duced a great study of the Apostle, The Life and Letters of St. Paul (1920), on the scale of Conybeare and Howson, in which he surveys with breadth of scholarship the old and the new knowledge of Paul, but with a touch of condescension at times out of keeping with the facts. Hayes does not call Paul the greatest theologian. He reserves that honor for John (Paul and His Epistles, 1915, p. 487). That is a matter of judgment, but Hayes admits that Paul's influence as an interpreter of Christ has been greater than that of John. Perhaps the truth is that John saw deeper into the mind and heart of Christ by the singleness of his gaze and the length of his fellowship with Christ. Paul is a man of more genius and more variety and of a wider culture and of a more practical turn of mind. He has seen more sides of Christ and of Christianity than John and has interpreted more aspects of Christ for more kinds of men. However, Paul remains today, as of old, the chief Interpreter of Jesus Christ for modern men. He cannot be gotten rid of. His grip on the mind of modern Christians is unshaken in spite of all criticism and progress. We must go back to Christ, but we must go by way of Paul. John shows Paul's influence as do Luke and Mark. and Barnabas felt the force of Paul's leadership. That leadership is still dominant, for Paul knew Christ after the Spirit of God.1

Peter

'Bacon's new volume, Jesus and Paul (1921), came into my hands as I was correcting the proof of this volume. McNeile's St. Paul (1920) is a masterly study.

CHAPTER II

THE VERSATILITY OF PAUL

The cry of "Back to Christ" has not disposed of Paul. The great Apostle continues to give criticism a busy time. He is accused of having perverted the simple gospel of the kingdom as preached by Jesus into an abstract theology foreign to the thought and purpose of Christ. He is called the second founder of Christianity, in reality the destroyer of the Christianity of Christ. So we have had the "Jesus or Paul" controversy.1 The battle is still raging over the Pauline Christology, and several recent volumes 2 treat this topic. Paul is condemned by some for rabbinising

1

1 Breitenstein, Jésus et Paul, 1908; Heine, Jesus Christus und Paulus, 1902; Goguel, L'apôtre Paul et Jésus Christ, 1904; Jülicher, Paulus und Jesus, 1910; Kaftan, Jesus und Paulus, 1906; Knowling, Testimony of St. Paul to Christ, 1911 (second ed.); A. Meyer, Jesus or Paul (tr.), 1909; Reid, Jesus the Christ and Paul the Apostle in the Light of Modern Criticism, 1915; Resch, Paulinismus und die Logia Jesu, 1904; C. A. Scott, Jesus and Paul (Cambridge Biblical Essays, 1909); J. Weiss, Paul and Jesus (tr.), 1909; Bacon, Jesus and Paul, 1921.

* Allen, The Christology of St. Paul, 1912; Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 1909; Olchewski, Die Wurzeln der paulinischen Christologie, 1909; Rostron, The Christology of St. Paul, 1912; Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ, 1912. See also R. H. Strachan's The Individuality of St. Paul, 1916.

1

Christianity, though Montefiore thinks that he did not properly understand Judaism which he denounces. Sir W. M. Ramsay contends in his books on Paul that he was familiar with the best things in current Hellenism, though he was a thorough Jew at bottom. "A Palestinian Jew could never have grown into the Apostle of the Græco-Roman world" (Ramsay, The Hellenism of Paul in the Teaching of Paul in Terms of the Present Day, 1913, p. 32). But Principal A. E. Garvie 2 disputes both the quantity and the quality of this Greek training of Paul. "In the mind of Paul a universalised Hellenism coalesced with a universalised Hebraism" (Ramsay, The Cities of St. Paul, p. 73). Indeed, the mystery-religions of the Græco-Roman world are held by some to be the determining factor in Paul's theology, a view ably answered by Professor H. A. A. Kennedy, but still advocated by Professor W. Morgan in his now famous volume, The Religion and Theology of St. Paul, 1917, clearly refuted also by Professor Kennedy in The Expositor 5 for August and September, 1917. Dr. Maurice Jones considers this onslaught on the orthodox view of Paul parallel in importance with the crisis raised by the criticism. of Baur: "I have no doubt that this attack will be as

4

3

1Judaism and St. Paul, 1915, p. 87.

6

Studies of Paul and His Gospel, 1911, p. 8; The Expositor, May, 1911, pp. 376 ff.

'Cf. Reitzenstein, Die hellenistischen Mysterien-religionen, 1910.

5

St. Paul and the Mystery-Religions, 1913.

A New Interpretation of Paulinism.

"Pauline Criticism in the Present Day," The Expositor, July, 1917, p. 31.

successfully repelled as was that of Baur, and that in the providence of God another Lightfoot will arise who, with a wider knowledge of the history of religion as a whole, and with a truer insight into the real significance of the development of Christian doctrine than those possessed by this school of critics, will do for the integrity and continuity of St. Paul's doctrine what Lightfoot did for the authenticity of the Epistles." I heartily agree with this prophecy. But even before the new Lightfoot comes, it is possible for us to keep our balance about Paul. Schweitzer, in his Paul and His Interpreters (1912), is merciless in the keenness and the force of his criticisms of ancient and modern interpreters of Paul. One recognises the pungency of his points till he undertakes himself to explain Paul's theology from the standpoint of eschatology alone.

1

So we go round in an endless circle or fly off at a tangent. Now we are told that Paul is a sacramentarian, this latest attempt to explain Paul by one idea. Even the able Heinrich J. Holtzmann went over to this view, and Professor H. T. Andrews argued in The Expositor for November, 1916, that this was now a settled fact with which evangelical Christians must reckon. My brief protest against claiming Paul as a sacramentarian was followed by an extended and adequate defence of the spiritual nature of Paul's message by Professor W. H. Griffith-Thomas, of

2

'The Expositor, February, 1917.

'The Expositor, May, 1917, "The Place of the Sacraments in the Teaching of St. Paul."

Toronto.1 Professor G. G. Findlay has sounded a needed note in his able article on "The Unity of St. Paul's Teaching," in the July London Quarterly Review. The apparently contradictory elements in Paul's teaching admit of easy and natural synthesis if once we let Paul be his own interpreter. This Dr. Findlay shows with characteristic ability. Paul was not an intellectual and theological chameleon, a mere jellyfish. He was "all things to all men," not because of mental flabbiness, but "that I may by all means save some" (1 Cor. ix. 22). This dominant. purpose runs through all of Paul's thinking and working. He was not drifting about picking up scraps of wisdom in the Agora of Athens, as the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers sneered (Acts xvii. 18), but a great constructive thinker with a true philosophy of history and of life. He was not grasping at straws to save himself, but he was projecting a great campaign to evangelise the Roman world for Christ. He lived among men, to be sure, and was no scholastic recluse out of touch with men, though not a mere artisan as Deissmann argues in his St. Paul. We shall never understand Paul's gospel till we understand "the Individuality of St. Paul" (R. H. Strachan, 1916). The notion that Paul was a borrower and made a patchwork of his theology, a kind of ill-assorted crazy-quilt, is not new. Lightfoot treated with great lucidity and force the alleged relations between Paul and Seneca in his commentary on Philippians. It is idle to assert that Paul was a Stoic because he shows familiarity