Two Preliminary Remarks.
Before I attempt to answer this question, there are two remarks that I should like to make upon it.
i. We observe here, as in so many other cases, that the theory reflects, not so much the essential disposition and proportions of the facts as the state of the extant evidence. Hardly anything has come down to us from the early years, at least for the first three decades, of the Mother Church; and from that which has come down to us, the earlier chapters of the Acts and the Epistle of St. James, criticism would make considerable deductions. I think that these deductions are greater than ought to be made, but their existence cannot be ignored. What we know of the Mother Church has to be pieced together by inference and constructive imagination. On the other hand for St. Paul we have in any case an impressive body of certainly genuine epistles. It is natural enough that the mind should be dominated by these, and that the assumption should be made—for it is pure assumption—that the leading ideas of these epistles are an original creation.
ii. But there is nothing really in the Epistles themselves to bear out this assumption. St. Paul does not write as though he were a wholesale innovator. He does not write as though he were founding a new religion. On the contrary, he lays great stress in a familiar passage (1 Cor. iii. 11) on the fact that the foundation is already laid. In another place (1 Cor. xv. 11) he speaks as though it made no difference whether he were the preacher or others, the belief of Christians was the same. St. Paul has indeed his special views and his special controversies, but they do not affect the main point. He assumes that this is common to all Christians.
This brings me to some of the points on which we have to test the theory, as it is stated by Wernle.