That is the element of greatness in the “Ultra-Tübingen” critics, that they did not forget the duty of asking questions, when it had fallen out of fashion among other theologians. To show that their hypothesis is untenable is by no means to get rid of it, as accredited theology wished to persuade itself. A few squadrons of cavalry which were skirmishing in the open have been cut off; the fortress has not been taken, indeed the siege has not even been laid. The chronicle of the discussion between contemporary theology and the revolutionaries is quite without interest. As soon as the refutation on points of detail was finished, and the fundamental questions regarding time and place came on the scene, there remained nothing for it to do but to stammer, with an embarrassed smile, something about tradition, intuition, an unmistakable impression, the stamp of genuineness, and the like, and to break off the conversation as quickly as might be. What it could or could not refute, and what the other party could or could not prove, followed necessary from the form which the problem had assumed. The construction of the illegitimate Tübingen critics answers, in reverse, to that of the legitimate school, like the reflection in a mirror to the object reflected. The presuppositions and the difficulties are the same in the two cases; the two solutions correspond except that they go in opposite directions. Both recognise that not only a conflict of practice, but one involving theory and principle, for and against the law, is fought out in the letters. The legitimate school place it in primitive Christian times, but cannot show how it was possible at that period, and how it could break off so suddenly that in the post-Pauline [pg 139] literature there is not an echo of it, and it seems as though it had never been. The illegitimate school represent the struggle as having occurred in the course of the second century, but can cite no evidence for this from the remaining literature, can point to no traces of the gradual growth of the opposition, or show how a struggle of that kind could break out at that time. Both explanations labour in vain at the problem of the inexplicable neglect of Paulinism in the post-Apostolic literature. Both parties assume as a datum that the doctrine of the letters is to be considered as a Hellenised Christianity. The one party represents the process which leads to this result as taking place in primitive Christian times, without being able to show how such a thing is possible, or how the Greek and the Jewish-eschatological elements mutually tolerated and united with one another.