hurried, dragging the words after it. . . . Unfinished phrases, daring omissions, parentheses which leave us out of sight and out of breath, rabbinical subtleties, audacious paradoxes, vehement apostrophes, — pour in like surging billows. Mere words in their ordinary meaning are insufficient to sustain this overwhelming plenitude of thought and feeling. Every phrase is obliged, so to speak, to bear a double and triple burden.” The authenticity of the letter is generally conceded.*
* Galatians with Romans and the two Corinthian letters, were received as genuine and authentic by the Tiibingen critics. Some sixteen years ago they were attacked by a small coterie of critics, chiefly in Holland. Allard Pier- son and §. A. Naber ascribed the Pauline Epistles to one Paulus Episcopus, a Christian ecclesiastic, who appropriated large portions of certain reformed Jewish writings, and christianised them by means of changes and interpola- tions. A. D. Loman asserted that Christianity was a messianic movement among the Jews; that Jesus had no existence, but was a purely mythical embodiment of a series of ideas and principles developed in the second cen- tury. The four chief Epistles of Paul which contradict this hypothesis are spurious and legendary. Out of the anti-Judaic and universalistic Gnosis of the early part of the second century, was developed a Paul-legend in the interest of a universalistic Christianity. Romans, Galatians, and Corinthians were all written in Paul’s name to recommend this Christianity. These views obtained no currency, and were repudiated by even the radical critics of Germany. Rudolph Steck of Bern (1888) held that none of the four letters were the work of Paul, but were the product of a Pauline party of the second century. He revived the hypothesis of the dependence of the Pauline writings on Seneca.
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