2 Cf . Knowling, The Testimony of St. Paul to Christ, pp. 44, 45 : " The Twelve and St. Paul differed, no doubt, in many ways ; but there is no trace that the former opposed the Gentile Apostle in the estimate which he formed of the person of Christ and of His relation- ship to the Father." " If the deification of Christ was due to St. Paul, how is It that we do not hear of any such opposition, of any such viola- tion of Jewish feeling and belief ? "
222 The Designations of Our Lord
is distinctly to be borne in mind that these Epistles were written not merely in the lifetime of the original apostles of Christ, but also in full view of their teaching, and with an express claim to harmony with it. Their testimony is accordingly not to Paul's distinctive doctrine with regard to the person of Jesus, but to the common doc- trine of the Churches of the first age, when the Churches included in their membership the original followers of Jesus.' They, therefore, do not present us a different usage from that reflected in Acts and the Synoptic Gos- pels, but the same usage from a different point of sight. As didactic writings addressed by a Christian leader to Christian readers they enable us to observe, as the his- torical books do not, how Christians of the sixth and seventh decades of the first century were accustomed to speak of the Lord to one another; and accordingly what their thought of Jesus was as they sought to quicken In themselves Christian faith and hope and to bring their lives Into conformity with their profes- sions. Not merely in point of date, therefore, but also in point of intimacy of revelation, the Epistles of Paul present to us the most direct and determining evidence of the conception of Jesus prevalent in the primitive Church.
It belongs to their character as didactic rather than
narrative writings, for example, that In Paul's Epistles
the designation of our Lord by the slm-
Use of ' Lord' P^^ ' J^^*^^ ' ^^^^^ Strikingly Into the back- ground,* while the designation of Him
3 Cf . Stanton, The Jeivisk and Christian Messiah, p. 156-7.
* Cf. Robinson on Eph i^ (p. 23) : "To St. Paul, Jesus was preemi- nently ' the Christ.' Very rarely does he use the name ' Jesus ' without linking it with the name or the title ' Christ.' " Cf. p. 107.
The Corroboration of Paul 223
as * Lord ' comes strikingly forward.® This phenome- non we already observed in Acts: it is much more marked in Paul. The simple ' Jesus ' occurs in all these Epistles only some seventeen times, while the simple 'Lord' occurs some 144 or 146 times, to which may be added 95 to 97 more instances of the use of ' Lord ' in conjunction with the proper name.* And this con- stant application of the term ' Lord ' to Jesus must not be imagined merely a formal mark of respect.'^ It is the definite ascription to Him of universal absolute dominion not only over men, but over the whole uni- verse of created beings (Phil 2", Rom 10^").*
It is, of course, true that Paul has the exalted Jesus
in mind in thus speaking of Him. It was only on His
Ground exaltation that Jesus entered upon His
of Jesus' dominion. But it by no means follows
Lordship ^]^^^ j^g conceived Jesus to have acquired
His ' Lordship,' in the sense of His inherent right to
reign, by His exaltation. On the contrary, to Paul it
was the ' Lord of Glory ' who was crucified ( i Cor 2^) .
5 On the relation of * Christ ' and ' Lord ' in Paul's usage cf . Robin- son, Com. on Ephesians, pp. 72-90.
^ The statistics of Paul's employment of the various designations of our Lord are carefully given by Paul Feine, Jesus Christus und Paulus, 1902, pp. 21 seq. The text he uses is Nestle's ed. 3, 1901.
'^ Cf . Knowling op. cit., pp. 39, 65, etc.: "No criticism has sufficed to do away with the peculiar significance of this title." . . . We must " frankly admit that St. Paul had very far overstepped the limits of Christ's humanity when he finds in Him the Lord of the O. T." 1
8 It was a notion of Baur's {Der Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit, I. p. 85, 'JL- N. T. Theologie, p. 193) that 'Lord' in Paul always means 'Lord of the "" ~- Church,' through whom salvation has been brought to men. Not only the passages cited, but many others, such as i Cor 8^, negative this. Dr. Sanday (on Rom 1*, p. 10) supposes that this was the primary meaning of the term: "On the lips of Christians, xopto? denotes the idea of 'sovereignty,' primarily over themselves as the society of be-
224 The Designations of Our Lord