uses the word "ransom," but there is no reason to doubt that he shared the Pauline view of the death of Christ. This is clearly indicated by the expression, "purchased with his own blood," contained in one of the "we-sections" of Acts (xx. 28), and in fact by the words of the risen Jesus (Luke xxiv. 46, 47). As the altar was central in the Old Testament, so, from the standpoint of its writers, is the Passion in the New Testament.

It is needless to show in detail that an exalted view of the person of Christ is with the New Testament writers connected with the central place which they assign to His death and resurrection. Mark, whose Christology is thought to be least developed, may be taken as a single example. In the opening scene of the ministry, as in the Transfiguration scene, the divine voice says: "Thou art (this is) my beloved Son" (i. 11; ix. 7); and in the closing scene the centurion exclaims, "Truly this man was the Son of God" (or a son of God, Mark xv. 39). The climax of the narrative is said to be the confession of Peter, "Thou art the Christ" (viii. 29); and Jesus alludes to Himself as "the Son," above prophets and men and angels (xii. 6; xiii. 32). At the trial, in answer to the solemn question of the high priest, "Art thou the Christ, the Son of the blessed?" He said, "I am" (xiv. 61-62). Bousset admits that the three first Gospels differ from the Fourth only in degree,[4] and in his latest work he says that if the phrase "Son of God" (i. 1), omitted in many manuscripts of Mark, is really an interpolation, it is a suitable one as indicating the theme of the book.[5] Wrede even says the Gospel of Mark belongs in a sense to the history of dogma.[6]

For the writers of the New Testament, leaving out for the present the question of sources, in spite of differences in time and place and race and circumstances, and by implication for the various circles of readers, Jewish, Greek and Roman, whom they addressed, there was but one kind of Christianity, one gospel of the Kingdom and the Cross and the Son of God.

II. Primitive Christianity and Pauline Christianity

It is asserted that the striking unanimity of the New Testament writers in their view of Christianity is not due to the teaching of Jesus, but to the powerful influence of the Apostle Paul. The statement is made in many quarters that not Jesus but Paul was the virtual founder of Christianity, so far as its central doctrines, its institutions, its worship of a divine Christ, and its world-wide propaganda are concerned. In Paul, it is said, the gospel of a simple piety and a pure ethic, the gospel of Jesus, was so overlaid by the incrustations of dogma that its true nature was hidden until rediscovered by modern criticism; and it had thus lost the simplicity that is in Christ. It was Paul himself, whose missionary labours carried the gospel throughout Europe, that really preached "another gospel." As Schweitzer, following Kalthoff, suggests with some irony, there was, under this supposition, "an immediate declension from and falsification of a pure original principle" in Christianity, comparable only to the Fall in the moral history of mankind.[7]

The teaching of the primitive apostles is sometimes declared to be an intermediate step between the gospel of Jesus and the doctrinal Christianity of Paul. It is desirable then to compare the Pauline teaching, first with the teaching of the other apostles and the Jerusalem church, and then with the teaching of Jesus.

When we examine the historical situation, the lines of connection between Paul and the primitive apostles and the Jerusalem church are so many and so strong as practically to negative the supposition of a fundamental difference between them in their conception of the gospel.

(1) If Luke had written the Fourth Gospel, the case would be different; but Luke wrote (assuming his authorship of the Third Gospel and the Acts)[8] the Gospel which contains the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. When one remembers that Luke was the intimate companion of Paul and his co-labourer in missionary work before he wrote his Gospel, that he derived his material largely from "eye-witnesses of the word," and that afterwards he recorded the teaching of both Peter and Paul in the Acts, it is clear that Luke himself saw no essential difference between the Christianity of the primitive apostles and that of Paul, and it becomes improbable that such a difference existed.

(2) Paul took with him on his missionary journeys Barnabas and Silas, accredited leaders and representatives of the primitive Jerusalem church (Acts xiii. 2f.; xv. 40). Paul's work for years was carried on under the surveillance of these men, and Barnabas stood sponsor for Paul before the Jerusalem authorities (Acts xv. 12). The close connection of these two men with both parties excludes the supposition of any radical difference in their doctrines.

(3) Paul's Christology was accepted by his Jewish-Christian opponents at Jerusalem, and never questioned by them. Paul we know to have been bitterly assailed by a Pharisaic party in the Jerusalem church. They dogged his steps wherever he went; they impugned his orthodoxy from the Mosaic standpoint; they called in question his apostleship and his sincerity. But it is significant that they never assailed as an innovation the Christological views in which he is supposed to differ from them. "Certain from James" (Gal. ii. 12), in the bitter polemic over circumcision, never accused Paul, as they would have done if his views were different in this respect, of a declension from Jewish monotheism. Paul doubtless used the name current in Jerusalem when he spoke, in a context in which he puts Christ above men and above angels and on an equality with God as a source of grace, of "James, the Lord's brother" (Gal. i. 3, 12, 19). He used the same titles as did those at Jerusalem, and a difference in Christological dogma can only be made out by saying that the names are used in different senses.[9] This is to admit that the difference discovered by modern critical acumen was so small as not to be recognized by either party at the time. In Paul's controversial encounter with Peter, in a context full of the characteristic Pauline ideas of Justification, of the Cross, of the indwelling Christ, and of Jesus as the Son of God, Paul appealed to the essential unity of their Christian faith and experience (Gal. ii. 11-21).

(4) Paul asserts the identity of his gospel with that of the primitive apostles as well known to his readers. He preached the faith of which he once made havoc (Gal. i. 23). His gospel of a