580 NEW TESTAMENT 



for the individual human soul in its relation to the whole, in tem- 

 porary mechanical suspension. 



Paul's cosmology, as we have seen, is built upon elements of largely 

 Greek and Stoic origin, though the point of infiltration is to be 

 sought further back than we used to seek it, back of Paul himself in 

 the Hochmah writers with their hypostatizing of the divine creative 

 Wisdom, and the effort of scribal theology to adjust its growing con- 

 ception of God's transcendence to the doctrine of his special provi- 

 dence to which they were bound by the past. Paul comes by his 

 doctrine of the preexistence of Christ as the Divine Wisdom, not 

 by what he learned from Peter, nor even from Stephen, but from the 

 school of Gamaliel. He vitalizes and transfigures it by the religious 

 and moral principle of Christianity: Love as the essence of the 

 Creator's motive and the ethical principle of the creature. The 

 mystery of being, hid from the foundation of the world, but now 

 made manifest, is that " God in love foreordained and chose us in the 

 person of the Beloved to be an adoption," "joint heirs" with our 

 Christ of the Creation. 



Paul's soteriology and connected doctrines, his anthropology, 

 doctrine of flesh and spirit, redemption, mystic union with the 

 Redeemer in death and life,. rest largely upon conceptions held in 

 common with mystery-religion: the avatar doctrine of incarnation 

 and redemption, the 0eos o-omfc, and ^ouo-tao-/xo's of Greek and 

 Oriental cults. Here too the primary point of contact was earlier 

 than Paul's time. The avatar doctrine of Ephesians, with its picture 

 of the descent and ascent of the Spirit of the divine Wisdom, which, 

 according to the Book of Wisdom, "fills "the world," the Spirit of 

 God in Christ victorious over the hostile powers of the underworld, 

 ascending to God's throne, and thence filling the universe of animate 

 being with the emanation of its own vitality, was not new when Paul 

 advanced it; it had become almost as much a part of Jewish apo- 

 calypse as of Greek and Oriental mystery-religion. Jesus' parable of 

 the Strong Man armed, whose goods are spoiled, his captives freed 

 by the Stronger than he, in which the fathers see an allegory of 

 Christ's descent to the underworld and victory over its hostile powers, 

 already affects Paul's representation of the triumphal march of the 

 Spirit of God in Christ in Ephesians and Colossians. Paul even quotes 

 therewith a pre-Christian Jewish apocalypse whose theme is this 

 avatar of the divine Logos awakening dead Israel, while the Gospel 

 of Mark itself puts Jesus personally in the place of that Spirit of God 

 which in the original form is victor over the Strong Man armed. 



Paul vitalized a Jewish-Oriental interpretation of Ps. 68 by identi- 

 fying that Wisdom and Power of God which takes its redeeming, vic- 

 torious way from heaven to earth, from earth to the realm of death, 

 delivering death's prisoners, and thence to the right hand of God, 



