But this hypothesis presents formidable difficulties. This would seem to be a roundabout way of impressing Gentiles with the superior claims of Christianity. It would appear to have been the more natural course to institute a direct com- parison between Christianity and paganism. See on ch. xiii. 7-165.
It is true that Gentile Christians were familiar with the Old Testament, and that Paul’s epistles to Gentile readers contain frequent allusions to it; and, further, that Clement of Rome, in his epistle to the Gentile church at Corinth, makes much use of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and cites freely from the Old Testament. But to illustrate one’s thoughts and arguments by occasional references to the Old Testament is a very different thing from drawing out an elaborate argument on the basis of a contrast between a new and an older order, designed to show, not only that the new is superior to the old, but that the new is enfolded in the old and developed from it. To this there is no parallel in the New Testament in writings addressed to Gentiles. It would have been superfluous to prove, as this epistle does, that the old order did not satisfy. The Gentiles never sup- posed that it did.
Moreover, in almost every case of Paul’s allusion to the Jewish institutions, the reference is called out by some fea- ture of the Mosaic economy which lay directly in his track and compelled him to deal with it. Thus, in Romans, he is forced to discuss the doctrine of salvation by faith with ref- erence to the Jewish doctrine of salvation by the works of the law. The Galatians had been tempted by Judaising emis- saries to return to the law of circumcision. In Corinth, Paul’s authority and teaching had been assailed by Jewish aggres- sors. In Philippians we have no allusion to the law until the writer comes to deal with “the dogs,” “the evil workers,” “the concision.” In Colossians, Jewish ceremonialism is a distinct factor of the heresy which is attacked; but nowhere in Paul’s epistles is there a didactic development of a thesis from the point of view of the Old Testament economy col- lectively.