The second, historical note of original Paulinism we recognize in the writer's _attitude towards Judaism_. We should be prepared to stake the genuineness of the epistle on this consideration alone. The position and point of view of the Jewish apostle to the Gentiles are unique in history. It is difficult to conceive how any one but Paul himself, at any other juncture, could have represented the relation of Jew and Gentile to each other as it is put before us here. The writer is a Jew, a man nourished on the hope of Israel (i. 12), who had looked at his fellow-men across "the middle wall of partition" (ii. 14). In his view, the covenant and the Christ belong, in the first instance and as by birthright, to the men of Israel. They are "the near," who live hard by the city and house of God. The blessedness of the Gentile readers consists in the revelation that they are "fellow-heirs and of the same body and joint-partakers with us of the promise in Christ Jesus" (iii. 6). What is this but to say, as the apostle had done before, that the branches "of the naturally wild olive tree" were "against nature grafted into the good olive tree" and allowed to "partake of its root and fatness," along with "the natural branches," the children of the stock of Abraham who claimed it for "their own"; that "the men of faith are sons of Abraham" and "Abraham's blessing has come on the Gentiles through faith"?[3]
For our author this revelation has lost none of its novelty and surprise. He is in the midst of the excitement it has produced, and is himself its chief agent and mouthpiece (iii. 1-9). This disclosure of God's secret plans for the world overwhelms him by its magnitude, by the splendour with which it invests the Divine character, and the sense of his personal unworthiness to be entrusted with it. We utterly disbelieve that any later Christian writer could or would have personated the apostle and mimicked his tone and sentiments in regard to his vocation, in the way that the "critical" hypothesis assumes. The criterion of Erasmus is decisive: _Nemo potest Paulinum pectus effingere._
St Paul's doctrine of _the cross_ is admittedly his specific theological note. In the shameful sacrificial death of Jesus Christ he saw the instrument of man's release from the curse of the broken law;[4] and through this knowledge the cross which was the "scandal" of Saul the Pharisee, had become Paul's glory and its proclamation the business of his life. It is this doctrine, in its original strength and fulness, which lies behind such sentences as those of chapter i. 7, ii. 13, and v. 2: "We have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses--brought nigh in the blood of Christ--an offering and sacrifice to God for an odour of sweet smell."
Another mark of the apostle's hand, his specific spiritual note, we find in the _mysticism_ that pervades the epistle and forms, in fact, its substance. "I live no longer: Christ lives in me." "He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit."[5] In these sentences of the earlier letters we discover the spring of St Paul's theology, lying in his own experience--_the sense of personal union through the Spirit with Christ Jesus_. This was the deepest fact of Paul's consciousness. Here it meets us at every turn. More than twenty times the phrase "in Christ" or its equivalents recur, applied to Christian acts or states. It is enough to refer to chapter iii. 17, "that the Christ may make His dwelling in your hearts through faith," to show how profoundly this mysterious relationship is realized in this letter. No other New Testament writer conceived the idea in Paul's way, nor has any subsequent writer of whom we know made the like constant and original use of it. It was the habit of the apostle's mind, the index of his innermost life. Kindred to this, and hardly less conspicuous, is his conception of "God in Christ" (2 Cor. v. 19) saving and operating upon men, who, as we read here, "chose us in Christ before the world's foundation--forgave us in Him--made us in Him to sit together in the heavenly places--formed us in Christ Jesus for good works."