576 NEW TESTAMENT 



Only the unifying subject was wanting for the synthesis of these 

 predicates, the nucleus of crystallization, about which this ferment- 

 ing, chaotic mass of religious ideas might shape itself into a new world 

 of faith and hope comprising both the present and the hereafter. This 

 point of unification was supplied in the person of Jesus, the Galilean 

 national Redeemer and King of the Jews, who through the cross 

 became the World-Redeemer and King of the universal kingdom of 

 God." 



Such utterances make plain the trend of New Testament science 

 in our day. Both criticism and interpretation have become historical, 

 and, as subsidiary to the history of religion, have been brought into 

 closest contact with kindred sciences. 



It remains to be seen to what extent the growing sense of what 

 is held in common enables us to differentiate with greater precision 

 that which is distinctive and vital; absorbent, but not absorbed. 



Since Baur we apprehend Christianity historically as made up of 

 the Petrine and the Pauline factors. What, then, is essential Paulin- 

 ism and essential Petrinism? Light comes when we begin to see 

 that Paul is more than a Rabbi, far more than a Rabbi of that period 

 of anti-Christian reaction, after the destruction of the temple, which 

 so dominates our conceptions of Rabbinism. Paul may or may not 

 owe to Gamaliel, the great latitudinarian of his age and student of 

 Greek literature, something of his later broad-minded attitude toward 

 " whatsoever things are pure, are noble, are worthy, are of good 

 report." Anyway we must appreciate his sense, not only of a divine 

 summons in his conversion to an "apostleship to the Gentiles," 

 but of having been even before it "set apart," like Jeremiah, "from 

 his mother's womb to be a prophet to the Gentiles." Paul regarded 

 the ideas imbibed in his pre-Christian career as a providential equip- 

 ment for the proclamation of his world-gospel. He is touched as no 

 Palestinian Jew could be with' the Gentiles' " groping after God, if 

 haply they might feel after him and find him." He has a feeling of 

 the burden of human guilt, of the inheritance from Adam of a sin- 

 polluted, weakened nature such as no Jewish writings reveal save 

 those deeply impregnated with the moral earnestness, and at the 

 same time the pessimistic dualism of the Stoic school, the Wisdom 

 literature which evinces the contact of Judaism with Hellenism on 

 its higher levels. Paulinism is only half intelligible until we know 

 how other national religions besides Judaism were disintegrating 

 under the double solvent of a world-empire and a cosmopolitan 

 philosophy, and giving place to individual religions, distinguished 

 like Christianity by their adaptation of ancient beliefs to a sacra- 

 mental mysticism aspiring to participation in the divine nature, their 

 avatar doctrines of the redeeming Saviour-god, their hope of personal 

 immortality, and ideals of a universal brotherhood of believers. 



