The reason appears to be that these very clear outlines are always obtained by omissions or suppressions that are artificial, and do not do justice to the wonderful richness and subtlety either of the human mind or of the powers that work upon it.
4. Interpretation of these Relations between the Synoptic Gospels, St. Paul and St. John: Alternative Constructions.
These comparisons that we have just been instituting between the Synoptic Gospels, St. Paul, and St. John raise a very large question, a question involving nothing less than our whole construction of the history of the Apostolic Age.
It is becoming more and more the custom with the left wing of critical writers to make the most fundamental part of Christianity, the pivot teaching of the New Testament, an invention of St. Paul’s. St. John is only the chief of his disciples. According to these writers primitive Christianity, the genuine Christianity, loses itself in the sands, or is represented, let us say, deducting the stress on the Mosaic Law, by the sect of the Ebionites. It is St. Paul who strikes out the new road; and the writer whom we call St. John follows him in it. The attempt of this later writer to supply a historical basis for Paulinism, holds good only in appearance. The teaching which it puts into the mouth of Jesus is in no sense an antecedent of the teaching of St. Paul, but a product of it.
Here, for instance, is a trenchant statement of the position.
‘The Fourth Gospel derived this importance, lasting long beyond the time of his birth, from its having bridged over the chasm between Jesus and St. Paul, and from its having carried the Pauline Gospel back into the life and teaching of Jesus. It is only through this gospel that Paulinism attains to absolute dominion in the theology of the Church.... Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Redeemer of the world, is for John as well as Paul the core and centre of Christianity. And, moreover, John’s Christology is Pauline in all its important features—the Son of God who was with God in heaven, and was sent by God upon earth, the Mediator of creation, the God of Revelation of the Old Testament, the Son of Man from heaven, as Paul, too, called Him. And the chief object of His coming into the world is the atonement by means of His death.... The whole of the Johannine theology is a natural development from the Pauline. It is Paulinism modified to meet the needs of the sub-apostolic age. Two important consequences follow from this. There is no Johannine theology by the side of and independent of the Pauline. Luther already felt this clearly, and he understood something of the matter. John and Paul are not two theological factors, but one. Were we to accept that St. John formed his conception of Christianity either originally or directly from Jesus’ teaching, we should have to refuse St. Paul all originality, for we should leave him scarcely a single independent thought. But it is St. Paul that is original; St. John is not. In St. Paul’s letters we look, as through a window, into the factory where these great thoughts flash forth and are developed; in St. John we see the beginning of their transformation and decay.’ Wernle, Beginnings of Christianity, ii. pp. 262, 264, 274 f. (E. T.).
Nothing could be clearer. And by reason of his clearness and boldness of statement Wernle is an excellent representative of the whole school; for what he asserts in set terms is really presupposed by a number of other writers who do not assert it. It remains for us to ask, Is this construction of the early history of Christianity tenable?
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.