The Origin of Paul's Religion

by J. Gresham Machen

This method of refuting the objection drawn from the presence of the supernatural in Luke-Acts has sometimes led to a curious return to the rationalizing method of interpretation which was prevalent one hundred years ago. By that method of interpretation even the details of the New Testament miracles were accepted as historical, but it was thought that the writers were wrong in regarding those details as miraculous. Great ingenuity was displayed by such rationalists as Paulus and many others in exhibiting the true natural causes of details which to the first observers seemed to be supernatural. Such rationalizing has usually been thought to have received its death-blow at the hands of Strauss, who showed that the New Testament narratives were either to be accepted as a whole—miracles and all—or else regarded as myths, that is, as the clothing of religious ideas in historical forms. But now, under the impulsion of literary criticism, which has led away from the position of Baur and Strauss and back to the traditional view of the authorship and date of the New Testament books, the expedients of the rationalizers have in some cases been revived.

The entire effort of Von Harnack is, however, quite hopeless. The objection to the Lucan authorship of Acts which is drawn from the supernatural element in the narrative is irrefutable on the basis of any naturalistic view of the origin of Christianity. The trouble is that the supernatural element in Acts does not concern merely details; it lies, rather, at the root of the whole representation. The origin of the Church, according to the modern naturalistic reconstruction, was due to the belief of the early disciples in the resurrection of Jesus; that belief in turn was founded upon certain hallucinations in which they thought they saw Jesus alive after His passion. In such experiences, the optic nerve is affected not by an external object but by the condition of the subject himself. But there are limitations to what is possible in experiences of that sort, especially where numbers of persons are affected and at different times. It cannot be supposed, therefore, that the disciples of Jesus thought they had any extended intercourse with Him after His passion; momentary appearances, with possibly a few spoken words, were all that they could have experienced. This view of the origin of the Church is thought to be in accord with the all-important testimony of Paul, especially in 1 Cor. xv. 3-8 where he is reproducing a primitive tradition. Thus desperate efforts are made to show that the reference by Paul to the burial of Jesus does not by any means confirm the accounts given in the Gospels of events connected with the empty tomb. Sometimes, indeed, in recent criticism, the fact of the empty tomb is accepted, and then explained in some naturalistic way. But at any rate, the cardinal feature of the modern reconstruction is that the early Church, including Paul, had a spiritual rather than a physical conception of the risen body of Jesus; there was no extended intercourse, it is supposed; Jesus appeared to His disciples momentarily, in heavenly glory.

But this entire representation is diametrically opposed to the representation in the Gospel of Luke and in the Book of Acts. If there is any one writer who emphasizes the plain, physical character of the contact between the disciples and their risen Lord, it is the author of Luke-Acts. In proof, it is only necessary to point to Acts x. 41, where it is said that the risen Jesus held table-companionship with His disciples after He was risen from the dead! But that is only one detail. The author of Acts is firmly convinced that the contact of the risen Jesus with His disciples, though not devoid of mysterious features, involved the absence of the body of Jesus from the tomb and an intercourse (intermittent, it is true, but including physical proofs of the most definite kind) extending over a period of forty days. Nothing could possibly be more directly contrary to what the current critical view regards as the real account given in the primitive Jerusalem Church and by the apostle Paul.

Yet on the basis of that modern critical view, Von Harnack and others have maintained that the book in which so false an account is given of the origin of the Church was actually the work of a man of the apostolic age. It is no wonder that Von Harnack's conclusions have evoked an emphatic protest from other naturalistic historians. Luke was a close associate of Paul. Could he possibly have given an account of things absolutely fundamental in Paul's gospel (1 Cor. xv. 1-8) which was so diametrically opposed to what Paul taught? He was in Jerusalem in 58 A.D. or earlier, and during years of his life was in close touch with Palestinian disciples. Could he possibly have given an account of the origin of the Jerusalem Church so totally at variance with the account which that church itself maintained? These questions constitute a complete refutation of Von Harnack's view, when that view is taken as a whole. But they do not at all constitute a refutation of the conclusions of Von Harnack in the sphere of literary criticism. On the contrary, by showing how inconsistent those conclusions are with other elements in the thinking of the investigator, they make only the more impressive the strength of the argument which has overcome such obstacles. The objection points out the antinomy which exists between the literary criticism of Von Harnack and his naturalistic account of the origin of Christianity. What that antinomy means is merely that the testimony of Acts to the supernatural origin of Christianity, far from being removed by literary criticism, is strongly supported by it. A companion of Paul could not have been egregiously mistaken about the origin of the Church; but literary criticism establishes Luke-Acts as the work of a companion of Paul. Hence there is some reason for supposing that the account given in this book is essentially correct, and that the naturalistic reconstruction of the origin of Christianity must be abandoned.

The second objection to the Lucan authorship of Acts is based upon the contradiction which is thought to exist between the Book of Acts and the Epistles of Paul.[15] The way to test the value of a historical work, it is said, is to compare it with some recognized authority. With regard to most of the narrative in Acts, no such comparison is possible, since there is no account parallel to Acts by which it may be tested. But in certain places the Book of Acts provides an account of events which are also narrated in the isolated biographical parts of the Pauline Epistles—notably in the first two chapters of Galatians. Here at last is found the long-sought opportunity for comparison. And the comparison, it is said, results unfavorably to the Book of Acts, which is found to contradict the Epistle to the Galatians, not merely in details, but in the whole account which it gives of the relation between Paul and the Jerusalem Church. But if the Book of Acts fails to approve itself in the one place where it can be tested by comparison with a recognized authority, the presumption is that it may be wrong elsewhere as well; in particular, it is quite impossible that a book which so completely misrepresents what happened at a most important crisis of Paul's life could have been written by a close friend of the apostle.

This argument was developed particularly by Baur and Zeller and their associates in the "Tübingen School." According to Baur, the major epistles of Paul constitute the primary source of information about the apostolic age; they should therefore be interpreted without reference to any other source. When they are so interpreted, they show that the fundamental fact of apostolic history was a conflict between Paul on one side and the original apostles on the other. The conflict, Baur maintained further, is particularly plain in the Epistles to the Galatians and Corinthians, which emphasize the complete independence of Paul with reference to the pillars of the Jerusalem Church, and his continued opposition to the efforts of Jewish Christians to bring the Gentiles into subjection to the Jewish Law—efforts which must have been supported to some extent by the attitude of the original apostles. This conflict, Baur supposed further, continued up to the middle of the second century; there was a Gentile Christian party appealing to Paul and a Jewish Christian party appealing to Peter. Finally however, Baur continued, a compromise was effected; the Pauline party gave up what was really most distinctive in the Pauline doctrine of justification, while the Petrine party relinquished the demand of circumcision. The New Testament documents, according to Baur, are to be dated in accordance with the position that they assume in the conflict; those documents which take sides—which are strongly anti-Pauline or strongly anti-Petrine—are to be placed early, while those which display a tendency toward compromise are to be placed late, at the time when the conflict was being settled. Such was the "tendency-criticism" of Baur. By that criticism the Book of Acts was dated well on in the second century, because it was thought to display a tendency toward compromise—an "irenic tendency." This tendency, Baur supposed, manifested itself in the Book of Acts in a deliberate falsification of history; in order to bring about peace between the Petrine and the Pauline parties in the Church, the author of Acts attempted to show by a new account of the apostolic age that Peter and Paul really were in perfect agreement. To that end, in the Book of Acts, Paul is Petrinized, and Peter is Paulinized; the sturdy independence of Paul, which actually kept him long away from Jerusalem after his conversion, gives place, in Acts, to a desire of contact with the Jerusalem Church, which brought him early to Jerusalem and finally led him even to accept for his Gentile converts, at the "Apostolic Council," a portion of the ceremonial law. Peter, on the other hand, is represented in Acts as giving expression at the Apostolic Council to Pauline sentiments about the Law; and all through the book there is an elaborate and unhistorical parallelism between Peter and Paul.

The theory of Baur did not long maintain itself in its entirety. It received a searching criticism particularly from A. Ritschl. The conflict of the apostolic age, Ritschl pointed out, was not a conflict between Paul and the original apostles, but between all the apostles (including both Paul and Peter) on the one side, and an extreme Judaizing party on the other; that conflict did not continue throughout the second century; on the contrary, specifically Jewish Christianity soon ceased to be influential, and the legalistic character of the Old Catholic Church of the end of the second century, in which Christianity was conceived of as a new law, was due not to any compromise with the legalism of the Judaizers but to a natural process of degeneration from Paulinism on purely Gentile Christian ground.

The Tübingen dating of the New Testament documents, moreover, has been abandoned under a more thorough investigation of early Christian literature. A study of patristics soon rendered it impossible to string out the New Testament books anywhere throughout the second century in the interest of a plausible theory of development. External evidence has led to a much earlier dating of most of the books than Baur's theory required. The Tübingen estimate of the Book of Acts, in particular, has for the most part been modified; the book is dated much earlier, and it is no longer thought to be a party document written in the interests of a deliberate falsification of history.

Nevertheless, the criticism of Baur and Zeller, though no longer accepted as a whole, is still influential; the comparison of Acts and Galatians, particularly in that which concerns the Apostolic Council of Acts xv, is still often thought to result unfavorably to the Book of Acts. Even at this point, however, a more favorable estimate of Acts has been gaining ground. The cardinal principle of Baur, to the effect that the major epistles of Paul should be interpreted entirely without reference to the Book of Acts, is being called in question. Such a method of interpretation, it may well be urged, is likely to result in one-sidedness. If the Book of Acts commends itself at all as containing trustworthy information, it should be allowed to cast light upon the Epistles. The account which Paul gives in Galatians is not so complete as to render superfluous any assistance which may be derived from an independent narrative. And as a matter of fact, no matter what principles of interpretation are held, the Book of Acts simply must be used in interpreting the Epistles; without the outline given in Acts the Epistles would be unintelligible.[16] Perhaps it may turn out, therefore, that Baur produced his imposing reconstruction of the apostolic age by neglecting all sources except Galatians and the Corinthian Epistles—and then by misinterpreting these.