There are two considerations which have to be weighed in estimating the Justice of St. Paul's verdict on contemporary Judaism. One is, that lie was diagnosing Pharisaism on the spot — and not across nineteen centuries, from a restricted survey of the earlier OT and the later Rabbinism. The other is, that he was diagnosing the symptoms of a disease from which he had himself suffered. Scattered statements can be disinterred from Rabbinic liter.ature to prove that faith was not ignored by all the leaders of contemporary Israel, that many were con- scious of the need of Divine grace in order to obe.\' the Torah, that they found a true religious joy in practising this obedience, that they were not invariably pluming themselves upon their merits, and that the Torah meant for them more than a code of legal enactments. No historical critic has any interest in minimizing such data. Nor has he an.v hesitation in allow- ing for the deflecting influence of controversy upon St. i'aul's mind : St. Paul was apt to he unconciliatory at times, and this idiosyncrasy would be fostered by the inevitable tendency of dialectic to state a case witliout qualification, in order to be impressive and telling. But that he knew what he was talking about when he analyzed the practical effects and the underlying spirit of the Pharisaic conception of righteousness, that his re- ligious genius enabled him to detect and exjxfse tlie cardinal issues which were bound up with the problem of the Jewish Law in relation to Christian faith, there is no sound reason to doubt. History and religious experience have justified the sense of exultation, the thrill, the delight of breaking out into the open air, which throbs through his words on the liberty of the believing man — and this liberty is only another aspect of his ' righteousness by faith ' conception.
The conception of righteousness, in this specific sense, is bound up with the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith ; in fact, it enters into the Apostle's thought upon the Person of Christ, sin, the Law, election, and eschatology. What it con- veys, however, is largely a generalization of his own experience. 'Righteousness' is one of the classical terms of OT and contemporary Jewish piety, but St. Paul has stamped it with an original meaning, due to his sense of the inadequacy of moral obedience to the Law, his profound con- sciousness of sin, and his experience of the forgive- ness and fellowship which faith in Christ opened up to him. P'urther, his use of the term is not only personal but polemical. He turns against legalism with weapons drawn from its own armoury, and the paradoxical element in some of his phrases and arguments is best explained by the fact that these are employed by hini to de- fend a religious position very ditt'erent from their original object and setting. It is probably for this reason also that the discussion of righteousness by faith is absent from the Thessalonian Epistles. When he wrote these letters, he had ahead}' been through the crisis depicted in Galatians. Rut the theme was primarily of apologetic interest to liim, and at Thessalonica the controversy with .lewish Christians and .lews w.as not raised on this issue. The argument .about righteousness was a particular expression of his views on the absolute grace and goodness of God in Christ, but these views could
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be otherwise expressed. Consequently ve find tliat in the earliest Epistles, iis in the later, the •righteousness' arj;unient falls into the back- ground, and even in the main Epistles it hardly ever appears except in controversial passages — the principal exceptions being 1 Co 6" and Ko 8'"-. When St. Paul was not developing his doctrine in opposition to Jewish tendencies, within or without the Church, he generally chose other terms and methods. This does not imply that the funda- mental thought in his conception of righteousness is secondary. On the contrary, it is from that central conception that his views on other nuitters ray out. His doctrine of sin, e.g., is really elicited by his deeper interest in righteousness, and the former is developed in connexion with the latter. At the same time, it must be realized that the doctrine of righteousness or justification by faith, in what we may call its fighting aspect, does not cover the entire range of fet. Paul's theology, and that the terms belonging to this particular aspect could be translated into other equivalents for the underlying religious experience. Thus, the con- ception of righteousness is closely allied to that of life. Only, whereas in the latter idea St. Paul seems to be developing tendencies characteristic of Hellenistic Judaism, whereas his conceptions of ' the bliss to be ' are tinged and shaped by Greek thoughts which had filtered into the Jewish mind, in 'righteousness' and 'justification,' despite Reitzenstein's plea, we must hold that the Apostle is on a Palestinian basis, even when he is con- structing there a fresh. Christian synthesis. His argument on righteousness is neither that of the OT nor that of the mysticism reproduced in the later Poimandres literature. Its specific elements are due to a new religious experience, and its specific terminology is best illustrated from the Messianic categories of Palestinian Judaism.
In Die hellenistiscken MysUn'enreligionen (Leipzig, 1910, pp. 100-104), R. Reitzenstein arprues tliat the use of SiKaiovirffaL in the Hermetic religious literature on the re-birth of the initiated points to a Hellenistic usage which ought to deter- mine the sense of the term in Ro 830 as ' made sinless (in nature).* The verb denotes the deliverance of a person from the 5vfa^i5 of dSiKi'a b}' the Divine powers which 'deify' him (,i8lKaLtilO^)^JLev, ui riKvov, aSiKias ajrovoT)?). It is by no means certain, however, that these ideas represent a pre-Christian type of mystical piety on Egyptian lines. Furthermore, as Reitzenstein admits, SiKaiomjvij is not prominent as a Divine Svraftis, and it seems hazardous to infer that originally it must have played a more important r61e, since the parent Egyptian religion expected a verdict of acquittal for the pious dead. It is interesting to find SiKaiovrrBat losing its forensic sense and denoting freedom from a5i«ia, but the origin of this type of mystical religion is as yet too unexamined to permit the con- clusion that we have here the clue to St. Paul's use of the term, e.g. in 1 Co 6ii, or to his conception of the Divine BtKaioa-vmj entering a human personality as a power to expel unrighteous- ness. "This may be due to the influence of Christian language on a later Gnostic religious mysticism. Even if it is not, the juristic associations of Stxaiocrui'T;, as of vio6f<Tia, define the central thought of St. Paul, without any need of conjecturing the influence of the Hermetic mysticism. ' Righteousness,' like vioOeaia, was capable of suggesting a state or relation to God as well as the initial act which created that state, and St. Paul's faith-mysticism would do the rest.