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history, psychology, and philosophy of religion. It will be interesting to see if the modern constructive theologian can do as well for our time as Paul and his followers did for theirs.

It would appear from the foregoing that the Petrine tradition of the Sayings and Doings of Jesus comes down to us only from a period after the death of the great Apostles, and in a form affected not only by the reaction of the Greek-speaking churches of the West toward the authoritative testimony of the eye and earwitnesses, but also by a doctrinal infiltration from the Pauline side. Are we thus impoverished in the material available for our religious faith? Quite the contrary. The true basis of our faith is not the bare record of Jesus' words and deeds, but what God wrought through him, both in his earthly career, and in the reaction to it of men like Paul. It includes the effort of the generation after Paul to combine the values of what Paul had seen, using the eye of the spirit, with what the older witnesses had seen with the eye of the flesh. Would it be easier, think you, or harder would it require less discrimination, or more, to extract those elements of the story which have permanent meaning for our own religious life, if we possessed on phonographic plates and photographic films a complete record of all the thirty years of Jesus' life? Selective discrimination must be our guide, as with all the generations past, including the evangelists themselves. And when we have discriminated record from interpretation, historical occurrence from pragmatic application, we shall not be worse off than before, but better. We shall see at the one extreme in this post-apostolic age a radical wing of ultra-Paulinists, endeavoring to interpret the Incarnation and Resurrection in terms of the mystery myths of personal immortality by participation in the divine nature. We shall see at the other extreme a re

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actionary Jewish-Christian wing, who would interpret it in terms of Jewish Law and Apocalypse. We shall see between these two extremes the central body of the Church driven by dangers without and within into a rapprochement between "those of Peter" and "those of Paul" of which First Peter is the first great irenicon. We shall see this central body feeling its way little by little to a faith which retains the values from both sides that are practically approved, and leaving the result to future generations.

To return, then, to the Gospel of Mark. We have here, it would seem, a Roman compend of the sayings and doings of Jesus, gathered from the anecdotes of those who had seen and heard the Lord. The reminiscences are turned to account that those who sought forgiveness for the sake of the Crucified might know what was meant by the offering of his body and blood, and that those who dedicated themselves in penitence and faith might understand what was meant by new life in his spirit. Suppose that when we had subtracted from the record those elements which the critic must regard as belonging rather to the interpretation than to the record itself, nothing more were left than could already be inferred from Paul's own incidental references. Still we should have enough. We should know of one Leader in the history of man's quest for the life of God, whose ideal was all that the loftiest aspiration can conceive, a gospel of reconciliation of man to man and man to God. We should have at the same time the portrait of One whose loyalty to that ideal knew no shade of reserve, no taint of self. We should know a Christ not after the flesh, but Son of God and Son of Man. But thank God that there is much more than this. As Dr. Morgan admits: "The risen Christ of Paul represents a generalized picture of the historical Jesus. The central and the new fill the horizon to the

overshadowing of much, the loss of which would have been an unspeakable calamity. In particular those features in Jesus which make him so real and so human pass out of sight. Paul's Christ has not the inexhaustible richness nor the human winsomeness of the historical figure." It is to this that the churches turned after the death of the Apostle, and as Dr. Morgan justly says: "The preservation of the Synoptic Gospels meant nothing less than the saving of Christianity."

8 Religion and Theology of Paul, p. 40.

LECTURE VII

THE GOSPEL AS LAW AND PROMISE

1. Conditions of the Later Synoptic Period The period from which are derived the remaining elements of the Aramaic Enclave, the writings of Luke, the Gospel of Matthew, and the Apocalypse of John, is not more than a score of years earlier than the Epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp. It is that of the Pastoral Epistles in their present form, an elaboration of authentic letters of Paul. James and Jude, encyclicals which address the Church at large in the name of two of the "desposyni," are best assigned to the same period, the closing decade of the first century; and even II Peter, later as it is, and dependent upon Jude, throws light upon the conditions of the age. All these epistolary writers are greatly concerned for the morals of the Church, threatened as in Paul's time, but more dangerously, by teachers of antinomian tendency.

The Hellenistic conception of fellowship with God is intellectual and mystical rather than moral, a participation in His omniscience and immortality by enlightenment, or ritual. The Church insists upon conduct. God's nature is beneficent goodness, toward which the road of fellowship lies open by dedication of the will to the fulfillment of His righteous commandment. This is the burden of the Johannine Epistles, which we consider in the next lecture. In II Peter the interest in ethics is extended to eschatology. It supplements the warning of Jude against the antinomians by adding a preliminary chapter on the certainty of the promise of glorification as guaranteed by the transfiguration vision,

and a closing chapter reaffirming the certainty and nearness of the predicted judgment. In I-III John, we have letters belonging to about the same date and region. These also strongly reflect the antinomian tendency, and oppose to it the new commandment of love. But the Epistles and Gospel of John take no such interest as Second Peter in the apocalyptic eschatology; or rather they concede a more Hellenistic view. They connect the heresy with the docetic doctrines denounced by Ignatius, and seek their remedy in worthier ideas of Jesus' life and teaching. Here, then, is a kind of bifurcation. In respect to the " denial of resurrection and judgment" the "Johannine" writings take one road, Second Peter and the Revelation quite another. But the dominant interest of the age is an easy one to define. The more immediate danger is from those who “ pervert the oracles of the Lord to their own lusts.". Over against this antinomian tendency the current of orthodoxy is already setting strongly toward neo-legalism. In the Catholic Epistles the life and death struggle against incipient Gnosticism has already begun, but theoretic Gnosticism scarcely affects the Aramaic Enclave. The Church everywhere is laying fresh emphasis upon the nature of its gospel as a "new commandment," but with different sanctions. In the Aramaic Enclave the effort is not (as in Jn. and I-III Jn.) to present the gospel as a way of moral union with God, so much as to reënforce the authority of the new commandment by more positive declarations as to the coming Judgment and the reality and certainty of its rewards and punishments. Most conspicuously of all in the Palestinian Gospel (Matthew) the message is conceived as Law and Promise.

We have quoted from the epistle written by Polycarp in 112–118 to Paul's church in Philippi the warning against the false teachers who "pervert the 'oracles of

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