with the development of its life and institutions, Baur could hardly fail to seize upon the same conspicuous point of departure as Marcion, the great Gnostic Paulinist of the first half of the second century. The key to all was Paul's story of his resistance to Peter. Marcion was an anti-Semite. Born and brought up in the great Pauline mission-field of Asia Minor he conceived Christianity as might have been expected from a typical Greek. Paul alone, said Marcion, understood Jesus. The "Pillar-Apostles" at Jerusalem had perverted the sense of his gospel. Jesus himself was not so much a Jew as a divine theophany which had occurred in Judaea, intended to reveal to the misguided Jews that the divinity Moses had taught them to worship was a mere demiurge, an inferior being ignorant of the true God, the "Father in heaven" of Jesus. Jehovah was a god of justice, severe and unrelenting in the punishment inflicted for disobedience to the laws he had imposed on his creation. But the Father in heaven was a God of goodness, loving-kindness, grace. Through favor of his manifested Son, Jesus, human souls could escape the wrath of Jehovah, and attain to the immortality of their Redeemer. In short Judaism and Christianity were made two antagonistic religions. Marcion naturally excluded the Old Testament from use by his churches, and substituted a canon of his own. This, the first Christian Canon, contained the Pauline Epistles minus the three Pastorals, plus an expurgated version of the Gospel of Luke. Marcion had removed from this Gospel what he regarded as the interpolations of the Pillar-Apostles, including all references to the Old Testament. It began: "In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Cæsar Jesus came down into Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and taught in their synagogue." His collection of the Pauline Epistles, likewise expurgated, began with Galatians and its account of how Paul had at first preached the gospel divinely committed to him without hindrance from the older Apostles, but later found obstacles being thrown in his way by Judaizers, until he was obliged to go up to Jerusalem and protest, in order that the truth of the gospel might remain unto the Gentiles. Finally, at Antioch, he was compelled even to withstand Peter to his face because of his cowardice and "hypocrisy" in face of emissaries from James and the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. was Paulinism and Gentile Christianity with a vengeance. And it had no small acceptance in the Greekspeaking Christian world. It has been credibly estimated that Christianity lost one-half its following to Marcion and other Gnostic heretics bent on divorcing it from its Jewish affiliations and making it over in the true likeness of a Hellenistic mystery-cult of personal redemption. Here At the other extreme from Marcion stood, at the same period, the Jewish-Christian sect of Ebionites, anathematizing Paul as a renegade from the Law and a traitor to the true gospel of Jesus. Salvation was of course free to all, but on condition of becoming what Jesus had been, a circumcised Jew. Down to the fifth century, in Ephiphanius' time, the Ebionites were still claiming, as they had in Paul's day at Corinth, to be" of Christ," saying "Christ was circumcised, therefore be thou circumcised. Christ kept the feasts, therefore do thou keep the feasts." 9 Extremists of both types, Jewish and Greek, were inevitably excluded in the long run from the great mass of the Church in its forward movement. Thrown off as heretics they gravitated for a time in a separate orbit, to be lost ere long in that blackness of darkness which Jude 9 Epiphanius, Panar. xxviii. See Bacon, "The Christ party in Corinth." Expos. VIII, 47 (Nov., 1914). assures his readers is reserved for such wandering stars. The main mass recovered its equilibrium and kept on a middle course. Irenaeus, at the close of the second century, represented this final equilibrium. His very name indicates, as Eusebius reminds us, his predestined function of "peacemaker" among the parties inside the Church, intolerant opponent as he is of all outside. Christianity had by this time balanced accounts with claimants from Judaism and the Gentile world alike. Rome had taken the place of Ephesus as spiritual heir of East and West. It regarded itself as trustee of both Peter and Paul, supreme arbiter of the faith since the dispersion in 135 of the Church of the Apostles, elders, and kindred of the Lord in Jerusalem. The remaining history of the new religion is a process of consolidation and development from within. Such was the broader nexus of historical development within which Baur sought an explanatory background for the writings of the New Testament. As a historical critic Baur was bent on bringing the literature of the growing religion into proper relation to the movement of its life, and thus exhibiting its true significance and values. In view of the outstanding facts as just outlined, what could be more natural than to say: This literature is a product of the nascent faith in the period of its emergence from Jewish particularism into its ultimate form of universalism. Those who, like Paul, perceived its broader destiny would inevitably encounter opposition at the hands of fellow-Christians less able to appreciate its larger implications, or more conservatively inclined; and from this opposition would result (unless the two were mutually destructive) a higher unity. The adaptable elements on both sides would be combined in the most workable and comprehensive common interpretation. This was Baur's scheme of the literary development. From the point of view of mechanics it might be called a theory of the resultant force, an invariable outcome of the opposition of two bodies moving toward one another, but not in exactly the same line, or if so, not with exactly balanced power. In the Hegelian philosophy of history, which is said to have influenced Baur, it is called the theory of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. No It would be superfluous for me to repeat the common remark how little now remains of Baur's application of his famous theory to New Testament literature. one, of course, denies a development of Christianity in its process of self-emancipation from the particularism of the older Apostles to the universalism of Paul. The struggle was real, but the Tübingen critics extended it too far down in time. They misunderstood its complexity, they misinterpreted the writings in their efforts to discover the particular "tendency" which should determine their place in it. Mark may in a sense be Petro-Pauline, but certainly not in Baur's sense; and it is not the latest, but the earliest of the Synoptic writings. Revelation is not the earliest book of the New Testament. In its present form it is one of the latest, and far from anti-Pauline. The Johannine literature may indeed represent that "higher synthesis" of which Baur wrote, but the date he gave it was two full generations too late. All this must be admitted. But the admission need detract but little from Baur's just claim to be the founder of constructive criticism; for he had taught all genuine students of the New Testament that the literature is but the mask of the enlarging life. We may be pardoned, then, a moment's digression to the criticism of a hundred years ago. Our subject of study is a kind of collective psychology of religion in historical manifestation. Baur has taught us fearlessly to apply to its material the methods of historico-critical analysis, and to apply them with a definite purpose in view; the purpose of tracing the movement of the greatest spiritual impulse ever imparted to the human race. Larger light is available now than in Baur's time on the conditions and movements of religious thought, both Jewish and Hellenistic, in the Empire. It should enable us to make better application than he made of a principle which, if stated in somewhat different terms from Baur's, remains profoundly true. It offers, as I believe, a valid coördinating scheme to the critic. The statement of that principle I must leave to a subsequent occasion. You have already divined that it concerns the impulse of religious life which assumes so different a shape in its transition from Jesus to Paul. Meantime let me sum up. The successive phases of the literature as it reaches us are three: the literature of the Apostle; the literature of the teacher, and of the prophet; the literature of the theologian. But as the Ephesian evangelist teaches us, the manifested life is one: even that which was from the beginning with the Father. He that sees it bears witness, that all men may share his fellowship with the Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ. A true answer to this Johannine utterance is made by the great Jewish philosopher of post-reformation times. "It is not absolutely necessary," says Spinoza, "to know Christ after the flesh, but we must think very differently of that eternal Son of God, I mean the eternal Wisdom of God, which has manifested itself in all things, and chiefly in the human mind, and most of all in Jesus Christ." 10 10 Spinoza, Op. i, 510, Ep. to Oldenburg. |