But another objection faces the solution proposed by Wrede and Brückner. Suppose the apocalyptic doctrine of the Messiah were really adequate to the strain which is placed upon it. Suppose it really represented the Messiah as active in creation and as indwelling in the hearts of the faithful and as exalted to the throne of God. These suppositions are entirely without warrant in the facts; they transcend by far even the claims of Wrede and Brückner themselves. But suppose they were correct. Even then the genesis of Paul's religion would not be explained. Suppose the Pauline doctrine of the Messiah really was complete in his mind before he was converted. Even then, another problem remains. How did he come to identify his exalted Messiah with a Jew who had lived but a few years before and had died a shameful death? The thing might be explained if Jesus was what He is represented in all of the extant sources as being—a supernatural person whose glory shone out plain even through the veil of flesh. It might be explained if Paul before his conversion really believed that the heavenly Christ was to come to earth before His final parousia and die an accursed death. But the former alternative is excluded by the naturalistic presuppositions of the modern man. And the latter is excluded by an overwhelming weight of evidence as to pre-Christian Judaism and the pre-Christian life of Paul. How then did Paul come to identify his heavenly Messiah with Jesus of Nazareth? It could only have been through the strange experience which he had near Damascus. But what, in turn, caused that experience? No answer, on the basis of naturalistic presuppositions, has yet been given. In removing the supernatural from the earthly life of Jesus, modern naturalism has precluded the only possible naturalistic explanation of the conversion of Paul. If Jesus had given evidence of being the heavenly Son of Man, then Paul might conceivably, though still not probably, have become convinced against his will, and might, conceivably though still not probably, have experienced an hallucination in which he thought he saw Jesus living in glory. But if Jesus was a mere man, the identification of Him with the heavenly apocalyptic Messiah becomes inconceivable, and the experience through which that identification took place is left absolutely uncaused. Thus the hypothesis of Wrede and Brückner defeats itself. In arguing that Paul's pre-conversion conception of the Messiah was not a conception of a mere earthly being or the like, but that of a transcendent being, Wrede and Brückner are really digging the grave of their own theory. For the more exalted was the Messiah in whom Paul believed before his conversion, the more inexplicable becomes the identification of that Messiah with a crucified malefactor.
But still another objection remains. Suppose the Pauline Christ were simply the Messiah of the Jewish apocalypses; suppose Paul knew so little about the historical Jesus that he could even identify the exalted Messiah with Him. Even then another fact requires explanation. How did Paul come to be so strikingly similar to the historical Jesus both in teaching and in character? Wrede was audacious enough to explain the similarity as due to a common dependence upon Judaism.[130] But at this point few have followed him. For the striking fact is that Paul agrees with Jesus in just those matters to which Judaism was most signally opposed. It would be more plausible to say that Paul agrees with Jesus because both of them abandoned contemporary Judaism and returned to the Old Testament prophets. But even that explanation would be quite inadequate. The similarity between Jesus and Paul goes far beyond what both hold in common with the Prophets and the Psalms. And why did two men return to the Prophets and Psalms at just the same time and in just the same way? The similarity between Jesus and Paul might then be regarded as due to mere chance. Paul, it might be supposed, developed the ideal of Christian love from the death of the Messiah, which he interpreted as an act of self-sacrifice.[131] This ideal of love happened to be just the same as that which Jesus of Nazareth exemplified in a life of service—to which life of service, however, Paul was completely indifferent. Such, essentially, is what the hypothesis of Wrede really amounts to. The hypothesis is really absurd. But its absurdity is instructive. It is an absurdity to which the naturalistic account of the origin of Christianity is driven by an inexorable logic. Paul, it must be supposed, could not have regarded Jesus as a divine being if he had really known Jesus. The similarity of his life and teaching to that of Jesus cannot, therefore, be due to knowledge of Jesus. It must therefore be due to chance. In other words, it is dangerous, on naturalistic principles, to bring Paul into contact with Jesus. For if he is brought into contact with Jesus, his witness to Jesus will have to be heard. And when his witness is heard, the elaborate modern reconstructions of the "liberal Jesus" fall to the ground. For according to Paul, Jesus was no mere Galilean prophet, but the Lord of Glory.
CHAPTER VI
THE RELIGION OF THE HELLENISTIC AGE