But instead of making a thorough examination of the problems and laboriously arguing the case with the other students of Paulinism, the authors at once proceed to suggest what appears to them a possible solution. They claim to have discovered that the inconsistencies are due in the main to the presence of two strata of thought which have been worked together. The one is of a sharply anti-Jewish character; the other consists of milder and more conciliatory ideas.
If it be assumed, so runs their argument, that Christianity was in its real origin a Jewish sect which had liberal ideas in regard to the law and directed its expectation towards the Messiah, the antinomian sections of the Epistles represent documents of that period.
The present form of the letters is due to the fact that a later “Churchman”—the authors call him Paulus episcopus, and think that he may have served as model for the Paul of Acts—worked into them the second, milder set of ideas.
At the time when Pierson and Naber launched this hypothesis, A. D. Loman had just finished the series of “Quaestiones Paulinae” which he threw out in the [pg 125] Theologisch Tijdschrift of 1882-1886.93 The battle began in earnest.
Loman confines himself to dealing with the external arguments, and only proposes to examine how far the assumption that these letters were written by the Apostle in primitive Christian times can or cannot be proved from the early witnesses. His decision is negative.
But his calmly written yet wonderfully living study shook two other thinkers out of their security, and compelled them to carry on the work of destruction to a further point.
Steck94 and van Manen95 undertook the task of supplementing the external arguments, of presenting the internal arguments by means of an analysis of the letters, and of offering a detailed hypothesis regarding the origin of the Pauline literature.
In respect of external arguments the three scholars combine to urge the following considerations:—
Acts, they argue, knows nothing of any literary activity of Paul; and it tells us nothing of the conflicts which these letters, if we are to believe their own evidence, called forth.
When the Tübingen school set up the axiom that Acts is less trustworthy than the Epistles, they made things easy for themselves. There are weighty arguments to support the opposite opinion.
That the moment a mission to the heathen was undertaken the question of the observance of the law must come up is clear. The most natural thing to happen would be that it should come up for discussion on purely practical lines and should take the form: how much must the Gentile Christians take over of the Commandments in order that the Jewish believers might have table-fellowship and social intercourse with them?
This is the form of the problem which Acts presupposes, and it gives us in the account of the so-called Apostolic Council a decision in accordance therewith.
The Epistle to the Galatians, on the other hand, asserts that the question of the validity of the law as such was raised at that time, and that Paul and the original apostles agreed to divide the spheres of their mission work into Gentile and Jewish. About the most pressing need, the establishment of a modus vivendi in mixed churches, nothing was done. This representation is much less natural than the other.
Nor is the case different in regard to the picture of Paul which these two sources give us. In Acts everything is clear and simple. The Apostle appears at first rather as an assistant to Barnabas, but afterwards makes himself independent, and maintains his position in relation to the original apostles by the force of his personality, in a free but not a hostile fashion.
In the letters, on the other hand, everything is unintelligible. Stress is laid on the fact that the Apostle of [pg 127] the Gentiles after his conversion has no intercourse with the original apostles and the Church, receives nothing whatever of the doctrinal tradition about Jesus, and draws his gospel entirely from revelation.
The statements regarding the external facts of his life are extremely confused. After his conversion he is said to have first spent three years in “Arabia” and then to have gone to Damascus, and from there, three years after his conversion, to have paid his “visit of ceremony” to the Church at Jerusalem, during which, however, he says that he saw only Peter, and James the Lord’s brother. After that he spent fourteen years in Syria and Cilicia.
Who can form a clear picture of the journeys implied in the letters, or of the relation of Paul to his churches?
Who can understand the character here presented? Sometimes the Apostle is radical, sometimes conservative, sometimes bold, sometimes despairing; in small things firm, in great things weakly yielding; now violent, then again mild; in all ways full of uncertainties and contradictions.
Far from arousing belief, the statements of the letters about the Apostle create difficulty upon difficulty and doubt upon doubt, if once one ventures to read them with an open mind. On the one side it seems as if a certain tendency to bring him into opposition with the original apostles made itself felt throughout, while on the other hand the traits are thrown together without any reference to an integral psychologically intelligible picture.
The most natural view is, therefore, that Acts represents what is historically most authentic, while in the letters an imaginary picture is drawn, exhibiting throughout the same tendency, but composed by various hands.
The external attestation in the early literature of a Pauline collection of letters, which is in any case not too brilliant, is further reduced by the radicals. The Ignatian letters are held—as they also are by the Tübingen [pg 128] school—to be spurious; and they endeavour to bring down the first epistle of Clement from the time of Domitian to the middle of the second century.96 If all this is admitted, the first attestation of the letters is that of Marcion. What, then, is there to oppose to the view that they had their origin in Gnostic circles and were only later forced upon the Church?
With this agrees, too, the fact that the Second Epistle of Peter, which alone in the New Testament makes mention of Paul’s literary activity,97 and which itself certainly belongs to the period of the struggle with Gnosticism, treats it as something in the nature of a “gift from the Greeks.”98
In any case, in view of the silence of Justin, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, and the Epistle of Barnabas, the attestation of the Pauline letters is no better than that of the Johannine literature.99
Great stress is laid on the fact that among the Gnostics the Epistles existed in a shorter form than in the Church, as appears from the reckoning which Tertullian holds with Marcion.100 If this shorter text can be reconstructed [pg 129] and proves to be the better, this would show that the Epistles passed from the hands of the Gnostics into that of the Church, and underwent in the process an expansion of a certain “tendency.”
In the hope of showing this, van Manen in the year 1887 reconstructed the Marcionite text of the Epistle to the Galatians.101 In regard to the other Epistles he does not attempt this, as Tertullian’s indications are insufficient.
The examination of the internal arguments takes the following form. These “Ultra-Tübingen” critics analyse the letters and point out all the difficulties which come to light in the course of exegetical study. They triumphantly establish the fact that there are many seams and divisions between the various verses and sections, that an ethico-mystical doctrine is found alongside of the juridical doctrine of justification, that the view of the law is subject to remarkable vacillations, and that it is not possible to weld together the different parts of the Epistles to the Romans and Corinthians, to determine the proper address of the Epistle to the Galatians, whether to the district or the province, to decide whether Romans presupposes Jewish-Christian or Gentile-Christian readers, and various questions of that kind.
The next point is to discover, if possible, some kind of system in the difficulties, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Steck and van Manen profess to be able to show that there is such a system.
What the letters tell us regarding the conversion, the life and work of Paul is not, according to them, to be considered earlier and more authentic than Acts, but is [pg 130] based on information which either coincides with the reports there given or points to an earlier common source. The material supplied by Acts is worked up in the letters under the influence of a tendency.
The existence of a written Gospel is also implied. All the passages in the Epistles which recall sayings of the Lord, and what the Epistles to the Corinthians in particular have to tell us about the institution of the Lord’s Supper and the resurrection of Jesus, make, they think, the impression of having been drawn from Luke, or an earlier Gospel which is one of his sources. Steck and van Manen are even inclined to hold that in Rom. ii. 16 and xvi. 25 the words “my Gospel” refer to a written Gospel, as indeed the Church Fathers also thought.
That the four main Epistles cannot all be from the same hand is, they think, manifest from the differences between them. Further, the order in which they were written can, these writers think, be recognised. This order does not agree with that generally accepted, since the Epistle to the Galatians is not placed before Corinthians and Romans, but concludes the series. Steck endeavours to give a detailed proof that it was written after Romans and presupposes the latter. Wherever in Galatians there appear gaps and obscurities, a glance at Romans always, he affirms, gives the desired explanation. The more strongly the opposition to the law comes to expression, the later is the writing in question to be placed in the series of the Pauline writings, in which a development is traceable.
Another point to which the “Ultra-Tübingen” critics attach importance is to discover criteria by which various strata can be distinguished in the main Epistles themselves. They propose to regard the Epistles to the Corinthians as fragments of Pauline literature which have gradually been worked up together into letters. In regard to the letter to the Romans, van Manen holds that it originally consisted, roughly speaking, of chapters [pg 131] i.-viii., and was only gradually extended to its present form.102
It is also, these critics consider, certain that a number of hands have been at work on the letters, and that the increasingly anti-Jewish tendency shows us the direction followed by the efforts of the Pauline school.
Steck and van Manen assume that the teaching represented in the Epistles is of a Greek character. They think they can show that the Pauline school were influenced by Philo and Seneca, and seek to explain Paulinism as an “attempt to spiritualise primitive Christianity.”
Essentially, they think, it belongs to Gnosticism, since it sets aside the “authority of tradition” and derives all knowledge, without historical mediation, from the revelation of the Spirit, and conceives of this knowledge as a system. The deification of Jesus Christ which is represented in the letters is also to be regarded as Greek and Gnostic.
By these observations Steck and van Manen are inevitably led to the decisive consideration regarding “time and space.”
Could a Christology of this kind come into being a few years only after the death of the historical Jesus? Is an intense anti-Judaism in primitive Christian times intelligible? Can Greek, Gnostical ideas be assumed to have existed in the first generation?
Steck and van Manen deny that this is possible and demand a longer period for the transformation of which the evidence lies before us. Therefore the historic Paul, [pg 132] if there ever was such a man, as is almost certainly the case, was not the creator of the Paulinism represented by the Epistles.
How, then, is the origin of the letters and the doctrine to be explained?
On the basis of the facts which they observe in the documents, and the consideration regarding the necessity of time and space, the “Ultra-Tübingen” critics throw out the following hypothesis.
Christianity, they hold, remained at first Jewish. But as time went on, and as it spread beyond Palestine, two different tendencies manifested themselves within it. One, as the result of contact with Gentiles, and no doubt in consequence of the destruction of the Jewish State, moved in the direction of attaching less and less importance to the law, while the other maintained the older stand-point.
In general the development, due to the influence of Graeco-Roman ideas, proceeded without a struggle. Its goal was a “catholicism” such as meets us in Justin.
Within this “Gnostic” party, however, there appeared a school which put the question of the relation to Judaism and the law in its most trenchant form, as a question of principle, and sought to bring it to a decisive issue.
Somewhere or other—perhaps in the Roman Church, perhaps in several places at the same time—where Gnostics and representatives of the older view were at odds, an open conflict broke out. The former party fought with literary weapons, dating back the controversy by means of an epistolary literature specially created for the purpose into primitive Christian times.
In the course of the struggle the antithesis became more and more acute. The climax is marked by the Epistle to the Galatians. Here a “Gnostic” endeavours, with the aid of the already existing Pauline literature, and depending more particularly on Romans, to defend the stand-point of liberal Gentile Christianity against a “Jewish Christianity” which, as it seems, was “making [pg 133] headway.” “With all the force of his intellectual superiority” he scourges the tendencies of a period which was endeavouring to make Christianity once more Jewish.
The form of a letter to the Galatians was given to the work, according to Steck’s hypothesis, “because the literary genre of Apostolic letters held an established position; and since the churches at Rome and Corinth already had their Epistles, the Galatian province, familiar in connexion with the first missionary journey in Acts, suggested itself as the appropriate scene of the struggle, since it was there that the Apostle had first had to suffer from the persecutions of the Jews. As the Epistle to the Galatians followed on the three other main epistles, and the Epistle to the Romans had already selected as its time and place the last visit of the Apostle to Corinth, shortly before his arrest at Jerusalem, the time of the Roman imprisonment suggested itself as the situation of the writer to be implied in the Epistle. During his imprisonment Paul receives news of the threatened, and in part already accomplished, falling away of the Galatian churches from his Gospel, and feeling himself about to take leave of the world he directs to the wavering churches this letter as the purest and most intense expression of his heart and mind.”
The main Epistles originated about the years 120-140. The elements from which they are worked up may be ten or twenty years earlier. A final redaction may have taken place even subsequently to 140.
Why, exactly, the school of thought which created this literature took Paul as its patron, it is, according to van Manen, impossible to explain. He holds that the historic Apostle had as little to do with Paulinism as John the Apostle with the theology of the Fourth Gospel. Steck, on the other hand, is inclined to admit the historical justification of this connexion. For him, it is to be held as certain that Paul was the first to “open the door of the Christian salvation freely to the Gentiles.” The doctrine [pg 134] of justification by faith must therefore already in some shape or other have formed part of his preaching. Only the strictly systematic and sharply anti-Jewish development of the doctrine was supplied by the later school.
Steck is therefore here, as on some other points, more conservative and less “critical” than van Manen. Nevertheless the differences are not very noticeable in comparison with the extent of the views which they share.
Theology of the post-Baur period generally had ignored Bruno Bauer; it would willingly have treated in the same way those who took up his work again. Since this was not possible, and references to “wild hypotheses” and “rash, wrong-headed critics” did not completely suffice to dispose of them, the authorities great and small had necessarily to undertake a refutation, which they prudently confined to the most pressing and the easiest points.
The discussions were for the most part carried on in periodicals. A work on the other side of an importance at all corresponding to those of Loman, Steck, and van Manen was not forthcoming.103
How far is it possible to refute their view?
In the domain of the external arguments, the main strength of the revolutionaries, the position is not so favourable to them as Loman wished to represent it. The transference of the first Epistle of Clement to the middle of the second century is not possible.104 The fact that Justin knew and used Paul’s writings, while he does not name him, is not explained by the hypothesis that they did not rank for him as Church writings.105
The Marcionite text of Galatians reconstructed by van Manen is not better but worse than the canonical text.106 If the Ignatian letters, as is now generally held, are genuine, the attestation of the Pauline Epistles is in much better case than was formerly supposed. That Acts says nothing about the literary activity of the Apostle has at most the value of an argumentum e silentio. It is not otherwise in regard to the fact that Acts has nothing to say of the conflicts between him and his churches. In regard to the question of priority as between its narrative and that of Galatians there is at least nothing certain to be said.
The position of matters is therefore that the Epistles to the Romans and Corinthians are witnessed to by the first Epistle of Clement at the end of the first century, but that neither the legitimate nor the illegitimate [pg 136] representatives of the Tübingen tradition can explain why Justin and the remaining writers of the beginning of the second century are not under the influence of these Epistles, and, with the exception of Clement, do not even mention them.
The hypothesis brought forward by Steck and van Manen in regard to different strata within the Epistles and the development which culminates in the antinomianism of the Epistle to the Galatians cannot be proved from the texts; the evidence is read into them by the exercise of great ingenuity.
But the negative observation which formed their starting-point holds its ground. Ordinary exegesis has not succeeded in getting rid of the illogical transitions and contradictions and making Paul’s arguments really intelligible. The impression of a certain disconnectedness is not to be denied. But Steck and van Manen have not succeeded in discovering the law and order which ought to prevail in it, and showing how the chaos arose in connexion with the creation of this literature.
Against the hypothesis of the origin of Paulinism in the second century there lies the objection that it is built on purely arbitrary assumptions. Whence do Steck and van Manen know anything about anti-Jewish conflicts taking place at that time? There is no evidence of any such thing in the contemporary literature; and the writings of the apostolic Fathers make quite in the contrary direction.
On the other hand, the general considerations which led them to adopt this hypothesis have not been in any way invalidated. The illegitimate Tübingen critics share with the legitimate school the presupposition that Paulinism signifies a Hellenisation of the Gospel; they are also at one with their adversaries in regarding this unproved and unprovable assumption as proved. The difference is that they do not follow the others in their second exhibition of naïveté—that of regarding this Greek religious faith as being coincident with primitive [pg 137] Christianity, but demand space and time for a development of this character. But the two wrestlers have the same chain about their feet; whichever of them throws the other into the water must drown along with him.
That they are both involved in the same fundamental view of Paulinism sometimes comes to the consciousness of the post-Baur theology and its radical opponents. In a momentary aberration of this kind Heinrici ventures to praise Bruno Bauer for having discovered the relationship of Paul to the religious life of the ancient world, and is prepared to see his weakness only in the inferences which he draws from this discovery.107
Steck, on his part, praises Heinrici’s commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians, in which the Hellenistic element is so excellently traced, and expresses the hope that the exegete and his party will consider carefully whether the composition of this work “does not stand in an even much closer relationship to Hellenism than had previously been supposed.”
The more the theologians who derive from Baur emphasise the Greek element in Paulinism the more helpless they are against the “Ultra-Tübingen” critics. For it is after all merely a matter of clearness and courage of thought whether they venture to raise the question about space and time. The moment they take this step they are lost. Nevermore can they find the way which leads back through the green pastures of sound common-sense theology, but are condemned to wander about with the revolutionaries in the wilderness of flat unreason. Wearied with problems, they come at last, like Steck and van Manen, to a condition of mind in which the wildest hypothesis appeals to them more than rational knowledge, if the latter demands the suppression of questioning.
How is it conceivable that a man of the primitive Christian period could, in consequence of a purely practical controversy regarding the observance or non-observance of the law by Gentile believers, go on, as Baur and [pg 138] his successors represent—to reject the law on principle? How could it be possible that, at that time, doctrine should take a frankly Gnostic shape, and in deliberate contempt of the tradition of the historic Jesus, should, under the eyes of the men who had been His companions, appeal only to revelation?
That is the element of greatness in the “Ultra-Tübingen” critics, that they did not forget the duty of asking questions, when it had fallen out of fashion among other theologians. To show that their hypothesis is untenable is by no means to get rid of it, as accredited theology wished to persuade itself. A few squadrons of cavalry which were skirmishing in the open have been cut off; the fortress has not been taken, indeed the siege has not even been laid.
The chronicle of the discussion between contemporary theology and the revolutionaries is quite without interest. As soon as the refutation on points of detail was finished, and the fundamental questions regarding time and place came on the scene, there remained nothing for it to do but to stammer, with an embarrassed smile, something about tradition, intuition, an unmistakable impression, the stamp of genuineness, and the like, and to break off the conversation as quickly as might be.
What it could or could not refute, and what the other party could or could not prove, followed necessary from the form which the problem had assumed. The construction of the illegitimate Tübingen critics answers, in reverse, to that of the legitimate school, like the reflection in a mirror to the object reflected. The presuppositions and the difficulties are the same in the two cases; the two solutions correspond except that they go in opposite directions. Both recognise that not only a conflict of practice, but one involving theory and principle, for and against the law, is fought out in the letters. The legitimate school place it in primitive Christian times, but cannot show how it was possible at that period, and how it could break off so suddenly that in the post-Pauline [pg 139] literature there is not an echo of it, and it seems as though it had never been.
The illegitimate school represent the struggle as having occurred in the course of the second century, but can cite no evidence for this from the remaining literature, can point to no traces of the gradual growth of the opposition, or show how a struggle of that kind could break out at that time.
Both explanations labour in vain at the problem of the inexplicable neglect of Paulinism in the post-Apostolic literature.
Both parties assume as a datum that the doctrine of the letters is to be considered as a Hellenised Christianity. The one party represents the process which leads to this result as taking place in primitive Christian times, without being able to show how such a thing is possible, or how the Greek and the Jewish-eschatological elements mutually tolerated and united with one another.
According to the other party, the Hellenisation came about in the course of a long development. But they cannot explain why Paulinism shows an entirely different character from that of the Greek Christianity which appears elsewhere in the literature of the second century. They assert that it belongs to Gnosticism; and are right in this so far as regards the form of the system. On the other hand they cannot allow themselves to consider seriously the difference between the doctrine of the letters and the fundamental views of the known Gnostic schools, or the hypothesis flies in pieces. The Gnostics were real spiritualists, opposed to eschatology, and denying a corporeal resurrection; Paul is an eschatologist, looking for the parousia and the transformation of the body. Therefore the “Ultra-Tübingen” critics must either explain the Jewish eschatological element in the system in such a way as to spiritualise it, or else drop it out of sight.
And as a matter of fact the ominous word eschatology is, one might almost say, never mentioned in their works.
The parallel between what the one and the other construction can and cannot make intelligible goes through to the last detail. For both it is true that the ostensible solution in each case introduces openly or otherwise a new problem which arises out of the solution itself. The sum of what is explained and unexplained is the same for both.
At first sight the position of the legitimate successors of the Tübingen school is more favourable than that of the other party. They have tradition and natural impression on their side, and are able to regard the situation implied in the Epistles as historic, whereas their opponents are bound to show that it is fictitious. When subjected to critical examination, however, they are no better off, for they cannot give any proof that the main epistles can belong to primitive Christianity and to it only. When they declared again and again that the attacks of the radicals had served a useful purpose in inciting them to examine anew their results, and to make corrections where necessary, that was the mere cant of criticism. If they had dared to make an effort to understand the objection which Loman, Steck, and van Manen constantly repeated, and to consider whether they could really prove the Pauline origin of the main epistles, or whether they did not really by their conception of the doctrine make it improbable, they would have been bound to perceive that nothing could be done by revising and correcting; it was a case of mutually exclusive alternatives.
As matters stood, they had to choose between being consistent but irrational, or rational but inconsistent. They chose the latter form of the dilemma and left the other to the radicals.
The Ultra-Tübingen critics on their part cannot escape the blame of raising the question in a one-sided purely literary form, and not concerning themselves with the thought contained in the Epistles, because they felt that herein lay the weak point of their undertaking. Instead of analysing the system, they made play with the [pg 141] catchwords Greek and Gnostic, and thought to have got rid in that way of the question regarding the essential character of Paulinism. If contemporary theology did not grasp the problem which was presented to it in its full significance, that was partly due to the pettifogging way in which it was formulated. The representatives of radical criticism were like criminals who cannot rise to the height of their crime!
For a time it almost looked as if a modus vivendi had been found between the successors of Baur’s school and the radicals. Steck, who stood on the right wing of the revolutionaries, refused to give up the belief that the historic Paul had in some way or other fought a battle for freedom from the law, and might be indirectly claimed as the starting-point of the theology which reaches its full development in the Epistles. From this it was only a short step to the hypothesis that the Epistles were not wholly spurious but combined thoughts of the Apostle with later views.
A criticism based on the distinction of original and interpolated elements did not need to be now for the first time called into being. It already existed, and had indeed made its appearance contemporaneously with Bruno Bauer’s. Like the latter it had been either talked down or left to die of neglect.
In the first volume of his “Philosophic Dogmatic” (1855), when speaking of the documentary sources of our knowledge of Christianity, Christian Hermann Weisse defines his attitude towards the Pauline Epistles and offers the results of a study extending over many years, which he had undertaken in opposition to the conservatives on the one side and the Tübingen school on the other.108
His method he himself describes as criticism based on style. A man like Paul, he argues, has so characteristic a literary style that it will serve one who has made himself [pg 142] thoroughly familiar with it as an unfailing criterion of what is genuine and what is not. Such a method of criticism must of course be prepared to be accused of arbitrariness and subjectivity. But that is no great matter. The fruits will vouch for the goodness of the tree.
The standard of indubitably genuine Pauline style is furnished, according to Weisse, by the First Epistle to the Corinthians. It bears in all its parts the stamp of the most complete integrity and genuineness. The eye which has acquired due fineness of perception by the study of this writing discovers that only the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, the First to the Thessalonians, and that to Philemon, “can boast of preserving in the same purity the original apostolic text.” The Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, Philippians, and Colossians “have interwoven in them a regular series of interpolations, which so far efface the genuine apostolic character of the style in many places as to render it unrecognisable, and have given rise to that difficulty of disentangling the meaning which has made Romans especially a crux interpretum, and by the forced artificiality, intrinsic falsity, and unnaturalness of these interpretations has made this Epistle the bane of theological study; of which, in virtue of the character of its fundamental ideas, it was fitted to be the most precious treasure.”109
The whole of these interpolations are, he thinks, from one and the same hand, and go back to a time previous to the ecclesiastical use of the writings. The redactor cherished withal the most respectful awe of the Apostle’s words, and has hardly deleted a single one of them.
What remains after the elimination of the secondary stratum in the Epistles to the Romans and Philippians [pg 143] does not prove to be an integral whole. The latter consists of two letters to this church, the second beginning with iii. 3. With the former there has been worked up a letter to a church in Asia Minor, consisting of ix.-xi. and xvi. 1-20.110
Weisse did not get the length of publishing the reconstructed text of the Epistles. When his pupil Sulze carried it through after his death,111 the prophecy which the author had put on record in his “Dogmatics” regarding his undertaking was fulfilled. It met with “universal disbelief.”
In part the cause of this ill-success lay in the one-sidedness of the principle maintained by the author. Weisse confines himself entirely to “stylistic criticism.” While he recognises the possibility of a distinction between genuine and spurious based on the contents, the trains of thought, of the letters, he will have nothing to do with it.
With the controversy about the genuineness of the main Epistles there began a new era of “interpolation criticism.” Daniel Völter, rendered confident by the professedly “assured results” of the criticism of the Apocalypse in regard to the distinction of sources, thinks to find in a similar procedure the solution of the Pauline problem, and hopes that it will be possible by “careful criticism” to separate the genuine from the spurious.112
He differs entirely from Weisse in seeking the criterion for the distinction of what is genuine from what is spurious in the subject-matter. What is simple and “plain”—the [pg 144] latter expression recurs again and again—is to be regarded as primitive-Christian and Pauline, but anything which has the appearance of being complicated or having the character of a speculative system is to be regarded as of later origin.
Thus wherever we find a highly developed Christology, speculations regarding the Spirit, and eschatology, strongly predestinarian views, and an advanced estimate of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, we are, according to Völter, in the presence of interpolations. A further mark by which these may be recognised is an advanced antinomianism.
The doctrine of the historic Paul includes, according to this author, the following points: The central point in it is the death of Christ, regarded as an atoning death appointed by God and ratified by the resurrection. Man becomes partaker of its fruits by faith, and thus obtains justification by the forgiveness of sins, of which he is given assurance by the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Faith also includes within it, however, a “mystico-ethical partaking in the death of Christ.” Therefore in the act of faith there takes place at the same time an inner conversion to a life well-pleasing to God, which causes the believer “to appear blameless on the day of Christ and makes him a partaker in the resurrection.”
As regards the relation of the Epistle to the Galatians to Acts Völter takes over the conclusions, unfavourable to the former, of the radical critics. Consequently this work is spurious throughout. It only reproduces the ideas of the interpolators of the letters to the Romans and Corinthians, and pushes to an extreme the antinomianism there represented. It dates from near the end of the first century.
In the Epistles to the Corinthians—we are still following Völter—the interpolations are not very extensive. The most important is the correction applied to the original Pauline doctrine of resurrection, in 2 Corinthians 4 and 5, where the redactor has worked in his Platonico-Stoic doctrine of immortality.
The Epistle to the Romans has been very extensively interpolated.113 The original writing was addressed to Gentile readers. The interpolator, on the other hand, has in view readers “who occupy an Old Testament stand-point.” That is connected with the far-reaching development which began at Rome after the Neronian persecution. At that time, as is proved, Völter thinks, by the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Epistle of Barnabas, together with the first Epistle of Clement and the Shepherd of Hermas, the Church at Rome “fell back upon a religious stand-point determined by Old Testament ideas.” It is this “reduction of Christianity to Jewish Old Testament religion, modified by Christianity,” that the interpolator is concerned to combat. In doing so he is forced to enter upon general speculations regarding the flesh, sin, and the law; in order “to defend the independence and superiority of Christianity” he develops an antinomianism, according to which the law had as its sole purpose, “by intensifying the misery of sin, to prepare men for deliverance from sin and the law, by the redemption which is in Jesus Christ.”114
Völter’s work is one of the adroitest performances in the whole field of Pauline study. It is not only that it represents what is in its own way a brilliant synthesis between Weisse and the radicals; its main significance [pg 146] lies in the fact that it breaks off the barren literary-critical logomachy, and directs attention once more to the subject-matter.
Steck and van Manen had failed, once they went beyond the simple registration of inconcinnities in the text; Völter lets the theological problems have something to say for themselves. He observes more clearly than any one had stated it before exactly wherein the complexity of the question of the law consists, and rightly refers it to the fact that some passages take for granted its observance by the Jews as unquestionably right and proper, and only seek to maintain the freedom of the Gentiles in regard to it, whereas others reject it in principle, in such a way that Paul would be obliged to maintain also the emancipation of the Jews . . . if the rules of logical inference are to be applied. As it is, however, there is a want of congruence between the negative theory and the limitation of the practical demand.
In an equally thoroughgoing fashion Völter deals with the problems of Christology and of the doctrine of the Spirit, and eschatology.
His solution is ingenious and elegant. Of the hypothesis which places the controversies about the law in the post-apostolic period only so much is taken over as is absolutely necessary. The connexion between Paulinism and Gnosticism is made as loose as possible. The eschatology has a certain importance given to it. Hellenic elements are not assumed to be present in the primitive doctrine; on the other hand, a knowledge of the Book of Wisdom, Philo, Seneca and the Graeco-Roman philosophy in general is ascribed to the interpolators.
The criterion by which to distinguish what is genuine from what is not is ingeniously chosen. It is not particularly difficult to separate in the letters the parts which are mainly plain and practical from those which relate to an antinomian speculative system. The resulting division between original text and interpolations has a [pg 147] more natural and simple air than is the case in any of the other attempts to draw the line between them.
Nevertheless, it was scarcely possible that this work should contribute anything to the solution of the Pauline problem. It is built upon sand, for the argument on which everything is based is unsound.
Völter asserts that “simplicity” is the mark of what is genuinely apostolic and Pauline. Since when? How does he know this? How, if it were just the other way round, and the strange, the abstruse, the systematic, the antinomian, the predestinarian represented the original element, and what is simple came in later!
What he describes as the doctrine of the historic Paul has not a very convincing look. It has not the ring of what we find elsewhere in early Christian literature, but has a suspicious resemblance to the Good Friday and Easter-day meditations of the Christliche Welt.115
What does not strike the modern man and his theology as distinctly peculiar is gathered together and receives the stamp of approval as historic Paulinism! Völter, like every one else, has failed to consider, or to grasp, that fundamental question as to what is primitive-Christian in the Apostle’s teaching, which, since the encounter between Baur and Ritschl, had tacitly dominated the discussion and had been again forced on the theological centre-party by the radicals. Otherwise it would have been impossible that he, after promising a “cautious criticism,” should have so incautiously decided that what is simple is what is primitive-Christian.
Apart from Völter, the criticism which claims to distinguish various sources and detect interpolations is of a more innocent and guileless description. It does not plunge into the depths of the Pauline problems in the attempt to reach the firm ground that has never yet been reached, but amuses itself by determining what and how many original writings of the Apostle may have been worked up into the canonical Epistles to the [pg 148] Corinthians, Romans, and Philippians. This work, at which Semler had already made a beginning, is in itself necessary and interesting. The results, however, prove to be uncertain and contradictory, because the criteria by which the deletions, dissections, and combinations are determined, are always derived from subjective impression.
The one consolation in regard to them is that any importance which attaches to these results concerns almost exclusively the pre-canonical literary history of the Epistles and does not affect our knowledge of the Pauline system. The supposed interpolations are of a subsidiary character. The text as a whole is hardly seriously affected by them. The sense is scarcely altered by the dislocations and conflations by which one critic or another restores the original letters and releases the present-day reader from the tutelage of the so inconceivably astute redactor.
It remains to remark that most of the scholars who have occupied themselves with this work do not trouble themselves very much about the meaning and the connexion of Paul’s statements, but are like surgeons who think more of their skill in handling the knife than of being quite sure about the diagnosis which is to direct the incision, and therefore not seldom fall victims to the temptation of having recourse to an operation in cases where it turns out to have been unnecessary or even injurious.116
As a work which stands much above the average of [pg 149] the usual cutting-up hypotheses we may mention Spitta’s work on Romans.117
He distinguishes in the canonical Epistle two writings, a longer one consisting of, in the main—allowing for incidental interpolations—chapters i.-xi. with fragments from xv. and xvi., and a shorter writing which is made up of chapters xii., xiii. and xiv., with fragments of xv. and xvi. The longer one, which is the older, is supposed to have been preserved entire, the shorter is of later origin, and it lacks the introduction.
The problem of the composite character of the main epistle in connexion with the address and similar questions, is solved by supposing that it is a working up of an earlier general treatise intended for Jewish Christians into a letter addressed to the Roman Gentile Christians.
The controversy about the much-discussed series of greetings in Rom. xvi. is disposed of by attaching this to the shorter epistle, which is held to have been written between the first and second imprisonment. It is true this solution can only find favour with those who have made up their minds to take upon them the burdensome hypothesis of the second imprisonment along with the complete or partial acceptance of the genuineness of the Pastoral epistles.
In working them up, the redactor is supposed to have followed the method of bringing in the arguments of the second letter in those places in the first where they seemed most appropriate. That he showed no remarkable address in this process is credited to him as a proof of his historical existence.
Holtzmann has nothing very complimentary to say about the representatives of the dissection and interpolation criticism. In his New Testament Theology he reproaches them with “straining out the gnat,” and indulging in critical vivisection, instead of studying the [pg 150] currents and undercurrents of Jewish and Hellenistic thought which run side by side through Paul’s work, and so becoming cured of their mania.
In connexion with this, it is, however, curious that he himself, when he was asked why he never lectured on the Epistle to the Romans, used to say that the composition of Romans was, in his opinion, too problematical for him to venture to deal with the Epistle, so long as he was not obliged to do so.