pauline christianity and the gospels

Irish Church Quarterly

Pauline Christianity and the GospelsAuthor(s): James McConnellSource: The Irish Church Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 20 (Oct., 1912), pp. 318-327Published by: Irish Church QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30067457 .

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318 PAULINE CHRISTIANITY AND THE GOSPELS.

PAULINE CHRISTIANITY AND THE GOSPELS.'

WHAT is the relation between the Gospel which St. Paul preached, and the tradition embodied in the Gospels ?

There are, I think, three representative views. I. There is, first, the view of the modern Liberal School

of France and Germany. According to this, the Christianity of the Pauline

Epistles is a corruption of the earlier tradition. There is a divergence between the Jesus of History, and the Jesus of Paul.

Many things may be said here, and the most obvious consideration is this: "The Jesus of History," as the modern Liberal School presents Him, is not the Jesus of our Gospel records. In the light of a subjective and unscientific criticism it is but a shadowy Jesus that emerges. Between this Jesus, of whom the most certain things that can be predicated are His human infirmities, and the Jesus of Paul, there is indeed a wide gulf, so wide that we ask in amazement how was the Jesus of the Apostle's Gospel conceived at all ? He musT be the most fantastical dreamer who out of a substance so little could create a Christ so great.

This is really the problem which confronts this school of thinkers. How, on this basis, account for the Apostolic preaching at all? For it is certain, that within a very few years of the death of Christ, the contents of the

1 The writer desires to refer readers of this paper to the able study on a similar subject by Canon J. H. Kennedy, which appeared in I.O.Q., iv. (igi1), 28. The paper which follows

deals, for the most part, with other and different aspects of this discussion.



PAULINE CHRISTIANITY AND THE GOSPELS. 319

earliest Christian preaching was on the lines of the Pauline Christology. To these men the Gospel was good news about Jesus: the good news consisted in the fact that He came into certain saving relations with men through His life and death and resurrection. It was the religious significance of the life and work of Jesus which gave any Gospel at all. It is as historical as anything can be, that this was their conception of Jesus of Nazareth. Did they, did St. Paul, altogether misapprehend the facts?

"Back to Christ" is a favourite watchword. It is time we did get back to the Christ of the New Testament, away from the Christ of uncritical theorizing.

II. There is, in the second place, a school the very opposite to the former, which lays all the stress upon the Pauline Epistles, and appears to disparage the Gospel record of the earthly life of Jesus. If " disparage" be thought too strong a statement, then I will say that at least the Gospel facts are thought to be comparatively unimportant. "The Apostle Paul," says Dr. Allan Menzies, "was independent of the Gospel tradition. The Christ he preached was, in many important respects, a different being from the Jesus of the early tradition and of the Gospels."' He says this, be it observed, not to depreciate St. Paul's preaching: rather, he commends it, This seems to be very much the position of Mr. Lacey. "We find," he writes, "that in his (St. Paul's) writings, he does not concern himself at all with the life of Jesus in Galilee or Judaea."3 The inference he draws is, " Either St. Paul did not know the details of our Lord's life, or he thought them of comparatively small importance." Again, in his paper on Harnack and Loisy, read befoie certain members of the University of Oxford in 1903, Mr. Lacey tells us that the historic Christ "is not a thin figure drawn from inadequate materials in the Synoptics, but the Christ whom Paul preached." In a passage of much significance he proceeds: "If I believe Jesus of

2 Essays for the Times, i. 3 Historic Christ, p. 20.




Nazareth to be personally God Eternal, it does not follow that I shall look to find historical evidence of the fact in the records of His Galilaean life. . . . Human history is the record of human life. There may be more than this in the Gospel, but historical criticism can read no more. Believing something more, I may find traces of it in the record; but this is theology not criticism." "I find in the record," he goes on to say, "Jesus of Nazareth learning the lesson of boyhood; I see Him astonished at the unbelief of the Nazarenes; I hear Him declare Himself ignorant of the day and hour of the Messianic consummation, and at the same time announce it as very near at hand. I see traces of an exceptional exercise of that subliminal consciousness of which we know as yet little more than the existence; but this appears to be always limited and sometimes submerged."

I have quoted at length because the passage seems to me of profound importance, and not to have received the notice it deserves. To sum up Mr. Lacey's view: from an historical reading of the Gospels, he finds little glimpse of any other than a mexely human Jesus. Theology reads more into the record; St. Paul gives us the Christ of our definitions, the Christ of our Altars: the Synoptic writers do not.

This, in my view, is an untenable position. It is a divorce between the Christ of history and the Christ of faith.

Writers of this school make much of St. Paul's asser- tion in 2 Cor. v. 16, " Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more." This is interpreted to mean that St. Paul cared little for the actual facts of our Lord's earthly life. Yet surely this is not the thought. It is truer to say, with the author of that interesting book, The Fifth Gospel,

"He is by no means regarding the earthly life of Jesus as of no moment, but he is drawing a contrast between two different kinds of knowledge, two different ways of regarding Christ, the knowledge of Christ before, and the knowledge of Christ after the resurrection. . . . He is referring to the revolution in our whole mental outlook which the resurrection of Jesus inevitably produces."

Or, to put it in another way, "We are not to know Christ

merely as a man, but as God manifest in the flesh."




Now, to say this, is very different from saying that St. Paul had little knowledge of the life of Christ before the resurrection, and cared little for it. St. Paul, taught by the Spirit, by profound meditation, saw the inner meaning of that earthly life, saw it as crowned and revealed by the Cross and Resurrection. But if the Gospel story gives, in its plain reading, no hint of such an interpreta- tion, whence did St. Paul derive it? And still more, if he did not know the facts at all, how could he tell their theological significance? By such suppositions we leave the Pauline theology standing in the air, rooted only on mystical intuitions, and on subjective personal revelations. The earthly history of Jesus of Nazareth is held to war- rant no such views. So Dr. Menzies does not hesitate to speak of the Apostle Paul being "led to that higher knowledge of the Person and work of Christ, which, though not derived from the earliest Gospels, is still cherished by Christendom. That higher knowledge of Christ," he tells us, "as it was not derived from the Gospels, is still, if we can hold it fast, in a large measure independent of them, and those who can rise to it need not be seriously disturbed by what criticism of the Gospels may establish or disprove."

I am unable to understand the state of mind which can rest satisfied in such a position. For history, as the Abbe Loisy labours to show, "Jesus of Nazareth was a person of limited intelligence who went about telling men to prepare for a Messianic apocalypse, which he wrongly believed to be near at hand."' For faith, Jesus i& something quite other. He is what the Church declares Him to be. This means that our sole authority is the Church. Hence the ecstatic commendation pronounced by Lord Halifax: "Consider," he exclaims, "how carefully M. Loisy has distinguished between matter of faith and matter of science; he has impugned no doctrine of the Church: he professes unhesitating assent to all defined truth."

' Cp. Inge, Faith and Knowledge, p. 286. D




In other words, to M. Loisy the Gospels say one thing, the Church declares another, and he accepts both. To Mr. Lacey, the Gospels say one thing, and St. Paul, though somewhat ignorant of that tradition, develops out of it something which is not in it: and Mr. Lacey stands by St. Paul. To Dr. Menzies, the criticism of the Gospels may leave us few facts to reckon with: the higher knowledge is found in St. Paul and accepted by Christendom; and he is quite content.

Of these two views, it appears to me more logical to accept the modern liberal German view. St. Paul's doctrine is not based on the Gospel tradition: therefore it is a mere afterthought; a speculation of little authority for us. Let us put it in a theological museum, and go back to the simple Christ of the Evangelists.

III. But we are nQt.shut up to these two opposing conceptions, or rather, these two conceptions, opposed in their deductions, but resting each on practically the same pre- mise. We need not choose between two Christs; an altogether human Christ of the Gospels, and a Christ of Paul. I prefer to believe that to the New Testament writers there was but one Christ: the Christ whom some of them knew on earth as a personal Friend, the Christ on whose work accomplished on earth the Holy Spirit shed such a flood of illumination. The view for which I con- tend is that the germs of the Pauline Christology are found in the sayings of that Christ Himself when amongst men. The Epistles are the reflective development of the Gospel tradition: the answer to the question which faced the early Christians, "Who is this Jesus? What do these things mean ?"

St. Paul, then, was neither ignorant of, nor indifferent to, the tradition embodied in the Gospel histories. Much is made, by the Lacey school, of the fact-one might almost term it the truism-that no Gospels were written till after the latest of the Pauline Epistles. But is there no tradition, oral or written, Slehind the earliest Gospel ? Did the Gospels contain new and hitherto altogether




unknown matter ? St. Paul found the Christian Church already in existence. Had this no tradition? Had it no memory of the Christ on earth ? Had St. Peter and the rest nothing to say about the life of Jesus, and was nothing handed on from one to another ?

Let us come to questions of fact. Had St. Paul a knowledge, a detailed knowledge, of the facts of the earthly life? To put the evidence very briefly without detailed proof, St. Paul shows knowledge of the follow- ing events: the death of Jesus, and its details; the night on which He was betrayed; the agents and mode of that death; the resurrection and the appearances which con- firmed it. "St. Paul contents himself with a bare enume- ration," says Dr. Sanday, "not from lack of knowledge, but because he assumes knowledge in his readers."5 He knows that our Lord was "made of a woman ";-the phrase is significant; some see here an allusion to the Virgin birth: -that He was made under the law. He refers at Antioch in Pisidia to the forerunner John. He is acquainted with our Lord's teaching about marriage, His ordinance for the maintenance of the Church, His appeal to love as fulfiller of the law. He borrows some of His phraseology in I Thess. from our Lord's discourses as to the coming Judgement. He knows that Christ was without sin: whence did he derive this impression? Is this simply a judgement of faith? or is it a deliberate judgement with the facts of the life before him? He knows of the patient endurance of Christ: he knows of His poverty. He speaks of himself as being an imitator of Christ: he can hardly mean an imitator of the exalted Christ; he must refer to the earthly life.

I cannot follow this line of proof further: it will be found fully worked out in Dr. Knowling's Testimony of St. Paul to Christ.

The study of the doctrine of St. Paul is of still greater interest. Whence does he derive this ? Is it only from

s Art. " Jesus Christ," in Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible.




spiritual intuition? from communings with the exalted Christ ? Or may we not say that he has elaborated the hints given by Christ Himself, when He spoke of His mission undertaken at the will of the Father; of His right to forgive sins; of the ransom and remission He would procure for man ? What is the essence of St. Paul's doctrine of Atonement ? Is it not that the death of Christ is the ground of our forgiveness ? that it is "for us "? But this is Christ's own doctrine: it is contained in our Lord's declaration that He came to give "His life a ransom for many "; that His " Blood is shed for many." That this Blood is on behalf of sin, is clear from its being termed the "Blood of the Covenant," even if it be admitted that the addition in the first Gospel, "for the remission of sins," is not part of the original saying. It is sought to evade the force of this argument, by assert- ing that these two passages are no part of the primitive tradition, but are influenced by the theology of Paul. It seems hardly worth while to discuss this position.

Or, take St. Paul's view of the Person of Christ. Com- pare that with the Person of Christ drawn in the Synoptists. Is not the one simply the legitimate explana- tion of the other ? How else can we understand Christ's claims for Himself, except on the Pauline view ? St. Paul sums up his doctrine of Christ thus: "Born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and designated as the Son of God in power (that is, by miraculous power) according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead." Dr. Gore, in his Bampton Lectures,' says that this is a sufficiently accurate analysis of St. Mark's Gospel: in other words, that the two pictures correspond. The Bishop further states that in the Pauline Epistles we have "an account of the method of Christ's manifestations -the manifestation of the divinity through the humanity -which corresponds with the Evangelic record an appeal back behind his present teaching to primary

6 The Incarnation, p. 60 f.




instruction in the events of Christ's passion and resurrection, which pre-supposes an Evangelic narrative already existing in the memory of the Church."'

For the whole argument, I would refer to Dr. R. J. Drummond's The Relation of the Apostolic Teaching to the Teaching of Christ, and Canon T. D. Bernard's Progress of Doctrine, Bampton Lectures delivered as long ago as 1864, and still well worth reading.

I am therefore quite unable to understand the modern insistence on the lack of interest displayed by the early Church in the human life of Christ. Mr. Burkitt casts scorn upon the idea that either St. Matthew or St. Peter delivered catechetical lectures on the Life of Christ. Per- haps they did not do so formally: we have really no information; but I am simple enough to ask, "Why should they not ?" Did they never talk to others of that life? Had they forgotten its details? Had it lost its interest? Really the argument seems to amount to this, that because the Epistles, and other Christian writings are not biographies, because they are mainly concerned with theology and ethics, therefore there is no biographical knowledge underlying them. Why should they repeat details of what was well known ? Mr. R. J. Drummond gives an excellent illustration. Take the first Epistle of Peter. What direct references to the doings and words of Jesus are found there? Certainly no more than in Paul. Did Peter then know or care nothing about such things? If this be made an argument against the genuineness of Peter, then the pointed reference to the Transfiguration in 2 Peter should tell in its favour. Or, again, what detailed references do we find in the Epistles of St. John ? Yet the writer of those Epistles knew enough to furnish a Gospel.

In fact, the argument from silence, even if it were stronger in actual truth than it is, is very precarious in this case, as I believe, with Professor Sanday, it is in most

Op. cit., p. 6z.




others. When Paul persecuted the disciples of Jesus, did he know nothing of the life or opinions of that teacher? When, on his missions, he was asked, as he surely would be asked, "Who is this Jesus whom you preach ?" could he tell them nothing except that an obscure Nazarene, who had been crucified by the Jews, had risen again, and appeared to him on the way? Had he no information to furnish of the life of Christ before those strange events? The supposition is absurd: indeed, it does not explain his own conversion. The vision of the Exalted Christ enabled him to interpret the personality of Jesus of Nazareth: had the Apostle been ignorant of the Nazarene there would have been for him no personality to interpret.

"Wherein," asks Dr. Deismann, "lay the superiority of the cult of Jesus Christ [which the Apostolic Mission- aries introduced]? In the Gospel tradition of Jesus which lay behind the cult. Jesus was not merely a sacred name, the unknown mysteries of which filled men with vague misgivings, but He was a personality in history, richly endowed with very definite characteristics, and present to men's minds in very definite portraits, thanks to the tradition enshrined in the Gospels."8'

I must bring this superficial study of a great subject to a close. In my judgement, there is not in Paul's writings either the divergence from, nor the independence of, the Gospel tradition, which are the favourite theories of the day. There is no independence, nor neglect of it. So far from thinking that the Apostle knew less of the life of Christ than we do, I conclude that he knew more. He has preserved for us at least one fragment, probably more, otherwise unknown, of the Lord's' teaching. He had sources of information closed to us. He knew those who knew Jesus in the flesh. There is no divergence. There is the development; there is the spiritual insight, which the Lord Himself promised. The Spirit takes of the things of Christ and shows them to St. Paul.

'Expository Times, xviii., 20o.




To sum up all, in the words of Dr. Inge, from his book, Personal Idealism and Mysticism :I "The Christ of the Church is the same Christ as Jesus of Nazareth: but the Church understands who and what He is more fully than those could do who walked with Him on the shores of Gennesaret, It was expedient for us that He should go away."

JAMES MCCONNELL.

p. 87 f.



pauline christianity and the gospels

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