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JUDAISM 
 AND ST. PAUL 
 
JUDAISM AND ST. PAUL 
 
 TWO ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 C. G. MONTEFIORE 
 
 LONDON 
 MAX GOSCHEN LTD. 
 
 20 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, W.C. 
 
 1914 
 
 E..V, 
 
TO 
 ARNOLD PAGE 
 
 DEAN OF PETERBOROUGH 
 
 IN 
 
 GRATITUDE AND AFFECTION 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 The two essays of which the present 
 httle volume is composed were written some 
 months ago, but various circumstances 
 have prevented an earUer pubHcation. I 
 am indebted to several friends for many 
 suggestions and corrections, for which I 
 now tender them my grateful thanks. 
 
 It should perhaps be stated that the first 
 essay deliberately omits the consideration 
 of a number of questions and topics which, 
 though closely connected with its main 
 subject, have been so fully discussed and 
 set forth (from different and opposing 
 points of view) that it seemed unnecessary 
 to repeat what has been already so ably and 
 learnedly said by others. Hence a certain 
 allusiveness in the treatment, which stu- 
 dents of St. Paul will readily forgive, but 
 which will yet, I trust, not render the essay 
 unintelligible to the general reader. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 As regards the second essay, I should say 
 that I have no call or commission to speak 
 for Liberal Judaism as a whole. And as a 
 growing and living faith, young in years, 
 though confident of a long life. Liberal 
 Judaism is still, in many matters, engaged 
 in thinking out its own position. My con- 
 tributions, both here and elsewhere, are 
 those of a private individual, who in some 
 things is perhaps more conservative, and 
 in some more radical, than other Jews no 
 less ardently Jewish and Liberal than he. 
 In particular, my attitude towards the New 
 Testament, its central hero and his greatest 
 apostle, though I am vain enough to think 
 that it will be the common attitude of 
 Liberal Judaism tomorrow, is hardly its 
 common and usual attitude to-day. 
 
 I have only to add that a few paragraphs 
 towards the end of the first essay are taken 
 from an article of mine upon St. Paul, 
 published in the Jewish Quarterly Review 
 many years ago. 
 
 C. G. M. 
 January^ 1914. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 The Genesis of the Religion 
 
 OF St. Paul 1 
 
 The Relation of St. Paul to 
 
 Liberal Judaism 131 
 
 Appendix - 221 
 
THE GENESIS OF THE RELIGION 
 OF ST. PAUL 
 
 Everything which is connected, or which 
 may be Unked up, with a great original 
 genius hke Paul has its interest and fas- 
 cination. It may be doubted whether this 
 interest and fascination can ever pass away. 
 For Paul had too deep an effect upon the 
 thought and religion of the Western world 
 for his personality and opinions ever to be- 
 come matters of indifference to all those 
 who fall within the limits of European 
 influence and civilisation. His doctrine, 
 as we find it expressed and implied in 
 those of the Epistles which are generally 
 recognised as genuine, will, I should 
 imagine, constantly invite fresh attempts 
 at exposition and criticism. The in- 
 genuity and learning of the commentator 
 will be called into play generation after 
 generation, and each age will perchance 
 fondly fancy that it has advanced a little 
 
2 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 nearer to the meaning of the Apostle, and 
 has thrown some new and fuller light upon 
 those numerous dark places which, from 
 their very obscurity, attract the ingenious 
 interpreter, as the honey-laden flower at- 
 tracts the industrious bee. But not only 
 his doctrine and actual words draw men to 
 them. We would fain know all that we can 
 about his spiritual history ; the antecedents 
 of his doctrine ; his mental and moral 
 character ; the events of his life. What 
 sort of man was Paul before the conversion 
 near Damascus, before the great outward or 
 inward event which changed his outlook, 
 his beliefs, and his activities ? What had 
 he felt and experienced ? By what inner 
 processes, if at all, was the conversion led up 
 to and prepared ? What were the earlier in- 
 fluences to which Paul had been subjected ? 
 What was the exact nature of his environ- 
 ment so. far as it affected his religious 
 development — his faith and his doubts (if 
 doubts he had), his yearnings, his struggles, 
 his ideals ? More specifically, we would fain 
 know what sort of Jew this man Paul 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 3 
 
 actually was, seeing that several Judaisms, 
 all more or less fluid and growing, existed 
 in the first century, and that Paul may have 
 been influenced by more than one of them. 
 How old was Paul when Jesus died ? And 
 lastly, we would dearly like to be told, with 
 definiteness and detail, how much Paul 
 knew of other religions and of other religious 
 thought outside his own. 
 
 To all these fascinating and perplexing 
 questions full and certain answers can never 
 be obtained. We must be satisfied with 
 arguments and probabilities and even with 
 ignorance. Yet this last is that with which 
 we shall never be satisfied, and hence the 
 constant search, the renewed enquiry. 
 
 To-day we flatter ourselves, and not 
 without justification, that we can add a 
 little to our knowledge, and here and there 
 can correct the interpretations of the past. 
 Indubitably the great scholars have found 
 out a great deal more than preceding genera- 
 tions knew of the Hellenistic world, of its 
 thought, its religion (doctrine and cultus 
 included), and its literature. Inscriptions 
 
4 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 and papyri have yielded up many a secret. 
 
 Whole reHgions, so to speak, have been 
 revivified, and forgotten phases of thought 
 and aspiration have been discovered and 
 revealed. It is also not inaccurate to say 
 that our knowledge of the Judaism, or, 
 as we had perhaps better say, of the 
 Judaisms of the first century, has also been 
 increased within the last twenty or thirty 
 years. Apocalyptic and Hellenistic 'Juda- 
 isms ' have been extensively and intensively 
 studied, with the result that they, or their 
 literary products, are known much better 
 and more fully than has hitherto been the 
 case. And of Palestinian or early Rabbinic 
 Judaism it may be said that we realize 
 better the limits of our knowledge ; we 
 realize how meagre is its literary remains ; 
 and we realize also how the purest Rabbinic 
 Judaism of 50 a.d., whether in doctrine or 
 in the type of average believer which it pro- 
 duced, may not have been wholly the same 
 as the Rabbinic Judaism of 500. Then 
 again we have also come to perceive that, 
 as regards the Jewish world of 50 a.d.. 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 5 
 
 these divisions, Rabbinic, Apocalyptic, 
 Hellenistic, are not water-tight or cut and 
 dry. They fuse and mingle with each other, 
 and in the living personalities of 50 a.d. 
 there must have been many combinations 
 in which two, or even all three, of these di- 
 visions were represented in different pro- 
 portions and in varying degrees. 
 
 Lastly, we all believe ourselves to be, and 
 perhaps a few of us— such as Loisy or Lake 
 or Herford — actually are, more impartial 
 than our fathers, and therefore better able 
 to perceive and describe the Truth. Some 
 of us perhaps are able to do more adequate 
 justice both to Gentile and Jew, both to 
 Jesus and the Pharisee, both to Paul and 
 the Rabbis, both to the Gospel and the Law. 
 Some have come to believe that, even in the 
 first century, there were many saints among 
 those who accepted Jesus and many saints 
 among those who rejected him ; many holy 
 men among those who followed and appre- 
 ciated Paul, and many holy men among 
 those who disliked and attacked him. Some 
 of us have come to realize that there are 
 
6 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 varieties of saintliness, different types of 
 righteousness, and that one must not judge 
 any religion by the picture drawn of it by 
 an antagonist or a convert. Some of us 
 believe that in religious quarrels (as in other 
 quarrels) there is something to be said for 
 both sides, and that each party, and the 
 religion of each party, are much better than 
 they are painted by the other. Some of us 
 have learnt to realize that there are many 
 pathways which lead to God, and they are 
 fain to believe that the Father of all is well 
 pleased to accept the very varying con- 
 ceptions of Himself, and the very varying 
 conceptions of His relation to man, worked 
 out by Jew and by Christian, with 
 equal indulgence, and perhaps with the 
 same loving condescension of perfect good- 
 ness and perfect understanding. For none 
 are impartiality and knowledge and sym- 
 pathy more urgently necessary than for 
 Paul and his antagonists. None more 
 greatly require detachment of mind and 
 a comprehensiveness of vision. And dan- 
 gerous capacity though imagination be, 
 
RELIGION OF ST, PAUL 7 
 
 it is surely necessary for those working 
 hypotheses without which we cannot at 
 present get on, that some grains of imagina- 
 tion should fill up and illumine the many 
 gaps in our knowledge. 
 
 Hitherto the large majority of scholars 
 who have studied Paul most deeply have 
 been unsympathetic to his antagonists and 
 to Rabbinic Judaism. They have also been 
 somewhat lacking in first-hand knowledge. 
 Rabbinic Judaism seems to be the one 
 department of learning about which many 
 great scholars have been willing to make 
 assertions without being able to read the 
 original authorities, or to test the references 
 and statements of the writers whom they 
 quote/ Such a willingness is the more sur- 
 prising when one remembers that these 
 scholars are all more or less inclined, whether 
 from training or environment, from faith or 
 from tradition, to be sympathetic towards 
 
 ^ " Als ruhmliche Ausnahmen sind in dieser Beziehung 
 Dalman Strack Wuensche, und von englischen Gelehrten, 
 Taylor and Herford zu nennen. Was auf alien andern Gebieten 
 als eine selbstverstandliche Voraussetzung der Forschung gilt 
 muss also hier als selt^ner Vorzug besonders hervorgehoben 
 werden." — Felix Perles in Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft 
 (1913)^, 589, Vol.XYi. 
 
8 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 Paul and unsympathetic to the Rabbis. If 
 a man knew that he had a bit of a bias 
 against Plato, would he not be careful, if he 
 meant to write a book about the Platonic 
 philosophy, to study Plato very thoroughly? 
 Would he be content to use a mere text book 
 about Plato, more especially if he knew that 
 the text book was composed by a man who 
 had the same kind of bias as his own ?^ If a 
 scholar quotes at second hand a statement 
 about Confucius, it does not much matter, 
 for he has no reason not to be per- 
 fectly impartial as regards Confucius and 
 Confucianism. But when the quotation 
 concerns the Law or the Talmud, this im- 
 partiality does not exist. There is almost 
 always, or up till now there has almost 
 always been, an unconscious prejudice 
 against Talmud, Rabbi and Law. A stan- 
 dard of excellence or Tightness has been set 
 up from childhood in the scholar's mind, and 
 this standard has been partly formed by one 
 of the very parties in the dispute which the 
 
 ^ The allusion is to the still too habitual use of the one-sided 
 and biassed book of Ferdinand Weber's Jiidische Theologie. 
 [Znded. 7897.) 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 9 
 
 scholar has to analyze and to describe. 
 Surely, impartiality being thus so difficult 
 to obtain, it would be thought that the 
 scholar would at least seek to provide a 
 make-weight by a superabundance of 
 knowledge. And yet in the very depart- 
 ment where knowledge is most desirable, 
 the scholar appears to think it least neces- 
 sary. He has his text book and a few 
 translations, and he is content. What 
 wonder that the spirit of Rabbinic Judaism 
 should escape him? The very word * spirit' 
 in connection with that religion would 
 strike him as misplaced and ridiculous ! For 
 is not Rabbinic Judaism all letter and no 
 spirit ? 
 
 On the other side, the Jewish scholar has 
 hitherto shown little capacity for appreci- 
 ating Paul. The fact is easily explicable 
 and pardonable, but remains a fact none the 
 less. A merely defensive attitude, or a 
 merely combative attitude, prevents the 
 possibility of comprehensive vision and 
 sympathetic impartiality. The Jewish 
 scholar is always wanting to show that Paul 
 
10 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 was unjust to the Law, and that his 
 charges do not apply. He is probably quite 
 correct, but such proofs do not take one very 
 far in a positive understanding and appreci- 
 ation of the author of the Epistle to the 
 Romans. Paul may have been unjust to 
 the Law, but he may be a great religious 
 genius none the less ; he may have had 
 some important things to say to the men of 
 his own day, and may have even some im- 
 portant things to say to us. You will never 
 get to understand a book or a religion, if 
 you are always on the look out for its worse 
 side, for its faults or errors and crudities ; 
 if you are always trying to contrast it 
 with the ideal of religious perfection which 
 your own religion seems to you to possess. 
 To pick holes is a poor and easy task ; it 
 carries one a very little way. And yet it 
 seems a delightful occupation both for 
 Christian and Jew. The right thing is surely 
 to ask : What is there in this religion or 
 in this religious book which has caused 
 men and women to die for it, or to live 
 through it noble and holy lives? Moreover, 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL ii 
 
 although the bulk of the Pauline Epistles 
 is so tiny as compared with the huge 
 corpus of Rabbinical literature, it may 
 yet be doubted whether the Jewish scholar 
 has given the adequate time for their 
 proper comprehension. For, after all, the 
 Epistles are extremely difficult, and the 
 very fact that Jewish prejudices are apt 
 to be aroused, and that the Jewish mind is 
 inclined to be rubbed up the wrong way, at 
 the first and second reading, make a third 
 and a fourth reading so exceedingly desir- 
 able. One of the greatest Rabbinic scholars 
 of his age, Dr. Schechter, whose books 
 should be read again and again by all who 
 wish to know what the ' spirit ' of the Rab- 
 binic religion really was, has clearly made no 
 vigorous and painful effort to appreciate 
 Paul. He speaks of him and of his commen- 
 tators with a certain hauteur and irony 
 which are at first amusing and perhaps 
 rarely unjustified, but which, when repeated 
 too often, become at last a little boring, and 
 which, at any rate, do not illuminate. 
 ' The apostle himself,' he says ' I do not 
 
12 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 profess to understand.'^ Has he, one won- 
 ders, ever fairly tried ? Has he sat down 
 with the Greek text and a couple of good 
 commentaries before him, and laboriously 
 read through the main Epistles three times 
 running ? He ventures on this curious 
 alternative : ' Either the theology of the 
 Rabbis must be wrong, its conception of 
 God debasing, its leading motives material- 
 istic and coarse, and its teachers lacking in 
 enthusiasm and spirituality, or the Apostle 
 to the Gentiles is quite unintelligible/ I 
 believe that this alternative is both un- 
 necessary and inaccurate. The theology of 
 the Rabbis is none of these dreadful things 
 which Dr. Schechter says it must be if Paul 
 should be intelligible, and, on the other 
 hand, we can go far, and later generations 
 will, I hope, go further, in the understanding 
 of Paul. 
 
 The only possible value of the present 
 essay is that it is written by one who, though 
 unlearned, has a profound admiration for 
 Paul, and is also convinced that many of 
 
 ^Schechter — 'Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology,' {igog)p.iS. 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 13 
 
 those who rejected and scorned his teaching 
 were noble men of the deepest rehgious faith 
 and Hvers of fair and saintly lives. While 
 readily acknowledging that Paul was a great 
 original genius, and that there is no reason 
 to believe that any one of his Jewish antag- 
 onists approached him in greatness, in 
 originality or in genius, the present writer 
 feels none the less convinced that among 
 those very antagonists were many who 
 loved God no less passionately than he, and 
 were no less loyal to the highest that they 
 knew. 
 
 It is not a statement or exposition of 
 Paul's teaching and religious position that 
 I want to give in this essay. Incidentally I 
 shall have to speak of some of his teachings 
 and of his religious position. But chiefly I 
 want to touch once more upon that well- 
 worn subject of Paul's religious antecedents 
 — his religious history and opinions before 
 his conversion — and of his relation to the 
 Judaisms of his age and time. The main 
 question in my mind is this : How far was 
 Paul, up to his conversion, a Rabbinic Jew ? 
 
14 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 Was Rabbinic Judaism the religion which 
 he had known, believed in, and practiced ? 
 
 Let us assume, for the moment, that it was. 
 In order, then, to gain some sort of an idea 
 of what Paul's religion was before his con- 
 version, we should have to start with a 
 description of Rabbinic Judaism as it ex- 
 isted about the year 30 or 50 A. d. Paul was, 
 indeed, in no case an average or ordinary 
 Jew : even before his conversion he was a 
 genius, and not an average or ordinary 
 personality. Still, we might assume, even 
 if his religion had something peculiar, 
 distinctive and personal about it, that 
 nevertheless a full and impartial descrip- 
 tion of Rabbinic Judaism of the year 30 
 would, to a large extent, be a description 
 of the religion of Paul. 
 
 But now comes a great and crucial diffi- 
 culty. Can the Rabbinic Judaism of 30 or 
 50 A.D. be adequately described ? Have we 
 enough material from which to do so ? This 
 is doubtful. The great bulk of Rabbinic 
 literature is much later. The other Jewish 
 material, dating from about 100 B.C. to 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 15 
 
 100 A.D. which we actually possess, or 
 which, let us rather say, may be probably 
 relegated to these two hundred years, is the 
 work of writers whose relation to Rabbinic 
 Judaism is often doubtful and disputed. 
 It is, therefore, somewhat precarious to at- 
 tempt a picture of Rabbinic Judaism as it 
 existed in men's minds and hearts and lives 
 during, shall we say, the first half of the 
 first century a.d. It is not even easy to say 
 whether the Rabbinic Judaism of 30 was 
 ' better ' or ' worse ' (according to the 
 religious standards of to-day) than the 
 Rabbinic Judaism of 300. Either view has 
 been maintained, yet perhaps less from the 
 evidence than from some reason or precon- 
 ception outside this evidence and, ^dis- 
 connected with it. But one thing at least 
 we can do, and this provisional course I 
 propose to take. We know the Rabbinic 
 Judaism of 300 or 500 in some detail. 
 And so, provisionally, we will waive the 
 question as to the relation of Rabbinic 
 Judaism of 500 or 300 to that of 50 or 30. 
 We will take the Rabbinic Judaism of 500, 
 
i6 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 the Rabbinic Judaism of the Talmud and 
 of the Midrash, so far as such a phrase is 
 reasonable and legitimate. And without 
 asking now how far, or whether, such a 
 Judaism existed in 50, let us put the 
 question : What was the relation of Paul's 
 religion before his conversion to this Rab- 
 binic Judaism ? How far was his religion, 
 before the event at Damascus, the same 
 as, or different from, that of any ordinary 
 and average representative of Rabbinic 
 Judaism ? How far was Paul (in the sense 
 which the words would bear in the year 
 500), a typical Rabbinic Jew ? When 
 these questions have been answered, the 
 further and more difficult problem can 
 still be raised : Was the Rabbinic Judaism 
 of 500 the same as the Rabbinic Judaism 
 of 50, and, if not, in what did the one 
 differ from the other ? Did the earlier 
 differ from the later Rabbinic Judaism just 
 in those very ways and points as to make it 
 quite reasonable to argue that, though 
 Paul could not be fairly described as a 
 typical Rabbinic Jew of the 500 or 300 type, 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 17 
 
 he can rightly be described according to the 
 type of 50 and 30 ? A brief and ' undocu- 
 mented ' answer to this second series of 
 questions must perhaps be risked here : a 
 more detailed or definite answer must be 
 ultimately given by the scholars. Never- 
 theless (paradoxical as it may sound) the 
 really interesting questions, and theo- 
 logically the more important questions, 
 are contained in the first series and not 
 in the second. The reason may become 
 apparent later on. 
 
 The reader will already perceive that the 
 present writer is going to argue that Paul's 
 pre-Christian religion must have been, in 
 many important points, very unlike the 
 religion of a representative Rabbinic Jew of 
 the year 500. But, in spite of Dr. Schechter, 
 that does not make him unintelligible. For 
 the question of the relation of the Rabbinic 
 Judaism of 500 to that of 50 remains over. 
 Moreover, there were other branches of 
 Judaism existing in 50 over and above 
 the purest Rabbinic type. And, lastly there 
 were religious influences to which Paul 
 
i8 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 may have been subjected, and religious 
 ideas with which he may have been f amiUar, 
 which were not Jewish at all. 
 
 To explain adequately what we find, and 
 what we do not find, in Paul's Christian 
 writings, we must, as I believe, assume, first, 
 that the Judaism which he knew, and in 
 which he believed, was in many ways differ- 
 ent from the Rabbinic Judaism of 500, and, 
 secondly, that he had been subject, and had 
 become susceptible, to those outside in- 
 fluences which were not Jewish at all. As 
 regards the second assumption, the reader 
 will perceive that I have fallen a victim to 
 the views of such scholars as Reitzenstein 
 and Loisy. But I am much more concerned 
 with the first assumption than with the 
 second. And for the following reason which 
 will also give the reason and the justifica- 
 tion for the present short essay. 
 
 Up till recently, the general view has been 
 that, even if Paul could be rightly called a 
 Hellenistic Jew, or even if he had been 
 subj ect to certain Hellenistic influences, 
 yet in so far as his Judaism was concerned, 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 19 
 
 that Judaism, in all the big fundamentals, 
 closely resembled the Judaism of ' the 
 Rabbis.' It was further assumed that the 
 Judaism of 50 was much the same in its 
 legalism, its externality, its ' burdens/ its 
 self -righteousness, etc., etc., as the Judaism 
 of 500. So Paul's pre-Christian Judaism, in 
 all the big fundamentals, closely resembled 
 the Rabbinic Judaism of 500 no less than 
 the Rabbinic Judaism of 50. Paul's own 
 statements seemed to demand this view. 
 Does he not say that he ' had advanced in 
 the Jews' religion beyond many of mine 
 own age among my countrymen, being more 
 exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my 
 fathers'?^ And again, in one of his last 
 utterances, does he not say that he was 'as 
 touching the Law, a Pharisee ; as touching 
 the righteousness which is in the Law, found 
 blameless'?^ And is there not a marked 
 tendency now-a-days, even among great 
 scholars like Lake and Harnack, to believe 
 what is found in the book of the Acts, and 
 does not Paul say in that book that he was 
 
 ^ Galatians i, 14. 2 PhilUppians iii, 5, 6, 
 
20 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 brought up in Jerusalem, at the feet of 
 Gamahel, and ' instructed according to the 
 strict manner of the law of our fathers, being 
 zealous for God even as ye all are this day' ?^ 
 Thus it was Rabbinic Judaism which was 
 supposed to be the 'Jewish background ' 
 and antecedent of Paul's theology. Indeed, 
 rags and tatters — ugly, disconnected re- 
 mainders — of the old religion were supposed 
 occasionally to peep through. And these 
 'remainders' were exceedingly convenient, 
 and supplied a delightful explanation. Any- 
 thing you disliked or disagreed with in 
 Paul's writings, any weakness or crudity in 
 argument or theory, any superstition or 
 credulity, you called a Rabbinic survival, 
 and the whole matter was explained, ex- 
 cused and set aside. All the good things, or 
 the things which you happened to think 
 good and true, were new and original and 
 Christian and Pauline ; all the bad things, 
 or the things which you happened to think 
 bad or false, were survivals and Jewish and 
 Rabbinic. One can well understand that 
 
 ^ Acts.xxii, 3. 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 21 
 
 it will need a great deal of effort if scholars 
 should have to discard so simple and so 
 pleasant a phraseology. 
 
 If Rabbinic Judaism was the religious 
 antecedent of Paul, then Paul knew all about 
 Rabbinic Judaism. He could criticise it as 
 one who had been within its pale, and had 
 lived the life which it demands. And al- 
 though a convert rarely criticises fairly the 
 religion which he has left, still it makes a 
 great difference whether Paul left Rabbinic 
 Judaism or some other kind of Judaism, 
 which, in the very points wherein he criti- 
 cised it, was not Rabbinic (as the Rabbinic 
 Judaism of 300 or 500 is 'Rabbinic') at all. 
 If he was not only a convert, but did not 
 even know Rabbinic Judaism, his criticism 
 and attacks are of no value as regards that 
 particular religion. He was then certainly 
 not the great pathologist (as Wellhausen 
 calls him) of Rabbinic Judaism at all. 
 And this conclusion, if I am right in 
 drawing it, would be of considerable im- 
 portance. For the gruesome horrors and the 
 sad, inevitable religious fiasco of Rabbinic 
 
22 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 Judaism (with which many Christian 
 scholars have made us so famiUar), are 
 mainly drawn from the criticism of Paul. 
 He said so : he had been through the mill, 
 and he ought to know ! Doubtless the 
 Rabbinic writings have been made to 
 furnish proof that what Paul said was 
 accurate and right. But those writings are 
 so vast and difficult, so easily capable of 
 misinterpretation and false emphasis, that 
 be you Jew or Christian, you can pretty 
 certainly find in them whatever you desire. 
 Exquisite tolerance, arid externalism — 
 given adequate preconception, you can 
 haul up from that sea any kind of fish. 
 
 How different will our conclusions have 
 to be if we are driven to believe that Paul's 
 criticisms of Rabbinic Judaism (except one) 
 never come home, simply because his 
 religious ' background ' — the Jewish foil 
 for his new Christian doctrine — is not 
 Rabbinic Judaism as we know it from the 
 Rabbinic literature and from Rabbinic life. 
 For those criticisms, it must be remembered, 
 are not intended to be (like the mordant 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 23 
 
 criticisms of Jesus) criticisms of the per- 
 versions of Rabbinic Judaism, of the defects 
 of its quahties. He is not a pathologist in 
 that sense, that he lays bare sicknesses, 
 which assume a possible condition of health. 
 For he criticises the whole theory of the 
 Judaism which was opposed to him, its 
 foundations and its outcome, 
 
 But all this I admit, is a parenthesis and 
 indeed an anticipation. Let it here suffice 
 to emphasize the fact that hitherto it was 
 Rabbinic Judaism which was supposed to 
 explain Paul (so far as his main and funda- 
 mental Jewish antecedents were concerned) 
 and it was Rabbinic Judaism on which he 
 was supposed to throw such searching 
 and unveiling light. 
 
 Now to prove the truth of my thesis about 
 Paul and Rabbinic Judaism would need, I 
 am aware, a large book and much learning. 
 I have not the learning, and cannot there- 
 fore write the book. Yet sometimes even 
 an unlearned essay may have its uses. So I 
 proceed to an undertaking which is almost 
 absurdly bold. For in the pursuit of the 
 
24 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 argument, I have now to throw upon 
 the paper a short description of certain 
 essential elements of the Rabbinic religion. 
 I have to give a short summary of 
 Rabbinic Judaism as it would have been 
 exemplified in the religious consciousness 
 of the average and typical Rabbinic Jew. 
 Let the period be when Rabbinic Judaism 
 was fully developed, which we may place 
 at about 500 or even 300 a.d. Still must 
 I waive the delicate and important question 
 how far the Rabbinic religion of 30 or 50 
 was very different from, or much the same 
 as, the Rabbinic religion of 300 or 500. 
 (If the Roman Catholicism of 1464 or 
 even 1644 was not quite the same as the 
 Roman Catholicism of 1914, it would not 
 be so very surprising) . And the final 
 reason why I must make this rash venture 
 and attempt this daring delineation, is that 
 at the back of my mind I have the convic- 
 tion that, if the religion of Paul before his 
 conversion had been the religion I am now 
 to describe, the conversion itself might well 
 have taken place, but many things in the 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 25 
 Epistle to the Romans could never have 
 been written. 
 
 Let us start by trying, in roughest out- 
 line, to picture to ourselves the Rabbinic 
 conception of the Deity. For in Rabbinic 
 Judaism everything follows from, and de- 
 pends upon, this conception. Rabbinic 
 Judaism taught an intensely personal God. 
 To the Rabbinic Jew God was a distinct 
 individuality, separate, though not distant, 
 from the world which He had made. The 
 average believer was not in the least worried 
 by metaphysical considerations concerning 
 the relation of an ' infinite ' God to a uni- 
 verse which is ' outside ' Him. He carried 
 together in his religious consciousness all 
 sorts of ideas, which, though philosophically 
 inconsistent with each other, harmonised 
 religiously exceedingly well. God was the 
 creator and ruler of the world. He was the 
 Father of Israel and of every Israelite ; He 
 was omnipresent ; He was in heaven ; He 
 had no form ; He had no flesh or blood ; 
 He was not ' material ' : nevertheless He 
 could and did ' hear ' every sincere prayer 
 
26 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 of all His human children ; He was anxious 
 to hear it ; He loved to hear it. His throne 
 was far off on high ; but He was also very 
 near. He had no material eyes or ears ; but 
 He saw and knew everything which was 
 going on, and He concerned Himself greatly 
 with the fortunes of His people, to whom, as 
 His most precious gift, He had given His 
 perfect and immutable Law. 
 
 This simple personal God was great and 
 awful, but He was also merciful and loving. 
 He did not delegate His relations with 
 Israel to any angel or subordinate. Between 
 Him and every Israelite there was no go- 
 between, intercessor or mediator. The 
 child could, and did, go direct to the Father, 
 and the Father dealt directly with the child. 
 No human priest, no angelic or divine being, 
 obtruded on this simple and immediate 
 relation between the Israelite and his God. 
 The Rabbinic Jew doubtless believed in 
 angels. He might even have used a later 
 phrase, and said, * In the name of the Lord, 
 the God of Israel, may Michael be at my 
 right hand ; Gabriel at my left ; before 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 27 
 
 me Uriel ; behind me, Raphael ' ; but such 
 expressions would have had little value for 
 him. They were undogmatic. These angels 
 were mere servants of God, and the Rab- 
 binic Jew never thought it necessary to ask 
 an angel to present his supplications to the 
 divine Lord both of angels and of men. For 
 a hundred times in which he made mention 
 of God, there was only one in which he al- 
 luded to an angel. 
 
 God was, as I have said, mighty and 
 awful, but He was also kindly and pitiful. 
 His relations with Israel and with all 
 Israelites are similiar to the relations of a 
 human father to his children. As a human 
 father grieves sorely over the faults of his 
 children, and longs for them to be sorry for 
 their offences, so too with God. He grieves 
 bitterly over the faults (and the calamities 
 to which these faults have led) of His beloved 
 people. He longs for their repentance. His 
 own glory is intimately bound up with 
 theirs. His kingship is involved in, and 
 depends upon, their acceptance and pro- 
 clamation of it. So too, like a human 
 
28 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 father, God rewards and punishes ; He 
 chastises and He forgives ; above all. He 
 cares for His children's welfare ; He loves 
 them ; He wants them to be happy and 
 good. And He has provided them a 
 means by which happiness and goodness 
 may be secured — a means which, at the 
 same time, reveals and makes manifest His 
 own kingship and glory. This means is the 
 Law. To follow the precepts of the Law 
 means joy on earth and joy in the life to 
 come. Joy on earth consists in fulfilling 
 the commands of the perfect God, who 
 has chosen out Israel from all the other 
 peoples of the world and has given them 
 His Law. This gift constituted Israel's 
 special duty and special privilege, and every 
 separate injunction is duty and privilege in 
 one. The fulfilment of the divine precepts 
 should also lead to a happy life in the 
 ordinary sense of the word — to earthly 
 welfare and prosperity. For various reasons 
 this result by no means always follows, 
 but the joy in the doing, the glad con- 
 sciousness of sonship in the execution of 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 29 
 
 the commandments — these are always to 
 be obtained. 
 
 But are there not many commandments, 
 some ' moral/ some ' ceremonial ' ? Yes, 
 there are. The more commands, the more 
 honour ; the more injunctions, the more 
 privilege ; the more precepts, the more 
 gladness ; the more laws, the more means 
 for self -purification and self-control. The 
 many statutes lead to santification. No one 
 individual can fulfil them all. Some of the 
 laws relate to sacrifices. But the Temple is 
 destroyed, and even while it stood, by no 
 means all the laws concerned every Jew. 
 Some are only for priests, some for Levites; 
 some for women ; some for the king. But 
 a fair number remain, and the Rabbinic 
 Jew, in a manner unpleasing to modern 
 liberal Jews, daily thanks God that he is a 
 man and not a woman, because men have 
 more commandments to fulfill than women. 
 Greater privilege has, therefore, been given 
 to them ; greater opportunity for the 
 purest joy. The core and essence of the 
 Rabbinic religion are contained in that one 
 
30 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 familiar phrase, 'the joy of the command- 
 ments.' Nor is anything more significant 
 and revealing of the real inwardness of that 
 religion than the simple fact that the same 
 Hebrew word, which in the Old Testament 
 period means commandment and nothing 
 but commandment, came in the Rabbinic 
 period to mean privilege (or honour) as 
 well. We are wont to think of ' the Law ' 
 as a series of enactments, upon the viola- 
 tion of which, punishment would ensue. 
 To the Rabbinic Jew the Law was some- 
 thing quite different. It is true that for 
 its violation you would be punished. It is 
 true that for its observance you would be 
 rewarded. It is true that it was your duty 
 and obligation to obey it, that it stood, in 
 a sense, outside and above you, threatening 
 you with penalties, if also inciting you with 
 rewards. But it was far more than a mere 
 arbitrary code which you had to obey, if you 
 wanted to be prosperous and escape a whip- 
 ping, as a schoolboy must obey the, to him, 
 often arbitrary rules of his irresponsible 
 schoolmaster. The Rabbinic Jew knew why 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 31 
 
 the Law had been given. He knew that it 
 came from a God, who was perfect in right- 
 eousness and in love. He knew that it had 
 been given him for his own good. In the 
 execution of the Law's injunctions his own 
 nature would be purified and hallowed. In 
 the observance of its enactments he would 
 find life, happiness, satisfaction, peace. It 
 was not, so to speak, God in His capacity 
 as severe judge or as awful master who had 
 given to the Israelites His Law, it was God 
 as loving and merciful. It was the grace of 
 God which was made visible in the Law. 
 
 To the Rabbinic Jew, who conformed to 
 average and type, the observance of the Law 
 was in no wise a burden. How should it be 
 so ? Suppose you really believe in a ' per- 
 sonal ' God who is perfectly wise and per- 
 fectly good. Suppose you also believe that 
 this perfectly good and perfectly wise God 
 has entered into special relations with your 
 race or community, and that, through His 
 accredited messenger. He has told you to 
 fulfil certain moral and ceremonial laws to 
 the best of your ability. Suppose He has 
 
32 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 told you that these laws are His laws, and 
 that in the observance of them you will find 
 satisfaction and joy, the highest life on earth 
 and the most blissful life hereafter. It 
 seems prima facie unlikely that, with this 
 belief, you will find the fulfilment of the laws 
 a burden. And, as a matter of fact, the 
 great majority of the Jewish evidence goes 
 to show that, from the end of the first 
 century at any rate, the laws were not a 
 burden, but a delight. Moreover in the year 
 300 or 500 (whatever may have been the 
 case in 30 or 50), there were not really so 
 very many of them after all ! All the talk 
 in the text books of the immense number, 
 multiplicity and elaboration of the enact- 
 ments which the ordinary Israelite had to 
 fulfil is probably much exaggerated even for 
 the year 50 ; for the year 500 it is so un- 
 doubtedly. The compulsion of the Law was 
 chiefly felt in two directions — -the Sabbath 
 and food. There were very many things 
 which you might not do upon the Sabbath, 
 but you soon learnt what they were, and if 
 there is one thing more certain than another 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 33 
 
 it is that the Sabbath was a joy. There 
 were numerous laws about food, but some 
 concerned the butcher, others the women 
 who cooked ; those which remained were 
 easily acquired and remembered. These 
 food laws, doubtless, made, and were in- 
 tended to make, the intercourse between 
 Jew and Gentile difficult, unpleasant, or 
 even impossible, but the average Jew did 
 not desire any social intercourse with 
 persons who did not belong to his race and 
 his religious community. 
 
 Again, some bad Jews in every generation 
 may have pretended to believe, and may 
 have acted upon the belief, that the strict 
 observance of the Sabbath and the dietary 
 laws made an observance of the moral 
 laws — of justice, charity, compassion — un- 
 necessary and superfluous. Some bad Jews 
 in every generation may have thought that 
 the ceremonial laws were more important 
 than the moral laws. But the average 
 Rabbinic Jew did not think so. The bad 
 Jews did not conform to type. They were 
 the excrescence ; they were not the usual 
 
 D 
 
34 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 and regular product. They did not repre- 
 sent the 'spirit' of the Rabbinic creed. To 
 the typical, and even to the average, Jew 
 the Law was a joy for which he could 
 thank God in sincerity and in truth. 
 
 Rabbinic Judaism did not, as is still too 
 commonly believed, produce a regular crop 
 of proud and self-righteous Jews, upon the 
 one hand, and a regular crop of anxious, 
 scrupulous, timid and despairing Jews upon 
 the other. The evidence against such a 
 supposition for the developed Rabbinic 
 Judaism of 500, and for the Rabbinic 
 Judaism of many subsequent generations, 
 is, I believe, fairly conclusive. A religion, 
 like virtue, may be looked at from one point 
 of view as a mean ; from another, as an 
 excess. Looked at as a mean. Rabbinic 
 Judaism lies in between the two extremes 
 just indicated, and the prevailing type of 
 character which it produced — the charac- 
 teristic type of men which it brought up — 
 lay in between the two opposite extremes, 
 and was wholly different from both. Every 
 religion has its exceptional sinners and its 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 35 
 
 exceptional saints ; every religion produces 
 perversions from type, spiritual abortions 
 and caricatures. Doubtless Rabbinic Juda- 
 ism was no exception to this rule. In 
 each generation there doubtless existed— 
 and because they existed it is possible to 
 say that Rabbinic Judaism produced them 
 — some proud and self-righteous Jews, some 
 anxious, scrupulous, timid and despairing 
 Jews. I have already observed that in each 
 generation there probably existed some 
 hypocritical Jews, some who observed the 
 ceremonial laws and neglected the moral 
 laws, some whose morality was negative, 
 conventional and poor. What religion is 
 without the defects of its qualities ? Among 
 the nominal adherents of every religion 
 there are some bad men. But the prevailing 
 type of character which Rabbinic Judaism 
 produced was very different. Its adherents 
 were neither proud, on the one hand, nor 
 despairing, upon the other. They were 
 both humble and hopeful. They were, 
 indeed, taught to believe that the average 
 and decent-living Israelite would inherit 
 
36 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 the world to come, would be ' saved/ to 
 use other and more familiar phraselogy. 
 But they were not taught to believe that 
 this result would follow as the guerdon 
 of their own merits ; it would rather 
 befall them as the effect of God's love 
 and God's grace. They prayed : ' May it 
 be thy will, O Lord our God and God of our 
 fathers, that we may keep Thy statutes in 
 this world, and be worthy to live to witness 
 and inherit happiness and blessing in the 
 days of the Messiah, and in the life of the 
 world to come/ But they also said, and the 
 one sentence was no less sincere than the 
 other, ' We know that we have no good 
 works of our own ; deal with us in charity 
 and loving-kindness, and save us/ God's 
 love for Israel, His love of the repentant 
 sinner, His inveterate tendency to forgive- 
 ness, together with the merits of the patri- 
 archs, would amply make up for their own 
 individual deficiencies. Their religion was, 
 therefore, happy and hopeful : happy in 
 the performance, within the limits of human 
 frailty, of the divine commands in this 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 37 
 
 world, hopeful in the belief of the sure in- 
 heritance hereafter of the finer and purer 
 , beatitudes of the world to come/ 
 
 But do all Israelites observe the Law ? 
 Do they fulfil the injunction of this perfect 
 
 iDr. Vernon Bartlet in his article on Paul in the new 
 edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica does me the honour 
 of referring to certain old papers of mine in the Jewish 
 Quarterly Review. A full rejoinder to his criticism is here 
 impossible. I may, however, allude to one or two points. Dr. 
 Bartlet says : p. 941, col. 2, ' It is unproven and improbable 
 that Paul unfairly represents the prevailing tendency in the 
 Pharisaic Judaism of his own day as "legalistic" in the bad 
 sense. He is really the one extant witness upon the point as 
 just defined, if we except certain apocalyptic writings (whose 
 evidence modern Jews are anxious to discount) hke the Apoc- 
 alypse of Baruch and 4 Ezra, the latter of which suggests that 
 already the humbling effect of the capture of Jerusalem was 
 being felt.' Legalistic in the bad sense seems to mean pride 
 and self- righteousness. Now, first, if Paul is really the one 
 extant witness, he is a very tainted one. It is very hard to 
 condemn a whole religion, or a whole number of persons, upon 
 the unsupported evidence of an enemy. Secondly, all such 
 Rabbinic material as does exist prior to the destruction of the 
 Temple, including the oldest portion of the liturgy, points the 
 other way. Thirdly, and this is the most important con- 
 sideration, when Rabbinic literature becomes ample, we find, 
 (a) no prevailing self-righteousness or pride, (6) a full-blown 
 legalism. What becomes then of the contention that the Law 
 tended to evil ? Again, it may be true that Paul's universalism 
 was attained by his anti-legal attitude, but why that should 
 prove that the Law, or that Law, has a specific virus tending 
 prevailingly to pride and self-righteousness, I fail to perceive. 
 Assume that the Rabbinic Jews were particularists, and that 
 particularism is a sin ; yet why should they not have been 
 humble towards God ? Millions of Christians have beheved 
 that all non-Christians were doomed to everlasting torments, 
 and that only Christians of their own type of Christianity 
 would be saved. Yet they have believed in a God of love, 
 and have loved him, and have lived lives of piety and 
 righteousness and humility. 
 
38 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 code ? And is not God very angry with 
 them if they transgress any of these excel- 
 lent precepts, whether moral or ceremonial? 
 It is undoubtedly true that they do not all 
 observe the Law, on the contrary, all, more 
 or less, fail to fulfil its injunctions. And 
 doubtless God is very angry. A few hard- 
 ened and special sinners violate the in- 
 junctions of the Law in open revolt and 
 mockery and wickedness. But the enor- 
 mous mass of persons violate them through 
 weakness, through the solicitations and 
 temptations of the Evil Inclination, through 
 the attractions of base desire, or through 
 any other form of human frailty. Is not 
 then the whole scheme of things, the entire 
 religious system, broken through and broken 
 down ? Where is God's glory ? Where is 
 man's satisfaction ? Both depend upon the 
 keeping of the Law, and the Law cannot be 
 kept. 
 
 Theoretically, no doubt, the Law might 
 be a joy. So it would be in fact, if it 
 could be observed. But the Law itself 
 declares that man is accursed unless he 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 39 
 
 observe the whole Law, that is, all its en- 
 actments. To observe all the enactments, 
 both positive and negative, would mean 
 that a man would be sinless, whereas it is 
 notorious that all men sin. If one has 
 violated the Law by breaking one of its 
 enactments, and thus by a single trans- 
 gression become guilty and ' accursed,' 
 how can the whole thing be other than a 
 frightful burden, a constant and gnawing 
 anxiety ? The issues are tremendous — 
 life eternal (to say nothing of earthly happi- 
 ness) is at stake— the chances of success are 
 infinitesimal. Untempted angels might keep 
 the Law, and be happy in its observance. 
 How can man, solicited and tempted by the 
 evil inclinations within him (and perhaps 
 without), be happy when he knows that 
 failure is practically inevitable ? What use 
 to have observed commandments a, b, c, d, 
 if one fails to keep e or f ? For it is the 
 whole Law which must be observed, and he 
 who is guilty in one injunction is guilty in 
 all. How can a Law which must be ob- 
 served in all its parts, and which yet cannot 
 
40 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 be observed in all its parts, be the gift of 
 God's grace ? Surely it must, on the con- 
 trary, be the gift of His anger ! Instead of 
 a privilege, it is a burden ; instead of a joy, 
 it is sorrow and gloom; instead of leading 
 to santification and life, it leads to iniquity 
 and death. 
 
 It seems a bad business, but the un- 
 systematic and practical character of Rab- 
 binic Judaism, and the goodness and com- 
 passion of the God in whom it believed, 
 were equal to the occasion. 
 
 It is true that the Israelite often fails to 
 observe God's commands. He offends both 
 negatively and positively. But he reflects 
 that the Law was given to men, and not to 
 angels. It was given to men for their 
 improvement and santification and joy, and 
 it was given to beings who, by their very 
 constitution and history, were bound to 
 make frequent lapses and to fall often into 
 sin. The Rabbinic Jew did not worry 
 himself much about the theory that the 
 whole Law (with all its enactments) has to 
 be obeyed. He took a practical view of 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 41 
 
 the situation, and one which seemed to 
 harmonize with two fundamental facts, 
 first, that God was kind and merciful and 
 compassionate, and not merely awful and 
 holy and severe; secondly, that the Law had 
 been given for life, and not for death, for 
 good, and not for evil. And the difficulty 
 of the Law must not be exaggerated. The 
 Rabbinic Jew realized that the average 
 man can, and often does, fulfil and observe 
 many divine behests, though there is not 
 a command which he could not fulfil more 
 perfectly and devoutly than is actually 
 the case. Still the Law, in its separate 
 injunctions, is not, in one sense, too hard 
 for him. There is no commandment which 
 he cannot fulfil more or less. It is true 
 that the average man fulfils some, and fails 
 to fulfil others. But (in despite of the 
 theory, and even of the Law^s own state- 
 ment), the scheme of things does not break 
 down because of these partial failures. 
 They were foreseen and provided for. If 
 there were no failures, there could be no 
 improvement, no gradual purification, no 
 
42 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 advance in holiness. In spite of the failures, 
 the Law leads to life and not to death. 
 In spite of the failures, man can rejoice 
 in the commandments. In spite of the 
 failures, he can feel the Law to be a privilege, 
 and not a burden ; not a gloom, but a joy. 
 But is not God angry at man's violation 
 of the Law ? Yes, He is very angry. But 
 greater than His anger is His compassion. 
 He helps man to repair his fault. He helps 
 him in the struggle to resist temptation. He 
 helps him when he prays ; and by the 
 gracious gift of repentance He helps him 
 both to conquer his sin and to obtain its 
 forgiveness. God delights in man's repent- 
 ance. Let a man repent but a very little, 
 and God will forgive very much. For He 
 delights in the exercise of forgiveness far 
 more than in the exercise of punishment. 
 So anxious is God about repentance and 
 forgiveness that He instituted in the perfect 
 Law a day consecrated to both, Man may 
 and can and should repent every day ; God 
 can and does pardon every day. But the 
 day of Atonement is the day on which both 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 43 
 
 man and God are, so to speak, engaged in 
 doing nothing else tlian repentance and 
 forgiveness, on which, for every sincere and 
 humble penitent, there is offered the chance 
 of a fresh start and the opportunity of a 
 clean slate. 
 
 There is, therefore, no need whatever for 
 despair. No injunction of the Law is too 
 difficult for a man to seek to obey it. Every 
 man can obey the Law's behests, though 
 every man (and certainly every average 
 man) is bound to fail in obeying them 
 all, or in obeying them perfectly or entirely. 
 Yet the breaches can be repaired. Human 
 repentance, divine forgiveness ; these are 
 the methods. They are made visible and 
 corporealized in the great and crowning 
 mercy of the Law, the Day of Atonement. 
 
 Life is solemn, but not appalling. We 
 are bound to obey God's injunctions, but 
 in these very injunctions and in their fulfil- 
 ment lie happiness and self-realization. For 
 the Law is ' a tree of life to them that grasp 
 it, and of them that uphold it every one is 
 rendered happy.' 
 
44 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 None but the deliberate and determined 
 sinner need fail to ' grasp ' it ; none but the 
 mocker and the apostate are unable to 
 'uphold' it. It is not only the perfect who 
 can grasp ; it is not only the immaculate 
 who can uphold. Therefore the average 
 man, as well as the saint, can say and can 
 feel, ' Its ways are ways of pleasantness, 
 and all its paths are peace/ 
 
 Rabbinic Judaism was convinced, as I 
 have said, that for every decent Israelite 
 there was a place in the future world, in 
 'the life to come/ Only then and only there 
 would he find perfect happiness. Never- 
 theless, although, as a just punishment 
 of many transgressions, the lot of Israel 
 and of the Israelite upon earth was usually 
 hard and unpleasant, the Rabbinic Jew 
 was anxious to taste such happiness as 
 he could even before he died, and before 
 the resurrection of the dead. Though 
 it may be intended that man is to find 
 nothing but joy hereafter, it is not 
 intended that he is to find nothing but 
 sorrow on earth. That, indeed, may often 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 45 
 
 be the case, but that is not God's inviolable 
 and invariable intention. Man is to be 
 happy here and now : God has given the 
 means of happiness even upon earth, and 
 through earthly and material things. These 
 earthly and material things man is to enjoy, 
 and to hallow, through religion. Eating and 
 drinking ; family life ; the daily labour ; the 
 rest after toil ; the sights of nature ; all these 
 are to be enjoyed — enjoyed and sanctified. 
 The Rabbinic Jew of 500 doubtless believed 
 in a devil and in demons : but they did not 
 play a great part in his religion ; they did 
 not form a conspicuous portion of his re- 
 ligious dogmas. They were not determin- 
 ating or cardinal features of his religious 
 faith. Their role was vague, fluctuating, 
 indistinct. They belonged rather to his 
 superstitions and his folk-lore than to his 
 religion and his creed. So, to Rabbinic 
 Judaism, this world is not bad, but good. 
 The next world will certainly be much 
 better, but this world is good. God 
 created it, and He governs it still. He has 
 never withdrawn from its government. He 
 
46 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 has never allowed its government to fall into 
 the hands of any lesser divine being than 
 Himself, still less into the hands of some evil 
 spirit or demon. This world is God's world 
 still, and the Israelite is to enjoy it — tem- 
 perately, purely — as much as he can. For 
 every enjoyment and in every enjoyment he 
 is to render thanks to God the Giver. He 
 is to smell the rose, and to rejoice in its 
 perfume. And he is to say and to feel : 
 ' Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who createst 
 fragrant plants.' 
 
 Rabbinic Judaism was a simple religion, 
 but it was preserved from becoming too 
 simple by a strong current of intellectualism. 
 This intellectual side did not, however, 
 display itself in systematic theology and 
 metaphysics ; it was chiefly manifested in 
 the study of the Law, where it spent itself 
 in subtle and often arid discussions, in 
 elaborate legal minutiae, and in endless 
 casuistical distinctions and hairsplittings. 
 However, valueless the larger portion of 
 this legal study may have been as a con- 
 tribution to human progress and culture, it 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 47 
 
 is doubtful whether it had much injurious 
 effect upon the actual religious life which 
 was lived by the great mass of the total 
 Jewish population. It passed over their 
 heads, and left them unaffected. Concur- 
 rently with the purely legal discussions other 
 kinds of religious output existed also. With 
 the Halachah went the Haggadah, so that 
 the religious imagination of the teachers was 
 not checked or starved. And a certain 
 valuable idealism was undoubtedly pro- 
 duced by this elaborate and never ending 
 study of the Law. The most honoured 
 people among the Jews were not the rich, 
 but the learned ; not the successful money- 
 maker, but the scholar. A mother's am- 
 bition was not that her son should be 
 wealthy, but that he should be wise, 
 wise in the wisdom of the schools. A 
 narrow wisdom ; as regards much of it, a 
 useless wisdom ; a wisdom which produced 
 a literature of which huge portions have 
 little value and little charm. Nevertheless, 
 a wisdom. The consecration of the simple 
 ' material ' joys of life, together with the 
 
48 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 consecration of the mind and of wisdom, 
 was a special and characteristic feature of 
 Rabbinic Judaism, giving to it a cheerful 
 and healthy idealism that was peculiarly 
 its own. 
 
 A joyous, simple religion ; yet also an 
 intellectual and rational religion in its own 
 special way : a happy, spiritual, and even 
 ardent religion, but not a religion which 
 passed constantly and rapidly into mysti- 
 cism. A religion more usually (to use the 
 now familiar words of William James) of 
 the 'healthy-minded' and of the 'once-born.' 
 A religion which provoked much realisation 
 and love of God ; much delight in His 
 service ; much readiness to live for Him 
 and die for Him ; but which always main- 
 tained a vivid and profound distinction 
 between man and God, between the human 
 personality and the divine.^ 
 
 iThis does not mean that there was no mysticism among 
 the Rabbis (Dr. Abelson has lately twice over proved the 
 contrary), still less that the Rabbis were not capable of 
 sublime thoughts and profound utterances. Such thoughts 
 and utterances meet us by no means infrequently. I am 
 rather surprised that Dr. Herford in his edition of the Sayings 
 of the Fathers (in the great Oxford Apocrypha and Pseude- 
 pigrapha ed. Charles) should say of them (Vol. 2, p. 686) : 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 49 
 
 A religion of every day and family life, not 
 a religion of celibate asceticism or drastic 
 punishments of the flesh. A religion which 
 taught that God helped man to be good, 
 that He was 'near' and approachable and 
 kind, but which strongly and severely 
 maintained a clear-cut and large distinction 
 between the human child and the divine 
 Father. Rabbinic Judaism was without 
 
 ' The reader who will persevere will find much that is valuable 
 and instructive for the right understanding of the religion 
 and ethics of the Pharisees ; much, also, which, without being 
 either very profound or very sublime, is yet well and wisely 
 said.' Tastes and standards differ, but to my thinking the 
 following adages cannot without injustice be regarded as 
 lacking either in sublimity or profoundness. And the 
 ' Sayings of the Fathers ' is a mere selection of the Rabbinic 
 wisdom: 
 
 ' Be not like servants who minister to their master upon 
 the condition of receiving a reward.' 
 
 ' If I am not for myself, who will be for me ? And being 
 for myself, what am I ?' 
 
 ' Do His will as if it were thy will, that He may do thy 
 will as if it were His will.' 
 
 ' It is not thy duty to complete the work, but neither art 
 thou free to desist from it.' 
 
 ' He in whom the spirit of his fellow creatures takes delight, 
 in him the Spirit of the All-present takes delight.' 
 
 ' The recompense of a precept is a precept, and the recom- 
 pense of a transgression a transgression.' 
 
 ' This world is like a vestibule before the world to come ; 
 prepare thyself in the vestibule that thou mayest enter into 
 the hall.' 
 
 ' Better is one hour of repentance and good deeds in this 
 world than the whole life of the world to come : better is one 
 hour of blissfulness of spirit in the world to come than the 
 whole Hfe of this world.' 
 
50 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 sacraments and without mysteries. It 
 knew of no rapid change from bad to good 
 by any secret initiation or any second and 
 higher birth. For the most part it taught a 
 gradual progress in goodness and knowledge 
 and the love of God : and if it also realised 
 that there are some who inherit ' the king- 
 dom ' in a moment, such instantaneous 
 success was supposed to be only due to 
 repentance and forgiveness — the repentance 
 of man, the forgiveness of God. 
 
 Rabbinic Judaism did not readily produce 
 that mystic temper or soul which seems 
 to find itself afresh by losing itself in God. 
 Its saint does not naturally speak of being 
 in God or of God being in him. He does not 
 conceive that it is no longer the old human 
 ' he,' who, now that the higher life has been 
 won, is really acting and working, but a 
 transfigured and new ' he,' perhaps better to 
 be described as ' God in him ' rather than 
 ' himself.' The rapture, the abandon, the 
 ecstasy, of that sort of mystic are not 
 typical of Rabbinic Judaism, though, on the 
 other hand, it is inaccurate to say that 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 51 
 
 within Rabbinic Judaism mysticism had no 
 place at all. But its mysticism was of a 
 different kind. Mysticism can, perhaps, 
 never be altogether foreign to any genuine 
 religion, such as Rabbinic Judaism un- 
 doubtedly was. Yet, though the generalisa- 
 tion is, I believe, correct, that mysticism 
 of the order of which the fourth Gospel is 
 so familiar and illustrious an example, was 
 not typical of Rabbinic Judaism, it did 
 not on that account produce a lower level 
 of religious feeling or religious life, and it 
 certainly did not produce less readiness for 
 martyrdom. Nor is its ethical quality 
 lower. All that can justly be said is that 
 its fervour and its ethics, its religious tem- 
 per and spiritual tone, are generally other 
 than those of the mystic who feels himself 
 in God and God in him ; it reaches and 
 enjoys God, it attains its moments of 
 intensest communion with Him, but by a 
 different road and in a different way. 
 
 In 500A.D. Rabbinic Judaism still believed 
 (it believes to-day) in the advent of a 
 Messiah and of the Messianic age. But it 
 
52 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 did not teach that that age was coming soon. 
 The Messiah and his age were relegated to a 
 distant and indefinite future, much as they 
 are to-day, much as the Second Advent is 
 to-day by an orthodox and old-fashioned 
 Protestant. And the Messiah was to be a 
 man ; not a divine or semi-divine being, 
 already pre-existent in ' heaven,' but a 
 human descendant of Davidic stock, who 
 should be born as other men were born, and 
 only differ from other men by his superior 
 righteousness and power. 
 
 Such were (in briefest outline), so far as 
 I can make out, the main characteristics 
 of Rabbinic Judaism. But one important 
 point has been so far left out, or rather a 
 point which is of grave importance in one 
 respect, but not of grave importance in 
 another. The religion I have ventured to 
 describe in these rough and clumsy strokes 
 was the religion of the Rabbinic Jew to- 
 wards his God and towards the members of 
 his community and race. But what about 
 the big world outside ? What about the 
 Gentile, the non-Jew in race and the non- 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 53 
 
 Jew in religion ? Here we draw near to the 
 one really sore point, the one grave de- 
 ficiency of the Rabbinic religion. 
 
 It cannot truthfully be ignored or denied 
 that the great outstanding fault of Rabbinic 
 Judaism was its particularism. The relation 
 of God to Israel was other than His relation 
 to the world at large. It was not denied 
 that there were a righteous few among the 
 heathen, and the deepest hope of Rabbinic 
 Judaism was expressed and crystallized in 
 the famous prayer, which is still read week 
 by week in every orthodox Synagogue : 
 
 ' We therefore hope in Thee, O Lord our 
 God, that we may speedily behold the glory 
 of Thy might, when Thou will remove the 
 abominations from the earth, and the idols 
 will be utterly cut off, when the world will 
 be perfected under the kingdom of the 
 Almighty, and all the children of flesh will 
 call upon Thy name, when Thou wilt turn 
 unto Thyself all the wicked of the earth. 
 Let all the inhabitants of the world perceive 
 and know that unto Thee every knee must 
 bow, every tongue must swear. Before 
 
54 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 Thee, O Lord our God, let them bow and 
 fall ; and unto Thy glorious name let them 
 give honour ; let them all accept the yoke 
 of Thy kingdom, and do Thou reign over 
 them speedily, and for ever and ever. For 
 the kingdom is Thine, and to all eternity 
 Thou wilt reign in glory ; as it is written in 
 Thy law, The Lord shall reign for ever and 
 ever. And it is said. And the Lord shall be 
 King over all the earth ; in that day shall 
 the Lord be One, and His name One.' 
 
 But in spite of this prayer the general line 
 of Rabbinic Judaism towards the ' nations ' 
 was distinctly hostile and bitter. For, 
 to the Jew, the Gentile was, on the whole, 
 synonymous with the oppressor or the 
 enemy. Israel alone knew God, and God 
 was only 'near' to Israel.^ But it seems 
 fair to assert that Rabbinic Judaism, though 
 it had a theory or two as to the reason why 
 the one God who had undoubtedly 'created' 
 
 iDr. Abrahams observes : ' This narrowness was softened 
 by many human touches, for the Rabbinic particularism was 
 never absolute, and several of its most prominent teachers 
 spoke of the world outside Israel with love and fraternity. 
 Rabbinism always held within itself the possibility of 
 universalism, and this possibility was often reahzed in the 
 doctrines and sympathies of the synagogue.' 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 55 
 
 all things and all men, was, nevertheless, 
 in the best and most intimate sense, the 
 divine Father of Israel only, or why Israel 
 alone had the inestimable glory, privilege 
 and happiness of practising the enactments 
 of the perfect Law, did not greatly worry 
 its head over the future lot of the Gentiles. 
 It is true that even as late as 300 or 500 a.d. 
 proselytes were by no means unknown. But 
 the desire and the search for proselytes had 
 ceased. When Christianity became the state 
 church of the Roman Empire, it was for- 
 bidden under severe penalties for anybody 
 to become a proselyte to Judaism. And even 
 much earlier, after the Hadrianic war and its 
 agonies, the tendency to shutting themselves 
 off from the pitiless Gentile naturally tended 
 to increase among the Jews. The distant 
 future was for God. In the hard present 
 let the Jew keep himself as much aloof as he 
 could from the oppressor and the foe. The 
 non-Jew was not a worshipper of the One 
 God ; he was a sinner ; he was the enemy of 
 Israel. After death he would undoubtedly 
 receive (just as the Christian of 500 thought 
 
56 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 the Jew would receive) the reward of his 
 unbehef and his wickedness. Meanwhile the 
 Jew rejoiced in his own true and pure faith, 
 and he thanked God for the special favour 
 which the divine Father had vouchsafed to 
 him. He thanked Him (as the prayer which 
 immediately precedes the prayer already 
 quoted, puts it) : ' that He has not made us 
 like the nations of other lands, and has not 
 placed us like other families of the earth, 
 since He has not assigned unto us a portion 
 as unto them, or a lot as unto all their mul- 
 titude.' But what I am most keen to em- 
 phasize is that this indifference, dislike, 
 contempt, particularism, — this ready and 
 not unwilling consignment of the non- 
 believer and the non-Jew to perdition and 
 gloom, — was quite consistent with the most 
 passionate religious faith and with the 
 most exquisite and delicate charity. Just 
 as heaps and heaps of Christians have 
 devoutly believed that the unbeliever, or 
 even the heretical Christian, would un- 
 doubtedly go to hell, and that he fully 
 deserved to go there for his unbelief and 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 57 
 
 his sin, so was it mutatis mutandis with 
 the Jew. And just as heaps and heaps of 
 these Christians, in spite of this odious par- 
 ticularism, hved noble lives, and loved God 
 with beautiful intensity, so was it also with 
 the Jews. The odious particularism did not 
 affect their personal relations with God, or 
 their relations with their fellowmen within 
 the circle of their own community. In fact 
 the particularism was usually more sub- 
 conscious than conscious. As the ordinary 
 average Christian only consorted with 
 Christians, so the ordinary average Jew only 
 consorted with Jews. The fate of the out- 
 sider did not thrust itself persistently within 
 the circle of his thought, and even when it 
 did, he could, such is the pathetic incon- 
 sistency of the human mind, consign the 
 outsider to perdition and truly love God at 
 one and the same time. He could even 
 speak sincerely of a loving God, and really 
 believe in God's love, although he was con- 
 vinced that a huge proportion of God's 
 children were born to an eternal ' death ' ! 
 Can there be a more perfect example of this 
 
58 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 strange inconsistency than the author of the 
 Fourth Gospel ?^ 
 
 Now assume that I am right in my view 
 of Rabbinic Judaism ; assume that the 
 average and typical Rabbinic Jew of 300 or 
 500 was such as I have described. Picture 
 him and his religion to yourself with their 
 strength and their weakness ; their nobility 
 and their limitations. And then ask your- 
 self these questions : Is it conceivable that 
 Paul before his conversion was such a Rab- 
 binic Jew ? Is it conceivable that the 
 religion of the man who had the vision 
 at Damascus, and ultimately wrote the 
 Epistle to the Romans, was, or had ever been. 
 Rabbinic Judaism ? Whatever Paul's in- 
 dividual genius, whatever the effect of the 
 conversion, whatever revolution the new 
 faith wrought upon the materials of the old, 
 is it conceivable that the one could have 
 
 ^Dr. Abrahams remarks : ' It would be wrong to forget that 
 long before the western world had heard of a " wider hope," 
 Judaism, through the mouth-piece of its greatest medieval 
 teacher, elevated into a dogma the second century saying of 
 the Tosefta that " the pious of all nations have a share in the 
 world to come." It is indeed on this pragmatic basis that 
 Mendelssohn reared the structure of modern Judaism in its 
 relation to the world/ 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 59 
 been built up even on the ruins of the other? 
 
 If Paul had previously only known and 
 believed the markedly human view of the 
 Messiah, would or could he have evolved 
 his elaborate Christology ? 
 
 If he had concerned himself about the 
 fate or the lot of the non- Jew as little as the 
 typical Rabbinic Jew (of 500), would he 
 have come to believe that his special mission 
 was to the Gentiles ? (The question is 
 justified even if we accept the theory that 
 the consciousness of this special mission 
 'dawned on him only gradually/ that he 
 first sought out, and attempted to convert, 
 his own compatriots, and that it was 
 his failure with these which stimulated his 
 interest in the Gentiles, and turned his 
 thoughts and activities in their direction.^) 
 
 If he had held the Rabbinic view of the 
 world, would he have acquired and taught 
 his peculiar form of pessimism ? 
 
 If he had shared the Rabbinic view of the 
 Law, could he conceivably have evolved the 
 
 iDr. Vernon Bartlet in the article Paul — Encyc. Britt., nth 
 ed., p. 942, col. I. — But weigh against this view the words of 
 Loisy quoted in the Appendix. 
 
6o THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 particular theory about it elaborated in 
 the Epistle to the Romans ? 
 
 If he had held the Rabbinic view of 
 repentance, could he have ignored this con- 
 ception so completely as he does ? 
 
 If his piety and communion with God had 
 been purely of the Rabbinic type, could he 
 have evolved his noble and peculiar mys- 
 ticism ? 
 
 If his soteriology had been only that of 
 Rabbinic Judaism, and he had known, and 
 been attracted to, no other, could he have 
 possibly devised and constructed the soteri- 
 ology of the great Epistles ? 
 
 If his religious psychology had been that 
 of Rabbinic Judaism, would it have been 
 possible, even after Damascus, and after the 
 conversion, for such a religious psychology 
 to be evolved as we actually find (as much 
 assumed as worked out) in the genuine 
 writings of the Apostle ? 
 
 The two first questions are included for 
 the sake of completeness, but raise no new 
 point, and involve no difficulty. We know 
 that after the rise and development of 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 6i 
 
 Christianity, the more exalted and trans- 
 cendent views about the Messiah were aban- 
 doned by the Jews. A general reaction set 
 in. The other view that the Messiah would 
 be a mere man (however good), which had 
 been, so far as we can gather, the more 
 prevailing view of early Rabbinic Judaism, 
 gained ground : the ideas of pre-existence 
 and of semi-divinity, adopted by the 
 Apocalyptic thinkers and others both in 
 Palestine and in the Diaspora, became un- 
 popular, forgotten and taboo. Though to 
 Paul, Christ was not the Second Person of a 
 Trinity, though he was quite distinct from, 
 and subordinate to, the Divine Father, he 
 was nevertheless a regular divine being, who 
 had existed as divine before his incarnation, 
 and who, on his resurrection, was invested 
 with still greater power and glory than 
 before. He was God's own Son in a special 
 and peculiar sense. From the human 
 Messiah of the later Rabbinic Judaism he 
 was separated by an immense gulf. If Paul 
 had been a Rabbinic Jew of the 500 a.d. 
 type, he could hardly have made of the 
 
62 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 human Jesus, who hved and died in Paul's 
 own Ufetime, what he actually made of him 
 in the Epistles. Even if the Philippians and 
 Colossians were not genuine, this conclusion 
 would hold. The Christology of the Romans 
 and Corinthians would have been difficult 
 or impossible for such a Rabbinic Jew to 
 achieve, however whole-heartedly he might 
 have been converted to the belief that Jesus 
 of Nazareth was the Messiah. But in the 
 first half of the first century there was no 
 such difficulty or impossibility. 
 
 As to the second question (concerning the 
 fate or future of the Gentiles) we are aware 
 that, even in Palestinian Judaism, there was, 
 in the first century, a strong interest in 
 proselytes and proselytism. In the Diaspora 
 the interest was still greater. The facts are 
 well-known and reported in detail in the 
 text-books. A considerable fringe of persons 
 existed who, without becoming full Jews, 
 and accepting all the obligations of the 
 Jewish Law, had nevertheless acknowledged 
 the God of Israel as the one and only God, 
 and offered worship to Him alone. Jewish 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 63 
 
 teachers were wont to lay stress upon the 
 moral, rather than the ritual, commands of 
 the Law, and if idolatry was forsworn, and 
 the simplest rules of morality observed, they 
 held and taught that such 'fearers of God' 
 would inherit the joys of the world to come. 
 We hear of a famous case in which a would- 
 be proselyte was told by a Jewish teacher 
 that he might even become a full Jew with- 
 out submitting himself to circumcision. 
 These more liberal views still existed, even 
 after Hadrian. One Rabbi declared that 
 the whole purpose of the dispersion of Israel 
 was that Gentile men and women might be 
 brought under the wings of the Shechinah. 
 Another went so far as to argue that 
 baptism would suffice for an adult male 
 proselyte without circumcision. Hence 
 there is no reason why Paul, even before his 
 conversion, might not have been interested 
 in, or even troubled by, the religious con- 
 dition and future of the Gentile world. It 
 is just conceivable that he might have felt 
 that neither of the solutions offered so far 
 was perfectly satisfactory. For it was 
 
64 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 clearly very difficult for every Gentile to 
 accept and follow out all the injunctions 
 of the Law. On the other hand, the ' outer 
 fringe/ though their lot after death was 
 secured, were nevertheless in this world put 
 in a position of religious inferiority. They 
 had less obligations, but also less privileges. 
 How then was the wall of separation 
 between Jew and Gentile ever to be broken 
 down ? But if Paul did have any thoughts 
 and reflections of this kind, they were 
 probably suggested to him by a non- Jewish 
 environment. His noble religious univer- 
 salism — his great doctrine of the absolute 
 religious equality of Gentile and Jew— was 
 probably led up to (as we shall see) by 
 religious influences which lay outside the 
 range of Rabbinic Judaism. 
 
 It is, however, the remaining six ques- 
 tions which constitute the real difficulty. 
 Here is where the true problem lies. It is 
 in them that we find the full divergence 
 between Rabbinic Judaism and Paul — that 
 amazing divergence which has struck and 
 puzzled those Jewish scholars who thought 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 65 
 
 that they knew what Rabbinic Judaism 
 really was (I admit that they are wont to 
 take too purely favourable a view of it), and 
 who reject (with perhaps excessive indigna- 
 tion) what they regard as the imaginary 
 Rabbinic Judaism, created by Christian 
 scholars, in order to form a suitably lurid 
 background for the Epistles of St. Paul. 
 
 Now this immense divergence between 
 Rabbinic Judaism and Paul does not mean 
 that there was any decisive reason why, if 
 Paul had been a typical Rabbinic Jew, he 
 should not have become a Christian, that 
 he should not have come to believe that 
 Jesus of Nazareth was the predicted Messiah. 
 It does not mean that there is any reason 
 why he should not have taught that the 
 Law was not binding on the Gentile believer, 
 or even that, as the Messianic era was at 
 hand, its observance was altogether un- 
 necessary. It does not mean that there is 
 any reason why he should not have attacked 
 the various weaknesses and faults in Rab- 
 binic Judaism, some of which, as we know, 
 were the defects of its qualities, or even why 
 
66 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 he should not have realised that the pre- 
 dictions of the prophets concerning the 
 conversion and ingathering of the nations 
 were at last to be realised and fulfilled. All 
 this is conceivable. But what, if he had 
 been a typical Rabbinic Jew, is far less 
 conceivable is that he could have con- 
 structed the theory of the Law which we 
 actually find in the Epistle to the Romans, 
 that he would so wholly have ignored the 
 Rabbinic doctrine of repentance, or that his 
 soteriology and his mysticism would ever 
 have come into being. For these phenomena 
 Paul's individual genius and the conver- 
 sion at Damascus do not suffice. Paul must 
 have been less than a Rabbinic Jew, and 
 more. To explain him are needed : (i) a 
 Judaism which was other than Rabbinic ; 
 (2) religious influences, conceptions and 
 practises which were not Jewish at all. 
 
 In fact, the supposition that Paul before 
 his conversion was a Rabbinic Jew in the 
 ordinary sense of the word, led to a sort 
 of impasse, a cul de sac from which no 
 escape seemed possible. You could argue : 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 67 
 
 ' No one who was a Rabbinic Jew could 
 have written the great Epistles even twenty 
 years after his conversion. Therefore the 
 Epistles are forgeries.' Or you could say: 
 ' The Epistles are undoubtedly genuine. 
 Therefore they were written by one who 
 twenty years before had been a Rabbinic 
 Jew.' As the former deduction was even 
 more impossible than the latter (for all the 
 great scholars regarded forgery as wholly 
 out of the question), nothing remained but 
 to say that the epistles are an inexplicable 
 mystery, a psychological and theological 
 puzzle to which we have not yet succeeded 
 in finding the key. I felt this puzzle in 
 1894, but found very little recognition of it 
 among the great Christian scholars. In 
 1911, however, Professor Lake writes : "It 
 must be admitted that it is very hard to 
 believe that the Epistles could have been 
 written by the Rabbinical Jew whom 
 critical fancy has read back from the 
 Talmud into the first century ; and if we 
 accept the criticism which identified the 
 Judaism of the first century with that of 
 
68 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 two centuries later, Van Manen's criticism 
 is not only proper, but perhaps un- 
 answerable/'^ 
 
 Thus Professor Lake shows in what direc- 
 tion the solution of the puzzle must lie. 
 Either the Rabbinic Judaism of 50 was not 
 the Rabbinic Judaism of 500 (or 300), or 
 Paul at the time of his conversion was no 
 pure Rabbinic Jew. Professor Lake truly 
 says that we know comparatively little 
 about the various parties, sects and ten- 
 dencies in Judaism before the fall of the 
 Temple. This cautious reminder of ignor- 
 ance is intended to indicate that a full 
 solution of the puzzle may never be attain- 
 able. To this I would assent. But the next 
 remark of the Professor's is, I think in- 
 adequate. ' Many Jews, especially in the 
 Diaspora, were of a liberal and ethnicizing 
 disposition/ That statement may be per- 
 fectly true, but it will not carry us far. It 
 is not that Paul's antecedent Judaism must 
 
 iThe Earlier Epistles of St. Paul by Kirsopp Lake (igii), 
 p. 426. Van Manen was the distinguished Dutch scholar. 
 Prof. Lake's predecessor in the chair of New Testament 
 exegesis at the University of Leiden, who denied the authen- 
 ticity of all the Pauline Epistles. 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 69 
 
 have differed from Rabbinic Judaism in 
 being more liberal and ethnicizing, but it 
 must have differed from it in many impor- 
 tant features and doctrines in regard to 
 which the terms ' liberal and ethnicizing ' to 
 not come in or apply. 
 
 Let us recur again to the six questions, 
 and see more precisely wherein the diver- 
 gence between Paul and Rabbinic Judaism 
 actually consists. First as to the Pauline 
 pessimism. I have pointed out that to 
 average and typical Rabbinic Judaism the 
 world is good. It is God's world. How 
 different is the doctrine of Paul. The world 
 is under the domination of demons and of 
 Satan. Paul even goes so far as to call Satan 
 the god of this world, an expression which, 
 to the average Rabbinic Jew, would verge 
 upon blasphemy. External nature is in a 
 bondage of corruption. All creation groans 
 and travails in pain. It has been subjected 
 to vanity by God Himself from Adam's 
 day till the appearance of Christ. (How 
 Uttle can we picture Paul smelling the rose 
 and thanking God for its fragrance.) God's 
 
70 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 wrath hangs heavy upon all the world, and 
 especially upon man. It is a wrath so 
 comprehensive and severe that only an 
 amazing expedient and a terrific catas- 
 trophe can satisfy and appease it. 
 
 Combine this pessimism with the doctrine 
 of the Law. The wrath of God and the 
 wretchedness of man have not been les- 
 sened by the Law, holy though it be. 
 Israel is no exception to the universal 
 sinfulness and the universal misery. The 
 Law has brought neither happiness nor 
 virtue, and it was not intended to bring 
 them. The Law was a curse. It evoked 
 the knowledge of sin. It strengthened the 
 desire to sin. By the works of the Law no 
 man can win God's favour or be regarded 
 by God as righteous. No one becomes 
 righteous through the Law, if only because 
 no man can fulfil the Law. 
 
 Here again the gulf between Rabbinic 
 Judaism and Paul is gigantic. To the 
 former, not merely is the world good, not 
 merely ought we to enjoy ourselves in it, 
 when circumstances permit, but in Israel, 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 71 
 
 at all events, much happiness and much 
 goodness exist, and both are conditioned 
 and caused by the Law. The Law is the 
 dearest and most glorious of blessings and 
 of joys. Now it can be argued that in 
 the case of a convert his whole view of 
 the world is sometimes changed : what 
 was white is now black ; what was black 
 is now white. But even this occasional 
 phenomenon would not account for Paul. 
 If he had said that the Law was altogether 
 bad and undivine, his theory would be 
 almost easier for a Rabbinic Jew to have 
 constructed. But he asserts that the 
 Law itself is good and holy, and yet that 
 it was the strength of sin. Now there was 
 indeed one Rabbinic theory that the 
 Messiah would come when sin was at its 
 worst. When calamity and iniquity were 
 at their height, then, amidst such birth- 
 travails, would Messiah be born. But the 
 theory was never brought into relation with 
 the Law. The Law was always the cause of 
 goodness and the source of joy. If man 
 sinned, it was in spite, and not in virtue. 
 
72 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 of the Law. To throw the blame for human 
 sin upon the Law — the perfect, the adored, 
 the dehghtful — would be like throwing the 
 blame upon God. And however much sin 
 there seemed to be in the world, a pious 
 Rabbinic Jew was also conscious of some 
 observance and some righteousness. Is it 
 really conceivable that the Pauline theory 
 of the Law could have been evolved by a 
 man who had actually known the homely 
 joys and spiritual fervours which the Law 
 produced in every typical Rabbinic house- 
 hold ? Could such a one have said of 
 himself that he had been ' blameless ' as 
 regards the Law, and yet have won from it 
 no delight, no satisfaction, no peace ? If 
 he had been ' blameless ' in the Law, he 
 would have argued: ' So far as I have sinned, 
 it is my own fault. So far as I have done 
 right and reaped the joy of doing right, it 
 is due to the Law. So far as I have yielded 
 to temptation, I deplore my weakness ; so 
 far as I have overcome it, I thank God for 
 the Law. For through the Law have I 
 conquered/ That, if he had been a Rab- 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 73 
 binic Jew, would have been Paul's stand- 
 point up to his conversion. And if that liad 
 been his standpoint, the theory of the Law 
 as we find it in the Epistle to the Romans 
 would scarcely have been a psychological 
 possibility, however intense his faith might 
 have become in the Messiahship of Jesus, 
 the Son of God.^ 
 
 The systematic, and (within limits) the 
 consistent character of the Pauline teaching 
 is curiously unlike Rabbinic theology. No 
 doubt the Rabbis taught that there was a 
 terrible amount of sin in the world and 
 even in Israel, but their views were so much 
 less hard and fast, so much less driven home 
 and pushed to their extremest consequences, 
 so much less theoretic and one-sided. Paul 
 was a great and fiery genius, whose mind 
 was working under the influence of a tre- 
 mendous religious upheaval. This explains 
 
 lit is only fair to admit thatthere may be another explanation, 
 namely, that Paul knew the Rabbinic theory of the Law, but 
 that after his conversion, and after much controversy, he forgot 
 it, or ignored it, and so gradually formed his own new con- 
 ception. It is also not impossible, I admit, that a strange 
 genius like Paul might have gradually become discontented, 
 even though reared amid the happy environment of 
 Rabbinic Judaism. But this view, though conceivable, seems 
 to me, unlikely. 
 
74 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 a good deal, but it by no means explains 
 everything. God's anger is often spoken 
 about by the Rabbis, but with them it is 
 much less systematic and persistent than 
 with Paul, — at any rate in Israel. Through- 
 out history and experience, it was, as they 
 believed, constantly crossed by His forgive- 
 ness. His compassion. His love. Of these we 
 hear very little in Paul, except in so far as 
 God's love was ultimately manifested, when 
 the tale of human sin and misery had 
 reached its culmination, by the death of 
 Christ with its far-reaching effects for sal- 
 vation and for good. But for Rabbinic 
 theology (as for Jesus himself) God was so 
 good and near and kind, and man, through 
 the Law and through repentance, had such 
 constant, easy and efficacious opportunities 
 of access to Him, that there was no need of 
 a tremendous cosmic and divine event such 
 as was provided by the incarnation and the 
 crucifixion. Things were by no means 
 so bad as Paul, in his pessimism, supposed. 
 There was some righteousness and happi- 
 ness in the world, as well as much misery 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 75 
 
 and sin. And even from sin and misery 
 there was a way out. That way was con- 
 structed by God's forgiveness and man's 
 repentance. Its outward symbol was the 
 Day of Atonement. What neither God nor 
 man could do according to Paul except by 
 the incarnation of the Son, was done ac- 
 cording to Rabbinic Judaism constantly, 
 hour by hour, and year by year. Nothing 
 is more peculiar in the great Epistles than 
 the almost complete omission of the twin 
 Rabbinic ideas of repentance and forgive- 
 ness. The very word for repentance is only 
 found in three passages. The first of these 
 is in the second chapter of the Romans — -a 
 chapter which has so many peculiar features 
 that do not easily fit in with the subsequent 
 teaching that Lietzmann declares that its 
 reasoning depends throughout upon an 
 hypothesis which (to the writer) is fictitious. 
 The other two passages are in the seventh 
 chapter of the second Epistle to the Corin- 
 thians, and here repentance is only spoken 
 of in connection with persons who already 
 were Christians, and had nevertheless sinned. 
 
76 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 The same is the case in regard to the single 
 occasion in which the verb ' repent ' is 
 employed by Paul (2 Cor. xii. 21)} 
 
 This strange and fundamental difference 
 between Pauline and Rabbinic theology 
 seems scarcely conceivable if Paul up to his 
 conversion had been a typical Rabbinic 
 Jew. At least one might have expected 
 that, in his allusions to the Jews, Paul would 
 somewhere have said : ' your repentance, 
 about which you talk so much, is not ade- 
 quate, and God's forgiveness, of which you 
 prate so constantly, will not be extended to 
 you/ The Jews would doubtless have re- 
 fused to believe him, but at any rate he 
 would not have ignored the very keynote 
 of their whole position.^ 
 
 lA learned friend observes : ' I think you lay too much 
 stress on the rarity of the mere words. True, the words are 
 rare, but in every mention of the Cross, the thought is there, 
 and if ever there was a man who felt he was forgiven, it was 
 Paul. I feel sure that the sense of forgiveness coloured his 
 whole thought, however rarely expressed.' My friend's ob- 
 jection partly confirms my view. Undoubtedly the sense of 
 forgiveness coloured his whole Christian thought just because 
 it had been absent from his Jewish, thought. If he had been 
 a Rabbinic Jew, with the words and the thoughts of repen- 
 tance and forgiveness constantly on his lips and in his heart, 
 he would not have needed to establish the theory of the Cross. 
 
 2 1 admit that one must always remember that the Epistles 
 are controversial letters rather than theological doctrines, 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL yy 
 
 For these reasons the PauHne soteriology 
 seems to me impossible upon a purely Rab- 
 binic basis. The origin of the hard op- 
 position between ' faith ' and ' works ' will 
 always remain something of a puzzle. But 
 it is much more a puzzle (so far as its 
 development in the apostle's mind is con- 
 cerned) if we think of him up till his conver- 
 sion as a typical Rabbinic Jew. The 
 excellence of faith was not unknown to, or 
 uncelebrated by, Rabbinic Judaism, but it 
 was never opposed to works. ^ If one had 
 faith in God, one naturally tried to fulfil 
 his commands. Faith and works were parts 
 of a single whole. According to Rabbinic 
 theology, God could and did carry out the 
 whole process of salvation Himself. There 
 was no need of a Son, for nothing was 
 left for him to do. Salvation was the 
 privilege of every Israelite who, believing 
 in God and in His Law, tried to do his best, 
 
 and that Paul is dealing primarily with Jewish Christians 
 rather than with Jews. 
 
 I'Ce n'est pas dans la t6te d'un Juif palestinien qu'aurait pu 
 germer la pens^e d'une antinomie entre la foi et la loi — aussi 
 bien J^sus n'en a-t-il pas meme le soupgon.' Loisy in Revue 
 d'histoire et de litt^rature religieuses, vol. iv., p. 490 (1913). 
 
78 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 and was sorry for his failures and his lapses. 
 I do not think that to the Rabbinic Jew sin 
 was less hateful than it was to Paul, but he 
 objectified it less ; moreover, he thought 
 that God's power was greater and that sin's 
 power was less. Therefore it was unneces- 
 sary that a sinless divine being should 
 ' become sin ' on man's behalf. Man could 
 receive salvation, and get the better of sin, 
 (for God was always helping and forgiving) 
 even without so strange and wonderful a 
 device. 
 
 Rabbinic theology had no elaborate 
 theory about the relative functions of God 
 and man in human goodness. It spoke 
 freely about God's help : in Rabbinic 
 prayers that help is frequently implored ; 
 but at the same time it is not supposed that 
 human efforts count for nothing. Virtue 
 and vice have a meaning : goodness and 
 badness are real. They would have no such 
 true significance if man were not really to 
 blame when he sinned, and really to be 
 praised when he succeeded and did well. 
 Man co-operates with God. His will is free. 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 79 
 
 He can choose the good or the evil. And 
 though he often chooses the evil, he also 
 often chooses the good. It is not that the 
 Rabbis were conceited or self-righteous. It 
 is that they looked on facts as they were, 
 and saw life as it was. They neither de- 
 preciated human goodness on the one hand, 
 nor over-estimated it on the other. And, 
 above all, they were not theorists, and had 
 little philosophy. They spoke of flesh and 
 of spirit : they knew of the baser desires of 
 the body, and how human sin was connected 
 with human flesh. They believed that God 
 was spirit and not flesh. But they did not 
 oppose flesh and spirit in the same way as 
 they are opposed in the writings of Paul ; 
 and, above all, they did not make a distinc- 
 tion between the spiritual man on the one 
 hand, and the merely psychic (or 'natural') 
 man upon the other. Here most decidedly 
 we touch un-Rabbinic ground. Rabbinic 
 theory did not hold that man could only 
 conquer and free himself from sin if he was 
 born again and regenerated by the divine 
 spirit ; it taught a less antithetical doc- 
 
8o THE GENESIS OF THE 
 trine, and admitted more shades and 
 degrees. It did not divide people off into 
 ' those in the flesh/ who cannot do good, 
 and ' those in the spirit ' who (theoretically) 
 cannot do evil. The spirit and flesh doctrine 
 of the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the 
 Romans could not have been devised by 
 anyone who, to his Rabbinic antecedents, 
 merely added a conviction that the Messiah 
 had appeared in the person of Jesus. The 
 man who devised that doctrine had not 
 only been subjected to other influences, 
 but he had never been thoroughly imbued 
 with true Rabbinical theology. It was not 
 bone of his bone, or else the new teaching 
 could not have been conceived and thought 
 out. There would have been no need of it ; 
 no adequate impulse to set it going. ^ 
 
 iln all these matters the view of the Rabbis was the view 
 of Jesus. What Piepenbring says, for instance, of Jesus in 
 contrast to Paul is absolutely true of the Rabbis in contrast 
 to Paul. For example, " Se pla^ant uniquement sur le terrain 
 pratique, il se contentait, a I'instar des grands prophetes, de 
 precher la repentance et I'accomplissement fidele de la volonte 
 de Dieu, comme seuls moyens de salut, en supposant toujours 
 I'homme capable d'y suf&re par ses propres forces^ Voila 
 pourquoi il ne dit jamais que celui-ci a besoin d'etre ^claire ou 
 T6g6n6re par le Saint Esprit ou d'etre transform^ en homme 
 nouveau par la foi, par les sacraments ou par un autre moyen 
 quelconque." {Jesus et les Apotres, p. 214-) 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 8i 
 
 So far, then, we have seen that the rehgion 
 of Paul antecedent to his conversion must 
 have been different from the typical and 
 average Rabbinic Judaism of 300 or 500, 
 but not in that difference more ' liberal and 
 ethnicizing/ The curious, and, I fancy, 
 novel conclusion seems imperative that (in 
 the matters just gone through) it was a 
 religion poorer than, and even inferior to, 
 the typical and average Rabbinic Judaism 
 of 300 or 500. It may have been more 
 systematic, and perhaps a little more 
 philosophic and less child-like, but possibly 
 for these very reasons it was less intimate, 
 warm, joyous and comforting. Its God was 
 more distant and less loving. He was less 
 immediately concerned with Israel and with 
 the world ; He left more ' spheres of in- 
 fluence ' to the control of angels and devils. 
 The early religion of Paul was more sombre 
 and gloomy than Rabbinic Judaism ; the 
 world was a more miserable and God- 
 forsaken place ; there were fewer simple joys 
 and happinesses which could and should be 
 sanctified by religion, and then temperately 
 
82 THE GENISES OF THE 
 
 enjoyed. The outlook was darker : man 
 could be, and was, less good ; his actions 
 were looked at with a jaundiced eye. Man 
 repented less, and less successfully ; God 
 was not constantly helping and forgiving. 
 It needed the poverty and the pessimism 
 of the Pauline pre-Christian Judaism to have 
 produced the Pauline Christianity. From 
 the Rabbinic Judaism of 500 as basis, many 
 salient doctrines of the great Epistles could 
 never have been evolved. They would have 
 been so very unnecessary, and, because 
 unnecessary, they could not have been 
 thought out. 
 
 These arguments apply, I think, to five 
 of my eight questions. For the Christology 
 and the universalism other considerations 
 (as we have already seen) come into play. 
 Both the one and the other may, to some 
 extent, be accounted for by well-known 
 features of Jewish thought in the first 
 century, though the universalism probably 
 also needed the stimulus of external and 
 non- Jewish influences. 
 
 The same may be said of the noble Pauline 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 83 
 
 mysticism. That mysticism depends upon 
 the death and resurrection of the divine 
 being, Jesus Christ. It is expressed in a 
 spiritual imitation of that death which will 
 lead up to a union with the Risen One in 
 glory. But the imitated death, and the new 
 life which it brings, are mystically under- 
 gone here and now. The union is so com- 
 plete that the old personality has vanished; 
 it is Christ who lives within the soul. The 
 man who is in Christ is a new creature ; 
 the old man is crucified with Christ ; the 
 sinful body is destroyed. The Christian 
 is buried with Christ through the baptism 
 of death, so that, as Christ was raised 
 from the dead through the glory of the 
 Father, the Christian may walk even on 
 earth in a new life. He, the Christian, is 
 no longer in the flesh, but in the Spirit. 
 It is the Spirit which is his true life even 
 on earth ; it is the Spirit of Christ, which 
 is the Spirit of God, that will give him, 
 and him alone, the life of the resurrection. 
 Dying with Christ is d5dng to sin. It is 
 the sudden production of a new and higher 
 
84 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 existence, which is not interrupted, but 
 glorified, by death. For the Spirit, which 
 has virtually annulled this body of sin, will 
 then be given the spiritual body that befits 
 it. In this new and higher existence, en- 
 dowed with the Spirit, the new man pos- 
 sesses, at last, the power to sin no more. 
 He can will the good and accomplish it. 
 The Spirit needs no written and external 
 law : the Spirit, which is Christ, fulfils its 
 own law, the law of Christ, the law of faith, 
 the law of love. 
 
 This striking, enthusiastic, inspiring 
 mysticism, which has impelled to many 
 noble deeds of sacrifice and of love, could 
 hardly have grown up from a purely Jewish 
 soil. So far as it was not created by Paul 
 sheerly and merely on the basis of his con- 
 version, experience and genius, we must 
 look for its genesis outside Rabbinic Juda- 
 ism whether of 300 or of 30, of 500 or of 50. 
 To Rabbinic Judaism God was near. The 
 thought of Him, the service of Him, was a 
 perpetual joy. But just as the higher life 
 with God was not brought about by any 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 85 
 
 magical sacrament, so it was not realised 
 by any mystic process or mystic faith. The 
 Rabbinic Jew did not seek to become one 
 with God ; he knew, but made little use of, 
 the idea of dying to live ; he did not think 
 of God as in him or of himself as in God. 
 There might be sudden repentance and 
 complete forgiveness, but conceptions such 
 as those of a new creation, a spiritual 
 re-birth, an attainment or a bestowal of the 
 divine Spirit, an inward illumination, a 
 flooding of the soul with light, though not 
 wholly unknown, were no regular part of 
 his system and very seldom before his mind. 
 His religious life did not move on lower 
 lines ; it moved upon different lines. He 
 did not love God less : he loved Him in 
 another way. 
 
 If then Paul's pre-Christian religion was 
 not Rabbinic Judaism as we know it, what 
 does this imply ? It might imply (among 
 other things) that Rabbinic Judaism as we 
 know it — the Rabbinic Judaism of 300, 
 400 or 500 A.D. had not come into being in 
 50. Was the most un-Hellenistic, most 
 
86 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 purely Palestinian, Rabbinic Judaism of 
 50, a poorer, colder, gloomier religion than 
 its descendant of 300, 400 and 500 ? And 
 now being once more brought face to face 
 with this difficult and delicate question, 
 without possibility of further postponement 
 or evasion, I must honestly declare that it is 
 not for me to answer, or attempt to answer 
 it ! I must leave it to the great scholars. 
 Let men such as Abrahams or Buechler, 
 Bacher or Schechter, instruct us.^ For the 
 question is surely an intensely interesting 
 one, and we would like to hear the answer, 
 so far as an answer is possible.^ One point 
 seems clear. It has been made before, but it 
 bears constant repetition. So far as the 
 Rabbinic Judaism of 500 was richer, warmer. 
 
 ^Since these words were written, Professor Bacher, perhaps 
 the greatest of the four, has passed away. 
 
 ^Dr. Abrahams tells me that, so far as he is concerned, he 
 believes that there was no great upheaval as a result of the 
 destruction of the Temple in 70, but that, on the contrary, 
 there are to be detected the same general qualities in the 
 Rabbinic Judaism as expressed in the teaching and life of 
 Hillel — at the beginning of the Christian era — of Jochanan 
 ben Zakkai — at about the period of the Temple's fall — and of 
 Akiba — at the period of complete loss of the national indepen- 
 dence (135 A.D.) He believes, moreover (and this is the crucial 
 point), that these same general qualities are found in the 
 Rabbinic Judaism of the entire Talmudic period. 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 87 
 
 more joyous, and more optimistic than the 
 Rabbinic Judaism of 50, it was not all this 
 because it was less legal. For legalism and 
 the love of the Law were not less prevailing 
 and universal in 500 than they were in 50 : 
 they were more. The empire and domina- 
 tion of the Law were more complete and 
 pervasive than ever ; so that the Pauline 
 theories of the Law, which probably did not 
 fit the facts of Rabbinic Jewish life in 50, 
 most undoubtedly missed them in 500. 
 Whatever may have been the case in 50, 
 in 500 the Law brought peace and joy and 
 life : it produced righteousness and evoked 
 love : it made men realise, and brought 
 them near unto, God. 
 
 I am, however, inclined to think that, 
 even in 50, Rabbinic Judaism was a better, 
 happier, and more noble religion than one 
 might infer from the writings of the Apostle. 
 There are no signs of any great improvement 
 in the teachings of the famous Rabbis of the 
 fourth century over those of the first. There 
 is no violent break between the character 
 of the Rabbinic teaching (so far as we can 
 
88 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 gather it) before and after the fall of the 
 Temple. It is true that the shock of the 
 destruction of state and temple, and the 
 awful catastrophe of the Hadrianic war, 
 tended to a certain amount of pessimism, 
 but even in the worst times we hear of the 
 gloom of one Rabbi being cheered by the 
 optimism of another, and there is little 
 reason to believe that before the Temple fell 
 any large measure of pessimism (such as we 
 have inferred for the pre-Christian religion 
 of the Apostle) existed at all. In one point 
 only was the Rabbinic Judaism of the first 
 century probably much inferior to the 
 Rabbinic Judaism of the fourth or fifth. In 
 the first century the opposition between 
 the learned and the ignorant must have 
 been much more intense and more violent 
 than it afterwards became. A class of people 
 existed who, for one reason or another, 
 did not observe the Law, and were regarded 
 by the teachers as outcasts and reprobates. 
 But it is an interesting fact that these 
 people, who form a back ground for the life 
 and teaching of Jesus, do not do so for Paul. 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 89 
 
 Whatever Paul's religion may have been 
 before his conversion, he was never (so far 
 as we know) a member of the ' outcast/ or 
 ignorant class. He does not concern him- 
 self with those who were really outside the 
 legal pale. He does not come forward with 
 a message for the ' sinners/ that is, for those 
 regarded as ' sinners ' by the ' righteous ' 
 legalists. It is the legahsts themselves 
 whom he declared to be on the wrong track, 
 and it is the ' righteousness ' of the Law 
 which he attacks. Hence this particular 
 weakness of the Rabbinic Judaism of the 
 first century, while it explains a good deal 
 in Jesus, does not explain Paul. It is indeed 
 possible that in one particular department 
 of life the Law may have been more burden- 
 some in the first century than it afterwards 
 became. It is possible that the enactments 
 about ritual purity, which we know to have 
 caused little bother or trouble to the ordin- 
 ary layman in the fourth or fifth century, 
 may have caused more bother and trouble 
 to the layman of the first century before 
 the Temple fell. The subject is complicated 
 
go THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 and disputed. But even if, in this one 
 respect, the observance of the Law in the 
 first century was more burdensome than it 
 subsequently became, I still venture to 
 believe that Paul's Judaism was tolerably 
 far removed from contemporary Rabbinic 
 Judaism, even allowing for the possibility 
 that the Rabbinic Judaism of 50 was of a 
 somewhat poorer religious quality than the 
 Rabbinic Judaism of 500. I am, therefore, 
 disposed to look with much suspicion upon 
 the statement in the Acts, and none the less 
 because it is put into the mouth of the 
 Apostle, that Paul ' was brought up in 
 Jerusalem, at the feet of Gamaliel, in- 
 structed according to the strict manner of 
 the law of our fathers/^ Professor Lake, 
 
 1' Tout ce que racontent les Actes au sujet de Paul avant sa 
 conversion est grandement suspect. Ce qui est dit U de 
 Gamaliel serait beaucoup plus certain si on le trouvait dans 
 una fipitre de Paul, mais c'est dans un discours des Actes, 
 cons^quemment dans una composition du r^dacteur, et la 
 mention de Gamaliel {deja mentionne, Act v. 34-39, passage de 
 couleur l^gendafre) n'ofEre pas plus de garanties d'historicit6 
 que la participation de Paul au meurtra d'Etianna. Si ces 
 indications 6taient vraias, Paul aurait du ^tre a Jerusalem 
 quand Jesus y vint, et il aurait assists 6galement a la naissance 
 de la premiere communaut6. Or les Jipitres na laissent 
 
 entendre rien de semblable Bien qu'il vante son 
 
 orthodoxie, Paul n'a jamais ^t^ qu'un pharisien de province, 
 un juif de la dispersion.' From M. Loisy's reviews of Bohlig, 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 91 
 
 who wants and likes to accept as much of 
 Acts as he can, avoids the trouble of 
 this statement in a clever and humorous 
 way. He says, ' Saul of Tarsus may have 
 been a pupil of Gamaliel, and been pro- 
 foundly affected by him, and yet may have 
 succumbed to other influences. We do not 
 always follow all the opinions of our teachers, 
 and it would be scarcely suggested that our 
 books are not authentic because they do 
 not agree with the teaching which we re- 
 ceived at our Universities or Theological 
 Colleges.'^ It may, however, be doubted 
 whether this ingenious explanation is 
 adequate. In any case we have to consider 
 that in the sense in which we can speak 
 of Rabbinic Judaism in 300 or 500, and 
 probably in the sense in which we can 
 speak of Rabbinic Judaism in 50 or 30, 
 Paul was no Rabbinic Jew. 
 
 Die Geisteskultur von Tarsos im augusteischen Zeitalter, in his 
 own Revue d'histoire at de Utterature religieuses (vol. iv, 
 1913, p. 490), and in the Revue critique (1913) No. 30, p. 64. 
 Bohlig {p. Ill) rightly says : " Nicht Jerusalem, sondem 
 Tarsos und iiberhaupt die Diaspora ist die Heimstatte der 
 jiidischen Gedanken Pauh. Seine Zugehorigkeit zur Jiingers- 
 chaft Gamaliel's war nur eine Episode in seinem Leben.' 
 =LEarlier Epistles of Paul, p. 427. 
 
92 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 What sort of a Jew was he then ? Here 
 it may seem that I have been flogging a 
 dead horse. For everybody admits that 
 Paul was a Jew of the Diaspora, or, putting 
 it more precisely, that he was an Hellenistic 
 Jew. And his Christology and his intense 
 belief in the nearness of the Messianic age 
 show, in all probability, that, even before 
 his conversion, he had been influenced by 
 the Apocalyptic school of thinkers or 
 dreamers, many of whom held advanced 
 views about the nature of the Messiah, and 
 all of whom were inclined to believe that the 
 longed-for end was at hand. The elements, 
 however, in his doctrine which have led 
 many scholars to discuss the degree to which 
 he was influenced by his Hellenistic en- 
 vironment, or again the features in his 
 teaching which link him up with some of the 
 Apocalyptic seers, did not prevent these 
 scholars from describing his Jewish back- 
 ground as Rabbinic. They made, perhaps, 
 an exception for certain aspects of his 
 doctrine which seemed to prove that, to- 
 gether with a devotion to the Law, he also 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 93 
 
 united certain ' liberal and ethnicizing ' 
 features which were anything but Rabbinic. 
 I go further. My point is that the very 
 spirit of Paul's pre-Christian, religion, quite 
 apart from any possible liberal and ethni- 
 cizing tendencies, was other than the spirit 
 of Rabbinic Judaism. It was different 
 from the Rabbinic Judaism of 300 or 500, 
 and it was in all probability other than 
 the Rabbinic Judaism of 50 or 30. It was 
 other than Rabbinic Judaism because it 
 was colder, less intimate, less happy, 
 because it was poorer, more pessimistic. 
 And I am inclined to believe that it was 
 all this — that it possessed these inferiorities 
 — just because it was not Rabbinic Juda- 
 ism, but Diaspora Judaism. I am inclined 
 to believe that so far from Diaspora 
 Judaism being greatly superior to Rabbinic 
 Judaism, it was often (not always) inferior, 
 and that the pre-Christian religion of 
 Paul tended towards this poorer and \ 
 inferior type. And thus my thesis is the 
 reverse of the usual thesis. The usual 
 thesis, I think, is that, so far as Paul is 
 
94 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 to be explained by having been an Hellen- 
 istic Jew, this means that he had a better 
 religion than if he had been a pure Rab- 
 binic Jew. My thesis, on the contrary, is 
 that so far as Paul was an Hellenistic Jew, 
 and so far as that fact can explain him, he 
 had not a better religion than Rabbinic 
 Judaism, but a religion colder and more 
 sombre. 
 
 A Hellenistic Jew could be, and usually 
 was, a ' legal ' Jew. He too could describe 
 himself ' as touching the Law a Pharisee ' 
 (though all this passage in the Philippians 
 has, it must be admitted, no genuinejewish 
 ring), or again as one who had ' advanced 
 in the Jews' religion beyond many of his 
 own age among his countrymen, being more 
 exceedingly jealous for the traditions of his 
 fathers.' He could fancy himself perfectly 
 orthodox. But, for all that, his religion was 
 frequently not in all respects the religion of 
 Rabbinic Jews. It often seems to have 
 differed from it in those very points which 
 constitute the essence and bloom of a 
 religion, different less in dogma than in 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 95 
 
 attitude, less in creed than in outlook and 
 in emotion. 
 
 The God of many Hellenistic and Apoca- 
 lyptic Jews seems to me to have been a less 
 intimate, near and affectionate God than 
 the God of Rabbinic Judaism. A small 
 contact with philosophy seems to have made 
 God more distant and less approachable. 
 The God of the Rabbis was very personal 
 and childlike ; He did not care for system 
 and theories ; but, at all events. He was 
 always there when wanted, and He managed 
 His own affairs Himself. He loved and was 
 loved. The grandiose conceptions of the 
 Apocalyptic seers, and the influence of 
 Greek philosophy, made Him more august 
 and majestic, but less gentle and kindly. 
 Thus arose the greater necessity for inter- 
 mediaries between God and man — angels, 
 messiahs, or sons. The Rabbinic God dealt 
 directly with His human children, and for- 
 gave them without intercessor or middle- 
 man. 
 
 . Hellenistic and Apocalyptic Judaism, so 
 far as the latter can be safely distinguished 
 
96 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 as a separate type, strike us, when we read 
 their hterary products, as less human and 
 childlike than Rabbinic Judaism, and as 
 more sombre and austere. The fourth book 
 of Ezra was written not long after the 
 destruction of the Temple, when all Jews, 
 whether Rabbinic, Apocalyptic, or Hel- 
 lenistic, were inclined to be sorrowful and 
 gloomy. Nevertheless the fact remains 
 that in its pessimism and despair it offers 
 the most striking contrast to the extant 
 Rabbinic writings. Rabbinic Judaism, just 
 because of its essentially happy faith, had 
 the power to recover from the shock of the 
 Temple's fall, and even from the still more 
 appalling agony of the Hadrianic revolt. 
 Rabbinic Judaism not only recovered, but 
 became, or, as I am inclined to believe, 
 became again, a human and joyous religion, 
 declaring that, in spite of all which had 
 happened, the world was God's world still. 
 Hellenistic Judaism was, I suppose, more 
 on the defensive than Rabbinic Judaism. 
 It had to look outwards rather than inwards, 
 and began to invent theories and justifica- 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 97 
 
 tions of its religion instead of accepting it 
 as a delightful matter of course. May we 
 not also suppose that the general spiritual 
 anxiety which was widely diffused in the 
 later Hellenistic world had also infected 
 the Jews ? Some of them, too, may have 
 begun to worry about their salvation and 
 the ' state of their soul.' And as God had 
 become more distant, so did sin seem, not 
 more grievous, but less eradicable, than to 
 their ' Rabbinic ' brethren. Human re- 
 pentance and divine forgiveness were ideas 
 never far from the Rabbinic mind : we hear 
 less of them from the Hellenists. God helps 
 less and forgives less ; man continues more 
 persistently in sin. The Hellenistic Jew was 
 more theoretic and systematic, but his 
 outlook on life was less accurate and less 
 sensible. 
 
 Why the Day of Atonement should have 
 played a less potent part in Jewish Hel- 
 lenistic life I do not clearly understand, but 
 it seems probable that it must have done so.^ 
 
 ^A learned friend observes : ' Was it not because human 
 nature rebels against the sense of sinfulness and the creed of 
 
 H 
 
98 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 However closely and ardently the Hel- 
 lenistic Jew clung to the Law, it meant 
 something different to him from what it 
 meant to his full-fledged Rabbinic brother. 
 Greeks and barbarians laughed at some of 
 the ceremonial enactments, and did not the 
 Jew begin to wonder why such queer injunc- 
 tions had been ordained ? We know that 
 Philo could only approve of, and admire, 
 some of the Pentateuchal commandments 
 because of the inner spiritual meaning which 
 they were supposed to contain, while an 
 extreme radical wing of Jewish Hellenists 
 at Alexandria adopted these inner meanings, 
 and (to Philo's indignation) neglected the 
 outward observance. 
 
 To the Jew of the Diaspora who was 
 disposed to take a gloomy view of the 
 universal domination of sin, might not the 
 wonder occasionally arise (as indeed it did 
 arise to the author of the fourth book of 
 Ezra) how it was that the Law, given by 
 God for Israel's welfare, had yet not been 
 
 atonement, and that that sense rises or falls with the environ- 
 ment ? Hellenism knows nothing of it.' If so, it is another 
 instance of the subtle influence of environment. 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 99 
 
 able to destroy the evil impulse and the 
 wicked heart ? The more commandments, 
 the more opportunities for transgression. 
 Yet the Law had to be tenaciously and 
 consciously clung to and justified. The 
 Rabbinic Jew did not need to justify 
 the most adorable of God's gifts, the most 
 joyous of the Israelite's possessions. He 
 took it at its own valuation, and loved 
 it for its own sake. Directly you have to 
 justify a thing, it becomes a little external ; 
 you hold it at arm's length, and examine it 
 curiously. If you live with it, and grow with 
 it, and accept it as a matter of course, you 
 love it without asking why, and it becomes 
 a part of your own very self. You do not 
 compare it with anything else. It is just 
 your own, a sheer privilege and delight. 
 Perhaps the Hellenistic Jew was too much 
 surrounded by other people to feel like that 
 about the Law. Again, withm the com- 
 munity the negative injunctions of the Law 
 on the ceremonial side were hardly felt at 
 all. Who bothers his head to-day that he 
 is not given for his food the flesh of dogs 
 
100 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 and cats and horses ? The Rabbinic Jew, 
 in the recesses of his own community, had 
 no special desire to eat pig or rabbit or hare ; 
 while he ate his mutton, he did not long to 
 drink some milk. But the Hellenistic Jew 
 began to worry himself as to the meaning 
 and value of these enactments : he ate no 
 hares, but many a Gentile neighbour, whose 
 language he shared, ate hares and rabbits 
 too, and laughed at the Jew because he 
 refused to eat them. Did then the Law 
 become to him rather a series of Do not's 
 than a series of Do's ? Did he think of it 
 more in its negative than in its positive 
 aspects ? If so, unlike the Rabbinic Jew, 
 he would think of it as something which 
 restrained and forbade, rather than as 
 something through which he gained in- 
 effable joys and realised the presence of God. 
 The religious views of Paul after his 
 conversion appear to me an inexplicable 
 psychological enigma unless we assume that, 
 before his conversion, his religion was less 
 intimate and joyous than Rabbinic Judaism, 
 on the one hand, and more theoretic and 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL loi 
 
 questioning, upon the other. In spite (partly 
 perhaps as a cause) of his fanaticism, he 
 must have had his anxieties and perhaps 
 even his doubts. He must have had his 
 worries both about his own salvation and 
 about the salvation of his fellows. Repent- 
 ance and forgiveness had receded into 
 the background. The very Law which 
 he defended had its difficulties and its 
 puzzles. 
 
 We have seen that the joy of the com- 
 mandments, — that simple happiness in per- 
 forming any particular injunction of the Law 
 — seems to be a special and peculiar feature 
 of Rabbinic Judaism. I have myself no 
 doubt that it already existed in 50, though it 
 was perhaps more widespread in 500. But 
 if already known in Jerusalem, it had, we 
 may suppose, not yet penetrated to Tarsus. 
 On the other hand, the supposed burden of 
 the Law does not seem to have affected 
 the Apostle very greatly. The attack 
 of Matthew xxiii. 4, upon the Scribes and 
 Pharisees (' they bind heavy burdens/ etc.) 
 is not repeated in the Epistles. Nor do we 
 
102 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 hear anything as to the ' endless details/ 
 the ' innumerable ceremonial minutiae/ the 
 ' arbitrary and trivial commands/ not 
 ' lit up by any single principle/ with which 
 the text-books have made us familiar, 
 (The ' elements ' of Colossians and Galatians, 
 even though ' weak and beggarly/ do not 
 precisely imply a ' bondage ' of this kind.) 
 The Law was to Paul a whole, and it is 
 curious how very rarely he separates (as 
 Jesus seems to do) its ceremonial from its 
 moral enactments. His main points are, 
 first, that if you are under the Law, you 
 must observe it altogether and, secondly, 
 that failure is inevitable. But the famous 
 passage in the seventh chapter of the 
 Romans must be used with a little 
 caution as an indication of Paul's individual 
 experience before his conversion.^ In any 
 case the theory there elaborated does not 
 depend upon the ceremonial enactments of 
 the Pentateuch. If there were nothing in 
 the Pentateuch but moral laws, and of these 
 
 iBriickner — Die Entstehung der paulinischen Chris tologie, 
 p. 220 {1903). Loisy in Revue d'histoire et de litt6rature 
 religieuses. Vol. iii., 1912, p. 572 ad init. 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 103 
 
 not more than half a dozen, the argument 
 of the seventh chapter would still hold good. 
 And though Paul, as I believe, had un- 
 doubtedly pondered before his conversion 
 upon the deep ingrained sinfulness of man 
 and the difficulty of right-doing, the argu- 
 ment in the Romans is not so much based 
 upon personal experience as it is a general 
 deduction from, and a summing-up of, the 
 full-blown theory of sin and law as he had 
 constructed it after his conversion. The 
 person who speaks is not so much Paul as 
 humanity as a whole. But no Rabbinic 
 Jew could ever have accepted the force, or 
 the argument, of that seventh chapter. For 
 it was precisely the Law which to his mind 
 enabled him and all others to attain to any 
 measure of human goodness. Without the 
 Law they would be in bondage and in the 
 darkness of sin ; through the Law they 
 reached up to freedom, to righteousness 
 and to God. ' There is no liberty except in 
 the Torah.' So enormous is the gulf which 
 separates the religion of Paul from the 
 religion of any noble Rabbinic Jew, and yet 
 
104 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 both of them were filled with the spirit of 
 God. But if Paul before his conversion 
 had been a thorough Rabbinic Jew, the 
 seventh chapter of the Romans could 
 scarcely have been written. 
 
 Paul's doctrine of the Law is remarkable 
 both for what it says and what it omits. 
 One could have imagined that he might 
 have argued thus : 'Jesus Christ is Messiah, 
 and the end of the present world is at hand. 
 Moreover in Jesus Christ the barrier between 
 Jew and Gentile has been broken down. 
 There is no longer need of, or propriety in, 
 separative ceremonial enactments. The 
 Law had only to be observed till Jesus came 
 and lived and died and rose.^ Now neither 
 Jewish nor Gentile Christian need observe 
 it any longer.^ For now all that is neces- 
 
 iWe may here recall the Rabbinic theory (the date of which 
 is, however, uncertain), that the ceremonial laws were no 
 longer to be observed in the Messianic age. 
 
 21 am weU aware that the great name of Harnack can be 
 cited against the truth of the assertions in this sentence. 
 Harnack writes to vindicate the Lucan authorship and the 
 historic accuracy of the whole book of Acts. There is no 
 grave inconsistency between the Paul of the Letters and the 
 Paul of Acts. I venture to think that Harnack has not 
 proved his case. Two excellent articles against his inter- 
 pretation of certain passages in the Epistles, which would 
 appear to militate against what I have said in the text, are 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 105 
 
 sary is a warm and living faith in 
 Jesus Christ, and with this faith all men 
 will receive the spirit of God, and will 
 obtain the force to enable them to do the 
 right. The separating ceremonial laws 
 have become otiose, for all men are one in 
 Christ ; the moral laws will be obeyed 
 because of the possession of the spirit. 
 Faith in Jesus Christ is all that is necessary 
 in order to carry the believer onward into 
 the new era which cannot be far off. And 
 even if that new era be delayed, even so, 
 faith is adequate for righteousness. It 
 justified Abraham in the eyes of God. It 
 will justify the believer now. It will justify 
 him in the sense of freeing him from the 
 divine wrath ; it will justify him also in 
 the sense of destroying his sinful nature, 
 giving him a new nature, making him a new 
 man.' Again, we should not have been sur- 
 prised had Paul attacked the many accre- 
 tions of the Oral Law, had he spoken of the 
 
 those of P. W. Schmiedel, ' Galater v. 3, in neuester Aus- 
 legung ' (in the Protestantische Monatshefte, 1911, p. 318 — 
 322) , and A. Julicher, ' Die jiidischen Schranken des Harnack- 
 schen Paulus' (in same magazine, 1913, p. 1-20.) Cp. also 
 E. Vischer in Theologische Rundschau, 1913, p. 256-258. 
 
io6 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 dangers of legalism in promoting self- 
 righteousness and hypocrisy. 
 
 But though these lines of argument and 
 these criticisms are not wholly wanting in 
 the Epistles, they are not by any means 
 predominant. The important thing is that 
 Paul does not content himself with saying 
 that the Law was all very well, and did 
 very well, up to Jesus Christ's day, but 
 need not now, (and, therefore, should not 
 now), be observed any more, but that he 
 actually conceived the theory that the Law 
 did definite and positive harm. It was not 
 all very well, and did not do all very well, up 
 to Jesus, but it was all very bad, and did 
 exceedingly ill.^ It was not a blessing, and 
 the source of life, and a freedom, and a joy, 
 and the means of righteousness, as the Jews 
 supposed and said, up to Jesus, and it was 
 not merely now these things no more, but it 
 had never been any one of them from the day 
 of its bestowal, and, what is more, it had 
 never been intended to be any of them. It 
 
 lA learned friend observes : ' Note how Luke puts into 
 Peter's mouth the amazing statement. Acts xv. lo. This 
 seems like Paulinism at the gallop.' 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 107 
 
 made things worse than they were, or than 
 they would have been, without it. And all 
 this was its intention, the purpose for 
 which it had been given. The worst 
 sinners were the sinners of Israel (Paul 
 does not actually say this, but it seems to 
 follow from his argument), and to produce 
 this excess and heightened quality of sin 
 was just the very object of the Law ! The 
 supernatural and divine redemption was 
 intended to overcome and conquer sin at 
 its very height of quality and of amount. 
 That Jesus Christ might bring freedom 
 and sonship, the Law was to cause an 
 acute servitude and a conscious bondage.^ 
 
 The heat of antagonism may well have 
 carried Paul from point to point in his 
 strictures upon the Law, but even making 
 all allowance for that antagonism, I cannot 
 
 ^Dr. Abrahams observes : ' Rabbinic Judaism held, it is 
 true, that the Israelite sinner was the more culpable because 
 he disobeyed a law binding on Jews, than he would have been 
 had he sinned with no law to obey. But the meaning was 
 that to sin against the light is worse morally than to sin when 
 no guiding hght is present. This is quite difEerent from the 
 Pauline theory that the Law created sin. On the contrary, the 
 Law imparted the power to recognise sin and resist it. The 
 Law was the test and the antidote, the diagnosis and the 
 remedy." 
 
io8 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 believe that this absolute bouleversement, 
 this complete topsy-turvydom, of the Rab- 
 binic position could ever have been reached 
 if that Rabbinic position had once been his 
 own faith. Even the theory that sin was 
 to be at its height when Messiah appeared 
 cannot account for it satisfactorily. If 
 Paul, like an ordinary Rabbinic Jew, had 
 habitually thought of God as the divine 
 Father, and of the Israelites as His human 
 sons and children, if he had habitually 
 thought of the Law as the source of freedom 
 and of holiness, I do not think that any 
 amount of controversy and mutual hatred 
 could ever have produced the Epistle to the 
 Galatians. But the heat and bitterness of 
 antagonism might well have sufficed to 
 produce it, if Paul's pre-Christian religion 
 had been that poorer, more distant and 
 more pessimistic type of Judaism such as 
 I have attempted to describe. And to 
 this pessimism as regards man's actual, 
 psychological endowment, and as regards 
 his inveterate tendency to sin, may be 
 added what Paul read in the Scriptures, 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 109 
 
 how the Law had historically failed to 
 keep the Israelite from constant apostasy 
 and evil-doing, and how^ according to the 
 too general dogma both of the Biblical 
 writers and of his own time, all the 
 weary and continued misfortunes and 
 troubles of his fellow believers were due 
 to their never-ending transgressions and 
 iniquities. To these general explanations 
 may be added the unbelief of the great 
 majority of the Jews in the Messiahship 
 of Jesus and in the Gospel. The unbelief 
 was wilful : the light, the teaching, the 
 salvation, were presented to them, and 
 consciously and deliberately were they 
 refused. In that age only one deduction 
 was possible : all the unbelieving Jews 
 were sinners. For the idea and the con- 
 viction that a man can be a wilful un- 
 believer and yet morally virtuous is purely 
 modern.^ Just as the Jews more and more 
 
 ^Even so great, and, in many ways, so tolerant a man as 
 Erasmus, when thoroughly irritated and depressed by the 
 conflict with Luther, can write the amazing words : ' Deterior 
 enim est, qui recedit ab ecclesiae consortio et in hasresim 
 aut schisma demigrat, quam qui impure vivit salvis dog- 
 matibus.' {Volker, Toleranz und Intoleranz im Zeitalter der 
 Reformation, 1912, p. 188.) 
 
no THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 tended to suppose that those who accepted 
 Jesus as the Messiah were of necessity 
 wicked, so Paul was bound to suppose that 
 those who rejected his Messiahship were 
 necessarily depraved and sinful. But if 
 they clung to their Law and were sinful, 
 was not the next step to argue that the 
 tighter they clung the more they sinned, 
 and that the Law, of which they boasted 
 so outrageously, was the very source and 
 cause of their sin ? 
 
 Nor was the Law without its puzzles as 
 regards the Gentiles. If Rabbinic Judaism 
 had an occasional qualm about the darkness 
 of the heathen world, if it had to invent 
 an occasional theory to account for the 
 religion and the joys of the Law having 
 been vouchsafed to so small a fraction of 
 the human race (while nevertheless God 
 was the ruler and creator of all), we may 
 safely surmise that such qualms and theories 
 were more frequent in the Hellenistic com- 
 munities. The author of the 4th book of 
 Ezra gives up the whole question of the 
 heathen as an impossibly hopeless puzzle. 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL iii 
 
 ' Touching man in general. Thou knowest 
 best, but touching Thy people I will speak ! ' 
 The Apocalyptic seers were accustomed 
 to consign thousands with equanimity 
 to perdition, and on the orthodox side 
 the author of the 4th book of Ezra tries 
 to urge with odious emphasis that it 
 was quite the proper thing for this world 
 to be for many, and for the next world to be 
 for few. Even so God was compassionate ! 
 Few would be the saved of Israel ; still 
 fewer, if any, the saved of the Gentiles. But 
 like the author of the 4th book of Ezra in 
 his better moments of recoil and question, 
 some other Apocalyptic, and some Hel- 
 lenistic, Jews may have had compunctions 
 over this immensity of ruin. Paul, as we 
 know, could bear strong meat in more 
 senses than one. And he too could send 
 unbelievers to destruction without shrinking 
 or pity. But even before his conversion 
 may he not have had his troubles about the 
 reason why God had created so many 
 thousands of Gentiles only to let them 
 perish like the beasts ? (Let us mercifully 
 
112 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 assume that Paul believed in annihilation 
 rather than in future pain). May he not 
 have wondered when the predictions of the 
 prophets would be fulfilled ? And, on the 
 practical side, may he not have perceived 
 how difficult it was for a Greek to become a 
 complete Jew, and how inadequate was the 
 compromise of the ' God fearers ?' May 
 he not have realised that it was almost 
 impossible for the outsider and -the out- 
 lander to observe the traditions of the 
 fathers, and to practice the enactments of 
 a Law which, taken as a whole, was the Law 
 of a nation and not a Law for mankind ? 
 
 And here we enter into the polemical 
 ground which Dieterich, Reitzenstein and 
 other great scholars have opened up for us. 
 The last two questions do not, perhaps, 
 imply ideas too modern for Paul to have 
 conceived, or, in order to make the chasm 
 between Saul and Paul less huge, do not 
 antedate and foreshadow improperly, when 
 we remember that religions, or phases of 
 religion, existed in Paul's day and in his 
 country which deliberately sought to break 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 113 
 
 down the barriers of race, and to offer one 
 and the same method and kind of salvation 
 to all men, whether Greek or barbarian, 
 whether bond or free. What the false gods 
 of the heathen in their mysteries offered and 
 attempted should surely be provided by 
 the one true religion of the one real God. 
 But could the Law of Israel be the Law of 
 all mankind ? And even if this was not 
 intended, if the Law in its entirety was for 
 the Jews alone, was this permanent dis- 
 tinction between Jew and Gentile satis- 
 factory ? By what rites, or laws, or methods 
 were the Gentiles to draw near to the 
 common God ? I see no certain reason why 
 this big mind, this versatile and nimble wit, 
 this sensitive genius, should not have been 
 harassed by these troubles and questionings, 
 while yet seeing no clear way out and no 
 obvious solution, and stifling his doubts in 
 a still intenser loyalty and devotion to the 
 Law. 
 
 And was there not another point about 
 the ' mystery religions ' which may have 
 given him food for strange and painful 
 
114 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 reflections ? We have seen that Paul could 
 not have possessed that quiet and balanced 
 confidence of Rabbinic Judaism in virtue 
 of which any good man, while lamenting 
 his frailties and repenting his faults, yet 
 sought to do his best, and was content to 
 leave the issue of his fate, in happy trust, 
 to the judgment of a merciful God. Paul 
 knew a different and an inferior Judaism, 
 more anxious and pessimistic, more sombre 
 and perplexed. He was obsessed by the 
 sense of human frailty and sinfulness : he 
 had discovered no remedy strong enough to 
 cope with the Yetzer ha-Ra, the evil im- 
 pulse, the wicked promptings of the heart. 
 God was not near and loving enough for 
 him as He was to the Rabbinic Jew ; re- 
 pentance and the Day of Atonement did 
 not enter so deeply into the very make and 
 texture of his being ; the good impulse, 
 (the Yetzer ha-Tob), the righteous prompt- 
 ings of the heart, were less real to him. To 
 the Rabbinic Jew repentance and forgive- 
 ness were forces greater than sin, greater 
 than the evil inclination, while the 'joy of 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 115 
 
 the commandments ' was potent enough to 
 drive away the gloom of occasional and 
 inevitable failure. To Paul this was not so. 
 He was no Rabbinic Jew, and of the Law 
 he knew little more than the fetters, how- 
 ever, great and binding he deemed them : 
 to him they had not been transformed into 
 the robe of glory, or transfigured into the 
 crown of joy. He knew the struggle, but 
 unlike the Rabbinic Jew, he did not know 
 the humble triumph, the inward balm : 
 somehow or other, however ' blameless ' in 
 the Law's enactments, these had not yielded 
 to him that sense of rapture and sanctifica- 
 tion which no repetition of them, however 
 frequent, could dim or stale to the Rabbinic 
 believer. He had always the horrid feeling 
 of the unconquered evil inclination gnawing 
 within his soul. 
 
 All this is, I admit, pure assumption and 
 inference, but to account for the Epistles 
 we are forced to make use of these, and to 
 bring the imagination into play. If, then, 
 something like this were accurately to 
 represent the state of Paul's mind and the 
 
ii6 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 quality of his religion, may he not have 
 cast a wistful eye over the border, where 
 the votaries of the Hellenistic mystery 
 religions were claiming that they could 
 conquer sinfulness at a bound ? Those who 
 with humble faith passed through the rites 
 of initiation were mysteriously re-born ; 
 they died to live again ; they were endowed 
 with a fresh and supernatural strength ; 
 they were invested with a new personality, 
 which enabled them to conquer, and rise 
 superior to, the solicitations of sin. The 
 god had entered into them, and under the 
 appearance of the old body there now dwelt 
 a divine spirit, the source of a new and a 
 higher life. 
 
 It is admitted on all hands, though by 
 some reluctantly, that the terminology of 
 Paul shows the influence of the theology of 
 the ' mysteries/ But did he use the ter- 
 minology without knowing something about 
 the ideas which underlay them ?^ Doubtless 
 
 II have quoted words of Loisy on this point in the Appendix. 
 I might also have quoted from Reitzenstein's already classic 
 article in the Zeitschrift fur neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, 
 1912 (p. 1-28). Reitzenstein shows, on the one hand, that a 
 mere use of phraseology without any influence of the ideas 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 117 
 
 he thought the whole business false and 
 blasphemous and unclean, but for all that 
 he may have felt some secret allurement, 
 some half-conscious interest, some hidden 
 feeling, * how grand it would be if there 
 were a means of becoming really and truly 
 a new creature, of triumphing over sin and 
 the Yetzer ha-Ra and the evil heart once 
 and for all !' Then one would have received 
 that new heart and that new spirit which 
 the Prophets had declared was to be the 
 gift of God to Israel in the Messianic age. 
 And that new spirit was to be God's spirit. 
 The new personality would, in that sense, 
 be divine. No longer need one sin, no longer 
 need one be told in many enactments what 
 to do and from what to refrain ; the divine 
 spirit, the new heart, would assuredly 
 impel towards the right. 
 
 The conversion at Damascus must have 
 befallen a man who was not wholly satisfied 
 with the inadequate form of Judaism in 
 
 which underly them is, under all the circumstances, well nigh 
 impossible. On the other hand, it is not a question of 
 borrowing. It is a question of the subtlest form of unconscious 
 influence. 
 
ii8 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 which he had been brought up. He did not 
 know God, as his Rabbinic brethren knew 
 Him, as a loving Father, near, compassionate, 
 forgiving. Then to this mobile, eager, 
 yearning soul, with his gloomy and pessi- 
 mistic religion, comes the great illumination. 
 Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, the Son 
 of God. So much is sure, and soon the key 
 for all difficulties, the solution of all troubles, 
 the attainment of all desires, are found in 
 that one great fact. A new power and hope 
 have come into his life, flooding his whole 
 soul with light and joy. If he feels himself 
 transformed, endowed with a strength and 
 an assurance that he has never known 
 before, why should not this great truth do 
 to others all that it had done to him, and 
 why should he not help to bring it home to 
 them ? Here is the new life, here is the true 
 mystery, through which all alike, whether 
 Jew or Gentile, may attain to the conquest 
 of sin. 
 
 Here is the way out. Believe, surrender ; 
 humbly accept. Be convinced that you 
 have no effective power or capacity of your 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 119 
 
 own to crush the sinful desire and to become 
 righteous ; reahze that it is only the grace 
 of God and the acceptance, in devout faith, 
 of Jesus Christ as the Messiah who died to 
 free you of your sins, which will clear you 
 in the eyes of God, and will give you the 
 capacity for a new and holy life. Believe 
 in Jesus Christ, and you shall become a new 
 creature ; within you shall now be that 
 new heart and that new spirit, which the 
 prophets foretold, and which alone can 
 make you free. The votaries of the mys- 
 teries are tr5dng to get from idols and false 
 gods what can only be got from the One 
 True God, the God of Israel, who is also 
 the God of the spirits of all flesh. In the 
 death and in the resurrection of His divine 
 Son (remember that to Paul, the Hellenistic 
 Jew, the Messiah was a divine being), lies 
 the only efficacious mystery. With him all 
 men must die, in order that with him all 
 may live. Here is the true dying to live. 
 Here are the true I in Thee and Thou in Me.^ 
 
 ^Cp. the section on Paul in Bousset's new book, Kurios 
 Christos, (1913). 
 
120 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 So far, so good. So far seems psycho- 
 logically, on the basis of what has been 
 already said, tolerably clear and satisfactory. 
 And we can understand too that when Paul 
 felt that a new strength, a transfiguration 
 of his whole nature, had come to him from 
 his faith in the risen Christ, he might well 
 have argued : ' By your own efforts, apart 
 from this new power, you cannot fulfil the 
 Law. To try is hopeless. You are doomed 
 to failure. The strength for righteousness 
 can only come to you by the grace of God, 
 and the grace of God and the Spirit of God 
 will only be given to you if you believe 
 in His Son.' 
 
 But why did Paul oppose faith in the Son 
 to the works of the Law ? We can now 
 understand him when he says : you cannot 
 do righteous acts, or live a righteous life, 
 without faith in the Son (because you will 
 not receive the necessary power). But if 
 you have the faith, and therefore receive 
 the power, why should you not then seek to 
 fulfil the Law ? Why this opposition of 
 faith to works ? Why not say that you can 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 121 
 
 only accomplish works by means of faith ? 
 Rabbinic Judaism thought highly of faith, 
 but never dreamed of opposing it to the Law 
 or to the works of the Law. 
 
 To begin with, Paul, like most other 
 religious teachers before the modern period, 
 would have denied that anybody had, or 
 could have, any faith if he had not the same 
 faith as himself. If a Jew had said to him, 
 ' I have faith, faith in God who gives me 
 strength to fulfil his Law, faith in God who 
 will justify and forgive me if I try my best, 
 and repent of my faults. But I have no 
 faith in Jesus of Nazareth, who was not the 
 Messiah, and whose supposed intervention 
 between me and God was totally needless,' 
 Paul would have answered, ' Your faith is 
 no faith. Orthopistis is mypistis. There can 
 be no faith in God which is not also faith 
 in His Son.' Thus those who clung to the 
 Law and those who clung to faith in Christ 
 must inevitably draw further and further 
 apart, and the way of works would be 
 opposed to the way of faith. 
 
 But far more must the opposition to the 
 
122 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 Law and to its works be connected with 
 Paul's conviction that the new reUgion was 
 intended for all, and that God's long- 
 delayed mercy was to bring salvation to 
 every believer in the divine Son, whether 
 Greek or barbarian, whether Gentile or Jew. 
 The barriers of race are to be thrown down: 
 there is to be complete religious equality. 
 But how can there be equality if the Jew 
 is to boast of his Law and of his privileges ? 
 And how can one expect all the world to 
 observe the religious customs of the Jews, 
 customs which, as Paul well knew, if they 
 proved attractive to a Jew, were to many 
 Gentiles a subject of contempt and derision? 
 If all the world cannot obey the Law, then 
 all the world need not obey the Law, 
 
 Would not this point, when reached, 
 have been enough for the mobile and power- 
 ful mind of Paul ? The theories could now 
 have an incitement from which to start. 
 And theories in plenty were devised. Some 
 of them have already been noticed. There 
 were also others. 
 
 Abraham, even to the Jews, was the 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 123 
 
 father, the ' patron-saint ' of proselytes. 
 How did he win acceptance from God ? 
 Not by the works of the Law, but by faith. 
 Let all the new proselytes do like Abraham, 
 who lived before the Law, and reached his 
 righteousness without it. The law-men reject 
 faith. Let the faith-men reject the Law. 
 If the believers in Christ attempt to practice 
 the ritual commands of the Law, this means 
 that they think something else necessary to 
 salvation over and above, and beyond, their 
 faith in the Son. But this is to doubt the 
 all-sufficiency of the Son and of his potency 
 for salvation. Therefore to observe the Law 
 is a lack of faith. 
 
 But what purpose has the Law ? The 
 old religion is still strong enough in Paul to 
 make him (usually) remain convinced that 
 the Law was holy and good. Its purpose 
 must clearly have been temporary. The 
 patriarchs did, and did well, without it. 
 They had faith. The Law came in between 
 in order to bring about the need for Jesus 
 Christ and his redemptive work. The 
 unbelief of the Jews makes it clear that 
 
124 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 the Law does not prevent them being 
 wicked. What an illuminating flash it 
 must have been to Paul when he said, ' Not 
 prevent them being wicked ! Clearly more ! 
 It was intended to make them wicked ! ' 
 An illuminating flash indeed ! As of old 
 the wickedness of the Amorites had to be 
 made full, so now the wickedness of the 
 Jews had to be made full, so that Christ 
 might appear and redeem all mankind by 
 his death and resurrection. Without the 
 Law there would not be enough sin. With- 
 out enough sin there would not be adequate 
 occasion for Christ. 
 
 As the Gentiles had a certain natural law 
 of their own, and could sin and did sin, it 
 would not seem to matter much what took 
 place in one small tribe in Palestine. In the 
 immense sinfulness of the whole Gentile 
 world, there was, one would have imagined, 
 enough sin and to spare to secure the coming 
 of the Christ. But Paul, while in some 
 respects ' universal ' in his thought, natu- 
 rally looks at Jewish history as the centre 
 of the world. And we can see how, with ill 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 125 
 
 success and in a confused way, he yet tries 
 somehow to connect the Law of Moses with 
 
 the general and increased sinfulness of all 
 humanity. 
 
 Every now and then, in his bitter antag- 
 onism to the Law and to the Judaizers, 
 he goes even further, and the Law, which 
 he usually regarded as holy and good, 
 came near to being something which is 
 neither good nor holy. For, after all, was 
 the Law really given by God as the Jews so 
 frantically assert ? Was it not rather given 
 by angels ? And are its ritual laws after all 
 so perfect and divine ? Did not Jesus say : 
 ' Not that which goeth into the mouth 
 defileth a man ?' Of a surety, and in spite 
 of the Law, there is nothing unclean of 
 itself. And does not the Law include en- 
 actments which are suspiciously like 
 features of that heathen worship with which 
 we are all familiar ? Does it not hallow times 
 and seasons even like the religions of the 
 Gentiles ? What are such things but ragged 
 remnants that can now be cast away ? 
 Poor elements and beggarly rudiments 
 
126 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 which the new knowledge and the fuller 
 light can enable us to reject and to discard ! 
 So we may think of Paul advancing from 
 point to point, from argument to argument, 
 and from paradox to paradox, in his conflict 
 with opponents, upon whom he went so far 
 as to utter the imprecation, so amazing on 
 Jewish lips, ' I would that they who trouble 
 you would even destroy their virility !' 
 Could a Rabbinic Jew, even in the violence 
 of his anger, have uttered so remarkable a 
 malediction ? 
 
 Thus so far as one can get behind a great 
 genius and an uprooting, illuminating re- 
 ligious experience, one can best explain the 
 Epistles by assuming, first, that Paul's 
 pre-Christian religion was poorer, colder, 
 less satisfying and more pessimistic than 
 Rabbinic Judaism ; secondly, that a special 
 feature of that poorer religion was its more 
 developed and less ' human ' conception 
 of the Messiah ; thirdly, that Paul was 
 already anxious and worried as to the fate 
 of the Gentile world and the great mass of 
 Gentile sinners ; fourthly, that his pessi- 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 127 
 
 mistic outlook drove him to gloomy views 
 about the power of the ' evil inclination ' 
 and the impossibility of overcoming it ; 
 fifthly, that his knowledge of the mystery 
 religions made him ready and eager to dis- 
 cover a universal method of salvation, 
 suited and pre-destined for all men, whether 
 Gentile or Jew. His profoundly religious 
 nature had not been given the nurture it 
 required. The near Rabbinic God, who 
 longs to forgive His erring children at the 
 first sign of repentance, was unknown to 
 him. And so perhaps it may conceivably 
 be that the usual interpretation of the 
 7th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans 
 may not be wholly without validity. Paul 
 may perhaps have yearned to fulfil God's 
 Law, but may have never felt absolutely 
 sure that he had fulfilled it. If guilty in 
 one point, was he not, in God's eyes, 
 guilty in all ? He passionately longed to 
 find God, but perhaps he had no profound 
 assurance or conviction that he had found 
 Him. The very things, such as peace and 
 happiness and the presence of God, which 
 
128 THE GENESIS OF THE 
 
 to Rabbinic Jews were given by the Law, 
 the Law, to this Hellenistic Jew, seemed 
 perhaps powerless to give. May he not 
 have thought, ' Oh for a way, such as 
 these pagans falsely claim that they have 
 found, a way which would indeed cleanse 
 me of my sinfulness, which would indeed 
 make me right with God, which would 
 indeed enable me to walk in the paths 
 of holiness. The followers of Jesus of 
 Nazareth claim that their Teacher has 
 taught them a higher righteousness than has 
 yet been known. Can it perchance be that 
 these despised sectaries are right ?' And 
 then there came the vision at Damascus, 
 and the way for which he yearned was re- 
 vealed and made clear to him for ever. 
 Lastly, with the duty imposed upon him 
 by God to preach to all the world the Gospel 
 of the divine Son, he was met by Jewish 
 antagonism and hostility. The new truth 
 becomes not merely the complement of the 
 old religion and its fulfilment, but in one 
 important sense its direct antithesis and 
 contrary. The Law is the strength of sin. 
 
RELIGION OF ST. PAUL 129 
 
 Christianity is not the Law^/ws Jesus Christ. 
 It is Jesus Christ alone : it is the end of 
 the Law and of its bondage it is the advent 
 of the Spirit and of liberty. The letter, 
 which is the Law, kills and leads to death : 
 the Spirit, which is the Lord, gives life and 
 leads Godward. Thus Judaism and Christi- 
 anity become utterly severed and sundered 
 from each other. The saints of either 
 religion refuse to believe in the possibility 
 of sainthood in the other. In Abraham's 
 bosom each would be surprised to meet 
 the other. But God, who is above and 
 beyond these human limitations, is not 
 surprised at all. 
 
THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL TO 
 LIBERAL JUDAISM. 
 
 The way in which the hberal Jew of to- 
 day approaches the study and valuation of 
 Paul is necessarily peculiar. He does not 
 approach the study quite in the same way 
 as a modem Christian would approach 
 Mohammed or Buddha. Neither Buddha 
 nor Mahommed was ever a Christian ; but 
 Paul was bom a Jew, remained a Jew for 
 many years, and finally, in a religious sense, 
 ceased to be a Jew, and even became an 
 uncompromising opponent of Judaism. 
 Thus it is obviously easier for a Christian 
 to be an impartial student of Buddha and 
 even Mahommed, than for a Jew to be an 
 impartial student of Paul. 
 
 Or let us compare the attitude of a 
 Buddhist who begins the study of Isaiah 
 with the attitude of a Jew who begins the 
 study of Paul. Can they be the same ? The 
 Buddhist who studies Isaiah has clearly 
 
132 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 many advantages over the Jew who at- 
 tempts a study of Paul. He stands outside 
 and above his subject. He is not concerned, 
 as the Jew would probably be, to gloss over, 
 to apologise, to explain away. Quite simply 
 and easily he can say exactly what he 
 thinks Isaiah meant, and he can state quite 
 frankly whether he agrees with it or not, 
 whether he thinks it good or bad, true or 
 false, valuable or obsolete. He is not con- 
 cerned to give spiritualized meanings to any 
 unpleasing materialisms. Ragged edges 
 can be left ragged. Rough places need not 
 be smoothed down. Inconsistencies need 
 not be ignored. There will be no need to 
 read a number of modern interpretations 
 into the ancient text. On the other hand, 
 certain relics of still earlier thought which 
 the Jew might not notice and mind — he has 
 been accustomed to them all his life — the 
 Buddhist student will notice at once, and 
 very likely he will ' mind ' them a good deal. 
 He can be placidly critical and uncom- 
 promisingly impartial. Yet, if he is not the 
 sort of Buddhist who thinks that his own 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 133 
 
 religious literature has the monopoly of 
 religious excellence and truth, he will be 
 able to notice and emphasize all the good 
 and fine things in Isaiah. He will never 
 want to rob the Jewish prophet of his true 
 worth. He will seek to assess him as he 
 truly was. He will say : ' Here is a fine 
 idea, here is a noble utterance ; this point 
 we Buddhists might well adapt, that con- 
 ception we might well adopt.' And again 
 he might say, ' Here is a splendid and noble 
 thought, though it lies outside the range of 
 my own religious system ; though I cannot 
 accept the truth of the facts upon which 
 it rests, none the less I admire its beauty, 
 none the less I observe and realize its 
 religious potency and influence.' 
 
 Can the modern and liberal Jew study 
 Paul in the same spirit as our imaginary 
 Buddhist has been supposed to study 
 Isaiah ? It may be that the Jew is both too 
 near Paul and too far from him to do him 
 justice or even adequately to understand 
 him. The ashes of old controversies may 
 still glow within the Jew's mind and heart. 
 
134 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 Just as it is so very hard for the Christian, 
 even the modem, Uberal, quite unorthodox 
 Christian, such as a German professor of 
 theology, to understand and appreciate 
 the Rabbinic rehgion, so may it also be very 
 hard for the modern, liberal, quite un- 
 orthodox Jew to appreciate and understand 
 Paul. It may, therefore, be that this brief 
 essay of mine will have no value or accuracy 
 whatever. Probably all the things which 
 I shall say on the one side will seem false 
 to the Christian and correct to the Jew, 
 while all the things which I shall say upon 
 the other side will seem correct and obvious 
 to the Christian, false and exaggerated to 
 the Jew. Whether such conclusions might 
 indicate that I have hit the mark, or that I 
 am wrong all round, is difficult, and perhaps 
 hopeless, to decide. 
 
 The modern and liberal Jew has un- 
 doubtedly an enormous amount to reject in 
 the Pauline Epistles. So his impartiality 
 may seem at once to be in fault. Yet these 
 things must be mentioned because they are 
 essential portions of Paul's theology taken 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 135 
 
 as a whole. Moreover they are things over 
 and above the one great special point which 
 divides the Christian from the Jew. They 
 have nothing to do with the Messiahship of 
 Jesus, or with his nature, office and work. 
 They are things which the modem and 
 liberal Jew rejects — which are a ' stumbling 
 block ' to him — not so much because he is 
 a Jew as because he is ' liberal ' and 
 ' modem/ 
 
 How much of Pauline theology is con- 
 nected with a conception of the Old Testa- 
 ment that has passed away for ever ! Adam 
 has disappeared ; so have his fall and his 
 sin, and their effects. The resurrection of 
 the body has gone. All ideas of a devil and 
 of powers of evil, or of ' a god of this world ' 
 (the most un- Jewish phrase in Paul), have 
 utterly vanished. Once more, the dualisms 
 of Paul, not so bad as the dualism of the 
 fourth Gospel, but still bad enough, are 
 remote from us. ' Vessels of wrath created 
 for destruction.'^ How far is even Pauline 
 
 1 ' Fitted ' is hardly a strong enough word. * Prepared ' 
 might do. Lietzmann puts * geschafEen.' 
 
136 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 universalism from ours ! We refuse to 
 admit that those who disagree with us 
 rehgiously are ' natural ' men, and that we 
 who have the truth are ' spiritual.' All 
 men are for us children of God, and all are 
 created in his image. If this were so — Paul 
 might argue — the whole need for the in- 
 carnation and the death of the divine Son 
 would disappear. And here we should 
 entirely agree with Paul, showing in our 
 agreement the immensity of our diversity. 
 Still more would the necessity for this 
 tremendous episode in the history of man 
 disappear, if we reject, as reject we do, his 
 doctrine of divine wrath. For the God we 
 worship had no need to be propitiated by 
 the blood of Christ. For there was never a 
 long period of divine anger which had to 
 be cured by this amazing device. God was 
 always compassionate. The difficulties of 
 Theism are as great to us as they were to 
 Paul. Indeed we realise their difficulties 
 far more acutely than he. But we, never- 
 theless, believe in a ' good ' God. Only a 
 good God for us means that all men must 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 137 
 
 always have been, and always must be, 
 ' saved/ and that the very words wrath and 
 anger are, perhaps, meaningless as applied 
 to God. But if all men are ' saved ' whether 
 they believe in Christ or reject him, whether 
 they are idolaters or monotheists, the basis 
 of Pauline theology collapses. The whole 
 scheme and fabric tumble like a pack of 
 cards to the ground. And so for us modem 
 liberal Jews, they do. 
 
 To these general disagreements must be 
 added the specific Jewish disagreement as 
 regards the Christology. Like the Rabbinic 
 Jews of Paul's own day, we disbelieve in 
 this pre-existent divine being, who, though 
 not God, was ' in the form of God,' and 
 emptied himself and was made in the like- 
 ness of men. We do not believe that this 
 pre-existent divine being was, during his 
 brief stay on earth, Jesus of Nazareth. We 
 do not believe that he reconciled man to 
 God, because we hold that there was no need 
 of any external reconciliation. So all this 
 central doctrine falls completely away. And 
 though we modern, liberal Jews are not in 
 
138 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 Paul's sense, or in the sense of our orthodox 
 co-reHgionists, ' under the Law,' we never- 
 theless reject Paul's doctrines of the work 
 of Christ in regard to that Law, and of the 
 relation of the Law to sin. Thus, a great 
 deal of what Paul writes has, it must be 
 freely admitted, no value for us : it has 
 not only no value, but it has no present- 
 day interest. It needs some effort on our 
 part to seek to understand Paul, because 
 when we have read him and the best modern 
 commentaries with every care, there is so 
 much which is for us so crude, so remote, 
 so false, so unworthy of God, so valueless 
 for ourselves. 
 
 A long discussion concerning the sort of 
 sin which Adam sinned, the sort of sin which 
 people sinned between Adam and Moses, 
 the sort of sin which Jews sinned between 
 Moses and Christ, is wearisome to us. To 
 us the Law is no sudden revelation. Hence 
 the division of the world before and after 
 the Law seems to us mechanical. Paul's 
 confused and often inconsistent reasoning, 
 with its various gaps and omissions, is in- 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 139 
 
 clined to bore us. We are so far from his 
 point of view, and to our own mind so 
 enormously beyond it ! 
 
 Paul's psychology is not ours. His 
 doctrine of sin is not ours. His various 
 ragged edges are clear enough to us, but 
 they do not greatly concern us. What 
 happened to humanity between Adam and 
 Moses ? What happened to all the Gentiles 
 between Moses and Christ ? Did they all 
 sin, and were they all annihilated at death ? 
 We can recognise that Paul leaves these 
 gigantic questions open, and that his 
 ' theory ' is ragged indeed, but though so 
 much the worse for the theory, we are not 
 otherwise affected. It worries Paul dread- 
 fully that any Christian should sin : theo- 
 retically they ought not to sin any more. 
 We do not trouble : we pass on. Paul 
 appears to think that if everything is all 
 right in the end, God's kindness as well as 
 His justice are triumphantly vindicated. If 
 all those persons (so he seems to imply) 
 who survive upon the earth when Christ 
 comes again, 'believe' and are saved, the 
 
140 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 result appears to him to be highly satis- 
 factory. The heaps of people who must 
 have gone to perdition, or been annihilated 
 at death, between Adam and the second 
 coming of Christ, seem to give him no com- 
 punction or anxiety. We need not bother 
 about this curious attitude of mind, except 
 to remember that we too, like Paul, are 
 often too apt to gloze over the awful burden 
 which our Theistic faith is called upon to 
 bear. We talk of the progress of man, and, 
 like Paul, are sometimes disposed to think 
 that if all turn out right in the end, every 
 difficulty has been overcome. But what of 
 all the wreckage on the road ? Does even 
 the doctrine of immortality account and 
 compensate for this ? Anyhow, we are 
 far less easily satisfied than Paul, for our 
 eyes are much wider open than his. 
 
 I will omit a number of details — various 
 superstitions, outworn views about marriage, 
 celibacy, women, slavery, and other inci- 
 dental divergencies. Yet in a complete 
 estimate they would all need to be taken 
 into account. It is the general point of 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 141 
 
 view, however, in which the difference 
 between us and Paul is most glaring and 
 oppressive. Paul sees no difficulties where 
 we see many ; on the other hand, he is 
 pessimistic where we are inclined to be joy- 
 ful. We believe in the divine goodness so 
 intensely that the ' evil ' of the world is a 
 sore burden to our faith, whereas to Paul 
 the evils are a mark of the ' wrath ' in which 
 we totally disbelieve. Yet to us, no less 
 than to the Rabbis, this world (in spite of 
 evil) is good. God rules it. Creation is 
 not, and has not been, subjected to vanity. 
 The earth as well as the heavens declare the 
 glory of God. Like the Rabbis, we smell 
 the rose, and thank God for its fragrance. 
 
 Is, then, anything left over ? What a 
 mass we have rejected ! Paul's pessimism, 
 his Christology, much in his conception of 
 sin, his conception of the Law, his con- 
 ception of God's wrath, his demonology, his 
 view of human past and human future, have 
 all gone by the board ! What possibly 
 can remain ? 
 
 It may be, however, even in the very 
 
142 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 doctrines which we reject, that there are 
 fragments worth preserving. There may be 
 a good deal to adapt, although compara- 
 tively little to adopt. There may be 
 matters for appreciation and admiration, 
 though not for complete and absolute 
 agreement. And Paul's doctrine is so rich, 
 he says so many things, that in spite of all 
 that we have rejected, several elements of 
 value may remain over. Lastly, some of 
 Paul's imperfect teachings may point for- 
 ward to conclusions which we have reached 
 in another way, and along a different road. 
 It remains then to consider and set forth 
 what, in the eyes of a modern and liberal 
 Jew, may counterbalance, (at least to some 
 extent), all that he regards as obsolete or 
 valueless or false. And this is by far the 
 more important and interesting portion of 
 our task. What is positive is so much more 
 pleasant and useful than what is negative. 
 What we can find to care for and use in 
 a great man's writings is so much more 
 absorbing than what we have to reject and 
 cast away. 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 143 
 
 The heat and bitterness of the old conflict 
 have vanished. We need remember them 
 no more. And so from the very doctrines 
 and sayings which caused or expressed that 
 conflict, we of to-day, heirs of Paul's an- 
 tagonists though we be, and still rejecting 
 the comer stone of his teaching, can draw 
 profit and suggestion. 
 
 So, for instance, the modem and liberal 
 Jew has reached a universalism far broader 
 than Paurs. For we say, ' all are equal 
 before God ' whatever their creed, where- 
 as Paul left those who did not accept the 
 Son in the outer darkness. To us there is 
 no outer darkness, and the mercies of God 
 are for us not limited by race or by creed, 
 by belief or by unbelief. But though we 
 have reached this universalism in our own 
 way and along our own lines, we can recog- 
 nise the greatness of the advance which 
 was made by Paul, even while regretting 
 that the light of that advance was dimmed 
 by its own painful shadow. The prophetic 
 universalism was made grander and more 
 definite by such sayings as, ' There is no 
 
144 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 distinction between Jew and Greek ; for 
 the same Lord is Lord of all, and is rich 
 unto all that call upon Him.' ' Is God the 
 God of Jews only ? Is He not the God of 
 Gentiles also ? yea, of Gentiles also : if so 
 be that God is One.' In a sense we do not 
 need these words, for they make no addi- 
 tion to our present faith. There is nothing 
 fresh in them to adapt or to adopt. But 
 we cannot read them, I think, without a 
 thrill of admiration. We do not for a mo- 
 ment ignore the traces of universalism and 
 the many universalistic sayings in Rabbinic 
 literature : still less do we ignore the 
 movement and the leanings towards 
 universalism in Hellenistic Judaism. But 
 we perceive that, actually and historically, 
 and in the fullest sense theoretically and 
 verbally, universalism was never preached 
 and practised up till Paul's day as it was 
 preached and practised by him. It was 
 attained at a big price : it was attained, 
 moreover, by the forging of a fresh par- 
 ticularism. Still attained it was. And we 
 liberal and modern Jews have to consider 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 145 
 
 how far our yet wider theoretic univer- 
 salism can or should be matched by a 
 practical universaUsm as well. Paul's prac- 
 tical universalism was obtained by the 
 abolition of Judaism. Can our practical 
 universalism be won with its retention ? 
 
 Theoretically we are on perfectly firm 
 ground. We merely substitute God for 
 Christ. ' There is no more Jew nor Greek, 
 there is no more bond nor free : there is 
 no more male nor female ; but all are one 
 in ' — God. And again, ' where there is 
 not Greek and Jew, circumcision, and un- 
 circumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond- 
 man, freeman : but ' God ' is all and in all.' 
 Even to-day such grand and true words 
 have for us their lesson and significance. 
 And we can surely recognise not only the 
 immense influence of the Pauline teaching, 
 whereby a universal Theistic religion was 
 definitely established, but also, in spite of 
 the shadows, the greatness of that teaching 
 itself. In truth, Judaism could not become 
 a universal religion together with its in- 
 violate Law. It remains to be seen, now 
 
146 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 that liberal Judaism has adopted an attitude 
 towards that Law very different alike from 
 that either of Paul or his antagonists, 
 whether Judaism can, in practice as well 
 as in theory, be transformed into a universal 
 creed. Such a future for it may be very 
 distant : have we courage and faith enough 
 to work for its coming ? * 
 
 Let us now pass on to a feature in the 
 Pauline doctrine which seemed to him 
 fundamental, and in sharpest contrariety 
 to the old and superseded religion. Accord- 
 ing to Paul there is absolute opposition 
 between the method of the Law and the 
 method of Faith. One can seek to put 
 oneself right with God, and to win salvation, 
 by attempting to fulfil the works of the Law; 
 or one can put oneself right with God, and 
 win salvation, by faith. The first method 
 is doomed to failure : the second can be 
 successful. But apart from the inevitable 
 failure of the first, and the practically 
 certain success of the second, this further 
 
 lA learned friend observes : ' The day of " universal creeds " 
 is passing away. Community of conduct, not of thought, will 
 be the ]mk in the future,' 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 147 
 
 fact is of importance, A combination of 
 the two methods is impossible. If you have 
 faith, you are free from the Law ; and if, 
 pretending to have faith, you coquette with 
 the Law, you have no true and adequate 
 faith. Unfortunately, it is impossible to 
 give a full statement of PauFs doctrine of 
 faith: this would need an essay to itself. 
 I have to assume a general and sufficient 
 acquaintance with that doctrine, and this 
 assumption is troublesome, because even a 
 modern and liberal Jew is usually very 
 ignorant of Paul, and especially ignorant 
 of what he exactly means by faith. The 
 liberal, no less than the traditional, 
 Jew is inclined to think that it means 
 no more than a mere intellectual accep- 
 tance of the facts that Jesus was the 
 Messiah, and that he ' was delivered up 
 for men's trespasses, and was raised for 
 their justification/ He thinks it means an 
 intellectual acceptance, (i) of certain sup- 
 posed historical incidents, (2) of certain 
 alleged theories concerning these incidents; 
 just as a man might say, ' I fully and sin- 
 
148 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 cerely believe that the battle of Hastings 
 was fought in 1066, and that the effect of 
 that battle was to change the character of 
 the English language for ever/ Now it is 
 true that the intellectual element enters 
 into the Pauline doctrine. Paul says : ' So 
 if thou shalt confess with thy mouth that 
 Jesus is the Lord, and shalt believe in thy 
 heart that God raised him from the dead, 
 thou shalt be saved.' But the matter does 
 not end there. Paul means by faith much 
 more than mere intellectual acceptance of 
 certain alleged facts and theories. We mean 
 more than that ourselves when we speak of 
 faith in God. We mean a faith which has 
 an effect upon character. We mean a faith 
 which is a vital portion of our whole being 
 and nature, the dissolution or breakdown 
 of which might, and even would, mean a 
 complete change of outlook, bearing, dis- 
 position, and motive. A living and power- 
 ful faith in God may supply the whole 
 hidden key to a man's point of view and 
 manner of action. It can stimulate, humble, 
 strengthen, console. It may give the force 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 149 
 
 necessary for noble deeds and steady and 
 sustained purpose. And the change from 
 an incapacity to beheve in God to a strong 
 behef in His existence and goodness may 
 exercise the most tremendous effect upon 
 the whole moral and spiritual nature of 
 man. If we learned that, after all, the old 
 views about the battle of Hastings were 
 wrong, and that William was defeated at 
 that battle and not victorious, we should 
 be intensely surprised, but our moral and 
 spiritual nature would hardly undergo any 
 change, whether for better or for worse. 
 Some such wide effects for good, some 
 such broad change in character and outlook, 
 in strength and hope and purpose, were 
 thought by Paul to follow from the ' faith ' 
 in Jesus the Messiah. And doubtless to 
 him such good effects did follow from his 
 new and rapturous conviction. 
 
 If, however, we to-day possess a concep- 
 tion of God more inspiring and wider, 
 more consolatory and more stimulating, 
 more intimate and more many-sided, than 
 was Paul's comparatively poor Hellenistic 
 
150 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 conception of God before his conversion, 
 can his doctrine of faith (which is not merely 
 a doctrine of faith as such, but specifi- 
 cally and essentially a faith in the Messiah- 
 ship and redeeming work of Jesus) be of 
 any service and advantage to us ? Our 
 conception of God, so much richer and fuller, 
 so much more helpful and hopeful, than his 
 old pre-Christian conception of God, makes 
 a faith in any extra subordinate divine 
 being unnecessary, while on the other hand 
 we have not even an intellectual belief in 
 the theories about Jesus and his work with 
 which Paul's doctrine of faith is so inex- 
 tricably bound up. How, then, can that 
 doctrine be of any service or value to us ? 
 
 To us, moreover, ' faith ' is not opposed 
 to ' works ' and our conception of the Law 
 or of Law does not bring us into any diffi- 
 culties with our conception of faith. We 
 can easily harmonise the two. To Paul, 
 faith in Christ was of necessity opposed to 
 faith in the Law, and indeed he would 
 probably have found the collocation of the 
 two terms impossible to understand. For it 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 151 
 
 was part of his theory — essential to the 
 ingathering of the nations and to their 
 being placed upon a footing of religious 
 equality with the Jews — that Christ's 
 coming and Christ's work denoted the 
 termination of the Law's ineffective and 
 separating regime. ' Christ/ as he says, 
 ' is the end of the Law, for he brings 
 righteousness to all who believe. ' The 
 holy life, which the Law ordered, but 
 ordered vainly, Christ can cause to arise 
 in the soul of all who will believe in him 
 with full trust and self-surrender. To the 
 righteousness which the Law ordained, but 
 did not and could not produce, Christ for 
 all his followers can show the way. The 
 Law put men wrong with God, because 
 through the Law they sinned ; Christ, to 
 those who believe in him, puts men right 
 with God, initially and immediately in the 
 very act of faith, and continuously and 
 permanently, because now they need sin 
 no more. 
 
 The Pauline theory of faith has for its 
 necessary correlative the Pauline theory of 
 
152 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 the Law. If the one falls, the other, as a 
 whole, falls also. But his theory of the Law 
 was false to the facts of Rabbinic Judaism, 
 and even to some phases of that poorer 
 Hellenistic Judaism amid which he lived. 
 It is obviously, therefore, still more false, 
 or rather still more inapplicable, to our- 
 selves. The theory of faith and the theory 
 of the Law go together, and with them must 
 be associated the conception and theory 
 of grace. Just as Paul opposes ' faith ' and 
 ' Law,' so he opposes ' Law ' and ' grace.' 
 In the new order the believer is no longer 
 under the Law, but under grace. To the 
 man who seeks to do ' works ' under the 
 Law, his reward is reckoned as a ' debt ' 
 due to him, and not as a ' grace.' But in 
 the case of the man who entirely abandons 
 any attempt at obtaining salvation by 
 works, and frankly throws himself in faith 
 upon the mercy of Him who can even 
 ' justify ' the wicked, his faith is reckoned 
 to him as righteousness. In other words 
 God of His grace accepts the faith of the 
 believer as if it were deeds of righteousness. 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 153 
 
 He pardons and overlooks all his previous 
 sins, so that the man is now right with God, 
 and in addition has (by the gift of the 
 Spirit ) the mysterious power conferred 
 upon him to do, through faith, acts of good- 
 ness and piety. 
 
 Now in all this doctrine Paul does partly 
 hit a certain weakness of Rabbinical Juda- 
 ism, which must also have been a weakness 
 of the Hellenistic Judaism around him. 
 But this weakness was diminished and 
 rendered comparatively harmless in Rab- 
 binic Judaism by other doctrines and by 
 amiable inconsistencies. In the particular 
 sort of cheap and poor Hellenistic Judaism 
 from which Paul was converted to a belief 
 in Jesus the Messiah, these doctrines and 
 inconsistencies seem to have been wanting. 
 They were not wanting to Philo in Alexan- 
 dria; they were, as it would appear, want- 
 ing to Paul of Tarsus. 
 
 The weakness was due to a defect in 
 the quality of any legal religion. There 
 was a certain tendency to take a mechanical 
 view of righteousness and wickedness, as 
 
154 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 if righteousness consisted in the doing, and 
 as if sin consisted in the omission or the 
 violation, of so and so many separate 
 injunctions. Strike a balance, subtract 
 the good list from the evil, and you can 
 tell, or God can tell, the exact moral 
 condition of any particuliar man. There 
 are undoubtedly several Rabbinical utter- 
 ances based upon this outward, inadequate, 
 and mechanical conception of righteousness 
 and character, and it is not surprising if 
 the Christian commentators have fastened 
 upon them with much satisfaction. It is 
 unnecessary to point out how such cheap 
 and external valuations of goodness fail 
 to account for the complexity of human 
 character, and how they may directly 
 lead to a lowering of the whole moral 
 and spiritual life. 
 
 Character is expressed in, and moulded by, 
 action, but it is something far deeper and 
 more subtle than a number of outward 
 ' doings.' A man may even 'do' little, and 
 ' be ' much ; he may ' do' much, and ' be' 
 little. A man may have committed no 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 155 
 
 positive sin against the code, and yet he 
 may be a formahst and a hypocrite : at 
 any rate, he may be a poor, empty, negative 
 creature for all his conformity, and for all 
 his scrupulous compliance to the letter of 
 innumerable laws. A man may have com- 
 mitted many faults, and often have lapsed 
 from duty, and yet he may be a noble fellow 
 in the main; he may be one who has done 
 more good, and in truth is worth a vast deal 
 more, than the formal and conventional 
 observer of all the statutes of the code. All 
 this is commonplace and obvious enough 
 to all of us to-day, but it was not so obvious 
 and commonplace to the makers of Rab- 
 binic Judaism. 
 
 Then, again, it was rightly felt by these 
 makers of the Rabbinic faith that ' free 
 will ' (in some sense of the words) was at 
 the foundation of morality. Man was free 
 to choose and do either the right or the 
 wrong, and because he was free, he could 
 justly be held accountable, and could 
 become and be called either good or bad. 
 Hence the temptation arose, or, at any rate, 
 
156 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 it could, logically, have conceivably arisen, 
 to argue that if man ' deserves ' punishment 
 for his voluntary sins, he ' deserves ' reward 
 for his voluntary excellencies. If he has 
 justly ' earned ' punishment for his infrac- 
 tions of the divine commands, he has justly 
 ' earned ' reward for his fulfilment of them. 
 Our own wickedness makes us fail ; our 
 own righteousness makes us succeed. Vir- 
 tue and vice are within our own power. If 
 we merit punishment, we merit reward. 
 Each will be allotted according to our con- 
 formity or disconformity to the code. For 
 every ounce of good and evil we shall re- 
 ceive our deserts. 
 
 Whatever measure of truth may lie in 
 this doctrine (and Paul himself does not 
 mind saying that we shall all be judged by 
 our works), the religious mind revolts at it 
 as a whole. It needs to be tempered and 
 combined (at whatever loss of consistency) 
 with other doctrines of a very different 
 kind. By itself and alone it may lead, on 
 the one hand, to pride and false self- 
 sufficiency ; on the other hand, to gloom 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 157 
 
 and to despair. Paul may have observed 
 effects of both kinds among the Hellenistic 
 Jews with whom he was most familiar. 
 Rabbinic Judaism did, however, possess 
 ideas and doctrines which, as I have indi- 
 cated, could, with whatever loss of con- 
 sistency, temper and prevent the evils of 
 this moral independence. For it taught, 
 and believed in, the idea of the divine aid to 
 human righteousness, and also, though less 
 pronouncedly, the idea that human virtue 
 has no ' claim ' upon divine reward. ' For 
 merit lives from man to man, and not from 
 man, O Lord, to Thee,' Tennyson's thought 
 is by no means anti-Rabbinic. If God helps 
 us to do and to be good, we have no right 
 to expect a ' reward ' for something which, 
 in the last resort, is not purely ours. And 
 even as we are not requited (for God is 
 merciful) according to our sins, so we are 
 rewarded much beyond our ' merits ' and 
 'deserts.' Thus ' grace ' enters in on both 
 sides ; on the one hand, as forgiving and 
 making allowances ; on the other, as giving 
 and bestowing far beyond our meed. Rab- 
 
158 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 binic Judaism — for its inconsistency is its 
 strength — ^knew and made use of teachings 
 such as these quite as much as it knew and 
 made use of those doubtful and dangerous 
 teachings of reward and punishment in 
 strict conformity with the accomphshed 
 deed. And thus, in actual life, Rabbinic 
 Jews could be and were saved either from 
 despair, upon the one hand, or from pride 
 upon the other. ' God was gracious,' both 
 in forgiveness and in reward. There was 
 comparatively little question of earnings 
 and debts, of merits and deserts. 
 
 In the case of the modem and liberal Jew 
 it is obvious that there is less question still. 
 Nobody dreams of boasting to-day of his 
 own ' power,' his own capacities, his own 
 merit, in relation to God. There is no talk 
 or idea of ' debts,' or ' payment ' to be 
 rendered,' and so forth. Faith and grace 
 play a fit and wholesome part in our religious 
 conceptions ; they are neither exaggerated 
 nor ignored. Thus to us, at any rate, Paul 
 seems often to be fighting windmills. He 
 sets up objectionable ninepins that he may 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 159 
 
 knock them down again with his new 
 theories. I beheve that even as regards 
 Rabbinic Judaism the ideas he objects to 
 were largely ninepins ; certainly they are 
 so for us at the present day. 
 
 Nevertheless it does not follow that 
 Paul's diatribes are of no value even for us. 
 We need both ' law ' and ' grace/ both 
 ' grace ' and ' works/ and though we do not 
 oppose them to one another like Paul, and 
 though we believe that they can form part 
 of a harmonious and co-ordinate whole, 
 it is of value to be occasionally reminded, 
 now of one portion and now of another. 
 Paul, in his trenchant and one-sided 
 way, but with the fervour and eloquence 
 of a great genius and a lofty conviction, 
 reminds us of the one portion, the Rab- 
 binic doctors remind us of the other. We 
 need both 'Being' and 'Doing.' It is 
 not enough to conform outwardly to a 
 number of moral rules, however excellent. 
 A man needs the inward principle which 
 will make him equal to the varied emer- 
 gencies that may befall him. The whole 
 
i6o THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 soul must be turned to the light, and must 
 itself be luminious. A driving faith is re- 
 quired, or in Paul's words, ' a faith working 
 through love/ Not merely an intellectual 
 acceptance of the principle, but an emo- 
 tional acceptance of it. The combination 
 floods the whole human nature, and impels 
 it to noble deeds. For if the principle is 
 noble, so will be the deeds that issue from 
 it. Lapses and failures may occur, because 
 the ' faith ' will never be perfect ; the 
 ' flooding ' will never be complete. But 
 the lapses and failures will not be due to 
 ignorance or lack of rules. Given the 'faith' 
 — let us say an acceptance of the doctrine 
 of a righteous and benevolent God combined 
 with a keen love for Him — and there will 
 be little need for rules. The lover of God is 
 learned, even as a human lover is learned. 
 He knows the deeds which are in conformity 
 with his love and with the will of the 
 beloved. Still more, he is not driven to 
 do certain deeds and to refrain from others, 
 because a code, however excellent, says 
 ' Thou shalt ' and ' Thou shalt not,' but he 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM i6i 
 
 is driven to do and to refrain, because he 
 loves, because he has a faith which works 
 through love. In comphcated situations, 
 in the actual hurly-burly of life, he has not 
 to wait and say, ' Under what law do the 
 present circumstances fall ? ' ; his principle 
 his faith, his love, tell him sufficiently how 
 he is to act. He is carried beyond the letter 
 of the law, because love is never satisfied : 
 whatever he can do can never be enough. 
 And we may also say that the faith which 
 works through love is never satisfied. It 
 carries a man on to deeds of sacrifice and 
 supererogation. It gives the desire to do 
 these deeds, and the power to accomplish 
 them. It prevents the incoming of lower 
 yearnings ; it overcomes timidity, slug- 
 gishness and convention. The flooded soul 
 is carried forward at a bound, but it 
 is not only carried forward, but vitally 
 sustained. What a mere ' Thou shalt ' 
 or ' Thou shalt not ' cannot achieve, that, 
 and far more, is accomplished by faith 
 and love. 
 
 Reflections such as these are generated 
 
 M 
 
i62 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 by Paul's doctrine.^ They may be common- 
 place, but of some commonplaces it is well 
 to be reminded. They may also be one- 
 sided, but it is often necessary to think of 
 each of the two sides of a truth singly and 
 separately. We shall not forget the Law 
 because we also seek to remember Faith. 
 Having done each of them justice in 
 artificial isolation, we shall do them better 
 justice still in combination. On the present 
 occasion it is unnecessary to enter into a 
 defence of Law. That must be taken for 
 granted. ' If man,' as Professor MacCunn 
 says, ' is not to be the creature of caprice, 
 he must be made for Law.' The quotation 
 reminds me to say that for all Jews, whether 
 orthodox or liberal, the two chapters in 
 Professor MacCunn's most excellent little 
 book, the Making of Character, entitled, 
 ' Precept ' and ' Causistry ' would supply 
 most valuable and suggestive reading. They 
 
 iDr. Abrahams observes : ' We could also arrive at these 
 reflections from a study of the Hebrew Scriptures and from a 
 close reading of the Rabbinic Literature. They are in both, 
 not merely in germ, but in fruit. We need not, therefore, 
 refuse to be led to consider these points in the presentation 
 made of them by Paul/ 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 163 
 
 are entirely untheological, so that no 
 Jewish prejudices could be possibly aroused. 
 The good and the weak points of any moral 
 code are admirable pointed out. And 
 Professor MacCunn shows what, from the 
 liberal Jewish point of view, is extremely 
 sympathetic and agreeable, that it is to 
 Law, — the unwritten moral ideal — rather 
 than to any written code, however excellent, 
 to which our final and ultimate homage 
 must be paid. The supreme court is the 
 Moral Law ; that is the Law which makes 
 us free. This is the Law to which we may 
 apply the superb line of Goethe : ' Und 
 das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.' 
 Written and formulated precepts, however 
 venerable, however excellent, can only 
 obtain a ' provincial jurisdiction.' There 
 are, then, two Laws, and sometimes, though 
 rarely, as in that moving tale of Franzos, 
 Nach dem hoheren Gesetz, a man will find 
 that there is an opposition between the one 
 and to other. ' The choice,' as Professor 
 MacCunn puts it, will then be ' between two 
 kinds of law and two kinds of obedience — 
 
i64 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 obedience to the law of which the last word 
 is " Thus it is written," and obedience to 
 that other law which is more enduring and 
 more imperative than anything that can 
 ever find adequate embodiment in any 
 code of precepts.' 
 
 What Paul failed to see was that ' faith 
 which works by love ' could be, and often 
 was, appended to the very Law which, 
 with its works, he contrasts with faith. To 
 the Rabbinic Jew, the Law, as the perfect 
 gift of the perfect God, was accepted both 
 intellectually and emotionally. It was both 
 believed in and loved. And therefore this 
 faith and this love supplied the very motive 
 power which Paul had only found when he 
 became a convert to the new Messiah. He, 
 with his poorer form of Hellenistic religion, 
 does not seem to have loved the Law ; he 
 found love elsewhere. But the Rabbinic Jew, 
 (of 500 A.D. for certain and of 50 a.d. in all 
 probability), had love already. He could 
 not break with this love : he could not 
 disavow this faith. His allegiance was 
 already given ; a passionate allegiance 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 165 
 
 which led to noble lives and noble deaths. 
 He needed no new faith ; the old faith 
 sufficed. 
 
 And we, too, need no new faith. We do 
 not feel towards the Pentateuch as the Rab- 
 binic Jew felt towards it : but we feel to- 
 wards God as he felt ; our love for God is 
 adequate without intercessor. Our faith in 
 God is adequate without a faith in any- 
 lesser divinity or son. Nevertheless we 
 recognise the elements of value in Paul's 
 teaching, and can absorb them. ' Thou 
 shalt,' ' Thou shalt not ' are still needful 
 for us : an obligation and a compulsion, 
 before the majesty of which we bow down 
 in self-surrender and adoration. But ' the 
 faith which works through love ' must be 
 ours as well, the faith and the love which, 
 in one sense, make all law superfluous and 
 unnecessary. We stand midway between 
 the Old Covenant and the New as depicted 
 by the prophet Jeremiah. The Old Covenant 
 is outward, and rightly so, for God is with- 
 out as well as within ; the New Covenant is 
 inward, and rightly so, for God must be 
 
i66 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 within as well as without. The prophet 
 separated the old and the new too harshly ; 
 so long as man is man, there must always 
 be both old and new. The moral law is 
 always beyond and greater and above ; but 
 always, if gradually, God is helping us to 
 put His law in our inward parts and to write 
 it — more fully and more powerfully — within 
 our hearts. 
 
 We know that Paul, while he held that 
 the Law of Moses was itself spiritual, yet 
 denied that anyone, who clung to it and 
 lived under it and by it, could himself be 
 spiritual. Spirit is by him not merely 
 opposed to flesh, but it is also, so far as 
 man is concerned, opposed to law. Thus 
 Paul can say of the Christian (who alone 
 possesses or can possess the spirit), ' But 
 now, seeing that we have died to that which 
 once held us in bondage {i.e.j the Law), we 
 have become freed from the Law, so that 
 we serve in the new spirit and not in the old 
 letter.' To ' serve ' the Law is to Paul ipso 
 facto bondage, whereas to the Rabbinic Jew 
 to serve the Law is ipso facto liberty. And 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 167 
 
 again Paul says of himself, ' we are the ^ 
 servant of a new covenant, not of the letter, 
 but of the spirit. For the letter kills, but 
 the spirit gives life/ The opposition is: 
 always the same : on the one side are 
 Christ, spirit, liberty, life ; on the other 
 side are Law, flesh, bondage and death. 
 When we talk of the spirit of the law, or 
 of intrepreting the Law in its spirit and not 
 in its letter, we are using Pauline words, 
 but not Pauline ideas. To Paul there could 
 be no possibility of interpreting the Law 
 according to its ' spirit.' The Law is spirit- 
 ual, because given by God, but yet, in 
 relation to man and its observance, it is all 
 letter. You must either follow it as a whole 
 unto death, or be free from it as a whole 
 unto life. 
 
 Such a violent opposition is clearly of no 
 use for us to-day. Moreover the Pauline 
 particularism, according to which only the 
 Christian believer can possess the spirit of 
 God, is wholly abhorrent to our modern 
 point of view. Hence the greater part of 
 Paul's doctrine of the spirit is vitiated to 
 
i68 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 us because of its essential narrowness. Yet, 
 even so,we can still be stirred by his effective 
 and eloquent contrasts between the spirit 
 and the flesh, between, as we might say, 
 the higher and the lower self. These can 
 still be read by us with profit and edifica- 
 tion. We can also find Paul's teaching 
 helpful in so far as it reminds us of the 
 connection between goodness and God, 
 between human righteousness and divine 
 righteousness. For, so far as we have 
 framed such conceptions as those of good- 
 ness and righteousness, we have framed 
 them because we are spiritual, and because 
 the spirit of God is within us. So far as 
 we are ' free,' it is because of that spirit. 
 And this spirit is, on the one hand, intensely 
 our own, the most essentially human thing 
 about us, on the other hand, it is essentially 
 divine, and given to us by the great Not- 
 ourselves, who is all spirit. That is why we 
 can pray to God to give us His spirit and not 
 to ' take His holy spirit from us.' That is 
 why, whatever our efforts, we must needs 
 be humble, and why our strength for 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 169 
 
 righteousness is rather ' given ' than ' our 
 own.' Thoughts such as these the Pauhne 
 doctrine of the spirit can evoke, or revive, 
 in us, and so far as it does so, it is of 
 value. And, finally, Paul, in striking 
 phrases, bids us keep our bodies clean and 
 alert for the sake of the spirit which is 
 within them. ' Do you not know that your 
 bodies are a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit 
 which is within you — the Spirit which you 
 have from God ? . . . . Therefore 
 glorify God in your bodies/ And again, 
 ' Do you not know that you are God's 
 sanctuary, and that the Spirit of God has 
 His home within you ?' In the fine personal 
 passage which concludes the ninth chapter 
 of the first Epistle to the Corinthians he 
 says, ' Every man who strives in the games 
 practices self-restraint in all directions. 
 They do this to receive a corruptible wreath: 
 we do it to receive an incorruptible one. 
 That, then, is how I run, not blindly : I box 
 not as one who idly beats the air, but I 
 buffet my body and bring it into bondage, 
 so that I may not preach to others, but 
 
170 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 myself become rejected.' Surely this is a 
 grand plea for the right discipline of the 
 body. It is not a plea for useless and ex- 
 cessive asceticism, but it is a plea for that 
 exact, and possibly exacting, measure of 
 bodily training and bodily restraint which 
 will make the body the finest servant and 
 instrument of the soul.^ 
 
 The modern and liberal Jew stands far 
 away from, and far above, the old contro- 
 versy between Paul and the Jews as regards 
 the value and the domination of the 
 ' Mosaic ' Law. It is easy to see, from one 
 important and perfectly valid point of view, 
 that Paul was completely in the wrong. 
 The Law gives no indication of its own 
 transitoriness. Its enactments are to be 
 ' statutes for ever throughout your genera- 
 tions/ And in the fulfilment of these 
 statutes the Rabbinic Jew found sonship 
 and liberty, life and joy. Ingenious as 
 Paul's arguments are, they are ingenious 
 and nothing more. It is as impossible for 
 
 iDr. Abrahams compares the saying of Hillel who, when he 
 went to his bath, declared that he was performing a religious 
 duty, keeping the tenement clean for the soul that was within. 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 171 
 
 the Rabbinic Jew of the present. day to be 
 moved and influenced by them as it was 
 impossible for the Rabbinic Jew of the first 
 century. To try and prove the transiency 
 and imperfection of the Law from the Law 
 is much as if you tried to show from Modern 
 Painters that at bottom, and even in the 
 opinion of Ruskin himself. Turner was a 
 feeble artist and a failure in landscape. 
 
 But those who stand outside the con- 
 troversy, and can look at Paul and the Law 
 in an historical and impartial way, may 
 nevertheless find crumbs of value in PauFs 
 elaborate periods and denunciations. I 
 have touched already upon the opposition 
 of * Law ' to ' Grace ' and to ' Faith.' One 
 more point remains over. It is one which 
 must have very specially aroused the en- 
 mity and anger of the Jews. Paul clearly 
 came to believe that the Law was intended 
 for the childhood of the world, and that it 
 was no longer necessary or fitted for the 
 age of spiritual manhood and religious 
 emancipation. The Christian believer, 
 whether Gentile or Jew, is an adult son. 
 
172 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 free, and conscious of his freedom and of 
 his sonship. Before Christ came, the human 
 world was in tutelage. Men were minors, 
 ' under guardians and stewards until the 
 appointed time of the father.' This tutelage 
 and minority held good both of Gentiles 
 and of Jews : as Paul ascribed to both of 
 them now — when they accept Christ — a 
 complete religious equality, so, in one of 
 his moods at any rate, he is disposed also to 
 assimilate their religious condition before 
 Christ came with his message of sonship 
 and of liberty. The spirit alone gives free- 
 dom, and before the days of the spirit, in 
 other words, before the advent of the divine 
 Messiah, all men alike were in bondage and 
 in ward. The religion of the Jews before 
 Christ, the Jewish religion without Christ, 
 sank, therefore, in this mood of Paul's and 
 according to this theory, almost to a level 
 with heathen worships and heathen creeds. 
 All men alike were sinful ; all men alike 
 were children, differing, as children, little, 
 if at all, from the condition of the servant 
 and the slave. Paul was doubtless aware 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 173 
 
 of the criticisms levelled by various out- 
 siders upon the Jewish Law. And as, from 
 his position of hostility and aloofness, he 
 looked back upon it, it began to appear 
 to him as if some of these criticisms were 
 justified. Some portions of the Law were 
 like the various cults and worships of the 
 heathen nations themselves. There was 
 doubtless divine intention in this, for Jews, 
 no less than Gentiles, were to be children 
 and slaves till the universal Redeemer 
 should be born. But the fact remained. 
 The ritual of the Law was intended for such 
 children, and on a par with their religious 
 and spiritual capacities. So, too, was the 
 ritual of the heathen. Jews and Gentiles 
 alike offered sacrifices, observed times and 
 seasons, made distinctions of food. Though 
 we cannot prove it, it seems probable that 
 Paul, with his keen and nimble wit, was 
 able to realise the similarities, as well as 
 the differences, between the Jewish cere- 
 monial law and the ceremonial usages of the 
 heathen. In the three points mentioned, 
 sacrifices, observances of time and seasons. 
 
174 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 and regulations about food, such similarities 
 undoubtedly existed. All three sorts of 
 ceremonial seemed to the eager and passion- 
 ate mind of Paul, in the flush of his new 
 enthusiasm, alike antiquated and un- 
 necessary. With the faith in Christ, with 
 the regeneration which that faith could and 
 did bring about, and in the possession of 
 the Spirit, what need of such practices, 
 observances, and abstentions ? All such 
 rules and regulations could now be swept 
 away : they were suited to children, but 
 not to adults. Spiritual beings had no need 
 of them. The spirit would bring forth its 
 own fruits without such petty regulations. 
 A spiritual service was the only religion now 
 required and now suitable. Material sacri- 
 fices could be abolished for ever ; Christ 
 had made, and he was, the supreme and 
 final sacrifice. Humanity was emancipated 
 and free. And so Paul could say, ' We, 
 when we were children, were held in bondage 
 under the rudiments of the world, but when 
 the fullness of the time came, God sent 
 forth His Son, born of a woman, placed 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 175 
 
 under the Law, in order that he might re- 
 deem those who were enslaved under the 
 Law, that we might receive the adoption 
 of sons.' Now that this adoption has been 
 received, now that the child-slaves, whether 
 Jew or Gentile, have become sons, there 
 must be no looking or turning back. The 
 ' rudiments ' belong to a past age ; there 
 must be no coquetting with them again ; 
 no vain regrets for the bondage overthrown. 
 The Gentiles who have come to know God 
 must not turn back again to the ' weak and 
 beggerly rudiments,' or desire once more to 
 be in bondage. They must not observe (as 
 some had a retrograde desire and tendency 
 to do), ' days and months and seasons and 
 years.' This he says in the Galatians, and 
 if the Colossians are genuine, as is now 
 generally believed, the same thought is 
 taken up again here. ' If ye died with Christ 
 from the rudiments of the world, why, as 
 though living in the world, do ye subject 
 yourselves to ordinances, '* Handle not, 
 taste not, touch not," after the precepts and 
 doctrines of men ?' ' Let no man judge you 
 
176 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 in meat or in drink, or in respect of a feast 
 day or a new moon or a sabbath day. They 
 are but a shadow of what was to come. The 
 reahty is in Christ/ 
 
 Paul's doctrine of the 'stoicheia' — ele- 
 ments or rudiments as the word is usually 
 translated — ^is full of difficulties, and has 
 provoked pages of commentary and dis- 
 cussion. But however strange it may be 
 to conceive the quondam Jew speaking of 
 a command in the decalogue as a precept 
 and ordinance of men (for this is what his 
 argument, pushed home, would amount to), 
 it seems fairly certain that he does here 
 assimilate Jewish ceremonial ordinances to 
 the similar ordinances of the heathen. 
 
 What are we to say from our point of 
 view about these arguments and state- 
 ments ? We shall, first of all, remember 
 that for human beings institutional religion 
 and outward forms are a necessity. And in 
 spite of Paul we shall continue, quite un- 
 concernedly and with deliberate purpose, 
 to observe months and seasons, feast days 
 and sabbaths. Nor shall we fail to perceive 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 177 
 
 in such an institution as the Sabbath, 
 whatever its origin, something more than the 
 precept and doctrine of man. However the 
 Sabbath arose, and whatever its history, 
 the finger of God is in it. Again we shall not 
 be slow to recognise that the dietary laws, 
 though we may not choose to observe them 
 ourselves, have been, and still may be, of 
 distinct value for the discipline of the body 
 and of the will. Paul is wrong if he denies 
 that they can have such uses and effects. 
 But, nevertheless, the Apostle does seem 
 gifted with a certain prophetic vision when 
 he includes some portions of the ceremonial 
 law within the range and compass of 
 'stoicheia.' For we have now learnt to 
 realise — comparative religion has made it 
 clear — that the Pentateuchal Law includes 
 many a heathen ' rudiment/ Food taboos, 
 laws of uncleanness, circumcision, sacrifices 
 of flesh and blood — these things, and others 
 like them, are not parts of the prophetic 
 religion of Amos and Isaiah, they are not 
 peculiar to Israel, but they belong to an 
 earlier and wider stage of religious develop- 
 
178 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 ment, and were taken over and incorporated 
 into that compromise of Prophet and 
 Priest which we know as the Pentateuchal 
 or 'Mosaic' Law. Some of them, such as 
 the Day of Atonement, have been spirit- 
 ualised out of all recognition with their 
 origin in the Law. Some of them, such as 
 the Sabbath and the Passover, were ' his- 
 toricised ' and spiritualised within the Law 
 itself. But because we can now trace and 
 recognise their non-Israelite origin, because 
 we, like Paul, though on a far wider basis 
 of knowledge and with much greater calm 
 and impartiality, can recognise them as 
 stoicheia, we can use them, develop them, 
 amend them, or drop them, to the best 
 religious and spiritual advantage. We too 
 are free in regard to them, though, in and 
 with our freedom, we may choose freely to 
 observe them. A few of us may like freely 
 to practice some of them — such as the dietary 
 laws — which others may think it better to 
 ignore. But, in all cases, we shall act to- 
 wards them as freemen. Even the Sabbath 
 we shall observe, not according to a series 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 179 
 
 of rules, but in the ' liberty of the spirit/ 
 It is possible that, here and there, such an 
 observance in the spirit may mean in our 
 day a stricter observance than if we followed 
 the letter of the Rabbinical Law. Just be- 
 cause we are ' liberals,' we shall not, like 
 Paul, condemn the Law in essence or as 
 such. For we regard Law as a revelation of 
 the divine Spirit continuously at work, 
 and this very conception allows and justi- 
 fies our freedom towards the details of the 
 written code. 
 
 Meanwhile, recognising that many cere- 
 monial laws are stoicheia, our new attitude 
 towards them receives its historical and 
 scientific sanction. In one sense, indeed, it 
 may be said that all religious ceremonies 
 and institutions are stoicheia. All are 
 the human embodiments or handmaidens 
 of spiritual and moral truths. And thus our 
 relation to all Jewish ceremonial is con- 
 ditioned by its actual or possible relation to 
 those moral and spiritual truths. We 
 recognise the human need for forms and in- 
 stitutions. We recognise that, for a variety 
 
i8o THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 of reasons, we had better use and adapt 
 those which are hallowed by age and by- 
 history than create a series of cold and brand- 
 new forms for ourselves. We, therefore, 
 deliberately take over or modify those which 
 best suit our purpose and most fully answer 
 to our needs. And one of those needs is to 
 preserve the historic continuity of our re- 
 ligion and an adequate and outward con- 
 nection with all our brethren in faith. Such, 
 then, is the use and the development which 
 we make of Paul's doctrine of the rudiments 
 — a very different use from his, a very 
 different and far juster appreciation, but 
 yet one which can find in Paul's doctrine a 
 certain prediction or adumbration of our 
 own. 
 
 Paul's theory of the Law is in many ways 
 a perversion of the facts. Nevertheless, we 
 cannot but recognise that for the world at 
 large the Law could only have been a bon- 
 dage. We perceive now, from a wholly 
 different point of view, that there was a 
 real historic truth in comparing its cere- 
 monial enactments with the weak rudiments 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM i8i 
 
 of the lower religions. Knowing as we do 
 that there is no written document into 
 which the human mind, as well as the 
 human hand, does not largely enter, we 
 realise that the religious supremacy of such 
 a document, from which there was no 
 appeal, would be unsuited for the matured 
 conscience of humanity. We interpret the 
 Law ; we distinguish between what is moral 
 and what is ritual. By the infraction of a 
 single command which it is within his power 
 to obey, every Jew, however disinclined he 
 may be to acknowledge it, has tacitly put 
 himself above the Law, and claimed for his 
 conscience and for his reason the right of 
 interpretation and disobedience. He has 
 put the spirit above the letter, and entered 
 into the world of freedom. ' Where the 
 Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.' And 
 this spiritual emancipation is largely due to 
 Paul. The doctrine of that remarkable 
 passage in the ist Epistle to the Corinthians 
 (ii. 10-16) contains a great truth, however 
 useful it may be to disentangle its per- 
 manent value from its temporary form, and 
 
i82 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 to qualify it with saving provisos. ' He 
 that is spiritual judges all things/ In one 
 deep sense there can be nothing between the 
 human soul and God. Each of us must 
 fashion his own religion. 
 
 Though Paul, in his more violent and 
 intransigent moods, appears to admit of 
 no compromise as regards the Law and its 
 works, yet on other occasions, both in 
 theory and practice, he was seemingly will- 
 ing to do so. During his own apostleship 
 he became, as he himself phrases it, ' all 
 things to all men, that he might by all 
 means save some.' All this he did for the 
 Gospel's sake. Thus to the Jews he ' be- 
 came as a Jew that he might win the Jews ; 
 to those that were under the Law he became 
 as under the Law that he might gain those 
 that were under the Law.' What Paul 
 means by this statement is not perfectly 
 clear ; but, at any rate,in his intercourse with 
 Jews he must have made certain conces- 
 sions so as not to offend their ' prejudices,' 
 and in such things as food, and perhaps in 
 washing the hands before partaking of food, 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 183 
 
 he must have conformed to Jewish practice, 
 obeying the Law, not because of the Law 
 or as recognising its rule, but in order that 
 such details might not possibly interfere 
 with the success of his main message. He 
 justifies his action by the admirable counsel 
 and by the wise rulings which he lays down 
 for others both in the Epistle to the Romans 
 and in the ist Epistle to the Corinthians. 
 The great point is, he says, not to give need- 
 less offence. ' Give no occasion of stumbling 
 either to Jews or to Greeks or to the Church 
 of God ; even as I also please all men in all 
 things, not seeking mine own profit, but 
 the profit of the many that they may be 
 saved.' 
 
 This principle is elaborately exemplified 
 in the matter of food. He is convinced that 
 ' nothing is unclean of itself.' He, like Jesus, 
 (though it is doubtful whether he depends 
 upon the teaching of the Master), has eman- 
 cipated himself from all taboos. ' The earth 
 is the Lord's and the fulness thereof/ God 
 has created both the mouse and the cow ; 
 in one deep sense, therefore, the mouse is. 
 
i84 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 and can be, no less clean than the cow. 
 Rabbinic Judaism, in spite of the rigidity 
 with which it clung to the food taboos and 
 even painfully extended them, had, never 
 theless, reached this knowledge in its own 
 way, though on different lines. For, to the 
 Rabbinic teachers, the mouse was an un- 
 clean animal, not in itself, but because God 
 had chosen to declare it to be so for the Jews. 
 And he had chosen to declare it to be so in 
 order that by this means, as by all the other 
 ceremonial means, he might enable the Jews 
 to purify and discipline their wills. The 
 laws about food were so many arbitrary 
 ukases given by supreme wisdom for man's 
 training and sanctification. 
 
 This theory, though for historical and 
 philosophical reasons it is (at any rate in 
 its plain Rabbinic form) impossible of 
 acceptance for us to-day, was an immense 
 improvement over any view which regarded 
 the uncleanness of the mouse or of the hare 
 as inherent in the animal itself.^ Neverthe- 
 
 II leave out of account here what we may call the scientific 
 side of the question. Some of the old taboos may, for reasons 
 of health, be still approved by modern science. But the position 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 185 
 
 less it still left a not wholly satisfactory 
 situation. ' Uncleanness ' (which has by 
 the way nothing to do with unwholesome- 
 ness) was, it is true, not due to spirits and 
 demons or to anything dangerous, uncanny 
 and mysterious. But it was nevertheless 
 not wholly imaginary. It was a real thing, 
 arbitrarily created for moral purposes, and 
 from the best and kindest of motives, by 
 God himself. Such is the Rabbinic doctrine. 
 Paul's doctrine goes further. The Christian 
 believer no longer requires such methods of 
 purification. His faith is enough. He 
 must be grown up enough not to need to 
 lean upon such outward crutches. ' Food 
 will not bring us nearer God ; if we eat 
 not, we are not the worse ; if we eat, we 
 are not the better.' ' The kingdom of God 
 is not eating and drinking, but righteousness 
 and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.' 
 
 In the long run the attitude of liberal 
 Judaism towards the dietary laws will, I 
 think, have to be along these lines. We 
 
 of modern science towards food in its relation to health is no 
 less far removed from the Pauline, than it is from the Rab- 
 binic, point of view, and perhaps even farther. 
 
i86 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 shall not for a moment deny that for a Jew 
 who resides in England or America or 
 France, and who lives the ordinary life of 
 an English, American or French citizen, 
 associating freely with his non- Jewish 
 fellow-citizens, travelling, dining out, and 
 so on, the faithful observance of the Biblical, 
 to say nothing of the Rabbinical, dietary 
 laws may be an excellent exercise in self- 
 control. (For the Jew who lives almost 
 exclusively among Jews the self-control 
 involved is extremely small). Nevertheless, 
 the theoretic foundation being removed, 
 it will, I think, be necessary for liberal 
 Jews to train their children in other 
 methods of discipline and restraint. Such 
 methods there are in plenty, and there 
 is little reason to believe that those who 
 observe no dietary taboos need be less 
 self-controlled and less holy in mind or 
 pure in body than those who obey them. 
 
 So far, then, we shall be with Paul in his 
 main principle : ' nothing is unclean of 
 itself/ (Many things may be unwholesome 
 in themselves.) We have passed beyond 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 187 
 
 the stage — and we must see to it that our 
 children do not suffer — in which abstention 
 from certain meats can be clearly and 
 satisfactorily associated with religion. For 
 good or for evil (and we must see to it that 
 it shall not be for evil), the kingdom of God 
 is no longer associated with this or that 
 particular animal, or with this or that par- 
 ticular method of slaughter ; however much 
 we may also agree with that other saying of 
 Paul (quite Jewish and Rabbinic), 'whether, 
 therefore, ye eat and drink, or whatsoever 
 ye do, do all to the glory of God/ We shall 
 eat temperately, and for the best discipline 
 and strengthening of the body : we shall 
 eat such foods as the doctor may recommend 
 to us, and as may best happen to suit our 
 particular constitution and the climate in 
 which we live. Such, then, will be our 
 dietary laws,' and in their fulfilment we 
 shall best sanctify the natural, spiritualise 
 the material, and ' do all to the glory of God/ 
 But no less acceptable, and to many of 
 us, doubtless, far more acceptable, than the 
 broad principles of Paul as to clean and un- 
 
i88 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 clean, are his cautions and compromises. 
 First of all, no boasting. Even if (para- 
 phrasing Paul) when we eat hare, we are 
 not the worse, yet assuredly we are not the 
 better. Indeed, if we think we can, or must, 
 (lacking their foundation in faith) do with- 
 out the dietary laws, we have earnestly to 
 see to it that we are not the worse for our 
 'liberty.' Likely enough our ' unemanci- 
 pated ' brother, if we are not careful, may 
 be the better, And again, so many other 
 things are much more important than 
 dietary laws. There is no need to attack 
 them. If the Liberal Jew chooses to observe 
 the dietary laws — whether Biblical or Rab- 
 binic — let him do so. If they still help him 
 to a holy life and to a more vivid faith in 
 God, let him observe them. ' Overthrow 
 not, for food's sake, the work of God.' And 
 the admirable teaching in the fourteenth 
 chapter of Romans and in the eight and 
 tenth chapters of the first Corinthians gives 
 us excellent practical rules in our general 
 intercourse with our brethren in faith. An 
 outward detail may cause to some people 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 189 
 
 more difficulty and offence than a tlieo- 
 retical truth. To our principles we must be 
 true, and if we are speakers or writers, we 
 must give expression to them. But it is not 
 necessary to put them into practice on every 
 possible occasion in season and out of season. 
 Some people may readily understand and 
 appreciate a principle, but not yet be able 
 to realise its every application. If I am seen 
 to smoke on a Saturday, I may not only 
 offend my traditional and orthodox brother, 
 but I may hurt the conscience of my brother 
 to whom traditional and orthodox Judaism 
 has become unreal and impossible of ac- 
 ceptance, but who cannot as yet carry out, 
 without injury, the principles of Liberal 
 Judaism in all their applications. He may 
 not be able to smoke without an injury to 
 his conscience. I must, then, be careful not 
 to injure it. He lives to God without smok- 
 ing on Saturday, quite as much as, and 
 perhaps better than, I who smoke. So in 
 the same way, if you eat with him at a 
 restaurant, you may be able to eat a shrimp 
 without any injury to your conscience and 
 
190 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 in the most perfect freedom : he may not 
 Will you tempt him to follow your example, 
 seeing that he cannot yet do so without 
 sin ? Surely not. ' Let each man be fully 
 assured in his own mind.' If you eat the 
 shrimp, you can only eat it without sin, if 
 you can ' eat it unto God.' ' He that eats, 
 eats unto the Lord, for he gives God thanks; 
 he that eats not, unto the Lord he eats not, 
 and gives God thanks.' Though the shrimp 
 is in itself clean, and may be clean to you, 
 it is truly unclean for that man who eats it 
 with a bad conscience. At such a time, 
 ' the faith which you have, have it to your- 
 self before God.' And even if we feel a little 
 restraint in acting thus, it may be yet good 
 and wise. For we, who call ourselves in 
 such things ' strong,' should rightly bear, 
 in small outward details, the infirmities of 
 the weak : we ought not ' to please our- 
 selves.' Our vaunted enlightenment may 
 so easily puff us up : let us prevent such 
 conceit (which may have such evil conse- 
 quences) by the warmth of our love, ' for 
 love edifies.' 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 191 
 
 We may equally apply the sensible advice 
 which Paul gives about dinner parties and 
 about meat which has formed part of a 
 sacrifice to a heathen god. In fact we may 
 extend that advice both to those who follow, 
 and to those who do not follow, the dietary 
 laws of the Pentateuch. ' If one of them 
 that believe not, ask you to a banquet and 
 you are disposed to go, whatsoever is set 
 before you, eat, asking no question,' Thus 
 if a dish comes before you, which is ap- 
 parently beef or mutton, eat and ask no 
 questions ; but if the bill of fare or your 
 host informs you that it is made of lobster 
 or hare, then refrain. If you are an observer 
 of the dietary laws, the reason is obvious ; 
 if you are not, you may nevertheless do 
 well to refrain, either because of a weaker 
 brother who may be present (this is Paul's 
 reason), or because your host may think 
 that, as a Jew, you ought to refrain, and 
 your ' liberty,' put into practice, may be to 
 the dishonour, and not to the glory, of God. 
 The common-sense of the Apostle is 
 shown in another point which, though it 
 
192 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 has no connection with food, may perhaps 
 also be mentioned here. We may find it of 
 value as a justification for our use of the 
 vernacular in public worship. Paul is 
 writing about the peculiar phenomenon of 
 the first days of the Church, ' speaking in 
 tongues.' He himself ' spoke with tongues ' 
 more than ' any of them all,' but for pur- 
 poses of true edification he perceives that 
 such speaking is spiritually fruitlesss. Un- 
 less you understand what is said, what can 
 be the profit ? ' If I know not the meaning 
 of the language, the speaker is unintelligible 
 to me.' But in prayer there must be under- 
 standing. ' How shall the unlearned say 
 Amen to your thanksgiving, if he does not 
 understand what you say ? ' We have to 
 recognise facts as they are ; we have to 
 realise that the main purpose of public prayer 
 is that the worshipper shall understand it. 
 Public prayer is not for the learned few : it 
 is for the average and unlearned many.^ 
 
 iDr. Abrahams observes: 'The Rabbis taught the same. 
 Pray in any language was the sum of their teaching. In this 
 respect the later orthodoxy became far more rigid than were 
 the older Rabbis.' 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 193 
 
 Passing away at this point from Paul's 
 teaching about the Law, let us ask whether, 
 and how far, we are able to find help in, 
 or draw inspiration from, those portions of 
 Paul's doctrine which deal with the repro- 
 duction of the death and the risen life of the 
 Messiah in the experience of each individual 
 believer. It may be that we are touching 
 here upon a matter which is too closely and 
 inseparably bound up with a belief in certain 
 alleged events and with their interpretation 
 to be of any value to those who either dis- 
 believe in the events themselves, or interpret 
 them in a very different way. It may be that 
 these elements of Paul's teaching do not 
 bear transplantation to any alien soil or 
 admit of application to any other religion 
 than his own. I, moreover, have a special 
 difficulty in dealing with this portion of my 
 subject, which is peculiar to myself. Con- 
 vinced as I am that there is great religious 
 value, beauty and truth in mysticism, I, 
 like many, though by no means all, modern 
 Jews, stand outside the mystic limit. There 
 are some who (rashly and foolishly as I 
 
 o 
 
194 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 think) would deny that there is anything 
 beyond that Hmit, others who would deny 
 that what is beyond is more than idle dream- 
 ing, emotional vagueness, unreal phantasies. 
 For myself I am convinced that the mystics 
 of all creeds and races are much more than, 
 and very different from, irrational and use- 
 less dreamers. Nevertheless, the power fully 
 to comprehend and to appropriate the 
 thoughts and the language of mysticism 
 has been denied me. But the portion of 
 Paul's doctrine which has to do with the 
 appropriation and imitation of the death 
 and resurrection of Christ by the individual 
 believer leads us up into the very heart and 
 core of the Pauline mysticism. Even a 
 double outsider like myself — that is, a Jew 
 who is not a mystic — can to some extent 
 appreciate its solemnity, its power and its 
 beauty, but he will hardly be able to ap- 
 preciate and understand it fully, and still less 
 will he be able fully to measure or realise 
 how far it may be capable of adaptation 
 outside the borders of Christianity. 
 
 Paul's doctrine was a combination of 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 195 
 
 ethical and sacramental teaching. It was 
 allied to the doctrine of the mystery 
 religions, but it was much more thoroughly 
 moralized. The believer who, in full and 
 humble faith, accepted the facts, and the 
 interpretation of the facts, which Paul 
 presented to him concerning the life and 
 death of Christ, would be transformed 
 into a new creature. This transforma- 
 tion was real ; it was something given 
 to him, brought to him, put into him. 
 If we ask what meaning is to be assigned to 
 the word ' real,' it is not easy to define it. 
 The ' spirit ' which was ' given ' to the 
 believer was not purely ' spiritual ' in our 
 sense of the word. Paul's views about 
 ' matter ' and ' spirit,' about ' body ' and 
 ' soul/ were not quite the same as ours. So, 
 too, he could conceive no satisfactory life 
 after death without a ' body,' upon which, 
 apparently, individuality for him depended. 
 Even a ' naked ' spirit was probably not 
 for him anything so purely immaterial as 
 it would be for us. Something, then, which 
 was real and external to the believer hap- 
 
196 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 pened to him when he ' beheved/ and when, 
 as the pledge of his behef, he was baptized. 
 It may be — the point is disputed — that the 
 gift of the spirit was even conditional upon 
 the rite of baptism being undergone. In any 
 case, God gave something to the believer, 
 though the believer had also to bring some- 
 thing to God. The new life could not be 
 won without the joint action both of God 
 and man : and both their actions were 
 dependent upon the death and resurrection 
 of Christ having actually taken place. 
 Christ by his voluntary death destroyed 
 the domination of sin. What man, and, 
 it would not seem false to Paul to say, 
 what God, could not do before, now, 
 through the death of the Sinless Son, 
 became possible. God could forgive, and 
 man could rise. So much we have already 
 heard, but here is the point which specially 
 concerns us now. Consistently or not 
 consistently, Paul usually holds and teaches 
 that effort is still required. Until the full 
 transformation after death takes place, 
 there has to be a combination of effort and 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 197 
 
 faith. Full faith should really make an 
 injunction such as, ' let not sin reign in your 
 mortal body/ unnecessary. There should 
 be no longer the desire to sin. But Paul 
 never teaches placidity or quietism. He 
 preaches effort, striving, endeavour. And 
 it is precisely the combination of effort and 
 faith which is to produce that moral en- 
 thusiasm, that spiritual glow, that mystic 
 conviction, which break out so often in his 
 teaching, and which he sought so earnestly 
 to beget in his disciples. 
 
 The new faith was to produce a new man, 
 a new creature. And the new creature was 
 to be, in the first place, a more powerful and 
 a more joyful, as well as a more righteous 
 and more holy, creature than the old. He 
 was to endure sorrow more easily, and to 
 rejoice in tribulation : he was to love more 
 zealously : to live for others more com- 
 pletely. If he sought to be all this, he 
 could be all this. The power was within 
 him. But even all this is not all. For the 
 mystic element, that animates the whole, 
 has still to be mentioned. The new man is 
 
igS THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 a man who lives unto Christ and unto God, 
 and not only so, but he is united with Christ, 
 and has become one with him. The spirit 
 of God which raised up Jesus from the dead 
 dwells in him, and nothing can separate 
 him from the divine love. Christ is ' in ' 
 him ; the old ' I ' has vanished ; it is 
 Christ, the Son of God, who lives within 
 him now. 
 
 It cannot be valueless to read the passages 
 in the Epistles which are penetrated with 
 this white heat of conviction and enthusi- 
 asm. Regarded merely as literature, they 
 are magnificent : moreover, such fervent 
 and rapturous words are, to some extent, 
 infectious, even though they may depend 
 upon conceptions which are alien to those 
 that read them. Can we go a little further, 
 and more specifically make use of them ? 
 It is clear that we, like any modern Chris- 
 tian, are born into our faith. There cannot 
 be for us a tremendous severance between 
 old and new. Nevertheless, we can learn to 
 live unto God and not to ourselves ; work- 
 ing for His cause, which is the cause of 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 199 
 
 righteousness, and not merely for our own 
 advancement. We can learn to feel love 
 towards God, and to believe that God loves 
 us : and in the conviction and energy of that 
 dual love, might some of us not be capable 
 of rising to new heights of devotion, sacrifice 
 and enthusiasm ? The ' once born ' and the 
 ' twice born,' the non-mystic and the 
 mystic, can both go thus far together with 
 equal conviction and equal passion. The 
 mystic may pass forward another step, and 
 realise, without the necessity of any half- 
 way house between himself and the Father, 
 that he is in God and that God — or shall 
 we say God's spirit ? — is in him. I do not 
 see why the love of God should not at last 
 so fulfil and constrain a man as to make 
 him humbly declare that, when he compares 
 himself with what he was in older days, be- 
 fore he realised what this love of his towards 
 Divine perfection, and what this love of 
 Divine perfection towards him implied, he 
 must almost regard himself as a new creature, 
 with a fresh and different outlook upon life 
 and eternity. The Rabbis spoke of a 
 
200 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 proselyte, brought to the knowledge of the 
 One God, as new made and re-created. By 
 a Jew, then, as well as by Paul, it might be 
 said, ' the old things are passed away ; 
 behold they are become new,' And he 
 might be grateful to Paul, even though his 
 own language and conceptions will be so 
 different from the language and conceptions 
 of the Apostle. For from every lover of 
 God, filled also with a fiery zeal for 
 righteousness, when such love and zeal are 
 combined with force and genius such as 
 Paul's, it is surely possible to learn. Ad- 
 miration is helpful, and, in a certain sense, 
 it may be contagious. Mysticism is not the 
 prerogative of one religion only. Given man 
 and given God, there may be mystics in 
 every Theistic creed. 
 
 Whether, however, we are sympathetic 
 to mysticism or not, or whether, even though 
 sympathetic, we are capable or no of under- 
 standing it, and of ourselves advancing 
 some steps along ' the mystic way,' we can 
 in all cases alike, appreciate, and be stimu- 
 lated by, those wonderful passages in the 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 201 
 
 Epistles in which the Apostle speaks of his 
 own feelings and experiences. We cannot 
 but be struck by his remarkable combina- 
 tion of humility and confidence, by his 
 fortitude and enthusiasm, his indomitable 
 perseverance, his high spirits (to use a 
 homely and yet truthful expression), un- 
 daunted by difficulties, troubles and pain. 
 There is always something inspiring in the 
 picture of a great man, convinced of his 
 cause, and pursuing his straight course in 
 the face of constant opposition and trial. 
 Paul not only rises superior to his sufferings, 
 but he exults and rejoices in them. And 
 perhaps in this exultation and rej oicing 
 lies the most peculiar and instructive feature 
 of his career, the feature, moreover, in which 
 he was, though perhaps unconsciously, in 
 fullest accordance with the teaching of his 
 Master and his Lord. 
 
 These grand autobiographical passages 
 occur in greatest abundance in the two 
 Epistles to the Corinthians, and more 
 especially in the second. So, for instance, 
 in the stirring description of his apostle- 
 
202 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 ship : ' We give no cause of offence to any- 
 body in anything, so that our office may not 
 be condemned ; but in all things as God's 
 servants, we commend ourselves, — in much 
 patience, in affliction, in trials, in distresses, 
 in stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in 
 labours, in watchings, in fastings ; in purity, 
 in knowledge, in longsuffering, in kindness; 
 in the Holy Spirit, in love unfeigned, in the 
 word of truth, in the power of God ; by the 
 weapons of righteousness on the right hand 
 and on the left, in glory and in ignominy, 
 in good report and evil report ; as deceiving 
 and as true, as unknown and as well known; 
 as dying, and behold we live ; as chastened, 
 and yet not killed ; as sorrowful, yet always 
 rejoicing ; as beggars, yet making many 
 rich ; as having nothing, and yet posses- 
 ing all/ 
 
 In a small man this self-commendation 
 and this list of virtues would be offensive 
 and ridiculous ; in a big man like Paul, it 
 is justified, because it is not only true, but 
 spoken at the right time and in the right 
 way. Just because the glory of it is not his, 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 203 
 
 but God's — for so he would regard it — is 
 the pride of it justified, and not incom- 
 patible with humility. And the courage 
 the enthusiasm, and the indomitable joy, 
 can be helpful to quite ordinary people to- 
 day. To be stirred by such a passage and 
 by others like them must be of advantage 
 to us. To be ignorant of them, through 
 prejudice, must be a loss. Where else can 
 Jewish readers find such noble bits of auto- 
 biographical literature ? Why should they 
 lose the benefit of them ? We need not now 
 be deterred from admiring them and 
 catching the new note in them^ — for surely a 
 new note there is — merely because their 
 author was a born Jew, and wandered far 
 away from the doctrines of Judaism. 
 
 I fully admit that in one point Paul often 
 fell below the description which he gives, not 
 in all probability of his sufferings, but of 
 his attitude towards his opponents. In 
 the Epistles, at any rate, there is very little 
 to be found of kindness and blessing to- 
 wards those who differed from and opposed 
 him. He knew what he ought to have done, 
 
204 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 but his lower self in this one respect con- 
 stantly got the better of him. This we cannot 
 quite forget even when we read a noble 
 passage like the following : ' It seems to me 
 that God has exhibited us apostles last of 
 all, as men condemned to death ; for we 
 have become a spectacle to all creation — 
 alike to angels and to men. We are fools 
 for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ; 
 we are weak, but you are strong,; you have 
 glory, but we have dishonour. For even 
 unto this very hour we hunger and thirst, 
 and are naked and beaten, and have no 
 certain dwelling-place. We labour, working 
 with our own hands ; being reviled, we 
 bless ; being persecuted, we endure ; being 
 defamed, we entreat. We have become as 
 the scapegoats of the world, the refuse of all 
 things, even until now.' Again, in another 
 place, he says, ' We have this treasure {i.e., 
 the Gospel) in vessels of clay (i.e., his own 
 personality) that men may realise that the 
 surpassing greatness of the power is from 
 God, and not from us. We are pressed on 
 every side, yet not straitened utterly, per- 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 205 
 
 plexed,yet not unto despair, persecuted, yet 
 not forsaken, borne down, but not des- 
 troyed. . . And so we faint not, but though 
 our outward man is decaying, our inward 
 man is renewed day by day. For our light 
 affliction of the present works for us more 
 and more exceedingly an eternal weight of 
 glory ; while we look, not at the things 
 that are seen, but at the things which are 
 not seen ; for the things which are seen are 
 temporary, but the things which are not 
 seen are eternal.' We, too, with a kindred, 
 though different, faith, can feel the grandeur 
 of this last contrast ; we, too, often per- 
 plexed, may seek, like Paul, that our per- 
 plexity may not be unto despair. 
 
 Those who labour for any worthy cause 
 may find suggestion and help in the stead- 
 fastness of the great Apostle. Often where 
 Paul says Christ, we can say God, and to 
 us the word will seem grander and more 
 holy. In mental dejection, and in physical 
 weakness, we can take example from Paul, 
 when, referring to some distressing infirmity 
 from which he suffered, he says : ' Concern- 
 
2o6 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 ing this thing I besought the Lord thrice 
 that it might depart from me. And he said 
 unto me, My grace must be sufficient for 
 thee ; for the power perfects itself in weak- 
 ness. Most gladly, therefore, will I rather 
 boast of my weakness, that the power of 
 Christ may rest upon me. Wherefore I 
 take pleasure in weaknesses, in insults, in 
 trials, in persecutions, in distresses, for 
 Christ's sake ; for when I am weak, then I 
 am strong.' This, not mere fidelity, but 
 glad exultation in sufferings, meets us 
 frequently. So in the Epistle to the Colos- 
 sians, where Paul says : ' I rejoice in my 
 sufferings for your sake.' It is a privilege, 
 not merely to believe in Christ, but also to 
 suffer for him. Under all circumstances, 
 'rejoice in the Lord always; again I will 
 say, rejoice/ It is natural that to any brave 
 man, with an intense conviction of a future 
 life, death is robbed of its terrors. Paul 
 tells the Philippians that for himself he 
 would prefer ' to depart and be with Christ, 
 for it is very far better.' But for the sake of 
 his work, it is more needful that he should 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 207 
 
 still continue to ' abide in the flesh/ On 
 the other hand, if his life is to be poured out 
 as a libation upon the sacrificial offering of 
 the faith of the Philippian community, he 
 will ' rejoice.' Whatever befalls him, he is 
 content. ' I know how to be abased, and 
 how also to abound ; in everything and in 
 all things I have learned the secret both to 
 be filled and to be hungry, both to abound 
 and be in want. I can do all things through 
 him that strengthens me.' Truly a noble 
 and stimulating self-sufficiency. Truly 
 also a high-hearted and inspiring enthu- 
 siasm, an indomitable and inexhaustible 
 courage. A man who can feel in such a way 
 had the right to utter the bidding : ' Re- 
 joice always ; in everything give thanks.' 
 Or again, ' Let no one be moved by these 
 afflictions, for yourselves know that here- 
 unto we are appointed.' 
 
 The Jewish reader of the Epistles should 
 surely be able to approach this side of the 
 Epistles with greater facility and sympathy. 
 His own teachers have said many fine things 
 on the same topics. But we cannot, without 
 
2o8 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 serious loss, refuse to regard the good things 
 said by Paul because similar good things 
 (scattered over a huge, unwieldy and not 
 easily available literature) were said by 
 others. Because he finds inspiration in the 
 Rabbis, he should not turn a deaf ear to 
 Paul. For the Jewish student or reader 
 of the Epistles can consider their more 
 purely ethical portions with an un- 
 prejudiced mind. From them he can more 
 easily appropriate all that is good and true. 
 He may, indeed, raise the old, stale quarrel 
 as to priority and originality, but he will 
 hardly deny that such injunctions as, ' Let 
 love be without hypocrisy,' ' Render to no 
 man evil for evil.' 'Be not overcome by evil, 
 but overcome evil with good,' are in them- 
 selves useful and excellent even unto this 
 day. It is not, therefore, necessary for me 
 to dwell upon Paul's ethics at any length. I 
 doubt whether they go much beyond the 
 limit of Rabbinical teaching at its highest 
 and best. But they have these distinct 
 advantages, first, that they are easily 
 available, next, that they are contained 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 209 
 
 within a very small compass, and lastly, 
 that they are nobly expressed, and redolent 
 of enthusiasm and genius. The Jewish 
 critic may laboriously seek to prove that 
 the famous thirteenth chapter of the ist 
 Epistle to the Corinthians can be paralleled 
 by phrases and thoughts in the Rabbinical 
 literature (at least he will seek to do this 
 when he does not take the other tack, and 
 argue that Love is a poor second best to 
 Righteousness), but he will never be able 
 (nor ought he to desire) to dislodge that 
 chapter from the place to which the best 
 judgment of Europe has assigned it. Or 
 recall the other brief passage about Love 
 in the Romans : ' Owe no man anything, 
 save to love one another, for he that loves 
 his neighbour has fulfilled the Law. For 
 the precepts, '' Thou shalt not commit 
 adultery. Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt 
 not steal. Thou shalt not covet," and any 
 other commandment besides, are summed 
 up in this word, namely, " Thou shalt love 
 thy neighbour as thyself." Love works no 
 evil to any man ; therefore love is the ful- 
 p 
 
210 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 filment of the Law/ Who can deny the 
 stirring nobihty of this passage ? Nor will 
 such a recognition impair our appreciation 
 of the later saying of Akiba that the in- 
 junction in Leviticus, ' Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour as thyself/ is the root and 
 supreme commandment of the entire Law. 
 
 Though the list of the virtues enumerated 
 by Paul may hardly exceed the limits of 
 Old Testament and Rabbinic morality, they 
 have, it is not unreasonable to urge, a spirit 
 and a sureness of touch, a vigour and a con- 
 nectedness, which are essentially their own. 
 They are something more than isolated and 
 heterogeneous maxims, for they may be 
 fairly be said to flow from the one central 
 principle of Love, that ' more excellent way ' 
 and ' abiding ' grace, the virtues and fruits 
 of which are so excellently set forth in the 
 thirteenth chapter of the ist Corinthians/ 
 Even before he wrote that famous chapter, 
 
 iDr. Abrahams observes: 'One of the chief losses to us 
 caused by the manner in which Rabbinic teaching has been 
 transmitted is this lack of connectedness. If only we had a 
 whole statement by Hillel of his views on the nature of Juda- 
 ism ! ' (But was Hillel in his actual teaching ever ' connected * 
 like Paul or Philo?) 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 211 
 
 Paul had subtly connected his sovereign 
 ethical principle of love with his sovereign 
 religious principle of faith, when he had 
 said that in the religion of Christ ' neither 
 circumcision availeth anything, nor uncir- 
 cumsicion, but only faith working through 
 and expressed in love/ 
 
 The believer, according to Paul, is a 
 changed creature. He glories only in the 
 cross of Christ, through which the world is 
 crucified unto him and he unto the world. 
 |The lower, egoistic self, with its wearing 
 strife and its vain desires, the flesh, with the 
 passions and the lusts thereof, are now 
 subdued and abolished. Hence the primal 
 virtue of the Christian is what we now call 
 unselfishness. He does not seek his own 
 advantages, a virtue which is also described 
 as the characteristic of love. Negatively, 
 this unselfishness shows itself in an avoid- 
 ance of all pride, vainglory, jealousy, strife, 
 envy, insolence, boastfulness — sins against 
 which Paul continually protests. It shows 
 itself actively in a perfect humility, in 
 honouring others, in modesty ; meekness 
 
212 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 is a virtue of man as it was a virtue of 
 Christ. Again, unselfishness should lead to 
 unity and harmony in Christian congrega- 
 tions. Each man must do his own part, and 
 fulfil his own vocation. Factions, party 
 spirit, contentiousness, disputations and 
 rivalries are to be avoided. So we pass to 
 the more active aspects of unselfishness, 
 living for others, which is both the law of 
 Christ and the imitation of Christ. Negative- 
 ly, the sins which are rebuked by Paul under 
 this head comprise covetousness and ex- 
 tortion, revilings, backbitings and whisper- 
 ings, malignity and deceit. (His wealth of 
 ethical language is considerable.) Posi- 
 tively, we get the virtues of kindness and 
 long-suffering, brotherly affection, active 
 helpfulness and sympathy. ' Rejoice with 
 them that rej oice, weep with them 
 that weep.' And again, 'Admonish the 
 disorderly, encourage the faint-hearted, 
 support the weak, be long-suffering toward 
 all.' ' Bear ye one another's burdens, 
 and so fulfil the law of Christ.' All 
 these things lead up to that love un- 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 213 
 feigned which ' sums up ' the ethical com- 
 mandments of God. 
 
 Devotion to Christ, the consciousness of 
 their high caUing and of the possession of 
 the Holy Spirit, should exercise a definite 
 ethical effect upon the minds of true be- 
 lievers. They will put on ' the breastplate 
 of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope 
 of salvation.' The assurance of their faith, 
 the conviction that ' to them that love God 
 all things work together ' for ultimate good, 
 and that ' the sufferings of this present time 
 are not worthy to be compared with the 
 glory which shall be revealed,' give them a 
 wonderful power of endurance in the midst 
 of earthly tribulation. Nay, more, they 
 supply them with peace — ' the peace of God 
 which passeth all understanding '—with a 
 grand content, and even with an ineffable 
 joy. Several times over does Paul speak 
 of his own happiness in suffering and per- 
 secution ; and it is remarkable, as we have 
 seen, with what emphasis he speaks of *joy' 
 as an element in Christian character. It is 
 the second fruit of the spirit in that long 
 
214 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 list of which the first fruit is love, and in 
 the moral code in the Epistle to the Ro- 
 mans, 'joy in hope ' precedes, and implies, 
 •patience in tribulation.' And we get it 
 again among the famous paradoxes which 
 describe the spirit in which Paul lived 
 through his wonderful missionary life. 
 
 Since the body is the dwelling-place of 
 the Holy Spirit, so that each believer is 
 himself a visible sanctuary of God, purity 
 in body and purity in mind are the virtues 
 which befit so high a privilege and responsi- 
 bility. Paul gives to his diatribes against 
 all sexual impurity, as well as against 
 drunkenness, debauchery and lasciviousness, 
 this deep spiritual foundation. The charac- 
 ter which he seeks to train is one of sim- 
 plicity, sincerity and truth. Hence his not 
 unfrequent use of such words as ' unblame- 
 able,' ' harmless,' ' sincerity,' ' pureness,' 
 and ' simplicity.' These virtues are neces- 
 ary for that ethical sanctification to which 
 the new life of the believer must lead. 
 ' For God called us not for uncleanness, but 
 in sanctification,' that is, to live holy lives. 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 215 
 
 There must be no Hintergedanken^ no taint 
 of selfish motive, in the service of Christ. 
 The whole man is required. Hence the 
 remarkable way in which, following the 
 Rabbinic difference between almsgiving and 
 the doing of kindnesses, Paul distinguishes 
 between the higher and lower charity : ' If 
 I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, but 
 have not love, it profiteth me nothing/ 
 Paul's ideal Christian must be, as he says, 
 
 * wise unto that which is good, simple unto 
 that which is evil,' or as he elsewhere says, 
 ' in malice a babe, but in mind a man.' It is 
 noticeable that seemliness is considered a 
 fruit of love, and everybody quotes the 
 phrase, ' Let all things be done decently 
 and in order.' Yet while a certain grace and 
 even pliability of character are commended, 
 the believer must show firmess and im- 
 movable constancy when principles are 
 involved. Paul's own life testified to this 
 need, and he gives counsel corresponding : 
 
 * Be ye steadfast, immovable, always 
 abounding in the work of the Lord.' So, 
 too. a few sentences later at the close of the 
 
2i6 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 same Epistle : ' Watch ye, stand fast in 
 the faith, quit you like men, be strong/ To 
 which, however, he adds, coming back 
 again once more to the sovereign principle 
 of all, ' Let all that ye do be done in love/ 
 For my own part I see no reason why 
 Judaism cannot follow the precedent of 
 its early teachers, and continue to proclaim 
 the necessity both of love and of righteous- 
 ness. As to the primacy I will not argue, 
 but so far as Paul and love are concerned, 
 I am disposed to agree with a story about 
 a certain Jew which Dean Stanley quotes 
 from a sermon of John Wesley. It may be 
 worth while to add that Wesley says nothing 
 about this Jew showing any inclination to 
 adopt the specific tenets of dogmatic 
 Christianity. Here are his words : 'Nothing 
 is more common than to find even those 
 who deny the authority of the Holy Scrip- 
 tures, yet affirming, '' This is my religion : 
 that which is described in the thirteenth 
 chapter of the Corinthians," Nay, even a 
 Jew, Dr. Nunes, a Spanish physician, then 
 settled at Savannah, in Georgia, used to say, 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 217 
 
 with great earnestness, " that Paul of 
 Tarsus was one of the finest writers I have 
 ever read. I wish the thirteenth chapter 
 of his first letter to the Corinthians were 
 wrote in letters of gold ; and I wish every 
 Jew were to carry it with him wherever he 
 went." He judged (and herein he certainly 
 judged right) that this single chapter con- 
 tained the whole of true religion.' 
 
 For all his fervid teaching about love, it 
 cannot be said that Paul shows any lack of 
 zeal in the cause of righteousness. His 
 hatred of vice, his passion for integrity and 
 holy living, are patent to every reader of his 
 letters. Moreover, they are essentially 
 Jewish. They show that he, too, no less 
 than his Master, may be regarded as fol- 
 lowing, in this respect, in the footsteps of 
 the Prophets. In spite of his stress upon 
 faith, he shows (where controversy about 
 the Law does not come in) scarcely less stress 
 upon works. He is guilty, no doubt, of a 
 certain inconsistency. That faith does not 
 avail without works can easily be main- 
 tained out of Paul's own words. The un- 
 
2i8 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL 
 
 conscious Rabbinic resolve to establish a 
 harmony between faith and works is 
 justified by the necessity, which Paul him- 
 self seems sometimes to have felt, of reject- 
 ing an absolutely unqualified reliance on 
 faith. The Christian after death will be 
 judged by his deeds. ' For all of us have 
 to stand without disguise before the judg- 
 ment seat of Christ, that every one may 
 receive the result of his life in the body, 
 according to what he has done, whether 
 good or bad.' God ' will render to every 
 man according to his works.' Dr. Menzies 
 observes : ' That there is inconsistency be- 
 tween the doctrine of justification by faith 
 alone and this doctrine of a final judgment 
 of men according to their actions, it is 
 difficult to deny. On the one hand, Paul 
 teaches a judgment on moral grounds, 
 which applies to Christians as well as to 
 Jews and Gentiles ; on the other hand, 
 the saved are with him the called, the elect 
 only, and those who accept the new method 
 of justification by faith. '^ We shall not, 
 
 ^The second Epistle to the Corinthians, edited by Dr. Allan 
 Menzies (1912), p. 37. 
 
TO LIBERAL JUDAISM 219 
 
 however, by any means object to this in- 
 consistency, for it enables Paul to hint here 
 and there that even for non-Christian Jews 
 and non-Christian Gentiles there may per- 
 chance be some method, on the one hand, 
 of attaining to righteousness, on the other 
 hand, of finding salvation. ' When Gentiles 
 who have not the Law do by nature the 
 commands of the Law, these, having not 
 the Law, are a law unto themselves, in 
 that they show the works of the Law 
 written in their hearts.' And, so far as the 
 Jews are concerned, there are those noble 
 and prophetic words (with which we may 
 perhaps not unfitly bring this essay to a 
 close) : ' He is not a Jew who is one out- 
 wardly ; neither is that circumcision which 
 is outward in the flesh : but he is a Jew who 
 is one inwardly, and circumcision is that of 
 the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter ; 
 whose praise is not of men, but of God.'^ 
 
 iDr. Abrahams observes : ' A Jew should, I think, put 
 some of the clauses a little differently. He should say : Being 
 a Jew outwardly, let me see to it that I am also a Jew 
 inwardly. We may derive from Paul much enthusiasm for the 
 Spirit. But it is Judaism which must instruct us how to infuse 
 the letter ivith the spirit, so that a man, body and soul, may 
 be made one and whole in his desire to love and reverence God.' 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Comparatively few persons read, I fear, 
 the invaluable Revue in which, every two 
 months, M. Loisy pours out the results of 
 his immense learning and admirable im- 
 partiality. The great scholar seems now 
 to have reached a position of complete 
 detachment from which, as from a lofty 
 height, he surveys, with supreme serenity, 
 all the religions of the past. Truth is his 
 single aim, and in which direction truth 
 lies seems to be, so far as he is concerned, 
 wholly indifferent. He is thus raised far 
 above all those scholars and students, 
 whether Protestant^ Catholic, or Jewish, 
 who obviously do care about results, and 
 who, however much they may try to be 
 impartial, and to look at the facts with 
 absolute objectivity, are yet unable to do 
 so. It may be interesting, and is surely 
 worth while, to collect here some passages in 
 
222 APPENDIX 
 
 which M. Loisy deals with the relation of 
 Paul to the ' mystery religions ' and with 
 the arguments of scholars such as Clemen, 
 or Wendland, or Deissmann, or Schweitzer 
 (and here one might add Kennedy), who seek 
 to show that Paul borrowed little or nothing 
 from the ' mysteries ' or from ' mystery ' 
 thought, and that his own religious creations 
 were therefore arrived at wholly indepen- 
 dently of them. 
 
 (i) ' Sur les rapports du Christianisme 
 avec les religions de mysteres M. Wend- 
 land (in his splendid book " Die hellenist- 
 isch-romische Kultur in ihren Beziehun- 
 gen zu Judentum und Christentum ") n'est 
 par tres explicite, ou plutot il demeure 
 tres circonspect ... II nous dit bien 
 que Paul a connu le vocabulaire et les idees 
 des religions syncretistes, des cultes orien- 
 taux hellenises, et il definit fort heureuse- 
 ment le moyen de cette influence sur 
 I'esprit de Paul : pas d'emprunt mecanique, 
 accidentel, refiechi, mais transformation 
 spontanee de tout un ensemble de senti- 
 ments et d'idees dans une conscience forte- 
 
APPENDIX 223 
 
 ment penetree de Tatmosphere des religions 
 dont il s'agit. Rien n'est plus vrai : mais 
 ce n'est pas toute la verite. On nous parle 
 toujours de conscience religieuse, comme si 
 Paul n'avait ete qu'une conscience, et meme 
 une conscience moderne, voire protestante. 
 On oublie toujours Fintelligence mobile et 
 penetrable, Timagination sensible et sur- 
 excitee, le cerveau en travail, capables 
 d'operer parfois tres vite (temoin le fait 
 de la conversion) les plus deconcertantes 
 evolutions. On doit compter avec cet 
 esprit de Paul autant qu'avec sa conscience 
 et meme davantage ; car cet esprit etait la 
 lumiere et le guide de cette conscience. 
 Dans ce qu'on appelle experience religieuse 
 de Paul part est a faire, tres grande, a ce 
 mouvement d'une pensee febrile, prompte 
 a s'assimiler meme — peut-etre devrait-on 
 dire : d'abord — ce qu'elle combat. Cette 
 extreme mobilite d'un esprit visionnaire, 
 qui doit servir a expliquer le fait capital de 
 la vie de Paul, a savoir sa conversion, pour- 
 rait egalement servir a expliquer certains 
 Elements de sa doctrine et meme de sa 
 
224 APPENDIX 
 
 conscience religieuse, par exemple sa con- 
 ception de Funiversalite du salut et le 
 sentiment de sa propre vocation aupres des 
 paiens. Ni de Tune ni de Fautre il ne semble 
 qu'on ait donne jusqu'a present d'explica- 
 tions pleinement satisfaisantes. M. W., qui 
 accentue peut-etre un pen plus que de raison 
 runiversalisme de TEvangile, ne laisse pas 
 de reconnaitre que la predication de Jesus 
 avait un double aspect, et qu'elle pouvait 
 aboutir a une rechute dans le judaisme aussi 
 bien qu'a la victoire de la tendance uni- 
 versaliste qu'elle portait en soi. Paul aurait 
 determine la direction de Tavenir. Mais 
 comment Paul y est-il arrive ? Comment 
 Paul y a-t-il ete amene ? Certes, ce n'est 
 pas pour avoir per^u dans TEvangile de 
 Jesus Telement universel qu'y discerne 
 M. W. Tout le monde sait que TApotre ne 
 pretend a rien moins qu'a interpreter la 
 predication du Christ. C'est le Christ 
 immortel qui lui a revele Teconomie de salut 
 qu'il preche, et c'est au meme Christ qu'il 
 rapporte sa vocation. Osera-t-on le 
 contredire sur ce point essentiel ? On est 
 
APPENDIX 225 
 
 tellement habitue k le contredire discrete- 
 ment qu'on a fini par ne plus s'en apercevoir. 
 Or c'est la que git le mystere de la con- 
 version, et il s'explique, — qu'on me par- 
 donne le jeu de mots, — si Ton veut bien voir 
 que ce fut la conversion a un mystere, a 
 cette religion meme du salut acquis a tous 
 par la mort du Christ et par la f oi a ce Christ 
 mort et ressuscite. C'est cette idee-la que 
 Paul a eue des le commencement : or il ne 
 la devait ni au judaisme, ni aux premiers 
 fideles de Jesus. Ne la devrait-il pas aux 
 mysteres, et sa conversion ne consisterait- 
 elle pas dans Tapplication qu'il a faite au 
 Christ des principes qui caracterisaient les 
 cultes de mysteres, salut propose aux 
 croyants de toute nation qui participeraient 
 par la foi et les rites de Tinitiation aux 
 aventures mystiques, parfois a la mort et a 
 la resurrection d'un heros divin ? II est 
 bien difficile de ne pas Fadmettre et conse- 
 quemment de ne point placer Tinfluence des 
 mysteres a Torigine meme du christianisme, 
 dans la conversion de Thomme qui a con- 
 tribue plus que personne a faire de TEvan- 
 Q 
 
226 APPENDIX 
 
 gile une religion et une religion universelle, 
 au lieu d'une petite secte sans avenir dans 
 le judaisme ou elle etait nee. La pression 
 des evenements ne rend pas suffisamment 
 compte de revolution du christianisme 
 primitif ; car la predication aux paiens ne 
 fut pas une necessite du christianisme 
 naissant, et Paul lui-meme a compris la 
 chose tout autrement. II serait au moins 
 risque de soutenir qu'il a imagine sa theorie 
 de Tuniversalite du salut pour justifier les 
 missions deja faites et les conversions ac- 
 complies chez les paifens, quand lui-meme dit 
 expressement et clairement le contraire. On 
 n'a pas lieu d'alleguer contre ce temoignage 
 formel celui des Actes, ou il semble tou jours 
 que Paul ne preche aux paiens que lorsque 
 les Juifs le chassent. M. W. nous apprend 
 a suspecter ici le point de vue systematique 
 des Actes.'^ 
 
 (2) 'Que le chapitre vii. de I'Epitre aux 
 Romains represente une experience re- 
 ligieuse et morale toute personelle de Paul 
 encore juif, et meme de sa premiere jeunesse, 
 
 iRevue d'histoire et de litt^rature religieuses, vol. iii. 1912, 
 p. 566, 567. 
 
APPENDIX 227 
 
 M. Deissmann (in his Paulus : Eine kultur 
 — und religionsgeschichtliche Skizze, 1911) 
 n'est pas le premier a le soutenir, et Ton 
 s'expose grandement, en le contestant, a 
 scandaliser a pen pres tons les theologians 
 protestants. II faudra pourtant en rabattre 
 aussi beaucoup de cette pretendue ex- 
 perience, qui est avant tout une argumenta- 
 tion contre le salut par la Loi, argumenta- 
 tion qui n'a jamais pu prendre dans T esprit 
 d'un pharisien la forme que nous lui voyons ; 
 la part d'experience prealable a la conver- 
 sion doit etre beaucoup reduite, et il n'y a 
 pas lieu de la transformer en drame 
 psychologique d'une particuliere intensite 
 qui aurait trouble la conscience de Paul 
 
 enfant On nous a sou vent 
 
 fabrique un Paul plus ou moins moderne, 
 qui se serait forme peu a peu sa christologie 
 et toute sa doctrine sous la pression des 
 evenements quand il fut converti. Paul dit 
 positivement le contraire, et il n'a pas du 
 se tromper radicalement sur son propre cas. 
 Le grand merite de M. D. est de montrer 
 Paul tel qu'il se donne ; ainsi le comprend- 
 
228 APPENDIX 
 
 il mieux que ceux qui alterent le temoignage 
 de I'Apotre. Mais le probleme reste. D'oii 
 cela vient-il ? 
 
 A cette question les effusions pathetiques 
 de M. D. n'apportent pas de reponse. II lui 
 arrive bien de dire que Fouvrage de M. 
 Reitzenstein sur les cultes de mysteres 
 fournit des termes de comparaison qui 
 peuvent servir a expliquer certaines locu- 
 tions et meme certaines idees pauliniennes. 
 Mais il ne va pas plus loin. II se contente 
 de prouver fort longuement — ce qui n'a rien 
 d'inutile pour les theologiens, — que les idees 
 de Paul ne sont pas coordonnees en systeme, 
 que ce sont des formes ou des aspects de sa 
 foi, des impressions vivantes avec lesquelles 
 on a construit plus tard des theories. Cette 
 these renferme une grande part de verity, 
 mais elle comporte aussi une grande lacune. 
 M. D. soutient, et sans doute il a raison de 
 soutenir, que le langage de Paul etait in- 
 telligible pour ceux a qui il s'adressait. Le 
 langage et les idees qu'il traduit ne sont 
 done pas I'expression rigoureusement 
 personnelle d'experiences qui auraient ete 
 
APPENDIX 229 
 
 particulieres a Paul, ou meme aux seuls 
 Chretiens, aux paiens convertis a la foi de 
 Paul. La question serait d'abord de savoir 
 s'il a jamais existe, s'il peut exister dans 
 rhumanite des experiences psychologiques 
 tellement personnelles qu'elles ne doivent 
 rien au milieu ou vit Findividu en qui elles se 
 produisent. En un sens, elles doivent a ce 
 milieu quelque chose de tout cequ'elles sont. 
 Et dans le cas present, si Paul reussit a se 
 faire entendre des paiens, c'est qu'il a congu 
 lui-meme en paien le salut qu'il leur preche. 
 En fait, la religion qu'il leur annonce 
 ressemble de tout point aux religions de 
 mystere qui commengaient alors la con- 
 quete du monde romain : d'abord c'est une 
 assurance d'immortalite bienheureuse, ce 
 que n'etaient pas les anciens cultes nation- 
 aux, ce que n'etait meme pas le judaisme 
 officiel, mais ce qu'etaient les religions 
 de mystere ; de plus, comme dans les 
 mysteres orientaux, la garantie d'immor- 
 talite se fonde sur la communion a un 
 heros divin souffrant, mourant et ressusci- 
 tant ; par les rites de Tinitiation Ton 
 
230 APPENDIX 
 
 participe mystiquement a son epreuve, 
 a sa mort, et lui etant identifie ainsi dans 
 le sacrement, on ne peut manquer de lui 
 etre associe dans la gloire de son immor- 
 talite (se rappeler comment Paul argumente 
 sur le sujet de la resurrection); enfin, comme 
 dans les cultes de mystere, on est sauve 
 par la grace divine, et en meme temps par la 
 foi, par la foi au dieu qui sauve, qui sauve 
 par la mort. Toutes ces idees que Paul 
 rabbinise quelque peu, tout en accentuant 
 leur portee morale, Paul ne les doit pas au 
 rabbinisme. Car cela ne vient pas du 
 judaifsme, cela est tout autre chose que 
 TEvangile de Jesus. Paul a connu les 
 cultes de mysteres, certains cultes, il s'est 
 penetre de leur esprit des avant sa conver- 
 sion, et cette circonstance meme explique 
 en quelque maniere sa conversion, explique 
 sa vocation. Car, precisement, les cultes de 
 mystere offrent le salut a tout venant sans 
 distinction de nationalite, tandis que 
 TEvangile de Jesus ne s'adressait qu'aux 
 juifs. En verite, ce n'est pas assez, pour 
 expliquer la mentalite de Paul, que de mon- 
 
APPENDIX 231 
 
 trer en lui, avec M. D., le juif nourri de la 
 version des Septante et penetre de son 
 esprit. Tout bien considere, le miracle qui 
 a fait de Paul un disciple et un apotre de 
 Jesus, ce n'est pas Feblouissement qui Ta 
 renverse sur le chemin de Damas, c'est 
 Teclair jaillissant en son cerveau trouble, 
 qui lui a fait voir dans le crucifie du Gol- 
 gotha, dans le Christ des apotres galileens, 
 Tetre divin qui etait venu sauver le monde 
 par sa mort. Et Ton pent trouver que cette 
 idee-la porte sa marque d'origine.'^ 
 
 (3) 'La question de Tinfluence des cultes 
 de mysteres sur le christianisme primitif se 
 ramene pour M. Clemen a une serie de petits 
 problemes, a savoir si telle croyance ou tel 
 mot caracteristique, tel rite ont ete emprun- 
 tes a tel ou tel mystere selon qu'il nous 
 peut etre connu. Tel etait le point de vue 
 de sa Rehgionsgeschichtliche Erkldrung des 
 Neuen Testaments, publiee en 1909 : tel 
 reste celui de la tres erudite brochure qu'il 
 vient de publier sur le meme sujet {Der 
 Einfluss der Mysterienreligionen auf das 
 
 iRevue, vol. iii. 1912, p. 573-574- 
 
232 APPENDIX 
 
 dlteste Christentum, 1913). Or il ne semble 
 pas que le probleme soit ainsi pose tel qu'il 
 est dans ses veritables termes, dans sa reelle 
 ampleur. 
 
 II s'agit en effet de savoir comment 
 TEvangile de Jesus, c'est-a-dire Tannonce a 
 Israel de raccomplissement prochain du 
 regne de Dieu, avec Jesus pour Christ-roi, 
 est devenu le christianisme, c'est-a-dire une 
 religion distincte du judaisme, dont TEvan- 
 gile n'etait que la couronnement, religion 
 qui est constituee en economie de salut 
 universel, avec un mythe de salut, — car la 
 theorie paulinienne de la redemption n'est 
 pas autre chose, et Paul lui-meme la qualil&e 
 expressement de " gnose '' et de " mystere," 
 — et des rites mystiques par lesquels les 
 fideles regeneres sont unis en esprit au 
 Christ immortel, veritable esprit ou dieu du 
 mystere chretien. La question est la tout 
 entiere, car tout le reste est accessoire, et il 
 importe assez peu de savoir si tel trait par- 
 ticulier, par exemple Finterpretation paulin- 
 ienne du bapteme ou de Teucharistie, a ete 
 plus ou moins suggeree par tel mystere 
 
APPENDIX 233 
 
 plutot que par tel autre. Sur ce dernier 
 terrain il ne peut pas manquer de regner 
 beaucoup d'incertitudes, car on connait fort 
 mal et Taire d'expansion geographique des 
 cultes des differents mysteres au premier 
 siecle apres J.-C, et Tetat de leurs doctrines 
 et de leurs pratiques, et dans quelle mesure 
 les ecrivains du Nouveau Testament ont 
 pu en etre instruits, dans quelles conditions 
 s'est forme le premier et le plus grand 
 des gnostiques chretiens, celui qu'on appelle 
 I'Apotre des Gentils, saint Paul, Saul 
 dit Paul, de Tarse en Cilicie. M. Clemen 
 abuse vraiment de ces incertitudes, et 
 parce qu'en de nombreux details Tinfluence 
 des mysteres n'est pas evidente, il pense 
 avoir ferme toutes les portes par lesquelles 
 le paganisme aurait eu prise sur le 
 christianisme primitif, il croit pouvoir con- 
 clure en toute securite que Tinfluence des 
 mysteres sur le christianisme primitif n'a 
 ete que superficielle, accessoire, que le 
 christianisme primitif est plutot une Anti- 
 mysterienreligton qu'une Mysterienreligion. 
 Par malheur il n'a oublie que le point 
 
234 APPENDIX 
 
 essentiel ; TEvangile n'etait pas une re- 
 ligion ; comment Test-il devenu ? Com- 
 ment Fannonce du royaume de Dieu avec 
 le Christ-roi est-elle devenue une economie 
 de salut par la foi au divin Crucifie et Funion 
 mystique au Christ immortel ? Cette 
 religion-la, qui est le christianisme de Paul, 
 cette religion-la n'est ni le judaisme ni 
 TEvangile de Jesus. D'oii vient-elle ? De 
 toute evidence c'est la forme qu'a prise le 
 judaisme evangelique pour s'adapter au 
 milieu paien ou il s'est implante ; de tout 
 evidence cette transformation aboutit a une 
 economie de salut qui ressemble, et pour ce 
 qui est de la croyance et pour que ce qui est 
 du sens attache aux rites essentiels, aux 
 religions de mysteres. De toute evidence 
 c'est par Tinfluence du milieu paien que le 
 christianisme a pris ce caractere. De tout 
 evidence ce caractere n'est point quelque 
 chose de superficiel, mais quelque chose de 
 tres profond, car il n'y va de rien moins que 
 du Christ-Sauveur et des sacrements Chre- 
 tiens. Pour rhistorien qui n'a dans cette 
 affaire aucun interet de foi, Tinfluence 
 
APPENDIX 235 
 
 reelle, profonde, — d'ailleures inevitable, et 
 sans laquelle le christianisme n'aurait pas 
 existe, — du paganisme et specialement des 
 mysteres paiens ne peut pas faire doute, et 
 ce qui est a determiner, ce sont les conditions, 
 c'est le mode de cette influence. 
 
 M. C. s*est fait la partie belle en supposant 
 que cette influence n'avait pu consister 
 qu'en un tas plus ou moins considerable 
 d'emprunts speciaux, materiels en quelque 
 fa^on, de morceaux de paganisme brutale- 
 ment transplantes dans la predication chre- 
 tienne. Beaucoup de ceux qu'il refute ont 
 eu Fair de Tentendre eux-memes ainsi ; il 
 s'ensuit seulement que sa refutation ne 
 manque pas de valeur relative. Mais ne 
 doit-on pas se representer le christianisme 
 comme reprenant sous une autre forme, dans 
 d'autres conditions, Toeuvre du judaisme 
 hellenistique, une transposition du mono- 
 theisme juif, par assimilation, non par 
 simple ingestion, d'elements venus du 
 paganisme ? Et comme le christianisme, a 
 la difference du j udaisme phflonien par 
 example, etait un mouvement essentielle- 
 
236 APPENDIX 
 
 ment religieux, non philosophique, n'est-il 
 pas nature! qu'il se soit assimile les elements 
 les plus vivants des religions paiennes, et 
 qu'il se les soit assimiles par la puissance du 
 sentiment mystique, non par un travail de 
 reflexion, par Telan d'ames plus ou moins 
 penetrees de la mystique du paganisme, 
 non par T etude des textes et pratiques du 
 paganisme ? Est-ce que dans Tame ardente 
 et visionnaire d'un saint Paul les idees 
 religieuses du milieu ou il vivait, ou il 
 s'agitait, pouvaient tomber en vain ? Est-ce 
 qu'un beau jour Tidee du Christ- Jesus, qu'il 
 avait combattue, ne se trouva pas dominer 
 sa pensee ? Et croira-t-on que ce fut par 
 hasard que cette idee se trouva par la meme 
 occasion muee en celle du Christ sauveur 
 des hommes par la mort de la croix ? N'est- 
 ce pas que Paul, qui connaissait beaucoup de 
 dieux et de sauveurs et de seigneurs, aux- 
 quels il ne voulait pas croire, se creant par 
 son refus persistant le besoin de croire a 
 I'un d'eux, s'avisa tout a coup, — dans un 
 coup de vision,— que Jesus etait le Christ 
 parce qu'il etait le Sauveur, le vrai, institu6 
 
APPENDIX 237 
 
 par le Dieu unique, et que la mort de la 
 croix etait precisement Tacte par lequel il 
 avait sauve le monde ? Poser a ce propos 
 la question d'emprunt est presque ridicule. 
 Ce n'est pas deliberement que Paul a place 
 le Christ dans une fonction analogue a celle 
 des dieux de mystere ; il a pense le mettre 
 et il Ta mis beaucoup plus haut, bien que, 
 s'il n'eut connu que la tradition juive 
 palestinienne, s'il n'eut remue dans son 
 esprit des conceptions paiennes, il n'eut 
 jamais compris ainsi le role du Messie ni le 
 salut apporte par lui. Influence et emprunt 
 sont deux. II pent y avoir influence sans 
 emprunt formel. 
 
 Mais ce n'est le lieu de traiter a fond le 
 sujet que M. C. a envisage par ses petits 
 cotes. Disons seulement que la meme 
 remarque est a f aire sur beaucoup des points 
 de detail que touche M. C. Parce que tel 
 trait qu'il examine ne se retrouve pas 
 identique dans le christianisme et dans le 
 mystere paien ou on le recontre, M. C. nie 
 Temprunt. Mais la aussi Tinfluence est 
 possible sans qu'il y ait eu emprunt con- 
 
238 APPENDIX 
 
 scient. On peut meme dire que tous les 
 elements de la mystique paienne que le 
 christianisme primitif s'est assimiles, il les 
 a transformes en se le assimilant. M. C. 
 peut done nier Temprunt ; il ne prouve pas 
 que rinfluence paienne n'ait pas existe, que 
 le christianisme ait tire ces elements de lui- 
 meme. Ni le christianisme n'est un mystere 
 comme les autres, ni les elements qu'il tient 
 des mysteres ne sont restes simplement ce 
 qu'ils etaient dans ceux-ci. La foi mono- 
 theiste leur donne une autre consistance, la 
 personne du Christ leur donne plus de vie, 
 son Evangile plus de valeur morale. Le 
 christianisme reste malgre tout une exploita- 
 tion du syncretisme paien pour le compte 
 du monotheisme juif . Par la il se differencie 
 nettement du gnosticisme, avec lequel le 
 christianisme primitif, surtout chez Paul, a 
 tant d'affinite, mais qui n'est pas autre 
 chose, si on Tentend bien, qu'une exploita- 
 tion du christianisme pour le compte du 
 syncretisme paien. '^ 
 
 (4) ' Les objections de M, Schweitzer (in 
 
 ^Revue, vol. iv., 1913, p. 477-480. 
 
APPENDIX 239 
 
 his fascinating book, Die Geschichte der 
 Paulinischen Forschung von der Reforma- 
 tion bis auf die Gegenwart, 191 1) aux 
 savants qui admettent une influence des 
 mysteres sur les croyances de saint Paul por- 
 tent surtout contre ceux qui supposent de 
 veritables emprunts, une exacte conformite 
 entre les croyances des mysteres et la con- 
 ception paulinienne du salut. Or il n'est 
 pas douteux qu'aucun mystere ne concevait 
 le role du dieu sauveur comme Paul a com- 
 pris celui de son Christ. Mais la question 
 pourrait bien ne se poser pas dans ces 
 termes-la. II s'agit de savoir si Paul (c'est- 
 a-dire le mouvement de foi dont il est pour 
 nous le representant le plus connu), qui 
 congoit le role du Christ et Tobjet de I'Evan- 
 gile autrement que Jesus lui-meme ne les a 
 compris, est arrive a sa conception du salut, 
 a ridee qu'il se fait des rites Chretiens du 
 bapteme et de Feucharistie, sans aucune 
 influence des notions qui etaient a la base 
 des mysteres, passion divine suivie de 
 resurrection, fait primordial typique et 
 eifiicace d'immortalite pour ceux qui y sont 
 
240 APPENDIX 
 
 mystiquement associes par les rites de 
 rinitiation. Or qu'une telle conception ne 
 soit ni juive ni evangelique, c'est certain ; 
 que Paul Fait eue, ce n'est pas douteux ; 
 qu'elle se soit formee en lui par I'influence 
 du milieu oii elle regnait avant lui, c'est ce 
 qui parait evident. Paul n'a copie aucun 
 mythe, imite aucun mystere, mais, devant 
 le paganisme, dans le monde paien, vivant 
 dans une atmosphere paienne dont les idees 
 le penetraient malgre lui, il a congu le salut 
 Chretien a Tinstar des economies de salut 
 qu'etaient deja en ce temps-la les mysteres 
 de Mithra, d'Isis, de la Mere, d'Eleusis, dont 
 il est superflu de lui denier toute connaiss- 
 ance generale, comme il serait gratuit de lui 
 preter la connaissance reflechie, speciale, 
 etudiee d'un seul. Paul a connu la re- 
 ligiosite paienne du monde mediterraneen, 
 et il a interprete TEvangile avec et centre 
 cette religiosite, faisant du Christ le veritable 
 sauveur et de sa mort le vrai principe de 
 salut.'^ 
 
 ^Revue, vol. iv . 1913, p. 486. 
 
Printed &v 
 
 'W'-'W- CURTIS U.*? 
 
 CReylcamore. FVess 
 
 Coventor ■