tian movement the great personality of Jesus, or that the primitive Christian community looked to Him as its founder and Lord. Is It not equally Impossible to deny In the presence of these letters that the primitive Christian community looked upon this Jesus as their divine founder and divine Lord?
Strange to say, Bousset draws back at this point. Paul's testimony to the existence of the historical Jesus and to His significance to the primitive Church is decisive. But Paul's testimony to the estimate placed upon the personality of this historical Jesus is not trustworthy. It Is, indeed, Impossible to doubt in the light of his testimony, that " the earthly Jesus worked in the souls of His disciples with inexpressible power" (p. 26): and that they had come to believe that He had risen from the dead. But it does not follow that they who had com- panled with Him in His life shared Paul's idea that He was " essentially a heavenly being" (p. 26). The inconsequence here Is flagrant. Paul is not writing a generation or two later, when the faith of the first dis- ciples was a matter only of memory, perhaps of fading memory; and when it was possible for him to represent it as other than It was. He is writing out of the very bosom of this primitive community and under its very eye. His witness to the kind of Jesus this community believed in Is just as valid and just as compelling, therefore, as his testimony that it believed in Jesus at all. In and through him the voice of the primitive community Itself speaks, proclaiming its assured faith in its divine Lord. This would be true quite apart from the consentient witness of the Acts and the Gos- pels. In the presence of this consentient witness it
258 The Designations of Our Lord
is Impossible to contend that Paul has misrepresented or misconceived the faith of Christians. The same divine Jesus which Paul presents as the universal and aboriginal object of Christian faith, Luke sets before us in Acts from the mouth of the primitive disciples — Peter and John and James and the rest — as from the beginning believed on in the Church; and the same Luke with his companion evangelists represents as Himself asserting His divine dignity. The testi- mony of Paul merely adds to this witness a new and thoroughly trustworthy voice; and renders it so much the more impossible to doubt that from the very be- ginning the entire Christian community was firmly con- vinced of the deity of its Lord.
Nor can the force of this testimony be broken or even weakened by suggesting doubts as to the genu- Inaccessibility ineness of more or fewer of Paul's let- to Critical ters, or raising question of a development Doubts of the doctrine of the person of our Lord through their course. We have treated them all as genuine products of Paul's mind and pen and as all of a piece : because, shortly, the facts warrant such a treatment of them. But the conclusion to be drawn from them in the matter in hand does not depend on so taking them. The conception of Jesus embedded in these letters is the same in them all: if they are not all Paul's they are all Pauline. You may discard any number of them you choose, therefore, as not Paul's personal product: the conception of Jesus in those that remain is not altered thereby. Take the extremest hypothesis which has ever even temporarily commanded the assent of any considerable number of scholars, — the old Tubingen theory which allowed to Paul only the
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four great Epistles, Romans, i and 2 Corinthians and Galatians." In these Epistles may be found Paul's entire witness to the deity of Christ. It is from them that we learn that Jesus Christ, while on the side of His flesh of the seed of David, had another side to His being, on which He was the Son of God (Rom i^'^) ; that as God's own Son He was rich before He became poor by becoming of the seed of David (2 Cor 8^) ; and that in His real nature He is not merely God's Son but Himself God over all, blessed for ever (Rom 9^). When we add to these four great Epistles one after another of the others — such as Philippians, and I Thessalonians and Colossians, as practically all living critics do*^ — and even Ephesians and Second Timothy, as many are willing to do — we merely add to the mass of the testimony, and in no respect alter its character or effect. These letters one and all only repeat, and in repeating more or less clarify, the teach- ing of the four chief Epistles as to the dignity of our Lord's person.
41 The extreme radicalism of the so-called Dutch school, the best representative of which is probably van Manen (or in Germany, Steck), may safely be neglected.