Acts) a disinclination to associate with the Gentile which suggests that he also was a strict Pharisee. There can be no doubt that of the Apostles of Christianity, who are known to us, St. Paul’s was the master-mind. And there can be no doubt that St. Paul brought to the service of the Church a body of doctrine which he had inherited from Gamaliel and the masters of*Gamaliel. The common notion that Christianity was something absolutely new planted by St. Paul and watered—watered down—by St. Peter and finally by St. John is inconsistent with known facts and with general probability. It is, indeed, the vicious product of the artificial isolation of the New Testament literature from the literature and the life of Judaism.
Others than St. Paul modified their inherited theology in the light of their belief, that Jesus, having been raised from the dead, was the promised and anointed deliverer—the Messiah, who by revealing God’s will more fully than the prophets or the scribes, but not independently of either, introduced to men more fully the Sove- reignty of Heaven, under whose yoke he lived and died. Inevitably and insensibly the first Christian teachers learned from each other and profited by their own and each other’s experience. But they all inherited and already possessed the presuppositions and categories of the Scribes, whose teaching their Master had endorsed and extended. Into this body of theology they fitted the new fact of a crucified Mes- siah—into the framework of Pharisaism—as Pharisees fitted all new facts which threw fresh light upon the will of God. If St. Paul was the first (as our fragmentary evidence suggests) to find a deep significance in it, it is not derogatory to St. Peter to suggest that he may have been indebted to St. Paul both here and elsewhere, and such in- debtedness is not necessarily an argument against the authenticity of this Epistle of Peter.
The second objection is that our document contains no vivid re- miniscences of the life and doctrine of Jesus such as we should expect from a personal disciple.
The alleged expectation is not altogether a reasonable one. If the document is, as an unbroken chain of tradition affirms, a pastoral letter addressed to Christian Churches already in being, there is no reason to expect reminiscences of the life and teaching of Jesus. The Church was built upon the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead and so declared to be the promised deliverer. His submission to death—and the death of the cross—was the crown and the summary of His life as it was the fulfilment of His teaching. So far as other facts and traditions were relatively necessary to the faith of the converts they were naturally communicated—formally or informally— by those who founded or confirmed the Churches. But in an epistle