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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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. . . .”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Baur’s criticism was occupied with the Corpus Paulinum which remained after the exclusion of the Pastoral epistles. In the ten remaining Epistles, which show a large degree of inner homogeneity, he professed to discover differences on the basis of which some were to be assigned to the Apostle, others to the school which took its rise from him.

Once the rights of such a criticism are admitted, nothing can prevent it from working itself out to its limit, and seeking to explain all the Epistles as products of a school which went under Paul’s name.

The letters to the Romans and to the Galatians, on the other hand, deal partly with the same subjects, since they both treat of sin, law, and justification by faith. Nevertheless they are far from coinciding. For all their agreement in fundamental views they show remarkable differences in detail. Is it, if this line of argument be followed, after all so indubitably certain that the four main epistles are from the same pen?

Is it certain that they are by Paul? Strictly examined, Baur’s assumption that they are so rests only on tradition, which in respect of the other letters he impugns. Has he then the right to rely on it so confidently as regards the main epistles? In conformity with his own principles he ought to have felt himself obliged to exercise “positive criticism” here also, and would only have had the right to regard them as Pauline after it had been proved that they really belong to primitive Christian times and have the historical Apostle of the Gentiles as their author.

The assumption of the genuineness of the four main epistles is by no means so self-evident as it may seem to us in our simplicity. The Acts of the Apostles know nothing of any literary activity of Paul. It is only from Clement of Rome, Ignatius, and the Gnostics that we first hear of his Epistles. Justin and the remainder of early Christian literature are silent in regard to his writings. Supposing that the first Epistle of Clement does not belong to the first century, the earliest evidence for the Epistles comes from the second century. If the Ignatian letters are not genuine, Marcion, about the middle of the second century, is the first witness to an actual Corpus paulinum!

Moreover, Baur made larger concessions than he realised to the opinion which jeopardised his position, when he maintained that Paulinism represents a Hellenisation of the Gospel.

Is it probable that a single individual belonging to the primitive Christian community, immediately after the death of Jesus, by himself achieved this result? Historical analogy is uniformly in favour of the view that developments of that kind have a gradual beginning, and are only accomplished in the course of two or three generations. It would therefore be inherently much more probable that Paulinism should be the work of a school which sought to reconcile Christianity with Hellenism. In any case a writer who regards it as Greek ought to face the difficulty of explaining it as at the same time belonging to primitive Christianity, and ought not to regard this hypothesis as self-evident, but as standing in need of proof.

These theoretic considerations regarding the basis of the views of Baur and his successors are so obvious that they were bound to come up sooner or later. The fact was that in one particular point the Tübingen master had held back from unprejudiced criticism and had foisted upon critical science the traditional belief. In doing so he had obeyed an instinct of caution. Those who proceeded further along the path of questioning and investigation arrived, some with satisfaction and some with dismay, at the result of declaring all the epistles to be spurious.

The Christian “community” arose among the oppressed, the slaves and Jews, of the great city. They formed associations and fostered in one another a yearning for the End of the Age, developed the Platonico-Stoic thoughts of Seneca into the sayings of the Sermon on the Mount, and invented for themselves their hero, Christ. The spirit of the new creation came from the West; its framework was furnished by Judaism.

Judaism brought with it a tendency towards legalism. In the Flavian period the Greek ethical philosophy struck up an alliance with the law. This movement was opposed by the freedom-loving Gnosis. In the last years of Hadrian and the first half of the reign of Marcus Aurelius matters came to an issue. So far as the struggle took a literary form we have the evidences of it in the Pauline letters and the Acts of the Apostles. Galatians is the last of the letters, issued at the crisis of the struggle, and was directed against Acts, which appeared at the same time.

“The figure of this champion of a universal Church and freedom from the law of ordinances” must have been already known to the Church. What was new was the association with his name of an epistolary literature, the production of which occupied a series of earnest and able men for some forty years.

In the Acts of the Apostles Paul is co-ordinated with or subordinated to Peter, the representative of the Judaeo-Roman hierarchic tendency. That reflects the issue of the struggle. The freedom-loving party was defeated; in the last quarter of the second century Catholicism became supreme in the Church.

Nevertheless, in detached observations, and in some of the incidental ideas, he displays a critical acumen which has something great about it.