew in order to appropriate it. (10) Yet we cannot speak of any total effect of Paulinism, as there was no such thing. The abundance of its details was too great and the greatness of its simplicity too powerful, its hope of the future too vivid, its doctrine of the law too difficult, its summons to a new life in the spirit too mighty to be comprehended and adhered to even by those communities which Paul himself had founded. What they did comprehend was its Monotheism, its universalism, its redemption, its eternal life, its asceticism; but all this was otherwise combined than by Paul. The style became Hellenic, and the element of a new kind of knowledge from the very first, as in the Church of Corinth, seems to have been the ruling one. The Pauline doctrine of the incarnate heavenly Man was indeed apprehended; it fell in with Greek notions, although it meant something very different from the notions which Greeks had been able to form of it.

Supplement 4.—What we justly prize above all else in the New Testament is that it is a union of the three groups, Synoptic Gospels, Pauline Epistles,⁹¹ and Johannine writings, in which are expressed the richest contents of the earliest history of the Gospel. In the Synoptic Gospels and the epistles of Paul are represented two types of preaching the Gospel which mutually supplement each other. The subsequent history is dependent on both, and would have been other than it is had not both existed alongside of each other. On the other hand, the peculiar and lofty conception of Christ and of the Gospel, which stands out in the writings of John, has directly exercised no demonstrable influence on the succeeding development—with the exception of one peculiar movement, the Montanistic, which, however, does not rest on a true understanding of these writings—and indeed partly for the same reason that has prevented the Pauline theology as a whole from having such an influence. What is given in these writings is a criticism of the Old Testament as religion, or the independence of the Christian religion, in virtue of an accurate knowledge of the Old Testament through development of its hidden germs. The Old Testament stage of religion is really transcended and overcome in the Johannine Christianity, just as in Paulinism, and in the theology of the epistle to the Hebrews. "The circle of disciples who appropriated this characterisation of Jesus is," says Weizsäcker, "a revived Christ-party in the higher sense." But this transcending of the Old Testament religion was the very thing that was unintelligible, because there were few ripe for such a conception. Moreover, the origin of the Johannine writings is, from the stand-point of a history of literature and dogma, the most marvellous enigma which the early history of Christianity presents: Here we have portrayed a Christ who clothes the indescribable with words, and proclaims as his own self-testimony what his disciples have experienced in him, a speaking, acting, Pauline Christ, walking on the earth, far more human than the Christ of Paul and yet far more Divine, an abundance of allusions to the historical Jesus, and at the same time the most sovereign treatment of the history. One divines that the Gospel can find no loftier expression than John XVII.: one feels that Christ himself put these words into the mouth of the disciple, who gives them back to him, but word and thing, history and doctrine are surrounded by a bright cloud of the suprahistorical. It is easy to shew that this Gospel could as little have been written without Hellenism, as Luther's treatise on the freedom of a Christian man could have been written without the "Deutsche Theologie." But the reference to Philo and Hellenism is by no means sufficient here, as it does not satisfactorily explain even one of the external aspects of the problem. The elements operative in the Johannine theology were not Greek Theologoumena—even the Logos has little more in common with that of Philo than the name, and its mention at the beginning of the book is a mystery, not the solution of one⁹²—but the Apostolic testimony concerning Christ has created from the old faith of Psalmists and Prophets, a new faith in a man who lived with the disciples of Jesus among the Greeks. For that very reason, in spite of his abrupt Anti-judaism, we must without doubt regard the Author as a born Jew.

Supplement 5.—The authorities to which the Christian communities were subjected in faith and life, were these: (1) The Old Testament interpreted in the Christian sense. (2) The tradition of the Messianic history of Jesus. (3) The words of the Lord: see the epistles of Paul, especially 1 Corinthians. But every writing which was proved to have been given by the Spirit had also to be regarded as an authority, and every tested Christian Prophet and Teacher inspired by the Spirit could claim that his words be received and regarded as the words of God. Moreover, the twelve whom Jesus had chosen had a special authority, and Paul claimed a similar authority for himself (διαταξεις των αποστολων). Consequently, there were numerous courts of appeal in the earliest period of Christendom, of diverse kinds and by no means strictly defined. In the manifold gifts of the spirit was given a fluid element indefinable in its range and scope, an element which guaranteed freedom of development, but which also threatened to lead the enthusiastic communities to extravagance.

Literature.—Weiss, Biblical Theology of the New Testament, 1884. Beyschlag, New Testament Theology, 1892. Ritschl, Entstehung der Alt-Katholischen Kirche, 2 Edit. 1857. Reuss, History of Christian Theology in the Apostolic Age, 1864. Baur, The Apostle Paul, 1866. Holsten, Zum Evangelium des Paulus und Petrus, 1868. Pfleiderer, Paulinism, 1873: also, Das Urchristenthum, 1887. Schenkel, Das Christusbild der Apostel, 1879. Renan, Origins of Christianity Vols. II.-IV. Havet, Le Christianisme et ses orig. T, IV. 1884. Lechler, The Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Age, 1885. Weizsäcker, The Apostolic Age, 1892. Hatch, Article "Paul" in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Everett, The Gospel of Paul. Boston, 1893. On the origin and earliest history of the Christian proofs from prophecy, see my "Texte und Unters. z. Gesch. der Alt-Christl." Lit. I. 3, p. 56 f.

§ 4. The Current Exposition of the Old Testament, and the Jewish hopes of the future, in their significance for the earliest types of Christian preaching.

1. Although Jesus had in principle abolished the methods of pedantry, the casuistic treatment of the law, and the subtleties of prophetic interpretation, yet the old Scholastic exegesis remained active in the Christian communities above all the unhistorical local method in the exposition of the Old Testament, both allegoristic and Haggadic; for in the exposition of a sacred text—and the Old Testament was regarded as such—one is always required to look away from its historical limitations and to expound it according to the needs of the present.⁹³ The traditional view exercised its influence on the exposition of the Old Testament, as well as on the representations of the person, fate and deeds of Jesus, especially in those cases where the question was about the proof of the fulfilment of prophecy, that is, of the Messiahship of Jesus. (See above § 3, 2). Under the impression made by the history of Jesus it gave to many Old Testament passages a sense that was foreign to them, and, on the other hand, enriched the life of Jesus with new facts, turning the interest at the same time to details which were frequently unreal and seldom of striking importance.⁹⁴

2. The Jewish Apocalyptic literature, especially as it flourished since the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, and was impregnated with new elements borrowed from an ethico-religious philosophy, as well as with Babylonian and Persian myths (Greek myths can only be detected in very small number), was not banished from the circles of the first professors of the Gospel, but was rather held fast, eagerly read, and even extended with the view of elucidating the promises of Jesus.⁹⁵ Though their contents seem to have been modified on Christian soil, and especially the uncertainty about the person of the Messiah exalted to victory and coming to judgment,⁹⁶ yet the sensuous earthly hopes were in no way repressed. Green fat meadows and sulphurous abysses, white horses and frightful beasts, trees of life, splendid cities, war and bloodshed filled the fancy,⁹⁷ and threatened to obscure the simple and yet, at bottom, much more affecting maxims about the judgment which is certain to every individual soul, and drew the confessors of the Gospel into a restless activity, into politics, and abhorrence of the State. It was an evil inheritance which the Christians took over from the Jews,⁹⁸ an inheritance which makes it impossible to reproduce with certainty the eschatological sayings of Jesus. Things directly foreign were mixed up with them, and, what was most serious, delineations of the hopes of the future could easily lead to the undervaluing of the most important gifts and duties of the Gospel.⁹⁹

3. A wealth of mythologies and poetic ideas was naturalised and legitimised¹⁰⁰ in the Christian communities, chiefly by the reception of the Apocalyptic literature, but also by the reception of artificial exegesis and Haggada. Most important for the following period were the speculations about Messiah, which were partly borrowed from expositions of the Old Testament and from the Apocalypses, partly formed independently, according to methods the justice of which no one contested, and the application of which seemed to give a firm basis to religious faith.

Some of the Jewish Apocalyptists had already attributed pre-existence to the expected Messiah, as to other precious things in the Old Testament history and worship, and, without any thought of denying his human nature, placed him as already existing before his appearing in a series of angelic beings.¹⁰¹ This took place in accordance with an established method of speculation, so far as an attempt was made thereby to express the special value of an empiric object, by distinguishing between the essence and the inadequate form of appearance, hypostatising the essence, and exalting it above time and space. But when a later appearance was conceived as the aim of a series of preparations, it was frequently hypostatised and placed above these preparations even in time. The supposed aim was, in a kind of real existence, placed, as first cause, before the means which were destined to realise it on earth.¹⁰²