in the use they make of this document, its decisive bearing on questions of early Church History and Apologetics.
4. Criticism. Until quite recently the authenticity and integrity of 1 Corinthians were never doubted. The criticism of P. C. Baur and the Tiibingen School left it standing as one of the “ four un- disputed Epistles ’’; Bruno Bauer’s attack (Kritik d. Paul. Briefe, 1851) was quite isolated. In Holland, however, a more radical criticism has arisen—whose exponents are Loman (Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1882-86), Pierson and Naber (Verisimilia, 1886), van Manen (Paulus, i., ii., 1890-91; and Prot. Kirchenzeitung, 1882-86), Meyboom (Theol. Tijdschr., 1889-91); aided by Steck (Gal.-Brief, 1888) in Germany, and ‘“ Edwin Johnson” (Antiqua Mater, 1887) in England—which sweeps away these four with the rest, leaving nothing but morsels surviving of the genuine Paul. These scholars premise a slow development, along a single line, in early Christian thought. They claim to be the uniformitarians, as against the catastrophists, of Biblical science. The universalism with which Paul is credited, they set down as the final issue, reached in the second century, of the continued interaction of Judaic and Hellenic thought. In support of this view they point out numerous alleged contradictions within the four Epistles and the traces of various tendencies and times affording evidence of compilation, so reducing them to a many-coloured patchwork, the product of a century of conflict and hardly won progress. They attempt to prove the literary dependence of the four on post-Pauline writings, both within and without the New Testament. This theory presents no con- sistent shape in the hands of its advocates, and has been subjected to a destructive examination by Holtzmann and Jilicher in their Ν.Τ. Einleitungen (recent editions), by Lipsius (Romans) and Schmiedel (1 and 2 Corinthians) in the Handcommentar ; also by Knowling in chap. iii. of his “« Witness of the Epistles”. A sound exegesis is the best refutation of extravagances which are, in effect, the reductio ad absurdum ot the Baurian method.
Another group of critics, maintaining the genuineness of the Corinthian Epistles in substance, desire to redistribute their contents. Hagge (Fahrbuch fir prot. Theologie, 1876) finds four older docu- ments behind the two; Vdlter (Theol. Tijdschrift, 1889) discovers three, making considerable excisions besides ; Clemen, who discusses. all the schemes of rearrangement in his Evnheitlichkeit d. paul. Briefe (1l., Die Corintherbr. : cf. Schmiedel in the Handcom., an d. Kor., Einleitung, ii.), dissects the canonical Epistles into five origi- nals. These re-combinations are highly ingenious; Clemen’s.