PAUL AND HIS INTERPRETERS A CRITICAL HISTORY BY ALBERT SCHWEITZER PRIVATDOZENT IN NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG AUTHOR OF “THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS” TRANSLATED BY W. MONTGOMERY, BA., BD. LONDON ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 1912 [pg v] PREFACE THE present work forms the continuation of my History of the Critical Study of the Life of Jesus, which appeared in 1906 under the title “Von Reimarus zu Wrede.”_(_1_)_ Any one who deals with the teaching and the life and work of Jesus, and offers any kind of new reading of it, ought not to stop there, but must be held under obligation to trace, from the stand-point at which he has arrived, the pathway leading to the history of dogma. Only in this way can it be clearly shown what his discovery is worth. The great and still undischarged task which confronts those engaged in the historical study of primitive Christianity is to explain how the teaching of Jesus developed into the early Greek theology, in the form in which it appears in the works of Ignatius, Justin, Tertullian and Irenaeus. How could the doctrinal system of Paul arise on the basis of the life and work of Jesus and the beliefs of the primitive community; and how did the early Greek theology arise out of Paulinism? Strauss and Renan recognised the obligation, and each endeavoured in a series of works to trace the path leading from Jesus to the history of dogma. Since their time no one who has dealt with the life of Jesus has attempted to follow this course. Meanwhile the history of dogma, on its part, has come to place the teaching of Jesus, as well as that of Paul, outside the scope of its investigations and to regard its own task as [pg vi] beginning at the point where the undisputed and general Hellenisation of Christianity sets in. It describes therefore the growth of Greek theology, but not of Christian theology as a whole. And because it leaves the transition from Jesus to Paul, and from Paul to Justin and Ignatius, unexplained, and therefore fails to arrive at any intelligible and consistent conception of Christian dogma as a whole, the edifice which it erects has no secure basis. Any one who knows and admires Harnack’s “History of Dogma” is aware that the solid mason-work only begins in the Greek period; what precedes is not placed on firm foundations but only supported on piles. Paulinism is an integral part of the history of dogma; for the history of dogma begins immediately upon the death of Jesus.