Paul

by the late

Professor Dr. W. WREDE

of breslau

translated by

edward lummis, m.a.

with preface by

J. ESTLIN CARPENTER, M.A., D. Litt.

London

PHILIP GREEN, 5 ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W.C

1907

Preface

The Apostle Paul is presented to us in the pages of the New Testament in various aspects. He is the agent of the great expansion of Christianity, who carried it from Syria to Asia Minor, from Asia Minor to Greece, and converted it from a sect of the Jews into a religion for the world. He is the champion of liberty, who set the new faith free from the yoke of the Law. He is the preacher of life in the Spirit, showing men the ‘upward way’ to the noblest ethical heights, and cheering them with immortal music in the Psalm of Love. Not only is he the intrepid missionary, he is the organizer of Churches, knit together by an exalted theory of organic unity in Christ. And besides this, he is a thinker of extraordinary boldness, compelled by the necessities of his work to justify the Gospel, on the one hand to his own countrymen, and on the other to the Gentiles. He does so by reasonings which are often difficult to follow; partly because his presuppositions are different from ours; partly because the letters which he has left are not complete or systematic expositions of his teaching; and partly because his thought is rooted in a profound personal experience which has rarely been repeated, and is consequently difficult fully to apprehend.

In one respect, indeed, the student of the Apostle’s thought has an advantage denied to the student of the Gospels. We have the actual words which Paul wrote, while only a very few of those which Jesus spoke have been transmitted to us in his native tongue. True, not all the letters bearing Paul’s name may have been written at his own dictation; true, we do not know for certain the year in which he was converted, the dates of his correspondence with the Churches, the time and place of his death. But these things are not necessary for the understanding of his ideas. What is essential for that purpose is that the interpreter should come to his words through the modes of thought and feeling belonging to Paul’s own time, rather than through the fabrics of doctrine which theologians of a later day have reared upon them.

Such a guide is to be found in the late Prof. Wrede, of Breslau, whose lamented death in November, 1906, removed from the field of New Testament study a brilliant investigator and a teacher of profound sincerity and earnestness. Into the sketch which these pages contain he has condensed the results of laborious years. He is not afraid to describe the Apostle as a man rather than as a saint; and he does not find his significance for Christian history impaired because he can no longer accept the forms in which the preacher of the crucified Messiah presented the person of Jesus and the meaning of his death. But he shows us how these forms arose in Paul’s mind out of the circumstances of his own history, the school of ...