with the Risen Christ, the Jesus of Nazareth whom the Jews had crucified. He claimed that he received of the Lord, how the Lord Jesus instituted the supper on the night in which he was betrayed (1 Cor. xi. 23-34). In this exposition Paul gives a non-sacramental interpretation of the supper: "This do in remembrance of me." To make the symbolic meaning beyond controversy, he adds: "For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye proclaim the Lord's death till he come" (xi. 26). There is no "magic" here. We may set aside as irrelevant the question whether Paul received this direct revelation from the Lord Jesus, as I sincerely believe to be true. The point in dispute is Paul's own interpretation of the ordinance in the non-sacramental sense. This is as plain as a pikestaff. It is quite beside the mark to produce proof of what the Mithraists meant by their baptism and by their suppers. That is eisegesis, not exegesis. Paul is himself the most competent exponent of Paulinism. He is entitled to the canons of criticism applied to Plato or to Shakespeare. Paul was a mystic (cf. Campbell, Paul the Mystic, 1907), but he was no raving rhapsodist. This many-sidedness is a peril only to those unable to understand a real man of flesh and blood, this statesman, this tent-maker, this rabbi, this philosopher, this scholar, this orator, this theologian, this missionary, this pastor, this ecclesiastic, this humanitarian, this lover of Jesus Christ, this great Christian freeman.

CHAPTER III

PAUL AND THE DEITY OF CHRIST

The Outlook, of New York, in a very kindly review of my "Divinity of Christ in the Gospel of John," closes with these words: "The thesis to which the Gospel thus leads him up is, 'Jesus is God.' It is certain that Paul, in Epistles of earlier date than the earliest Gospel, and of undisputed authorship, never taught that."

The reviewer admits that John's Gospel does teach that view of Jesus, but pits Paul's Epistles against John's Gospel to the discredit of the Gospel.

Now, if the reviewer means that Paul did not say in so many words, "Jesus is God," he is correct. But neither does John say these words, though he evidently says the thing in substance. John says that the Word was God (John 1:1) and that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). He makes it perfectly evident that he considers the incarnate Son of God, the eternal Logos. John also represents Thomas as addressing Jesus as "My Lord and my God" (John 20:28).

How is it with Paul? Luke in Acts 20:28 (correct text, margin of Revised Version) reports Paul as saying to the elders of Ephesus at Miletus: "Feed the church of God which he purchased with his own

blood." The two oldest and best Greek manuscripts of the New Testament (Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) read "God" here, not "Lord." But, it may be replied, this is simply Luke's report of Paul's speech.

In Romans 9:5, Paul himself says: "Whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ as concerning the flesh, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen." This is the text of the Revised Version. The old Greek had no punctuation and one is at liberty to make his own punctuation. There is no semicolon after "flesh; he who is over all, God, be blessed for ever. Amen." This is possible to be sure, but nothing like so natural either in the Greek or in the English. Besides, the phrase "Christ as concerning the flesh" clearly suggests Christ not according to the flesh and seems to demand "God" in apposition to complete the sense.

But this is by no means all. The Epistle to Titus is not admitted as Pauline by all scholars, but the balance of evidence still turns that way. In Titus 2:13 we read: "Looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ" (margin of the Revised Version). The text (R. V.) reads "of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ." The papyri and inscriptions furnish abundant proof that the expression "Our great God and Saviour" was a current formula in the worship of the Roman emperor. Paul simply took this formula and applied it to Christ (cf. my Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research, p. 786; Moulton's Prolegomena to New Testament Greek, p. 84).

In Colossians 1:15f. Paul describes Jesus as “the

image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him were all things created," language that reminds one curiously of the opening verse of John's Gospel.

Bacon (The Fourth Gospel in Research and Debate, p. 7) says: "All of the Logos doctrine but the name is already present in the Pauline Epistles." It is hardly worth while to split hairs over the word "God" when the idea is the same. Besides, as already shown, it is not at all certain that Paul did not apply the word "God" to Jesus. The balance of the evidence in Acts 20:28, Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13 is in favor of that position. Besides, Paul in numerous passages calls Jesus "Lord," a common word for God in the Old Testament and in the Gospels. He also places Jesus on an equality with God in various passages, even in the earliest Epistles, as "in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thess. 1:1), "peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" (2 Thess. I:1), "now our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father" (2 Thess. 2:14), "through Jesus Christ, and God the Father" (Gal. I:1).

And then in that famous passage, Philippians 2:6-11, Paul expressly asserts the preincarnate state of Christ "in the form of God" "on an equality with God." This great passage affirms the deity of Christ and the humanity of Jesus and the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

"No man can say, Jesus is Lord, but in the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor. 12:3). The preincarnate riches of Christ Paul asserts in 2 Corinthians 8:9.

This is by no means all that Paul has on this sub

ject, but it is enough to controvert completely the opinion of The Outlook reviewer that "Paul never taught that" (the deity of Jesus Christ), as John's Gospel has it.

The simple truth is that all the New Testament books have the same attitude toward Jesus. Dr. Lukyn Williams has a new and able discussion of Matthew's Gospel under the title, The Hebrew Christian Messiah, in which he shows conclusively that the author of the first Gospel presents and proves the deity of Christ. The same position appears in the so-called Logia (the Qof criticism).

Mark does no other.

Modern criticism has shown that all the sources of our knowledge agree that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.

Thus far is my brief reply to The Outlook in The Baptist World in 1917. But the argument is really stronger than I put it then. One must remember that Paul was a Jew, a Pharisee of the straitest sort, a trained theologian from Gamaliel's school and familiar with all the Jewish antipathy to polytheistic language and emperor worship so rife when he wrote. In applying the term "Lord" 1 to Jesus he was fully aware of the Jewish sensitiveness about the use of that word in the Septuagint for God and also of the free way in which the Romans applied it to "Lord Cæsar." Paul saw the issue clearly drawn between Cæsar and Christ for the Lordship of the world. He boldly challenged the Cæsar cult and championed the worship of Jesus

1 Κύριος

1