JESUS AND PAUL In giving to Paulinism the label "Christocentric," one at once raises the question of its relation to the Gospel proclaimed by Jesus. That Paul conceived himself utterly dependent for his gospel upon Jesus the Christ, is not in doubt, but only how far he unconsciously modified the Gospel by making Christ its object as well as its revealer. In one aspect, this is but the question as to Paul's attitude to the historic Jesus over again : yet it is more. Granting that Paul felt his gospel to be in essential agreement with the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, as known to him, it remains to ask whether he did not put all into so fresh a perspective as to change the relative emphasis on points central to the teaching of Jesus, and so alter its spirit. A school of writers, by no means unappreciative of Paul, of whom W. Wrede may be taken as example, answer that Paul so changed Christianity as to become its "second founder"—the founder of ecclesiastical Christianity as distinct from the Christianity of Jesus. They say, "either Jesus or Paul: it cannot be both at once." They urge not only that Paulinism is involved in certain "mythological" conceptions, as to sin, redemption, and the pre-existent celestial person of the Redeemer; but also that, apart from the Rabbinic and anti-Rabbinic element in Paul, his whole mystical attitude towards Christ, as the medium of redemption is alien to the sane teaching of Jesus as to God and man, and their true relations.
The essential issue here is this. Could Jesus the Messiah him self set forth the Gospel in the same perspective as a devoted disciple of His? Must not the personal embodiment of the life of the Messianic kingdom by Jesus himself, and so His person ality, become the prime medium through which this life in its essential features, and especially in its spirit of devoted love, attains and maintains its hold upon the souls of men? Surely the new life must appear most fully and movingly sub specie Christi; and the imitatio Christi, in an inner sense which finds in Him the very principle of the new Christian consciousness as to God and man, must be the most direct and morally potent means to the realization of the Christ-type. Thus to say that Paulinism is practically and proximately "Christocentric," is not to deny that it is ultimately and theoretically "Theocentric," if only Christ's personality be regarded as the revelation of God the Father—even if in virtue of unique community of nature with Him, as Son. It may be questioned whether Paul attained, or indeed had within his reach in that age, the best intellectual equivalent of his religious intuition of Christ as "mediator be tween God and man." But it is another matter to question whether his intuition, that the personality of the Christ Himself was the secret of the spiritual power latent in his Gospel, be a true interpretation of the Gospel, as it appears even in the Syn optics. Thus the truth seems to lie rather with those who see in Paul "Jesus's most genuine disciple" (H. Weinel), the one who best understood and reproduced His thought. True, Jesus saw the Gospel through the sinless consciousness of a Saviour, while Paul saw it ever through the eyes of a conscious sinner. But that is the perspective in which mankind generally has to view the Gospel; and apart from the special quality of Paul's personal experience of sin, the Gospel as it "found" him may surely be in principle the needful experimental complement to the Gospel as set forth by Jesus Himself. By restoring Jesus's own
stress upon "eternal life" as present rather than future, Paul saved Christianity from a Judaizing of the universal and spiritual religion of "grace" rather than legal merit, with which Jesus had in fact inspired His personal disciples.
No doubt there is another side to all this, the side of Paul's idiosyncrasy, both religiously and as a thinker. Paul's special religious experience has proved a limitation to his direct and full influence. While "numberless men have discovered themselves in reading Paul," more have not been "found" by him; and of those who have felt the religious appeal of his writings, not a few have misunderstood the theoretic setting of his message. Indeed mis understanding, one way or another, was Paul's usual lot in the ancient Church (especially for Greeks and Romans) as regards his most distinctive ideas, due partly to the difficult form in which some of those ideas were couched. But to say this is little more than saying that Paulinism is a less universal form of the Gospel than that given it by his Master, Jesus Christ. To do full justice to Paulinism in this respect, we must compare it with other interpretations of Jesus and His Gospel in the age immediately ensuing. At the one extreme stands Judaeo-Chris tianity, with its ultra-conservatism and undeveloped spirituality; at the other Gnosticism, with its ultra-spiritualism, born of rigid dualism and a defective sense for historical continuity in revela tion. Between these stands Paul, blending the positive ideas of both in a religious unity of immense ethical power and initiative; while the other and intermediate types represented in the New Testament all testify to his pervasive influence.
2. For Paulinism: Baur's Paulus (5845, 1866) ; E. Reuss, Hist. de la theol. chret. au siecle apostolique, tome ii. (Eng. trans., 1872) ; B. Towett, essays in his Epistles of St. Paul to the Thess., etc.; J. B. Light foot, dissertations in his Commentaries; Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism; 0. Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lecture (i885) ; A. Sabatier, L'Apotre Paul (1881) ; J. F. Clarke, The Ideas of the Apostle Paul (1884) ; G. B. Stevens, The Pauline Theology (1892) ; A. B. Bruce, St. Paul's Conception of Christianity (1894) ; G. Matheson, The Spir itual Development of St. Paul; brief sketches by W. Bousset, H. Weinel, W. Wrede, P. Wernle, and A. Jillicher (in Die Kultur der Gegenwart, 1905, I iv. i. 69-97) cf. W. Sanday, article "Paul" in Diet. of Christ and the Gospels (1908), where the literature bearing on "Jesus and Paul" will be found; F. Prat, La Theol. de S. Paul (1908) ; A. E. Garvie, Studies in Paul and his Gospel (Igin ; W. Morgan, The Rel. and Theol. of Paul (1917) ; C. H. Dodd, The Meaning of Paul for to-day (192o) A. Deissmann, The Rel. of Jesus and the Faith of Paul (1923) ; C. A. Scott, Christianity acc. to St. Paul (1927) ; S. Cave, The Gospel of St. Paul (1928). (J. V. B.)