Pfleiderer believes also that he can show the course of the development by which the new conception was arrived at. In I Thessalonians, he thinks, the Apostle still rested unquestioningly in that notion of a corporeal resurrection which primitive Christianity shared with Judaism. But in the explanations in I Cor. xv. the influence of the Greek ideas becomes observable, while in 2 Corinthians and Philippians it becomes dominant.

This construction of the course of events is defended by Pfleiderer and his followers—Holsten here stands apart—with fanatical energy, as though they wished to make noise enough to distract attention from the fact that they have so very little else to point to in the shape of positive evidence of Greek influence in Paul.

What are the difficulties which are raised by the assumption of Greek ideas in Paul’s doctrine? They are many and various, and they grow greater in proportion as the new element in Paul is more strongly emphasised. Take the problem of explaining the dualism of flesh and spirit. It is assumed that this has been done when it has been declared to be Greek. But in doing so a duality has been introduced into Paul himself which creates many more difficulties than the dualism it was invoked to solve.

But for Pfleiderer the conception of the Jewish element has become much more comprehensive and vital, because he appreciates the significance of the eschatological ideas. The result of that is to make the opposition which has to be recognised much more acute. And, nevertheless, it must continue to be asserted that Paul was unconscious of the inconsistencies!

But the new conception does not in fact displace the old, although it is diametrically opposed to it. Pfleiderer has to admit that Paul, even in the writings of the latest period, advances without misgiving the doctrine of the “awakening of the whole man from the sleep of death,” just as if the new doctrine of “the presence with the Lord beginning immediately after death” were not in existence, although it is the outcome of long years of mental struggle.

Pfleiderer, however, is prepared to accept even this portentous fact also, and to go on contentedly believing that Paul lived in a kind of mental twilight which is at once Jewish-eschatological and Greek-spiritualistic. He expresses this euphemistically by speaking of the Pauline eschatology as “hovering between the Pharisaic hope of the here and the Greek hope of the hereafter.” The way to a scientific understanding of Paulinism lies, therefore, for Pfleiderer through a credo quia absurdum.

By his assertions about 2 Cor. v. I ff. he had brought the assumption of Hellenistic ideas in Paul into a dangerous position. Previously when a student of the subject had stated it to be his view that the sharp antithesis of flesh and spirit was Greek, there was no way in which this belief could be countered. If he was, further, convinced that the Apostle’s brain was so organised that he could at the same time think consistently along two separate lines, Greek-spiritualistic and Jewish-eschatological, without noticing their divergence and without ever mingling the two sets of ideas, a mind accustomed to work by the methods of historical criticism was similarly powerless against views arrived at as if by revelation.

The point which Pfleiderer raised here was after all only a particular case in relation to the general question whether a Hellenistic influence is to be recognised in the Apostle’s conceptions of the final state and the times of the End. It was in this wider aspect that Kabisch dealt with the problem in his work on the Pauline eschatology. His decision is in the negative. The much-discussed “development” of the views of I Thessalonians into those of I Corinthians xv., and of these again into those of 2 Corinthians and Philippians, is, he maintains, a delusion. The conception of the things of the End is a unity, and remains the same throughout.

He arrives at the following conclusions:—In I Thessalonians Paul still assumes that Christians will enter the kingdom of heaven with their earthly bodies. Not before I Corinthians xv. does he introduce the idea of a “transformation.” He is then led to do so by the development of the Greek doctrine of flesh and spirit. In the second Epistle to the Corinthians he carries out this new conception to its logical issue. “The compromise which he had attempted in I Cor. is abandoned, and the result is that the conception of the resurrection of the dead is set aside.” Along with the resurrection of the dead the Apostle also strikes out from his programme of the future the parousia. “For the expectation of the descent of Christ to earth he substitutes the entry of the believer into the heavenly world. A resurrection of the dead, a descent of Christ to earth, was now no longer necessary.”

Not only so, but the conception of the judgment is also abolished. In the first place, Paul draws this inference “at least so far as Christians are concerned.” That subsequently, in following out his ideas, “he should also arrive at the conception of universal blessedness, can in view of his universalism cause no surprise.” “As all men were included in Christ at His resurrection, so all must receive the Spirit, they must all be made alive.” The End does not, therefore, mean blessedness for some and destruction for others, but eternal life for all. But since eternal life depends on the possession of the Spirit, it must be assumed that those who are not believers at their death “come to faith in Christ in the period between the parousia and the delivery of all authority into the hands of God, and in consequence of this the Spirit is given to them.”

Not one of his “results” can be proved from the Apostle’s letters. Where is there a single word to suggest that the Apostle abandoned the conception of the judgment and that of predestination to life or to damnation? Where does he ever speak of universal blessedness? Where does he hint at the possibility that mankind as a whole is to be converted to belief in Christ between the parousia and the delivery of all authority into the hands of God, and will thereupon receive the Spirit? What grounds are there for supposing that he gives up the idea of the parousia as superfluous? In his zeal to discover antinomies and trace developments, Teichmann forgets to take account of the most elementary facts. He asserts, for instance, that in I Thessalonians those who arise from the dead enter the kingdom of God in their earthly bodies. But from the Jewish Apocalyptic and from the teaching of Jesus it clearly appears that the resurrection included within itself a transformation of this creaturely corporeity into a glorified corporeity. It would not do for Teichmann to remember this. He is bound, even where he represents the Apostle as still wholly under the sway of Jewish conceptions, to bring him into an inconceivable opposition to these in order that the transformation which is taught in I Corinthians xv.—entirely in accordance with Jewish eschatology—may be represented as derived from the Greek doctrine of the Spirit.

But if that be so, the theory that the doctrine of flesh and spirit is Greek is itself most seriously imperilled. Teichmann felt, and therein he was more logical and consistent than the rest, that if there were any Hellenistic ideas in Paulinism they must necessarily have attacked and displaced the Jewish eschatology. Pfleiderer’s view that the two could have subsisted side by side without—except in the case of 2 Corinthians v. I ff.—influencing and interpenetrating one another is an untenable theoretical hypothesis. From the whole range of the history of thought no analogy could be produced for this harmonious coexistence of two different worlds of thought.

A further difficulty of the theory of the Hellenisation of Paulinism arises from the fact that the Apostle’s views have to be more and more spiritualised in proportion as the Greek element is emphasised. Lüdemann, overpowered by the impression of the documents, had expressly characterised the doctrine of redemption which is bound up with the dualism of flesh and spirit as not ethical but physical. Holsten and Pfleiderer do not venture to follow him in that. The Platonism which they seek to discover in Paulinism cannot be brought into connexion with a physical doctrine of redemption, but is thought of as the antithesis of the “crude Jewish ideas.” The whole of the mystical teaching about dying and rising again with Christ, about the new creature and the influence of the Spirit, has therefore to be spiritualised.

This brings them into conflict with the natural, literal meaning of the Apostle’s statements, in which the materialistic character of his conceptions maintains itself against all the arts of exegesis. The interpretation given by Pfleiderer and his school deprives them of their original meaning to an even greater extent than the modern interpretation in general does.

There is a further point in which, according to Gunkel, Paul raises to a higher level the view which he took over. By the possession of the Spirit the primitive Church was made certain that the end of the present age was at hand and the new age was about to dawn. For the Apostle the temporal relation becomes an inner one. The Spirit is for him the earnest of the coming kingdom of God. Already in the present he calls into being the future life in believers and gives them the certainty, and to some extent even the reality, of the life which is about to dawn for them.

The Pauline doctrine of the Spirit is therefore simply a development of the primitive Christian doctrine. That it was so long regarded as Greek is due, according to Gunkel, to the fact that scholars never examined it as a whole, but always confined themselves to the discussion of the dualism of spirit and flesh. This prevents the relation of the doctrine to the views of the primitive community, and especially its relation to the doctrine of the future age, from becoming apparent.

The remarkable point, therefore, is that the post-Apostolic writers, though they are acquainted with the works of the Apostle of the Gentiles, make no real use of them. His ideas remain foreign, lifeless, so far as they are concerned.

That is also shown by the fact that early Greek Church-theology is quite independent of him. It is concerned with the incarnation and resurrection of Christ and with regeneration; Paul’s speculations deal with the death and resurrection of the Lord, and he never speaks of regeneration. The underlying logic is in the two cases so different that the representatives of Greek theology, even if they wished to do so, could not appeal to the Apostle. No community of thought between him and Justin is to be discovered.

These are the facts as they lie clearly before us in the letters. But to register them is not to explain them. How, exactly, do these conclusions result from the logic of the primitive Christian belief as rightly worked out in the Apostle’s mind? That is the form which the question takes as the next stage, after Baur, Ritschl, and Harnack.

The negative result that the Pauline attitude in regard to these points is not Greek is in any case established. And so too is the other result that the creators of Greek dogma did not take him as their starting-point, and cannot therefore have discovered anything Hellenic in him. They had no consciousness that he had already quarried and shaped the material which they needed for their edifice.

But if they did not recognise in him one who had made a beginning in their direction, it is more than questionable whether modern historical criticism is right in professing to find Greek elements in him. If so, it must be supposed to have a better instinct for what is Hellenic than the men who Hellenised Christianity.

In any case it has no right to talk at large about the significance of Paulinism for Greek Christianity, as though the history of dogma was not there to prove the contrary.

How do the Debit and Credit of the theory stand at this point? For the credit side, it claims that the dualism of flesh and spirit is of Greek origin, but it does not get beyond the general assertion. No serious attempt has been made to demonstrate the existence of Greek conceptions in the particular aspects of the doctrine, and to explain the pessimism, the desire for death, and the ethical teaching of the Apostle as derived from the non-Jewish world of thought. That the Pauline universalism and doctrine of freedom from the law are directly inspired by the Greek spirit it no longer has the right to assert.

In a single instance its defenders venture to point to the influence of Greek religious thought on the Apostle’s views. They seek to show that his Jewish, eschatological conception of the future life and his view of the events of the End were in time entirely transformed by it, if not actually cancelled. But the attempt to prove this from the documents has not been successful.

Meanwhile the following difficulties appear. The theory is obliged to assume a dualism between Jewish and Greek elements in Paul, and to assert that on the one hand he never allowed the two systems of thought to coalesce, while on the other he never became conscious of their disparity; it has to attribute to him a capacity for combining contradictions, which allows him to maintain alongside of one another a spiritualistic doctrine of immortality and a crudely materialistic notion of resurrection without becoming aware of their incompatibility; it is logically forced to the conclusion that he set aside the Jewish eschatology, with its conceptions of judgment and condemnation, in favour of a doctrine of universal blessedness, whereas there is in the Epistles not a single hint pointing in this direction; it is forced, in order to make his statements appear “Platonic,” so to spiritualise them that the natural sense of the words disappears; it must ignore the proved fact that his doctrine of the spirit, when taken in its full compass and not confined to the antithesis of spirit and flesh, is most naturally explained as a mere development of the primitive Christian view; it must meet the objection—which it never can do—that the original apostles never discovered anything of an essentially foreign, Greek character in Paul’s views; it must, when confronted with the history of dogma, bend itself with what grace it may to the admission that Paulinism exercised no influence upon the formation of early Greek theology, and cannot therefore have been felt by the men who were concerned in that process as itself representing a first stage in the Hellenisation of Christianity.

The theory therefore explains nothing, but creates difficulty upon difficulty.

In view of this relation of its assets to its liabilities it would have no alternative but to declare itself bankrupt, had it not astutely refrained from keeping any accounts.

And so far we have considered the mere for and against. Even if the balance had here inclined in favour of the theory, that would not have proved anything. The ideas in question ought not to be considered as Greek until it had been shown that they actually were so. But this would require it to be shown that exactly corresponding ideas were to be found in the preceding or contemporary Greek literature, and that Paul betrayed some kind of acquaintance with this literature. The possibility that it was a mere case of analogy would have to be systematically excluded, so far as that is possible.

But such a method of proof has never been seriously contemplated by the adherents of the theory. In going through their works one is astonished to see how lightly they have treated their task. They have never properly collected the material; it is much if here and there a point is thoroughly considered.

The assumption of Greek elements in Paulinism appeared something so self-evident, and indeed, if one desired to arrive at any understanding of him, so necessary, that from the first it came forward with an assurance which secured credit for it everywhere without its needing to produce adequate guarantees.

When Lüdemann in the year 1872 worked out clearly the dualism of flesh and spirit, he added, as a thing to be taken for granted, that it was Greek in character. His successors show a similar absence of misgiving.

In order to bring the question once for all to an issue, let us gather up and put to the test, along with the poor fragments of attempted proof, every consideration that can be cited in favour of the assumption of Greek elements in Paulinism.

It is in any case certain that the Apostle always makes use of Greek translations; and it is further certain that he argues from peculiarities in their wording which for one who knew Hebrew, as he also certainly did, must have been recognisable as mistranslations. He therefore goes so far as to ignore the original.

Nevertheless these facts do not warrant us in drawing conclusions of a too far-reaching character. If he wrote in Greek at all he could not do otherwise than use the Greek translations which were familiar to him, and in the synagogues of the Diaspora were regarded as “authentic,” as the Vulgate is for the Latin Church according to the decrees of the Council of Trent. That being so, it was out of the question for him, in making quotations, to introduce renderings of his own from the original.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What are the possibilities of direct influences which have to be taken into account?

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.

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.