PROBLEMS OF NEW TESTAMENT STUDY 613 



the Old Testament, or Hellenism, or the transmitted teaching of 

 Jesus, or his own personal experience, the ultimately controlling factor 

 in his conception of what constituted the gospel? Or if to no one of 

 them can be attributed the place of imperator, how did they relate 

 themselves in his thought? Is it possible to define more exactly 

 than has yet been done the precise attitude of Paul to the Old Testa- 

 ment, to which he apparently ascribed authority in some sense, 

 yet whose teachings on some matters he unhesitatingly and emphat- 

 ically set aside? To a relative ranking of the sources from which he 

 derived his opinions and convictions did there correspond a relative 

 ranking of these opinions and convictions themselves? That Paul 

 was a man of intense convictions there can be no manner of doubt. 

 Did it result from this that all his opinions were convictions held 

 with equal intensity and assurance; or is it rather true that the 

 few central convictions that he held entered freely into combination, 

 which might almost be described as chemical, with every phase of 

 thought with which he came into contact, appropriating and con- 

 verting to their own use whatever lent itself to such conversion, 

 rejecting and consuming whatever threatened itself to destroy those 

 governing ideas of the apostle? Is the gospel of Paul essentially 

 and centrally eschatological? Is reembodiment as an element of 

 the future blessedness of the believer vital to his thought, or the 

 product of his gospel combined with the Palestinian Jewish anthropo- 

 logy? Is the Christology of the later Pauline letters the late emerg- 

 ence of an element held as vital and central from the beginning 

 of his Christian thinking, or the late unfolding of what was latent 

 in his primary thought, or the product of his primal conception of 

 Jesus and contact with a type of thought with which he came 

 into influential touch only in the latter part of his career? All 

 these questions are but phases of the search for the real Paul, 

 the effort to present him to ourselves not simply in a list of his 

 deeds and a catalogue of his doctrines, but in the true perspective 

 of his life and the emphasis of his thought; and this again to the 

 end that we may more perfectly apprehend the history of the origin 

 of Christianity. 



The problems of the later apostolic age are, as already indicated, 

 complicated by questions of the authorship and date of the writings 

 that constitute the sources for the period, and which are either con- 

 fessedly of uncertain date and authorship, or are the subject of great 

 difference of opinion on these points. That Christianity is in this 

 period struggling to adjust itself to its environment, not by surrender, 

 but by conquest, and this both in respect to Judaism and Hellenism, 

 and at the same time to solidify the foundation on which it rests 

 its faith this is fairly clear. But possessing neither a connected 

 narrative of events nor the clear presentation of any commanding 



