Arthur Drews

“ The Spuriousness of the Pauline Epistles.—If Paul refers in his Epistles to an historical Jesus, these Epistles, bearing his name, cannot possibly have been written by the apostle who was changed from Saul to Paul by the Damascus vision. For it is inconceivable that an historical individual should, so soon after his death, be elevated by the apostle to the dignity of a second God, a co-worker in the creation and redemption of the world. If the Epistles really were written by Paul, the Jesus Christ who is a central figure in them cannot be an historical personality. ”

“ How could anyone talk of a “fall” of the Jews, which is to be visited by “the sternness of God”? This, as van Manen observes, presupposes the fall of Jerusalem, “the first important fact after the death of Jesus in which the Christians might see a punishment” (p. 159) .
The Christian tendency that most strenuously opposed Judaism was Gnosticism. Its roots go back, as Friedländer [12] and others have shown, into the period of the origin of Christianity. But it is not until the second century that we encounter it as a fully-developed religious-philosophical theory or a theosophy. ”

“ In the eyes of these theologians Paul is the weightiest witness to the historicity of Jesus on whom their “science” can rely, hence nothing can be “scientific” which tends to discredit the testimony of their witness. We who are convinced that, even if the Pauline Epistles were genuine, they would not prove the existence of an historical Jesus, and that they probably refer to another Jesus altogether, are only moderately interested in the question who was the author of the Epistles. ”

“ We have here a complete breach with Judaism, a new and substantially complete system, needing only to be elaborated in detail and accommodated to the needs of a later generation, a thorough reform of the prevailing system, assuredly the fruit of a deep experience of life and a long period of earnest thought. ”

“ The question why the Jews were excluded from salvation could not arise and be answered until they were actually outside Christianity. Yet at the time when the Epistle to the Romans is usually supposed to have been written the mission to the Gentiles had only just fully developed, and at least those of the Jews who lived in the dispersion had as yet had no opportunity of learning the gospel. How, then, could Israel be at that time described as “broken off from the trunk” (Romans xi, 17-21) ? ”

“ Historical theology has need of genuine Pauline Epistles, in order to base on them its belief in an historical Jesus, and therefore they must not be spurious. But how are they going to prove that they are genuine? There are no non-Christian witnesses. ”

“ In both we find a thoroughly dualistic system, in which God and the world, law and grace, death and life, spirit and flesh, etc., are set in the sharpest contrast, and the tendency to mysticism and asceticism goes hand in hand with the striving after a speculative interpretation of the facts of religious experience. ”

“ And the difficulty is not removed by supposing that the apostle had somewhere or other met the crucified Jesus. Paul had never known Jesus personally. The Christianity that was linked with Paul in its later development cannot be traced to a personal action of Jesus on the apostle. That is unequivocally shown by the documents, the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles. Any man who denies this is reading into the documents something that they do not contain; in fact, they say just the contrary. ”

“ It was long ago recognised by van Manen and others that by these “princes” we must understand, not the Jewish or Roman authorities, nor any terrestrial powers whatever, but the “enemies of this world,” the demons higher powers, which do indeed rule the earth for a time, but will “pass away” before the coming triumph of the saviour-God. [13] That is precisely the Gnostic idea of the death of the Redeemer, and it is here put forward by Paul ”

“ Now Paulinism has the closest affinity to Gnosticism, as Holsten, Pfleiderer, Weizsäcker, and others have shown. In both the idea of faith changes into the idea of knowledge; this knowledge is based on divine revelation: the salvation of the soul depends on the recognition of certain facts of revelation. ”

“ That indicates that about the middle of the second century the two parties in Christendom still faced each other much as we find them doing in the Epistle to the Galatians. [11]
As is well known, the attitude of the Christian towards the law and his relation to Judaism is a central preoccupation of the Pauline system. Now, during the whole of the first century, at least until the destruction of Jerusalem, there was no opposition between Jews and Christians in regard to the law. ”