the Epistle to the Romans, it has been argued that the large number of friends and acquaintances Paul had in the Church, and especially the conspicuous place given to his old associates Prisca and Aquila, prove that the Christianity of the Romans was essentially of the Pauline type, and that the Church therefore owed its origin and its character, indirectly no doubt, to him. The epistle certainly does not bear this on its face ; Paul never says a word which implies that the Romans owed anything, even remotely, to him; there is rather an impression of regret that they did not. Besides, it is a mistake to assume that all Paul’s friends were necessarily ‘“ Paulinists ” —an expression which neither he nor they could have under- stood. Among those at Rome, and among the most important, as we should judge by the honourable terms in which they are men- tioned (xvi. 7), were some who had been Christians longer than he ; and “the quiet and as it were fortuitous filtration’’ was that of Christianity, undoubtedly of some universal type, but not distinctively of Paulinism.
CHAPTER II. CHARACTER OF THE CHURCH AT ROME,
HarDLy any question in New Testament criticism has been more elaborately discussed than this. The traditional opinion was that the Church consisted of Gentile Christians. The idea that it con- sisted of Jewish Christians, first broached apparently by Koppe in 1824, gained currency through Baur, and for a generation after his essay (1836) commanded wide assent among critics. A strong pro- test in favour of the old opinion was kept up all the time, but it was not till 1876 that Weizsacker produced a decisive reaction in its favour. The great mass of the Church, he argued, must have been Gentile-Christian, though there was no doubt a Jewish-Christian minority. An attempt to construct a theory answering more closely to the facts presented by the epistle is that of Beyschlag. He supposes that the Church consisted mainly of proselytes—that is, of persons who were Gentiles by birth, but had passed through the Jews’ religion. This would explain the great difficulty of the epistle, that Paul addresses his readers as if they were Gentiles, but argues with them as if they were Jews. Schiirer, again, conceives of the Church as non-Jewish, and at the same time non-Pauline; the Hellenistic Jews of the diaspora would make Christians compara- tively free in their relations to the ceremonial law, but with no adequate comprehension of the Pauline freedom, in principle, from law in every sense ; it is an audience like this Paul is trying to elevate to his own standpoint. That such an audience could be found is not to be denied; whether it is to be found here we can only ascertain by comparing this theory with the facts of the epistle. Finally, Holtzmann gives up the attempt to realise the character of the Church. St. Paul had never been in Rome, did not really know the situation there, and has no distinct idea of his audience. When he finds it necessary to explain why he writes to them at all he thinks of them as Gentiles; when their previous culture and spiritual history, their sympathies, antipathies, and mode of reacting toward
the Gospel generally, are in question, they are Jews. All this VOL. Π. 36