Here Clement only alludes to Paul’s letter, not citing it, and he betrays a knowledge of the order and times in which Paul wrote his Epistles; for he declares that 1 Corinthians was written by Paul in the beginning of the good tidings—i.e., of his preaching to them of the Gospel. The Corinthians had been first evangelized by him three years before. The same phrase meets us in the same sense in Paul ([Philippians iv, 15]):—
And ye yourselves also know, ye Philippians, that in the beginning of the Gospel, when I departed from Macedonia, etc.
Altogether there are thirty passages in Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians which indicate more or less clearly a knowledge of the Pauline Epistles, including that to Hebrews. If we were tracing the relation of two profane authors, no scholar would hesitate to acknowledge a direct influence of one on the other. Merely because one of them happens to belong to the New Testament, such writers as Van Manen, W. B. Smith, et hoc genus omne, feel themselves in duty bound to run their heads against a brick wall. The responsibility, it must be admitted, lies at the door of orthodox theologians. For centuries independent scholars have been warned off the domain of so-called sacred literature. The Bible might not be treated as any other book. I once heard the late Canon Liddon forecast the most awful fate for Oxford if it ever should be. The nemesis of orthodox superstition is that such writers as those we are criticizing cannot bring themselves to treat the book fairly, as they would other literature; nor is any hypothesis too crazy for them when they approach Church history. The laity, in turn, who too often do not know their right hand from their left, are so justly suspicious of the evasions and arrière-pensée of orthodox apologists that they are ready to accept any wild and unscholarly theory that labels itself Rationalist.
Presuppositions of the argument from silence The Epistles of Paul, then, must obviously have been widely known before Marcion issued an expurgated edition of them in the year 140. We have shown that many of them were familiar to Clement of Rome in the last decade of the first century. But even if we had no traces of the Pauline Epistles before the year 140, as Van Manen and these writers in the teeth of the evidence maintain, it would not follow that they were as late as the first irrefragable use of them by a later author. Professor W. B. Smith’s argument is based on the supposed silence of earlier authors, and he entitles his chapter on this subject “Silentium Saeculi.” A magnificent petitio principii! He has never thought over the aptitudes of the “argument from silence.” This argument, as MM. Langlois and Seignobos remark in their Introduction to the Study of History (translation by Berry; London, Duckworth, 1898),
is based on the absence of indications with regard to a fact. From the circumstance of the fact [e.g., of Paul’s writing certain epistles] not being mentioned in any document it is inferred that there was no such fact …. It rests on a feeling which in ordinary life is expressed by saying: “If it were true, we should have heard of it.” … In order that such reasoning should be justified it would be necessary that every fact should have been observed and recorded in writing, and that all the records should have been preserved. Now the greater part of the documents which have been written have been lost, and the greater part of the events which happen are not recorded in writing. In the majority of cases the argument would be invalid. It must, therefore, be restricted to the cases where the conditions implied in it have been fulfilled. It is necessary not only that there should be now no documents in existence which mention the fact in question, but that there should never have been any.
Now it is notorious that in the case of the earliest Christian literature there was a special cause at work of a kind to lead to its disappearance; this was the perpetual alteration of standards of belief, and the anxiety of rival schools of thought to destroy one another’s books. The philosophic authors above cited further point out that “every manuscript is at the mercy of the least accident; its preservation or destruction is a matter of pure chance.” In the case of Christian books malice prepense and odium theologicum were added to accident and mere chance.
How, then, can Mr. W. B. Smith be sure that there were not fifty writings before the year 140 which by citation or otherwise attested the earlier existence of all or some of the Pauline Epistles? We have the merest debris of the earliest Christian literature. What right has he to argue as if he had the whole of it in the hollow of his hand? In such a context the argument from silence is absolute rubbish, and he ought to know it. But, alas, the orthodox apologist has trained him in this sphere to be content with “demonstrations” which in any other would be at once extinguished by ridicule.
Date of Paulines to be determined by contents Obviously the genuineness and date of the Pauline Epistles can only be determined by their contents, and not by a supposed deficiency of allusions to them in a literature that is well-nigh completely lost to us. Judged by these considerations, and by the hundreds of undesigned coincidences with the Book of Acts, we must conclude in regard to most of them that they are from the hand of the Paul who is so familiar a figure in that book. The author of the Paulines has just the same supreme and exclusive interest in the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah as the Paul of Acts; he manifests everywhere the same aloofness from the earthly life and teaching of Jesus. They yield the same story as does Acts of his birth and upbringing, of his persecution of the Messianist followers of Jesus and of his conversion; much the same record of his missionary travels can be reconstructed from the Letters as we have in Acts. Yet there is no sign of borrowing on either side. By way of casting doubt on the Pauline Letters the deniers of the historicity insist on the fact that in Acts there is no hint of Paul ever having written Epistles to the Churches he created or visited. Why should there be? Undesigned agreement between Acts and PaulinesTo a companion Paul must have been much more than a mere writer of letters. To Luke the letter writing must have seemed the least important part of Paul’s activity, although for us the accident of their survival makes the Epistles seem of prime importance. In the Epistles, on the other hand, it is objected that there is no indication of any use of Acts. How could there be, seeing that the book was not penned (except on Van Manen’s hypothesis) until long after the Epistles had been written and sent? I admit that Paul’s account in Galatians of his personal history is difficult to reconcile with Acts, and has provided a regular crux for critics of every school.[1] The numerous coincidences, however, of the two writings are all the more worthy of attention. If we found them agreeing pat with each other we should reasonably suspect some form of common authorship, if not of collusion. As it is they attest one another very much in the way in which the letters of Cicero attest and are attested by Sallust, Julius Cæsar, and other contemporary or later writers of Roman history. There is neither that complete accord nor complete discord between Acts and Paulines, which would lead a competent historian to distrust either as fairly contemporary and trustworthy witnesses to the same epoch and province of history.
Paul witnesses a real Jesus The testimony of Paul to a real and historical Jesus is to be gathered from those passages in which he directly refers to him or in which he refers to his brethren and disciples, for obviously a solar myth cannot have had brethren nor have personally commissioned disciples and apostles. I have pointed out in the first chapter of Myth, Magic, and Morals that the interest of Paul in the historical Jesus was slender, and have explained why it was so. But that is no excuse for ignoring it, or pretending it is not there.
Summary of Pauline evidence What does it amount to? This, that Jesus the Messiah “was born of the seed of David according to the flesh” ([Rom. i, 2]); that “he was born of a woman, born under the law”—that is to say, he was born like any other man, and not, as a later generation believed, of a virgin mother. It means also that he was born into Jewish circles, and that he was brought up as a Jew, obedient to the Mosaic law ([Gal. iv, 4]). His gospel was intended “for the Jews in the first instance, but also for the Greeks” ([Rom. i, 16], [ ii, 11]). He was “made a minister of the circumcision” ([Rom. xv, 8]); in other words, he had no quarrel with circumcision, even if he did not go out of his way to insist on it as part of the Law which, in the first Gospel it is recorded, he came not to destroy but to fulfil.